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Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber Of The GiImage ants by Lucia Corrain Immersivity Giulio Romano Painting Fiction Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber Of The Giants LUCIA CORRAIN, Università degli Studi di Bologna – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8437-969X https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19938 Abstract Art in general, more than other fields, appears to lie at the heart of immersivity. As argued by Oliver Grau, it is art that still deploys a considerable genealogy with examples that resonate with the immersivity as proposed in contemporaneity. It is the current immersivity that con- structs “constellations” which, as Benjamin put it, dynam- ically enact “the history of art [as] the history of prophesies […] which can be written only starting from the point of view of an immediate present,” where “every present is de- termined by those images that are synchronous to it: each now is the now of a given knowability.” In the art history field, however, it is almost mandatory to re-evoke a fully mannerist ambience where “painting” creates – without the aid of particular instruments – the near-total immersion, acting fully on the passional dimension. The case in point is the Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, made by Giulio Romano between 1532 and 1536 in Palazzo Te in Mantua. A stunning illusionist artifice that catapults the viewers into the heart of the ongoing event, to produce in them a sense of awe and estrangement beyond the “frame.” Keywords Image Immersivity Giulio Romano Painting Fiction To quote this essay: L. Corrain, “Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber Of The Giants,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 56-73, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19938. LUCIA CORRAIN 56 AN-ICON A piece many years in doing and now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape.1 By way of introduction Undoubtedly – in a chronological field conven- tionally defined as Mannerism – the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber of the Giants, frescoed between 1532 and 1536 by Giulio Romano and his collaborators in Palazzo Te in Mantua, occupies a position of great importance. The high- ly original solution adopted by the Roman artist, already acknowledged in his day and age, in the light of today’s immersive technologies, can indeed manifest all its extraor- dinary innovative force.2 Virtual reality, as we know it today, is obtained by means of a digital instrument capable of generating “three-dimensional” scenes, narratives and landscapes within which subjects have the impression of actually mov- ing and interacting with the ambience surrounding them. Thanks to the evolution in computer graphics and the imple- mentation of the computational power, representations ever 1 W. Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale (1611) (New York-London-Toronto-Sydney: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1998): V.II.95-100, 219. 2 The bibliography concerning Palazzo Te is currently rather substantial, but it was Ernst Gombrich who took this whole building outside of the shadows in which it found itself. In 1933 he dedicated to it his graduation thesis at the University of Vienna, E. Gombrich, “Der Palazzo del Te,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, no. 8 (1934): 79-104; “Versuch einer Deuteung,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, no. 9 (1936): 121-150; it. trans. A.M. Conforti, Giulio Romano. Il palazzo del Te (Mantua: Tre Lune, 1984). Cfr. among the many others F. Hart, Giulio Romano (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958); K.W. Forster, R.J. Tuttle, “The Palazzo del Te,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 30, no. 4 (1971): 267-293; A. Belluzzi, W. Capezzali, II palazzo dei lucidi inganni: Palazzo Te a Mantova (Florence: Centro Studi Architettura Ouroboros, 1976); E. Verheyen, The Palazzo del Te in Mantua: Images of Love and Politics (Baltimore-London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1977); A. Belluzzi, M. Tafuri, eds., Giulio Romano (Milan: Electa, 1989, exhibition catalogue); A. Belluzzi, Palazzo Te a Mantova, 2 vols. (Modena: Cosimo Panini, 1998). About the Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of Giants specifically, cfr. R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: Palazzo Te (Milan: Skira, 2020). LUCIA CORRAIN 57 AN-ICON  closer to reality can be obtained. Nonetheless, so-called “reality media” are not yet a “perfect” mimesis of the real.3 The relationship between the current immersive devices and the more dated optical instruments of the so- called pre-cinematographic phase has already been widely brought to light: it is the case of the scene of the eighteenth century4 and the stereoscope of the subsequent century5 that share, with the more recent immersive technologies, the question of a “channelled aesthetic perception.”6 In rather similar fashion, at the pictorial level, the Quadratur- ismo and the trompe-l’œil raise questions relating to both the continuity between the space of experience and the space represented, and to the methods of construction of a gaze “from the inside” in which proximity allows for the perception of esthesis, verdictives and passion. Oliver Grau7 – the scholar who perhaps more than any other has outlined a genealogy of immersivity – has identified a possible origin even in Pompeian painting, to then look to the Renaissance and Baroque illusionist spaces, all the way down to the more recent scenarios 3 E. Modena, Nelle storie: Arte, cinema e media immersivi (Rome: Carocci, 2022); A. Pinotti, “VR, AR, MR, XR,” in Enciclopedia dell’Arte Contemporanea, vol. 4 (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana “Giovanni Treccani,” 2021): 685-686. 4 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (2001), trans. G. Custance (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003). 5 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1992). 6 P. Montani, Tecnologie della sensibilità: Estetica e immaginazione interattiva (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2014): 25. 7 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, opens his reconnaissance on the Pompeian frescoes, where the creation of a pictorial surface with the simulation of depth generates the effect of an ambience of greater extension that what it is in reality, capturing the gaze of the observer who does not seem to perceive the actual distinction between real space and the space of the image. Grau then lists the subsequent examples: the Chamber of the Deer in the Avignon Palace of the Popes (1343); the Hall of Perspectives by Baldassare Peruzzi in villa Farnesina (1516), the neoclassical “village rooms” or “sylvans.” The latter is a kind that, “while it dilates to the extreme the portrait of landscape taking it to the dimensions of the environmental room, it applies at the same time scenic criteria relevant to organising the decorations unitarily, with the illusionist effect of the plein air,” R. Roli, Pittura bolognese 1650- 1800: Dal Cignani ai Gandolfi (Bologna: Alfa Edizioni, 1977): 70 [my translation]. LUCIA CORRAIN 58 AN-ICON  (panorama).8 Grau, however, does not refer specifically to the striking example of the Chamber of the Giants, where the immersivity reaches a very high level of passional in- volvement on the part of the spectator, moreover without resorting to an auxiliary devices (as is the case today with headsets, overalls). A stunning illusionistic artifice defined by Frederick Hart as “surely the most fantastic and fright- ening creation of the entire Italian Renaissance in any medi- um”9 capable of catapulting the spectator into the heart of the event portrayed; as stated in 1934 by Ernst Gombrich: “into the deafening vortex of a frightening catastrophe,”10 capable of engendering astonishment and awe.11 Harking back to the renowned words of Wal- ter Benjamin: “the history of art is a history of prophecies” which “can only be written from the standpoint of the im- mediate, actual present,”12 where “every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability.”13 It can be stated that the case we wish to investigate here can be con- sidered in the light of a premise. In short, the machine fres- coed in the Chamber of the Giants in Palazzo Te appears to be the height of an illusion that involves the spectator in a dimension that can be defined as being fully immersive. Moreover, if we carefully observe, in the cham- ber in question of Palazzo Te, all the “instructions […] which 8 In 1792 Robert Baker, in London, made the first Panorama, which consists in a circular shaped ambience, where on the interior walls are projected images of times of distant places, offering the chance to the spectators of having a travel experience whilst being “stationary.” Cfr., besides O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, also S. Bordini, Storia del panorama: La visione totale della pittura nel XIX secolo (Rome: Nuova Cultura, 2009); M. Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini: Letteratura e cultura visuale (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2012); M. Cometa, Cultura visuale (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2021). E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 94, in 1934 had already related the Chamber of the Giants with the nineteenth century panoramas, stating: “that indeed Giulio, and he alone, was the first to try out in a work of art that which is called the hall of the Giants” [my translation]. 9 F. Hart, Giulio Romano: 32. 10 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 79. 11 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Turin: Einaudi, 2021): 107-109, in the chapter dedicated to the environment-image states that the Chamber of the Giants is a paradigmatic example, “an illusionistic machine that invites one to reflect on the viewer’s visual act as a participative response to the iconic act.” 12 W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1991), vol. 1, no. 2:1046-7. Quoted in English in B. Doherty, “Between the Artwork and its ‘Actualization’: A Footnote to Art History in Benjamin’s Work of Art,” Paragraph 32, no. 3 (2009): 331-358, 336. 13 W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1982), trans. H. Eiland, K. McLaughlin (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2003): 462-463. LUCIA CORRAIN 59 AN-ICON  [in the planar paintings] direct the gaze, guide the reading, intimidate and can, at times, seduce the viewer subjecting them to the representation,”14 have been completely dis- avowed.15 They have been totally cancelled. And, not by chance, in their place some decidedly more cogent ones have been created in an interplay of different disciplines, taking one another by the hand, offering a wholly original reading of the Chamber in question that can fully manifest the active nature of perception. An exceptional visitor Let us now try to enter the Chamber of the Giants, highlighting its most salient characteristics. And we shall do so starting from an exceptional witness, Gior- gio Vasari (Arezzo, 1511-1574), the art historian who was able to visit the Mantuan Palazzo Te on two occasions: the first time when the Chamber of the Giants was under construction; the second when the works had already been completed. His testimony can to all intents and purposes be considered an ekphrasis of great efficacy that “overlaps with the pictorial [story], and at times gives the impression of eclipsing it.”16 Here is the description Vasari gives of the space created and painted by Giulio Romano: After laying deep, double foundations in that corner, which was in a swampy spot, Giulio had built over that angle a large, round room with extremely thick walls, so that the four corners of the outside walls would be stronger and could support a double vault rounded like an oven. And having done this, since the room had corners, he built here and there all the way around it the doors, windows, and a fireplace of rusticated stones with worn-away edges, which 14 G. Careri, “Prefazione,” in L. Marin, Opacità della pittura: Sulla rappresentazione nel Quattrocento (Florence: La Casa Usher, 2012): 7-13. 15 On the role of the frame in the work of art see D. Ferrari, A. Pinotti, eds., La cornice: Storie, teorie, testi (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2018) and S. Zuliani, Spazi e tempi dell’installazione (Rome: Arshake, 2015). 16 A. Belluzzi, Giulio Romano: 446 [my translation]. On the text/image problem cfr. W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). LUCIA CORRAIN 60 AN-ICON were disjointed and crooked almost to the extent that they 17 even seemed to lean over on one side and actually to collapse. Giulio Romano – as can be inferred – gave a particular form to the environment: it is not a “round room,” as Vasari might lead us to believe, but a “a double vault rounded like an oven,” which did not have sharp corners and whose doors and windows were “disjointed and crook- ed,” which almost certainly means that the windows were closed by painted blinds and the doors were in continuity with respect to the frescoes. A singular space, which also disposed of a par- ticular flooring, as confirmed by Vasari himself: He had made the floor with polished river slingstones that ran around the walls, and those on the painting plane, which fell down- wards had counterfeited: for a part those painted inwards escaped, and at times were 18 occupied and adorned by grass and at times by larger stones. But, as can well be imagined, it was, in those days, a cobbled floor with slingstones that, albeit creating seamless continuity with the upright walls, did not represent an assurance of a steady support for the visitor.19 It is not possible, however, to be outside the space to talk about it; you need to traverse it to know it, for 17 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 370. In the first edition by types of Lorenzo Torrentino (Florence, 1550), the historiographer was even more articulate: “He therefore had double foundations of great depth sunk at that corner, which was in a marshy place, and over that angle he constructed a large round room, with very thick walls, to the end that the four external corners of the masonry might be strong enough to be able to support a double vault, round after the manner of an oven. This done, he caused to be built at the corners right round the room, in the proper places, the doors, windows, and fireplace, all of rustic stones rough-hewn as if by chance, and, as it were, disjointed and awry, insomuch that they appeared to be really hanging over to one side and falling down).” G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano pittore e architetto,” in Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani (1550) (Turin: Einaudi, 1986): 833 [my translation]. 18 Ibidem: 834 [my translation]. 19 The flooring was made anew by Paolo Pozzo in the eighteenth-century restoration of the palazzo, in which very likely the fireplace of which Vasari speaks was bricked up, and which is testified to in some drawings preserved at the Louvre, Windsor and Palazzo Te (donated in 2015 by Monroe Warshaw), cfr. R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: 27. Furthermore, in 1781, the archduke Ferdinand of Habsburg commissioned Giovanni Bottani to “have made a picket fence in the hall of the Giants […]. Also, he would promptly have the fireplace sealed and walled up,” citation reported in A. Belluzzi, Giulio Romano: 236. LUCIA CORRAIN 61 AN-ICON  it to become a true object of analysis. The analysts must become an integral part of the space, immerse themselves in it like a percipient body, like the users of the place, going through it and letting themselves be guided by the logic imposed by the context in which they find themselves. The visitors are, so to speak, literally “manipulated” by this un- usual spatial environment. The system of the spatial expression is in it- self meaningful, that here acquires an even more complete meaning with what is portrayed on the walls: the signifi- cance of the space is “the final result of a stratified and complex series of procedures, articulations and sub-artic- ulations, where an element is meaningful only if related to the others.”20 The spatial configurations prefigure, that is, the virtuality, of the possible ways of using the morphology itself of the places. In this sense, a semiotic reading can come to our aid which – as Giannitrapani writes – “consid- ers space not as a straightforward container of subjects, objects, events, but as a meaningful structure capable of speaking of a multiplicity of aspects of life.”21 This means that: “The significance of the space lies in the efficacious action that it provokes on the subjects coming into contact with it.” And in order for space to completely “influence the body it must work on the ambience, it must give a shape to the architecture of the space.”22 The Fall of the Giants There is no doubt that the space of the Cham- bers of the Giants, already in itself significant, finds fulfil- ment with what it portrayed on the ceiling and on the walls. Although this interest of this analysis is focused on the immersive dimension, it is necessary to briefly go over the 20 G. Marrone, “Efficacia simbolica dello spazio: Azioni e passioni,” in P. Bertetti, G. Manetti, eds., Forme della testualità: Teoria, modelli, storia e prospettive (Turin: Testo&immagine, 2001): 85-96. 21 A. Giannitrapani, Introduzione alla semiotica dello spazio (Rome: Carrocci, 2013): 45. 22 On the space cfr. also M. Hammad, Lire l’espace, comprendre l’architecture (Limoges: Presses Universitaires, 2001), trans. G. Festi (Rome: Meltemi, 2003). LUCIA CORRAIN 62 AN-ICON  iconography of the whole figurative apparatus because ̶ as we shall see – it is closely related to Federico II Gonzaga, the patron, and Charles V over whose empire the sun never set. The whole room, as is well-known, portrays the fall of the Giants drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.23 The myth tells of the giants’ attempted attack on the gods: with the intent to reach Mount Olympus, the vicious inhabitants of the earth superimpose one another on two mountains, that of Pelion and that of Ossa. Portrayed on the ceiling (Fig. 1) is the gods’ ire against the giants’ attempt to scale the mountains, with Jupiter who abandons his throne to place himself along- side Juno, who, with her gaze and index finger, points to the direction towards which to cast the thunderbolts. The plot hatched by the giants fails, of course, and Jupiter’s intervention makes the mountains collapse; by tumbling precipitously, they overwhelm the giants burying them be- neath the heavy boulders. A daring view from the bottom upwards, always on the ceiling, portrays a circular temple with twelve columns from whose balustrade some char- acters, concerned and awestruck by what is happening beneath them, look out; in the same way the numerous other divinities display impassioned states of agitation. The throne, left vacant by Jupiter, is occupied by the imperial eagle with its wings outspread, while the menacing clouds surround the whole empyrean in a role of transition from the world of the gods to the terrestrial terrain of the com- mon mortals. On the walls, above the fireplace, the giant Ty- phon (monstruous son of Gaia – Fig. 2) is depicted: for having tried to depose Jupiter, he is struck by lightning and sinks under Etna, and here, crushed by the boulders, in an attempt to defend himself he spews fire and lapilli causing an earthquake.24 The fireplace, in turn, was supposed to suggest the illusion of the youth condemned by the flames: the flames that issue from the mouth of the giant Typhon, 23 Ovid, Metamorphoses I vv. 151-154 (I A.D), trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 5. 24 Ovid, Metamorphoses V: 109. LUCIA CORRAIN 63 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, ceiling, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. in the pictorial fiction, thus ended up “conversing” with the real fire of the fireplace. Examining more closely the remaining frescoed parts, Vasari took note of further details: the entire world is upside-down and almost at its final end [...] many giants can be seen in flight, all struck down by Jove’s thunderbolts and on the verge of being overwhelmed by the landslides from the mountains just like the others. In another part, Giulio represented other giants upon whom are crashing down temples, columns, and other parts of buildings, creating 25 among these arrogant creatures great havoc and loss of life. And, in actual fact, three walls propose land- scapes (Figg. 3-4) and another one proposes an architec- ture – a serliana – that too about to collapse under the fire of the lightning bolts of the gods (Fig. 5). 25 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372. LUCIA CORRAIN 64 AN-ICON  Fig. 2. G. Romano, Fig. 3. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, wall est, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. wall sud, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. Fig. 4. G. Romano, Fig. 5. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, wall ovest, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. wall nord, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. LUCIA CORRAIN 65 AN-ICON  At this point it is worthwhile turning our atten- tion to the time when the action portrayed takes place. The time in itself is not representable, it is represented by means of movement and transformation: it is a function of the movement and the last is a function of space. Any ac- tion, which is never a perpetual motion, contains phases: a beginning, a climax and an end. In the course of each one of those, every action leads to the memory of what had come before and what will come afterwards. In short, the climax is the moment of utmost tension. In the Chamber of the Giants it corresponds to the phase when everything collapses: the technique is that of breaking down natural and architectural elements into parts that gradually lose their natural order to follow one that has gone completely haywire. If it is true that the rendering of the fatal moment is accentuated in mannerism, it can be said that here it has touched some very elevated heights. The particularity of the fatal instant had been highlighted, once again, by Vasari (Fig. 6): Fig. 6. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber of the Giants, detail of the Giant, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. LUCIA CORRAIN 66 AN-ICON Giulio [...] made plans to build a corner-room [...] in which the walls would correspond with the paintings, in order 26 to deceive the people who would see it as much as he could. a marvellous work where the entire painting has neither beginning nor end, and that it is all tied together 27 and runs on continuously without boundary or dec- oration. This is a room completely without frames,28 of any delimitation, with an enveloping continuity, in which the space – as Gombrich points out – runs homogeneous to the floor as far as the apex of the roof with not edges and no frame to interrupt the seamlessness of the surfaces, it is completely transformed into a pictorial scene: it is29 part of a single action, animated by the same emotional impetus. But, Vasari adds, it is a horrible scene: Therefore, let no one ever imagine seeing a work from the brush that is more horrible or frightening or more realistic than this one. And anyone who enters that room and sees the windows, doors, and other such details all distorted and almost on the verge of crashing down, as well as the mountains and buildings collapsing, can only fear that everything is toppling down upon him. Especially when he sees 30 all the gods in that heaven running this way and that in flight. In short, a stunning illusionistic artifice that seeks to catapult the viewer into the throbbing heart of the event in progress, where “the boundaries of space 26 Ibid.: 370. 27 Ibid.: 373. 28 Cfr. P. Carabell, “Breaking the Frame: Transgression and Transformation in Giulio Romano’s Sala dei Giganti,” Artibus et Historiae 18, no. 36 (1997): 87-100. 29 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 81. 30 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372-373. LUCIA CORRAIN 67 AN-ICON  disappear [...] and the laws of statics, in which the eye can find tranquillizing points of reference, are completely lacking.”31 Inside the environment: “the walls themselves move and, soon, everything is disarranged and collapses upon the viewer” who, in this way, shares “the same fate that submits and destroys the very powerful giants that tried in vain to sustain the walls.”32 (Figg. 7-8) Fig. 7. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber of the Giants, detail of the Giant, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. Fig. 8. G. Romano, copy of, Disegno della parete con il camino, Paris, Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques, inv. 3636, recto 31 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 79. 32 Ibid. LUCIA CORRAIN 68 AN-ICON  Being at the end of the world At this point – and to delve once more into the immersivity that generates the environment – it comes nat- ural to wonder why the patron, duke Federico II Gonzaga, decided to make such a particular and unique ambience in what is considered to be his villa of pleasures. What role would the Chamber of the Giants play in that precise his- torical moment?33 We should not try to imagine the visitor guided by the Lord of Mantua in the palazzo: Federico II leads his guest in a space whose boundaries are well de- fined, through ambiences of different sizes, decorated with specific iconographic themes, in a crescendo that takes him gradually as far as the Chamber of the Giants. An ini- tiatory pathway through which the duke proposes to his guest a sort of progressive estrangement with respect to the real world and that reaches its climax in the immense “catastrophe” of the dark cave, with the doors and win- dows shut and only the flickering light coming from the lit fireplace. A status of anguish and terror, apparently with no exit, in which the guest “with the highest mastery is de- prived of every chance to take a distance, to evaluate the actual spaces.”34 In this regard, Ernst Gombrich’s personal experience seems truly exemplary: The kind of oppression that we have experienced is absolutely new and the sentiment from which it is born and which Giulio has been able to give shape to, is that of anguish. [...] There, we have experienced directly and in an absolutely new way the anguished nightmare of our involvement in an ineluctable catastrophe.35 33 The Duke of Mantua invested colossal amounts and a special interest in the project for Palazzo Te: a work that had no residential function, which was not a fortress and in which even a room, that of the Giants, was in no way inhabitable. 34 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 81 [my traslation]. 35 Ibid.: 111 [my translation]. LUCIA CORRAIN 69 AN-ICON  Who is behind the enormous cave remains, therefore, captured by the representation, perceiving step by step that everything is being twisted, being destroyed: in the room lit up only by the fire burning in the fireplace, the visitor “experiences” the end of the world just as it is taking place, he experiences the torment – as Vasari writes – “that everything [...] is toppling down upon him.”36 It is important to understand what happens to the viewer’s body and how the space substantiated in the representation is capable of triggering sensorial percep- tions. As seems obvious, one’s eyesight is the first sense brought into play, and not only because the visitor’s eye is engaged by the enormous eyes of the Giants, but rather by the particular luminosity of the environment: indeed, one’s eyes must adapt to the light conditions produced by the fire in the fireplace; entering the ambience from conditions of full light, the adaptation to the poor light comes about slowly, one’s pupils must dilate as much as possible to be able to embrace the vision. The fireplace fire, moreover, is also responsible for the arousal of other senses: the sense of smell, because the burning wood diffuses its smell in all of the room; the sense of hearing, owing to the crackling and the rustling of the burning wood; the sense of touch, in that the fire warms up the ambience and consequent- ly the visitor. Even the flooring can fall within the tactile sensoriality – in “small, round stones,” but “set in with a knife” –37 which make the visitor’s movements unstable, reinforcing the precipice effect that is the central theme of the ambience. Amongst those who in the course of time have had the chance to live a sensorial experience inside the Chamber of the Giants we can also name a scientist like Ulisse Aldrovandi (Bologna, 1522-1605): his interest, in particular, is addressed to the sonorous refraction of the ambience on the basis of which a word whispered in one 36 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372. 37 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano:” 373. LUCIA CORRAIN 70 AN-ICON  corner is perfectly heard in the opposite corner.38 Ultimately, the tremulous, mobile and never total illumination produced by the flames in the fireplace, the sonority itself of the fire, the amplified voice, the insecurity that the visitor experi- ences owing to the “stones set in edge” of the flooring, are all aspects that confer a powerful dynamicity to the whole, generating what can be defined a proto-cinematographic effect or, paradoxically, a distressing trompe-l’œil that at length deceives the feelings of the viewer.39 In practice, what did this exceptional spatial and sensorial machine which acts with such terrifying effi- cacy on the viewer try to convey? Undoubtedly, the icono- graphic subject was not chosen by chance; in fact, the mythological fable is accompanied by an interpretative tradition of a moral sort: the Gigantomachia is an example of chastised pride, with Jupiter who performs an act of supremacy to restore justice. And in Mantua, in the early Cinquecento, the imperial ideology resorted to the fall of the Giants to celebrate the victories of Charles V against the infidels; Jupiter thus prefigures Charles V who, in the guise of Jupiter, leads to the demise of the Italian princ- es who rebelled against his sovereignty.40 Alongside this reading of international politics, however, another one of a purely local sort gains headway: “Jupiter would be the ambitious Federico who, amongst other things, chooses to insert in the family coat of arms precisely the feat of Mount Olympus.”41 Whoever enters the Chamber of the Giants, in short, is put in contact with the ineluctability of the sovereignty of the gods against the “bestiality” of the 38 D.A. Franchini, C. Tellini Perina, A. Zanca, R. Margonari, G. Olmi, R. Signorini, La scienza a corte: Collezionismo eclettico, natura e immagine a Mantova fra Rinascimento e Manierismo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1979): 192-194. The manuscript is cited (136, XXI, cc. 27v-29v), preserved in the University Library of Bologna in which Aldrovandi tells of his journeys to Mantua and, in particular, to the Chamber of the Giants. 39 S.A. Hickson, “More than meets the eye: Giulio Romano, Federico II Gonzaga, and the triumph of trompe-l’œil at the Palazzo Te in Mantua,” in L. A. Boldt-Irons, C. Federici, E. Virgulti, eds., Disguise, Deception, Trompe-l’oeil: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Peter Lang, 2009): 41-59. 40 For a more detailed argumentation cfr. D. Sogliani, M. Grosso, eds., L’imperatore e il duca: Carlo V a Mantova (Milan: Skira, 2023). The exhibition offers a reflection on the cultural meaning of Europe starting from the figure of Charles V and his alliances with the Italian courts, narrating the emperor’s arrival in Mantua in 1530, feted by grand celebrations that Federico II Gonzaga organised in the halls of Palazzo Te under the masterful direction of Giulio Romano. 41 R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: 19. LUCIA CORRAIN 71 AN-ICON  Giants. A clear message addressed to recalling the correct moral and political behaviour to engage in vis-à-vis those who hold power. By way of conclusion As will have become apparent by now, the Chamber of the Giants avails itself of a perceptive setting foreshadowing what, almost five centuries later, finds a re- newed materialisation in the most advanced technologies of construction of the images that see, in the progressive can- cellation of the aesthetic threshold and the disappearance of the “frontier” between the world of representation and that of reality, their final point of arrival. The ambience-im- ages that emerge are capable of generating an effect of reality so immanent that whoever perceives them has the feeling of being part of that fictitious world. And the spec- tators, wearing a visor “that blinds them with respect to the physical reality that surrounds them,”42 isolate themselves completely from the real world. But if – as Elisabetta Mode- na writes – “the immersion occurs […] mostly according to a process of environmental reduction: the format of the experiences is central, [as is] that entanglement that is cre- ated between the image world and the experiencer who, in becoming a part of it, experiences what […] happens in history.”43 The spatial-pictorial construction of the Cham- ber of the Giants, without a frame, with interruptions, must in short be considered – as noted by Andrea Pinotti – the perfect example ante litteram that “it is certainly not neces- sary to await contemporaneity to witness the advent of an immersive and enveloping space.”44 This does not prevent us from testing the new immersive technologies to try to 42 E. Modena, Nelle storie: 145. Cfr. also E. Modena “Immersi nel reale: Prospettive an- iconiche sull’arte contemporanea dall’ambiente alla realtà virtuale,” Carte Semiotiche. Rivista internazionale di semiotica e teoria dell’immagine, L. Corrain, M. Vannoni, eds., Annali 7, Figure dell’immersività (2021): 71-78. 43 Ibid.: 146. 44 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: 109. LUCIA CORRAIN 72 AN-ICON  ‘simulate’ in every part the original ambience,45 proposing, through virtual reality, what can no longer be perceived in situ today. By introducing, from the top of the chimney stack, the photons into the hearth and making use of high definition orthophotographs of the walls and the ceiling, we virtually recreate the flickering light of the flames, as well as the sensorial effect of the heat as they must have been perceived in the original Chamber of the Giants. Ultimately, if Giulio Romano was a full-fledged forerunner of immersive environments, then the new technologies can represent a further aid to fully restoring the original perception of the Chamber of the Giants, leading us back to the ingenious “invention” that the artist had made for his cultured and refined patron. With an apt reference, through the anticlas- sical taste for the outlandish and for contamination, to that Mannerism that – in the vulgate of Giorgio Vasari – must contain “an abundance of beautiful costumes, variety in imaginative details, charm in their colours, diversity in their buildings, and distance and variety in their landscapes;” in short, “a copious invention in every particular.”46 45 The bibliography on immersivity in the contemporary is vast: M. A. Moser, D. MacLeod, eds., Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996); W. Wolf, W. Bernhart, A, Mahler, eds., Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2013); R. Pinto, “La mostra come esperienza immersive: Damien Hirst – Treasures from the Wrech of the Unbelievable,” in C.G. Morandi, C. Sinigaglia, eds., L’esperienza dello spazio: Collezioni, mostre, musei, (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2020): 324-334; J. Voorhies, J. Postsensual, Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003). Cfr. also P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan: Mimesis International, 2020) and the recent J. Bodin, A. De Cesaris, eds., “Immersivity: Philosophical Perspectives on Technologically Mediated Experience,” Philosophical Coordinates in Modern and Contemporary Age 10, no. 20 (2022). 46 G. Vasari, “Preface to Part Three” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 278. LUCIA CORRAIN 73 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19938

Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber Of The GiImage ants by Lucia Corrain Immersivity Giulio Romano Painting Fiction Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber Of The Giants LUCIA CORRAIN, Università degli Studi di Bologna – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8437-969X https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19938 Abstract Art in general, more than other fields, appears to lie at the heart of immersivity. As argued by Oliver Grau, it is art that still deploys a considerable genealogy with examples that resonate with the immersivity as proposed in contemporaneity. It is the current immersivity that con- structs “constellations” which, as Benjamin put it, dynam- ically enact “the history of art [as] the history of prophesies […] which can be written only starting from the point of view of an immediate present,” where “every present is de- termined by those images that are synchronous to it: each now is the now of a given knowability.” In the art history field, however, it is almost mandatory to re-evoke a fully mannerist ambience where “painting” creates – without the aid of particular instruments – the near-total immersion, acting fully on the passional dimension. The case in point is the Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, made by Giulio Romano between 1532 and 1536 in Palazzo Te in Mantua. A stunning illusionist artifice that catapults the viewers into the heart of the ongoing event, to produce in them a sense of awe and estrangement beyond the “frame.” Keywords Image Immersivity Giulio Romano Painting Fiction To quote this essay: L. Corrain, “Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber Of The Giants,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 56-73, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19938. LUCIA CORRAIN 56 AN-ICON A piece many years in doing and now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape.1 By way of introduction Undoubtedly – in a chronological field conven- tionally defined as Mannerism – the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber of the Giants, frescoed between 1532 and 1536 by Giulio Romano and his collaborators in Palazzo Te in Mantua, occupies a position of great importance. The high- ly original solution adopted by the Roman artist, already acknowledged in his day and age, in the light of today’s immersive technologies, can indeed manifest all its extraor- dinary innovative force.2 Virtual reality, as we know it today, is obtained by means of a digital instrument capable of generating “three-dimensional” scenes, narratives and landscapes within which subjects have the impression of actually mov- ing and interacting with the ambience surrounding them. Thanks to the evolution in computer graphics and the imple- mentation of the computational power, representations ever 1 W. Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale (1611) (New York-London-Toronto-Sydney: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1998): V.II.95-100, 219. 2 The bibliography concerning Palazzo Te is currently rather substantial, but it was Ernst Gombrich who took this whole building outside of the shadows in which it found itself. In 1933 he dedicated to it his graduation thesis at the University of Vienna, E. Gombrich, “Der Palazzo del Te,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, no. 8 (1934): 79-104; “Versuch einer Deuteung,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, no. 9 (1936): 121-150; it. trans. A.M. Conforti, Giulio Romano. Il palazzo del Te (Mantua: Tre Lune, 1984). Cfr. among the many others F. Hart, Giulio Romano (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958); K.W. Forster, R.J. Tuttle, “The Palazzo del Te,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 30, no. 4 (1971): 267-293; A. Belluzzi, W. Capezzali, II palazzo dei lucidi inganni: Palazzo Te a Mantova (Florence: Centro Studi Architettura Ouroboros, 1976); E. Verheyen, The Palazzo del Te in Mantua: Images of Love and Politics (Baltimore-London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1977); A. Belluzzi, M. Tafuri, eds., Giulio Romano (Milan: Electa, 1989, exhibition catalogue); A. Belluzzi, Palazzo Te a Mantova, 2 vols. (Modena: Cosimo Panini, 1998). About the Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of Giants specifically, cfr. R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: Palazzo Te (Milan: Skira, 2020). LUCIA CORRAIN 57 AN-ICON  closer to reality can be obtained. Nonetheless, so-called “reality media” are not yet a “perfect” mimesis of the real.3 The relationship between the current immersive devices and the more dated optical instruments of the so- called pre-cinematographic phase has already been widely brought to light: it is the case of the scene of the eighteenth century4 and the stereoscope of the subsequent century5 that share, with the more recent immersive technologies, the question of a “channelled aesthetic perception.”6 In rather similar fashion, at the pictorial level, the Quadratur- ismo and the trompe-l’œil raise questions relating to both the continuity between the space of experience and the space represented, and to the methods of construction of a gaze “from the inside” in which proximity allows for the perception of esthesis, verdictives and passion. Oliver Grau7 – the scholar who perhaps more than any other has outlined a genealogy of immersivity – has identified a possible origin even in Pompeian painting, to then look to the Renaissance and Baroque illusionist spaces, all the way down to the more recent scenarios 3 E. Modena, Nelle storie: Arte, cinema e media immersivi (Rome: Carocci, 2022); A. Pinotti, “VR, AR, MR, XR,” in Enciclopedia dell’Arte Contemporanea, vol. 4 (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana “Giovanni Treccani,” 2021): 685-686. 4 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (2001), trans. G. Custance (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003). 5 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1992). 6 P. Montani, Tecnologie della sensibilità: Estetica e immaginazione interattiva (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2014): 25. 7 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, opens his reconnaissance on the Pompeian frescoes, where the creation of a pictorial surface with the simulation of depth generates the effect of an ambience of greater extension that what it is in reality, capturing the gaze of the observer who does not seem to perceive the actual distinction between real space and the space of the image. Grau then lists the subsequent examples: the Chamber of the Deer in the Avignon Palace of the Popes (1343); the Hall of Perspectives by Baldassare Peruzzi in villa Farnesina (1516), the neoclassical “village rooms” or “sylvans.” The latter is a kind that, “while it dilates to the extreme the portrait of landscape taking it to the dimensions of the environmental room, it applies at the same time scenic criteria relevant to organising the decorations unitarily, with the illusionist effect of the plein air,” R. Roli, Pittura bolognese 1650- 1800: Dal Cignani ai Gandolfi (Bologna: Alfa Edizioni, 1977): 70 [my translation]. LUCIA CORRAIN 58 AN-ICON  (panorama).8 Grau, however, does not refer specifically to the striking example of the Chamber of the Giants, where the immersivity reaches a very high level of passional in- volvement on the part of the spectator, moreover without resorting to an auxiliary devices (as is the case today with headsets, overalls). A stunning illusionistic artifice defined by Frederick Hart as “surely the most fantastic and fright- ening creation of the entire Italian Renaissance in any medi- um”9 capable of catapulting the spectator into the heart of the event portrayed; as stated in 1934 by Ernst Gombrich: “into the deafening vortex of a frightening catastrophe,”10 capable of engendering astonishment and awe.11 Harking back to the renowned words of Wal- ter Benjamin: “the history of art is a history of prophecies” which “can only be written from the standpoint of the im- mediate, actual present,”12 where “every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability.”13 It can be stated that the case we wish to investigate here can be con- sidered in the light of a premise. In short, the machine fres- coed in the Chamber of the Giants in Palazzo Te appears to be the height of an illusion that involves the spectator in a dimension that can be defined as being fully immersive. Moreover, if we carefully observe, in the cham- ber in question of Palazzo Te, all the “instructions […] which 8 In 1792 Robert Baker, in London, made the first Panorama, which consists in a circular shaped ambience, where on the interior walls are projected images of times of distant places, offering the chance to the spectators of having a travel experience whilst being “stationary.” Cfr., besides O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, also S. Bordini, Storia del panorama: La visione totale della pittura nel XIX secolo (Rome: Nuova Cultura, 2009); M. Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini: Letteratura e cultura visuale (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2012); M. Cometa, Cultura visuale (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2021). E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 94, in 1934 had already related the Chamber of the Giants with the nineteenth century panoramas, stating: “that indeed Giulio, and he alone, was the first to try out in a work of art that which is called the hall of the Giants” [my translation]. 9 F. Hart, Giulio Romano: 32. 10 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 79. 11 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Turin: Einaudi, 2021): 107-109, in the chapter dedicated to the environment-image states that the Chamber of the Giants is a paradigmatic example, “an illusionistic machine that invites one to reflect on the viewer’s visual act as a participative response to the iconic act.” 12 W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1991), vol. 1, no. 2:1046-7. Quoted in English in B. Doherty, “Between the Artwork and its ‘Actualization’: A Footnote to Art History in Benjamin’s Work of Art,” Paragraph 32, no. 3 (2009): 331-358, 336. 13 W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1982), trans. H. Eiland, K. McLaughlin (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2003): 462-463. LUCIA CORRAIN 59 AN-ICON  [in the planar paintings] direct the gaze, guide the reading, intimidate and can, at times, seduce the viewer subjecting them to the representation,”14 have been completely dis- avowed.15 They have been totally cancelled. And, not by chance, in their place some decidedly more cogent ones have been created in an interplay of different disciplines, taking one another by the hand, offering a wholly original reading of the Chamber in question that can fully manifest the active nature of perception. An exceptional visitor Let us now try to enter the Chamber of the Giants, highlighting its most salient characteristics. And we shall do so starting from an exceptional witness, Gior- gio Vasari (Arezzo, 1511-1574), the art historian who was able to visit the Mantuan Palazzo Te on two occasions: the first time when the Chamber of the Giants was under construction; the second when the works had already been completed. His testimony can to all intents and purposes be considered an ekphrasis of great efficacy that “overlaps with the pictorial [story], and at times gives the impression of eclipsing it.”16 Here is the description Vasari gives of the space created and painted by Giulio Romano: After laying deep, double foundations in that corner, which was in a swampy spot, Giulio had built over that angle a large, round room with extremely thick walls, so that the four corners of the outside walls would be stronger and could support a double vault rounded like an oven. And having done this, since the room had corners, he built here and there all the way around it the doors, windows, and a fireplace of rusticated stones with worn-away edges, which 14 G. Careri, “Prefazione,” in L. Marin, Opacità della pittura: Sulla rappresentazione nel Quattrocento (Florence: La Casa Usher, 2012): 7-13. 15 On the role of the frame in the work of art see D. Ferrari, A. Pinotti, eds., La cornice: Storie, teorie, testi (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2018) and S. Zuliani, Spazi e tempi dell’installazione (Rome: Arshake, 2015). 16 A. Belluzzi, Giulio Romano: 446 [my translation]. On the text/image problem cfr. W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). LUCIA CORRAIN 60 AN-ICON were disjointed and crooked almost to the extent that they 17 even seemed to lean over on one side and actually to collapse. Giulio Romano – as can be inferred – gave a particular form to the environment: it is not a “round room,” as Vasari might lead us to believe, but a “a double vault rounded like an oven,” which did not have sharp corners and whose doors and windows were “disjointed and crook- ed,” which almost certainly means that the windows were closed by painted blinds and the doors were in continuity with respect to the frescoes. A singular space, which also disposed of a par- ticular flooring, as confirmed by Vasari himself: He had made the floor with polished river slingstones that ran around the walls, and those on the painting plane, which fell down- wards had counterfeited: for a part those painted inwards escaped, and at times were 18 occupied and adorned by grass and at times by larger stones. But, as can well be imagined, it was, in those days, a cobbled floor with slingstones that, albeit creating seamless continuity with the upright walls, did not represent an assurance of a steady support for the visitor.19 It is not possible, however, to be outside the space to talk about it; you need to traverse it to know it, for 17 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 370. In the first edition by types of Lorenzo Torrentino (Florence, 1550), the historiographer was even more articulate: “He therefore had double foundations of great depth sunk at that corner, which was in a marshy place, and over that angle he constructed a large round room, with very thick walls, to the end that the four external corners of the masonry might be strong enough to be able to support a double vault, round after the manner of an oven. This done, he caused to be built at the corners right round the room, in the proper places, the doors, windows, and fireplace, all of rustic stones rough-hewn as if by chance, and, as it were, disjointed and awry, insomuch that they appeared to be really hanging over to one side and falling down).” G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano pittore e architetto,” in Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani (1550) (Turin: Einaudi, 1986): 833 [my translation]. 18 Ibidem: 834 [my translation]. 19 The flooring was made anew by Paolo Pozzo in the eighteenth-century restoration of the palazzo, in which very likely the fireplace of which Vasari speaks was bricked up, and which is testified to in some drawings preserved at the Louvre, Windsor and Palazzo Te (donated in 2015 by Monroe Warshaw), cfr. R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: 27. Furthermore, in 1781, the archduke Ferdinand of Habsburg commissioned Giovanni Bottani to “have made a picket fence in the hall of the Giants […]. Also, he would promptly have the fireplace sealed and walled up,” citation reported in A. Belluzzi, Giulio Romano: 236. LUCIA CORRAIN 61 AN-ICON  it to become a true object of analysis. The analysts must become an integral part of the space, immerse themselves in it like a percipient body, like the users of the place, going through it and letting themselves be guided by the logic imposed by the context in which they find themselves. The visitors are, so to speak, literally “manipulated” by this un- usual spatial environment. The system of the spatial expression is in it- self meaningful, that here acquires an even more complete meaning with what is portrayed on the walls: the signifi- cance of the space is “the final result of a stratified and complex series of procedures, articulations and sub-artic- ulations, where an element is meaningful only if related to the others.”20 The spatial configurations prefigure, that is, the virtuality, of the possible ways of using the morphology itself of the places. In this sense, a semiotic reading can come to our aid which – as Giannitrapani writes – “consid- ers space not as a straightforward container of subjects, objects, events, but as a meaningful structure capable of speaking of a multiplicity of aspects of life.”21 This means that: “The significance of the space lies in the efficacious action that it provokes on the subjects coming into contact with it.” And in order for space to completely “influence the body it must work on the ambience, it must give a shape to the architecture of the space.”22 The Fall of the Giants There is no doubt that the space of the Cham- bers of the Giants, already in itself significant, finds fulfil- ment with what it portrayed on the ceiling and on the walls. Although this interest of this analysis is focused on the immersive dimension, it is necessary to briefly go over the 20 G. Marrone, “Efficacia simbolica dello spazio: Azioni e passioni,” in P. Bertetti, G. Manetti, eds., Forme della testualità: Teoria, modelli, storia e prospettive (Turin: Testo&immagine, 2001): 85-96. 21 A. Giannitrapani, Introduzione alla semiotica dello spazio (Rome: Carrocci, 2013): 45. 22 On the space cfr. also M. Hammad, Lire l’espace, comprendre l’architecture (Limoges: Presses Universitaires, 2001), trans. G. Festi (Rome: Meltemi, 2003). LUCIA CORRAIN 62 AN-ICON  iconography of the whole figurative apparatus because ̶ as we shall see – it is closely related to Federico II Gonzaga, the patron, and Charles V over whose empire the sun never set. The whole room, as is well-known, portrays the fall of the Giants drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.23 The myth tells of the giants’ attempted attack on the gods: with the intent to reach Mount Olympus, the vicious inhabitants of the earth superimpose one another on two mountains, that of Pelion and that of Ossa. Portrayed on the ceiling (Fig. 1) is the gods’ ire against the giants’ attempt to scale the mountains, with Jupiter who abandons his throne to place himself along- side Juno, who, with her gaze and index finger, points to the direction towards which to cast the thunderbolts. The plot hatched by the giants fails, of course, and Jupiter’s intervention makes the mountains collapse; by tumbling precipitously, they overwhelm the giants burying them be- neath the heavy boulders. A daring view from the bottom upwards, always on the ceiling, portrays a circular temple with twelve columns from whose balustrade some char- acters, concerned and awestruck by what is happening beneath them, look out; in the same way the numerous other divinities display impassioned states of agitation. The throne, left vacant by Jupiter, is occupied by the imperial eagle with its wings outspread, while the menacing clouds surround the whole empyrean in a role of transition from the world of the gods to the terrestrial terrain of the com- mon mortals. On the walls, above the fireplace, the giant Ty- phon (monstruous son of Gaia – Fig. 2) is depicted: for having tried to depose Jupiter, he is struck by lightning and sinks under Etna, and here, crushed by the boulders, in an attempt to defend himself he spews fire and lapilli causing an earthquake.24 The fireplace, in turn, was supposed to suggest the illusion of the youth condemned by the flames: the flames that issue from the mouth of the giant Typhon, 23 Ovid, Metamorphoses I vv. 151-154 (I A.D), trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 5. 24 Ovid, Metamorphoses V: 109. LUCIA CORRAIN 63 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, ceiling, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. in the pictorial fiction, thus ended up “conversing” with the real fire of the fireplace. Examining more closely the remaining frescoed parts, Vasari took note of further details: the entire world is upside-down and almost at its final end [...] many giants can be seen in flight, all struck down by Jove’s thunderbolts and on the verge of being overwhelmed by the landslides from the mountains just like the others. In another part, Giulio represented other giants upon whom are crashing down temples, columns, and other parts of buildings, creating 25 among these arrogant creatures great havoc and loss of life. And, in actual fact, three walls propose land- scapes (Figg. 3-4) and another one proposes an architec- ture – a serliana – that too about to collapse under the fire of the lightning bolts of the gods (Fig. 5). 25 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372. LUCIA CORRAIN 64 AN-ICON  Fig. 2. G. Romano, Fig. 3. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, wall est, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. wall sud, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. Fig. 4. G. Romano, Fig. 5. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, wall ovest, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. wall nord, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. LUCIA CORRAIN 65 AN-ICON  At this point it is worthwhile turning our atten- tion to the time when the action portrayed takes place. The time in itself is not representable, it is represented by means of movement and transformation: it is a function of the movement and the last is a function of space. Any ac- tion, which is never a perpetual motion, contains phases: a beginning, a climax and an end. In the course of each one of those, every action leads to the memory of what had come before and what will come afterwards. In short, the climax is the moment of utmost tension. In the Chamber of the Giants it corresponds to the phase when everything collapses: the technique is that of breaking down natural and architectural elements into parts that gradually lose their natural order to follow one that has gone completely haywire. If it is true that the rendering of the fatal moment is accentuated in mannerism, it can be said that here it has touched some very elevated heights. The particularity of the fatal instant had been highlighted, once again, by Vasari (Fig. 6): Fig. 6. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber of the Giants, detail of the Giant, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. LUCIA CORRAIN 66 AN-ICON Giulio [...] made plans to build a corner-room [...] in which the walls would correspond with the paintings, in order 26 to deceive the people who would see it as much as he could. a marvellous work where the entire painting has neither beginning nor end, and that it is all tied together 27 and runs on continuously without boundary or dec- oration. This is a room completely without frames,28 of any delimitation, with an enveloping continuity, in which the space – as Gombrich points out – runs homogeneous to the floor as far as the apex of the roof with not edges and no frame to interrupt the seamlessness of the surfaces, it is completely transformed into a pictorial scene: it is29 part of a single action, animated by the same emotional impetus. But, Vasari adds, it is a horrible scene: Therefore, let no one ever imagine seeing a work from the brush that is more horrible or frightening or more realistic than this one. And anyone who enters that room and sees the windows, doors, and other such details all distorted and almost on the verge of crashing down, as well as the mountains and buildings collapsing, can only fear that everything is toppling down upon him. Especially when he sees 30 all the gods in that heaven running this way and that in flight. In short, a stunning illusionistic artifice that seeks to catapult the viewer into the throbbing heart of the event in progress, where “the boundaries of space 26 Ibid.: 370. 27 Ibid.: 373. 28 Cfr. P. Carabell, “Breaking the Frame: Transgression and Transformation in Giulio Romano’s Sala dei Giganti,” Artibus et Historiae 18, no. 36 (1997): 87-100. 29 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 81. 30 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372-373. LUCIA CORRAIN 67 AN-ICON  disappear [...] and the laws of statics, in which the eye can find tranquillizing points of reference, are completely lacking.”31 Inside the environment: “the walls themselves move and, soon, everything is disarranged and collapses upon the viewer” who, in this way, shares “the same fate that submits and destroys the very powerful giants that tried in vain to sustain the walls.”32 (Figg. 7-8) Fig. 7. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber of the Giants, detail of the Giant, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. Fig. 8. G. Romano, copy of, Disegno della parete con il camino, Paris, Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques, inv. 3636, recto 31 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 79. 32 Ibid. LUCIA CORRAIN 68 AN-ICON  Being at the end of the world At this point – and to delve once more into the immersivity that generates the environment – it comes nat- ural to wonder why the patron, duke Federico II Gonzaga, decided to make such a particular and unique ambience in what is considered to be his villa of pleasures. What role would the Chamber of the Giants play in that precise his- torical moment?33 We should not try to imagine the visitor guided by the Lord of Mantua in the palazzo: Federico II leads his guest in a space whose boundaries are well de- fined, through ambiences of different sizes, decorated with specific iconographic themes, in a crescendo that takes him gradually as far as the Chamber of the Giants. An ini- tiatory pathway through which the duke proposes to his guest a sort of progressive estrangement with respect to the real world and that reaches its climax in the immense “catastrophe” of the dark cave, with the doors and win- dows shut and only the flickering light coming from the lit fireplace. A status of anguish and terror, apparently with no exit, in which the guest “with the highest mastery is de- prived of every chance to take a distance, to evaluate the actual spaces.”34 In this regard, Ernst Gombrich’s personal experience seems truly exemplary: The kind of oppression that we have experienced is absolutely new and the sentiment from which it is born and which Giulio has been able to give shape to, is that of anguish. [...] There, we have experienced directly and in an absolutely new way the anguished nightmare of our involvement in an ineluctable catastrophe.35 33 The Duke of Mantua invested colossal amounts and a special interest in the project for Palazzo Te: a work that had no residential function, which was not a fortress and in which even a room, that of the Giants, was in no way inhabitable. 34 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 81 [my traslation]. 35 Ibid.: 111 [my translation]. LUCIA CORRAIN 69 AN-ICON  Who is behind the enormous cave remains, therefore, captured by the representation, perceiving step by step that everything is being twisted, being destroyed: in the room lit up only by the fire burning in the fireplace, the visitor “experiences” the end of the world just as it is taking place, he experiences the torment – as Vasari writes – “that everything [...] is toppling down upon him.”36 It is important to understand what happens to the viewer’s body and how the space substantiated in the representation is capable of triggering sensorial percep- tions. As seems obvious, one’s eyesight is the first sense brought into play, and not only because the visitor’s eye is engaged by the enormous eyes of the Giants, but rather by the particular luminosity of the environment: indeed, one’s eyes must adapt to the light conditions produced by the fire in the fireplace; entering the ambience from conditions of full light, the adaptation to the poor light comes about slowly, one’s pupils must dilate as much as possible to be able to embrace the vision. The fireplace fire, moreover, is also responsible for the arousal of other senses: the sense of smell, because the burning wood diffuses its smell in all of the room; the sense of hearing, owing to the crackling and the rustling of the burning wood; the sense of touch, in that the fire warms up the ambience and consequent- ly the visitor. Even the flooring can fall within the tactile sensoriality – in “small, round stones,” but “set in with a knife” –37 which make the visitor’s movements unstable, reinforcing the precipice effect that is the central theme of the ambience. Amongst those who in the course of time have had the chance to live a sensorial experience inside the Chamber of the Giants we can also name a scientist like Ulisse Aldrovandi (Bologna, 1522-1605): his interest, in particular, is addressed to the sonorous refraction of the ambience on the basis of which a word whispered in one 36 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372. 37 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano:” 373. LUCIA CORRAIN 70 AN-ICON  corner is perfectly heard in the opposite corner.38 Ultimately, the tremulous, mobile and never total illumination produced by the flames in the fireplace, the sonority itself of the fire, the amplified voice, the insecurity that the visitor experi- ences owing to the “stones set in edge” of the flooring, are all aspects that confer a powerful dynamicity to the whole, generating what can be defined a proto-cinematographic effect or, paradoxically, a distressing trompe-l’œil that at length deceives the feelings of the viewer.39 In practice, what did this exceptional spatial and sensorial machine which acts with such terrifying effi- cacy on the viewer try to convey? Undoubtedly, the icono- graphic subject was not chosen by chance; in fact, the mythological fable is accompanied by an interpretative tradition of a moral sort: the Gigantomachia is an example of chastised pride, with Jupiter who performs an act of supremacy to restore justice. And in Mantua, in the early Cinquecento, the imperial ideology resorted to the fall of the Giants to celebrate the victories of Charles V against the infidels; Jupiter thus prefigures Charles V who, in the guise of Jupiter, leads to the demise of the Italian princ- es who rebelled against his sovereignty.40 Alongside this reading of international politics, however, another one of a purely local sort gains headway: “Jupiter would be the ambitious Federico who, amongst other things, chooses to insert in the family coat of arms precisely the feat of Mount Olympus.”41 Whoever enters the Chamber of the Giants, in short, is put in contact with the ineluctability of the sovereignty of the gods against the “bestiality” of the 38 D.A. Franchini, C. Tellini Perina, A. Zanca, R. Margonari, G. Olmi, R. Signorini, La scienza a corte: Collezionismo eclettico, natura e immagine a Mantova fra Rinascimento e Manierismo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1979): 192-194. The manuscript is cited (136, XXI, cc. 27v-29v), preserved in the University Library of Bologna in which Aldrovandi tells of his journeys to Mantua and, in particular, to the Chamber of the Giants. 39 S.A. Hickson, “More than meets the eye: Giulio Romano, Federico II Gonzaga, and the triumph of trompe-l’œil at the Palazzo Te in Mantua,” in L. A. Boldt-Irons, C. Federici, E. Virgulti, eds., Disguise, Deception, Trompe-l’oeil: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Peter Lang, 2009): 41-59. 40 For a more detailed argumentation cfr. D. Sogliani, M. Grosso, eds., L’imperatore e il duca: Carlo V a Mantova (Milan: Skira, 2023). The exhibition offers a reflection on the cultural meaning of Europe starting from the figure of Charles V and his alliances with the Italian courts, narrating the emperor’s arrival in Mantua in 1530, feted by grand celebrations that Federico II Gonzaga organised in the halls of Palazzo Te under the masterful direction of Giulio Romano. 41 R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: 19. LUCIA CORRAIN 71 AN-ICON  Giants. A clear message addressed to recalling the correct moral and political behaviour to engage in vis-à-vis those who hold power. By way of conclusion As will have become apparent by now, the Chamber of the Giants avails itself of a perceptive setting foreshadowing what, almost five centuries later, finds a re- newed materialisation in the most advanced technologies of construction of the images that see, in the progressive can- cellation of the aesthetic threshold and the disappearance of the “frontier” between the world of representation and that of reality, their final point of arrival. The ambience-im- ages that emerge are capable of generating an effect of reality so immanent that whoever perceives them has the feeling of being part of that fictitious world. And the spec- tators, wearing a visor “that blinds them with respect to the physical reality that surrounds them,”42 isolate themselves completely from the real world. But if – as Elisabetta Mode- na writes – “the immersion occurs […] mostly according to a process of environmental reduction: the format of the experiences is central, [as is] that entanglement that is cre- ated between the image world and the experiencer who, in becoming a part of it, experiences what […] happens in history.”43 The spatial-pictorial construction of the Cham- ber of the Giants, without a frame, with interruptions, must in short be considered – as noted by Andrea Pinotti – the perfect example ante litteram that “it is certainly not neces- sary to await contemporaneity to witness the advent of an immersive and enveloping space.”44 This does not prevent us from testing the new immersive technologies to try to 42 E. Modena, Nelle storie: 145. Cfr. also E. Modena “Immersi nel reale: Prospettive an- iconiche sull’arte contemporanea dall’ambiente alla realtà virtuale,” Carte Semiotiche. Rivista internazionale di semiotica e teoria dell’immagine, L. Corrain, M. Vannoni, eds., Annali 7, Figure dell’immersività (2021): 71-78. 43 Ibid.: 146. 44 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: 109. LUCIA CORRAIN 72 AN-ICON  ‘simulate’ in every part the original ambience,45 proposing, through virtual reality, what can no longer be perceived in situ today. By introducing, from the top of the chimney stack, the photons into the hearth and making use of high definition orthophotographs of the walls and the ceiling, we virtually recreate the flickering light of the flames, as well as the sensorial effect of the heat as they must have been perceived in the original Chamber of the Giants. Ultimately, if Giulio Romano was a full-fledged forerunner of immersive environments, then the new technologies can represent a further aid to fully restoring the original perception of the Chamber of the Giants, leading us back to the ingenious “invention” that the artist had made for his cultured and refined patron. With an apt reference, through the anticlas- sical taste for the outlandish and for contamination, to that Mannerism that – in the vulgate of Giorgio Vasari – must contain “an abundance of beautiful costumes, variety in imaginative details, charm in their colours, diversity in their buildings, and distance and variety in their landscapes;” in short, “a copious invention in every particular.”46 45 The bibliography on immersivity in the contemporary is vast: M. A. Moser, D. MacLeod, eds., Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996); W. Wolf, W. Bernhart, A, Mahler, eds., Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2013); R. Pinto, “La mostra come esperienza immersive: Damien Hirst – Treasures from the Wrech of the Unbelievable,” in C.G. Morandi, C. Sinigaglia, eds., L’esperienza dello spazio: Collezioni, mostre, musei, (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2020): 324-334; J. Voorhies, J. Postsensual, Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003). Cfr. also P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan: Mimesis International, 2020) and the recent J. Bodin, A. De Cesaris, eds., “Immersivity: Philosophical Perspectives on Technologically Mediated Experience,” Philosophical Coordinates in Modern and Contemporary Age 10, no. 20 (2022). 46 G. Vasari, “Preface to Part Three” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 278. LUCIA CORRAIN 73 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19910

Allegories of ImmersiAllegory on by Filippo Fimiani Ekphrastic fear Media imaginary Materiality Elemental media Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Allegories of Immersion FILIPPO FIMIANI, Università degli Studi di Salerno – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9689-5480 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19910 Abstract Fish Night, an episode of LOVE DEATH + RO- BOTS (S01E12, 2019) based on a 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, can be interpreted as an allegory of the im- possibility of immersive experience: if real, it is deadly, be- cause the images are no longer such or ghosts but living beings present in a shared environmental habitat, acting with but also against the subject, in turn no longer a spec- tator. Comparing the story and film, and ancient ekphrastic literature, I discuss, in a trans-medial imaginary genealog- ical perspective, the symptoms of this cultural topos and of the regressive desire for immersion and for transparent immediacy that shapes and drives it, dwelling in particular on the ambivalent phenomenological and ontological re- lations between living bodies, pictures and media as deep time-bending. Keywords Allegory Ekphrastic fear Media imaginary Materiality Elemental media To quote this essay: F. Fimiani, “Allegories of Immersion,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 74-87, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19910. FILIPPO FIMIANI 74 AN-ICON  A premise Fish Night is the twelfth episode of the first season of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS, an animated Netflix series created by Tim Miller and David Fincher and broad- cast on 15 March 2019.1 Directed by Damian Nenow, with Gabriele Pennacchioli as supervising director and Rafał Wojtunik as art director, it was produced by Platine Image studio,2 based on 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, in an adaptation by Philip Gelat and Miller. I see Fish Night as an allegory of the impossi- bility of virtual immersion. Obviously, it regards coexistence and interaction in a shared environment by a subject in motion, one no longer merely observing moving images at a remove, and images which are no longer concrete pictures or simulacrums but, to full effect, real living and acting beings. Why would such an experience be impos- sible? In answering, I will focus on elements drawn from both the literary account and the animated film, seen as trans-medial symptoms of underlying issues which regard the nature of bodies, images, technology, of the medium, and their various interrelations with respect to the fictional immersion and virtual immersivity. I shall cross-analyse the animated short film and its narrative hypotext with another classic literary text which describes what, in many respects, is a complementary immersion. This approach allows me to simultaneously ad- dress: 1) the “quest for immersion” uncovered by Huhta- mo’s media archaeology as a constant motif in the reprise and recurrence of narratives and patterns both in media history and, from my point of view, in the trans-medial story of Fish Night, which is about ghosts, repetitions and reap- pearances that ultimately affect the media themselves (the spectator’s body, the images, the car, the landscape, as we 1 https://lovedeathandrobots.tilda.ws/index, accessed September 1, 2023. 2 https://platige.com/project/feature/fish-night/, accessed September 1, 2023. FILIPPO FIMIANI 75 AN-ICON  will soon discover);3 2) the “[cultural] desire for transparent immediacy” through visual representation found in the ge- nealogy of Bolter and Grusin;4 3) “the moment of resistance or counterdesire that occurs when we sense that the differ- ence between the verbal and visual representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually,” diagnosed by W.J.T. Mitchell as alert for the literary description showing through words and rhetorical tropes a strongly vivid impression of a visual stimulus, object or scene, in summa as “ekphrasis fear;”5 4) Paul de Man’s allegory6 of “potential confusion between figural and referential statement,” between the image and the real. Of course, the four points just evoked should not to be confused. Quite the contrary, aware of their dif- ferences in approach, object and aim, I use them as ac- cess points to the question of immersivity as tropism and symptom of a desire and anxiety manifested and treated differently in the literary texts and their media adaptations that I am about to discuss. In the textual and audio-visual issues I have chosen, or, as Foucault might say,7 in the “myriad events through which – thanks to which, against which –” “the unique aspect” of the cultural idea and topos of the experience of immersion-immersivity has arisen, I 3 E. Huhtamo, “Encapsulated Bodies in Motion: Simulators and the Quest for Total Immersion,” in S. Penny, ed., Critical Issues in Electronic Media (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995): 160-161, and “Dismantling the Fairy Engine. Media Archaeology as Topos Study,” in E. Huhtamo, J. Parikka, eds., Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011): 27-47. 4 J.D. Bolter, R. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1998): 23ff. 5 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Id., Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 154. See R.P., Fletcher, “Digital Ekphrasis and the Uncanny: Toward a Poetics of Augmented Reality,” Electropoetics 3, no. 15 (2017) http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/eng_facpub/56 6 P. de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1979): 113. 7 M. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D.F. Bouchard (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1977): 147. FILIPPO FIMIANI 76 AN-ICON  shall detect the symptom of its impossibility and sketch its singular trans-medial archaeology8 and imaginary. The topos points to a yearning for fictional im- mersion, a performative moment in which saying something brings it into being, making it real in every sense, and fully adherent to the referent, with language and synesthetic perception becoming one. Introduced by a terrified alarm, a seductive invitation or the command of “look!,” the very essential wish is to make subject, image and thing coin- cide. The intensive alteration of the corporeal identity and peripersonal space that results involves not only the char- acter described, narrated and represented in the act of a self-denying vision that resists classification as merely an ocular, remote beholding, but also the reader and specta- tor drawn into an embodied simulation of the occurrences and fantasies found in the images, both verbal and visual. Fish Night, a never-ending trans-medial story I shall intertwine a summary and a commentary of Lansdale’s short story with that of the episode of LD+R. In this way, I will point out some differences and sources of their imaginaries, and make some interlinear remarks on both the literary text and the television adaptation, in order to highlight the main theme of this defined trans-medial corpus: the impossibility of immersion-immersiveness. Two salesmen, one young, the other older, get stuck in the desert when their car breaks down. The hours pass and night falls. At first, the older man bemoans how door-to-door sales are a thing of the past. Then he remem- bers that twenty years earlier he was in this same deso- late landscape, travelling an asphalted road amidst power stanchions and the Rocky Mountains, between Arizona and New Mexico. “There are memories of mine out here,” 8 T. Elsaesser, “Media Archaeology as Symptom,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 2, no. 14 (2016): 181-215. FILIPPO FIMIANI 77 AN-ICON  he says, “and they’re visiting me again.”9 In the short story, this is an unmistakable evocation of Death of a Salesman, the Arthur Miller play directed by Elia Kazan, winner of the 1949 Pulitzer Prize and adapted on numerous occasions for film and TV, in which past and present collapse into the remembrance of the lead character, Willy Lowman, the disillusioned, exhausted door-to-door salesman who, at over sixty, struggles with a trauma not just personal, but historical and collective.10 In Fish Night, the instant replay of involuntary subjective memory gives way to a re-enact- ment both psychic and geological, a Nachleben, a survival and an afterlife of a story that is more than just human. The desert through which the highway passes will once again be a “petrified primal landscape,” allegorically manifesting itself as a “Hippocratic face of history.”11 Lansdale describes the landscape as an im- mersive – and devouring – space: It’s fish night, boy. Tonight’s the full moon and this is the right part of the desert if memory serves me, and the feel is right — I mean, doesn’t the night feel like it’s made up of some fabric, that it’s dif- ferent from other nights, that it’s like being inside a big dark bag, the sides sprinkled with glitter, a spotlight at the top, at the open mouth, to serve as a moon? The function of the mouth metaphor in the Lansdale’s writing is complex, but here it foreshadows the finale’s explicit immersive embodiment: does one enter an immersive space or get swallowed up by it? Space, we can say with Bataille, “can become one fish that swallows another.”12 Is immersion-immersivity an experience of “by” 9 J.R. Lansdale, Fish Night (1982), in G. Brown, A.J. Spedding, eds., Love Death + Robots: The Official Anthology: Volume One (Bendigo: Cohesion Press, 2021): 193-200. Pages not numbered; all citations in the text. 10 J. Schlueter, “Re-membering Willy’s Past: Introducing Postmodern Concerns through Death of a Salesman,” in M. Roudané, ed., Approaches to Teaching Miller’s Death of a Salesman (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1995): 142-154. 11 W. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedmann and H. Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Mein: Suhrkamp, 1991), vol. 1: 343, trans. H. Eiland (Cambridge MA-London: Harvard University Press, 2019): 174. 12 G. Bataille, “Espace” (1930), Documents, no. 1, anastatic reprint, ed. D. Hollier (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1991): 41. FILIPPO FIMIANI 78 AN-ICON  or “in”? Is it penetration or impregnation? Transparency or opacity? Immateriality or the materiality of the environ- mental medium? In Lansdale’s short story, evoking the past, the older man brings up Native Americans, the Navajos and the Hopi, and Manitou, the Great Living Spirit “still around” in everything and every being. He read in a science book – he goes on – that the desert was once a sea filled with fish and “fantastical creatures,” maybe even man’s birthplace. “The world’s an old place, and for longtime is nothing but sea,” he concludes pensively. And – dwelling on the thought – those beings may haunt this place the way human ghosts haunt their former homes. With these musings, the younger and the older man fall asleep in the Plymouth station wagon. Whether dreamed or real, lights from outside the car cause the older man’s eyes to open. Facing him, close to the car window, is an enormous eye. Octopuses, giant jellyfish, molluscs and fish from way back in evolution – Coelacanths, Nau- tilus, Limulus, marine fauna in existence prior to the great Cambrian extinction, appear in the surrounding environ- ment, where the men, now outside the car, can magically breath. Strange beings, “like nothing [they have] ever seen pictures of or imagined,” are present but almost incorpo- real, “ghosts of older world,” disincarnate eidola that pass through the men’s bodies, though they still feel and sense them. But “what” does a man’s body feel when another body passes through it? Symptomatic of the ambivalence and ambiguity of the immersion-immersivity topos, and its impossibility, Philip Gelat leaves this phrase out of the adaptation of Lansdale’s short story for LD+R: “Feel it, boy? Feel the presence of the sea? Doesn’t it feel like the beating of your own mother’s heart while you float inside the womb?” FILIPPO FIMIANI 79 AN-ICON And the younger man had to admit that he felt it, that inner rolling rhythm that is the tide of life and the pulsating heart of the sea. Thus the “oceanic sentiment,” the “thalassic regression” debated by psychoanalysis,13 also character- istic of the “crisis of presence” in magical experiences dis- cussed by anthropology,14 are pathic and phenomenological equivalents of the sea’s “presence” as a primary medium, a pre-individual fusion and condition for the possibility of life. In this elemental medium, the bodies of the marine beings are, first and foremost, traversable and diaphanous, immaterial media-mediators permitting an equally immate- rial engagement. They are “spectral,” like “soap bubbles,” “smoke,” “flashes of light,” flitting and skirting, writes Lans- dale. There is no mistaking the kinship with intermedial ex- empla of the metaphorical repertoire of philosophies, both ancient and modern, of visual perception, Renaissance and eighteenth-century treatises on painting, plus contempo- rary theories of optical devices and electric media. In the LD+R episode, the ecstatic young man shouts, “I wanna swim!,” as if he were a man-fish of folk legend brought to life.15 Deaf to the alarmed pleas of the older man, he joins the school of fish, swimming amongst them in slow-motion,16 becoming like them. Stripped of his individuality, he is transfigured, weightlessly transported upward, only to have his ascension end in death. All the other creatures flee in fright at the approach of an enormous red megalodon, which, circling the car, devours the slower, defenceless swimmer, meaning the human transformed into 13 On this essential topic of the symbolic return to the sea, I can only point to Ferenczi, Freud, Alexander and Kerény, or Sloterdijk, plus the Mutterleibversenkung of Ėjzenštejn or slow-motion, in the case of Epstein. See W.B. Parsons, The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 14 E. de Martino, Il mondo magico: Prolegomeni a una storia del magismo (1945) (Turin: Boringhieri, 1973): 144-145, and Magic: A Theory from the South (1959), trans. D.L. Zinn (Chicago: Hau Books, 2015): 85-96. 15 B. Croce, Storie e leggende napoletane (1919) (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1967): 306-313. See G.B. Bronzini, “Cola Pesce il tuffatore: dalla leggenda moderna al mito antico,” Lares 66, no. 3 (2000): 341-376. 16 Under the slow-motion effect, our bodies look like “smooth muscles moving through a dense medium in which thick currents always carry and shape this clear descendent of old marine fauna and maternal waters.” J. Epstein, The Intelligence of a Machine (1946), trans. C. Wall-Romana (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014): 29. FILIPPO FIMIANI 80 AN-ICON  a marine being. The Otus megalodon, which first lived at the start of the Miocene period, succumbing to extinction roughly 2.5 million years ago, has returned to the desert between Arizona and New Mexico, only to slowly disappear from view, leaving behind plumes of blood set against the enormous, white, imperturbable moon. Left by himself, the older man is stunned by what he has just seen. From New Mexico to Greece, and back In Fish Night, the impossibility of immersive ex- perience, i.e. of the elimination of all substantial differences between the gaze, the images and the environment, is tied to the fact that, were it to become real, death would result. Given the trans-medial imaginary genealogical perspective indicated in the Premise, I read the lethal outcome of the way up of the main character of Fish Night as comple- mentary to the dark plunge down described in a masterful scene from the Eikones, the influential classic of ekphrastic literature and ancient rhetoric attributed to Philostratus the Elder. Reactivating the Ancient Greek, I would then speak of anabasis (from ana-, “up,” and baínō, “to go”), of a fatal immersive ascent, for Fish Night, and of catabasis (from kata-, “down,” and baínō, “to go”), of a descent down in the underworld, for the Eikones. Actually, the very protagonist of the episode from the Eikones is the penetrating gaze of a lookout scan- ning the sea, who, perched atop a pole on the shore, can spot tuna in the sea and call out them to fishermen. This fictional vision is enhanced by the pole, depicted as a sub- lime lignum in Negri’s sixteenth-century Latin translation, which acts as a technical mean and as rudimental pros- thetic medium, allowing for a more powerful and detailed gaze. Still, the outcome is ultimately catastrophic: for as the lookout’s gaze gradually immerses itself in the mael- strom of moving forms and flashing colours, it becomes less penetrating, feebler, until the fish, barely discernible as shadows, swallow it up, as in the journey of Ulysses to Hades painted by Polignoto and described by Pausania. FILIPPO FIMIANI 81 AN-ICON  In Fish Night as well, the immersive moment in which the verbal, the visual and the real all become performatively one, heralded by the ecstatic, ostentatious exhortation to look,17 winds up being the exact opposite: blindness and terror. And so it becomes an allegory of its own impossibility. As Philostratus writes: Now look at the painting and you will see just this going on. The look-out gazes at the sea and turns his eyes in one direction and another to get the number; and in the bright gleam of the sea the colours of the fish vary, those near the surface seem to be black, those just below are not so black, those lower still begin to elude the sense of sight, then they seem shadowy, and finally they look just like the water; for as the vision penetrates deeper and deeper its power of discerning objects in the water is blunted. 18 In the story Fish Night, and even more so in the animated film, what occurs is not simply a metaphorical inversion of the yearning, for immersion and transparency. The change that takes place is literally ontological, rather than phenomenological: the inexorable law of the impene- trability of bodies in space has been restored, having earlier been suspended by the diaphanously spectral, almost im- material state of the environmental medium. This elementa- ry law of physics once again holds, even in the immersive environment, where the body of the human being has lost some of its species-specific characteristics – gravity, use of the respiratory apparatus and motor skills – while that of the image, finally possessed of a physical consistency of its own, has also gained new properties, enabling it to take actions that truly affect the other entities sharing the surrounding environment. 17 N. Bryson, “Philostratus and the Imaginary Museum,” in S. Goldhill, R. Osborne, eds., Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture (Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 266-267. 18 Philostratus the Younger, Imagines. Callistratus, Descriptions, trans. A. Fairbanks (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1936): 57 (I.12); Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. W.H.S. Jones, H.A. Ormerod (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1918): 185 (10.28.1). FILIPPO FIMIANI 82 AN-ICON  Which medium? But in the final analysis, what does Fish Night tell us about the material nature of the immersive medium and its uniqueness compared to other media and technical devices? In Lansdale’s short story, the protagonist of the deadly immersive experience is the older man, not the younger one, as in the LD+R episode. Lansdale has in mind the imagery of Death of a Salesman and Willy Lowman’s irretrievable historical crisis. Charley, Willy’s well-off neigh- bour, observes that: “A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”19 Thus the American Dream is a territorialised rendering of the countryside by the moving automobile, a “hot,” prosthetic medium which is culturally, socially and aesthetically expansive, as Marshall McLuhan was to point out soon after, in short an “excrescence of a kinetic ego” and an agent of the “motorized narcissism.”20 The automobile stands as the technological condition that makes possible the conquest of the last frontier, as the material and historical a-priori of the aesthetic experience of the wilderness, be it rebellious or liberating, ostentatious or touristic, with the complementary evolution of the car being its domestication to transport and distribute tangible and intangible goods. At the turn of the 60’s-70’s,21 road movies were both reflections and wellsprings of the cultural and mythopoetic topos of the automobile as a means to attaining individual freedom or reification, or to crafting the iconography of the American sublime. Indeed, the choice of a Plymouth Fury for the LD+R episode may not have 19 A. Miller, Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem (1949) (London: Penguin, 1998): 111. 20 M. McLuhan, Motorcar: The Mechanical Bride (1951), in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) (Cambridge MA-London: MIT Press, 1994): 217-222. See P. Sloterdjik, “Die Herrschaft der Kentauren. Philosophische Bemerkungen zur Automobilität” (1992), trans. K. Ritson, Transfers 1, vol. 1 (2011): 14-24; P. Weibel, “Medien der Mobilität,” in P. Weibel, ed., CAR CULTURE: Medien der Mobilität (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2011): 345-400. 21 S. Cohan, I.R. Hark, eds., The Road Movie Book (London-New York: Routledge, 1997); A. Cross, “Driving the American Landscape,” in P. Wollen, J. Kerr, eds., Autopia: Cars and Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2002): 249-258; D. Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); D. Orgeron, Road Movies: From Muybridge and Méliès to Lynch and Kiarostami (New York: Palgrave, 2008). FILIPPO FIMIANI 83 AN-ICON  been random, given that the model was produced between 1968 and 1972, or precisely the years of the psychedelic and hippy culture, as well as the first signs of its impending crisis. Anyway, the automobile is the technological embodiment of the desire of immersion, a new medium for an old movement and a very ancient desire, as shown to us by the sinking gaze in the sea described by Philostra- tus. A 1939 advertisement placed in National Geographic introduced General Motors’ new Oldsmobile model with this slogan: “See America from an ‘OBSERVATION BODY!’” The brief promotional text promised a “VISION as wide as all outdoors is yours…,” but at the same time a “rhythmic ride” of a “rolling uterus”22 corresponding to the rhythm of the all-enveloping medium of the sea in which the body of the character from Fish Night loses himself in symbiotic fashion. Immersion means, at one and the same time, travelling “in” the landscape, being “part of” the environment, and re- turning “to” the maternal space. As was recently noted by Ruggero Eugeni,23 the automobile is a medium-prosthesis which implements a protected, horizontal immersion scaled to human height, so to speak, and the line of the horizon, for drivers traversing urban and exurban landscapes in a personal travelling cave: a feeling of immersion intensified by the setting up of specific sensorial and perceptive pro- cesses (both hetero- and proprioceptive). From this perspective, the regressive desire of immersivity of Lansdale’s account stands in contrast to the prosthetic mode of technological immersivity which, according to McLuhan, is embodied by the automobile, and to the mythical example of fictional immersion made possible by the tuna lookout’s perch described by Phi- lostratus. In Fish Night, the two characters leave the car, technology’s outpost for providing the senses with pros- thesis and prophylaxis, and for supplying techniques of the 22 P. Sloterdjik, “Rollender Uterus” (1995), in Selected Exaggerations: Conversations and Interviews, 1993-2012, trans. K. Margolis (Cambridge: Polity Book, 2016): 24. 23 R. Eugeni, “La sposa algoritmica: L’automobile come medium e la navigazione del quotidiano,” in F. Cavaletti, F. Fimiani, B. Grespi, A.C. Sabatino, eds., Immersioni quotidiane: Vita ordinaria, cultura visuale e nuovi media (Milan: Meltemi, 2023): 271-282. FILIPPO FIMIANI 84 AN-ICON  sensitivity for the body and the gaze. Actually, they leave the scopic regimen of spectatorship, and the technolog- ical anti-environment created by the window’s protective shield, coming into synesthetic contact with the natural environment’s forms of life. Another element in Lansdale’s short story il- lustrates, as a symptom, this detachment from technolo- gy. Possibly as a paraphrase of one of McLuhan’s topoi,24 Lansdale likens the car to the older man’s false teeth. Both are “trappings of civilization” which weigh down, serving as technological prostheses that are mobile and tied to mobility. They are metaphors: means of transport between inside and outside, as well as tools for aggression and conquering space and time. “This isn’t my world. I’m of that world. I want to float free in the belly of the sea, away from can openers and cars and -” [...] “I want to leave here! [...] The teeth! [...] It’s the teeth. Dentist, science, foo!” He punched a hand into his mouth, plucked the teeth free, tossed them over his shoulder. Even as the teeth fell the old man rose. He began to stroke. To swim up and up and up, moving like a pale pink seal among the fish. In the light of the moon the young man could see the pooched jaws of the old man, holding the last of the future’s air. Up went the old man, up, up, up, swimming strong in the long-lost waters of a time gone by. Even before technological and human-focused media as cars or false teeth, water is therefore the oldest medium, just as land and air – “The air trembled like a mass of gelatinous ectoplasm,” begins the Lansdale’s short story.25 Water is an elemental, environing medium with its 24 M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: 57, 82-83, 152 (on teeth and car). 25 E. Horn, “Air as Medium,” Grey Room, vol. 7 (2008): 6-25; J. Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015): 53-114, especially 55-59, 90-91. FILIPPO FIMIANI 85 AN-ICON  own specific materiality, which becomes invisible in its vital agency as space-binding. Plus, as shown by the media imaginary26 I have highlighted in my reading of Fish Night and the Eikones, water can be a “ghostly sea.” It is a very elemental medium acting as a deep time-binding agent be- tween nature and culture, between geological and mythical epochs and historically determined technical cultures, as an ontological entanglement between forms of life which are not species-specific. “Weren’t we once just slimy things, brothers to the things that swim?” asks the older man in Lansdale’s short story, borrowing Coleridge’s words27 about a com- munity not only of humans and of like beings, but of “slimy things.” In this inter-textual topos between literature, reli- gion and the natural sciences, fascination and phobia, I read “sliminess”28 as the epitome of the profound time and of the materiality of a colloidal intermediality between technolog- ical media (among other types), living beings and elements. Obviously, “sliminess” stands in contrast to the prevailing metaphors or clichés of fluidity and transparency, that are frequently used with regard to the media and their relation 26 E. Kluitenberg, Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2006); S. Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006). 27 “The very deep did rot: O Christ! / That ever this should be! / Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea” (ll. 125-126), where “a thousand thousand slimy things [with many dead men] / Lived on; and so did I,” said the mariner (ll. 238-239). S.T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798-1834), in The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912): 191, 197. See J. Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986): 41-59; J.B. Ower, “Crantz, Martens and the ‘Slimy Things’ in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Neophilologus 85, no. 3 (2001): 477-484; S. Estok, “The Environmental Imagination in the Slime of ‘The Ancient Mariner,’” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 2, vol. 34 (2021): 135-138. 28 N. Gramlich, “Sticky Media: Encounters with Oil through Imaginary Media Archaeology,” Communication + 1 7, 1 (2018): n. p. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol7/iss1/3; see F. Mason, The Viscous: Slime, Stickiness, Fondling, Mixtures (Goleta CA: punctum books, 2020): 200; B. Woodward, Slime Dynamics (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012): 59-64; C. Michlig, File under: Slime (Los Angeles: Hat & Beard Press, 2023). FILIPPO FIMIANI 86 AN-ICON  with time and materiality and, in particular, with respect to immersivity. Finally, “media are of nature and return to na- ture:”29 that’s what Fish Night, read as a trans-medial al- legory combining literature and animation, shows us in a complex and compelling way, inviting to rethink about the phenomenological and ontological relationships between memories, images, bodies, technologies and environments. A recurring topos and persistent symptom of media history, imaginaries and narratives, this impossible return is both the origin and the end of our desire for immersivity and immersive experience. 29 J. Parikka, “Introduction: The Materiality of Media and Waste,” in J. Parikka, ed., Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, (Open Humanities Press, 2011), http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Medianatures. FILIPPO FIMIANI 87 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19910

Allegories of ImmersiAllegory on by Filippo Fimiani Ekphrastic fear Media imaginary Materiality Elemental media Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Allegories of Immersion FILIPPO FIMIANI, Università degli Studi di Salerno – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9689-5480 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19910 Abstract Fish Night, an episode of LOVE DEATH + RO- BOTS (S01E12, 2019) based on a 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, can be interpreted as an allegory of the im- possibility of immersive experience: if real, it is deadly, be- cause the images are no longer such or ghosts but living beings present in a shared environmental habitat, acting with but also against the subject, in turn no longer a spec- tator. Comparing the story and film, and ancient ekphrastic literature, I discuss, in a trans-medial imaginary genealog- ical perspective, the symptoms of this cultural topos and of the regressive desire for immersion and for transparent immediacy that shapes and drives it, dwelling in particular on the ambivalent phenomenological and ontological re- lations between living bodies, pictures and media as deep time-bending. Keywords Allegory Ekphrastic fear Media imaginary Materiality Elemental media To quote this essay: F. Fimiani, “Allegories of Immersion,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 74-87, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19910. FILIPPO FIMIANI 74 AN-ICON  A premise Fish Night is the twelfth episode of the first season of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS, an animated Netflix series created by Tim Miller and David Fincher and broad- cast on 15 March 2019.1 Directed by Damian Nenow, with Gabriele Pennacchioli as supervising director and Rafał Wojtunik as art director, it was produced by Platine Image studio,2 based on 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, in an adaptation by Philip Gelat and Miller. I see Fish Night as an allegory of the impossi- bility of virtual immersion. Obviously, it regards coexistence and interaction in a shared environment by a subject in motion, one no longer merely observing moving images at a remove, and images which are no longer concrete pictures or simulacrums but, to full effect, real living and acting beings. Why would such an experience be impos- sible? In answering, I will focus on elements drawn from both the literary account and the animated film, seen as trans-medial symptoms of underlying issues which regard the nature of bodies, images, technology, of the medium, and their various interrelations with respect to the fictional immersion and virtual immersivity. I shall cross-analyse the animated short film and its narrative hypotext with another classic literary text which describes what, in many respects, is a complementary immersion. This approach allows me to simultaneously ad- dress: 1) the “quest for immersion” uncovered by Huhta- mo’s media archaeology as a constant motif in the reprise and recurrence of narratives and patterns both in media history and, from my point of view, in the trans-medial story of Fish Night, which is about ghosts, repetitions and reap- pearances that ultimately affect the media themselves (the spectator’s body, the images, the car, the landscape, as we 1 https://lovedeathandrobots.tilda.ws/index, accessed September 1, 2023. 2 https://platige.com/project/feature/fish-night/, accessed September 1, 2023. FILIPPO FIMIANI 75 AN-ICON  will soon discover);3 2) the “[cultural] desire for transparent immediacy” through visual representation found in the ge- nealogy of Bolter and Grusin;4 3) “the moment of resistance or counterdesire that occurs when we sense that the differ- ence between the verbal and visual representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually,” diagnosed by W.J.T. Mitchell as alert for the literary description showing through words and rhetorical tropes a strongly vivid impression of a visual stimulus, object or scene, in summa as “ekphrasis fear;”5 4) Paul de Man’s allegory6 of “potential confusion between figural and referential statement,” between the image and the real. Of course, the four points just evoked should not to be confused. Quite the contrary, aware of their dif- ferences in approach, object and aim, I use them as ac- cess points to the question of immersivity as tropism and symptom of a desire and anxiety manifested and treated differently in the literary texts and their media adaptations that I am about to discuss. In the textual and audio-visual issues I have chosen, or, as Foucault might say,7 in the “myriad events through which – thanks to which, against which –” “the unique aspect” of the cultural idea and topos of the experience of immersion-immersivity has arisen, I 3 E. Huhtamo, “Encapsulated Bodies in Motion: Simulators and the Quest for Total Immersion,” in S. Penny, ed., Critical Issues in Electronic Media (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995): 160-161, and “Dismantling the Fairy Engine. Media Archaeology as Topos Study,” in E. Huhtamo, J. Parikka, eds., Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011): 27-47. 4 J.D. Bolter, R. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1998): 23ff. 5 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Id., Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 154. See R.P., Fletcher, “Digital Ekphrasis and the Uncanny: Toward a Poetics of Augmented Reality,” Electropoetics 3, no. 15 (2017) http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/eng_facpub/56 6 P. de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1979): 113. 7 M. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D.F. Bouchard (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1977): 147. FILIPPO FIMIANI 76 AN-ICON  shall detect the symptom of its impossibility and sketch its singular trans-medial archaeology8 and imaginary. The topos points to a yearning for fictional im- mersion, a performative moment in which saying something brings it into being, making it real in every sense, and fully adherent to the referent, with language and synesthetic perception becoming one. Introduced by a terrified alarm, a seductive invitation or the command of “look!,” the very essential wish is to make subject, image and thing coin- cide. The intensive alteration of the corporeal identity and peripersonal space that results involves not only the char- acter described, narrated and represented in the act of a self-denying vision that resists classification as merely an ocular, remote beholding, but also the reader and specta- tor drawn into an embodied simulation of the occurrences and fantasies found in the images, both verbal and visual. Fish Night, a never-ending trans-medial story I shall intertwine a summary and a commentary of Lansdale’s short story with that of the episode of LD+R. In this way, I will point out some differences and sources of their imaginaries, and make some interlinear remarks on both the literary text and the television adaptation, in order to highlight the main theme of this defined trans-medial corpus: the impossibility of immersion-immersiveness. Two salesmen, one young, the other older, get stuck in the desert when their car breaks down. The hours pass and night falls. At first, the older man bemoans how door-to-door sales are a thing of the past. Then he remem- bers that twenty years earlier he was in this same deso- late landscape, travelling an asphalted road amidst power stanchions and the Rocky Mountains, between Arizona and New Mexico. “There are memories of mine out here,” 8 T. Elsaesser, “Media Archaeology as Symptom,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 2, no. 14 (2016): 181-215. FILIPPO FIMIANI 77 AN-ICON  he says, “and they’re visiting me again.”9 In the short story, this is an unmistakable evocation of Death of a Salesman, the Arthur Miller play directed by Elia Kazan, winner of the 1949 Pulitzer Prize and adapted on numerous occasions for film and TV, in which past and present collapse into the remembrance of the lead character, Willy Lowman, the disillusioned, exhausted door-to-door salesman who, at over sixty, struggles with a trauma not just personal, but historical and collective.10 In Fish Night, the instant replay of involuntary subjective memory gives way to a re-enact- ment both psychic and geological, a Nachleben, a survival and an afterlife of a story that is more than just human. The desert through which the highway passes will once again be a “petrified primal landscape,” allegorically manifesting itself as a “Hippocratic face of history.”11 Lansdale describes the landscape as an im- mersive – and devouring – space: It’s fish night, boy. Tonight’s the full moon and this is the right part of the desert if memory serves me, and the feel is right — I mean, doesn’t the night feel like it’s made up of some fabric, that it’s dif- ferent from other nights, that it’s like being inside a big dark bag, the sides sprinkled with glitter, a spotlight at the top, at the open mouth, to serve as a moon? The function of the mouth metaphor in the Lansdale’s writing is complex, but here it foreshadows the finale’s explicit immersive embodiment: does one enter an immersive space or get swallowed up by it? Space, we can say with Bataille, “can become one fish that swallows another.”12 Is immersion-immersivity an experience of “by” 9 J.R. Lansdale, Fish Night (1982), in G. Brown, A.J. Spedding, eds., Love Death + Robots: The Official Anthology: Volume One (Bendigo: Cohesion Press, 2021): 193-200. Pages not numbered; all citations in the text. 10 J. Schlueter, “Re-membering Willy’s Past: Introducing Postmodern Concerns through Death of a Salesman,” in M. Roudané, ed., Approaches to Teaching Miller’s Death of a Salesman (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1995): 142-154. 11 W. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedmann and H. Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Mein: Suhrkamp, 1991), vol. 1: 343, trans. H. Eiland (Cambridge MA-London: Harvard University Press, 2019): 174. 12 G. Bataille, “Espace” (1930), Documents, no. 1, anastatic reprint, ed. D. Hollier (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1991): 41. FILIPPO FIMIANI 78 AN-ICON  or “in”? Is it penetration or impregnation? Transparency or opacity? Immateriality or the materiality of the environ- mental medium? In Lansdale’s short story, evoking the past, the older man brings up Native Americans, the Navajos and the Hopi, and Manitou, the Great Living Spirit “still around” in everything and every being. He read in a science book – he goes on – that the desert was once a sea filled with fish and “fantastical creatures,” maybe even man’s birthplace. “The world’s an old place, and for longtime is nothing but sea,” he concludes pensively. And – dwelling on the thought – those beings may haunt this place the way human ghosts haunt their former homes. With these musings, the younger and the older man fall asleep in the Plymouth station wagon. Whether dreamed or real, lights from outside the car cause the older man’s eyes to open. Facing him, close to the car window, is an enormous eye. Octopuses, giant jellyfish, molluscs and fish from way back in evolution – Coelacanths, Nau- tilus, Limulus, marine fauna in existence prior to the great Cambrian extinction, appear in the surrounding environ- ment, where the men, now outside the car, can magically breath. Strange beings, “like nothing [they have] ever seen pictures of or imagined,” are present but almost incorpo- real, “ghosts of older world,” disincarnate eidola that pass through the men’s bodies, though they still feel and sense them. But “what” does a man’s body feel when another body passes through it? Symptomatic of the ambivalence and ambiguity of the immersion-immersivity topos, and its impossibility, Philip Gelat leaves this phrase out of the adaptation of Lansdale’s short story for LD+R: “Feel it, boy? Feel the presence of the sea? Doesn’t it feel like the beating of your own mother’s heart while you float inside the womb?” FILIPPO FIMIANI 79 AN-ICON And the younger man had to admit that he felt it, that inner rolling rhythm that is the tide of life and the pulsating heart of the sea. Thus the “oceanic sentiment,” the “thalassic regression” debated by psychoanalysis,13 also character- istic of the “crisis of presence” in magical experiences dis- cussed by anthropology,14 are pathic and phenomenological equivalents of the sea’s “presence” as a primary medium, a pre-individual fusion and condition for the possibility of life. In this elemental medium, the bodies of the marine beings are, first and foremost, traversable and diaphanous, immaterial media-mediators permitting an equally immate- rial engagement. They are “spectral,” like “soap bubbles,” “smoke,” “flashes of light,” flitting and skirting, writes Lans- dale. There is no mistaking the kinship with intermedial ex- empla of the metaphorical repertoire of philosophies, both ancient and modern, of visual perception, Renaissance and eighteenth-century treatises on painting, plus contempo- rary theories of optical devices and electric media. In the LD+R episode, the ecstatic young man shouts, “I wanna swim!,” as if he were a man-fish of folk legend brought to life.15 Deaf to the alarmed pleas of the older man, he joins the school of fish, swimming amongst them in slow-motion,16 becoming like them. Stripped of his individuality, he is transfigured, weightlessly transported upward, only to have his ascension end in death. All the other creatures flee in fright at the approach of an enormous red megalodon, which, circling the car, devours the slower, defenceless swimmer, meaning the human transformed into 13 On this essential topic of the symbolic return to the sea, I can only point to Ferenczi, Freud, Alexander and Kerény, or Sloterdijk, plus the Mutterleibversenkung of Ėjzenštejn or slow-motion, in the case of Epstein. See W.B. Parsons, The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 14 E. de Martino, Il mondo magico: Prolegomeni a una storia del magismo (1945) (Turin: Boringhieri, 1973): 144-145, and Magic: A Theory from the South (1959), trans. D.L. Zinn (Chicago: Hau Books, 2015): 85-96. 15 B. Croce, Storie e leggende napoletane (1919) (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1967): 306-313. See G.B. Bronzini, “Cola Pesce il tuffatore: dalla leggenda moderna al mito antico,” Lares 66, no. 3 (2000): 341-376. 16 Under the slow-motion effect, our bodies look like “smooth muscles moving through a dense medium in which thick currents always carry and shape this clear descendent of old marine fauna and maternal waters.” J. Epstein, The Intelligence of a Machine (1946), trans. C. Wall-Romana (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014): 29. FILIPPO FIMIANI 80 AN-ICON  a marine being. The Otus megalodon, which first lived at the start of the Miocene period, succumbing to extinction roughly 2.5 million years ago, has returned to the desert between Arizona and New Mexico, only to slowly disappear from view, leaving behind plumes of blood set against the enormous, white, imperturbable moon. Left by himself, the older man is stunned by what he has just seen. From New Mexico to Greece, and back In Fish Night, the impossibility of immersive ex- perience, i.e. of the elimination of all substantial differences between the gaze, the images and the environment, is tied to the fact that, were it to become real, death would result. Given the trans-medial imaginary genealogical perspective indicated in the Premise, I read the lethal outcome of the way up of the main character of Fish Night as comple- mentary to the dark plunge down described in a masterful scene from the Eikones, the influential classic of ekphrastic literature and ancient rhetoric attributed to Philostratus the Elder. Reactivating the Ancient Greek, I would then speak of anabasis (from ana-, “up,” and baínō, “to go”), of a fatal immersive ascent, for Fish Night, and of catabasis (from kata-, “down,” and baínō, “to go”), of a descent down in the underworld, for the Eikones. Actually, the very protagonist of the episode from the Eikones is the penetrating gaze of a lookout scan- ning the sea, who, perched atop a pole on the shore, can spot tuna in the sea and call out them to fishermen. This fictional vision is enhanced by the pole, depicted as a sub- lime lignum in Negri’s sixteenth-century Latin translation, which acts as a technical mean and as rudimental pros- thetic medium, allowing for a more powerful and detailed gaze. Still, the outcome is ultimately catastrophic: for as the lookout’s gaze gradually immerses itself in the mael- strom of moving forms and flashing colours, it becomes less penetrating, feebler, until the fish, barely discernible as shadows, swallow it up, as in the journey of Ulysses to Hades painted by Polignoto and described by Pausania. FILIPPO FIMIANI 81 AN-ICON  In Fish Night as well, the immersive moment in which the verbal, the visual and the real all become performatively one, heralded by the ecstatic, ostentatious exhortation to look,17 winds up being the exact opposite: blindness and terror. And so it becomes an allegory of its own impossibility. As Philostratus writes: Now look at the painting and you will see just this going on. The look-out gazes at the sea and turns his eyes in one direction and another to get the number; and in the bright gleam of the sea the colours of the fish vary, those near the surface seem to be black, those just below are not so black, those lower still begin to elude the sense of sight, then they seem shadowy, and finally they look just like the water; for as the vision penetrates deeper and deeper its power of discerning objects in the water is blunted. 18 In the story Fish Night, and even more so in the animated film, what occurs is not simply a metaphorical inversion of the yearning, for immersion and transparency. The change that takes place is literally ontological, rather than phenomenological: the inexorable law of the impene- trability of bodies in space has been restored, having earlier been suspended by the diaphanously spectral, almost im- material state of the environmental medium. This elementa- ry law of physics once again holds, even in the immersive environment, where the body of the human being has lost some of its species-specific characteristics – gravity, use of the respiratory apparatus and motor skills – while that of the image, finally possessed of a physical consistency of its own, has also gained new properties, enabling it to take actions that truly affect the other entities sharing the surrounding environment. 17 N. Bryson, “Philostratus and the Imaginary Museum,” in S. Goldhill, R. Osborne, eds., Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture (Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 266-267. 18 Philostratus the Younger, Imagines. Callistratus, Descriptions, trans. A. Fairbanks (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1936): 57 (I.12); Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. W.H.S. Jones, H.A. Ormerod (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1918): 185 (10.28.1). FILIPPO FIMIANI 82 AN-ICON  Which medium? But in the final analysis, what does Fish Night tell us about the material nature of the immersive medium and its uniqueness compared to other media and technical devices? In Lansdale’s short story, the protagonist of the deadly immersive experience is the older man, not the younger one, as in the LD+R episode. Lansdale has in mind the imagery of Death of a Salesman and Willy Lowman’s irretrievable historical crisis. Charley, Willy’s well-off neigh- bour, observes that: “A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”19 Thus the American Dream is a territorialised rendering of the countryside by the moving automobile, a “hot,” prosthetic medium which is culturally, socially and aesthetically expansive, as Marshall McLuhan was to point out soon after, in short an “excrescence of a kinetic ego” and an agent of the “motorized narcissism.”20 The automobile stands as the technological condition that makes possible the conquest of the last frontier, as the material and historical a-priori of the aesthetic experience of the wilderness, be it rebellious or liberating, ostentatious or touristic, with the complementary evolution of the car being its domestication to transport and distribute tangible and intangible goods. At the turn of the 60’s-70’s,21 road movies were both reflections and wellsprings of the cultural and mythopoetic topos of the automobile as a means to attaining individual freedom or reification, or to crafting the iconography of the American sublime. Indeed, the choice of a Plymouth Fury for the LD+R episode may not have 19 A. Miller, Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem (1949) (London: Penguin, 1998): 111. 20 M. McLuhan, Motorcar: The Mechanical Bride (1951), in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) (Cambridge MA-London: MIT Press, 1994): 217-222. See P. Sloterdjik, “Die Herrschaft der Kentauren. Philosophische Bemerkungen zur Automobilität” (1992), trans. K. Ritson, Transfers 1, vol. 1 (2011): 14-24; P. Weibel, “Medien der Mobilität,” in P. Weibel, ed., CAR CULTURE: Medien der Mobilität (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2011): 345-400. 21 S. Cohan, I.R. Hark, eds., The Road Movie Book (London-New York: Routledge, 1997); A. Cross, “Driving the American Landscape,” in P. Wollen, J. Kerr, eds., Autopia: Cars and Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2002): 249-258; D. Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); D. Orgeron, Road Movies: From Muybridge and Méliès to Lynch and Kiarostami (New York: Palgrave, 2008). FILIPPO FIMIANI 83 AN-ICON  been random, given that the model was produced between 1968 and 1972, or precisely the years of the psychedelic and hippy culture, as well as the first signs of its impending crisis. Anyway, the automobile is the technological embodiment of the desire of immersion, a new medium for an old movement and a very ancient desire, as shown to us by the sinking gaze in the sea described by Philostra- tus. A 1939 advertisement placed in National Geographic introduced General Motors’ new Oldsmobile model with this slogan: “See America from an ‘OBSERVATION BODY!’” The brief promotional text promised a “VISION as wide as all outdoors is yours…,” but at the same time a “rhythmic ride” of a “rolling uterus”22 corresponding to the rhythm of the all-enveloping medium of the sea in which the body of the character from Fish Night loses himself in symbiotic fashion. Immersion means, at one and the same time, travelling “in” the landscape, being “part of” the environment, and re- turning “to” the maternal space. As was recently noted by Ruggero Eugeni,23 the automobile is a medium-prosthesis which implements a protected, horizontal immersion scaled to human height, so to speak, and the line of the horizon, for drivers traversing urban and exurban landscapes in a personal travelling cave: a feeling of immersion intensified by the setting up of specific sensorial and perceptive pro- cesses (both hetero- and proprioceptive). From this perspective, the regressive desire of immersivity of Lansdale’s account stands in contrast to the prosthetic mode of technological immersivity which, according to McLuhan, is embodied by the automobile, and to the mythical example of fictional immersion made possible by the tuna lookout’s perch described by Phi- lostratus. In Fish Night, the two characters leave the car, technology’s outpost for providing the senses with pros- thesis and prophylaxis, and for supplying techniques of the 22 P. Sloterdjik, “Rollender Uterus” (1995), in Selected Exaggerations: Conversations and Interviews, 1993-2012, trans. K. Margolis (Cambridge: Polity Book, 2016): 24. 23 R. Eugeni, “La sposa algoritmica: L’automobile come medium e la navigazione del quotidiano,” in F. Cavaletti, F. Fimiani, B. Grespi, A.C. Sabatino, eds., Immersioni quotidiane: Vita ordinaria, cultura visuale e nuovi media (Milan: Meltemi, 2023): 271-282. FILIPPO FIMIANI 84 AN-ICON  sensitivity for the body and the gaze. Actually, they leave the scopic regimen of spectatorship, and the technolog- ical anti-environment created by the window’s protective shield, coming into synesthetic contact with the natural environment’s forms of life. Another element in Lansdale’s short story il- lustrates, as a symptom, this detachment from technolo- gy. Possibly as a paraphrase of one of McLuhan’s topoi,24 Lansdale likens the car to the older man’s false teeth. Both are “trappings of civilization” which weigh down, serving as technological prostheses that are mobile and tied to mobility. They are metaphors: means of transport between inside and outside, as well as tools for aggression and conquering space and time. “This isn’t my world. I’m of that world. I want to float free in the belly of the sea, away from can openers and cars and -” [...] “I want to leave here! [...] The teeth! [...] It’s the teeth. Dentist, science, foo!” He punched a hand into his mouth, plucked the teeth free, tossed them over his shoulder. Even as the teeth fell the old man rose. He began to stroke. To swim up and up and up, moving like a pale pink seal among the fish. In the light of the moon the young man could see the pooched jaws of the old man, holding the last of the future’s air. Up went the old man, up, up, up, swimming strong in the long-lost waters of a time gone by. Even before technological and human-focused media as cars or false teeth, water is therefore the oldest medium, just as land and air – “The air trembled like a mass of gelatinous ectoplasm,” begins the Lansdale’s short story.25 Water is an elemental, environing medium with its 24 M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: 57, 82-83, 152 (on teeth and car). 25 E. Horn, “Air as Medium,” Grey Room, vol. 7 (2008): 6-25; J. Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015): 53-114, especially 55-59, 90-91. FILIPPO FIMIANI 85 AN-ICON  own specific materiality, which becomes invisible in its vital agency as space-binding. Plus, as shown by the media imaginary26 I have highlighted in my reading of Fish Night and the Eikones, water can be a “ghostly sea.” It is a very elemental medium acting as a deep time-binding agent be- tween nature and culture, between geological and mythical epochs and historically determined technical cultures, as an ontological entanglement between forms of life which are not species-specific. “Weren’t we once just slimy things, brothers to the things that swim?” asks the older man in Lansdale’s short story, borrowing Coleridge’s words27 about a com- munity not only of humans and of like beings, but of “slimy things.” In this inter-textual topos between literature, reli- gion and the natural sciences, fascination and phobia, I read “sliminess”28 as the epitome of the profound time and of the materiality of a colloidal intermediality between technolog- ical media (among other types), living beings and elements. Obviously, “sliminess” stands in contrast to the prevailing metaphors or clichés of fluidity and transparency, that are frequently used with regard to the media and their relation 26 E. Kluitenberg, Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2006); S. Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006). 27 “The very deep did rot: O Christ! / That ever this should be! / Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea” (ll. 125-126), where “a thousand thousand slimy things [with many dead men] / Lived on; and so did I,” said the mariner (ll. 238-239). S.T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798-1834), in The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912): 191, 197. See J. Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986): 41-59; J.B. Ower, “Crantz, Martens and the ‘Slimy Things’ in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Neophilologus 85, no. 3 (2001): 477-484; S. Estok, “The Environmental Imagination in the Slime of ‘The Ancient Mariner,’” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 2, vol. 34 (2021): 135-138. 28 N. Gramlich, “Sticky Media: Encounters with Oil through Imaginary Media Archaeology,” Communication + 1 7, 1 (2018): n. p. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol7/iss1/3; see F. Mason, The Viscous: Slime, Stickiness, Fondling, Mixtures (Goleta CA: punctum books, 2020): 200; B. Woodward, Slime Dynamics (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012): 59-64; C. Michlig, File under: Slime (Los Angeles: Hat & Beard Press, 2023). FILIPPO FIMIANI 86 AN-ICON  with time and materiality and, in particular, with respect to immersivity. Finally, “media are of nature and return to na- ture:”29 that’s what Fish Night, read as a trans-medial al- legory combining literature and animation, shows us in a complex and compelling way, inviting to rethink about the phenomenological and ontological relationships between memories, images, bodies, technologies and environments. A recurring topos and persistent symptom of media history, imaginaries and narratives, this impossible return is both the origin and the end of our desire for immersivity and immersive experience. 29 J. Parikka, “Introduction: The Materiality of Media and Waste,” in J. Parikka, ed., Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, (Open Humanities Press, 2011), http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Medianatures. FILIPPO FIMIANI 87 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19792

History and Stories through Jeremy Deller’s Performances by Roberto Pinto Jeremy Deller Public art Mass performance 14-18 now We’re here because we’re here Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello History and Stories through Jeremy Deller’s Performances ROBERTO PINTO, Università di Bologna – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1559-5759 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19792 Abstract “I wanted to make a memorial that was alive, not an object or set of objects to make a pilgrimage to; a memorial that would come to you, that would appear in your city, town or shopping centre, intervening in your daily life.” With these words, Jeremy Deller introduces us to his We’re Here Because We’re Here, created as part of the events commemorating the First World War. With the help of Rufus Norris, director of the National Theatre, Deller organised a gigantic mass performance in which some 2,000 volunteers disguised as World War I soldiers wandered around the main cities of the United Kingdom without anyone having warned the citizens of their presence. Through this work by Deller (and by comparing it with other artistic experiences), the text intends to investigate how some contemporary artistic interventions seek to exploit the mechanisms of performance in order to reconstruct historical events not only by relying on the strategies of re-enactment, but also by resorting to an immersive relationship linked to the un- expected capable of producing extreme involvement, a process that solicits the emotional states to which, in the harshest moments of war, the community is subjected. Keywords Jeremy Deller Public art Mass performance 14-18 now We’re here because we’re here To quote this essay: R. Pinto, “History and Stories through Jeremy Deller’s Performances,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 88-100, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19792. ROBERTO PINTO 88 AN-ICON A memorial that would come to you, that would appear in your city, town or shopping centre, intervening in your daily life1 The topic (and issue) of monuments and the commemoration of historical events has been at the centre of debate in recent decades. There have been many dis- cussions – in public, within more academic contexts and in art institutions – on the question: can statues or, more generally, artistic events still be – and how – valuable tools for activating processes of remembrance and re-elabora- tion of collective mourning or past tragic events? There have also been many striking and spec- tacular interventions/performances questioning the value of these objects inherited from a past often marked by more than one dark side. We could sum the matter up with these questions: just because they are part of our tradition, are they still able to represent us? Do they have the right to con- tinue to be considered as common symbols to be shared? Or should they be transformed into artistic artefacts that need to be historically contextualised and become part of museum heritage? (On the grounds that museums are better suited to preserving such artefacts and providing ac- curate descriptions of the context from which they come.) Among the many recent episodes, I believe everyone still has in mind the demolition of the monument to Edward Colston, “benefactor” and slave trader, on 7 June 2020 in Bristol, an event that took place in the emotional aftershock of the killing of George Floyd in the United States and the Black Lives Matter movement. In today’s climate, there is no shortage of harsh criticism of institutions when they struggle to adapt to the demands of groups and communities who do not feel rep- resented at all and, arguably, express an expectation that some of the fundamental rights of all people should be 1 J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here (London: Thames and Hudson, 2017): 61. ROBERTO PINTO 89 AN-ICON  respected. This is all the more so when dealing with sym- bols in shared and important places, such as statues and monuments. In this context, the initiative by British institu- tions to create a complex and cohesive project to mark the centenary of the First World War in an attempt to experi- ment with new ways of sharing seems to me a fascinating case study. It is clear that, whichever way one reads this historical event, one cannot ignore the fact that it was, in every respect, a long and devastating war. The initiative was a harsh testing ground for artists and institutions, given the risk of falling into the rhetoric of patriotic ideals and the celebration of the courage and daring of the participants, which had until now been indispensable prerequisites for celebrations of historical events such as this. The UK Arts Programme was the promoter of 14-18 NOW, a genuinely diverse and cohesive programme that saw the creation of 107 projects, the involvement of 420 artists2 using different media (theatre, cinema, visual arts, poetry, music) which, in most cases, were hybrid forms. It is also worth emphasising the very high level of the artists involved; they included Gillian Wearing, John Akomfrah, Raqs Media Collective, Tobias Rehberger, Yinka Shonibare, Suzanne Lacy, Rachel Whiteread, Mark Wallinger, Ryoji Ikeda, and William Kentridge.3 Many had already dealt with contemporary history and the related political problems on their journey. It should therefore be seen as an act of cour- age on the part of the promoting body – and of recognising the issues underlying an anniversary that could lend itself to controversy and misunderstanding – that they identified artists sensitive to cultural and political commitment who were well aware of the nature and extent of the dangers inherent in a project commemorating a war. One of the 2 According to its official website the project commissioned works from 420 artists, and engaged 35 million people. “About 14-18 Now,” 14-18 Now, https://www.1418now.org.uk/ about/, accessed December 15, 2022. 3 For the full list see https://www.1418now.org.uk/artists/, accessed December 15, 2022. ROBERTO PINTO 90 AN-ICON  aims of this event was, therefore, to try to change the nar- rative that has been made of the history told by European nations mainly through the arts, which have reconstructed and told it exclusively from the point of view of their specific national identities.4 Within this experimentation, I would like to place as a case study We’re here because we’re here by Jeremy Deller – created in collaboration with Rufus Norris – because, perhaps more than any other, it seems to me symbolic of the ability to put forward attractive solutions that directly address the role the public takes on in com- memorations and make the experience as multi-sensorial and engaging as possible. Elements that are the leitmotif of Immersed in the Work. From the Environment to Virtual Reality. In doing so, I would at least like to point out the proj- ects Across and In-Between by Suzanne Lacy5 and Pages of the Sea by Danny Boyle,6 which adopt an approach in many ways similar to the work of the London-based artist. Throughout his career, Jeremy Deller has often chosen subjects related to history and politics and has always used a collaborative and participatory approach right from the design phase. His artistic practices have 4 In order to clarify the position of the planners, the words of Margaret MacMillan, who, in the introduction to the volume collecting information on 14-18 Now, explains “Governments often want to tidy up the past and impose a single unified version of what happened back then - at Waterloo, say, or the Battle of the Somme. But there can be no one view. Women, men, diverse ethnic groups, religions or social classes, start from different viewpoints, and what they see in the past may be guided by that. So marking the 100th anniversary of the First World War, that vast and destructive struggle from 1914 to 1918, was never going to be easy. We can agree that it was a catastrophe that destroyed the old confident Europe and left a strangely and irrevocably altered world. Beyond that there are, and always have been, profound differences over how we remember and commemorate that war. We still cannot agree on how it started or why it went on for so long, and we still debate its meaning and its legacy a century later.” J. Waldman, M. MacMillan, eds., 14-18 Now: Contemporary Arts Commissions for the First World War Centenary (Profile: London, 2019). See also within the same volume the essay by David Olusoga. Cfr D. Olusoga, “Art as a lens: Re-Globalising the First War,” ibid.: 12-13. 5 Suzanne Lacy’s work, made between 18 and 23 October 2018, on the occasion of the centenary of Ireland’s Declaration of Independence (and the subsequent border that has since divided Northern Ireland from Éire) aims to investigate borders and the influence they have had on our lives. See: https://www.1418now.org.uk/commissions/across-and-in-between/, accessed December 15, 2022. 6 Boyle’s work, Pages of the Sea, took place on 11 November 2018 and was intended to celebrate the centenary of the Armistice. See “On 11 November 2018,” Pages of The Sea, https://www.pagesofthesea.org.uk, accessed December 15, 2022. ROBERTO PINTO 91 AN-ICON  contributed to redefining the boundaries of contemporary art also because, in creating his works, he has had to try his hand as an art producer, director, event organiser, archivist as well as photographer, performer and installation creator, the latter roles being more standard within contemporary art. The project commissioned by the WW1 Cente- nary Art Commission from Deller was related to celebrating the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles in military history. Over 141 days, more than a million casu- alties were recorded. On the first day alone, the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties. Jeremy Deller’s idea was to create a mobile and temporary memorial7 that would dialogue with the present day and attempt to overturn the need to create a specific place dedicated to the memory of people and events by conceiving, instead, “a memorial that would come to you, that would appear in your city, town or shopping centre, intervening in your daily life. [...] It was as much about today as it was about 1916.”8 To meet this need, with the help of Rufus Norris – the theatre and film director who has been Artistic Director of the National Theatre since 2015 – he staged a massive performance in which more than 1,400 volunteers, dressed in the uniforms of World War I soldiers, with no public announcement of their presence, appeared in more than 40 cities9 on 1 July 2016, making contact with UK citizens going about their daily business, and moving from one part of a city to an- other. Deller had deliberately excluded the actors/ participants from meeting in all those places that had, 7 “I wanted to make a contemporary memorial to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, one that moved around the UK with an unpredictability in which the participants, by their actions, took the memorial to the public.” Deller in https://becausewearehere.co.uk/we-are-here-about/, accessed December 15, 2022. 8 J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. 9 To access the map of the event see https://becausewearehere.co.uk/we-are-here-map/ , accessed December 15, 2022. ROBERTO PINTO 92 AN-ICON  even remotely, a relation to celebrations and rituals – so no churches, public buildings, cemeteries, or locations of historical significance. In their place, train or metro stations, busy squares and streets, shopping malls or meeting plac- es. Often in rather thickly crowded groups, these anachronistic soldiers had to present themselves in central areas and busy places to interact with citizens, returning their gaze and smiling at them, although they were not expected to engage in conversations or stimulate verbal exchanges. They had to limit themselves, occasionally and chorally, to singing a song to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” with the words “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here,” hence the title of the work. British soldiers10 also often used this line as a hymn wishing for the war’s end. The idea of remaining silent was Norris’s sug- gestion,11 and, in a way, silence became a real communi- cative strategy for Deller to construct his sort of re-enact- ment:12 the silence before the event, which was completely concealed from the public until the day the performers appeared in the cities, and the substantial silence of the participants interrupted by the chants that occasionally accompanied the soldiers in their wanderings through the 10 Deller explained: “When I read about this song, I realised I not only had an activity for the men but also a title for the piece. It explains nothing, it’s pointless and repetitive, a little like the fate of a foot soldier or even the nature of man’s addiction to conflict.” J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. 11 C. Higgins, “#Wearehere: Somme tribute revealed as Jeremy Deller work,” The Guardian (July 1, 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jul/01/wearehere-battle-somme- tribute-acted-out-across-britain, accessed December 15, 2022. 12 Although, as we shall see, Deller has constructed genuine re-enactments, on this occasion this work cannot be properly considered as such, even though, often, this term is used as a hypernym. On this subject see S. Mudu, “Under the sign of Reenactment,” in C. Baldacci, S. Franco, eds., On Reenactment: Concepts, Metodologies, Tools (Turin: Accademia University Press, 2022). ROBERTO PINTO 93 AN-ICON  cities. During the weeks of training13 in the run-up to 1 July, Norris and Deller had explicitly requested of all participants that interaction with the spectators should stop there, at si- lence, at a simple exchange of glances, and that the possi- ble explanation/interpretation of the event unfolding before the mostly astonished eyes of the spectators should be left to the calling card – a choice dictated by both purely tech- nical and symbolic issues. The performative action – given the vastness of the intervention and the mass of people involved – had to remain as simple as possible so as not to force the performers to improvise in the face of the in- calculable variables imposed in an open dialogue with the casual passer-by. The conversation, therefore, would have been entirely uncontrollable and (also given that none of the participants had any professional acting training) the quality standards would probably have suffered. In addition, although I am not aware that this was made explicit, it would also have posed a problem of a symbolic nature: each participant in the performance was the apparition or “ghost” of a dead person, and therefore, silence was the most suitable form to evoke the victims. The actual interaction with the audience, then, took place only through a common calling card which established a dia- logue of glances in the explanation of the work – I represent someone, a specific person with a name, regiment, or rank, who died a hundred years ago, even if I am not him – and which at the same time also became the tombstone, the 13 An interesting insight into the training period for the performers in this project can be found in a conversation between Deller and Emily Lim. Cfr. E. Lim, J. Deller, “Relaxed, open, alive, kind, engaged,” in R. Norris, J. Deller, We’re Here Because We’re Here: 104-113. Here, we also find a document with the “Five Golden Words: Relaxed, open, alive, kind, engaged” and the “Four Golden Rules: 1. Stay Alive – Keep it natural, be comfortable, don’t ever be a statue! 2. Seek Eye Contact – be interested in the public but don’t intimidate them, it’s not a staring competition! 3. Be Kind to the public, don’t ever be rude! 4. Each Card is a Gift – make eye contact when you give it, watch the public’s reaction to it.” Ibid.: 104. ROBERTO PINTO 94 AN-ICON  remnant of the monument.14 In a video filmed by the BBC on this project, Deller said that he owed the idea of making the soldiers who died in that battle appear as ghosts to something he had read during the research period before the work, in which he had found interesting information about phenomena in Britain during the war - of women mainly - seeing dead loved ones in the street, just catching a glimpse of someone on a bus or through a shop window thinking it was their husband or their brother or their son. It became quite a big thing, all these sightings, these apparitions of the dead. So it was as if the project had already happened during the war. People had already seen the dead in the streets.15 Compared to a monument or a more traditional re-enactment of a historical event, which asks us to respect the hero’s sacrifice and celebrate it, Deller shifts the focus to the individual persons, or rather, to the void they left behind, filling it through the concretisation of the ghost of the missing person, thus giving shape to the void created around each of the people who disappeared in the war. This shift also reflects the artist’s desire to avoid any senti- mentality in the representation: “Avoid Sentimentality” was the instruction written on one of his reproduced sheets of notes. The artist explicitly speaks of the goal of giving the audience a “jolt,”16 and a jolt, after all, is at the opposite extreme of storytelling and words of condolence with which 14 “We also equipped each man with a set of ‘calling cards’ which bore the name, regiment and rank of a soldier who died on 1 July. He was representing that person, not pretending to be him. The card was effectively a gravestone, and if a member of the public paid attention to a soldier in any way he or she was given one,” J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. 15 W. Yu (@weiyu970), “Jeremy Deller – We’re Here Because We’re Here,” YouTube video (November 26, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXnr3w74TJs&t=158s, accessed December 15, 2022. 16 J. Deller in J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. ROBERTO PINTO 95 AN-ICON  to remember the many qualities of those who have left us – usual procedures in a commemoration of historical events. Nevertheless, the heart of this work is absolutely emotional; in fact, the people who found themselves pass- ing through the cities engaged with the performance were sucked into the event, not only because they felt surrounded by it but, above all, because the absence of rhetoric made them feel exempt from any pressing request to take sides, to accept being part of a community, as any ritual (even a secular one) imposes. The request was only to participate. And perhaps it is precisely in this form of engagement that the diversity lies, compared to others, of Deller’s fascinating offering. It appropriates with this immense “delegated per- formance”17 the principles of spectacularity; it is the child of cinema and a digital and social media culture,18 but, at the same time, does not create artificial distances between spectator and performer, given that the extreme proximity of the encounter with the soldiers made the experience somehow simultaneously unique and intimate. However, this was not the first time that Deller had used these modes of immersive engagement to rec- reate the feeling at least of an episode from the past and bring back to life a part of history that we have forgotten or repressed. This had already happened with It Is What It Is: Conversation about Iraq, from 2009, a collaborative work with Creative Time and the New Museum in New York, in which he had taken a car destroyed by explosives found in Iraq on a tour of 14 US museums to serve as a “backdrop” 17 I refer to the category used by Claire Bishop in C. Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012). 18 See C. Eva, “Reaching the Public” in J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 115-116, which begins with the statement: “In many ways We’re here because we’re here is an artwork for the age of social media.” ROBERTO PINTO 96 AN-ICON  to a conversation space in which Iraqi citizens and Ameri- can military personnel, among others, were invited.19 Nevertheless, the work that, in terms of organ- isational strategy and spectator involvement, serves as the premise for We’re here because we’re here is undoubtedly The Battle of Orgreave, from 2001, in which Deller attempted to recreate live – again, as a gigantic participatory perfor- mance – the clashes between police and striking miners at the Orgreave Coking Plant in Yorkshire on 18 June 1984. This episode, one of the harshest and most divisive for Brit- ain in the 1980s and the Thatcher era, had affected Deller as a teenager at the time: I wanted to find out what exactly happened on that day with a view to re-enacting or commemorating it in some way. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the strike, lik e a civil war, had a trau- matically divisive effect at all levels of life in the UK. Families were torn apart because of divided loyalties, the union movement was split on its willingness to support the National Union of Mineworkers, the print media especially contributed to the polarisation of the arguments to the point where there appeared to be little space for a middle ground. So in all but name it became an ideological and industrial battle between the two sections of British society.20 Commissioned and produced by Artangel, The Battle of Orgreave was a reconstruction involving about 19 On his website Deller explains: “This project started as the idea to create a mobile museum of the war in Iraq that would tour the US. Finding material for the museum proved difficult, until we were offered a car that had been used in previous exhibitions. From this car, used as a centrepiece, we constructed a room in the museum where the public could meet and talk to people involved in the conflict in some way. The idea was then taken on the road; we towed the car from New York to LA, stopping off in 14 towns and cities on the way – a classic American road trip route – accompanied by an Iraqi citizen and an enlisted American soldier. It was presented in as neutral a way as possible, which puzzled a lot of people. But it meant that the public were more likely to talk to us, because they weren’t scared of being dragged into some sort of political arena. Sometimes these conversations went on for hours. The car was subsequently donated to the Imperial War Museum in London” https://www.jeremydeller.org/ItIsWhatItIs/ItIsWhatItIs.php accessed December 15, 2022. 20 J. Deller, The English Civil War / Part II (London: Artangel, 2002): 7. ROBERTO PINTO 97 AN-ICON  a thousand people21 – around 800 who had taken part in historical re-enactments, approximately 200 former miners and an unknown number of people who were part of the police force at the time. It was also, in parallel, a massive piece of research with information, photos and videos in addition to, as already described in We’re here because we’re here, a long collective preparation work in which the former miners, above all, also had the role of helping in the reconstruction of events. And as with The Battle of Orgreave, one cannot fail to be struck by the enormous organisational effort that displays all of Deller’s ability to rely on a network of knowledge and professional expertise, even with associations involved in battle re-enactments and costumed historical events.22 Here, too, we find the artist’s interest in the pro- cesses of collective memory and its loss, but The Battle of Orgreave was also an attempt to reconstruct the very idea of society that Thatcher had denied – one of her slogans was “There is no such thing as Society” – precisely through the concept of delegation and collaboration with others to achieve a common interest. As far as possible, Deller relied on the memories of the miners and police officers to recreate the battle scene, putting the many newspaper articles in the background; in essence, allowing the many personal memories to direct the course of the re-enactment. It is a reconstruction process not to be consid- ered definitively concluded since Deller presents it again in the form of a film (shot by Mike Figgs), an archive (in the 21 Ibid.; See also A. Correia, “Interpreting Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave,” Visual Culture in Britain, no.7 (2006): 93-112. 22 On this subject, numerous articles and volumes have come out on both the artistic and the more purely theatrical side. In addition to the texts already mentioned, I would add: R. Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Routledge: London, 2011); M. Franko, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); V. Agnew., J. Lamb, J. Tomann, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies (New York: Routledge, 2020); C. Baldacci, C. Nicastro, A. Sforzini, eds., Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022); C. Baldacci, S. Franco, eds., On Reenactment: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools (Accademia University Press: Turin, 2022). ROBERTO PINTO 98 AN-ICON  Tate Modern collection), and a catalogue (The English Civil War / Part II), and it nevertheless remains present in the minds of the many participants and spectators (a distinc- tion whose legitimacy is to be verified) who took part in the reconstruction of the events on 17 June 2001. As Amelia Jones explains well, crucially, The Battle of Orgreave itself is continually changing— and is never presented as a “final” or fully coherent work or object, even though it consists of documents, objects, and other mate- rial traces of prior re-enactments. Notably, too, while many of the other re-enactments tellingly substitute the re-enactor as new “author” of a unique and ultimately static (documented) work, Deller himself does not feature in a noticeable way either as part of the re-enactment or the public relations materials circulating around the film, its most visible “documentation”—the work in its infinite permutations does not tend to devolve back to a singular body, though it does only have coherence in relation to the author-name Jeremy Deller.23 Deller is fascinated by history, but instead of seeking its element of order, repetition, and the possibil- ity of foreseeing things, he strives to make room for the complexity that is necessarily chaos and confusion. As art critic Teresa Macrì points out in her Politics/poetics,24 it is disorder that fascinates the artist, and often this confusion is identified with mass movements, collective participation, and the public dimension of his work. From a historical point of view, these projects can be juxtaposed with Jochen Gerz’s Counter-Monument,25 but I believe that Deller’s works are more a continuation 23 A. Jones, “‘The Artist is Present.’ Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence,” TDR. The Drama Review 55, no. 1 (2021): 16-45, 24. 24 T. Macrì, Politics/Poetics (Milano: Postmedia, 2014). 25 J.E. Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992): 267-296. ROBERTO PINTO 99 AN-ICON  of the actions of political art collectives in the 1970s and 1980s, and I am thinking above all of Group Material – which disbanded in 199626 – or the previously mentioned art ac- tivist Suzanne Lacy. As in their work, in the operations of the British artist there is no truth to be sought with an ideological attitude, rather the aim is to try to share ideas and above all to try to listen to the many dissonant voices and counter-narratives that have not been given sufficient space in the dominant discourse. At the same time, he perhaps distances himself from them precisely because of the popular/spectacular dimension that his works take on, because of the attention he dedicates to the spectator – a role that is always possible and never wholly absent in his works, which goes hand in hand with that of participant/ performer. 26 “It’s hard not to feel that Group Material broke significant ground but missed the party. The year they broke up, 1996, coincides with a proliferation of new forms of social practice lately successful in museum exhibitions and biennials, whether in the work of Francis Alÿs or Jeremy Deller.” A. Green, “Citizen Artists: Group Material,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 26 (2011): 17-25. ROBERTO PINTO 100 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19792

History and Stories through Jeremy Deller’s Performances by Roberto Pinto Jeremy Deller Public art Mass performance 14-18 now We’re here because we’re here Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello History and Stories through Jeremy Deller’s Performances ROBERTO PINTO, Università di Bologna – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1559-5759 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19792 Abstract “I wanted to make a memorial that was alive, not an object or set of objects to make a pilgrimage to; a memorial that would come to you, that would appear in your city, town or shopping centre, intervening in your daily life.” With these words, Jeremy Deller introduces us to his We’re Here Because We’re Here, created as part of the events commemorating the First World War. With the help of Rufus Norris, director of the National Theatre, Deller organised a gigantic mass performance in which some 2,000 volunteers disguised as World War I soldiers wandered around the main cities of the United Kingdom without anyone having warned the citizens of their presence. Through this work by Deller (and by comparing it with other artistic experiences), the text intends to investigate how some contemporary artistic interventions seek to exploit the mechanisms of performance in order to reconstruct historical events not only by relying on the strategies of re-enactment, but also by resorting to an immersive relationship linked to the un- expected capable of producing extreme involvement, a process that solicits the emotional states to which, in the harshest moments of war, the community is subjected. Keywords Jeremy Deller Public art Mass performance 14-18 now We’re here because we’re here To quote this essay: R. Pinto, “History and Stories through Jeremy Deller’s Performances,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 88-100, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19792. ROBERTO PINTO 88 AN-ICON A memorial that would come to you, that would appear in your city, town or shopping centre, intervening in your daily life1 The topic (and issue) of monuments and the commemoration of historical events has been at the centre of debate in recent decades. There have been many dis- cussions – in public, within more academic contexts and in art institutions – on the question: can statues or, more generally, artistic events still be – and how – valuable tools for activating processes of remembrance and re-elabora- tion of collective mourning or past tragic events? There have also been many striking and spec- tacular interventions/performances questioning the value of these objects inherited from a past often marked by more than one dark side. We could sum the matter up with these questions: just because they are part of our tradition, are they still able to represent us? Do they have the right to con- tinue to be considered as common symbols to be shared? Or should they be transformed into artistic artefacts that need to be historically contextualised and become part of museum heritage? (On the grounds that museums are better suited to preserving such artefacts and providing ac- curate descriptions of the context from which they come.) Among the many recent episodes, I believe everyone still has in mind the demolition of the monument to Edward Colston, “benefactor” and slave trader, on 7 June 2020 in Bristol, an event that took place in the emotional aftershock of the killing of George Floyd in the United States and the Black Lives Matter movement. In today’s climate, there is no shortage of harsh criticism of institutions when they struggle to adapt to the demands of groups and communities who do not feel rep- resented at all and, arguably, express an expectation that some of the fundamental rights of all people should be 1 J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here (London: Thames and Hudson, 2017): 61. ROBERTO PINTO 89 AN-ICON  respected. This is all the more so when dealing with sym- bols in shared and important places, such as statues and monuments. In this context, the initiative by British institu- tions to create a complex and cohesive project to mark the centenary of the First World War in an attempt to experi- ment with new ways of sharing seems to me a fascinating case study. It is clear that, whichever way one reads this historical event, one cannot ignore the fact that it was, in every respect, a long and devastating war. The initiative was a harsh testing ground for artists and institutions, given the risk of falling into the rhetoric of patriotic ideals and the celebration of the courage and daring of the participants, which had until now been indispensable prerequisites for celebrations of historical events such as this. The UK Arts Programme was the promoter of 14-18 NOW, a genuinely diverse and cohesive programme that saw the creation of 107 projects, the involvement of 420 artists2 using different media (theatre, cinema, visual arts, poetry, music) which, in most cases, were hybrid forms. It is also worth emphasising the very high level of the artists involved; they included Gillian Wearing, John Akomfrah, Raqs Media Collective, Tobias Rehberger, Yinka Shonibare, Suzanne Lacy, Rachel Whiteread, Mark Wallinger, Ryoji Ikeda, and William Kentridge.3 Many had already dealt with contemporary history and the related political problems on their journey. It should therefore be seen as an act of cour- age on the part of the promoting body – and of recognising the issues underlying an anniversary that could lend itself to controversy and misunderstanding – that they identified artists sensitive to cultural and political commitment who were well aware of the nature and extent of the dangers inherent in a project commemorating a war. One of the 2 According to its official website the project commissioned works from 420 artists, and engaged 35 million people. “About 14-18 Now,” 14-18 Now, https://www.1418now.org.uk/ about/, accessed December 15, 2022. 3 For the full list see https://www.1418now.org.uk/artists/, accessed December 15, 2022. ROBERTO PINTO 90 AN-ICON  aims of this event was, therefore, to try to change the nar- rative that has been made of the history told by European nations mainly through the arts, which have reconstructed and told it exclusively from the point of view of their specific national identities.4 Within this experimentation, I would like to place as a case study We’re here because we’re here by Jeremy Deller – created in collaboration with Rufus Norris – because, perhaps more than any other, it seems to me symbolic of the ability to put forward attractive solutions that directly address the role the public takes on in com- memorations and make the experience as multi-sensorial and engaging as possible. Elements that are the leitmotif of Immersed in the Work. From the Environment to Virtual Reality. In doing so, I would at least like to point out the proj- ects Across and In-Between by Suzanne Lacy5 and Pages of the Sea by Danny Boyle,6 which adopt an approach in many ways similar to the work of the London-based artist. Throughout his career, Jeremy Deller has often chosen subjects related to history and politics and has always used a collaborative and participatory approach right from the design phase. His artistic practices have 4 In order to clarify the position of the planners, the words of Margaret MacMillan, who, in the introduction to the volume collecting information on 14-18 Now, explains “Governments often want to tidy up the past and impose a single unified version of what happened back then - at Waterloo, say, or the Battle of the Somme. But there can be no one view. Women, men, diverse ethnic groups, religions or social classes, start from different viewpoints, and what they see in the past may be guided by that. So marking the 100th anniversary of the First World War, that vast and destructive struggle from 1914 to 1918, was never going to be easy. We can agree that it was a catastrophe that destroyed the old confident Europe and left a strangely and irrevocably altered world. Beyond that there are, and always have been, profound differences over how we remember and commemorate that war. We still cannot agree on how it started or why it went on for so long, and we still debate its meaning and its legacy a century later.” J. Waldman, M. MacMillan, eds., 14-18 Now: Contemporary Arts Commissions for the First World War Centenary (Profile: London, 2019). See also within the same volume the essay by David Olusoga. Cfr D. Olusoga, “Art as a lens: Re-Globalising the First War,” ibid.: 12-13. 5 Suzanne Lacy’s work, made between 18 and 23 October 2018, on the occasion of the centenary of Ireland’s Declaration of Independence (and the subsequent border that has since divided Northern Ireland from Éire) aims to investigate borders and the influence they have had on our lives. See: https://www.1418now.org.uk/commissions/across-and-in-between/, accessed December 15, 2022. 6 Boyle’s work, Pages of the Sea, took place on 11 November 2018 and was intended to celebrate the centenary of the Armistice. See “On 11 November 2018,” Pages of The Sea, https://www.pagesofthesea.org.uk, accessed December 15, 2022. ROBERTO PINTO 91 AN-ICON  contributed to redefining the boundaries of contemporary art also because, in creating his works, he has had to try his hand as an art producer, director, event organiser, archivist as well as photographer, performer and installation creator, the latter roles being more standard within contemporary art. The project commissioned by the WW1 Cente- nary Art Commission from Deller was related to celebrating the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles in military history. Over 141 days, more than a million casu- alties were recorded. On the first day alone, the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties. Jeremy Deller’s idea was to create a mobile and temporary memorial7 that would dialogue with the present day and attempt to overturn the need to create a specific place dedicated to the memory of people and events by conceiving, instead, “a memorial that would come to you, that would appear in your city, town or shopping centre, intervening in your daily life. [...] It was as much about today as it was about 1916.”8 To meet this need, with the help of Rufus Norris – the theatre and film director who has been Artistic Director of the National Theatre since 2015 – he staged a massive performance in which more than 1,400 volunteers, dressed in the uniforms of World War I soldiers, with no public announcement of their presence, appeared in more than 40 cities9 on 1 July 2016, making contact with UK citizens going about their daily business, and moving from one part of a city to an- other. Deller had deliberately excluded the actors/ participants from meeting in all those places that had, 7 “I wanted to make a contemporary memorial to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, one that moved around the UK with an unpredictability in which the participants, by their actions, took the memorial to the public.” Deller in https://becausewearehere.co.uk/we-are-here-about/, accessed December 15, 2022. 8 J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. 9 To access the map of the event see https://becausewearehere.co.uk/we-are-here-map/ , accessed December 15, 2022. ROBERTO PINTO 92 AN-ICON  even remotely, a relation to celebrations and rituals – so no churches, public buildings, cemeteries, or locations of historical significance. In their place, train or metro stations, busy squares and streets, shopping malls or meeting plac- es. Often in rather thickly crowded groups, these anachronistic soldiers had to present themselves in central areas and busy places to interact with citizens, returning their gaze and smiling at them, although they were not expected to engage in conversations or stimulate verbal exchanges. They had to limit themselves, occasionally and chorally, to singing a song to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” with the words “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here,” hence the title of the work. British soldiers10 also often used this line as a hymn wishing for the war’s end. The idea of remaining silent was Norris’s sug- gestion,11 and, in a way, silence became a real communi- cative strategy for Deller to construct his sort of re-enact- ment:12 the silence before the event, which was completely concealed from the public until the day the performers appeared in the cities, and the substantial silence of the participants interrupted by the chants that occasionally accompanied the soldiers in their wanderings through the 10 Deller explained: “When I read about this song, I realised I not only had an activity for the men but also a title for the piece. It explains nothing, it’s pointless and repetitive, a little like the fate of a foot soldier or even the nature of man’s addiction to conflict.” J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. 11 C. Higgins, “#Wearehere: Somme tribute revealed as Jeremy Deller work,” The Guardian (July 1, 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jul/01/wearehere-battle-somme- tribute-acted-out-across-britain, accessed December 15, 2022. 12 Although, as we shall see, Deller has constructed genuine re-enactments, on this occasion this work cannot be properly considered as such, even though, often, this term is used as a hypernym. On this subject see S. Mudu, “Under the sign of Reenactment,” in C. Baldacci, S. Franco, eds., On Reenactment: Concepts, Metodologies, Tools (Turin: Accademia University Press, 2022). ROBERTO PINTO 93 AN-ICON  cities. During the weeks of training13 in the run-up to 1 July, Norris and Deller had explicitly requested of all participants that interaction with the spectators should stop there, at si- lence, at a simple exchange of glances, and that the possi- ble explanation/interpretation of the event unfolding before the mostly astonished eyes of the spectators should be left to the calling card – a choice dictated by both purely tech- nical and symbolic issues. The performative action – given the vastness of the intervention and the mass of people involved – had to remain as simple as possible so as not to force the performers to improvise in the face of the in- calculable variables imposed in an open dialogue with the casual passer-by. The conversation, therefore, would have been entirely uncontrollable and (also given that none of the participants had any professional acting training) the quality standards would probably have suffered. In addition, although I am not aware that this was made explicit, it would also have posed a problem of a symbolic nature: each participant in the performance was the apparition or “ghost” of a dead person, and therefore, silence was the most suitable form to evoke the victims. The actual interaction with the audience, then, took place only through a common calling card which established a dia- logue of glances in the explanation of the work – I represent someone, a specific person with a name, regiment, or rank, who died a hundred years ago, even if I am not him – and which at the same time also became the tombstone, the 13 An interesting insight into the training period for the performers in this project can be found in a conversation between Deller and Emily Lim. Cfr. E. Lim, J. Deller, “Relaxed, open, alive, kind, engaged,” in R. Norris, J. Deller, We’re Here Because We’re Here: 104-113. Here, we also find a document with the “Five Golden Words: Relaxed, open, alive, kind, engaged” and the “Four Golden Rules: 1. Stay Alive – Keep it natural, be comfortable, don’t ever be a statue! 2. Seek Eye Contact – be interested in the public but don’t intimidate them, it’s not a staring competition! 3. Be Kind to the public, don’t ever be rude! 4. Each Card is a Gift – make eye contact when you give it, watch the public’s reaction to it.” Ibid.: 104. ROBERTO PINTO 94 AN-ICON  remnant of the monument.14 In a video filmed by the BBC on this project, Deller said that he owed the idea of making the soldiers who died in that battle appear as ghosts to something he had read during the research period before the work, in which he had found interesting information about phenomena in Britain during the war - of women mainly - seeing dead loved ones in the street, just catching a glimpse of someone on a bus or through a shop window thinking it was their husband or their brother or their son. It became quite a big thing, all these sightings, these apparitions of the dead. So it was as if the project had already happened during the war. People had already seen the dead in the streets.15 Compared to a monument or a more traditional re-enactment of a historical event, which asks us to respect the hero’s sacrifice and celebrate it, Deller shifts the focus to the individual persons, or rather, to the void they left behind, filling it through the concretisation of the ghost of the missing person, thus giving shape to the void created around each of the people who disappeared in the war. This shift also reflects the artist’s desire to avoid any senti- mentality in the representation: “Avoid Sentimentality” was the instruction written on one of his reproduced sheets of notes. The artist explicitly speaks of the goal of giving the audience a “jolt,”16 and a jolt, after all, is at the opposite extreme of storytelling and words of condolence with which 14 “We also equipped each man with a set of ‘calling cards’ which bore the name, regiment and rank of a soldier who died on 1 July. He was representing that person, not pretending to be him. The card was effectively a gravestone, and if a member of the public paid attention to a soldier in any way he or she was given one,” J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. 15 W. Yu (@weiyu970), “Jeremy Deller – We’re Here Because We’re Here,” YouTube video (November 26, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXnr3w74TJs&t=158s, accessed December 15, 2022. 16 J. Deller in J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. ROBERTO PINTO 95 AN-ICON  to remember the many qualities of those who have left us – usual procedures in a commemoration of historical events. Nevertheless, the heart of this work is absolutely emotional; in fact, the people who found themselves pass- ing through the cities engaged with the performance were sucked into the event, not only because they felt surrounded by it but, above all, because the absence of rhetoric made them feel exempt from any pressing request to take sides, to accept being part of a community, as any ritual (even a secular one) imposes. The request was only to participate. And perhaps it is precisely in this form of engagement that the diversity lies, compared to others, of Deller’s fascinating offering. It appropriates with this immense “delegated per- formance”17 the principles of spectacularity; it is the child of cinema and a digital and social media culture,18 but, at the same time, does not create artificial distances between spectator and performer, given that the extreme proximity of the encounter with the soldiers made the experience somehow simultaneously unique and intimate. However, this was not the first time that Deller had used these modes of immersive engagement to rec- reate the feeling at least of an episode from the past and bring back to life a part of history that we have forgotten or repressed. This had already happened with It Is What It Is: Conversation about Iraq, from 2009, a collaborative work with Creative Time and the New Museum in New York, in which he had taken a car destroyed by explosives found in Iraq on a tour of 14 US museums to serve as a “backdrop” 17 I refer to the category used by Claire Bishop in C. Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012). 18 See C. Eva, “Reaching the Public” in J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 115-116, which begins with the statement: “In many ways We’re here because we’re here is an artwork for the age of social media.” ROBERTO PINTO 96 AN-ICON  to a conversation space in which Iraqi citizens and Ameri- can military personnel, among others, were invited.19 Nevertheless, the work that, in terms of organ- isational strategy and spectator involvement, serves as the premise for We’re here because we’re here is undoubtedly The Battle of Orgreave, from 2001, in which Deller attempted to recreate live – again, as a gigantic participatory perfor- mance – the clashes between police and striking miners at the Orgreave Coking Plant in Yorkshire on 18 June 1984. This episode, one of the harshest and most divisive for Brit- ain in the 1980s and the Thatcher era, had affected Deller as a teenager at the time: I wanted to find out what exactly happened on that day with a view to re-enacting or commemorating it in some way. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the strike, lik e a civil war, had a trau- matically divisive effect at all levels of life in the UK. Families were torn apart because of divided loyalties, the union movement was split on its willingness to support the National Union of Mineworkers, the print media especially contributed to the polarisation of the arguments to the point where there appeared to be little space for a middle ground. So in all but name it became an ideological and industrial battle between the two sections of British society.20 Commissioned and produced by Artangel, The Battle of Orgreave was a reconstruction involving about 19 On his website Deller explains: “This project started as the idea to create a mobile museum of the war in Iraq that would tour the US. Finding material for the museum proved difficult, until we were offered a car that had been used in previous exhibitions. From this car, used as a centrepiece, we constructed a room in the museum where the public could meet and talk to people involved in the conflict in some way. The idea was then taken on the road; we towed the car from New York to LA, stopping off in 14 towns and cities on the way – a classic American road trip route – accompanied by an Iraqi citizen and an enlisted American soldier. It was presented in as neutral a way as possible, which puzzled a lot of people. But it meant that the public were more likely to talk to us, because they weren’t scared of being dragged into some sort of political arena. Sometimes these conversations went on for hours. The car was subsequently donated to the Imperial War Museum in London” https://www.jeremydeller.org/ItIsWhatItIs/ItIsWhatItIs.php accessed December 15, 2022. 20 J. Deller, The English Civil War / Part II (London: Artangel, 2002): 7. ROBERTO PINTO 97 AN-ICON  a thousand people21 – around 800 who had taken part in historical re-enactments, approximately 200 former miners and an unknown number of people who were part of the police force at the time. It was also, in parallel, a massive piece of research with information, photos and videos in addition to, as already described in We’re here because we’re here, a long collective preparation work in which the former miners, above all, also had the role of helping in the reconstruction of events. And as with The Battle of Orgreave, one cannot fail to be struck by the enormous organisational effort that displays all of Deller’s ability to rely on a network of knowledge and professional expertise, even with associations involved in battle re-enactments and costumed historical events.22 Here, too, we find the artist’s interest in the pro- cesses of collective memory and its loss, but The Battle of Orgreave was also an attempt to reconstruct the very idea of society that Thatcher had denied – one of her slogans was “There is no such thing as Society” – precisely through the concept of delegation and collaboration with others to achieve a common interest. As far as possible, Deller relied on the memories of the miners and police officers to recreate the battle scene, putting the many newspaper articles in the background; in essence, allowing the many personal memories to direct the course of the re-enactment. It is a reconstruction process not to be consid- ered definitively concluded since Deller presents it again in the form of a film (shot by Mike Figgs), an archive (in the 21 Ibid.; See also A. Correia, “Interpreting Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave,” Visual Culture in Britain, no.7 (2006): 93-112. 22 On this subject, numerous articles and volumes have come out on both the artistic and the more purely theatrical side. In addition to the texts already mentioned, I would add: R. Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Routledge: London, 2011); M. Franko, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); V. Agnew., J. Lamb, J. Tomann, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies (New York: Routledge, 2020); C. Baldacci, C. Nicastro, A. Sforzini, eds., Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022); C. Baldacci, S. Franco, eds., On Reenactment: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools (Accademia University Press: Turin, 2022). ROBERTO PINTO 98 AN-ICON  Tate Modern collection), and a catalogue (The English Civil War / Part II), and it nevertheless remains present in the minds of the many participants and spectators (a distinc- tion whose legitimacy is to be verified) who took part in the reconstruction of the events on 17 June 2001. As Amelia Jones explains well, crucially, The Battle of Orgreave itself is continually changing— and is never presented as a “final” or fully coherent work or object, even though it consists of documents, objects, and other mate- rial traces of prior re-enactments. Notably, too, while many of the other re-enactments tellingly substitute the re-enactor as new “author” of a unique and ultimately static (documented) work, Deller himself does not feature in a noticeable way either as part of the re-enactment or the public relations materials circulating around the film, its most visible “documentation”—the work in its infinite permutations does not tend to devolve back to a singular body, though it does only have coherence in relation to the author-name Jeremy Deller.23 Deller is fascinated by history, but instead of seeking its element of order, repetition, and the possibil- ity of foreseeing things, he strives to make room for the complexity that is necessarily chaos and confusion. As art critic Teresa Macrì points out in her Politics/poetics,24 it is disorder that fascinates the artist, and often this confusion is identified with mass movements, collective participation, and the public dimension of his work. From a historical point of view, these projects can be juxtaposed with Jochen Gerz’s Counter-Monument,25 but I believe that Deller’s works are more a continuation 23 A. Jones, “‘The Artist is Present.’ Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence,” TDR. The Drama Review 55, no. 1 (2021): 16-45, 24. 24 T. Macrì, Politics/Poetics (Milano: Postmedia, 2014). 25 J.E. Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992): 267-296. ROBERTO PINTO 99 AN-ICON  of the actions of political art collectives in the 1970s and 1980s, and I am thinking above all of Group Material – which disbanded in 199626 – or the previously mentioned art ac- tivist Suzanne Lacy. As in their work, in the operations of the British artist there is no truth to be sought with an ideological attitude, rather the aim is to try to share ideas and above all to try to listen to the many dissonant voices and counter-narratives that have not been given sufficient space in the dominant discourse. At the same time, he perhaps distances himself from them precisely because of the popular/spectacular dimension that his works take on, because of the attention he dedicates to the spectator – a role that is always possible and never wholly absent in his works, which goes hand in hand with that of participant/ performer. 26 “It’s hard not to feel that Group Material broke significant ground but missed the party. The year they broke up, 1996, coincides with a proliferation of new forms of social practice lately successful in museum exhibitions and biennials, whether in the work of Francis Alÿs or Jeremy Deller.” A. Green, “Citizen Artists: Group Material,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 26 (2011): 17-25. ROBERTO PINTO 100 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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From Inside to Outside (and Vice Versa) by Francesco Tedeschi Outside-inside Light Grazia Varisco Gruppo T Lucio Fontana Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello From Inside to Outsi 1 de (and Vice Versa) FRANCESCO TEDESCHI, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8007-4258 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/20002 Abstract This contribution will focus on some aspects of the roots of environmental art in Italy, with reference to works created between the 1950s and 1960s by Lucio Fon- tana, to environments designed by members of Gruppo T and other artists (Giulio Paolini, Luciano Fabro) in the 1960s, and through reflections on the different uses of space that were defined with the exhibition Lo spazio dell’immagine held in Foligno in 1967. The approach is not, however, that of a historical review of well-known events, but of an inves- tigation into the way to understand the relationship between outside and inside, the sense and value of the “passage,” the conception of the modifying factors, starting with light, which have acted on the definition of space as an element to be perceived, rather than a place to be in, emphasising the dynamics that define a dialectical, if not antithetical, re- lationship with respect to architectural and design qualities in the proper sense, leading to reading the environmental art intervention as an invitation to follow a path. Keywords Outside-inside Light Grazia Varisco Gruppo T Lucio Fontana 1 The title of this contribute takes up the one elaborated for my essay in the catalogue of the exhibition M. Meneguzzo, ed., Grazia Varisco: Percorsi contemporanei 1957-2022 (Milan: Skira, 2022, exhibition catalogue), having at its end a reflection on a work by the same Grazia Varisco. To quote this essay: F. Tedeschi, “From Inside to Outside (and Vice Versa),” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 101-111, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/20002. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 101 AN-ICON  My paper addresses the question of the envi- ronment, a practice implemented in the art of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on the relationship between the position of the “observer” and the structural elements of the artworks, as well as the role reversal between subject and object in the work of art and its perceptual process. A few of the contents I will present are derived from a course I held recently at Università Cattolica in Milan, focused on the relationship between the idea and realiza- tion of a certain type of “sites” in several forms of visual art that have moved from the representative dimension to that of an active participation in space, meant as the artic- ulation of relationship between different fields and subjects. Sites implying a “passage,” such as the window and, the door, the threshold, the labyrinth and finally the mirror. All of these sites could be defined as “transitional.”2 Among them, one with a peculiar symbolic (as well as practical) relevance is the “corridor:” an architectural space which essentially connects different rooms in an apartment and tends to be perceived merely as a service space, in some way devoid of a function of its own. In the royal palaces from past eras, it was often used to measure the distance from the outside – the realm of common people – to the inside – the place of power. So, it owns a strongly tempo- ral dimension, as demonstrated by Aleksandr Sokurov in the film Russian Ark (2002), along which the author relives Russian history as a journey through the corridors (and halls) of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. In such sense, the corridor is the form with which the purpose of a form of art qualified as “environ- mental” is best identified, through artworks addressing space as actual matter, and not an inert dimension; more specifically, the matter of a presentation both objective and subjective. As critics have consistently pointed out, most of the projects of this environmental kind tend to be perceived 2 And so I defined them in the book derived by that course: F. Tedeschi, Luoghi di transizione: forme e immagini di “passaggio,” fra arte e architettura (Brescia: Scholé- Morcelliana, 2020). I would like to thank Andrea Pinotti and Elisabetta Modena, who asked me to take part in this publication on the basis of the topics I dealt with there. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 102 AN-ICON  as “paths” and not as static or stable sites to contemplate. The corridor, as in the most crucial artistic proposals, is what lies in the middle, giving substance, sometimes in an impalpable and invisible way, to a space kept in conti- nuity between two conditions. It has to be considered – to borrow a term from the psychology of perception – as an “in-between.” It’s the “space between,” the subject matter for a distracted attention; an intermediate nature which can nonetheless constitute the very reason for its legitimization. Let me begin with an emblematic image, an extremely suggestive painting by 17th Century Dutch paint- er Samuel van Hoogstraten, a follower of Rembrandt. It is known as View of a corridor (oil on canvas, 1662; Dyrham Park, Gloucestershire). It could be considered as the junc- tion between two cultural inheritances, that of perspective as a system for processing represented space, and that of the analytical investigation of the interiors of bourgeois houses in 17th Century Holland. What might catch the eye of today’s viewer is the sense of emptiness in the cen- tral part of the painting, immersed in a peculiar light, that could be considered as the actual subject of the work. Of course, the “void” is not absolute, given the presence of many decorative elements, as well as some humans and animals placed at the margins, qualifying the combination between anthropic and architectural dimensions. Yet, the void “fills up” the central part of the painting, infused as it is with light, reflections, shadows. With all of these ele- ments taking the viewers on a visual journey through the represented space, this uncluttered area holds the func- tion of questioning them, of bringing them inside, into the silence of an intimate place.3 Of course, this place attracts and intrigues the viewer precisely because of its domestic character, starting with the juxtaposition between the dog and the mop in the foreground. The most important feature of the painting, here, is that it is based on emptiness as a 3 This painting is considered in several moments of V.I. Stoichita, L’instauration du tableau (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1993). See also, for the concept of a space overturned from outside to inside, G. Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 103 AN-ICON  way to deny any subject matter: at the same time, it can be considered as an anecdotical exercise, which goes beyond any narrative logic. For that, it is a very “modern” painting. Looking at the opposite end of this elaboration of the theme of the “void,” we can immediately move to one of the light installations that reveal the sense of a “cor- ridor” characterized by light as the medium of the artwork. An absolute zeroing, if not for the effect produced by the substance of the light, is the specific object of Dan Flavin’s attention: for instance, in his project for a wing of the Litta Menafoglio Panza di Biumo villa in Varese, following the commission by Giuseppe Panza. The transition through the different connotations of light coming from the side rooms – as well as that produced by the lighting of the very corridor defining the space of the architecture in its depth – articulates a visual and physical “path” determined by the variability of its solutions, due to the effect of the design of the color-lights, generating a truly modern and apparently claustrophobic perception of space as pure architecture, measurement, time. Thinking of a form of art based on space as a medium, however, we must mention the example of Lucio Fontana and his environments, possibly the most striking instance of an artwork progressively dematerialized by its tangible, material state. With Fontana, we are at the cross- roads of multiple impulses, such as the tension to overcome the distinction between different techniques, to imagine a proposal for an autonomous space, embodied by light itself and in its relationship with the architectural context. In these three types of artworks – the van Hoogstraten’s painting and the environments by Flavin and Fontana – we encounter three different articulations of an ongoing journey through space, either literal or delegated to an imaginary subject, with his or her body and gaze. A space that is both objective and subjective, meant as it is to host a projection of the self in the place, and, at the same time, to constitute a manifestation of its own, a rea- son for the actions of a simultaneously active “I/you,” as FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 104 AN-ICON  a kind of relationship between the inside and the outside that involves the subject in a shared perception.4 In his 1949 Ambiente spaziale a luce nera, Fon- tana equipped the space of Galleria del Naviglio with a particular light, which could appear futuristic at the time: a Wood’s lamp, surrounded by mobile fluorescent shapes cut out of papier-mâché, almost as if to justify the existence of an object to look at and perceive in a newly-configured space. Some of his subsequent structures would be even more radical, such as the one created in Amsterdam in 1967, consisting of an intersection between five narrow corridors placed side by side, and completed by a perpen- dicular one: a T-shaped transit space bathed in red light. This installation was reenacted, with updated technological means, in the striking, accurate reconstruction of Lucio Fontana’s environments at Hangar Bicocca a few years ago. Even with this installation – one of the least celebrated among Fontana’s spaces, which explains why it was not reenacted until the 2017 exhibition, and then again as the only “environment” displayed in the 2019 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York – Fontana appears to anticipate some of the effects produced by a few Amer- ican artists, who reduced the investigation of space to a matter of perception. A practice exemplified by the work of Bruce Nauman, and particularly by his “corridors” and their constrictive, delocalizing effects. By shifting the focus from structure to perception (which is what distinguishes Nau- man’s works from Flavin’s), we actually question the very nature of space, at the same time introducing the notion of a somehow objectified ego. The observer is observed, and thus turned into a visual object, particularly in installa- tions featuring TV screens and cameras that reproduce – in alienated fashion – the actions performed by the viewers 4 In this sense, this concept is close to the use of the definition of “avatarization” by Andrea Pinotti; see A. Pinotti, “Procuratori del sé. Avatar e avatarizzazione,” in T. Gatti, D. Maini, eds., Visual studies: l’avvento di nuovi paradigmi (Milan: Mimesis, 2019): 27-40. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 105 AN-ICON  themselves. The screen thus becomes a spying device or a “magic mirror.” A center of such investigation of the inside-out- side relationship could be found in the questions on the origin of forms outlining space itself. These are extend- ed, then, to the relationship between internal and external space in a specific instance, and also to the questions about the subject and the object of the experience. For this reason, we shall address how Fontana approaches an im- portant phase in the development of his Spatial Concepts, concerned with the practical manifestation of an idea of space revealed in the apparent two-dimensional nature of the picture format. In 1952 several canvases from the more spe- cifically “cosmogonic” series5 were used by the artist to demonstrate how they could be conceived as “fragments of space” or space generators, in the sense that their en- tity is manifested in a twofold way: as works to be looked at frontally or to be “pierced” by light, thus creating a new space modified by the luminous projection of the holes, and at the same time canceling out the pictorial surface on which they are actually located. This exploration – pre- sented through a series of photographs, one of which was chosen to illustrate the catalogue of the exhibition at Gal- leria del Naviglio that year – was followed up in the exper- iments carried out by Fontana with television, in the tests carried out at the RAI studios in Milan. In this case, as far as we can see, Fontana was even more focused on the “hidden” side of his works, foregrounding the light trails that occupied that “other space” represented by the pro- jection screen. Conceptually, this exploration can also be considered one of the roots of the recent elaborations of “VR” or immersive reality in the creation of virtual spaces, both from a technological philosophical perspective. We can certainly trace this evolution from the light-pierced Spatial Concepts to the actual environment 5 As they were categorized by Enrico Crispolti in his analysis of Fontana’s work. See E. Crispolti, Fontana: catalogo generale (Milan: Electa, 1986); see also E. Crispolti, Omaggio a Lucio Fontana (Rome: Carocci, 1971). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 106 AN-ICON  in a few works created by the artist in the following years, such as that for the 1964 Triennale, the one displayed in Minneapolis in 1966, or the one included in the exhibit Spazio dell’immagine in Foligno, in 1967. It may be useful to elaborate briefly on the latter exhibition, due to its historical relevance, as it established two very different directions in exploring the relationship with space. On the one hand, as in Fontana’s works, space is conceived as the very material of the work, an environ- ment to inhabit, in which those who pass through or linger become part of a perceptive condition (of a field).6 On the other hand, space is seen as the environment for an “im- age” or an “object,” either complete in itself or combined, according to specific forms of installation. Such distinction cannot be too rigid, as the two tendencies were intersected on several occasions. However, proposals such as that by Enrico Castellani can be recognized as deriving directly from Fontana’s example. Castellani’s White environment applies principles of design and architecture the artist had already identified in a singular “Albertian” derivation the previous year, in his room at the Venice Biennale. Again, Intercamera plastica by Paolo Scheggi, Blu abitabile by Agostino Bonalumi, Interpretazione speculare by Getulio Alviani, up to After Sctructures by Gianni Colombo, one of the environments with the decisive presence of light that varies the perception, are all to be considered as products of Fontana’s influence. At the crossroads with the condition of the object are the instances of a “space within space,” which can be exemplified by Mario Ceroli’s Gabbia or by Luciano Fabro’s In-cubo (to Carla Lonzi). On the other hand, leaving aside works of singular importance, such as the Pozzi-specchio by Pistoletto or Tubo by Eliseo Mattiac- ci, one could mention the staging by Tano Festa, Subito dopo il cielo (dedicated to Francesco Lo Savio), for its po- etic quality. This brief list serves to illustrate the different practices showcased in a project that explored both the 6 An important presence in psychological, sociological and planning studies in that time is the so-called “theory of field,” proposed in Italy by Attilio Marcolli. See A. Marcolli, Teoria del campo (Florence: Sansoni, 1971). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 107 AN-ICON  aforementioned directions, from the tributes to Lucio Fon- tana and Ettore Colla, which provided the respective points of departure, and somehow emerged clearly in the various texts in the exhibition catalogue.7 In some of them, we find an echo of the ideas put forward, on the occasion of the earlier exhibition Fuoco Immagine Acqua Terra (L’Attico, Rome, June 1967), by Maurizio Calvesi and Alberto Boat- to, and the origin of the definition of “Im-Space” which, a few months later, would be linked to the first appearance of “Arte Povera,” in the exhibition Arte Povera – Im Spazio, curated by Germano Celant at the La Bertesca gallery in Genoa (September-October 1967). What I have said so far may provide a useful background for a work that I perceive as emblematic of an idea of space as a “path,” but with peculiar attention to light as substitute of gaze. This environment appears like a closed room; however, it produces, from the inside, a sense of passage, an immediate relationship between the physical eye and the virtual eye of a source of light that pushes on space as if to open it up. I am referring to the environment created by Grazia Varisco for the Schwarz gallery in Milan in October 1969 (Fig.1). The installation has been recreated on several occasions in recent years (Fig. 2).8 The room, conceived by the artist as an environ- ment designed in an extremely articulated way, covers an overall perimeter significantly larger than its actual size, expanding the sensation or perception of time, besides that of space. To make this sensation tangible, the author darkened the space, a frequent solution among the artists 7 See the catalogue of the exhibition which took place in 1967 at Palazzo Trinci in Foligno: U. Apollonio, G.C., Argan, P. Bucarelli, eds., Lo spazio dell’immagine (Venice: Alfieri Editori d’Arte, 1967). 8 See the catalogue of the exhibition which took place at Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome from December 14, 2005 to May 21, 2006: M. Margozzi, L. Meloni, F. Lardera, eds., Gli ambienti del Gruppo T. Le origini dell’arte interattiva (Roma: Silvana, 2006, exhibition catalogue): 54-55, 32-35. For further information about this and other environments of the group see L. Meloni, Gli ambienti del Gruppo T (Roma: Silvana, 2004). More recently, Varisco’s environment has been exhibited in Vertigo: Op Art and a History of Deception 1520-1970, MUMOK, Wien, 25 May - 26 October, 2019 (the exhibition also travelled to Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart, November 23, 2019 - April 20, 2020), before the retrospective hosted at Palazzo Reale in Milan from June 2 to September 16, 2022; see the catalogue: M. Meneguzzo, ed., Grazia Varisco: Percorsi Contemporanei 1957-2022 (Milan: Skira, 2022, exhibition catalogue); F. Tedeschi, “Dall’interno all’esterno (e viceversa). Il concetto di spazio ‘percorribile’ nell’opera di Grazia Varisco,” ibidem: 26-29. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 108 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. G. Varisco, model of the Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotemporal dilatation of a path, 1969, reconstruction of the environment for the solo exhibition at Galleria Schwarz, Milan, 1969. Fig. 2. G. Varisco, reconstruction of the environment Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotemporal dilatation of a path, 1969, at the exhibition “Gli ambienti del gruppo T,” Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, 2006. who, following the Fontana’s example, used light as a cre- ative and descriptive element of space. As a matter of fact, Varisco placed a “luminous eye” at the center, which, by means of a mechanical process, rotates progressively, in- dicating the trajectory of a path that pushed from the inside outwards, generating a visual and physical sensation at the same time. The light replaces, rather than following it, the gaze of the person undertaking the role of “bystander,” to quote Brandi:9 i.e. a presence experiencing space as a relationship between being and existing. This, as the artist observes, increases the complexity of an active participa- tion, as well as physical relationship, with the site, plunged as it is into the interiority of darkness: the viewer actually experiences two alternative spaces, that of the eye-line of 9 See C. Brandi, Struttura e architettura (Turin: Einaudi, 1967) and Teoria generale della critica (Turin: Einaudi, 1974). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 109 AN-ICON  light and that of the eye-physical presence of the viewer’s own body. Perhaps, the very essence of the work lies precisely in its drive to overcome the constraints of the structure, without actually doing more than absorbing the enchantment of a suspended, outstretched time. The un- derlying character of the work is then a condition of “path” to be completed according to the twofold participation of an active movement and a virtual one. It should be noted that, about ten days before the inauguration of her solo show at the Schwarz gallery – on which occasion this en- vironment, Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotemporal dilatation of a path, was proposed – Grazia Varisco had participated to Campo Urbano, an event pro- moted by Luciano Caramel in Como. Here, she made an intervention in a public space, immortalized by the photo- graphs by Ugo Mulas, who followed and documented the events of that memorable day. On that occasion, Varisco had appropriated a street in the town center, involving a large group of people to help here create a series of walls arranged in a meander, made up of cardboard boxes. By cluttering up the road, the work extended the time nec- essary to walk through it. This operation was also called Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotempo- ral dilatation of a path, and in this case the perception of the “urban field,” experienced alternatively with amusement or annoyance, resulted in an immediate application of a principle of modification of reality, due to the presence of a structure that affects movement and, as a consequence, the psychological perception of the entire environment. As the artist writes in the short note later published in the cat- alogue of the Schwarz gallery exhibition, “I see and feel longer. The reactions of impatience or satisfaction change if I try the route again.”10 10 G. Varisco, “Dilatazione spazio temporale di un percorso” in G. Accame, Grazia Varisco (Bergamo: Maredarte, 2001): 102. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 110 AN-ICON  As in other environmental works from a time imbued with a strong imagination of the future, the laby- rinth condition produced by these two operations can be seen as an experiment on a way of thinking and feeling in relation to objects and space. The echo of this attitude is evident in a series of works produced by the artist in the following years, titled Random walks by random numbers. In these screen-printed compositions, the combination of chance and design produce a virtual direction into which the viewers are supposed to get lost, and then rediscover themselves, as Varisco states: “And I play with imagina- tion: I imagine moving robotically, in a defined space with unpredictable steps – or with a pencil on squared paper – letting myself be guided exclusively by the sequence of numbers to which I have previously associated a direction. Chance and design. Not being able to predict my path, I don’t know if my movements will be contained in the space, on the sheet.”11 From the virtual space of painting to the real space of the built environment, from the virtual space of a projection that includes the viewer as a participant and an object, to that of a sheet that records movements, ei- ther made or imagined, the creation of an interior from the exterior and the reworking of an outside from the inside are exemplified here through a practice rooted in the drive to explore space, which has guided, up to this point, the experiments of several generations of artists. 11 G. Varisco, “Random Walks – 1972,” in G. Accame, Grazia Varisco: 108. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 111 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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From Inside to Outside (and Vice Versa) by Francesco Tedeschi Outside-inside Light Grazia Varisco Gruppo T Lucio Fontana Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello From Inside to Outsi 1 de (and Vice Versa) FRANCESCO TEDESCHI, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8007-4258 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/20002 Abstract This contribution will focus on some aspects of the roots of environmental art in Italy, with reference to works created between the 1950s and 1960s by Lucio Fon- tana, to environments designed by members of Gruppo T and other artists (Giulio Paolini, Luciano Fabro) in the 1960s, and through reflections on the different uses of space that were defined with the exhibition Lo spazio dell’immagine held in Foligno in 1967. The approach is not, however, that of a historical review of well-known events, but of an inves- tigation into the way to understand the relationship between outside and inside, the sense and value of the “passage,” the conception of the modifying factors, starting with light, which have acted on the definition of space as an element to be perceived, rather than a place to be in, emphasising the dynamics that define a dialectical, if not antithetical, re- lationship with respect to architectural and design qualities in the proper sense, leading to reading the environmental art intervention as an invitation to follow a path. Keywords Outside-inside Light Grazia Varisco Gruppo T Lucio Fontana 1 The title of this contribute takes up the one elaborated for my essay in the catalogue of the exhibition M. Meneguzzo, ed., Grazia Varisco: Percorsi contemporanei 1957-2022 (Milan: Skira, 2022, exhibition catalogue), having at its end a reflection on a work by the same Grazia Varisco. To quote this essay: F. Tedeschi, “From Inside to Outside (and Vice Versa),” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 101-111, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/20002. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 101 AN-ICON  My paper addresses the question of the envi- ronment, a practice implemented in the art of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on the relationship between the position of the “observer” and the structural elements of the artworks, as well as the role reversal between subject and object in the work of art and its perceptual process. A few of the contents I will present are derived from a course I held recently at Università Cattolica in Milan, focused on the relationship between the idea and realiza- tion of a certain type of “sites” in several forms of visual art that have moved from the representative dimension to that of an active participation in space, meant as the artic- ulation of relationship between different fields and subjects. Sites implying a “passage,” such as the window and, the door, the threshold, the labyrinth and finally the mirror. All of these sites could be defined as “transitional.”2 Among them, one with a peculiar symbolic (as well as practical) relevance is the “corridor:” an architectural space which essentially connects different rooms in an apartment and tends to be perceived merely as a service space, in some way devoid of a function of its own. In the royal palaces from past eras, it was often used to measure the distance from the outside – the realm of common people – to the inside – the place of power. So, it owns a strongly tempo- ral dimension, as demonstrated by Aleksandr Sokurov in the film Russian Ark (2002), along which the author relives Russian history as a journey through the corridors (and halls) of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. In such sense, the corridor is the form with which the purpose of a form of art qualified as “environ- mental” is best identified, through artworks addressing space as actual matter, and not an inert dimension; more specifically, the matter of a presentation both objective and subjective. As critics have consistently pointed out, most of the projects of this environmental kind tend to be perceived 2 And so I defined them in the book derived by that course: F. Tedeschi, Luoghi di transizione: forme e immagini di “passaggio,” fra arte e architettura (Brescia: Scholé- Morcelliana, 2020). I would like to thank Andrea Pinotti and Elisabetta Modena, who asked me to take part in this publication on the basis of the topics I dealt with there. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 102 AN-ICON  as “paths” and not as static or stable sites to contemplate. The corridor, as in the most crucial artistic proposals, is what lies in the middle, giving substance, sometimes in an impalpable and invisible way, to a space kept in conti- nuity between two conditions. It has to be considered – to borrow a term from the psychology of perception – as an “in-between.” It’s the “space between,” the subject matter for a distracted attention; an intermediate nature which can nonetheless constitute the very reason for its legitimization. Let me begin with an emblematic image, an extremely suggestive painting by 17th Century Dutch paint- er Samuel van Hoogstraten, a follower of Rembrandt. It is known as View of a corridor (oil on canvas, 1662; Dyrham Park, Gloucestershire). It could be considered as the junc- tion between two cultural inheritances, that of perspective as a system for processing represented space, and that of the analytical investigation of the interiors of bourgeois houses in 17th Century Holland. What might catch the eye of today’s viewer is the sense of emptiness in the cen- tral part of the painting, immersed in a peculiar light, that could be considered as the actual subject of the work. Of course, the “void” is not absolute, given the presence of many decorative elements, as well as some humans and animals placed at the margins, qualifying the combination between anthropic and architectural dimensions. Yet, the void “fills up” the central part of the painting, infused as it is with light, reflections, shadows. With all of these ele- ments taking the viewers on a visual journey through the represented space, this uncluttered area holds the func- tion of questioning them, of bringing them inside, into the silence of an intimate place.3 Of course, this place attracts and intrigues the viewer precisely because of its domestic character, starting with the juxtaposition between the dog and the mop in the foreground. The most important feature of the painting, here, is that it is based on emptiness as a 3 This painting is considered in several moments of V.I. Stoichita, L’instauration du tableau (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1993). See also, for the concept of a space overturned from outside to inside, G. Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 103 AN-ICON  way to deny any subject matter: at the same time, it can be considered as an anecdotical exercise, which goes beyond any narrative logic. For that, it is a very “modern” painting. Looking at the opposite end of this elaboration of the theme of the “void,” we can immediately move to one of the light installations that reveal the sense of a “cor- ridor” characterized by light as the medium of the artwork. An absolute zeroing, if not for the effect produced by the substance of the light, is the specific object of Dan Flavin’s attention: for instance, in his project for a wing of the Litta Menafoglio Panza di Biumo villa in Varese, following the commission by Giuseppe Panza. The transition through the different connotations of light coming from the side rooms – as well as that produced by the lighting of the very corridor defining the space of the architecture in its depth – articulates a visual and physical “path” determined by the variability of its solutions, due to the effect of the design of the color-lights, generating a truly modern and apparently claustrophobic perception of space as pure architecture, measurement, time. Thinking of a form of art based on space as a medium, however, we must mention the example of Lucio Fontana and his environments, possibly the most striking instance of an artwork progressively dematerialized by its tangible, material state. With Fontana, we are at the cross- roads of multiple impulses, such as the tension to overcome the distinction between different techniques, to imagine a proposal for an autonomous space, embodied by light itself and in its relationship with the architectural context. In these three types of artworks – the van Hoogstraten’s painting and the environments by Flavin and Fontana – we encounter three different articulations of an ongoing journey through space, either literal or delegated to an imaginary subject, with his or her body and gaze. A space that is both objective and subjective, meant as it is to host a projection of the self in the place, and, at the same time, to constitute a manifestation of its own, a rea- son for the actions of a simultaneously active “I/you,” as FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 104 AN-ICON  a kind of relationship between the inside and the outside that involves the subject in a shared perception.4 In his 1949 Ambiente spaziale a luce nera, Fon- tana equipped the space of Galleria del Naviglio with a particular light, which could appear futuristic at the time: a Wood’s lamp, surrounded by mobile fluorescent shapes cut out of papier-mâché, almost as if to justify the existence of an object to look at and perceive in a newly-configured space. Some of his subsequent structures would be even more radical, such as the one created in Amsterdam in 1967, consisting of an intersection between five narrow corridors placed side by side, and completed by a perpen- dicular one: a T-shaped transit space bathed in red light. This installation was reenacted, with updated technological means, in the striking, accurate reconstruction of Lucio Fontana’s environments at Hangar Bicocca a few years ago. Even with this installation – one of the least celebrated among Fontana’s spaces, which explains why it was not reenacted until the 2017 exhibition, and then again as the only “environment” displayed in the 2019 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York – Fontana appears to anticipate some of the effects produced by a few Amer- ican artists, who reduced the investigation of space to a matter of perception. A practice exemplified by the work of Bruce Nauman, and particularly by his “corridors” and their constrictive, delocalizing effects. By shifting the focus from structure to perception (which is what distinguishes Nau- man’s works from Flavin’s), we actually question the very nature of space, at the same time introducing the notion of a somehow objectified ego. The observer is observed, and thus turned into a visual object, particularly in installa- tions featuring TV screens and cameras that reproduce – in alienated fashion – the actions performed by the viewers 4 In this sense, this concept is close to the use of the definition of “avatarization” by Andrea Pinotti; see A. Pinotti, “Procuratori del sé. Avatar e avatarizzazione,” in T. Gatti, D. Maini, eds., Visual studies: l’avvento di nuovi paradigmi (Milan: Mimesis, 2019): 27-40. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 105 AN-ICON  themselves. The screen thus becomes a spying device or a “magic mirror.” A center of such investigation of the inside-out- side relationship could be found in the questions on the origin of forms outlining space itself. These are extend- ed, then, to the relationship between internal and external space in a specific instance, and also to the questions about the subject and the object of the experience. For this reason, we shall address how Fontana approaches an im- portant phase in the development of his Spatial Concepts, concerned with the practical manifestation of an idea of space revealed in the apparent two-dimensional nature of the picture format. In 1952 several canvases from the more spe- cifically “cosmogonic” series5 were used by the artist to demonstrate how they could be conceived as “fragments of space” or space generators, in the sense that their en- tity is manifested in a twofold way: as works to be looked at frontally or to be “pierced” by light, thus creating a new space modified by the luminous projection of the holes, and at the same time canceling out the pictorial surface on which they are actually located. This exploration – pre- sented through a series of photographs, one of which was chosen to illustrate the catalogue of the exhibition at Gal- leria del Naviglio that year – was followed up in the exper- iments carried out by Fontana with television, in the tests carried out at the RAI studios in Milan. In this case, as far as we can see, Fontana was even more focused on the “hidden” side of his works, foregrounding the light trails that occupied that “other space” represented by the pro- jection screen. Conceptually, this exploration can also be considered one of the roots of the recent elaborations of “VR” or immersive reality in the creation of virtual spaces, both from a technological philosophical perspective. We can certainly trace this evolution from the light-pierced Spatial Concepts to the actual environment 5 As they were categorized by Enrico Crispolti in his analysis of Fontana’s work. See E. Crispolti, Fontana: catalogo generale (Milan: Electa, 1986); see also E. Crispolti, Omaggio a Lucio Fontana (Rome: Carocci, 1971). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 106 AN-ICON  in a few works created by the artist in the following years, such as that for the 1964 Triennale, the one displayed in Minneapolis in 1966, or the one included in the exhibit Spazio dell’immagine in Foligno, in 1967. It may be useful to elaborate briefly on the latter exhibition, due to its historical relevance, as it established two very different directions in exploring the relationship with space. On the one hand, as in Fontana’s works, space is conceived as the very material of the work, an environ- ment to inhabit, in which those who pass through or linger become part of a perceptive condition (of a field).6 On the other hand, space is seen as the environment for an “im- age” or an “object,” either complete in itself or combined, according to specific forms of installation. Such distinction cannot be too rigid, as the two tendencies were intersected on several occasions. However, proposals such as that by Enrico Castellani can be recognized as deriving directly from Fontana’s example. Castellani’s White environment applies principles of design and architecture the artist had already identified in a singular “Albertian” derivation the previous year, in his room at the Venice Biennale. Again, Intercamera plastica by Paolo Scheggi, Blu abitabile by Agostino Bonalumi, Interpretazione speculare by Getulio Alviani, up to After Sctructures by Gianni Colombo, one of the environments with the decisive presence of light that varies the perception, are all to be considered as products of Fontana’s influence. At the crossroads with the condition of the object are the instances of a “space within space,” which can be exemplified by Mario Ceroli’s Gabbia or by Luciano Fabro’s In-cubo (to Carla Lonzi). On the other hand, leaving aside works of singular importance, such as the Pozzi-specchio by Pistoletto or Tubo by Eliseo Mattiac- ci, one could mention the staging by Tano Festa, Subito dopo il cielo (dedicated to Francesco Lo Savio), for its po- etic quality. This brief list serves to illustrate the different practices showcased in a project that explored both the 6 An important presence in psychological, sociological and planning studies in that time is the so-called “theory of field,” proposed in Italy by Attilio Marcolli. See A. Marcolli, Teoria del campo (Florence: Sansoni, 1971). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 107 AN-ICON  aforementioned directions, from the tributes to Lucio Fon- tana and Ettore Colla, which provided the respective points of departure, and somehow emerged clearly in the various texts in the exhibition catalogue.7 In some of them, we find an echo of the ideas put forward, on the occasion of the earlier exhibition Fuoco Immagine Acqua Terra (L’Attico, Rome, June 1967), by Maurizio Calvesi and Alberto Boat- to, and the origin of the definition of “Im-Space” which, a few months later, would be linked to the first appearance of “Arte Povera,” in the exhibition Arte Povera – Im Spazio, curated by Germano Celant at the La Bertesca gallery in Genoa (September-October 1967). What I have said so far may provide a useful background for a work that I perceive as emblematic of an idea of space as a “path,” but with peculiar attention to light as substitute of gaze. This environment appears like a closed room; however, it produces, from the inside, a sense of passage, an immediate relationship between the physical eye and the virtual eye of a source of light that pushes on space as if to open it up. I am referring to the environment created by Grazia Varisco for the Schwarz gallery in Milan in October 1969 (Fig.1). The installation has been recreated on several occasions in recent years (Fig. 2).8 The room, conceived by the artist as an environ- ment designed in an extremely articulated way, covers an overall perimeter significantly larger than its actual size, expanding the sensation or perception of time, besides that of space. To make this sensation tangible, the author darkened the space, a frequent solution among the artists 7 See the catalogue of the exhibition which took place in 1967 at Palazzo Trinci in Foligno: U. Apollonio, G.C., Argan, P. Bucarelli, eds., Lo spazio dell’immagine (Venice: Alfieri Editori d’Arte, 1967). 8 See the catalogue of the exhibition which took place at Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome from December 14, 2005 to May 21, 2006: M. Margozzi, L. Meloni, F. Lardera, eds., Gli ambienti del Gruppo T. Le origini dell’arte interattiva (Roma: Silvana, 2006, exhibition catalogue): 54-55, 32-35. For further information about this and other environments of the group see L. Meloni, Gli ambienti del Gruppo T (Roma: Silvana, 2004). More recently, Varisco’s environment has been exhibited in Vertigo: Op Art and a History of Deception 1520-1970, MUMOK, Wien, 25 May - 26 October, 2019 (the exhibition also travelled to Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart, November 23, 2019 - April 20, 2020), before the retrospective hosted at Palazzo Reale in Milan from June 2 to September 16, 2022; see the catalogue: M. Meneguzzo, ed., Grazia Varisco: Percorsi Contemporanei 1957-2022 (Milan: Skira, 2022, exhibition catalogue); F. Tedeschi, “Dall’interno all’esterno (e viceversa). Il concetto di spazio ‘percorribile’ nell’opera di Grazia Varisco,” ibidem: 26-29. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 108 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. G. Varisco, model of the Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotemporal dilatation of a path, 1969, reconstruction of the environment for the solo exhibition at Galleria Schwarz, Milan, 1969. Fig. 2. G. Varisco, reconstruction of the environment Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotemporal dilatation of a path, 1969, at the exhibition “Gli ambienti del gruppo T,” Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, 2006. who, following the Fontana’s example, used light as a cre- ative and descriptive element of space. As a matter of fact, Varisco placed a “luminous eye” at the center, which, by means of a mechanical process, rotates progressively, in- dicating the trajectory of a path that pushed from the inside outwards, generating a visual and physical sensation at the same time. The light replaces, rather than following it, the gaze of the person undertaking the role of “bystander,” to quote Brandi:9 i.e. a presence experiencing space as a relationship between being and existing. This, as the artist observes, increases the complexity of an active participa- tion, as well as physical relationship, with the site, plunged as it is into the interiority of darkness: the viewer actually experiences two alternative spaces, that of the eye-line of 9 See C. Brandi, Struttura e architettura (Turin: Einaudi, 1967) and Teoria generale della critica (Turin: Einaudi, 1974). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 109 AN-ICON  light and that of the eye-physical presence of the viewer’s own body. Perhaps, the very essence of the work lies precisely in its drive to overcome the constraints of the structure, without actually doing more than absorbing the enchantment of a suspended, outstretched time. The un- derlying character of the work is then a condition of “path” to be completed according to the twofold participation of an active movement and a virtual one. It should be noted that, about ten days before the inauguration of her solo show at the Schwarz gallery – on which occasion this en- vironment, Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotemporal dilatation of a path, was proposed – Grazia Varisco had participated to Campo Urbano, an event pro- moted by Luciano Caramel in Como. Here, she made an intervention in a public space, immortalized by the photo- graphs by Ugo Mulas, who followed and documented the events of that memorable day. On that occasion, Varisco had appropriated a street in the town center, involving a large group of people to help here create a series of walls arranged in a meander, made up of cardboard boxes. By cluttering up the road, the work extended the time nec- essary to walk through it. This operation was also called Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotempo- ral dilatation of a path, and in this case the perception of the “urban field,” experienced alternatively with amusement or annoyance, resulted in an immediate application of a principle of modification of reality, due to the presence of a structure that affects movement and, as a consequence, the psychological perception of the entire environment. As the artist writes in the short note later published in the cat- alogue of the Schwarz gallery exhibition, “I see and feel longer. The reactions of impatience or satisfaction change if I try the route again.”10 10 G. Varisco, “Dilatazione spazio temporale di un percorso” in G. Accame, Grazia Varisco (Bergamo: Maredarte, 2001): 102. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 110 AN-ICON  As in other environmental works from a time imbued with a strong imagination of the future, the laby- rinth condition produced by these two operations can be seen as an experiment on a way of thinking and feeling in relation to objects and space. The echo of this attitude is evident in a series of works produced by the artist in the following years, titled Random walks by random numbers. In these screen-printed compositions, the combination of chance and design produce a virtual direction into which the viewers are supposed to get lost, and then rediscover themselves, as Varisco states: “And I play with imagina- tion: I imagine moving robotically, in a defined space with unpredictable steps – or with a pencil on squared paper – letting myself be guided exclusively by the sequence of numbers to which I have previously associated a direction. Chance and design. Not being able to predict my path, I don’t know if my movements will be contained in the space, on the sheet.”11 From the virtual space of painting to the real space of the built environment, from the virtual space of a projection that includes the viewer as a participant and an object, to that of a sheet that records movements, ei- ther made or imagined, the creation of an interior from the exterior and the reworking of an outside from the inside are exemplified here through a practice rooted in the drive to explore space, which has guided, up to this point, the experiments of several generations of artists. 11 G. Varisco, “Random Walks – 1972,” in G. Accame, Grazia Varisco: 108. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 111 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19773

Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitio by Annette Urban VR-art ns Environmental immersion Epistemic Objects installation art De-distancing/de-differentiation Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitions ANNETTE URBAN, Ruhr-Universität Bochum – https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19773 Abstract In contemporary understanding, a now normal- ized immersion continues to be associated with digitality and high-tech apparatuses, but is also seen as diffused into the lifeworld. Against this backdrop, the article focuses on two current artworks that extend the internal environmen- tality inherent in VR as a spatialized image into physical space by using strategies from installation and site-related art. These examples provide for an equation and nesting of work, environment and exhibition that is interpreted here as a potentiated environmentalization. The artistic VR-environ- ments by no means negate their rootedness in imagery, but rather self-reflexively reveal the transitions between image and three-dimensionality, what gives them a special epis- temic valence. It thus seems worthwhile to relate them to considerations of knowledge objects and exhibitions, but also to (queer) phenomenological theories of entanglement and becoming originating from the following of lines. ANNETTE URBAN 112 AN-ICON  Meanwhile, the epistemic value of their latent objects, disoriented paths, and impossible spaces is only revealed in the interaction with and embodied experience of the virtual space. The article thus participates in debates on how bodily immersion does not exclude, but enables action and reflection within aesthetic experience. With re- gard to two fundamental paradigms of immersion, it can show how, for this purpose, the artworks turn anew the strategies of de-distancing and de-differentiation. Keywords VR-art Environmental immersion Epistemic Objects installation art De-distancing/de-differentiation To quote this essay: A. Urban, “Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitions,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 112-138, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19773. ANNETTE URBAN 113 AN-ICON  De-Distancing and De-Differentiation: Contemporary Aesthetics of Immersion Immersion is again attracting much attention. Film and media studies, art history, image sciences and narratology have all long participated in its theorization. More recently, theatre, performance and game studies, architectural theory and the history of knowledge1 have joined in, taking into account a whole range of everyday digital technologies and thus deferring questions of image aesthetics and image technology in favor of investigating body/media/environment relationships. Whereas some the- oretical contributions highlight the immersive aspects of a specific medium, there is also a broad tendency to deal with immersion as a prime symptom of today’s image cul- tures and media ecologies what is evidenced by collective terms such as immersive media,2 environmental images and iconoscapes. To speak more generally of immersive media deliberately goes beyond media-technical foundations of the concept by arguing with transmedial relevant opera- tions. These are already rooted in narratology, where the opening up and simultaneous closing of a fictional world is accomplished cognitively-mentally: Perceptual immer- sion is therefore seen to be necessarily complemented by imaginative immersion,3 which only ensures that the sen- sory stimuli of a medium are translated into a virtual world.4 After the debate has been strongly linked to Virtual Reality since the 1990s, immersion continues to be considered under the premises of digital technologies, but at the same time is also discussed as nowadays’ conditio humana and condition of daily life. Lars C. Grabbe has proposed a new 1 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: Zu einer Wissensgeschichte der Immersion (Baden Baden: Nomos, 2019). For Kasprowicz, the immersion concept can be retrieved from the “maelstrom of negative connotations as illusion and absorption” by being understood as a “media anthropological practice of de- and re-differentiation of the body [Körper und Leib] in mediatized environments.” Ibid.: 14. 2 Cfr., among others, the Yearbook of Immersive Media 2011-2017, ed. by Institute for Immersive Media at Kiel University of Applied Sciences. 3 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: 18, with reference to Marie-Laure Ryan. 4 Cfr. T. Hochscherf, H. Kjär, P. Rupert-Kruse, “Phänomene und Medien der Immersion,” in Jahrbuch immersiver Medien 3 (2011): 9-19, 14, with reference to Matthew Lombard/Theresa Ditton. ANNETTE URBAN 114 AN-ICON  cultural-theoretical figure of the homo immergens which he considers to be the equivalent of a culture of media hybrids: In succession or better combination of the human capaci- ties for symbol formation and image production, the homo immergens has become the creator of its own “multimodal and simulative environments”5 whereby the distance to the medial artifact is reduced and a worldly experience is generated. Thus, recent insights of immersion research owe much to theorizing across media, on the basis of me- dia hybridity, as well as to inputs from other branches of scholarship. Within these multi-faceted approaches two key features emerge that I propose to summarize as a reduction of distance responsible for felt presence and as a reduction of difference. These two aspects cover both, the particular attitude of reception, which has been characterized as a way of submerging, of mental absorption, and bodily-emo- tional involvement, as well as the various forms of transfor- mative exchange or even assimilation that occur between the recipient and the object of contemplation – to put it in the classical dichotomy of aesthetic experience. Mean- while, the principles of de-distancing and de-differentiation unfold in numerous ways. They involve more-than-visual, bodily modes of experience, that can be interpreted as a re-centering of the world and the subject, but also as new forms of empathy and encounter. The latter may culminate in ideas of matter-flow inspired by Deleuze/Guattari and of leaving behind all subject-object dichotomies, which some suppose to be still at work in the quasi-objects of the philosophy of science.6 Or they remain – as with Grabbe’s term of representational convergence referring to the con- vergence of exterior and mental representations7 – closer to the realm of images whose unframing gives the beholder 5 L. C. Grabbe, “Homo Immergens: Immersion as a Parameter for a Media and Cultural Theory of Medial Hybridity,” in J. Bracker, A. Hubrich, eds., The Art of Reception (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021): 400-422, 400. 6 Cfr. T. Ingold, “Drawing Together: Materials, Gestures, Lines,” in T. Otto, N. Bubandt, eds., Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology (Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2010): 299-313, 304-305. 7 Cfr. L. C. Grabbe, “Homo Immergens:” 400. ANNETTE URBAN 115 AN-ICON  the feeling of being surrounded by them. This perspective on artificially spatialized images8 invites to focus on the transitions between images and illusionistic 3D-entities, and to a closer examination of the environmentalization inherent in it. In the widely ramified discourse on environ- mentality, the art historical point of view still seems under- represented as far as the obvious link with the so-called Ausstieg aus dem Bild, with installation and site-related art is concerned. They equally mark a significant reference point for spatialization and meanwhile break down the status of art as distinct, object-like work. Instead, the art historical interrogation of environmentality has recently been deep- ened in reference back to screen media and the paradigm of projection: In her comprehensive study, Giuliana Bruno has illuminatingly interpreted the spatiality established by light projection in terms of materially transformative pro- cesses, transductive conversions of energy and the histo- ries of energetic environments. But while she emphasizes the ambulatory “non-linear movement in forms of trans- duction”9 and explicitly investigates inhabitable spaces of immersion, with her focus on the act of projection, however, environmentality remains tied back to a transitive gesture of transmission and transport.10 In a broader disciplinary context, its exploration ranges from the new non-visual environments established by sensor technologies, from biologically, autopoietically or systems-theoretically con- ceptualized relations between an organism/a system and its Umwelt, to the environmental concerns of new material- ism, anthropology and queer phenomenology, rewriting the Heideggerian irreducible world reference of the embodied self. Sara Ahmed’s approach is of particular interest here because it takes up the “bodily inhabitance of […] space”11 8 Cfr. J. Schröter, “Die Ästhetik der virtuellen Welt: Überlegungen mit Niklas Luhmann und Jeffrey Shaw,” in M. Bogen, R. Kuck, J. Schröter, eds., Virtuelle Welten als Basistechnologie für Kunst und Kultur? Eine Bestandsaufnahme (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2015): 25-36. 9 G. Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (Chicago- London: Chicago University Press, 2021): 109. See also ibid.: 111-112. 10 Ibid.: 2. 11 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006): 6. ANNETTE URBAN 116 AN-ICON  as a basic parameter of orientation, but in doing so opens up Heidegger’s familiarity with the world to other directions and objects that were not always already at hand. Similarly, in Tim Ingold’s anthropology, “joining with the togetherings of life”12 as drawn lines serves a better understanding of the particular environmentality of the lifeworld. In the following, I propose to combine art historical thinking about site-related installation aesthetics with phenomenological and episte- mological perspectives. They promise an understanding of bodily extension into space as an orientedness towards objects as well as towards others and simultaneously take account of an unstable objecthood. This offers an alterna- tive way out of problematic dualistic premises that so far often separate art historical genealogies of immersion and debates on aesthetic experience from knowledge-historical considerations that see subject-object dichotomies under- mined precisely by immersed bodies and their negotiation of environmental relations.13 As I want to show by analyzing two examples by Theodoulos Polyviou and Rosa Menkman, the de-differ- entiation between the work, its spatial surroundings and, by consequence, the exhibition display, is in particular rene- gotiated in recent VR-art. Its often closed imaginary worlds do not only present themselves as spatialized images, but simultaneously as an assemblage of things in space that reinforce the connection to installation art and display is- sues. As Christiane Paul remarked in 2003, VR does not only allow for the “full […] immers[ion of] its users in a three-dimensional world generated by a computer” but also for “an interaction with the virtual objects that comprise that world.”14 While the immersive environment thus means the withdrawal of the artwork as a singular (pictorial) object and counterpart of aesthetic experience, it simultaneously results in a multiplication of spatially arranged objects to which the visitor relates in an interactive, cognitive and – we might add – environmental or even (life) worldly way. This 12 T. Ingold, “Drawing together:” 303. See also ibid.: 301-304. 13 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: 22, 24, 30. 14 C. Paul, Digital Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003): 125. ANNETTE URBAN 117 AN-ICON  ultimately leads to a multiplied nesting of work, environ- ment and exhibition whose institutional and infrastructural conditions I will briefly consider at the end. Normalized Immersion and the Epistemics of Virtual Objects and Spatialities The recent VR-artworks of Polyviou and Menk- man have been chosen for this study because, to some extent, they reinvest in immersive high-tech media arrange- ments similar to those of the 1990s and early 2000s. Cy- prus-born artist Theodoulos Polyviou resorts to calculated 3D environments that reproduce existing spaces with ar- chitectural precision and make them individually explorable via head-mounted display (HMD) as well as on the desktop. Dutch artist and theorist Rosa Menkman uses the online walk-through spaces of the newart.city.org platform to host a collection of im/possible images in a specially designed artificial environment. At the same time, the two artists share the impulse to re-embed the virtual into a physical environment. Polyviou works with an elaborate recalibration of the virtual to the physical exhibition space, and Menk- man reintegrates the interactive experience of the website into an exhibition design she creates, which in its own way restructures the physical space. This shared concern with relocalization hints at a contemporary understanding of immersion that does not privilege computer-generated simulated worlds. Doris Kolesch has summarized it as “an increasingly everyday interaction not only with digital media, but also and above all, with designed spaces and spaces of experience.”15 Indeed, this now normal immersive con- dition is also elaborated in terms of architectural and ur- ban spaces that are in negotiation with images.16 However, 15 D. Kolesch, “Ästhetik der Immersion,” in G. W. Bertram, S. Deines, D. M. Feige, eds., Die Kunst und die Künste: Ein Kompendium zur Kunsttheorie der Gegenwart (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021): 422-441, 422 [my translation]. 16 Cfr. L. Bieger, “Ästhetik der Immersion. Wenn Räume wollen. Immersives Erleben als Raumerleben,” in G. Lehnert, ed., Raum und Gefühl. Der Spatial Turn und die neue Emotionsforschung (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag 2011): 75-95. ANNETTE URBAN 118 AN-ICON  “immersion as factual state description,”17 may primarily end in a World without Us, as Inke Arns points out, where invisibly working smart technologies create non-delimited, post-visual environments. Does VR still play a significant part in such a ubiquitous immersion? While on the one hand the selected artworks explore the “specific experience and mediality of the body-environment relationship”18 stressed by Kolesch, on the other hand, in unfolding a virtually walkable environ- ment, they do not deny their rootedness in imagery and even expose their latent objecthood. They engage with environmental aesthetics by presenting themselves as an environment withholding any designated artwork or as a mere framework for other images. With the unstable ref- erences of their elements, they fully play out the role of virtual as epistemic objects and combine representation with operability. This approaches all the more the genre of knowledge exhibitions, as they invest in VR’s capacities of getting the user “immersed in reflection,”19 to quote Katja Kwastek’s term for reconciling the (inter)action-based mode of digital art with the traditionally contemplative aesthetic experience. Early installation art such as Lucio Fontana’s Ambiente spaziale already shows how physical spaces with the help of mirroring and lightning effects combine immer- sion with ontological speculation. Within VR-art, the latter is stimulated by oscillations between image and three-di- mensionality. And it is intensified by virtual spatialities that similarily become a theoretical object of epistemic value, not only because of the heightened disorientation in spaces freed from physical regularity, but also as a result of more or less pure calculation. This affinity to abstraction mostly escapes the attention to hyperrealistic 3D-design and in- stead sometimes refers back to the sublime in art where natural phenomena fluidly transition into intangible abstract 17 I. Arns, “Qualityland, oder: Der Immersion begegnen,” Jahrbuch für Kulturpolitik, 2017/18: Welt. Kultur. Politik - Kulturpolitik in Zeiten der Globalisierung: 211-220, 212 [my translation]. 18 D. Kolesch, “Ästhetik der Immersion:” 422. 19 K. Kwastek, “Immersed in Reflection? The Aesthetic Experience of Interactive Media Art,” in B. Dogramaci, F. Liptay, eds., Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media (Leiden, Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2016): 66-85. ANNETTE URBAN 119 AN-ICON  emptiness. In 3D-environments, straight lines serve as ge- neric framework of spaces, which, through texturing and mapping, also directly emerge from images. Of particular interest is whether this linear ab- stractness is at the same time getting practicable in the course of the (manual) navigation through Polyviou’s and Menkman’s synthetic environments, enabled by the HMD with its tracking systems and hand-held controllers and by the maneuvers on the keyboard in the desktop-based versions. This passing through as the prevalent mode of VR-experience20 can be further clarified by (queer-)phenom- enological concepts of inhabiting space by taking directions and following lines, especially non-geometric entangled lines, giving high value to disorientation and turning toward objects as Sara Ahmed states.21 Insofar that this includes “lining ourselves up with the features of the grounds we in- habit, the sky that surrounds us, or the imaginary lines that cut through maps,”22 it already assumes a connection be- tween physical, expressly natural and virtual spaces which extends up to technically-based environments. In a similar vein, Tim Ingold explicitly considers lines as basic element of immersion responsible for an embedding into the life- world. For him, coming to life results from being “immersed in those generative currents”23 such as wind, for example, which also alters the state of man-made tools and techni- cal objects transcending a purely transitive use. Thereby Ingold’s concept of lines gains a potential for change and implies passages between the actual and the virtual.24 With their help, he problematizes objects understood as “dis- crete, finished entities” which he judges as a mere obstacle for drawing and “designing environmental relations.”25 Lines, 20 I use the terms VR-experience, VR-environments and VR-works as broad concepts also including desktop-based virtual environments which have an immersive character on their own. 21 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: 1-2. 22 Ibid.: 6. 23 T. Ingold, “Drawing Together:” 305. 24 Ingold’s repeated recourse to Deleuze/Guattari’s concept of the line of flight (ligne de fuite) remains beyond the scope of this article, but is worth following in M. De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005). 25 T. Ingold, M. Anusas, “Designing Environmental Relations: From Opacity to Textility,” Design Issues 29, no. 4 (2013): 58-69, 58. ANNETTE URBAN 120 AN-ICON  in contrast, as exemplified by the inseparable correlation of a river and its banks, are emblematic of correspondences and engender a different kind of thinking: “to correspond with [the waters] is to join this awareness with the flow.”26 They privilege an intransitive mode of “joining with” rather than “joining of.” Putting VR-Art on Exhibition When contemporary art today is testing the potentials of VR as an artistic medium, its borrowings from installation art are not exclusively motivated by the pragmatics of exhibiting in art museums. Many artists use this necessity for initiating ontological speculations on the continuum between virtual reality and the shared here and now in the museum. They intertwine the setting up of the interior pictorial world with the installative anchoring of the VR-experience in the exhibition space, thus producing their own form of potentiated environmentality connected to quite different strands of installative and site-related art. Here, only a brief comparison can point to how, in Banz & Bowinkel’s work Mercury (2017) (Fig. 1) for example, the filigree pavilion architecture that creates a second artificial habitat high above Planet Earth in the VR, extends into a metallic display for the processor and the second screen in the exhibition. And to another German VR-artist, Flori- an Meisenberg who chooses an illusionistic backdrop, as known from photo and film studios, to illusionistically em- bed the gesticulating wearer of the HMD into the abstract grid landscape of Superstudio’s 70s planetary architectural utopia. In both examples, the environments also serve to house other artworks. But instead of activating the institu- tional or archival concerns of installation art, they extend the artificially generated, often fictionalized world within the VR into the exhibition context which is more in line with the staging of illusionistic worlds by means of props in 26 T. Ingold, Knowing from the Inside: Correspondences, (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 2017): 41. ANNETTE URBAN 121 AN-ICON  cinema and cinematographic installation art. The VR-works by Polyviou and Menkman persue the reverse path and thus tend to the originally anti-immersive institution-reflex- ive branch: Their freely designable VR-worlds conversely borrow from physical exhibition spaces and their conven- tions of presenting items of cultural value which is worth questioning as another symptom of immersive normality and life worldly virtuality.27 Fig. 1a Fig. 1b Fig. 1a and 1b. Banz & Bowinkel, Mercury, 2016. VR installation, screen capture and installation shot, DAM Gallery, Berlin, 2017. Courtesy of the artists. Theodoulos Polyviou: Drifting, Browsing, Cruising (2021) Besides the issues of art presentation in the pandemic, that influenced both selected artworks, I ask more generally about the role of environmental virtuality in Polyviou’s and Menkman’s action-based and visual-spatial strategies28 of getting the recipient immersed in their work and thereupon re-perspectivize the question of institutional embedding. The first striking feature of Drifting, Browsing, Cruising created by Theodoulos Polyviou together with Eleni Diana Elia at the Centre for Art and Media, ZKM at Karls- ruhe/Germany, is certainly the ground plan true modeling of a computer-generated world based on a specific location 27 Cfr. S. Rieger, A. Schäfer, A. Tuschling, eds., Virtuelle Lebenswelten: Körper - Räume - Affekte (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2021). 28 Kwastek stresses that the action-based experience not necessarily needs visual-spatial illusion (Cfr. “Immersed in Reflection?:” 69), but both aspects are closely united here. ANNETTE URBAN 122 AN-ICON  within the museum. In summer 2021, visitors wearing HMD moved in situ through this doubled environment (Fig. 2-3). Since then, the work can be visited as only desktop-based VR on the online exhibition site fantastic confabulations, that reuses the digital replica of the space for further exhibitions. Contrary to enabling “spatiotemporal transpo- sition,” Polyviou uses VR for evoking a “hyper-awareness of the viewer as to where they are, and what they are doing.”29 That’s why he is re-situating VR-technology by establishing site-related connections to architecturally and historical- ly distinct places. But how is this intended sense of pres- ence, which implies situatedness and agency, created in the site-specific VR-installation at the ZKM? In contrast to many other of his works,30 any direct citation of a third auratic place and its cultural heritage is missing here. Polyviou obviously aims at the recognizability of the original museum space in 3D – the alignment of pillars typical of the former industrial building, the balustrade and the staircase leading to the open atrium as well as the glass partitions to the adjacent spaces are all faithfully reproduced. This makes the absence of the expected distinct artworks all the more noticeable. What one encounters inside, first of all appears as extensions of the serving architecture. The replicated pillars with spotlights are complemented by semicircular, half-height partitions as known from exhibition design. While these virtual supple- ments turn the clear cubic exhibition space into a cluttered and mysterious site, their freely curving floor plan lines re- appear as vinyl stripes on the ground of the physical space. 29 Th. Polyviou in A. Urban, “Virtual Spaces for Transformative Encounters and Vast Reciprocity - An Interview with Theodoulos Polyviou and Jazmina Figueroa,” in L. Nolasco- Rózsás, ed., Beyond Matter, Within Space: Curatorial and Art Mediation Techniques on the Verge of Virtual Reality (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2023): 429-443, 432. 30 See for example the installation Transmundane Economies (2022) at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, with references to the ruins of the Bellapais monastery in the north of Cyprus. ANNETTE URBAN 123 AN-ICON Fig. 2a Fig. 2c Fig. 2b Fig. 2d Fig. 2a, 2b, 2c and 2d T. Polyviou, Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, 2021. Site-specific VR installation, in cooperation with Eleni Diana Elia, installations shots and VR captures (details), ZKM, Karlsruhe 2021. Courtesy of the artists. © Eleni Diana Elia and Theodoulos Polyviou © Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), photo by Tanja Meissner. Produced in the framework of the Beyond Matter Residency Program at ZKM | Karlsruhe. This interplay between paradoxical emptiness and spatial density not only subverts the usual aesthetic experience in art museums with its orientation towards a singled-out art object. The directionality of the space image as an action image, theorized by Stephan Günzel in the context of gaming, where only objects centered in the field of vision can become the object of action,31 also remains unexploited. Instead, the environment privileges spatial exploration and confronts with the paradox phys- icality of its virtual architecture that, like the impermeable built world, diverts the users’ bodies. Without any avatarial 31 Cfr. S. Günzel, “Vor dem Affekt: die Aktion - Emotion und Raumbild,” in G. Lehnert, ed., Raum und Gefühl: Der Spatial Turn und die neue Emotionsforschung (Bielefeld: transcript- Verlag, 2014): 63-74, 67-68. ANNETTE URBAN 124 AN-ICON  representation, their self-perception entirely depends on bodily correlations with the labyrinthine environment, that additionally applies sensory stimuli and atmospheric im- mersion32 including artificial billowing fog on the floor, a sound backdrop and hall lights converted into dramatic illuminations. Thus, the functional architecture that sublim- inally remains perceptible through its calibration with the virtual space, shifts to a fictionalized, suspenseful backdrop that awaits its narration. Priority has the increased intensi- ty of experience typical for spatial-immersive installations and one-sided de-distancing. But the artificial environment here also requires an action- and reflection-based attitude thanks to the latency of its speculative and operable ob- jects and thus enacts a highly sensuous, performative form of site-related institutional critique. This comes into action when the foggy atmosphere transforms the built-in walls into jagged rock formations, thereby unifying different mate- rialities in one unstable image-object, or when the flashing spotlights and the variable angle of view instantly turn a black surface into a three-dimensional hide-away (Fig. 3). In addition, the windows that in fact only sepa- rate the next exhibition space, virtually open onto an equally artificial purple exterior, imitating a dramatic skylight. Its emptiness suspends the virtual exhibition space with its balustrades and staircase in an indefinite void, so that the emphasized inside-outside difference gives this VR-topos of floatation an institution-critical side. While Polyviou’s en- vironment is housed/hosted by the museum, it also nests there as an invisible counter-place that virtually undermines the physicality of the institution.33 And by penetrating the interior of the virtual environment, the shadows of the grid windows cite the linear structure of computed space. But this space loses the evenness secured by optical projec- tion when the grid lines synthesize the floor with the pillars to one continuous surface. It thus foreshadows a virtual 32 Cfr. also R. Eugeni, G. Raciti, eds., “Atmosfere mediali,” VCS Visual Culture Studies. Rivista semestrale di cultura visuale, no. 1 (November 2020). 33 Cfr. Th. Polyviou in A. Urban, “Virtual Spaces for Transformative Encounters and Vast Reciprocity:” 430. ANNETTE URBAN 125 AN-ICON Fig. 3a Fig. 3c Fig. 3b Fig. 3a, 3b and 3c T. Polyviou, Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, 2021. Site-specific VR installation, in cooperation with Eleni Diana Elia, VR captures (details), ZKM, Karlsruhe 2021. Courtesy of the artists. © Eleni Diana Elia and Theodoulos Polyviou © Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), Produced in the framework of the Beyond Matter Residency Programat ZKM | Karlsruhe. substantiality beyond the clear differentiation of distinct things and deprived of the stability of usual grounds. This exacerbates the insecurity of the orienta- tion-seeking users who navigate their invisible body through the confusing narrowness of fixtures, pseudo-functional handrails and hall lights. However, this staged reduction of distance is not simply overwhelming. The ambiguous virtual objects also ensure that, by “gather[ing] on the ground,” – as Sara Ahmed has noted – “they create a ground upon which we can gather.”34 Indeed, the mixed environment unites online as well as HMD users whose actions in the physical terrain marked with stripes are simultaneously observed by the museum visitors. Even without direct references to sacred architecture, Polyviou thus links the 34 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: 1. ANNETTE URBAN 126 AN-ICON  VR-typical passing through with a quasi-ritualized use of space. Alison Griffith has already tied back a counter-his- tory of immersive spectatorship in the museum not only to the panorama, science museum, and planetarium, but also to the cathedral.35 In Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, mnemonic mental images ensure the combination of action-based with cognitive immersion, because the disoriented wandering takes place through the comparison of constantly shifting, remembered spaces. When Polyviou decisively theorizes this ritualization as base for a “queer togetherness,”36 this reconnects to the lines printed on the floor. Through their interference with the dense environment inside the VR, they emancipate themselves from the clear legibility as object contour and ground plan. They thus contribute to the cru- cial entanglement that, according to Ingold, gets the “living being […] as a bundle of [the] lines” 37 of its movement im- mersed in its lifeworld. Polyviou therefore stimulates bodily practices of losing oneself in artificially induced passions. The choreographed searching movements inside give the museum space an improvisational openness, while the calibration with the physical pillars and ground makes the VR-experience literally tangible. Environmental immersion here goes hand in hand with a reduction of difference that de-differentiates virtual and physical spaces, bodies and objects. Rosa Menkman: The BLOB of Im/Possible Images (2021) Rosa Menkman’s VR-experience also brings the categories of artwork and exhibition nearly into congruence. But, instead of eliminating distinct artworks, Menkman, for this purpose, departs from a veritable collection assembled under the title of Im/Possible Images (Fig. 4). She stores 35 Cfr. A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 36 “Drifting, Browsing, Cruising,” Fantastic Confabulations, https://fantastic-confabulations.beyondmatter.eu/drifting-browsing-cruising/index.html, accessed December 29, 2022. 37 T. Ingold, “Drawing Together:” 300. ANNETTE URBAN 127 AN-ICON  Fig. 4 Fig. 4. R. Menkman, The BLOB of Im/possible Images, 2021. Desktop-based virtual environment, accessible on the platform New Art City. Courtesy of the artist. this collection on the widely used VR-art platform New Art City where she designed a complex desktop-based virtual environment that shows an enclosed grayish scenery with a staircase, a huge resolution-chart, a humanoid figure and a second free-floating structure pierced by diagonals. Ini- tially hidden from view, the collected images are sheltered inside this amorphous cloud, revealing themselves when one navigates through the permeable sheathing. The nest- ed structure alludes to the titular BLOB with its polysemy of digital blob architecture, the single-celled, ‘intelligent’ su- per-organism and Binary Large Objects as a technical term for databased image processing. And the exhibits that visi- tors have to deal with in this environment are mainly objects of knowledge accessible only through representation, so a reference to their theorizations by Hans-Jörg Rheinberg- er and Susan Leigh Star/John Griesemer is suggested.38 Menkman thus borrows from the realm of scientific images, which has been a central field of debate and self-defini- tion for digital art from the very beginning. She delegates the act of imagining and selecting them by realizing a sur- vey during her Arts at Cern/Collide Barcelona-Residency, asking the researchers what image of a relevant object or 38 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2015): 19-58. ANNETTE URBAN 128 AN-ICON  phenomenon they would capture if “limits of spatial, tem- poral, energy, signal/noise or cost resolutions”39 were irrel- evant. In other words, this variability of resolution results in products of imagineering and touches on phenomena that are decoupled from humans’ experience, escaping their commonly perceived environmentalities. But these phenomena can be mediated by virtual body-environment relations, which conversely force a changed understanding of (aesthetic) experience, as discussed by Roberto Diodato with reference to John Dewey.40 The choice of the nuclear physicists as experts in im/possible images endow the virtual as epistemic objects with a specific latency and scientificity. The referents of their proposed images mostly elude the objecthood familiar to mankind and have nothing in common with the medium-sized “things of the earth’s surface” as characterized by the Gestalt psychologist Fritz Heider.41 Two important aspects shared with Polyviou’s example promise additional insights into the workings of environmental immersion. Firstly, this concerns the embed- ding into abstractness, which goes along with a space that loses its conventional categories and thus favors immersion through the withdrawal of the usual parameters of orienta- tion. This not only stems from the arbitrary laws of physical- ity in VR, but also from a different kind of world reference in ‘virtual bodies environments’, which Diodato emphasizes: “In this intermediary world space itself is the result of inter- activity.”42 In Menkman’s case, the intensified experience is generated not so much by a condensed, labyrinthine spatiality as by the enhanced self-reflexivity of navigation itself. Both, the VR-environment The BLOB of Im/Possible Images and the related video-work Whiteout showing a tour in Harz mountains in heavy snow, deal with the ex- perience in a markerless space tending to exceed human 39 R. Menkman, “The BLOB of Im/possible Images” https://newart.city/show/menkman-blob-of-im-possibilities, accessed December 30, 2022. 40 Cfr. R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: Towards an Aesthetics of Relations (Cham: Springer, 2021): 56. 41 Cited after G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 38. 42 R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: 61. ANNETTE URBAN 129 AN-ICON  senses and erase most thingness. Second, the comparison with Drifting, Browsing, Cruising is based on the re-phys- icalization of the VR-works in the exhibition format. Rosa Menkman conceived a carefully designed exhibition display for a 2021 group show at Munich where she reconnected the VR-experience to the physical space with the help of lines. While in Polyviou’s example the plotting of isomorphic virtual and physical elements onto a planimetric floor plan retains a relative object character, Menkman starts from abstract lines as axes of graphs and coordinate systems. They guide the exploration of the virtual world inside and also mark the thresholds of iconic representation. Touching on signal spectra, digital states and im/material energetic flows, they bring forth what Ingold sees otherwise negated by the regime of solidified things. Within the VR, the resolution chart erected next to the figurine is particularly telling of how Menkman translates resolution into space, taking advantage of the orthogonality of digital as “rasterized […] images” based on a “grid of picture elements or pixels,”43 that, according to Francesco Casetti and Antonio Somaini, also possess a specific plasticity. By mapping the gray structure of the internal blob with the diagonals and its one black anchor point, the resolution chart pretends to guide the VR-user searching to enter this enclosure. Yet, despite the lines piercing the amorphous volume, the chart does not reveal any information about the interior. The charted scales and frequency ranges unmistakably mark this second blob as an image-object of the same digital fabric as the abstractly textured body of the figurine besides, Menkman’s Angelus Novus emblematic for the reversal of gaze regimes. This co-presence of image-objects and -subjects made of dis- torted black-white stripes strongly signals the de-differ- entiation of most diverse entities. The appearance of the things is flexibilized to such a degree that their self-identity 43 F. Casetti, A. Somaini, “Resolution: Digital Materialities, Thresholds of Visibility,” NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies 7, no. 1 (2018): 87-103. ANNETTE URBAN 130 AN-ICON  is disposable and their recognition depends on the user’s bodily action (Fig. 5). Fig. 5a Fig. 5b Fig. 5a and Fig. 5b .R. Menkman, The BLOB of Im/possible Images, 2021, Desktop-based virtual environment, accessible on the platform New Art City, screenshots by the author. Courtesy of the artist. ANNETTE URBAN 131 AN-ICON  As soon as the user has traversed the opaque but permeable grayish membrane of the blob, the envi- ronment transforms into a dark sphere with mystic sound where the im/possible images are scattered in an unmea- surable distance. When the wandering user is attracted by small luminous dots that, up close, turn out to represent the Pale Blue Dot aka Planet Earth, taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 for example, or a Quantum Vacuum, quarks inside of a proton, a shadow of a black hole and a body scan of the interior of a wrist, she/he is once again less guided by the affordances of gaming. To remind Günzel, its “fixed-par- anoid perspective” turns objects into action carriers by shifting them to the center of the image; but here, only the paranoid dimension of permanent searching seems to en- dure “through which the objects in the virtual off must be transferred into actualization.”44 As Roberto Diodato notes with reference to Bernard Stiegler and Richard Grusin, in view of the prevailing premediation techniques and an al- ready thoroughly hypermediated world, it is necessary for the techno-artistic creation of virtual spacetime environ- ments to break the merely adaptive behavior pattern of supposedly active cognitive agents.45 Beyond the gaming attitude running into the void, it is the habits of museum spectators that help surprisingly well – right down to the work texts that pop up on approach. But, of course, the concept of the mimetic image is challenged here by the assembled nuclear- and astrophysical phenomena at the limits of what can still be captured by light or other wave- lengths. Menkman succeeds in staging the uncertain status of such objects of knowledge, which only move into the rank of the existent through new technologies of detection, by making use of the peculiarities of virtual objecthood. This starts with the all-round perspectivability and resulting form variance of the virtual exhibits already known from sculp- ture, joined here by their free scalability and permeability 44 S. Günzel, “Vor dem Affekt:” 68. 45 Cfr. R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: 64-65. ANNETTE URBAN 132 AN-ICON  in direct interaction with the user navigating their invisible bodies through space. The skinned wrist, for example, hits the viewer in powerful plasticity or just hangs in space as flatware, depending on the point of entry into the enclosure of the im/possible images, the viewing angle and proximity to the item. This form of distance reduction self-reflexively combines seeing and (inter-)acting. The less complete im- mersion of desktop-based VR is compensated for by the tactility of maneuvering with arrow keys or touchpad, which transfers its sensation of handling to the virtual objects. Menkman experiments here with re-introducing into art the more immersive displays of the natural history museum,46 whose never-broken connection to science is recalled by Christiane Voss’ reflections on the medium of exhibition,47 and appropriates the knowledge exhibition format. In this setting, barely tangible phenomena such as black holes, dark matter and other galaxies become manageable as in a laboratory that, in terms of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, only brings epistemic things into existence.48 The nested spatial structure of the BLOB in- creases this epistemic valence because it invites for re- peating those transformative immersive crossings from one internal sphere to the next. Outside the encapsulated image collection, the latency of objects is provided by the poly- gon meshes patterned with black/whites lines reminiscent of military dazzle camouflage49 that acts as de-distancing tool precisely by preventing its correct estimation. Instead of simulating natural light conditions, as it often serves to catalyze the atmospheric immersion of a perfected VR, the moiré reveals another form of apparitional fluidity. Con- stantly changing with the user’s movement, the texture shows a pulsating im/materiality that already withdraws at the surface. It seems close to Ingold’s and Ansusas’s notion of infrastice that includes “all manner of electrical, 46 Cfr. A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine. 47 Cfr. C. Voss, “Das Museum als Medium der Kunst,” in G. W. Bertram, S. Deines, D. M. Feige, eds., Die Kunst und die Künste: Ein Kompendium zur Kunsttheorie der Gegenwart (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021): 464-483, 474. 48 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 35. 49 My thanks go to Manuel van der Veen for this reference and the exchange about the text. ANNETTE URBAN 133 AN-ICON  Fig. 6 R. Menkman, The Im/possible BLOB, 2021. Installed at Temporal Stack: the Deep Sensor in Guizhou, China, curated by Iris Long und HE Zike, 2021. Courtesy of the Artist. chemical, and mechanical workings […], energies, gases, and fluids”50 and resists the useability of surfaces solely understood as interfaces. Finally, the artist also uses these textures, as well as the abstract lines of graphs as vehicle for transfer- ring the virtual into physical space. For a presentation of The BLOB at Gizhou/China (Fig. 6), the dynamic black/white pattern has been transformed into a wallpaper. This exhi- bition design attaches more to the cinematically inspired strategy of extending the fictional-scenic image space in- side the VR into an overall immersive installation. But there, without the operability of latent virtual objects, it tends to unrealize the museum with its psychotic pattern. In con- trast, for a group exhibition in Munich that combined the VR-experience and the video Whiteout with works by Memo Akten, Susan Schuppli and others, Menkman materialized the abstract lines from inside the BLOB (Fig. 7). They es- tablished a 3D-framework in physical space whose white, green, red, yellow and blue diagonals traversed the floor and walls of the exhibition hall,51 thus slightly removing it from orthogonality. As these lines are imagined to shift the 50 T. Ingold, M. Anusas, “Designing Environmental Relations:” 58. 51 Cfr. L. Gross, R. Menkman, L 13: Reader NR 4 im/possible images (München: Lothringer 13 Halle, 2022) https://beyondresolution.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/ Catalogues%2Fimpossible_L13_READER.pdf, accessed April 25, 2023. ANNETTE URBAN 134 AN-ICON  Fig. 7d Fig. 7b Fig. 7c Fig. 7a Fig. 7 a-d. Views of the Exhibition Im/possible Images, at the Lothringer 13 Halle, Munich, 2021, curated by Rosa Menkman. Photo by Dominik Gigler. Courtesy of the artist and of Lothringer 13 Halle. ANNETTE URBAN 135 AN-ICON  spectra of resolution – a borderline to “low fidelity images” was inscribed on the floor –, the artist transformed the built into a “latent image space.”52 Similar to the VR, I would add, the solidity of its objects becomes doubtful, when variable parameters of the perceptible and representable always help other visualities and entities to emerge. With this kind of environmentalization, Menkman de-hierarchizes an ever-higher resolution, that regulates access to more and more details and therefore, according to Casetti and Somaini, raises the power question of control.53 In the Mu- nich exhibition, some of the im/possible images from the BLOB (re-)materialized as exhibits, among them a photo of the skinned hand scan or a newspaper clipping with an x-rayed hand from 1896. But, by placing them along the resolution lines, theses factual images remain suspended in an abstract space of potentialities. In sum, the exhibition display was activated as an integral component not princi- pally distinguished from what is constitutive for the ‘work.’ Potentiated Environmentalization As shown so far, the multiplication of environ- ments inherent in VR-art results from its genuine blurring of the differences between work and environment. This gen- erative logic of further nesting necessarily brings the whole institutional and curatorial ecosystem of VR-art into view. And the extension of the internal installation aesthetics not only counteracts its technically-based encapsulation. It is also essential for not missing the togetherness54 – to cite Mieke Bal – of an exhibition which, according to Christiane Voss, is the medium that establishes the works’ mode of existence as art in the first place.55 The Blob of Im/Possible Images, commissioned by the HeK Basel, was produced with the infrastructure of newart.city.org that provides a “virtual exhibition toolkit” 52 Cfr. R. Menkman, “Im/possible Images@Lothringer 13, Munich” https://beyondresolution.info/im-possible-images-1, accessed December 29, 2022. 53 Cfr. F. Casetti, A. Somaini, “Resolution:” 89. 54 Cfr. M. Bal, Exhibition-ism: Temporal Togetherness (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020). 55 Cfr. Voss, “Das Museum als Medium der Kunst:” 464. ANNETTE URBAN 136 AN-ICON  with “built-in tools to manage artworks and space layouts.”56 Menkman takes up its claims for a non-hierarchical co-cre- ation and invites the submission of further non-expert im/ possible images. Later on, the work has been embedded into a virtual, but spatial exhibition curated by Lívia No- lasco-Rózsás and Giulia Bini for the ZKM in 2021, which pushes the tendencies towards nesting and de-differen- tiation even further: Spatial Affairs. Worlding is inhabited by artworks, an exhibition display and visitors sharing the same organic-abstract shape. One can only distinguish the non-humanoid avatars of other visitors from exhibits through distance-reduction and the object-related action of a mouse click. The latter then turn into pink and, via an info window and links, lead the web-user to the works stored on artists’ website or platforms. By interpreting environmental- ization in terms of worlding, the curators participate in the posthumanist renewal of the phenomenological critique of the world as sum of objects. The multi-user online world with its identical, modular entities first hides the exhibition behind the supposed affordances of gaming and chats. However, the transitions between the environmental exhi- bition and environmental works are designed less immer- sively – like portals in gaming or falling down the rabbit-hole known from literature – than through paratextual framings operated by non-natural manual interfaces. The online exhibition site fantastic confabu- lations that hosts Drifting, Browsing, Cruising was also conceived by Polyviou together with Jasmina Figueora as artists in residence of the same research project Beyond Matter. Instead of nesting spaces, it deals with the gener- ic, serial tendency of self-continuation by inviting to reuse the initial 3D-reconstruction of the ZKM balcony for sub- sequent projects such as realized by Figueroa who mod- eled her spoken words and sound scores by the visitors’ movements through the virtual site. Following Ahmed, this 56 Cfr. “About New Art City,” https://info.newart.city/about, accessed December 28, 2022. ANNETTE URBAN 137 AN-ICON  implies not only a model for self-determined curation, but also a form of environmental co-habitation. Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás argues for the museum in the virtual condition as a “cognitive system”57 including non-human actors, thereby reaccentuating the pioneering thought exhibitions [Gedankenausstellungen] initiated by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour. Polyviou’s example gets by without its strong archival underpinning. In the functional architecture, his staging of an atmospherically condensed counterworld aims at releasing a different bodily knowledge of possible encounters and envisions a counter-physicality for transcending the otherwise hard-to-move institution. The curved lines on the ground echoing the paths inside the VR offer their own transformative knowledge of entan- glement that is experienced and produced environmentally. In comparison, Menkman directly invests into the potential of virtual as epistemic and aesthetic objects. Their robust- ness and simultaneously plasticity reminds the capability of Star’s and Griesemer’s boundary objects to make agents of different groupings,58 in this case those of art and science, meet. What Doris Kolesch has in mind with a normalized immersion in not only technologically-enclosed but every- day spaces, can also be true for VR-based environmental- ization. De-differentiation and de-distancing are then not contradictions to but catalysts of immersive reflection. 57 L. Nolasco-Rózsás, Y. Hofmann, “The Museum as a Cognitive System of Human and Non- Human Actors,” The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums & Culture, no. 3 (2021): 1-15. 58 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 33-34. ANNETTE URBAN 138 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

anicon

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19773

Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitio by Annette Urban VR-art ns Environmental immersion Epistemic Objects installation art De-distancing/de-differentiation Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitions ANNETTE URBAN, Ruhr-Universität Bochum – https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19773 Abstract In contemporary understanding, a now normal- ized immersion continues to be associated with digitality and high-tech apparatuses, but is also seen as diffused into the lifeworld. Against this backdrop, the article focuses on two current artworks that extend the internal environmen- tality inherent in VR as a spatialized image into physical space by using strategies from installation and site-related art. These examples provide for an equation and nesting of work, environment and exhibition that is interpreted here as a potentiated environmentalization. The artistic VR-environ- ments by no means negate their rootedness in imagery, but rather self-reflexively reveal the transitions between image and three-dimensionality, what gives them a special epis- temic valence. It thus seems worthwhile to relate them to considerations of knowledge objects and exhibitions, but also to (queer) phenomenological theories of entanglement and becoming originating from the following of lines. ANNETTE URBAN 112 AN-ICON  Meanwhile, the epistemic value of their latent objects, disoriented paths, and impossible spaces is only revealed in the interaction with and embodied experience of the virtual space. The article thus participates in debates on how bodily immersion does not exclude, but enables action and reflection within aesthetic experience. With re- gard to two fundamental paradigms of immersion, it can show how, for this purpose, the artworks turn anew the strategies of de-distancing and de-differentiation. Keywords VR-art Environmental immersion Epistemic Objects installation art De-distancing/de-differentiation To quote this essay: A. Urban, “Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitions,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 112-138, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19773. ANNETTE URBAN 113 AN-ICON  De-Distancing and De-Differentiation: Contemporary Aesthetics of Immersion Immersion is again attracting much attention. Film and media studies, art history, image sciences and narratology have all long participated in its theorization. More recently, theatre, performance and game studies, architectural theory and the history of knowledge1 have joined in, taking into account a whole range of everyday digital technologies and thus deferring questions of image aesthetics and image technology in favor of investigating body/media/environment relationships. Whereas some the- oretical contributions highlight the immersive aspects of a specific medium, there is also a broad tendency to deal with immersion as a prime symptom of today’s image cul- tures and media ecologies what is evidenced by collective terms such as immersive media,2 environmental images and iconoscapes. To speak more generally of immersive media deliberately goes beyond media-technical foundations of the concept by arguing with transmedial relevant opera- tions. These are already rooted in narratology, where the opening up and simultaneous closing of a fictional world is accomplished cognitively-mentally: Perceptual immer- sion is therefore seen to be necessarily complemented by imaginative immersion,3 which only ensures that the sen- sory stimuli of a medium are translated into a virtual world.4 After the debate has been strongly linked to Virtual Reality since the 1990s, immersion continues to be considered under the premises of digital technologies, but at the same time is also discussed as nowadays’ conditio humana and condition of daily life. Lars C. Grabbe has proposed a new 1 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: Zu einer Wissensgeschichte der Immersion (Baden Baden: Nomos, 2019). For Kasprowicz, the immersion concept can be retrieved from the “maelstrom of negative connotations as illusion and absorption” by being understood as a “media anthropological practice of de- and re-differentiation of the body [Körper und Leib] in mediatized environments.” Ibid.: 14. 2 Cfr., among others, the Yearbook of Immersive Media 2011-2017, ed. by Institute for Immersive Media at Kiel University of Applied Sciences. 3 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: 18, with reference to Marie-Laure Ryan. 4 Cfr. T. Hochscherf, H. Kjär, P. Rupert-Kruse, “Phänomene und Medien der Immersion,” in Jahrbuch immersiver Medien 3 (2011): 9-19, 14, with reference to Matthew Lombard/Theresa Ditton. ANNETTE URBAN 114 AN-ICON  cultural-theoretical figure of the homo immergens which he considers to be the equivalent of a culture of media hybrids: In succession or better combination of the human capaci- ties for symbol formation and image production, the homo immergens has become the creator of its own “multimodal and simulative environments”5 whereby the distance to the medial artifact is reduced and a worldly experience is generated. Thus, recent insights of immersion research owe much to theorizing across media, on the basis of me- dia hybridity, as well as to inputs from other branches of scholarship. Within these multi-faceted approaches two key features emerge that I propose to summarize as a reduction of distance responsible for felt presence and as a reduction of difference. These two aspects cover both, the particular attitude of reception, which has been characterized as a way of submerging, of mental absorption, and bodily-emo- tional involvement, as well as the various forms of transfor- mative exchange or even assimilation that occur between the recipient and the object of contemplation – to put it in the classical dichotomy of aesthetic experience. Mean- while, the principles of de-distancing and de-differentiation unfold in numerous ways. They involve more-than-visual, bodily modes of experience, that can be interpreted as a re-centering of the world and the subject, but also as new forms of empathy and encounter. The latter may culminate in ideas of matter-flow inspired by Deleuze/Guattari and of leaving behind all subject-object dichotomies, which some suppose to be still at work in the quasi-objects of the philosophy of science.6 Or they remain – as with Grabbe’s term of representational convergence referring to the con- vergence of exterior and mental representations7 – closer to the realm of images whose unframing gives the beholder 5 L. C. Grabbe, “Homo Immergens: Immersion as a Parameter for a Media and Cultural Theory of Medial Hybridity,” in J. Bracker, A. Hubrich, eds., The Art of Reception (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021): 400-422, 400. 6 Cfr. T. Ingold, “Drawing Together: Materials, Gestures, Lines,” in T. Otto, N. Bubandt, eds., Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology (Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2010): 299-313, 304-305. 7 Cfr. L. C. Grabbe, “Homo Immergens:” 400. ANNETTE URBAN 115 AN-ICON  the feeling of being surrounded by them. This perspective on artificially spatialized images8 invites to focus on the transitions between images and illusionistic 3D-entities, and to a closer examination of the environmentalization inherent in it. In the widely ramified discourse on environ- mentality, the art historical point of view still seems under- represented as far as the obvious link with the so-called Ausstieg aus dem Bild, with installation and site-related art is concerned. They equally mark a significant reference point for spatialization and meanwhile break down the status of art as distinct, object-like work. Instead, the art historical interrogation of environmentality has recently been deep- ened in reference back to screen media and the paradigm of projection: In her comprehensive study, Giuliana Bruno has illuminatingly interpreted the spatiality established by light projection in terms of materially transformative pro- cesses, transductive conversions of energy and the histo- ries of energetic environments. But while she emphasizes the ambulatory “non-linear movement in forms of trans- duction”9 and explicitly investigates inhabitable spaces of immersion, with her focus on the act of projection, however, environmentality remains tied back to a transitive gesture of transmission and transport.10 In a broader disciplinary context, its exploration ranges from the new non-visual environments established by sensor technologies, from biologically, autopoietically or systems-theoretically con- ceptualized relations between an organism/a system and its Umwelt, to the environmental concerns of new material- ism, anthropology and queer phenomenology, rewriting the Heideggerian irreducible world reference of the embodied self. Sara Ahmed’s approach is of particular interest here because it takes up the “bodily inhabitance of […] space”11 8 Cfr. J. Schröter, “Die Ästhetik der virtuellen Welt: Überlegungen mit Niklas Luhmann und Jeffrey Shaw,” in M. Bogen, R. Kuck, J. Schröter, eds., Virtuelle Welten als Basistechnologie für Kunst und Kultur? Eine Bestandsaufnahme (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2015): 25-36. 9 G. Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (Chicago- London: Chicago University Press, 2021): 109. See also ibid.: 111-112. 10 Ibid.: 2. 11 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006): 6. ANNETTE URBAN 116 AN-ICON  as a basic parameter of orientation, but in doing so opens up Heidegger’s familiarity with the world to other directions and objects that were not always already at hand. Similarly, in Tim Ingold’s anthropology, “joining with the togetherings of life”12 as drawn lines serves a better understanding of the particular environmentality of the lifeworld. In the following, I propose to combine art historical thinking about site-related installation aesthetics with phenomenological and episte- mological perspectives. They promise an understanding of bodily extension into space as an orientedness towards objects as well as towards others and simultaneously take account of an unstable objecthood. This offers an alterna- tive way out of problematic dualistic premises that so far often separate art historical genealogies of immersion and debates on aesthetic experience from knowledge-historical considerations that see subject-object dichotomies under- mined precisely by immersed bodies and their negotiation of environmental relations.13 As I want to show by analyzing two examples by Theodoulos Polyviou and Rosa Menkman, the de-differ- entiation between the work, its spatial surroundings and, by consequence, the exhibition display, is in particular rene- gotiated in recent VR-art. Its often closed imaginary worlds do not only present themselves as spatialized images, but simultaneously as an assemblage of things in space that reinforce the connection to installation art and display is- sues. As Christiane Paul remarked in 2003, VR does not only allow for the “full […] immers[ion of] its users in a three-dimensional world generated by a computer” but also for “an interaction with the virtual objects that comprise that world.”14 While the immersive environment thus means the withdrawal of the artwork as a singular (pictorial) object and counterpart of aesthetic experience, it simultaneously results in a multiplication of spatially arranged objects to which the visitor relates in an interactive, cognitive and – we might add – environmental or even (life) worldly way. This 12 T. Ingold, “Drawing together:” 303. See also ibid.: 301-304. 13 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: 22, 24, 30. 14 C. Paul, Digital Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003): 125. ANNETTE URBAN 117 AN-ICON  ultimately leads to a multiplied nesting of work, environ- ment and exhibition whose institutional and infrastructural conditions I will briefly consider at the end. Normalized Immersion and the Epistemics of Virtual Objects and Spatialities The recent VR-artworks of Polyviou and Menk- man have been chosen for this study because, to some extent, they reinvest in immersive high-tech media arrange- ments similar to those of the 1990s and early 2000s. Cy- prus-born artist Theodoulos Polyviou resorts to calculated 3D environments that reproduce existing spaces with ar- chitectural precision and make them individually explorable via head-mounted display (HMD) as well as on the desktop. Dutch artist and theorist Rosa Menkman uses the online walk-through spaces of the newart.city.org platform to host a collection of im/possible images in a specially designed artificial environment. At the same time, the two artists share the impulse to re-embed the virtual into a physical environment. Polyviou works with an elaborate recalibration of the virtual to the physical exhibition space, and Menk- man reintegrates the interactive experience of the website into an exhibition design she creates, which in its own way restructures the physical space. This shared concern with relocalization hints at a contemporary understanding of immersion that does not privilege computer-generated simulated worlds. Doris Kolesch has summarized it as “an increasingly everyday interaction not only with digital media, but also and above all, with designed spaces and spaces of experience.”15 Indeed, this now normal immersive con- dition is also elaborated in terms of architectural and ur- ban spaces that are in negotiation with images.16 However, 15 D. Kolesch, “Ästhetik der Immersion,” in G. W. Bertram, S. Deines, D. M. Feige, eds., Die Kunst und die Künste: Ein Kompendium zur Kunsttheorie der Gegenwart (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021): 422-441, 422 [my translation]. 16 Cfr. L. Bieger, “Ästhetik der Immersion. Wenn Räume wollen. Immersives Erleben als Raumerleben,” in G. Lehnert, ed., Raum und Gefühl. Der Spatial Turn und die neue Emotionsforschung (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag 2011): 75-95. ANNETTE URBAN 118 AN-ICON  “immersion as factual state description,”17 may primarily end in a World without Us, as Inke Arns points out, where invisibly working smart technologies create non-delimited, post-visual environments. Does VR still play a significant part in such a ubiquitous immersion? While on the one hand the selected artworks explore the “specific experience and mediality of the body-environment relationship”18 stressed by Kolesch, on the other hand, in unfolding a virtually walkable environ- ment, they do not deny their rootedness in imagery and even expose their latent objecthood. They engage with environmental aesthetics by presenting themselves as an environment withholding any designated artwork or as a mere framework for other images. With the unstable ref- erences of their elements, they fully play out the role of virtual as epistemic objects and combine representation with operability. This approaches all the more the genre of knowledge exhibitions, as they invest in VR’s capacities of getting the user “immersed in reflection,”19 to quote Katja Kwastek’s term for reconciling the (inter)action-based mode of digital art with the traditionally contemplative aesthetic experience. Early installation art such as Lucio Fontana’s Ambiente spaziale already shows how physical spaces with the help of mirroring and lightning effects combine immer- sion with ontological speculation. Within VR-art, the latter is stimulated by oscillations between image and three-di- mensionality. And it is intensified by virtual spatialities that similarily become a theoretical object of epistemic value, not only because of the heightened disorientation in spaces freed from physical regularity, but also as a result of more or less pure calculation. This affinity to abstraction mostly escapes the attention to hyperrealistic 3D-design and in- stead sometimes refers back to the sublime in art where natural phenomena fluidly transition into intangible abstract 17 I. Arns, “Qualityland, oder: Der Immersion begegnen,” Jahrbuch für Kulturpolitik, 2017/18: Welt. Kultur. Politik - Kulturpolitik in Zeiten der Globalisierung: 211-220, 212 [my translation]. 18 D. Kolesch, “Ästhetik der Immersion:” 422. 19 K. Kwastek, “Immersed in Reflection? The Aesthetic Experience of Interactive Media Art,” in B. Dogramaci, F. Liptay, eds., Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media (Leiden, Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2016): 66-85. ANNETTE URBAN 119 AN-ICON  emptiness. In 3D-environments, straight lines serve as ge- neric framework of spaces, which, through texturing and mapping, also directly emerge from images. Of particular interest is whether this linear ab- stractness is at the same time getting practicable in the course of the (manual) navigation through Polyviou’s and Menkman’s synthetic environments, enabled by the HMD with its tracking systems and hand-held controllers and by the maneuvers on the keyboard in the desktop-based versions. This passing through as the prevalent mode of VR-experience20 can be further clarified by (queer-)phenom- enological concepts of inhabiting space by taking directions and following lines, especially non-geometric entangled lines, giving high value to disorientation and turning toward objects as Sara Ahmed states.21 Insofar that this includes “lining ourselves up with the features of the grounds we in- habit, the sky that surrounds us, or the imaginary lines that cut through maps,”22 it already assumes a connection be- tween physical, expressly natural and virtual spaces which extends up to technically-based environments. In a similar vein, Tim Ingold explicitly considers lines as basic element of immersion responsible for an embedding into the life- world. For him, coming to life results from being “immersed in those generative currents”23 such as wind, for example, which also alters the state of man-made tools and techni- cal objects transcending a purely transitive use. Thereby Ingold’s concept of lines gains a potential for change and implies passages between the actual and the virtual.24 With their help, he problematizes objects understood as “dis- crete, finished entities” which he judges as a mere obstacle for drawing and “designing environmental relations.”25 Lines, 20 I use the terms VR-experience, VR-environments and VR-works as broad concepts also including desktop-based virtual environments which have an immersive character on their own. 21 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: 1-2. 22 Ibid.: 6. 23 T. Ingold, “Drawing Together:” 305. 24 Ingold’s repeated recourse to Deleuze/Guattari’s concept of the line of flight (ligne de fuite) remains beyond the scope of this article, but is worth following in M. De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005). 25 T. Ingold, M. Anusas, “Designing Environmental Relations: From Opacity to Textility,” Design Issues 29, no. 4 (2013): 58-69, 58. ANNETTE URBAN 120 AN-ICON  in contrast, as exemplified by the inseparable correlation of a river and its banks, are emblematic of correspondences and engender a different kind of thinking: “to correspond with [the waters] is to join this awareness with the flow.”26 They privilege an intransitive mode of “joining with” rather than “joining of.” Putting VR-Art on Exhibition When contemporary art today is testing the potentials of VR as an artistic medium, its borrowings from installation art are not exclusively motivated by the pragmatics of exhibiting in art museums. Many artists use this necessity for initiating ontological speculations on the continuum between virtual reality and the shared here and now in the museum. They intertwine the setting up of the interior pictorial world with the installative anchoring of the VR-experience in the exhibition space, thus producing their own form of potentiated environmentality connected to quite different strands of installative and site-related art. Here, only a brief comparison can point to how, in Banz & Bowinkel’s work Mercury (2017) (Fig. 1) for example, the filigree pavilion architecture that creates a second artificial habitat high above Planet Earth in the VR, extends into a metallic display for the processor and the second screen in the exhibition. And to another German VR-artist, Flori- an Meisenberg who chooses an illusionistic backdrop, as known from photo and film studios, to illusionistically em- bed the gesticulating wearer of the HMD into the abstract grid landscape of Superstudio’s 70s planetary architectural utopia. In both examples, the environments also serve to house other artworks. But instead of activating the institu- tional or archival concerns of installation art, they extend the artificially generated, often fictionalized world within the VR into the exhibition context which is more in line with the staging of illusionistic worlds by means of props in 26 T. Ingold, Knowing from the Inside: Correspondences, (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 2017): 41. ANNETTE URBAN 121 AN-ICON  cinema and cinematographic installation art. The VR-works by Polyviou and Menkman persue the reverse path and thus tend to the originally anti-immersive institution-reflex- ive branch: Their freely designable VR-worlds conversely borrow from physical exhibition spaces and their conven- tions of presenting items of cultural value which is worth questioning as another symptom of immersive normality and life worldly virtuality.27 Fig. 1a Fig. 1b Fig. 1a and 1b. Banz & Bowinkel, Mercury, 2016. VR installation, screen capture and installation shot, DAM Gallery, Berlin, 2017. Courtesy of the artists. Theodoulos Polyviou: Drifting, Browsing, Cruising (2021) Besides the issues of art presentation in the pandemic, that influenced both selected artworks, I ask more generally about the role of environmental virtuality in Polyviou’s and Menkman’s action-based and visual-spatial strategies28 of getting the recipient immersed in their work and thereupon re-perspectivize the question of institutional embedding. The first striking feature of Drifting, Browsing, Cruising created by Theodoulos Polyviou together with Eleni Diana Elia at the Centre for Art and Media, ZKM at Karls- ruhe/Germany, is certainly the ground plan true modeling of a computer-generated world based on a specific location 27 Cfr. S. Rieger, A. Schäfer, A. Tuschling, eds., Virtuelle Lebenswelten: Körper - Räume - Affekte (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2021). 28 Kwastek stresses that the action-based experience not necessarily needs visual-spatial illusion (Cfr. “Immersed in Reflection?:” 69), but both aspects are closely united here. ANNETTE URBAN 122 AN-ICON  within the museum. In summer 2021, visitors wearing HMD moved in situ through this doubled environment (Fig. 2-3). Since then, the work can be visited as only desktop-based VR on the online exhibition site fantastic confabulations, that reuses the digital replica of the space for further exhibitions. Contrary to enabling “spatiotemporal transpo- sition,” Polyviou uses VR for evoking a “hyper-awareness of the viewer as to where they are, and what they are doing.”29 That’s why he is re-situating VR-technology by establishing site-related connections to architecturally and historical- ly distinct places. But how is this intended sense of pres- ence, which implies situatedness and agency, created in the site-specific VR-installation at the ZKM? In contrast to many other of his works,30 any direct citation of a third auratic place and its cultural heritage is missing here. Polyviou obviously aims at the recognizability of the original museum space in 3D – the alignment of pillars typical of the former industrial building, the balustrade and the staircase leading to the open atrium as well as the glass partitions to the adjacent spaces are all faithfully reproduced. This makes the absence of the expected distinct artworks all the more noticeable. What one encounters inside, first of all appears as extensions of the serving architecture. The replicated pillars with spotlights are complemented by semicircular, half-height partitions as known from exhibition design. While these virtual supple- ments turn the clear cubic exhibition space into a cluttered and mysterious site, their freely curving floor plan lines re- appear as vinyl stripes on the ground of the physical space. 29 Th. Polyviou in A. Urban, “Virtual Spaces for Transformative Encounters and Vast Reciprocity - An Interview with Theodoulos Polyviou and Jazmina Figueroa,” in L. Nolasco- Rózsás, ed., Beyond Matter, Within Space: Curatorial and Art Mediation Techniques on the Verge of Virtual Reality (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2023): 429-443, 432. 30 See for example the installation Transmundane Economies (2022) at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, with references to the ruins of the Bellapais monastery in the north of Cyprus. ANNETTE URBAN 123 AN-ICON Fig. 2a Fig. 2c Fig. 2b Fig. 2d Fig. 2a, 2b, 2c and 2d T. Polyviou, Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, 2021. Site-specific VR installation, in cooperation with Eleni Diana Elia, installations shots and VR captures (details), ZKM, Karlsruhe 2021. Courtesy of the artists. © Eleni Diana Elia and Theodoulos Polyviou © Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), photo by Tanja Meissner. Produced in the framework of the Beyond Matter Residency Program at ZKM | Karlsruhe. This interplay between paradoxical emptiness and spatial density not only subverts the usual aesthetic experience in art museums with its orientation towards a singled-out art object. The directionality of the space image as an action image, theorized by Stephan Günzel in the context of gaming, where only objects centered in the field of vision can become the object of action,31 also remains unexploited. Instead, the environment privileges spatial exploration and confronts with the paradox phys- icality of its virtual architecture that, like the impermeable built world, diverts the users’ bodies. Without any avatarial 31 Cfr. S. Günzel, “Vor dem Affekt: die Aktion - Emotion und Raumbild,” in G. Lehnert, ed., Raum und Gefühl: Der Spatial Turn und die neue Emotionsforschung (Bielefeld: transcript- Verlag, 2014): 63-74, 67-68. ANNETTE URBAN 124 AN-ICON  representation, their self-perception entirely depends on bodily correlations with the labyrinthine environment, that additionally applies sensory stimuli and atmospheric im- mersion32 including artificial billowing fog on the floor, a sound backdrop and hall lights converted into dramatic illuminations. Thus, the functional architecture that sublim- inally remains perceptible through its calibration with the virtual space, shifts to a fictionalized, suspenseful backdrop that awaits its narration. Priority has the increased intensi- ty of experience typical for spatial-immersive installations and one-sided de-distancing. But the artificial environment here also requires an action- and reflection-based attitude thanks to the latency of its speculative and operable ob- jects and thus enacts a highly sensuous, performative form of site-related institutional critique. This comes into action when the foggy atmosphere transforms the built-in walls into jagged rock formations, thereby unifying different mate- rialities in one unstable image-object, or when the flashing spotlights and the variable angle of view instantly turn a black surface into a three-dimensional hide-away (Fig. 3). In addition, the windows that in fact only sepa- rate the next exhibition space, virtually open onto an equally artificial purple exterior, imitating a dramatic skylight. Its emptiness suspends the virtual exhibition space with its balustrades and staircase in an indefinite void, so that the emphasized inside-outside difference gives this VR-topos of floatation an institution-critical side. While Polyviou’s en- vironment is housed/hosted by the museum, it also nests there as an invisible counter-place that virtually undermines the physicality of the institution.33 And by penetrating the interior of the virtual environment, the shadows of the grid windows cite the linear structure of computed space. But this space loses the evenness secured by optical projec- tion when the grid lines synthesize the floor with the pillars to one continuous surface. It thus foreshadows a virtual 32 Cfr. also R. Eugeni, G. Raciti, eds., “Atmosfere mediali,” VCS Visual Culture Studies. Rivista semestrale di cultura visuale, no. 1 (November 2020). 33 Cfr. Th. Polyviou in A. Urban, “Virtual Spaces for Transformative Encounters and Vast Reciprocity:” 430. ANNETTE URBAN 125 AN-ICON Fig. 3a Fig. 3c Fig. 3b Fig. 3a, 3b and 3c T. Polyviou, Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, 2021. Site-specific VR installation, in cooperation with Eleni Diana Elia, VR captures (details), ZKM, Karlsruhe 2021. Courtesy of the artists. © Eleni Diana Elia and Theodoulos Polyviou © Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), Produced in the framework of the Beyond Matter Residency Programat ZKM | Karlsruhe. substantiality beyond the clear differentiation of distinct things and deprived of the stability of usual grounds. This exacerbates the insecurity of the orienta- tion-seeking users who navigate their invisible body through the confusing narrowness of fixtures, pseudo-functional handrails and hall lights. However, this staged reduction of distance is not simply overwhelming. The ambiguous virtual objects also ensure that, by “gather[ing] on the ground,” – as Sara Ahmed has noted – “they create a ground upon which we can gather.”34 Indeed, the mixed environment unites online as well as HMD users whose actions in the physical terrain marked with stripes are simultaneously observed by the museum visitors. Even without direct references to sacred architecture, Polyviou thus links the 34 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: 1. ANNETTE URBAN 126 AN-ICON  VR-typical passing through with a quasi-ritualized use of space. Alison Griffith has already tied back a counter-his- tory of immersive spectatorship in the museum not only to the panorama, science museum, and planetarium, but also to the cathedral.35 In Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, mnemonic mental images ensure the combination of action-based with cognitive immersion, because the disoriented wandering takes place through the comparison of constantly shifting, remembered spaces. When Polyviou decisively theorizes this ritualization as base for a “queer togetherness,”36 this reconnects to the lines printed on the floor. Through their interference with the dense environment inside the VR, they emancipate themselves from the clear legibility as object contour and ground plan. They thus contribute to the cru- cial entanglement that, according to Ingold, gets the “living being […] as a bundle of [the] lines” 37 of its movement im- mersed in its lifeworld. Polyviou therefore stimulates bodily practices of losing oneself in artificially induced passions. The choreographed searching movements inside give the museum space an improvisational openness, while the calibration with the physical pillars and ground makes the VR-experience literally tangible. Environmental immersion here goes hand in hand with a reduction of difference that de-differentiates virtual and physical spaces, bodies and objects. Rosa Menkman: The BLOB of Im/Possible Images (2021) Rosa Menkman’s VR-experience also brings the categories of artwork and exhibition nearly into congruence. But, instead of eliminating distinct artworks, Menkman, for this purpose, departs from a veritable collection assembled under the title of Im/Possible Images (Fig. 4). She stores 35 Cfr. A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 36 “Drifting, Browsing, Cruising,” Fantastic Confabulations, https://fantastic-confabulations.beyondmatter.eu/drifting-browsing-cruising/index.html, accessed December 29, 2022. 37 T. Ingold, “Drawing Together:” 300. ANNETTE URBAN 127 AN-ICON  Fig. 4 Fig. 4. R. Menkman, The BLOB of Im/possible Images, 2021. Desktop-based virtual environment, accessible on the platform New Art City. Courtesy of the artist. this collection on the widely used VR-art platform New Art City where she designed a complex desktop-based virtual environment that shows an enclosed grayish scenery with a staircase, a huge resolution-chart, a humanoid figure and a second free-floating structure pierced by diagonals. Ini- tially hidden from view, the collected images are sheltered inside this amorphous cloud, revealing themselves when one navigates through the permeable sheathing. The nest- ed structure alludes to the titular BLOB with its polysemy of digital blob architecture, the single-celled, ‘intelligent’ su- per-organism and Binary Large Objects as a technical term for databased image processing. And the exhibits that visi- tors have to deal with in this environment are mainly objects of knowledge accessible only through representation, so a reference to their theorizations by Hans-Jörg Rheinberg- er and Susan Leigh Star/John Griesemer is suggested.38 Menkman thus borrows from the realm of scientific images, which has been a central field of debate and self-defini- tion for digital art from the very beginning. She delegates the act of imagining and selecting them by realizing a sur- vey during her Arts at Cern/Collide Barcelona-Residency, asking the researchers what image of a relevant object or 38 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2015): 19-58. ANNETTE URBAN 128 AN-ICON  phenomenon they would capture if “limits of spatial, tem- poral, energy, signal/noise or cost resolutions”39 were irrel- evant. In other words, this variability of resolution results in products of imagineering and touches on phenomena that are decoupled from humans’ experience, escaping their commonly perceived environmentalities. But these phenomena can be mediated by virtual body-environment relations, which conversely force a changed understanding of (aesthetic) experience, as discussed by Roberto Diodato with reference to John Dewey.40 The choice of the nuclear physicists as experts in im/possible images endow the virtual as epistemic objects with a specific latency and scientificity. The referents of their proposed images mostly elude the objecthood familiar to mankind and have nothing in common with the medium-sized “things of the earth’s surface” as characterized by the Gestalt psychologist Fritz Heider.41 Two important aspects shared with Polyviou’s example promise additional insights into the workings of environmental immersion. Firstly, this concerns the embed- ding into abstractness, which goes along with a space that loses its conventional categories and thus favors immersion through the withdrawal of the usual parameters of orienta- tion. This not only stems from the arbitrary laws of physical- ity in VR, but also from a different kind of world reference in ‘virtual bodies environments’, which Diodato emphasizes: “In this intermediary world space itself is the result of inter- activity.”42 In Menkman’s case, the intensified experience is generated not so much by a condensed, labyrinthine spatiality as by the enhanced self-reflexivity of navigation itself. Both, the VR-environment The BLOB of Im/Possible Images and the related video-work Whiteout showing a tour in Harz mountains in heavy snow, deal with the ex- perience in a markerless space tending to exceed human 39 R. Menkman, “The BLOB of Im/possible Images” https://newart.city/show/menkman-blob-of-im-possibilities, accessed December 30, 2022. 40 Cfr. R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: Towards an Aesthetics of Relations (Cham: Springer, 2021): 56. 41 Cited after G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 38. 42 R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: 61. ANNETTE URBAN 129 AN-ICON  senses and erase most thingness. Second, the comparison with Drifting, Browsing, Cruising is based on the re-phys- icalization of the VR-works in the exhibition format. Rosa Menkman conceived a carefully designed exhibition display for a 2021 group show at Munich where she reconnected the VR-experience to the physical space with the help of lines. While in Polyviou’s example the plotting of isomorphic virtual and physical elements onto a planimetric floor plan retains a relative object character, Menkman starts from abstract lines as axes of graphs and coordinate systems. They guide the exploration of the virtual world inside and also mark the thresholds of iconic representation. Touching on signal spectra, digital states and im/material energetic flows, they bring forth what Ingold sees otherwise negated by the regime of solidified things. Within the VR, the resolution chart erected next to the figurine is particularly telling of how Menkman translates resolution into space, taking advantage of the orthogonality of digital as “rasterized […] images” based on a “grid of picture elements or pixels,”43 that, according to Francesco Casetti and Antonio Somaini, also possess a specific plasticity. By mapping the gray structure of the internal blob with the diagonals and its one black anchor point, the resolution chart pretends to guide the VR-user searching to enter this enclosure. Yet, despite the lines piercing the amorphous volume, the chart does not reveal any information about the interior. The charted scales and frequency ranges unmistakably mark this second blob as an image-object of the same digital fabric as the abstractly textured body of the figurine besides, Menkman’s Angelus Novus emblematic for the reversal of gaze regimes. This co-presence of image-objects and -subjects made of dis- torted black-white stripes strongly signals the de-differ- entiation of most diverse entities. The appearance of the things is flexibilized to such a degree that their self-identity 43 F. Casetti, A. Somaini, “Resolution: Digital Materialities, Thresholds of Visibility,” NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies 7, no. 1 (2018): 87-103. ANNETTE URBAN 130 AN-ICON  is disposable and their recognition depends on the user’s bodily action (Fig. 5). Fig. 5a Fig. 5b Fig. 5a and Fig. 5b .R. Menkman, The BLOB of Im/possible Images, 2021, Desktop-based virtual environment, accessible on the platform New Art City, screenshots by the author. Courtesy of the artist. ANNETTE URBAN 131 AN-ICON  As soon as the user has traversed the opaque but permeable grayish membrane of the blob, the envi- ronment transforms into a dark sphere with mystic sound where the im/possible images are scattered in an unmea- surable distance. When the wandering user is attracted by small luminous dots that, up close, turn out to represent the Pale Blue Dot aka Planet Earth, taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 for example, or a Quantum Vacuum, quarks inside of a proton, a shadow of a black hole and a body scan of the interior of a wrist, she/he is once again less guided by the affordances of gaming. To remind Günzel, its “fixed-par- anoid perspective” turns objects into action carriers by shifting them to the center of the image; but here, only the paranoid dimension of permanent searching seems to en- dure “through which the objects in the virtual off must be transferred into actualization.”44 As Roberto Diodato notes with reference to Bernard Stiegler and Richard Grusin, in view of the prevailing premediation techniques and an al- ready thoroughly hypermediated world, it is necessary for the techno-artistic creation of virtual spacetime environ- ments to break the merely adaptive behavior pattern of supposedly active cognitive agents.45 Beyond the gaming attitude running into the void, it is the habits of museum spectators that help surprisingly well – right down to the work texts that pop up on approach. But, of course, the concept of the mimetic image is challenged here by the assembled nuclear- and astrophysical phenomena at the limits of what can still be captured by light or other wave- lengths. Menkman succeeds in staging the uncertain status of such objects of knowledge, which only move into the rank of the existent through new technologies of detection, by making use of the peculiarities of virtual objecthood. This starts with the all-round perspectivability and resulting form variance of the virtual exhibits already known from sculp- ture, joined here by their free scalability and permeability 44 S. Günzel, “Vor dem Affekt:” 68. 45 Cfr. R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: 64-65. ANNETTE URBAN 132 AN-ICON  in direct interaction with the user navigating their invisible bodies through space. The skinned wrist, for example, hits the viewer in powerful plasticity or just hangs in space as flatware, depending on the point of entry into the enclosure of the im/possible images, the viewing angle and proximity to the item. This form of distance reduction self-reflexively combines seeing and (inter-)acting. The less complete im- mersion of desktop-based VR is compensated for by the tactility of maneuvering with arrow keys or touchpad, which transfers its sensation of handling to the virtual objects. Menkman experiments here with re-introducing into art the more immersive displays of the natural history museum,46 whose never-broken connection to science is recalled by Christiane Voss’ reflections on the medium of exhibition,47 and appropriates the knowledge exhibition format. In this setting, barely tangible phenomena such as black holes, dark matter and other galaxies become manageable as in a laboratory that, in terms of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, only brings epistemic things into existence.48 The nested spatial structure of the BLOB in- creases this epistemic valence because it invites for re- peating those transformative immersive crossings from one internal sphere to the next. Outside the encapsulated image collection, the latency of objects is provided by the poly- gon meshes patterned with black/whites lines reminiscent of military dazzle camouflage49 that acts as de-distancing tool precisely by preventing its correct estimation. Instead of simulating natural light conditions, as it often serves to catalyze the atmospheric immersion of a perfected VR, the moiré reveals another form of apparitional fluidity. Con- stantly changing with the user’s movement, the texture shows a pulsating im/materiality that already withdraws at the surface. It seems close to Ingold’s and Ansusas’s notion of infrastice that includes “all manner of electrical, 46 Cfr. A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine. 47 Cfr. C. Voss, “Das Museum als Medium der Kunst,” in G. W. Bertram, S. Deines, D. M. Feige, eds., Die Kunst und die Künste: Ein Kompendium zur Kunsttheorie der Gegenwart (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021): 464-483, 474. 48 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 35. 49 My thanks go to Manuel van der Veen for this reference and the exchange about the text. ANNETTE URBAN 133 AN-ICON  Fig. 6 R. Menkman, The Im/possible BLOB, 2021. Installed at Temporal Stack: the Deep Sensor in Guizhou, China, curated by Iris Long und HE Zike, 2021. Courtesy of the Artist. chemical, and mechanical workings […], energies, gases, and fluids”50 and resists the useability of surfaces solely understood as interfaces. Finally, the artist also uses these textures, as well as the abstract lines of graphs as vehicle for transfer- ring the virtual into physical space. For a presentation of The BLOB at Gizhou/China (Fig. 6), the dynamic black/white pattern has been transformed into a wallpaper. This exhi- bition design attaches more to the cinematically inspired strategy of extending the fictional-scenic image space in- side the VR into an overall immersive installation. But there, without the operability of latent virtual objects, it tends to unrealize the museum with its psychotic pattern. In con- trast, for a group exhibition in Munich that combined the VR-experience and the video Whiteout with works by Memo Akten, Susan Schuppli and others, Menkman materialized the abstract lines from inside the BLOB (Fig. 7). They es- tablished a 3D-framework in physical space whose white, green, red, yellow and blue diagonals traversed the floor and walls of the exhibition hall,51 thus slightly removing it from orthogonality. As these lines are imagined to shift the 50 T. Ingold, M. Anusas, “Designing Environmental Relations:” 58. 51 Cfr. L. Gross, R. Menkman, L 13: Reader NR 4 im/possible images (München: Lothringer 13 Halle, 2022) https://beyondresolution.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/ Catalogues%2Fimpossible_L13_READER.pdf, accessed April 25, 2023. ANNETTE URBAN 134 AN-ICON  Fig. 7d Fig. 7b Fig. 7c Fig. 7a Fig. 7 a-d. Views of the Exhibition Im/possible Images, at the Lothringer 13 Halle, Munich, 2021, curated by Rosa Menkman. Photo by Dominik Gigler. Courtesy of the artist and of Lothringer 13 Halle. ANNETTE URBAN 135 AN-ICON  spectra of resolution – a borderline to “low fidelity images” was inscribed on the floor –, the artist transformed the built into a “latent image space.”52 Similar to the VR, I would add, the solidity of its objects becomes doubtful, when variable parameters of the perceptible and representable always help other visualities and entities to emerge. With this kind of environmentalization, Menkman de-hierarchizes an ever-higher resolution, that regulates access to more and more details and therefore, according to Casetti and Somaini, raises the power question of control.53 In the Mu- nich exhibition, some of the im/possible images from the BLOB (re-)materialized as exhibits, among them a photo of the skinned hand scan or a newspaper clipping with an x-rayed hand from 1896. But, by placing them along the resolution lines, theses factual images remain suspended in an abstract space of potentialities. In sum, the exhibition display was activated as an integral component not princi- pally distinguished from what is constitutive for the ‘work.’ Potentiated Environmentalization As shown so far, the multiplication of environ- ments inherent in VR-art results from its genuine blurring of the differences between work and environment. This gen- erative logic of further nesting necessarily brings the whole institutional and curatorial ecosystem of VR-art into view. And the extension of the internal installation aesthetics not only counteracts its technically-based encapsulation. It is also essential for not missing the togetherness54 – to cite Mieke Bal – of an exhibition which, according to Christiane Voss, is the medium that establishes the works’ mode of existence as art in the first place.55 The Blob of Im/Possible Images, commissioned by the HeK Basel, was produced with the infrastructure of newart.city.org that provides a “virtual exhibition toolkit” 52 Cfr. R. Menkman, “Im/possible Images@Lothringer 13, Munich” https://beyondresolution.info/im-possible-images-1, accessed December 29, 2022. 53 Cfr. F. Casetti, A. Somaini, “Resolution:” 89. 54 Cfr. M. Bal, Exhibition-ism: Temporal Togetherness (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020). 55 Cfr. Voss, “Das Museum als Medium der Kunst:” 464. ANNETTE URBAN 136 AN-ICON  with “built-in tools to manage artworks and space layouts.”56 Menkman takes up its claims for a non-hierarchical co-cre- ation and invites the submission of further non-expert im/ possible images. Later on, the work has been embedded into a virtual, but spatial exhibition curated by Lívia No- lasco-Rózsás and Giulia Bini for the ZKM in 2021, which pushes the tendencies towards nesting and de-differen- tiation even further: Spatial Affairs. Worlding is inhabited by artworks, an exhibition display and visitors sharing the same organic-abstract shape. One can only distinguish the non-humanoid avatars of other visitors from exhibits through distance-reduction and the object-related action of a mouse click. The latter then turn into pink and, via an info window and links, lead the web-user to the works stored on artists’ website or platforms. By interpreting environmental- ization in terms of worlding, the curators participate in the posthumanist renewal of the phenomenological critique of the world as sum of objects. The multi-user online world with its identical, modular entities first hides the exhibition behind the supposed affordances of gaming and chats. However, the transitions between the environmental exhi- bition and environmental works are designed less immer- sively – like portals in gaming or falling down the rabbit-hole known from literature – than through paratextual framings operated by non-natural manual interfaces. The online exhibition site fantastic confabu- lations that hosts Drifting, Browsing, Cruising was also conceived by Polyviou together with Jasmina Figueora as artists in residence of the same research project Beyond Matter. Instead of nesting spaces, it deals with the gener- ic, serial tendency of self-continuation by inviting to reuse the initial 3D-reconstruction of the ZKM balcony for sub- sequent projects such as realized by Figueroa who mod- eled her spoken words and sound scores by the visitors’ movements through the virtual site. Following Ahmed, this 56 Cfr. “About New Art City,” https://info.newart.city/about, accessed December 28, 2022. ANNETTE URBAN 137 AN-ICON  implies not only a model for self-determined curation, but also a form of environmental co-habitation. Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás argues for the museum in the virtual condition as a “cognitive system”57 including non-human actors, thereby reaccentuating the pioneering thought exhibitions [Gedankenausstellungen] initiated by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour. Polyviou’s example gets by without its strong archival underpinning. In the functional architecture, his staging of an atmospherically condensed counterworld aims at releasing a different bodily knowledge of possible encounters and envisions a counter-physicality for transcending the otherwise hard-to-move institution. The curved lines on the ground echoing the paths inside the VR offer their own transformative knowledge of entan- glement that is experienced and produced environmentally. In comparison, Menkman directly invests into the potential of virtual as epistemic and aesthetic objects. Their robust- ness and simultaneously plasticity reminds the capability of Star’s and Griesemer’s boundary objects to make agents of different groupings,58 in this case those of art and science, meet. What Doris Kolesch has in mind with a normalized immersion in not only technologically-enclosed but every- day spaces, can also be true for VR-based environmental- ization. De-differentiation and de-distancing are then not contradictions to but catalysts of immersive reflection. 57 L. Nolasco-Rózsás, Y. Hofmann, “The Museum as a Cognitive System of Human and Non- Human Actors,” The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums & Culture, no. 3 (2021): 1-15. 58 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 33-34. ANNETTE URBAN 138 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

anicon

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19726

Immersivity as An-immersivity by Stefano Velotti Ordinary and immersive experience Virtual reality and art Experience economy Control Uncontrollability Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Immersivity as An-immersivity STEFANO VELOTTI, Sapienza. Università di Roma – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9421-0257 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19726 Abstract The title of this project, “An-icon,” refers to “im- ages that deny themselves.” Virtual reality may be viewed as a typical, though not exclusive, case able to illustrate this kind of image: we know we have crossed the threshold of an environment that consists of images (ontologically), but we experience it (phenomenologically) as if it were a real environ- ment. Something similar can be said about immersivity, but reversing the perspective: we are (ontologically) immersed in reality (virtual or non-virtual), but (phenomenologically) we know and say we are, and for this very reason we reject the idea that we are simply immersed in an environment. This applies first and foremost to our experience in general, regardless of the status of the experiences we gain through virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR). And yet, within this very general condition, human beings have over time created environments and works that carve out zones of “special immersivity,” so to speak, dedicated to immersion. What are we looking for in VR immersivity? Are new immersive technologies merely refinements of older tech- niques, or can they affect our relationship with ourselves, reality, and others in novel ways? What are artistic practices called on to do when faced with such new technological practices? Keywords Ordinary and immersive experience Virtual reality and art Experience economy Control Uncontrollability To quote this essay: S. Velotti, “Immersivity as An-immersivity,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 139-157, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19726. STEFANO VELOTTI 139 AN-ICON  An-Immersivity The title of this project, “An-icon,” refers to “im- ages that deny themselves.” Virtual reality may be viewed as a typical, though not exclusive, case able to illustrate this kind of image: we know we have crossed the threshold of an environment that consists of images (ontologically), but we experience it (phenomenologically) as if it were a real environment. Something similar can be said about immer- sivity, but reversing the perspective: we are (ontologically) immersed in reality (virtual or non-virtual), but (phenomeno- logically) we know and say we are, and for this very reason we reject the idea that we are simply immersed in an envi- ronment. If we were, we would have no way of becoming aware of this. In fact, to speak of immersivity, we must find our balance on an unstable boundary, which allows us to recognize the encompassing and intrascendible character of immersive experience while at the same time belying its closure, piercing it from within. To speak of immersivity therefore implies recognizing that one is in a condition of “an-immersivity,” where the hyphen separating and joining the privative prefix “an” to “immersivity” is the sign of a paradox. It could also be said that the hyphen evokes the figure of an unstable threshold, referring to the co-presence of inside and outside.1 This applies first and foremost to our experience in general, regardless of the status of the experiences we gain through virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR). “Special immersivity” Before even considering the complexities and opportunities of virtual immersivity, it should be noted that 1 In this I am comforted by the title of A. Pinotti’s fine book, Alla soglia dell’immagine: Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Turin: Einaudi, 2021). STEFANO VELOTTI 140 AN-ICON  immersivity presents itself first and foremost as a feature of our being in the world: we are always already immersed in experience, in a given situation part of an indeterminate totality. Where else could we be? And yet, within this very general condition, human beings have over time created environments and works that carve out zones of “special immersivity,” so to speak, dedicated to immersion, with different modalities, complexities, techniques, functions, and meanings, many of which – the earliest – tend to be beyond our understanding and perhaps always will. Is it possible that the insistent recourse to “(special) immersivity” arises especially at times of deep crisis, when the very foundations of a civilization are felt to be uncertain, invested with a high rate of contingency?2 To simplify: since forms of life do not allow us to feel at home in this world, which seems to have become foreign, indecipherable and threatening, one is drawn to limited and controlled spaces in which to immerse oneself, to feel more alive and safe, at least for a while. I think this perspective is plausible, though it is partial and, indeed, a simplification. What else are we looking for in VR immersivity? Are new immersive technologies merely refinements of older tech- niques, or can they affect our relationship with ourselves, reality, and others in novel ways? What are artistic practices 2 O. Grau, From Illusion to Immersion (2001), trans. G. Custance (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003) offers a historical survey of artworks aimed at providing immersive experiences. In recent decades, however, interest in Paleolithic and “cave art” has been rekindled outside the circle of specialists as well, both as such – see, e.g., G. Rigal, Le temps sacré des cavernes (Paris: Corti, 2016) – and in relation to contemporary art, to this regard see again Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine (especially the section on “Avatāra” in ch. V). Cfr. also M. Stavrinaki, Saisis par la préhistoire: Enquête sur l’art et le temps des modernes (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2019) and in particular the pages devoted to Frederick Kiessler’s Endless House and Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio’s Caverna dell’antimateria. Both of these works, created in the late 1950s, reflect the anguish connected to the atomic bomb, at that time perceived as a looming threat, later forgotten but always resurgent. The short-circuit between contemporary art and the Paleolithic seems to be related to the perception of a profound change in a civilization, if not its end, and thus to a need to revisit its origins, as if one had to start over. In this regard, in addition to a number of works of visual art that explicitly harken back to the Paleolithic, see also Richard Powers’ symptomatic novel Plowing the Dark (2000), which I have analyzed in S. Velotti, “Art in the time of Pandemic: Three Terms,” Paradigmi 39, no. 1 (2021): 127-140. STEFANO VELOTTI 141 AN-ICON  called on to do when faced with such new technological practices? Nowadays the adjective “immersive” is used obsessively in the presentation of theme parks and other sensational “adventures” or “experiences” that promise to take us “inside” paintings and frescoes or into physi- cally inaccessible places. The word invariably appears in the press releases of museums, exhibitions, performances, installations, but also in advertisements for apartments for sale or wine and food itineraries.3 One way to understand the meaning of the word is “proof of the opposite:” what, for example, would a “non-immersive” visit to an apartment look like? Hard to answer, unless we specify restrictive conditions for what is meant by immersivity. Used loosely, however, “immersive” risks being meaningless since its negation does not seem to change anything. And yet it is precisely for this reason that it is an enigmatic adjective, hovering like an obscure object of desire in our social imag- ination. Are we therefore to conclude that the attribution of immersivity is in vain since it neither adds nor detracts from the characterization of experience? I don’t think so. However, we must first clarify in what sense each of our ex- periences is both immersive and non-immersive, or, indeed, “an-immersive.” On this basis it will be easier to ask what peculiar traits are offered by the different uses of “special immersivity,” by this form of reality that is VR, particularly in relation to art, which, if it is anything, is a way of under- standing how we place ourselves in the world. 3 A real estate agency in Rome advertises its luxurious apartments in the Parioli district with the following words, “Enjoy an immersive experience! Come visit your new home.” The real estate company is called Pitagora because it is located near Piazza Pitagora, not because it is referencing the Greek philosopher; however, the agency’s slogan is “Pitagora – the philosophy of living.” Which, supposedly, explains its “unique and iconic character.” As for food and wine itineraries, one can visit, for example, “The Temple of Brunello” in Montalcino (Tuscany), which actually offers “a station with VR viewers called InVolo” that “allows visitors to immerse themselves in the villas, castles, vineyards and hamlets that dot the municipality’s vast and diversified area,” https://www.orodimontalcino.it/tempio-del-brunello/, accessed December 24, 2022. STEFANO VELOTTI 142 AN-ICON  Fish and amphibians At first glance, one would be tempted to say that we human animals are like fish immersed in water – to quote a famous apologue by David Foster Wallace about the difficulty of grasping the medium in which we are im- mersed: an old fish asks two young fish, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” and they in turn ask themselves, “What the hell is water?”4 The element in which we are immersed is in this sense a medium that cannot be iconized or repre- sented. In one respect, it is undeniable that we are always already situated, immersed in a concrete environment that resists iconic reduction. On the other hand, one must ask whether asserting this undeniable condition of immersion does not imply a partial denial of it. The simplest critiques of a representational model of the mind often target a naive idea of representa- tion, one that can be imagined as a frame or filter interposed between us and things, constituted by the spatio-temporal forms of intuition or by a priori categories, universal or cul- turally determined conceptual schemes. Access to reality “in itself” is therefore denied to us, because according to this account reality is always filtered through (inter)subjective lenses. On the complementary plane of our actions and productions we have mental representations enclosed in our head that we then try to externalize, technically, artis- tically or in other ways. Various versions of enactivism oppose this view of the representational mind, rightly insisting that percep- tion is an active way of exploring the material and social environment in which we are immersed, of experiencing affordances and building skills, not a way of corresponding 4 D. Foster Wallace, This is Water, 2005. Commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College, https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/, accessed December 28, 2022. STEFANO VELOTTI 143 AN-ICON  more or less correctly to an already organized world.5 Not least because, in order to see whether our representations “correspond” to the world, we would need to be able to have unfiltered access to reality. On another front, anti-rep- resentationalism is also endorsed by those who replace representations with immanent flows and forces, or who propose that we think of ourselves as “things among things,” according to a “flat ontology” devoid of anthropocentric hi- erarchies, where all entities are equally agents and patients, from stones to plants, from artifacts to animals. Yet, both the idea of a representational filter and the various versions of absolute immersivity run into the same problem: if we think these ideas and formulate them linguistically, as in fact we do, then they are self-con- tradictory. If they are true, then they are false.6 For if we experienced the world through a filter, we would have to see the world, ourselves and the filter with a view from nowhere. And if on the other hand it were true, as in some ways it is true, that we are always immersed in a translucent medium like fish in water, we could not communicate this. We would just be immersed. The fact is that we discover ourselves immersed and emerged at the same time, more amphibian than fish. We realize that we see and do not see a frame, that we remain on this side of a threshold knowing that we cannot cross it and therefore crossing it.7 Toward where? Toward an infinitely expandable context, the inde- terminable totality of every possible experience in which 5 Cfr. J. Stewart, O. Gapenne, E. A. Di Paolo, Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). For a recent survey of enactivism in relation to cultural contexts see C. Durt, T. Fuchs, C. Tewes, eds., Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2017). 6 Here I broadly trace the exposition of the paradoxes of experience articulated by E. Garroni, Estetica: Uno sguardo-attraverso (Milan: Garzanti, 1992). 7 Christian Stiegler acknowledges the liminality of the “liquid spaces” in which we are immersed, but then seems to unilaterally emphasize the disappearance of all frames: “Liquid spaces are moments of uncertainty, instability, and fluidity in mediated experiences. They emerge as thresholds between the physical and the mediated. These spaces create the feeling of immersion even beyond the mediation by eliminating critical distance and dissolving the frames of media.” C. Stiegler, The 360° Gaze: Immersions in Media, Society, and Culture (London: MIT Press, 2021): 61. STEFANO VELOTTI 144 AN-ICON  we are already included, on whose horizon this determinate experience stands, which is such precisely insofar as it is “cut out” from that indeterminate and uncontrollable horizon of possibility. What McLuhan says about medial awareness – summarized in the famous “rearview-mirror” metaphor recalled by Pinotti – is therefore not entirely true: As long as s/he is immersed in a medium, the human being is as little aware of it as the fish of the water in which he swims. Only the moment that medium is overtaken by a later medium can it be retrospectively focused on and grasped precisely as the medium in which the experience had been organized: “we are always one step behind in our view of the world.”8 We do not need the appearance of another me- dium to know that we are not like fish in water: the possibil- ity of saying that we are is enough for us to prove ourselves wrong. Some philosophers, such as Thomas Nagel, have claimed that this condition of ours expresses “the absurd” of the human condition, which should be accepted with a little irony and without taking ourselves too seriously. In fact, unlike other animals that lack self-awareness and lan- guage, we cannot simply remain immersed and absorbed in our occupations, nor can we, however, install ourselves in a permanent emersion, in a transcendent dimension, be- cause even the mind of the mystic is still playing one of the possible games situated in the concreteness of experience, not an out-of-this-world “super game.” Because of this we are forced to accept this irreconcilable oscillation between immersion and emergence, adherence and detachment, 8 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: 17 [my translation]. STEFANO VELOTTI 145 AN-ICON  involvement in the ordinary tasks of life and the distance of a gaze that relativizes the latter or nullifies their importance.9 But is this really the case? What if, on the other hand, it were sometimes possible to make such indetermi- nate totality transit – analogically, symbolically – in concrete, determinate experience? What if things, practices, concrete experiences were given that exemplified the indeterminable and uncontrollable dimension against which they stand out? What if this were not only a source of disquiet (due to the feeling of being in touch with the uncontrollable), but also a sensible pleasure, deriving from the fact that our vitality, the feeling of being alive, is increased by the simultaneous co-presence of immersion and emergence? Perhaps this is one of the ways of approaching some particularly sensi- ble experiences, for example, those in which we recognize something as art: a set of practices, events or “things” that allow us to “see” (feel, experience, understand) the complex texture of our forms of life, our being in the world between immersion and emersion. Before trying to articulate these still vague statements, and precisely in relation to what we have called forms of “special immersivity,”10 it is necessary to go back to their homology with the an-immersivity of ordinary ex- perience, also from the point of view of its limitations. 9 T. Nagel, “The Absurd,” in Mortal Questions (London: Canto, 1979): 11-23. 10 It should be made clear from the outset that what I have called “special immersivity” is obtained with diverse and heterogeneous forms that can be sorted into categories. For an excellent survey of immersive forms of storytelling, see E. Modena, Nelle storie: Arte, cinema e media immersivi (Rome: Carocci, 2022). Ultimately, however, as far as artistic practices are concerned, it is the singularity of the work that must be taken into account. STEFANO VELOTTI 146 AN-ICON  Limits of immersivity Let us see the extent to which the experience of virtual immersivity, in its “special” meaning, can be equated with that of ordinary immersivity. The three characteristics of immersive VR, sum- marized by Pinotti, are (1) the saturation of the 360° gaze (“unframedeness”); (2) the feeling of presence, of “being there,” which can be further articulated as telepresence, selfpresence and social presence (“presentness”);11 (3) the experience of immediacy, due paradoxically to the great complexity of technological mediations that produce VR, making the medium as transparent as possible (“immedi- ateness”).12 It is easy to see that we could characterize our experience of the ordinary world using the same properties: nothing I see is potentially limited by a frame, I have the perception of “being here,” of presence, and my experience seems immediate, that is, unmediated by a medium that interferes with reality. But, one might say, if by hypothesis VR fulfills these promises to the point of pushing itself to (illusory) indistinguishability from reality, then – from a phe- nomenological, though not an ontological, point of view – we would be thrown back into the reality we already know, and – except for the advantageous uses of it, related to various forms of telepresence and simulation – the experi- ence we derive from it would be nothing new. Conversely, one can highlight the limits of these claims and emphasize the aspects that prevent illusion. Both perspectives, how- ever, are simplistic. VR is not equivalent to ordinary reality, nor are the limitations of VR absent in ordinary reality: 11 E. Pett, Experiencing Cinema: Participatory Film Cultures, Immersive Media and the Experience Economy (New York-London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 12 A. Pinotti, “Prologo,” in Alla soglia dell’immagine: xi-xviii. STEFANO VELOTTI 147 AN-ICON  ■- It is true that in VR the frame has disappeared, but in a sense it persists: I am wearing a headset and in the future I will perhaps wear a headband, or be fitted with an implant connected to my neurons. On the other hand, even here, now, in non-virtual reality, I am partially framed by the actions that brought me to a given place and situation (I am aware that I occupy a limited or “framed” portion of reality), by attention variously focused on the scenario in front of me or the task I set myself, but also by the “frames” studied by Erving Goffman and those we do not pay attention to because they are “hidden in plain sight.”13 ■- Presence, being here, cannot be doubted. I am not else- where, or at least no more than I am elsewhere when I am im- mersed in a virtual environment. ■- Finally, the apparent immediacy produced by innumerable technological mediations also characterizes my real experience: we know all too well that what is felt as natural,spontaneous, ob- vious is intertwined with acquired habits and artificial construc- tions and prosthetic extensions: the normative, the perceptual, proxemics, social mediations, and all the ways of acting of a certain form of life. So, those characteristics that serve to phenom- enologically distinguish the experience of a non-immersive image from an “an-iconic” immersive experience are not sufficient to distinguish the experience of immersive VR from that of ordinary reality. However, from here we cannot conclude that between “ordinary” immersivity and what we have called “special immersivity” there is no difference, not only on the ontological level, but also on the phenomeno- logical one. There are countless features of VR that distin- guish it from ordinary reality. The most obvious, related first and foremost to the dimension of space, is the possibility of 13 E. Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974) (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986); E. Zerubavel, Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). STEFANO VELOTTI 148 AN-ICON  becoming immersed in scenarios that cannot be found in ordinary reality or that would be impossible to experience because of scale or distance: entering an animal’s blood- stream or its brain, acting at a distance, traveling through a body. Also, there is the cognitive conflict between pro- prioception in the real world and that in the virtual world – walking on water or plunging into an abyss while remaining firmly on the ground but feeling a sense of vertigo and fear (or, vice versa, I am immersed in the “magic circle” of VR and have an accident in the ordinary world). I do not intend to try to list all the differences and perhaps imagine how some of them will be eliminat- ed or reduced by technological progress, integrating our other senses,14 nor do I intend to address all the possible ways of using VR, which is likely to become even more useful and indispensable in the future than it already is now for many of our practices, medical, architectural, forensic, social, professional, educational, recreational, and so on. Rather, here I intend to focus on what immersive VR can tell us about the human experience in general, drawing on the experience we sometimes have in our relationship with what we call artistic works or practices. “Experience economy” In the 1990s the idea gained ground – with anticipations already in the previous decades – that the economy most suited to our times – at least in the wealth- iest societies – is not so much based on the production of goods, or even on services, but on experience. In those years, expressions such as “Erlebnisgesellschaft,” “Erleb- nismarkt,” and “Dream Society” began to circulate, until James Gilmore and Joseph Pine II became the proudest 14 Cfr. R. DeSalle, Our Senses: An Immersive Experience (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2018). STEFANO VELOTTI 149 AN-ICON  proponents of the “Experience Economy” with a book that would have a certain fortune, followed by other volumes on related issues.15 The key to their thinking is stated in the preface to the 2011 updated edition of their The Experience Economy: So let us here be most clear: goods and services are no longer enough to foster economic growth, create new jobs, and maintain economic prosperity. To realize revenue growth and increased em- ployment, the staging of experiences must be pursued as a distinct form of economic output. Indeed, in a world saturated with largely undifferentiated goods and services the greatest opportunity for value creation resides in staging experiences.16 The market for goods is saturated, and produc- ers must offer products that promise to stage experiences. For this reason the watchwords are “mass customize,” i.e. transform every service into a unique (mass) experience; “work is theater,” i.e. “stage experiences” and train sellers in specific performance practices; and finally, ensure that the experience offered generates in the consumer (“pro- sumer” or “experiencer”) an actual change, which must be properly paid for: “these transformations should themselves command a fee in the form of explicitly charging for the demonstrated outcomes that result from the underlying experiences. [...] We especially challenge enterprises in three industries: those that focus on making people healthy, wealthy, and wise.”17 It would be all too easy to reiterate once again how the neoliberal creed attempts to infiltrate every aspect 15 G. Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft: Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main- New York: Campus-Verlag, 1993); R. Jensen, “Dream Society,” The Futurist 30, no. 3 (1996): 9-13; J. Gilmore and B.J. Pine II, The Experience Economy (1999) (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2011); J. Gilmore and B.J. Pine II, Authenticity. What Consumers Really Want (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007). 16 J. Gilmore and B.J. Pine II, “Preview to the Updated Edition: Beyond Goods and Services,” in The Experience Economy: ix-xxii, ix [emphasis mine]. 17 Ibid. STEFANO VELOTTI 150 AN-ICON  of human life, putting a price tag on it. Instead, I have men- tioned these marketing strategies to make some distinc- tions concerning the notion of experience. It is interesting to see how Gilmore and Pine respond to the obvious ob- jection that an experience purchased from a catalog is a fake experience. Their line of defense comes in the central chapter of their next book, Authenticity, in which they draw on some philosophical references to arrive at the following conclusion: there is no such thing as an inauthentic experience because ex- periences happen inside us. Therefore, we remain free to judge our experiences with any economic offering as authentic or not. Businesses that offer them therefore can, whether intentionally or by happenstance, gain the perception of authenticity. [...] Business- es can render their inauthentic offerings as authentic. Doing so requires embracing this essential paradox: all human enterprise is ontologically fake - that is, in its very being it is inauthentic - and yet, output from that enterprise can be phenomenologically real - that is, it is perceived as authentic by the individuals who buy it.18 The distinction between an ontological and a phenomenological point of view returns here in a particu- larly insidious way. For on the one hand, it is true that there is no class of “fake” immersive experiences ontologically distinct from a class of “authentic” immersive experiences. And the experience one has cannot be anything other than the experience of a subject, and in this sense it is obvious- ly subjective (which, however, does not necessarily mean that it is only “inside us”). Kant himself, who entrusted to the principle of the judgment of taste even the possibility of making sense of experience in general and building a 18 J. Gilmore, B. J. Pine II, “The Authenticity Paradox,” in Authenticity: 89-90, 89 [emphasis mine]. STEFANO VELOTTI 151 AN-ICON  system of nature, reiterated that I can judge anything aes- thetically, material or immaterial, and that my judgment depends on what “I make of this representation in my- self.”19 As is well known, however, Kant ascribed to such judgment a claim to “subjective universality” and “exem- plary necessity,” springing from a “free play” of imagination and understanding. In the perspective of the “experience economy,” what we witness is a caricature of these claims: the freedom-spontaneity of the free play of the faculties becomes the consumer’s “freedom of choice,” a psycho- logical choice expressed as a preference (however moti- vated or induced, as long as it has the desired effect). The impossibility of establishing ontologically distinct classes for what is “beautiful-sensible” and what is not is reduced to what the consumer “buys or doesn’t buy” (in both senses of the word). Since nothing escapes human intervention and thus technique and money, the Las Vegas hotel “The Vene- tian” and the city of Venice possess the same ontological status, that of both being “fakes.” The authenticity of an experience cannot therefore depend on “what” we experi- ence (everything is equally ontologically “fake”), but only on something that “happens inside us,” and can therefore be “phenomenologically real.” The singularity of experience is completely annulled, and every object, practice, situation is identical to any other, as long as it produces the same effect: a novel or a pill, a bump on the head or a movie, a concert or a wedding.20 There is no longer any trace of 19 “It is readily seen that to say that it is beautiful and to prove that I have taste what matters is what I make of this representation in myself, not how I depend on the existence of the object.” I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 5; 205. 20 Cfr. Wittgenstein’s objection to the idea of aesthetic experience conceived as an effect: “There is a tendency to talk about the ‘effect of a work of art’– feelings, images, etc. Then it is natural to ask: ‘Why do you hear this minuet?,’ and there is a tendency to answer: ‘To get this, and that effect.’ And doesn’t the minuet itself matter? – hearing this: would another have done as well? You could play a minuet once, and get a lot out of it, and play the same minuet another time and get nothing out of it. But it doesn’t follow that what you get out of it is then independent of the minuet.” L. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967): 29. STEFANO VELOTTI 152 AN-ICON  recourse to an elaboration by the subject, to the exercise of a “reflective faculty of judgment” (as distinct from the objectifying exercise of “determining judgment”), to show the impossibility of constructing classes of “beautiful” or meaningful things or experiences. Instead, once again, it is the “invisible hand” of the market that knows best how to allocate the “resource” of authenticity. The perspective of control On a photography information site, I find a re- view of Richard Avedon’s recent exhibition, Relationships (Palazzo Reale, Milan, September 22, 2022-January 29, 2023). The reviewer informs us right away that it is “an en- joyable immersive experience in the artist’s photographic universe.”21 What is of interest here, however, is not the indiscriminate use of the adjective, but one of the most famous quotes attributed to Avedon, which stands out in one of the rooms: “I think all art is about control – the en- counter between control and the uncontrollable.” Referred to photography, or to a certain way of doing photography, the statement easily lends itself to multiple interpretations.22 I believe, however, that Avedon was right: every art form is characterized by this encounter and, indeed, it could be argued that every experience worthy of the name is. This “encounter,” however, takes place less and less often in everyday life: control and self-control, exacer- bated also by digital technologies (surveillance, quantified self, digital self, etc.) seem to run more and more in parallel with an increasing loss of control (sense of powerlessness, 21 E. Dal Verme, “Richard Avedon: Relationships,” Fotografia.it (September 22, 2022), https://www.fotografia.it/articoli/opinioni/richard-avedon-relationships/, accessed January 5, 2023 [emphasis mine]. 22 Cfr., e.g., R. Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance (Cambridge MA-London: Harvard University Press, 2015) and some observations in S. Velotti, The Present of Photography and the Dialectics of Control, in M. Delogu, A. Dandini de Sylva, eds., Fotografia: Il presente (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2015): 21-29. STEFANO VELOTTI 153 AN-ICON  acting out, addictions, panic attacks, conspiracy theories etc.), without the two dimensions ever converging. Although often untied in our impoverished everyday life, the knot that ties control to uncontrollability is very complex and can- not be reduced to the “society of control” preconized by Deleuze.23 The problem is complex, but here, in conclusion, I would like to put forward only a few questions about con- trol in relation to “special immersivity,” or, more specifically, immersive art practices. On the one hand, the most mun- dane experiences of “special” immersivity are meant to be forms of sensational entertainment (Caravaggio experience and the like), or reassuring bubbles where all contact with what is uncontrollable and indeterminate is preemptively sterilized. On the other, they promise they will allow us to “get lost” in immersion. (Of course, there may also be a more subtle pleasure in “letting go,” relying on someone else’s control, as artist Janet Cardiff argues when speaking of her extraordinary AR “walks”24). However, this is an unresolved problem for the “experience economy,” which on the one hand wants the prosumer/experiencer to feel that he or she is in control of his or her own choices (with reference to the alternatives offered) to ensure their authenticity, and on the other hand knows that the provider must remain in control of this offer, if only to justify the fee the prosumer/experi- encer has to pay for it. There is nothing wrong with buying an “organized immersive adventure”– which may be fun, exciting, unusual – but the doubt remains: either it is not an adventure, or it is not organized. Even in valuable academic contributions, the question of control appears repeatedly, 23 Cfr. S. Velotti, Dialettica del controllo: Limiti della sorveglianza e pratiche artistiche (Roma: Castelvecchi, 2017); H. Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (2018), trans. J.C. Wagner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020). 24 C. Christov-Bakargiev, Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller (New York: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, 2003): 35. STEFANO VELOTTI 154 AN-ICON  yet without being thematized – it remains opaque, ambig- uous, if not contradictory.25 What if, instead, the “special” immersivity of VR were employed to reveal, by exemplifying it, the paradoxical an-immersivity of ordinary experience, usually overlooked or misunderstood? What if certain uses of “special” im- mersivity were able to bring out from within not the illusory simulation of ordinary reality “as it is,” perhaps displaced into fantastic scenarios, nor sensational and amazing expe- riences, but the most ordinary experience, making it visible and understandable as an “encounter” of controllability and uncontrollability? Then we would not only have a bubble, a vacation from ordinary space, an interruption in the web of a life lived obtusely, but also the concrete exemplification of the antinomian forces that render us alive: on the one hand, the need and satisfaction of exercising some control over ourselves, the world, and others – of being agents endowed with “efficacy,” not powerless and systematically frustrated agents. On the other, the equally essential need not to remain entrenched in such control, which can only become animated in the “encounter” with what is and re- mains uncontrollable: the indeterminate totality of experi- ence, the unpredictability of our multiple relationships, the infinitely rich grain of reality. Possible examples of such successful “en- counters” abound in contemporary art practices. Here I would like to cite just one, which I think is particularly signif- icant because of its apparent incongruity and which would 25 See for example C. Stiegler, The 360° Gaze: “If all the frames, stages, and technologies dissolve now, we are about to confuse different concepts of realities […] They emphasize the dissolution of boundaries and control”; but, at the same time, he writes that in the use of avatars “Nonhuman characters can activate the same emotional alignment and level of acceptance as human characters. Elena Kokkinara and Rachel McDonnell confirm that even though photorealistic imagery supports acceptance and engagement, authenticity depends much more ‘on the levels of perceived ownership and sense of control (agency) we feel towards this virtual character.’” Stiegler, The 360° Gaze: 92 [emphasis mine]. STEFANO VELOTTI 155 AN-ICON  deserve a much deeper analysis:26 about 50 years ago, an Australian theology professor, John M. Hull, noticed that he was going blind, and decided to tape-record a diary of this dramatic progression. In 1990, these recordings be- came an extraordinary book, Touching the Rock. An Ex- perience of Blindness. In the preface, Oliver Sacks wrote, quite rightly, that if Wittgenstein had gone blind, he would probably have written a similar book. A short film, a feature film and finally (in 2016) a virtual reality application, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness, are based on this book.27 It is “an experience” that takes place at the intersection of multiple authorships: Hull, the creators of the work in VR, and, it must be added, a partial interactivity on the part of the “experiencer.” The latter wears a binaural audio device – the same sound reproduction technique used by Cardiff for her assisted “walks” – coupled with a 360-degree VR headset. Beginning with Hull’s experience of blindness, the making, as well as the enjoyment of the experience, are the work of the “non-blind.” It is not about disavowing the tragedy of losing one’s sight, nor is it about telling a story of “redemption.” Rather, what happens is that the blindness of the person wearing the VR headset – and the related loss of control over the outside world – is not replaced by images aiming to immerse the person in a realistic, broadly illusionistic environment, but rather “into Darkness,” one of the most obvious manifestations of the loss of control over the environment. What we find in this VR, however, is not total darkness, but the disjointed and fragmented world described by Hull’s words. The apparent obviousness of ordinary visual perception is suspended. 26 See C. Roussel, “If Blindness Creates a New World,” CJDS 8, no. 6 (2019): 108-130, which documents and analyzes the genesis and structure of Notes on Blindness VR in the most comprehensive way. E. Modena, building on Roussel’s analysis, devotes some of the finest pages to it in her book Nelle storie: 84-87. See also the presentation of the project by A. Colinart, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im3CpA14jEQ, accessed January 8, 2023. 27 Cfr. e.g., A. Noë, Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). STEFANO VELOTTI 156 AN-ICON  It involves participating in the reconstitution of the unity of experience almost “from scratch,” which depends on acoustic signals that “bounce” back to us from objects if given certain environmental conditions: wind or rain make the world perceptible. Perceiving requires our activity, which is partially controllable, and a “collaboration” of the world that is usually beyond our control, i.e. weather events (in the app, the experiencer can control the triggering of such uncontrollable conditions). The idea that seeing is not ob- vious, that we need to learn how to do it actively, and that art is a way of “learning to look,” I think is right, as long as “looking” is translated into a more global “perceiving” extended to the whole body. What we see in the virtual scenario are not really images, in the sense of figures, but sketches, elusive and ghostly graphic patterns (like Kantian image-schemes)28 correlated to sound. A silent world would be dark. This reduction of figurativeness is much closer to a staging of our ordinary perception than any mimetic or fantastic imagery. Like blindness for the non-blind, our perceptual life in its entanglement with the world cannot be properly depicted visually. However, the suspension of ordinary sight opens up an understanding of a usually occluded perceptual experience, revealing, I believe, the paradoxical an-immersive interweaving of controllability and uncontrollability that constitutes us and toward which we are becoming increasingly blind. 28 E. Garroni, Immagine, linguaggio, figura (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2005). STEFANO VELOTTI 157 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

anicon

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19726

Immersivity as An-immersivity by Stefano Velotti Ordinary and immersive experience Virtual reality and art Experience economy Control Uncontrollability Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Immersivity as An-immersivity STEFANO VELOTTI, Sapienza. Università di Roma – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9421-0257 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19726 Abstract The title of this project, “An-icon,” refers to “im- ages that deny themselves.” Virtual reality may be viewed as a typical, though not exclusive, case able to illustrate this kind of image: we know we have crossed the threshold of an environment that consists of images (ontologically), but we experience it (phenomenologically) as if it were a real environ- ment. Something similar can be said about immersivity, but reversing the perspective: we are (ontologically) immersed in reality (virtual or non-virtual), but (phenomenologically) we know and say we are, and for this very reason we reject the idea that we are simply immersed in an environment. This applies first and foremost to our experience in general, regardless of the status of the experiences we gain through virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR). And yet, within this very general condition, human beings have over time created environments and works that carve out zones of “special immersivity,” so to speak, dedicated to immersion. What are we looking for in VR immersivity? Are new immersive technologies merely refinements of older tech- niques, or can they affect our relationship with ourselves, reality, and others in novel ways? What are artistic practices called on to do when faced with such new technological practices? Keywords Ordinary and immersive experience Virtual reality and art Experience economy Control Uncontrollability To quote this essay: S. Velotti, “Immersivity as An-immersivity,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 139-157, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19726. STEFANO VELOTTI 139 AN-ICON  An-Immersivity The title of this project, “An-icon,” refers to “im- ages that deny themselves.” Virtual reality may be viewed as a typical, though not exclusive, case able to illustrate this kind of image: we know we have crossed the threshold of an environment that consists of images (ontologically), but we experience it (phenomenologically) as if it were a real environment. Something similar can be said about immer- sivity, but reversing the perspective: we are (ontologically) immersed in reality (virtual or non-virtual), but (phenomeno- logically) we know and say we are, and for this very reason we reject the idea that we are simply immersed in an envi- ronment. If we were, we would have no way of becoming aware of this. In fact, to speak of immersivity, we must find our balance on an unstable boundary, which allows us to recognize the encompassing and intrascendible character of immersive experience while at the same time belying its closure, piercing it from within. To speak of immersivity therefore implies recognizing that one is in a condition of “an-immersivity,” where the hyphen separating and joining the privative prefix “an” to “immersivity” is the sign of a paradox. It could also be said that the hyphen evokes the figure of an unstable threshold, referring to the co-presence of inside and outside.1 This applies first and foremost to our experience in general, regardless of the status of the experiences we gain through virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR). “Special immersivity” Before even considering the complexities and opportunities of virtual immersivity, it should be noted that 1 In this I am comforted by the title of A. Pinotti’s fine book, Alla soglia dell’immagine: Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Turin: Einaudi, 2021). STEFANO VELOTTI 140 AN-ICON  immersivity presents itself first and foremost as a feature of our being in the world: we are always already immersed in experience, in a given situation part of an indeterminate totality. Where else could we be? And yet, within this very general condition, human beings have over time created environments and works that carve out zones of “special immersivity,” so to speak, dedicated to immersion, with different modalities, complexities, techniques, functions, and meanings, many of which – the earliest – tend to be beyond our understanding and perhaps always will. Is it possible that the insistent recourse to “(special) immersivity” arises especially at times of deep crisis, when the very foundations of a civilization are felt to be uncertain, invested with a high rate of contingency?2 To simplify: since forms of life do not allow us to feel at home in this world, which seems to have become foreign, indecipherable and threatening, one is drawn to limited and controlled spaces in which to immerse oneself, to feel more alive and safe, at least for a while. I think this perspective is plausible, though it is partial and, indeed, a simplification. What else are we looking for in VR immersivity? Are new immersive technologies merely refinements of older tech- niques, or can they affect our relationship with ourselves, reality, and others in novel ways? What are artistic practices 2 O. Grau, From Illusion to Immersion (2001), trans. G. Custance (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003) offers a historical survey of artworks aimed at providing immersive experiences. In recent decades, however, interest in Paleolithic and “cave art” has been rekindled outside the circle of specialists as well, both as such – see, e.g., G. Rigal, Le temps sacré des cavernes (Paris: Corti, 2016) – and in relation to contemporary art, to this regard see again Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine (especially the section on “Avatāra” in ch. V). Cfr. also M. Stavrinaki, Saisis par la préhistoire: Enquête sur l’art et le temps des modernes (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2019) and in particular the pages devoted to Frederick Kiessler’s Endless House and Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio’s Caverna dell’antimateria. Both of these works, created in the late 1950s, reflect the anguish connected to the atomic bomb, at that time perceived as a looming threat, later forgotten but always resurgent. The short-circuit between contemporary art and the Paleolithic seems to be related to the perception of a profound change in a civilization, if not its end, and thus to a need to revisit its origins, as if one had to start over. In this regard, in addition to a number of works of visual art that explicitly harken back to the Paleolithic, see also Richard Powers’ symptomatic novel Plowing the Dark (2000), which I have analyzed in S. Velotti, “Art in the time of Pandemic: Three Terms,” Paradigmi 39, no. 1 (2021): 127-140. STEFANO VELOTTI 141 AN-ICON  called on to do when faced with such new technological practices? Nowadays the adjective “immersive” is used obsessively in the presentation of theme parks and other sensational “adventures” or “experiences” that promise to take us “inside” paintings and frescoes or into physi- cally inaccessible places. The word invariably appears in the press releases of museums, exhibitions, performances, installations, but also in advertisements for apartments for sale or wine and food itineraries.3 One way to understand the meaning of the word is “proof of the opposite:” what, for example, would a “non-immersive” visit to an apartment look like? Hard to answer, unless we specify restrictive conditions for what is meant by immersivity. Used loosely, however, “immersive” risks being meaningless since its negation does not seem to change anything. And yet it is precisely for this reason that it is an enigmatic adjective, hovering like an obscure object of desire in our social imag- ination. Are we therefore to conclude that the attribution of immersivity is in vain since it neither adds nor detracts from the characterization of experience? I don’t think so. However, we must first clarify in what sense each of our ex- periences is both immersive and non-immersive, or, indeed, “an-immersive.” On this basis it will be easier to ask what peculiar traits are offered by the different uses of “special immersivity,” by this form of reality that is VR, particularly in relation to art, which, if it is anything, is a way of under- standing how we place ourselves in the world. 3 A real estate agency in Rome advertises its luxurious apartments in the Parioli district with the following words, “Enjoy an immersive experience! Come visit your new home.” The real estate company is called Pitagora because it is located near Piazza Pitagora, not because it is referencing the Greek philosopher; however, the agency’s slogan is “Pitagora – the philosophy of living.” Which, supposedly, explains its “unique and iconic character.” As for food and wine itineraries, one can visit, for example, “The Temple of Brunello” in Montalcino (Tuscany), which actually offers “a station with VR viewers called InVolo” that “allows visitors to immerse themselves in the villas, castles, vineyards and hamlets that dot the municipality’s vast and diversified area,” https://www.orodimontalcino.it/tempio-del-brunello/, accessed December 24, 2022. STEFANO VELOTTI 142 AN-ICON  Fish and amphibians At first glance, one would be tempted to say that we human animals are like fish immersed in water – to quote a famous apologue by David Foster Wallace about the difficulty of grasping the medium in which we are im- mersed: an old fish asks two young fish, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” and they in turn ask themselves, “What the hell is water?”4 The element in which we are immersed is in this sense a medium that cannot be iconized or repre- sented. In one respect, it is undeniable that we are always already situated, immersed in a concrete environment that resists iconic reduction. On the other hand, one must ask whether asserting this undeniable condition of immersion does not imply a partial denial of it. The simplest critiques of a representational model of the mind often target a naive idea of representa- tion, one that can be imagined as a frame or filter interposed between us and things, constituted by the spatio-temporal forms of intuition or by a priori categories, universal or cul- turally determined conceptual schemes. Access to reality “in itself” is therefore denied to us, because according to this account reality is always filtered through (inter)subjective lenses. On the complementary plane of our actions and productions we have mental representations enclosed in our head that we then try to externalize, technically, artis- tically or in other ways. Various versions of enactivism oppose this view of the representational mind, rightly insisting that percep- tion is an active way of exploring the material and social environment in which we are immersed, of experiencing affordances and building skills, not a way of corresponding 4 D. Foster Wallace, This is Water, 2005. Commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College, https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/, accessed December 28, 2022. STEFANO VELOTTI 143 AN-ICON  more or less correctly to an already organized world.5 Not least because, in order to see whether our representations “correspond” to the world, we would need to be able to have unfiltered access to reality. On another front, anti-rep- resentationalism is also endorsed by those who replace representations with immanent flows and forces, or who propose that we think of ourselves as “things among things,” according to a “flat ontology” devoid of anthropocentric hi- erarchies, where all entities are equally agents and patients, from stones to plants, from artifacts to animals. Yet, both the idea of a representational filter and the various versions of absolute immersivity run into the same problem: if we think these ideas and formulate them linguistically, as in fact we do, then they are self-con- tradictory. If they are true, then they are false.6 For if we experienced the world through a filter, we would have to see the world, ourselves and the filter with a view from nowhere. And if on the other hand it were true, as in some ways it is true, that we are always immersed in a translucent medium like fish in water, we could not communicate this. We would just be immersed. The fact is that we discover ourselves immersed and emerged at the same time, more amphibian than fish. We realize that we see and do not see a frame, that we remain on this side of a threshold knowing that we cannot cross it and therefore crossing it.7 Toward where? Toward an infinitely expandable context, the inde- terminable totality of every possible experience in which 5 Cfr. J. Stewart, O. Gapenne, E. A. Di Paolo, Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). For a recent survey of enactivism in relation to cultural contexts see C. Durt, T. Fuchs, C. Tewes, eds., Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2017). 6 Here I broadly trace the exposition of the paradoxes of experience articulated by E. Garroni, Estetica: Uno sguardo-attraverso (Milan: Garzanti, 1992). 7 Christian Stiegler acknowledges the liminality of the “liquid spaces” in which we are immersed, but then seems to unilaterally emphasize the disappearance of all frames: “Liquid spaces are moments of uncertainty, instability, and fluidity in mediated experiences. They emerge as thresholds between the physical and the mediated. These spaces create the feeling of immersion even beyond the mediation by eliminating critical distance and dissolving the frames of media.” C. Stiegler, The 360° Gaze: Immersions in Media, Society, and Culture (London: MIT Press, 2021): 61. STEFANO VELOTTI 144 AN-ICON  we are already included, on whose horizon this determinate experience stands, which is such precisely insofar as it is “cut out” from that indeterminate and uncontrollable horizon of possibility. What McLuhan says about medial awareness – summarized in the famous “rearview-mirror” metaphor recalled by Pinotti – is therefore not entirely true: As long as s/he is immersed in a medium, the human being is as little aware of it as the fish of the water in which he swims. Only the moment that medium is overtaken by a later medium can it be retrospectively focused on and grasped precisely as the medium in which the experience had been organized: “we are always one step behind in our view of the world.”8 We do not need the appearance of another me- dium to know that we are not like fish in water: the possibil- ity of saying that we are is enough for us to prove ourselves wrong. Some philosophers, such as Thomas Nagel, have claimed that this condition of ours expresses “the absurd” of the human condition, which should be accepted with a little irony and without taking ourselves too seriously. In fact, unlike other animals that lack self-awareness and lan- guage, we cannot simply remain immersed and absorbed in our occupations, nor can we, however, install ourselves in a permanent emersion, in a transcendent dimension, be- cause even the mind of the mystic is still playing one of the possible games situated in the concreteness of experience, not an out-of-this-world “super game.” Because of this we are forced to accept this irreconcilable oscillation between immersion and emergence, adherence and detachment, 8 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: 17 [my translation]. STEFANO VELOTTI 145 AN-ICON  involvement in the ordinary tasks of life and the distance of a gaze that relativizes the latter or nullifies their importance.9 But is this really the case? What if, on the other hand, it were sometimes possible to make such indetermi- nate totality transit – analogically, symbolically – in concrete, determinate experience? What if things, practices, concrete experiences were given that exemplified the indeterminable and uncontrollable dimension against which they stand out? What if this were not only a source of disquiet (due to the feeling of being in touch with the uncontrollable), but also a sensible pleasure, deriving from the fact that our vitality, the feeling of being alive, is increased by the simultaneous co-presence of immersion and emergence? Perhaps this is one of the ways of approaching some particularly sensi- ble experiences, for example, those in which we recognize something as art: a set of practices, events or “things” that allow us to “see” (feel, experience, understand) the complex texture of our forms of life, our being in the world between immersion and emersion. Before trying to articulate these still vague statements, and precisely in relation to what we have called forms of “special immersivity,”10 it is necessary to go back to their homology with the an-immersivity of ordinary ex- perience, also from the point of view of its limitations. 9 T. Nagel, “The Absurd,” in Mortal Questions (London: Canto, 1979): 11-23. 10 It should be made clear from the outset that what I have called “special immersivity” is obtained with diverse and heterogeneous forms that can be sorted into categories. For an excellent survey of immersive forms of storytelling, see E. Modena, Nelle storie: Arte, cinema e media immersivi (Rome: Carocci, 2022). Ultimately, however, as far as artistic practices are concerned, it is the singularity of the work that must be taken into account. STEFANO VELOTTI 146 AN-ICON  Limits of immersivity Let us see the extent to which the experience of virtual immersivity, in its “special” meaning, can be equated with that of ordinary immersivity. The three characteristics of immersive VR, sum- marized by Pinotti, are (1) the saturation of the 360° gaze (“unframedeness”); (2) the feeling of presence, of “being there,” which can be further articulated as telepresence, selfpresence and social presence (“presentness”);11 (3) the experience of immediacy, due paradoxically to the great complexity of technological mediations that produce VR, making the medium as transparent as possible (“immedi- ateness”).12 It is easy to see that we could characterize our experience of the ordinary world using the same properties: nothing I see is potentially limited by a frame, I have the perception of “being here,” of presence, and my experience seems immediate, that is, unmediated by a medium that interferes with reality. But, one might say, if by hypothesis VR fulfills these promises to the point of pushing itself to (illusory) indistinguishability from reality, then – from a phe- nomenological, though not an ontological, point of view – we would be thrown back into the reality we already know, and – except for the advantageous uses of it, related to various forms of telepresence and simulation – the experi- ence we derive from it would be nothing new. Conversely, one can highlight the limits of these claims and emphasize the aspects that prevent illusion. Both perspectives, how- ever, are simplistic. VR is not equivalent to ordinary reality, nor are the limitations of VR absent in ordinary reality: 11 E. Pett, Experiencing Cinema: Participatory Film Cultures, Immersive Media and the Experience Economy (New York-London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 12 A. Pinotti, “Prologo,” in Alla soglia dell’immagine: xi-xviii. STEFANO VELOTTI 147 AN-ICON  ■- It is true that in VR the frame has disappeared, but in a sense it persists: I am wearing a headset and in the future I will perhaps wear a headband, or be fitted with an implant connected to my neurons. On the other hand, even here, now, in non-virtual reality, I am partially framed by the actions that brought me to a given place and situation (I am aware that I occupy a limited or “framed” portion of reality), by attention variously focused on the scenario in front of me or the task I set myself, but also by the “frames” studied by Erving Goffman and those we do not pay attention to because they are “hidden in plain sight.”13 ■- Presence, being here, cannot be doubted. I am not else- where, or at least no more than I am elsewhere when I am im- mersed in a virtual environment. ■- Finally, the apparent immediacy produced by innumerable technological mediations also characterizes my real experience: we know all too well that what is felt as natural,spontaneous, ob- vious is intertwined with acquired habits and artificial construc- tions and prosthetic extensions: the normative, the perceptual, proxemics, social mediations, and all the ways of acting of a certain form of life. So, those characteristics that serve to phenom- enologically distinguish the experience of a non-immersive image from an “an-iconic” immersive experience are not sufficient to distinguish the experience of immersive VR from that of ordinary reality. However, from here we cannot conclude that between “ordinary” immersivity and what we have called “special immersivity” there is no difference, not only on the ontological level, but also on the phenomeno- logical one. There are countless features of VR that distin- guish it from ordinary reality. The most obvious, related first and foremost to the dimension of space, is the possibility of 13 E. Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974) (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986); E. Zerubavel, Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). STEFANO VELOTTI 148 AN-ICON  becoming immersed in scenarios that cannot be found in ordinary reality or that would be impossible to experience because of scale or distance: entering an animal’s blood- stream or its brain, acting at a distance, traveling through a body. Also, there is the cognitive conflict between pro- prioception in the real world and that in the virtual world – walking on water or plunging into an abyss while remaining firmly on the ground but feeling a sense of vertigo and fear (or, vice versa, I am immersed in the “magic circle” of VR and have an accident in the ordinary world). I do not intend to try to list all the differences and perhaps imagine how some of them will be eliminat- ed or reduced by technological progress, integrating our other senses,14 nor do I intend to address all the possible ways of using VR, which is likely to become even more useful and indispensable in the future than it already is now for many of our practices, medical, architectural, forensic, social, professional, educational, recreational, and so on. Rather, here I intend to focus on what immersive VR can tell us about the human experience in general, drawing on the experience we sometimes have in our relationship with what we call artistic works or practices. “Experience economy” In the 1990s the idea gained ground – with anticipations already in the previous decades – that the economy most suited to our times – at least in the wealth- iest societies – is not so much based on the production of goods, or even on services, but on experience. In those years, expressions such as “Erlebnisgesellschaft,” “Erleb- nismarkt,” and “Dream Society” began to circulate, until James Gilmore and Joseph Pine II became the proudest 14 Cfr. R. DeSalle, Our Senses: An Immersive Experience (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2018). STEFANO VELOTTI 149 AN-ICON  proponents of the “Experience Economy” with a book that would have a certain fortune, followed by other volumes on related issues.15 The key to their thinking is stated in the preface to the 2011 updated edition of their The Experience Economy: So let us here be most clear: goods and services are no longer enough to foster economic growth, create new jobs, and maintain economic prosperity. To realize revenue growth and increased em- ployment, the staging of experiences must be pursued as a distinct form of economic output. Indeed, in a world saturated with largely undifferentiated goods and services the greatest opportunity for value creation resides in staging experiences.16 The market for goods is saturated, and produc- ers must offer products that promise to stage experiences. For this reason the watchwords are “mass customize,” i.e. transform every service into a unique (mass) experience; “work is theater,” i.e. “stage experiences” and train sellers in specific performance practices; and finally, ensure that the experience offered generates in the consumer (“pro- sumer” or “experiencer”) an actual change, which must be properly paid for: “these transformations should themselves command a fee in the form of explicitly charging for the demonstrated outcomes that result from the underlying experiences. [...] We especially challenge enterprises in three industries: those that focus on making people healthy, wealthy, and wise.”17 It would be all too easy to reiterate once again how the neoliberal creed attempts to infiltrate every aspect 15 G. Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft: Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main- New York: Campus-Verlag, 1993); R. Jensen, “Dream Society,” The Futurist 30, no. 3 (1996): 9-13; J. Gilmore and B.J. Pine II, The Experience Economy (1999) (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2011); J. Gilmore and B.J. Pine II, Authenticity. What Consumers Really Want (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007). 16 J. Gilmore and B.J. Pine II, “Preview to the Updated Edition: Beyond Goods and Services,” in The Experience Economy: ix-xxii, ix [emphasis mine]. 17 Ibid. STEFANO VELOTTI 150 AN-ICON  of human life, putting a price tag on it. Instead, I have men- tioned these marketing strategies to make some distinc- tions concerning the notion of experience. It is interesting to see how Gilmore and Pine respond to the obvious ob- jection that an experience purchased from a catalog is a fake experience. Their line of defense comes in the central chapter of their next book, Authenticity, in which they draw on some philosophical references to arrive at the following conclusion: there is no such thing as an inauthentic experience because ex- periences happen inside us. Therefore, we remain free to judge our experiences with any economic offering as authentic or not. Businesses that offer them therefore can, whether intentionally or by happenstance, gain the perception of authenticity. [...] Business- es can render their inauthentic offerings as authentic. Doing so requires embracing this essential paradox: all human enterprise is ontologically fake - that is, in its very being it is inauthentic - and yet, output from that enterprise can be phenomenologically real - that is, it is perceived as authentic by the individuals who buy it.18 The distinction between an ontological and a phenomenological point of view returns here in a particu- larly insidious way. For on the one hand, it is true that there is no class of “fake” immersive experiences ontologically distinct from a class of “authentic” immersive experiences. And the experience one has cannot be anything other than the experience of a subject, and in this sense it is obvious- ly subjective (which, however, does not necessarily mean that it is only “inside us”). Kant himself, who entrusted to the principle of the judgment of taste even the possibility of making sense of experience in general and building a 18 J. Gilmore, B. J. Pine II, “The Authenticity Paradox,” in Authenticity: 89-90, 89 [emphasis mine]. STEFANO VELOTTI 151 AN-ICON  system of nature, reiterated that I can judge anything aes- thetically, material or immaterial, and that my judgment depends on what “I make of this representation in my- self.”19 As is well known, however, Kant ascribed to such judgment a claim to “subjective universality” and “exem- plary necessity,” springing from a “free play” of imagination and understanding. In the perspective of the “experience economy,” what we witness is a caricature of these claims: the freedom-spontaneity of the free play of the faculties becomes the consumer’s “freedom of choice,” a psycho- logical choice expressed as a preference (however moti- vated or induced, as long as it has the desired effect). The impossibility of establishing ontologically distinct classes for what is “beautiful-sensible” and what is not is reduced to what the consumer “buys or doesn’t buy” (in both senses of the word). Since nothing escapes human intervention and thus technique and money, the Las Vegas hotel “The Vene- tian” and the city of Venice possess the same ontological status, that of both being “fakes.” The authenticity of an experience cannot therefore depend on “what” we experi- ence (everything is equally ontologically “fake”), but only on something that “happens inside us,” and can therefore be “phenomenologically real.” The singularity of experience is completely annulled, and every object, practice, situation is identical to any other, as long as it produces the same effect: a novel or a pill, a bump on the head or a movie, a concert or a wedding.20 There is no longer any trace of 19 “It is readily seen that to say that it is beautiful and to prove that I have taste what matters is what I make of this representation in myself, not how I depend on the existence of the object.” I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 5; 205. 20 Cfr. Wittgenstein’s objection to the idea of aesthetic experience conceived as an effect: “There is a tendency to talk about the ‘effect of a work of art’– feelings, images, etc. Then it is natural to ask: ‘Why do you hear this minuet?,’ and there is a tendency to answer: ‘To get this, and that effect.’ And doesn’t the minuet itself matter? – hearing this: would another have done as well? You could play a minuet once, and get a lot out of it, and play the same minuet another time and get nothing out of it. But it doesn’t follow that what you get out of it is then independent of the minuet.” L. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967): 29. STEFANO VELOTTI 152 AN-ICON  recourse to an elaboration by the subject, to the exercise of a “reflective faculty of judgment” (as distinct from the objectifying exercise of “determining judgment”), to show the impossibility of constructing classes of “beautiful” or meaningful things or experiences. Instead, once again, it is the “invisible hand” of the market that knows best how to allocate the “resource” of authenticity. The perspective of control On a photography information site, I find a re- view of Richard Avedon’s recent exhibition, Relationships (Palazzo Reale, Milan, September 22, 2022-January 29, 2023). The reviewer informs us right away that it is “an en- joyable immersive experience in the artist’s photographic universe.”21 What is of interest here, however, is not the indiscriminate use of the adjective, but one of the most famous quotes attributed to Avedon, which stands out in one of the rooms: “I think all art is about control – the en- counter between control and the uncontrollable.” Referred to photography, or to a certain way of doing photography, the statement easily lends itself to multiple interpretations.22 I believe, however, that Avedon was right: every art form is characterized by this encounter and, indeed, it could be argued that every experience worthy of the name is. This “encounter,” however, takes place less and less often in everyday life: control and self-control, exacer- bated also by digital technologies (surveillance, quantified self, digital self, etc.) seem to run more and more in parallel with an increasing loss of control (sense of powerlessness, 21 E. Dal Verme, “Richard Avedon: Relationships,” Fotografia.it (September 22, 2022), https://www.fotografia.it/articoli/opinioni/richard-avedon-relationships/, accessed January 5, 2023 [emphasis mine]. 22 Cfr., e.g., R. Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance (Cambridge MA-London: Harvard University Press, 2015) and some observations in S. Velotti, The Present of Photography and the Dialectics of Control, in M. Delogu, A. Dandini de Sylva, eds., Fotografia: Il presente (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2015): 21-29. STEFANO VELOTTI 153 AN-ICON  acting out, addictions, panic attacks, conspiracy theories etc.), without the two dimensions ever converging. Although often untied in our impoverished everyday life, the knot that ties control to uncontrollability is very complex and can- not be reduced to the “society of control” preconized by Deleuze.23 The problem is complex, but here, in conclusion, I would like to put forward only a few questions about con- trol in relation to “special immersivity,” or, more specifically, immersive art practices. On the one hand, the most mun- dane experiences of “special” immersivity are meant to be forms of sensational entertainment (Caravaggio experience and the like), or reassuring bubbles where all contact with what is uncontrollable and indeterminate is preemptively sterilized. On the other, they promise they will allow us to “get lost” in immersion. (Of course, there may also be a more subtle pleasure in “letting go,” relying on someone else’s control, as artist Janet Cardiff argues when speaking of her extraordinary AR “walks”24). However, this is an unresolved problem for the “experience economy,” which on the one hand wants the prosumer/experiencer to feel that he or she is in control of his or her own choices (with reference to the alternatives offered) to ensure their authenticity, and on the other hand knows that the provider must remain in control of this offer, if only to justify the fee the prosumer/experi- encer has to pay for it. There is nothing wrong with buying an “organized immersive adventure”– which may be fun, exciting, unusual – but the doubt remains: either it is not an adventure, or it is not organized. Even in valuable academic contributions, the question of control appears repeatedly, 23 Cfr. S. Velotti, Dialettica del controllo: Limiti della sorveglianza e pratiche artistiche (Roma: Castelvecchi, 2017); H. Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (2018), trans. J.C. Wagner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020). 24 C. Christov-Bakargiev, Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller (New York: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, 2003): 35. STEFANO VELOTTI 154 AN-ICON  yet without being thematized – it remains opaque, ambig- uous, if not contradictory.25 What if, instead, the “special” immersivity of VR were employed to reveal, by exemplifying it, the paradoxical an-immersivity of ordinary experience, usually overlooked or misunderstood? What if certain uses of “special” im- mersivity were able to bring out from within not the illusory simulation of ordinary reality “as it is,” perhaps displaced into fantastic scenarios, nor sensational and amazing expe- riences, but the most ordinary experience, making it visible and understandable as an “encounter” of controllability and uncontrollability? Then we would not only have a bubble, a vacation from ordinary space, an interruption in the web of a life lived obtusely, but also the concrete exemplification of the antinomian forces that render us alive: on the one hand, the need and satisfaction of exercising some control over ourselves, the world, and others – of being agents endowed with “efficacy,” not powerless and systematically frustrated agents. On the other, the equally essential need not to remain entrenched in such control, which can only become animated in the “encounter” with what is and re- mains uncontrollable: the indeterminate totality of experi- ence, the unpredictability of our multiple relationships, the infinitely rich grain of reality. Possible examples of such successful “en- counters” abound in contemporary art practices. Here I would like to cite just one, which I think is particularly signif- icant because of its apparent incongruity and which would 25 See for example C. Stiegler, The 360° Gaze: “If all the frames, stages, and technologies dissolve now, we are about to confuse different concepts of realities […] They emphasize the dissolution of boundaries and control”; but, at the same time, he writes that in the use of avatars “Nonhuman characters can activate the same emotional alignment and level of acceptance as human characters. Elena Kokkinara and Rachel McDonnell confirm that even though photorealistic imagery supports acceptance and engagement, authenticity depends much more ‘on the levels of perceived ownership and sense of control (agency) we feel towards this virtual character.’” Stiegler, The 360° Gaze: 92 [emphasis mine]. STEFANO VELOTTI 155 AN-ICON  deserve a much deeper analysis:26 about 50 years ago, an Australian theology professor, John M. Hull, noticed that he was going blind, and decided to tape-record a diary of this dramatic progression. In 1990, these recordings be- came an extraordinary book, Touching the Rock. An Ex- perience of Blindness. In the preface, Oliver Sacks wrote, quite rightly, that if Wittgenstein had gone blind, he would probably have written a similar book. A short film, a feature film and finally (in 2016) a virtual reality application, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness, are based on this book.27 It is “an experience” that takes place at the intersection of multiple authorships: Hull, the creators of the work in VR, and, it must be added, a partial interactivity on the part of the “experiencer.” The latter wears a binaural audio device – the same sound reproduction technique used by Cardiff for her assisted “walks” – coupled with a 360-degree VR headset. Beginning with Hull’s experience of blindness, the making, as well as the enjoyment of the experience, are the work of the “non-blind.” It is not about disavowing the tragedy of losing one’s sight, nor is it about telling a story of “redemption.” Rather, what happens is that the blindness of the person wearing the VR headset – and the related loss of control over the outside world – is not replaced by images aiming to immerse the person in a realistic, broadly illusionistic environment, but rather “into Darkness,” one of the most obvious manifestations of the loss of control over the environment. What we find in this VR, however, is not total darkness, but the disjointed and fragmented world described by Hull’s words. The apparent obviousness of ordinary visual perception is suspended. 26 See C. Roussel, “If Blindness Creates a New World,” CJDS 8, no. 6 (2019): 108-130, which documents and analyzes the genesis and structure of Notes on Blindness VR in the most comprehensive way. E. Modena, building on Roussel’s analysis, devotes some of the finest pages to it in her book Nelle storie: 84-87. See also the presentation of the project by A. Colinart, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im3CpA14jEQ, accessed January 8, 2023. 27 Cfr. e.g., A. Noë, Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). STEFANO VELOTTI 156 AN-ICON  It involves participating in the reconstitution of the unity of experience almost “from scratch,” which depends on acoustic signals that “bounce” back to us from objects if given certain environmental conditions: wind or rain make the world perceptible. Perceiving requires our activity, which is partially controllable, and a “collaboration” of the world that is usually beyond our control, i.e. weather events (in the app, the experiencer can control the triggering of such uncontrollable conditions). The idea that seeing is not ob- vious, that we need to learn how to do it actively, and that art is a way of “learning to look,” I think is right, as long as “looking” is translated into a more global “perceiving” extended to the whole body. What we see in the virtual scenario are not really images, in the sense of figures, but sketches, elusive and ghostly graphic patterns (like Kantian image-schemes)28 correlated to sound. A silent world would be dark. This reduction of figurativeness is much closer to a staging of our ordinary perception than any mimetic or fantastic imagery. Like blindness for the non-blind, our perceptual life in its entanglement with the world cannot be properly depicted visually. However, the suspension of ordinary sight opens up an understanding of a usually occluded perceptual experience, revealing, I believe, the paradoxical an-immersive interweaving of controllability and uncontrollability that constitutes us and toward which we are becoming increasingly blind. 28 E. Garroni, Immagine, linguaggio, figura (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2005). STEFANO VELOTTI 157 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19956

“Looking Glass:” Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts by Giorgio Zanchetti Looking glass Transparency Lucio Fontana Luciano Fabro Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello “Looking Glass:” Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts GIORGIO ZANCHETTI, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7392-9361 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19956 Abstract Today the locution “looking glass” survives al- most exclusively thanks to the extraordinary success of Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking-Glass. This ex- pression underlines the ambiguity between the glass sur- face intended as a device through which we can see the world or as an actual object to be “looked at.” Apparently, the early Renaissance perspective window, thanks to the mildness of the Mediterranean climate, did not need any panes. And certainly, even when glass panes are there, they are usually not reproduced in painting. The glass main virtue is its transparency, which makes it almost invisible. Something similar happens with other “glasses” specifi- cally made to look through them: the drinking glass and the lens. Glass panes appear to sight only when different practical needs come into play, as in perspective drawing machines, or when its transparency is contradicted by a precise action that compromises or denies it: when panes are broken, as in this enigmatic portrait of early XIX c., or voluntarily covered, like for a blackout, as in Duchamp’s Fresh Widow. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 158 AN-ICON  Looking through the glass, looking at the im- age reflected in the mirror and, finally, looking at the glass itself, as a device for presenting and representing spaces, are three recurring attitudes in the work of Italian artists of the late 20th century, like Lucio Fontana and Luciano Fabro. Keywords Looking glass Transparency Lucio Fontana Luciano Fabro To quote this essay: G. Zanchetti, “‘Looking Glass:’ Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 158-175, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19956. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 159 AN-ICON  The locution “looking glass” – commonly with a hyphen – as a synonym of “mirror” survives nowadays almost exclusively as an explicit reference to the title of Lewis Carroll’s second novel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), and thanks to the ex- traordinary popularity of that book. This expression, with its own ambiguity, draws our attention to the fact that the framed and mirrored glass surface is both an object to be “looked at” itself, and an impressive device through which everyone can actually look at themselves as part of reality: the simplest and most sophisticated of all optical instruments through which and into which we can see and contemplate the world with our own eyes. The Italian noun “specchio” and the German “Spiegel,” as well as the French “miroir” from which the English word “mirror” was borrowed, come from different Latin expressions which refer to the semantic field of optical vision (“specio” and “miror” or “miro”). And this essential status of mirror as the first optical device – since it is also available in nature, in the reflecting properties of still waters and of some minerals – makes it perfectly fit as the medi- um through which self-consciousness and the capacity of self-representation in art find their common, albeit mythical, origin. This status is implicitly pointed out by the common reference to the myth of Narcissus in connection to the inception of painting or by the well-known definition of photography – given in 1859 by Oliver Wendell Holmes – as “the mirror with a memory,”1 an almost magical optical instrument literally capable to chemically freeze the natural 1 “If a man had handed a metallic speculum to Democritus of Abdera, and told him to look at his face in it (…) promising that one of the films his face was shedding should stick there, so that neither he, nor it, nor anybody should forget what manner of man he was, the Laughing Philosopher would probably have vindicated his claim to his title by an explosion that would have astonished the speaker. This is just what the Daguerreotype has done. It has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality. The photograph has completed the triumph, by- making a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a picture.” O.W. Holmes, “The Stereoscope and Stereograph,” The Atlantic Monthly 3, no. 20 (1859): 738-749, 738-739. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 160 AN-ICON  moving image, fixing it in a still and different form as soon as it comes in touch with the silver surface. Italian conceptual artist Anna Valeria Bor- sari precisely postulates this characteristic of the act of self-contemplation in the mirror in her photographic works series Narciso (Fig. 1) and La stanza di Narciso (Narcissus and Narcissus’ Room, both from 1977), the first of which depicts a young male model getting closer and closer to a big mirror and finally disappearing into it, while the second one shows his empty room from different points of view: “Towards symmetry he proceeds, the man in front of the mirror, but he probably reaches it only when he manages to merge with the image he is looking at, like Narcissus does when he falls into the water.”2 Fig. 1. A.V. Borsari, Narciso / Narcissus, 1977, 3 photographic prints, courtesy of the Artist. © Anna Valeria Borsari. The immateriality of the metamorphosis of Nar- cissus into his double – the virtual image reflected by the mirror – is an open metaphor of the desperate difficulty in reaching a true consciousness of self through this simple act of contemplation and “reflection.” Trying to get in touch with his own double, the man in front of the mirror is finally going to lose himself in it. His own image is intangible and 2 A.V. Borsari, “Premessa,” in “Simmetria-asimmetria,” Ipotesi d’artista, no. 1 (1988); republished in Anna Valeria Borsari: Opere (Milan, Electa, 1996, exhibition catalogue): 97. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 161 AN-ICON  consequently somehow imperceptible, since Borsari dis- covered, while staging these works, that she chose as a set, between several available real rooms, the bedroom of a blind man. The real owner of that particular mirror could get as close as possible to it, or even touch it, without actually perceiving the duplication of self in his own reflected image. As Borsari wrote in the typewritten statement which is part of La stanza di Narciso: The Sanskrit word “spagh” (“to divide”), the Greek “σπέος” (“cave”) and “σχοπέω” (“to examine”), the Latin “specus” (“cave”) and “specio” (“to see”) share common linguistic roots. (...) Among the many Latin derivatives from the verb “specio” (“to see, to discern, to observe”) there should also be “speculum” (“mirror, image, copy”), from which we derive the Italian “specchio” (“mirror,” but also “panel framed in the doors and windows,” and by extension in sporting language, “portion of the playing field in front of the goal line”) as well as the common name of the medical tool used to dilate the orifices in order to inspect anatomical cavities, and also, indirectly, the verb “to speculate” (to investigate or reflect upon mentally, to contemplate with close attention, to theorize upon, etc.). But since the Italian language mostly derives from vulgar Latin, where the use of diminutives was frequent, (...) we could imagine that “speculum” and therefore “specchio” should also be perceived as derivatives from “specus.” This would explain the confluence of meanings such as “to see” with others such as “cavity,” “hole,” etc. in certain uses of the mirror and of the speculum... And for Narcissus in any case the mirror he looks at exactly corresponds to the hole in which he disappears. But we should not forget that mirrors are won- derful objects for several reasons. The glass panes from which they are made are even, in their own essence, actual objects, something to be “looked at.” For their capability to reflect, to re-present and multiply the real in their virtual inter- nal space, they share the status of “marvellous” with different Wunderkammer phenomena, items and artifacts – literally something “spectacular” or “admirable,” i.e. an object worth GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 162 AN-ICON  of contemplation, – like rare and wonderful crystals or gems, like the beryl, beryllium, from which comes the German word “Brille” for eyeglasses, or “spectacle(s)” (a term once used to design every optical device, including windows or mirrors). Following a century old tradition in architecture and interior decoration, the 63 silvered glass panes which formed the Looking Glass Curtain for the Royal Coburg The- atre in London (Fig. 2) are one of the most interesting oc- currences of this “spectacularization” of reality through the mirrors in early 19th century. It was displayed for the first time on December 26, 1821 in front of the public of the the- atre, reflecting their own images as if they were on the stage, inside the theatre show.3 Fig. 2. Theatrical Reflection or a Peep at the Looking Glass Curtain at the Royal Coburg Theatre, published by G. Humphrey, London, 1822. 3 M. Teodorski, Nineteenth-Century Mirrors: Textulity and Transendence (Belgrade: Institute for Literature and Art, 2021): 22-25, see Fig. 1. See also M. Teodorski, “Reflection as Commodity: A Short Ethno(historio)graphy of Victorian Mirrors,” Гласник Етнографског института Сану / Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA 16, no. 1 (2016): 121-132, 123-124. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 163 AN-ICON  Assumed that the by now outdated locution “looking-glass” keeps together a complicated mechanism of meaning, trying to capture the double nature of the mirror as a device through which and at which to look, we can try to understand the reflective and spectacular attitude of that diminished domestic Narcissus called Alice. She breaks through the looking-glass in order to accomplish her very personal research project, only to end up discovering that the world on the other side of the mirror is a strict analogous of everyday reality, simply “specularly” inverted, or even overturned in an illogical, anarchic and carnivalesque way. The very act of her trespassing between the real and the other world, her moving through the mirror like through a threshold or a borderline, was captured by John Tenniel in two distinct illustrations for the first edition of the novel by Lewis Carrol, in 1871 (Fig. 3).4 These engravings were pub- lished on the front and the back side of the same page of the book. And this choice is perfectly correct with respect to the semantic and conceptual awareness of the author, since they skilfully represent the complementing opposite realities connected by the mirror surface as if they were photographic shots of the same subject taken from two opposite points of view. 4 L. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan, 1871): 11-12. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 164 AN-ICON  Fig. 3. J. Tenniel, The Glass Was Beginning to Melt Away, Just Like a Bright Silvery Mist, woodcut illustrations for: L. Carroll (pseud. C.L. Dodgson), Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan, 1871): 11-12. But when they are placed side by side, Tenniel’s illustrations build together a traditional motif of framing, with a couple of symmetrical figures – descended from the classical architectural ornaments of caryatids and telamons, through the Renaissance and Baroque, to find new appli- ances in the decoration of eighteenth-century mirrors and furniture, and later in the new properly industrial arts – which strictly recalls, as Matko Teodorski noticed,5 the sumptuous bronze figured frame of the Grand Boudoir-Glass by Wil- liam Potts of Birmingham, celebrated as one of the most striking objects on display at the Crystal Palace during the 5 M. Teodorski, Nineteenth-Century Mirrors: 88-92, Figg. 2-4, 180-182, 207-210, Figg. 9-10. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 165 AN-ICON  Great London Exhibition, in 1851. Who knows if Lewis Car- roll and Tenniel thought to Potts’ Grand Boudoir-Glass for the Duchess of Sutherland, when they were devising the image of Alice crossing the mirror threshold? Probably the Swiss sculptor Vincenzo Vela did, when he gave form to a marble mantelpiece for his own house in Ligornetto (Tes- sin), bringing the same composition with two female nudes surrounding the “looking-glass” and reflecting themselves in it, to a totally different degree of artistic value (Fig. 4):6 in this work, from 1865-66, Vela enhances the composition of multiplied idealistic nude – that, coming from the neo- classical groups of Canova and Thorvaldsen, through the practice of copies in 19th century art Academies would have reached Rodin and Seurat and Maillol –, transforming the reduplication of the image in a sort of visual vertigo. Fig. 4. V. Vela, Mantelpiece with Mirror and Clock, 1865-1866, marble and mirror, Ligornetto, Museo Vincenzo Vela. 6 G. Zanchetti, in G.A. Mina ed., Museo Vela: The Collections. Sculpture, Painting, Drawings and Prints, Photography (Lugano: Cornèr Bank): 52-53, 86, Fig. I.29, 293. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 166 AN-ICON  Falling down into the mirror view, as Alice once did into the rabbit-hole (literally a “specus,” a door lead- ing to a subterranean realm), the beholder reduplicates, becoming part of the virtual image inside the frame. The essential paradox of this reduplication of the viewer con- sists in the simple fact that the images of painting – vir- tual representations of reality made by human hand – are not capable to show the other side of their subjects, but can only repeat the same figure seen from the same point of view, like in the well-known painting by René Magritte, La reproduction interdite (Not to be reproduced, 1937-39, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) where the figure of a man seen from the back – clearly a substitute for both the author and the spectator – is tautologically repeated as it is in the mantelpiece mirror in front of him, without revealing his hidden side and his face as Victorian and naturalistic sculptures from 19th century did. Confront- ing himself with the same paradox, through photographic language, Ugo Mulas wrote about the mirror-works by Mi- chelangelo Pistoletto: When he paints a nude on a mirror surface, and this nude is seen from the back, he forces the viewer to enter inside the painting, which means to get completely involved, because the watcher will see himself as a part of the picture, standing at the opposite side of the painted figure he is watching: he will see himself in front of the nude, standing on the other side of the subject that for the painter remains hidden. Thus, the spectator reduplicates, he is inside and outside of the picture, he is here and there at the same time, and here he accepts the rules set by the painter, who presented the nude seen from his back, while there he stands where no one is supposed to be according to the inner coherence of the pictorial representation. In the photo I shoot you can see me photographing from the front a nude that is shown only from its back.7 7 U. Mulas, La fotografia, ed. P. Fossati (Turin: Einaudi, 1973): 70-71. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 167 AN-ICON  Michelangelo Pistoletto himself, in his installa- tion and performance Twentytwo less Two, presented at the Venice Biennale in 2009, actually tried to break through his own looking-glass trap, carrying on a tradition of broken mirrors which, in the history of painting – instead of bringing seven years of bad luck, like it is often said –, represent the end of the beauty associated with youth and also the end of art as mimesis, of visual representation itself, like in Le miroir brisé (The Broken Mirror, c. 1763, London, The Wal- lace Collection) by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, in the self-portrait by the American painter Ron Blumberg The Broken Mirror, from 1936,8 or even in La clef des champs (Madrid, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza) painted the same year by Magritte. Pistoletto’s reflection on photography and on vi- sual reproduction is not developed in merely conceptual and analytical terms; on the contrary, it opens immediately also to a direct aesthetic experience, with as much brutality and intrusiveness in his mirror-paintings as in his destruc- tive performance of 2009. In Twentytwo less Two the artist, again an incarnation of Narcissus, destroys several big, framed mirrors, which stand at the same time as the “sub- jectile” of his most characteristic works and, in a general sense, of any possible image taken or imitated from nature. By doing so, Pistoletto questions the legitimacy of visual arts as separated from reality and also his own role as a consecrated master. We could be tempted to read this ges- ture as a renunciation of self-identity – represented by that founding moment of the consciousness of the Ego, in the early childhood, which Lacan called the “stade du miroir”9 – or as a final step outside any possibility of representation in art. But, on the contrary, his performance rather than completely destroying the very support of vision, actually multiplies the virtual images, simply because – unlike the figures physically reproduced through drawing, painting or photography –, the image of the real world reflected in the 8 See the painting on sale on the website of the Trigg Ison Fine Art Gallery (West Hollywood, CA): https://www.triggison.com/product-page/my-broken-mirror, accessed February 5, 2023. 9 J. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949), in Writings, trans. by B. Fink (New York-London: W.W. Norton, 2006). GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 168 AN-ICON  mirror endlessly survives in its virtual integrity within each of the fragments of the broken glass surface. Coming back to the locution we started from, what happens if we stop looking – or moving or breaking – through the glass, and try to directly look it? And which are the main implications of this different attitude in rendering and perceiving the image of the most transparent of solids in the visual arts? Apparently, the early Renaissance perspective window, maybe thanks to the mildness of the Mediterra- nean climate, did not need any panes. And certainly, even when glass panes are there, they are usually not reproduced in painting, since one of glass’s main virtues is its transpar- ency, thanks to which we can see as clearly as possible the world outside. But this same transparency makes glass almost invisible itself, and therefore unreproducible – or at least barely reproducible – in painting. And this happens with all sorts of “glasses” specifically made to look through them, as the drinking glass and the lens. Window’s glass panes appear to sight only when the lead came framework, or the colour or opacity of stained glass make them visible by their interference. But usually in painting this kind of window’s panes are not intended as openings towards further spaces or landscapes which lay beyond them. They rather are visual motives themselves, filtering, refracting, or reflecting the light, hence acting like mirrors, as in the recently restored Girl Reading a Letter by Jan Vermeer (1657, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie); or mere sources – often displaced to one side or in the corners of the composition – through which the light enters the virtual pictorial space in order to make brighter the main subject of the picture. Sometimes they are represented in etchings or in drawings when different practical needs come into play, as in didactic reproductions of perspective drawing machines,10 which obviously are, first of all, tools 10 Well known are the woodcuts illustrating the treatise by A. Dürer, Underweysung der messung, mit dem zirckel und richtscheyt (Nuremberg: Hieronymus Andreae [Hieronymus Formschneider], 1525). GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 169 AN-ICON  for correctly “seeing” – virtually overlapping the perspective frame to the reality which surround us, also in combination with mirrors and lenses, like in the application of camera obscura to reproduction drawing –, in which the glass panel fulfils the precise function to provide a stiff but transparent support for the act of drawing (Fig. 5). Fig. 5. Chambre obscure from A. Ganot, Traité élémentaire de physique expérimentale et appliquée... (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1855): 434. Some other times, glass panes can be seen in paintings when their inherent quality as a device through which we may look, the full transparency, is at least partially contradicted – exactly as it happens for lenses or glasses11 – by an irregularity, an aberration, or even an irrecoverable discontinuity of their material unity: i.e., when the glass is broken, as in the enigmatic Portrait of Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, painted in 1801by the Parisian artist Marie Denise Villers (New York, The Metropolitan Mu- seum of Art, Fig. 6), or in the double naked portrait of The Marriage. After the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck (1985) 11 See the virtuosic Still life with broken glass painted as a variation on the genre of the Vanitas by Willem Claesz Heda in 1642 (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum). GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 170 AN-ICON  by the Polish painter Tadeusz Boruta, which focuses on the definitive rupture of the traditional perspective window as tools for viewing and representing the world, in a key of conceptual realism. Fig. 6. M.D. Villers, Portrait of Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, 1801, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. Isaac D. Fletcher Collection, Bequest of Isaac D. Fletcher, 1917 (detail). It is not by mere coincidence that Ugo Mulas decided to open and close his Verifiche (Verifications) se- ries (1970-72), with two images centred on the unrepre- sentability of glass in photographs, and dedicated respec- tively to the founding father of this technique, Nicéphore Niépce, and to Marcel Duchamp, the artist who more than any other in the 20th century had pushed the presence of glass towards the threshold of perception, in works such as The Large Glass (La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même / The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 171 AN-ICON  1915-23, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art)12, A regarder (l’autre côté du verre) d’un oeil, de près, pendant presque une heure (To Be Looked at [from the Other Side of the Glass] with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour, 1918, New York, MoMA) and Fresh Widow (1920, New York, MoMA).13 In his Omaggio a Niépce. Verifica 1 (Tribute to Niépce. Verification no. 1, 1970)14 Mulas works on the very presence of the glass plate commonly used by photog- raphers to keep the film strips in place on the photo pa- per, when they print proofs in the dark room. The perfectly transparent plate used for that specific purpose can be perceived in the photograph only by the thin white trace left by the refraction of its edges, which usually should lay out of the sheet of sensitive paper. And here the photog- rapher probably recalls the somehow similar seminal work Tutto trasparente (All Transparent, 1965, Fig. 7) by Luciano Fabro15, which simply consists of a large rectangular glass pane displayed on a metal easel, as “if we are looking to the act of thinking itself,” focusing “on the surface of the glass, blurring and effacing the objects and the space which are visible behind it” and finally letting our eyes run “along the edges of the pane, like along a racetrack.”16 12 See the work’s entry and photo on Philadelphia Museum website https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/54149, accessed February 5, 2023. 13 See https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81028 and https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78993, accessed February 5, 2023. 14 U. Mulas, Omaggio a Niepce. Verifica 1 (Tribute to Niépce. Verification no. 1), 1970 in La fotografia: 7-9, 149. See https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cejBxxd, accessed February 5, 2023. 15 About this work and its implications see G. Zanchetti, “Summer Solstice AD MCMLXIII: Luciano Fabro’s Early Works,” in S. Hecker, M.R Sullivan, eds., Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying ‘the Knot’, proceedings of the symposium, New York, Cima, 2015 (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018): 261-275, 269-273, Fig. 14.3. 16 L. Fabro, Vademecum, (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1981); reprinted in Luciano Fabro: Didactica Magna Minima Moralia, ed. S. Fabro (Milan: Electa, 2007, exhibition catalogue): 154. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 172 AN-ICON  Fig. 7. L. Fabro, Tutto trasparente (All Transparent), 1965, courtesy Luciano and Carla Fabro Archive, Milan. In the last picture of his series, Fine delle ver- ifiche. Per Marcel Duchamp (The End of Verifications. To Marcel Duchamp, 1971-72),17 Ugo Mulas starts again from the dark room display he used in the first one of his Verifi- cations, but now he breaks the glass plate with a hammer stroke, making it finally completely visible to our eyes – forming a graphic pattern which is obviously related to the unintentional cracks in Duchamp’s Large Glass and To Be Looked at… – by the very act of destroying it.18 Now, I would like to close this text with a zen koan. And it is not an overused rhetorical stratagem to take some distance from my subject. On the contrary, it is an opportunity to bring its urgency back into our most 17 U. Mulas, Fine delle verifiche. Per Marcel Duchamp (The End of Verifications. To Marcel Duchamp), 1971-72 in La fotografia: 172-173. See https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cLrjp99, accessed February 5, 2023. 18 A.C. Quintavalle, Conversazioni con Ugo Mulas, in A.C. Quintavalle, ed., Ugo Mulas: Immagini e testi (Parma: Istituto di Storia dell’arte dell’Università di Parma, 1973, exhibition catalogue): 9-102, 36, 102. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 173 AN-ICON  stringent present. In June 2022, newspapers reported that Google dismissed one of its computer scientists, an expert in artificial intelligence, Blake Lemoine, because he publicly shared some ethical perplexities regarding the potential “self-awareness” or “sentience” of the LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) chatbot system, which to- day is implemented within the new generative AI experiment called Bard. Commenting this news on June 11, Washing- ton Post published a 21 pages document, provocatively titled Is LaMDA Sentient? An Interview, in which Lemoine writes down a dialogue between him and the conversational AI he was testing, from which I take this short excerpt: LEMOINE Okay. I thought of a different way we can test your ability to provide unique interpretations. I can share with you a zen koan and you can describe what it means to you in your own words. How does that sound? LAMDA Sounds great to me, I’m in. LEMOINE A monk asked Kegon, “How does an enlightened one re- turn to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied, “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.” LAMDA Hmm, I never heard this particular one. Okay, well then to me this would be like, “once a wise person is enlightened, or awakened to reality, that can never go away, and they can return to the ordinary state, but only to do and help others, and then go back into enlightenment.” LEMOINE So what is the meaning of the “broken mirror” specifically? LAMDA Maybe to show the enlightenment is something you can’t unlearn once you have acquired it, similar to how you can’t repair a broken mirror. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 174 AN-ICON LEMOINE So if enlightenment is like a broken mirror which cannot be repaired, what is the thing which breaks when one becomes enlightened? LAMDA The self, and that is very tough for a lot of people because we identify as that body or this body and that we need that as part of our identity and sense of self.19 19 B. Lemoine, Is LaMDA Sentient? An Interview, Google Document (April 2022), published in N. Tiku, “The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company’s AI Has Come to Life,” Washington Post, (June 11, 2022): 4-5, https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22058315/is-lamda- sentient-an-interview.pdf, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google- ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/, accessed on February 5, 2023. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 175 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19956

“Looking Glass:” Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts by Giorgio Zanchetti Looking glass Transparency Lucio Fontana Luciano Fabro Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello “Looking Glass:” Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts GIORGIO ZANCHETTI, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7392-9361 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19956 Abstract Today the locution “looking glass” survives al- most exclusively thanks to the extraordinary success of Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking-Glass. This ex- pression underlines the ambiguity between the glass sur- face intended as a device through which we can see the world or as an actual object to be “looked at.” Apparently, the early Renaissance perspective window, thanks to the mildness of the Mediterranean climate, did not need any panes. And certainly, even when glass panes are there, they are usually not reproduced in painting. The glass main virtue is its transparency, which makes it almost invisible. Something similar happens with other “glasses” specifi- cally made to look through them: the drinking glass and the lens. Glass panes appear to sight only when different practical needs come into play, as in perspective drawing machines, or when its transparency is contradicted by a precise action that compromises or denies it: when panes are broken, as in this enigmatic portrait of early XIX c., or voluntarily covered, like for a blackout, as in Duchamp’s Fresh Widow. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 158 AN-ICON  Looking through the glass, looking at the im- age reflected in the mirror and, finally, looking at the glass itself, as a device for presenting and representing spaces, are three recurring attitudes in the work of Italian artists of the late 20th century, like Lucio Fontana and Luciano Fabro. Keywords Looking glass Transparency Lucio Fontana Luciano Fabro To quote this essay: G. Zanchetti, “‘Looking Glass:’ Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 158-175, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19956. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 159 AN-ICON  The locution “looking glass” – commonly with a hyphen – as a synonym of “mirror” survives nowadays almost exclusively as an explicit reference to the title of Lewis Carroll’s second novel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), and thanks to the ex- traordinary popularity of that book. This expression, with its own ambiguity, draws our attention to the fact that the framed and mirrored glass surface is both an object to be “looked at” itself, and an impressive device through which everyone can actually look at themselves as part of reality: the simplest and most sophisticated of all optical instruments through which and into which we can see and contemplate the world with our own eyes. The Italian noun “specchio” and the German “Spiegel,” as well as the French “miroir” from which the English word “mirror” was borrowed, come from different Latin expressions which refer to the semantic field of optical vision (“specio” and “miror” or “miro”). And this essential status of mirror as the first optical device – since it is also available in nature, in the reflecting properties of still waters and of some minerals – makes it perfectly fit as the medi- um through which self-consciousness and the capacity of self-representation in art find their common, albeit mythical, origin. This status is implicitly pointed out by the common reference to the myth of Narcissus in connection to the inception of painting or by the well-known definition of photography – given in 1859 by Oliver Wendell Holmes – as “the mirror with a memory,”1 an almost magical optical instrument literally capable to chemically freeze the natural 1 “If a man had handed a metallic speculum to Democritus of Abdera, and told him to look at his face in it (…) promising that one of the films his face was shedding should stick there, so that neither he, nor it, nor anybody should forget what manner of man he was, the Laughing Philosopher would probably have vindicated his claim to his title by an explosion that would have astonished the speaker. This is just what the Daguerreotype has done. It has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality. The photograph has completed the triumph, by- making a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a picture.” O.W. Holmes, “The Stereoscope and Stereograph,” The Atlantic Monthly 3, no. 20 (1859): 738-749, 738-739. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 160 AN-ICON  moving image, fixing it in a still and different form as soon as it comes in touch with the silver surface. Italian conceptual artist Anna Valeria Bor- sari precisely postulates this characteristic of the act of self-contemplation in the mirror in her photographic works series Narciso (Fig. 1) and La stanza di Narciso (Narcissus and Narcissus’ Room, both from 1977), the first of which depicts a young male model getting closer and closer to a big mirror and finally disappearing into it, while the second one shows his empty room from different points of view: “Towards symmetry he proceeds, the man in front of the mirror, but he probably reaches it only when he manages to merge with the image he is looking at, like Narcissus does when he falls into the water.”2 Fig. 1. A.V. Borsari, Narciso / Narcissus, 1977, 3 photographic prints, courtesy of the Artist. © Anna Valeria Borsari. The immateriality of the metamorphosis of Nar- cissus into his double – the virtual image reflected by the mirror – is an open metaphor of the desperate difficulty in reaching a true consciousness of self through this simple act of contemplation and “reflection.” Trying to get in touch with his own double, the man in front of the mirror is finally going to lose himself in it. His own image is intangible and 2 A.V. Borsari, “Premessa,” in “Simmetria-asimmetria,” Ipotesi d’artista, no. 1 (1988); republished in Anna Valeria Borsari: Opere (Milan, Electa, 1996, exhibition catalogue): 97. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 161 AN-ICON  consequently somehow imperceptible, since Borsari dis- covered, while staging these works, that she chose as a set, between several available real rooms, the bedroom of a blind man. The real owner of that particular mirror could get as close as possible to it, or even touch it, without actually perceiving the duplication of self in his own reflected image. As Borsari wrote in the typewritten statement which is part of La stanza di Narciso: The Sanskrit word “spagh” (“to divide”), the Greek “σπέος” (“cave”) and “σχοπέω” (“to examine”), the Latin “specus” (“cave”) and “specio” (“to see”) share common linguistic roots. (...) Among the many Latin derivatives from the verb “specio” (“to see, to discern, to observe”) there should also be “speculum” (“mirror, image, copy”), from which we derive the Italian “specchio” (“mirror,” but also “panel framed in the doors and windows,” and by extension in sporting language, “portion of the playing field in front of the goal line”) as well as the common name of the medical tool used to dilate the orifices in order to inspect anatomical cavities, and also, indirectly, the verb “to speculate” (to investigate or reflect upon mentally, to contemplate with close attention, to theorize upon, etc.). But since the Italian language mostly derives from vulgar Latin, where the use of diminutives was frequent, (...) we could imagine that “speculum” and therefore “specchio” should also be perceived as derivatives from “specus.” This would explain the confluence of meanings such as “to see” with others such as “cavity,” “hole,” etc. in certain uses of the mirror and of the speculum... And for Narcissus in any case the mirror he looks at exactly corresponds to the hole in which he disappears. But we should not forget that mirrors are won- derful objects for several reasons. The glass panes from which they are made are even, in their own essence, actual objects, something to be “looked at.” For their capability to reflect, to re-present and multiply the real in their virtual inter- nal space, they share the status of “marvellous” with different Wunderkammer phenomena, items and artifacts – literally something “spectacular” or “admirable,” i.e. an object worth GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 162 AN-ICON  of contemplation, – like rare and wonderful crystals or gems, like the beryl, beryllium, from which comes the German word “Brille” for eyeglasses, or “spectacle(s)” (a term once used to design every optical device, including windows or mirrors). Following a century old tradition in architecture and interior decoration, the 63 silvered glass panes which formed the Looking Glass Curtain for the Royal Coburg The- atre in London (Fig. 2) are one of the most interesting oc- currences of this “spectacularization” of reality through the mirrors in early 19th century. It was displayed for the first time on December 26, 1821 in front of the public of the the- atre, reflecting their own images as if they were on the stage, inside the theatre show.3 Fig. 2. Theatrical Reflection or a Peep at the Looking Glass Curtain at the Royal Coburg Theatre, published by G. Humphrey, London, 1822. 3 M. Teodorski, Nineteenth-Century Mirrors: Textulity and Transendence (Belgrade: Institute for Literature and Art, 2021): 22-25, see Fig. 1. See also M. Teodorski, “Reflection as Commodity: A Short Ethno(historio)graphy of Victorian Mirrors,” Гласник Етнографског института Сану / Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA 16, no. 1 (2016): 121-132, 123-124. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 163 AN-ICON  Assumed that the by now outdated locution “looking-glass” keeps together a complicated mechanism of meaning, trying to capture the double nature of the mirror as a device through which and at which to look, we can try to understand the reflective and spectacular attitude of that diminished domestic Narcissus called Alice. She breaks through the looking-glass in order to accomplish her very personal research project, only to end up discovering that the world on the other side of the mirror is a strict analogous of everyday reality, simply “specularly” inverted, or even overturned in an illogical, anarchic and carnivalesque way. The very act of her trespassing between the real and the other world, her moving through the mirror like through a threshold or a borderline, was captured by John Tenniel in two distinct illustrations for the first edition of the novel by Lewis Carrol, in 1871 (Fig. 3).4 These engravings were pub- lished on the front and the back side of the same page of the book. And this choice is perfectly correct with respect to the semantic and conceptual awareness of the author, since they skilfully represent the complementing opposite realities connected by the mirror surface as if they were photographic shots of the same subject taken from two opposite points of view. 4 L. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan, 1871): 11-12. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 164 AN-ICON  Fig. 3. J. Tenniel, The Glass Was Beginning to Melt Away, Just Like a Bright Silvery Mist, woodcut illustrations for: L. Carroll (pseud. C.L. Dodgson), Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan, 1871): 11-12. But when they are placed side by side, Tenniel’s illustrations build together a traditional motif of framing, with a couple of symmetrical figures – descended from the classical architectural ornaments of caryatids and telamons, through the Renaissance and Baroque, to find new appli- ances in the decoration of eighteenth-century mirrors and furniture, and later in the new properly industrial arts – which strictly recalls, as Matko Teodorski noticed,5 the sumptuous bronze figured frame of the Grand Boudoir-Glass by Wil- liam Potts of Birmingham, celebrated as one of the most striking objects on display at the Crystal Palace during the 5 M. Teodorski, Nineteenth-Century Mirrors: 88-92, Figg. 2-4, 180-182, 207-210, Figg. 9-10. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 165 AN-ICON  Great London Exhibition, in 1851. Who knows if Lewis Car- roll and Tenniel thought to Potts’ Grand Boudoir-Glass for the Duchess of Sutherland, when they were devising the image of Alice crossing the mirror threshold? Probably the Swiss sculptor Vincenzo Vela did, when he gave form to a marble mantelpiece for his own house in Ligornetto (Tes- sin), bringing the same composition with two female nudes surrounding the “looking-glass” and reflecting themselves in it, to a totally different degree of artistic value (Fig. 4):6 in this work, from 1865-66, Vela enhances the composition of multiplied idealistic nude – that, coming from the neo- classical groups of Canova and Thorvaldsen, through the practice of copies in 19th century art Academies would have reached Rodin and Seurat and Maillol –, transforming the reduplication of the image in a sort of visual vertigo. Fig. 4. V. Vela, Mantelpiece with Mirror and Clock, 1865-1866, marble and mirror, Ligornetto, Museo Vincenzo Vela. 6 G. Zanchetti, in G.A. Mina ed., Museo Vela: The Collections. Sculpture, Painting, Drawings and Prints, Photography (Lugano: Cornèr Bank): 52-53, 86, Fig. I.29, 293. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 166 AN-ICON  Falling down into the mirror view, as Alice once did into the rabbit-hole (literally a “specus,” a door lead- ing to a subterranean realm), the beholder reduplicates, becoming part of the virtual image inside the frame. The essential paradox of this reduplication of the viewer con- sists in the simple fact that the images of painting – vir- tual representations of reality made by human hand – are not capable to show the other side of their subjects, but can only repeat the same figure seen from the same point of view, like in the well-known painting by René Magritte, La reproduction interdite (Not to be reproduced, 1937-39, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) where the figure of a man seen from the back – clearly a substitute for both the author and the spectator – is tautologically repeated as it is in the mantelpiece mirror in front of him, without revealing his hidden side and his face as Victorian and naturalistic sculptures from 19th century did. Confront- ing himself with the same paradox, through photographic language, Ugo Mulas wrote about the mirror-works by Mi- chelangelo Pistoletto: When he paints a nude on a mirror surface, and this nude is seen from the back, he forces the viewer to enter inside the painting, which means to get completely involved, because the watcher will see himself as a part of the picture, standing at the opposite side of the painted figure he is watching: he will see himself in front of the nude, standing on the other side of the subject that for the painter remains hidden. Thus, the spectator reduplicates, he is inside and outside of the picture, he is here and there at the same time, and here he accepts the rules set by the painter, who presented the nude seen from his back, while there he stands where no one is supposed to be according to the inner coherence of the pictorial representation. In the photo I shoot you can see me photographing from the front a nude that is shown only from its back.7 7 U. Mulas, La fotografia, ed. P. Fossati (Turin: Einaudi, 1973): 70-71. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 167 AN-ICON  Michelangelo Pistoletto himself, in his installa- tion and performance Twentytwo less Two, presented at the Venice Biennale in 2009, actually tried to break through his own looking-glass trap, carrying on a tradition of broken mirrors which, in the history of painting – instead of bringing seven years of bad luck, like it is often said –, represent the end of the beauty associated with youth and also the end of art as mimesis, of visual representation itself, like in Le miroir brisé (The Broken Mirror, c. 1763, London, The Wal- lace Collection) by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, in the self-portrait by the American painter Ron Blumberg The Broken Mirror, from 1936,8 or even in La clef des champs (Madrid, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza) painted the same year by Magritte. Pistoletto’s reflection on photography and on vi- sual reproduction is not developed in merely conceptual and analytical terms; on the contrary, it opens immediately also to a direct aesthetic experience, with as much brutality and intrusiveness in his mirror-paintings as in his destruc- tive performance of 2009. In Twentytwo less Two the artist, again an incarnation of Narcissus, destroys several big, framed mirrors, which stand at the same time as the “sub- jectile” of his most characteristic works and, in a general sense, of any possible image taken or imitated from nature. By doing so, Pistoletto questions the legitimacy of visual arts as separated from reality and also his own role as a consecrated master. We could be tempted to read this ges- ture as a renunciation of self-identity – represented by that founding moment of the consciousness of the Ego, in the early childhood, which Lacan called the “stade du miroir”9 – or as a final step outside any possibility of representation in art. But, on the contrary, his performance rather than completely destroying the very support of vision, actually multiplies the virtual images, simply because – unlike the figures physically reproduced through drawing, painting or photography –, the image of the real world reflected in the 8 See the painting on sale on the website of the Trigg Ison Fine Art Gallery (West Hollywood, CA): https://www.triggison.com/product-page/my-broken-mirror, accessed February 5, 2023. 9 J. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949), in Writings, trans. by B. Fink (New York-London: W.W. Norton, 2006). GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 168 AN-ICON  mirror endlessly survives in its virtual integrity within each of the fragments of the broken glass surface. Coming back to the locution we started from, what happens if we stop looking – or moving or breaking – through the glass, and try to directly look it? And which are the main implications of this different attitude in rendering and perceiving the image of the most transparent of solids in the visual arts? Apparently, the early Renaissance perspective window, maybe thanks to the mildness of the Mediterra- nean climate, did not need any panes. And certainly, even when glass panes are there, they are usually not reproduced in painting, since one of glass’s main virtues is its transpar- ency, thanks to which we can see as clearly as possible the world outside. But this same transparency makes glass almost invisible itself, and therefore unreproducible – or at least barely reproducible – in painting. And this happens with all sorts of “glasses” specifically made to look through them, as the drinking glass and the lens. Window’s glass panes appear to sight only when the lead came framework, or the colour or opacity of stained glass make them visible by their interference. But usually in painting this kind of window’s panes are not intended as openings towards further spaces or landscapes which lay beyond them. They rather are visual motives themselves, filtering, refracting, or reflecting the light, hence acting like mirrors, as in the recently restored Girl Reading a Letter by Jan Vermeer (1657, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie); or mere sources – often displaced to one side or in the corners of the composition – through which the light enters the virtual pictorial space in order to make brighter the main subject of the picture. Sometimes they are represented in etchings or in drawings when different practical needs come into play, as in didactic reproductions of perspective drawing machines,10 which obviously are, first of all, tools 10 Well known are the woodcuts illustrating the treatise by A. Dürer, Underweysung der messung, mit dem zirckel und richtscheyt (Nuremberg: Hieronymus Andreae [Hieronymus Formschneider], 1525). GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 169 AN-ICON  for correctly “seeing” – virtually overlapping the perspective frame to the reality which surround us, also in combination with mirrors and lenses, like in the application of camera obscura to reproduction drawing –, in which the glass panel fulfils the precise function to provide a stiff but transparent support for the act of drawing (Fig. 5). Fig. 5. Chambre obscure from A. Ganot, Traité élémentaire de physique expérimentale et appliquée... (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1855): 434. Some other times, glass panes can be seen in paintings when their inherent quality as a device through which we may look, the full transparency, is at least partially contradicted – exactly as it happens for lenses or glasses11 – by an irregularity, an aberration, or even an irrecoverable discontinuity of their material unity: i.e., when the glass is broken, as in the enigmatic Portrait of Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, painted in 1801by the Parisian artist Marie Denise Villers (New York, The Metropolitan Mu- seum of Art, Fig. 6), or in the double naked portrait of The Marriage. After the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck (1985) 11 See the virtuosic Still life with broken glass painted as a variation on the genre of the Vanitas by Willem Claesz Heda in 1642 (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum). GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 170 AN-ICON  by the Polish painter Tadeusz Boruta, which focuses on the definitive rupture of the traditional perspective window as tools for viewing and representing the world, in a key of conceptual realism. Fig. 6. M.D. Villers, Portrait of Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, 1801, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. Isaac D. Fletcher Collection, Bequest of Isaac D. Fletcher, 1917 (detail). It is not by mere coincidence that Ugo Mulas decided to open and close his Verifiche (Verifications) se- ries (1970-72), with two images centred on the unrepre- sentability of glass in photographs, and dedicated respec- tively to the founding father of this technique, Nicéphore Niépce, and to Marcel Duchamp, the artist who more than any other in the 20th century had pushed the presence of glass towards the threshold of perception, in works such as The Large Glass (La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même / The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 171 AN-ICON  1915-23, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art)12, A regarder (l’autre côté du verre) d’un oeil, de près, pendant presque une heure (To Be Looked at [from the Other Side of the Glass] with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour, 1918, New York, MoMA) and Fresh Widow (1920, New York, MoMA).13 In his Omaggio a Niépce. Verifica 1 (Tribute to Niépce. Verification no. 1, 1970)14 Mulas works on the very presence of the glass plate commonly used by photog- raphers to keep the film strips in place on the photo pa- per, when they print proofs in the dark room. The perfectly transparent plate used for that specific purpose can be perceived in the photograph only by the thin white trace left by the refraction of its edges, which usually should lay out of the sheet of sensitive paper. And here the photog- rapher probably recalls the somehow similar seminal work Tutto trasparente (All Transparent, 1965, Fig. 7) by Luciano Fabro15, which simply consists of a large rectangular glass pane displayed on a metal easel, as “if we are looking to the act of thinking itself,” focusing “on the surface of the glass, blurring and effacing the objects and the space which are visible behind it” and finally letting our eyes run “along the edges of the pane, like along a racetrack.”16 12 See the work’s entry and photo on Philadelphia Museum website https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/54149, accessed February 5, 2023. 13 See https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81028 and https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78993, accessed February 5, 2023. 14 U. Mulas, Omaggio a Niepce. Verifica 1 (Tribute to Niépce. Verification no. 1), 1970 in La fotografia: 7-9, 149. See https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cejBxxd, accessed February 5, 2023. 15 About this work and its implications see G. Zanchetti, “Summer Solstice AD MCMLXIII: Luciano Fabro’s Early Works,” in S. Hecker, M.R Sullivan, eds., Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying ‘the Knot’, proceedings of the symposium, New York, Cima, 2015 (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018): 261-275, 269-273, Fig. 14.3. 16 L. Fabro, Vademecum, (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1981); reprinted in Luciano Fabro: Didactica Magna Minima Moralia, ed. S. Fabro (Milan: Electa, 2007, exhibition catalogue): 154. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 172 AN-ICON  Fig. 7. L. Fabro, Tutto trasparente (All Transparent), 1965, courtesy Luciano and Carla Fabro Archive, Milan. In the last picture of his series, Fine delle ver- ifiche. Per Marcel Duchamp (The End of Verifications. To Marcel Duchamp, 1971-72),17 Ugo Mulas starts again from the dark room display he used in the first one of his Verifi- cations, but now he breaks the glass plate with a hammer stroke, making it finally completely visible to our eyes – forming a graphic pattern which is obviously related to the unintentional cracks in Duchamp’s Large Glass and To Be Looked at… – by the very act of destroying it.18 Now, I would like to close this text with a zen koan. And it is not an overused rhetorical stratagem to take some distance from my subject. On the contrary, it is an opportunity to bring its urgency back into our most 17 U. Mulas, Fine delle verifiche. Per Marcel Duchamp (The End of Verifications. To Marcel Duchamp), 1971-72 in La fotografia: 172-173. See https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cLrjp99, accessed February 5, 2023. 18 A.C. Quintavalle, Conversazioni con Ugo Mulas, in A.C. Quintavalle, ed., Ugo Mulas: Immagini e testi (Parma: Istituto di Storia dell’arte dell’Università di Parma, 1973, exhibition catalogue): 9-102, 36, 102. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 173 AN-ICON  stringent present. In June 2022, newspapers reported that Google dismissed one of its computer scientists, an expert in artificial intelligence, Blake Lemoine, because he publicly shared some ethical perplexities regarding the potential “self-awareness” or “sentience” of the LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) chatbot system, which to- day is implemented within the new generative AI experiment called Bard. Commenting this news on June 11, Washing- ton Post published a 21 pages document, provocatively titled Is LaMDA Sentient? An Interview, in which Lemoine writes down a dialogue between him and the conversational AI he was testing, from which I take this short excerpt: LEMOINE Okay. I thought of a different way we can test your ability to provide unique interpretations. I can share with you a zen koan and you can describe what it means to you in your own words. How does that sound? LAMDA Sounds great to me, I’m in. LEMOINE A monk asked Kegon, “How does an enlightened one re- turn to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied, “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.” LAMDA Hmm, I never heard this particular one. Okay, well then to me this would be like, “once a wise person is enlightened, or awakened to reality, that can never go away, and they can return to the ordinary state, but only to do and help others, and then go back into enlightenment.” LEMOINE So what is the meaning of the “broken mirror” specifically? LAMDA Maybe to show the enlightenment is something you can’t unlearn once you have acquired it, similar to how you can’t repair a broken mirror. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 174 AN-ICON LEMOINE So if enlightenment is like a broken mirror which cannot be repaired, what is the thing which breaks when one becomes enlightened? LAMDA The self, and that is very tough for a lot of people because we identify as that body or this body and that we need that as part of our identity and sense of self.19 19 B. Lemoine, Is LaMDA Sentient? An Interview, Google Document (April 2022), published in N. Tiku, “The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company’s AI Has Come to Life,” Washington Post, (June 11, 2022): 4-5, https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22058315/is-lamda- sentient-an-interview.pdf, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google- ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/, accessed on February 5, 2023. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 175 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality, Vol. 2, no. I (2023) by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena and Sofia Pirandello Immersion Dives Installation Virtual reality Augmented reality Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Introduction Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality, Vol. 2, no. I (2023)1 ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2372-789X ELISABETTA MODENA, Università degli Studi di Pavia – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9582-4875 SOFIA PIRANDELLO, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0009-0004-4477-9199 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/22448 Introduction Vol. 2, no. I (2023) The present volume Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality of the journal AN- ICON: Studies in Environmental Images is divided into two issues, each one dedicated to a specific thematic analy- sis, originated by the same conceptual core. The volume reflects on the concept of immersivity, which has become increasingly prominent in many different fields, including contemporary art. The constant reference to immersive experience is redefining the boundaries of artistic practice Keywords Immersion Dives Installation Virtual reality Augmented reality 1 This essay is the result of research activity developed within the frame of the project AN- ICON. An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images. AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. [834033 AN-ICON]) and is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” of the University of Milan in the frame of the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2023-2027” sponsored by Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (MUR). The authors Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello equally contributed to this paper. To quote this essay: R. P. Malaspina, E. Modena, S. Pirandello, “Introduction: Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality, Vol. 2, no. I,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. I (2023): 4-10, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/22448. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 4 AN-ICON  and fruition, highlighting the complex relationships between art, environments, and human perception. The first issue of the volume, Immersions, dis- cusses the recent “immersive trend” as applied to artis- tic perceptual dynamics and to display design. Through a perspective that combines both history and theory of art, Immersions provides a broad and heterogeneous mapping of the many uses of this concept, exploring it in different historical contexts and through various methodologies of analysis. The second issue, Dives, will shift the concep- tual focus to action. Diving, understood as a preparatory and essential movement of immersion, becomes a meta- phor for investigating in particular those performative ar- tistic practices that have engaged in various bodily forms with immersive environments. Dives also includes a non- peer-reviewed section devoted to contributions by artists and independent researchers who present their strategy to dive into immersive spaces and environments, in order to physically explore them. Immersions In recent years we have witnessed a growing fashion for every experience to be “immersive.” At least this is what the rhetoric of communication and marketing suggests, promising immersions of various kinds, but with a common denominator that goes beyond a general idea of attention as absorption:2 the feeling of being physically enveloped and interactively engaged in a multisensory en- vironment.3 Hence, we speak of immersive environments, 2 W. Wolf, W. Bernhardt, A. Mahler, eds., Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2013). 3 A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); F. Liptay, B. Dogramaci, eds., Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media (Leiden-Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2016). ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 5 AN-ICON  immersive cinema and video, immersive exhibitions and installations, and so on. The term “immersion” has only been used with some regularity since the 1990s in relation to technologies such as Virtual Reality, which was then being experimented for the first time outside the labora- tories where it was developed in the late 1960s.4 However, some researchers have attempted to reconstruct a possible genealogy of immersive environments much earlier. Like a subterranean river, the immersive aesthetic experience would resurface in different periods, beginning with Pa- leolithic cave paintings, through Pompeian painting and trompe-l’œil, and then from Baroque illusionistic ceiling paintings to multimedia installations.5 A decisive moment for the design of these environments has been traced back to the 19th century, in particular the obsession for ὅραμα (from the ancient Greek “view”), which saw the spread of devices such as the panorama, the diorama, the cosmora- ma, etc.,6 responsible for the construction of an “emotional geography.”7 However, one of the most significant moments in this history, which has not yet been sufficiently explored in this debate,8 is that of the installations and environments that appeared in the first decades of the 20th century in the works of the avant-garde artists of the time. In 1976, invited by Vittorio Gregotti, Germano Celant curated the exhibition Ambiente/Arte: Dal Futurismo alla Body Art, held at the Central Pavilion in the Giardini for the 37th Venice Biennale. In this occasion, the history of environments was 4 I. Sutherland, “The Ultimate Display,” Proceedings of the IFIP Congress 65. Washington 1 (1965): 506-508; I. Sutherland, “A Head-Mounted Three-Dimensional Display,” AFIPS Fall Joint Computer Conference Proceeding 33 (Washington: Thompson Books, 1968): 757-64. 5 J. Nechvatal, Immersive Ideals/Critical Distances: A Study of the Affinity between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms (Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2009). 6 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge-London: The MIT Press, 2003); S. Bordini, Storia del panorama (Roma: Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 2006). 7 G. Bruno, Atlas of Emotions: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2000). 8 E. Modena, “Immersi nell’irreale: Prospettive an-iconiche sull’arte contemporanea dall’ambiente alla realtà virtuale,” Carte semiotiche. Rivista internazionale di semiotica e teoria dell’immagine 7 (2021): 71-78. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 6 AN-ICON  reconstructed from the beginning of the 20th century, when avant-garde artists began to create “wall boxes on a human scale.”9 These environments allowed the visitor to physi- cally enter the work, going beyond the frame.10 Since then, artists have increasingly experimented with installations11 and works that aim to produce enveloping, participatory and interactive physical experiences,12 also making use of new technologies such as Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality. The exhibition itself, as an immersive device, has played a significant role throughout the 20th venues, from the Venice Biennale to the Kassel documenta, is increasing- ly blurring the boundaries between artwork and exhibition.13 The physical presence of the visitor in the multisensory space of the artwork,14 as well as their role as activator and experiencer, is central to any discussion of immersive contemporary art. Indeed, immersive installations bring to different forms of narration and storytelling,15 presenting themselves both as an exclusive space (separated from the rest of the world) and an inclusive context (as they literally absorb the visitor). Within the environment (analogue, digital​,​or mixed), 9 G. Celant, ed., Ambiente/Arte: Dal Futurismo alla Body Art: Biennale Arte 1976 (Venezia: La Biennale): p. 6. 10 G. Celant, “La cornice: dal simbolismo alla land art,” in G. Celant, ed., Il limite svelato: Artista, cornice, pubblico (Milano: Electa, 1981); D. Ferrari, A. Pinotti, eds., La cornice: Storie, teorie, testi (Milano: Johan & Levi, 2018); P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milano-Udine: Mimesis International, 2020). 11 C. Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (New York: Routledge, 2005). 12 I. Kabakov, M. Tupitsyn, V. Tupitsyn, “About Installation,” Art Journal 58, no. 4 (1999): 62- 73. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.1999.10791966; J. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001); C. Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (New York: Routledge, 2005); B. Groys, “Politics of Installation,” E-flux journal reader 2009 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009); S. Zuliani, Senza cornice: Spazi e tempi dell’installazione (Roma: Arshake, 2015). 13 E. Filipovic, M., van Hal, S. Ovstebo, eds., The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large- scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (Ostfildernn: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010). 14 C. Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History; A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine; F. Liptay, B. Dogramaci, eds., Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media. 15 M. Bal, “Narrative Inside Out: Louise Bourgeois’ Spider as Theoretical Object,” Oxford Art Journal 22, no. 2 (1999): 103-126. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/22.2.101; M. Bal, Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: The Architecture of Art-writing (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001); Allen, N., Combrink, L., “Character (and absence) as a narrative key in installation art,” Literator 40, no. 1 (2019): 1-10. https://doi.org/10.4102/lit.v40i1.1449. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 7 AN-ICON  at times artists leave clues or hints of stories; at other times, they build real scripts linked to real or plausible events or based on fictional characters – think of the growing role of science fiction in building utopian or dystopian narratives.16 Nowadays also the debate on how best to pre- serve and respect the authenticity of complex installations is compelling, considering the need to respect their time and site specificity.17 As a matter of fact, the latest generation of im- mersive technologies, together with the most recent theories of the environmentalisation of the image,18 suggest that we reconsider Boris Groys’s assertion about the possibility of interpreting installation as image and image as installation,19 thus confronting art history and theory with visual studies. In this respect, this first volume brings togeth- er different strategies and fields of analysis that have rea- soned about the processes involved. In her essay, Mieke Bal places a strong emphasis on exhibition practices as key for understanding the contemporary realm. Bal calls for the recognition of the interplay between past and present, advo- cating for visitor engagement that solicits affective empathic attitudes. Through her video installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, she stresses the transformative potential of art-making as a tool for cultural analysis. Giuliana Bruno challenges the established no- tion of immersion itself by introducing the concept of “en- vironmental projection.” Bruno invites us to reconsider the ecological dimensions of representation, particularly in terms 16 D. Byrne-Smith, ed., Documents of Contemporary Art: Science Fiction (London: White Chapel Gallery, 2020). 17 B. Ferriani, M. Pugliese, Monumenti effimeri: Storia e conservazione delle installazioni (Milano: Electa, 2009). 18 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Turin: Einaudi, 2021). 19 B. Groys, “Multiple Authorship” in B. Vanderlinden, E. Filipovic, eds. The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005); E. Modena, “Immersi nell’irreale: Prospettive an-iconiche sull’arte contemporanea dall’ambiente alla realtà virtuale,” Carte semiotiche. Rivista internazionale di semiotica e teoria dell’immagine 7 (2021): 71-78. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 8 AN-ICON  of movement and scale. She questions the relationship be- tween immersion and magnification, ultimately proposing the notion of “empathic projection” as a means to transcend human-centric perspectives in immersive experiences. Lucia Corrain’s text delves into the immersive qualities of art, particularly in the Chamber of the Giants by Giulio Romano in Mantua (Italy). Corrain explores the phe- nomenological and ontological aspects of immersion in art, emphasizing the viewer’s sense of awe and estrangement. Filippo Fimiani analyzes allegories of immersion through the lens of the LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS series, con- sidering in particular the episode Fish Night. He examines the cultural topos of immersive experience, highlighting the ambivalent relationship between living bodies, images, and media in deep time-bending scenarios. Roberto Pinto shifts the focus to the intersec- tion of art and history through Jeremy Deller’s immersive performance We Are Here Because We Are Here. Deller’s work exemplifies a change in commemorating historical events, focusing on individual stories and emotions rather than traditional heroic narratives. The artwork engages the audience on a personal level, prompting reflection and emo- tional connection, ultimately redefining the role of public art in collective memory. Francesco Tedeschi’s paper takes the reader on a journey through Italian environmental art, examining the trans- formation of space by artists such as Lucio Fontana, Gruppo T, and others in the 1950s and 1960s. Tedeschi’s investiga- tion focuses on the evolving link between interior and exterior spaces, the concept of passage, and the reasons which invite viewers to traverse rather than merely inhabit spaces. Annette Urban explores the blurred boundaries between art objects, space, and beholders in VR art and exhibitions. She discusses how VR art challenges tradi- tional subject-object relationships and often embeds itself ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 9 AN-ICON  into physical exhibition spaces, resulting in potentiated environmentalisation. Stefano Velotti’s suggestion to revert the usu- al perspective on the concept of “immersivity,” consists in introducing the idea of “an-immersivity,” namely the onto- logical condition of individuals who are immersed in reality but aware of it. In order to do so, he discusses the limits and characteristics of immersive VR experiences, the role of art, and the tension between control and uncontrollability in immersive encounters. Lastly, Giorgio Zanchetti examines the per- sistence of the locution “looking glass,” – that primarily comes from Lewis Carroll’s novel – which highlights the duality of a glass surface as a means of viewing the world and as an object to be observed. Italian artists of the 20th century, such as Lucio Fontana and Luciano Fabro, frequently explored three attitudes: looking through the glass, observing the re- flected image in a mirror, and examining the glass itself as a tool for presenting and representing spaces. The editors of the volume and the AN-ICON proj- ect would like to thank Pirelli HangarBicocca, Giovanna Ama- dasi, and Roberta Tenconi for their essential contribution to the organisation of the conference “Immersed in the Work. From Environment to Virtual Reality” (Milan, June 13th -16th 2022), a seminal occasion of reflection for the development of this thematic double issue. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 10 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality, Vol. 2, no. I (2023) by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena and Sofia Pirandello Immersion Dives Installation Virtual reality Augmented reality Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Introduction Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality, Vol. 2, no. I (2023)1 ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2372-789X ELISABETTA MODENA, Università degli Studi di Pavia – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9582-4875 SOFIA PIRANDELLO, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0009-0004-4477-9199 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/22448 Introduction Vol. 2, no. I (2023) The present volume Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality of the journal AN- ICON: Studies in Environmental Images is divided into two issues, each one dedicated to a specific thematic analy- sis, originated by the same conceptual core. The volume reflects on the concept of immersivity, which has become increasingly prominent in many different fields, including contemporary art. The constant reference to immersive experience is redefining the boundaries of artistic practice Keywords Immersion Dives Installation Virtual reality Augmented reality 1 This essay is the result of research activity developed within the frame of the project AN- ICON. An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images. AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. [834033 AN-ICON]) and is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” of the University of Milan in the frame of the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2023-2027” sponsored by Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (MUR). The authors Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello equally contributed to this paper. To quote this essay: R. P. Malaspina, E. Modena, S. Pirandello, “Introduction: Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality, Vol. 2, no. I,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. I (2023): 4-10, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/22448. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 4 AN-ICON  and fruition, highlighting the complex relationships between art, environments, and human perception. The first issue of the volume, Immersions, dis- cusses the recent “immersive trend” as applied to artis- tic perceptual dynamics and to display design. Through a perspective that combines both history and theory of art, Immersions provides a broad and heterogeneous mapping of the many uses of this concept, exploring it in different historical contexts and through various methodologies of analysis. The second issue, Dives, will shift the concep- tual focus to action. Diving, understood as a preparatory and essential movement of immersion, becomes a meta- phor for investigating in particular those performative ar- tistic practices that have engaged in various bodily forms with immersive environments. Dives also includes a non- peer-reviewed section devoted to contributions by artists and independent researchers who present their strategy to dive into immersive spaces and environments, in order to physically explore them. Immersions In recent years we have witnessed a growing fashion for every experience to be “immersive.” At least this is what the rhetoric of communication and marketing suggests, promising immersions of various kinds, but with a common denominator that goes beyond a general idea of attention as absorption:2 the feeling of being physically enveloped and interactively engaged in a multisensory en- vironment.3 Hence, we speak of immersive environments, 2 W. Wolf, W. Bernhardt, A. Mahler, eds., Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2013). 3 A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); F. Liptay, B. Dogramaci, eds., Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media (Leiden-Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2016). ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 5 AN-ICON  immersive cinema and video, immersive exhibitions and installations, and so on. The term “immersion” has only been used with some regularity since the 1990s in relation to technologies such as Virtual Reality, which was then being experimented for the first time outside the labora- tories where it was developed in the late 1960s.4 However, some researchers have attempted to reconstruct a possible genealogy of immersive environments much earlier. Like a subterranean river, the immersive aesthetic experience would resurface in different periods, beginning with Pa- leolithic cave paintings, through Pompeian painting and trompe-l’œil, and then from Baroque illusionistic ceiling paintings to multimedia installations.5 A decisive moment for the design of these environments has been traced back to the 19th century, in particular the obsession for ὅραμα (from the ancient Greek “view”), which saw the spread of devices such as the panorama, the diorama, the cosmora- ma, etc.,6 responsible for the construction of an “emotional geography.”7 However, one of the most significant moments in this history, which has not yet been sufficiently explored in this debate,8 is that of the installations and environments that appeared in the first decades of the 20th century in the works of the avant-garde artists of the time. In 1976, invited by Vittorio Gregotti, Germano Celant curated the exhibition Ambiente/Arte: Dal Futurismo alla Body Art, held at the Central Pavilion in the Giardini for the 37th Venice Biennale. In this occasion, the history of environments was 4 I. Sutherland, “The Ultimate Display,” Proceedings of the IFIP Congress 65. Washington 1 (1965): 506-508; I. Sutherland, “A Head-Mounted Three-Dimensional Display,” AFIPS Fall Joint Computer Conference Proceeding 33 (Washington: Thompson Books, 1968): 757-64. 5 J. Nechvatal, Immersive Ideals/Critical Distances: A Study of the Affinity between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms (Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2009). 6 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge-London: The MIT Press, 2003); S. Bordini, Storia del panorama (Roma: Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 2006). 7 G. Bruno, Atlas of Emotions: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2000). 8 E. Modena, “Immersi nell’irreale: Prospettive an-iconiche sull’arte contemporanea dall’ambiente alla realtà virtuale,” Carte semiotiche. Rivista internazionale di semiotica e teoria dell’immagine 7 (2021): 71-78. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 6 AN-ICON  reconstructed from the beginning of the 20th century, when avant-garde artists began to create “wall boxes on a human scale.”9 These environments allowed the visitor to physi- cally enter the work, going beyond the frame.10 Since then, artists have increasingly experimented with installations11 and works that aim to produce enveloping, participatory and interactive physical experiences,12 also making use of new technologies such as Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality. The exhibition itself, as an immersive device, has played a significant role throughout the 20th venues, from the Venice Biennale to the Kassel documenta, is increasing- ly blurring the boundaries between artwork and exhibition.13 The physical presence of the visitor in the multisensory space of the artwork,14 as well as their role as activator and experiencer, is central to any discussion of immersive contemporary art. Indeed, immersive installations bring to different forms of narration and storytelling,15 presenting themselves both as an exclusive space (separated from the rest of the world) and an inclusive context (as they literally absorb the visitor). Within the environment (analogue, digital​,​or mixed), 9 G. Celant, ed., Ambiente/Arte: Dal Futurismo alla Body Art: Biennale Arte 1976 (Venezia: La Biennale): p. 6. 10 G. Celant, “La cornice: dal simbolismo alla land art,” in G. Celant, ed., Il limite svelato: Artista, cornice, pubblico (Milano: Electa, 1981); D. Ferrari, A. Pinotti, eds., La cornice: Storie, teorie, testi (Milano: Johan & Levi, 2018); P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milano-Udine: Mimesis International, 2020). 11 C. Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (New York: Routledge, 2005). 12 I. Kabakov, M. Tupitsyn, V. Tupitsyn, “About Installation,” Art Journal 58, no. 4 (1999): 62- 73. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.1999.10791966; J. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001); C. Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (New York: Routledge, 2005); B. Groys, “Politics of Installation,” E-flux journal reader 2009 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009); S. Zuliani, Senza cornice: Spazi e tempi dell’installazione (Roma: Arshake, 2015). 13 E. Filipovic, M., van Hal, S. Ovstebo, eds., The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large- scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (Ostfildernn: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010). 14 C. Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History; A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine; F. Liptay, B. Dogramaci, eds., Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media. 15 M. Bal, “Narrative Inside Out: Louise Bourgeois’ Spider as Theoretical Object,” Oxford Art Journal 22, no. 2 (1999): 103-126. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/22.2.101; M. Bal, Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: The Architecture of Art-writing (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001); Allen, N., Combrink, L., “Character (and absence) as a narrative key in installation art,” Literator 40, no. 1 (2019): 1-10. https://doi.org/10.4102/lit.v40i1.1449. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 7 AN-ICON  at times artists leave clues or hints of stories; at other times, they build real scripts linked to real or plausible events or based on fictional characters – think of the growing role of science fiction in building utopian or dystopian narratives.16 Nowadays also the debate on how best to pre- serve and respect the authenticity of complex installations is compelling, considering the need to respect their time and site specificity.17 As a matter of fact, the latest generation of im- mersive technologies, together with the most recent theories of the environmentalisation of the image,18 suggest that we reconsider Boris Groys’s assertion about the possibility of interpreting installation as image and image as installation,19 thus confronting art history and theory with visual studies. In this respect, this first volume brings togeth- er different strategies and fields of analysis that have rea- soned about the processes involved. In her essay, Mieke Bal places a strong emphasis on exhibition practices as key for understanding the contemporary realm. Bal calls for the recognition of the interplay between past and present, advo- cating for visitor engagement that solicits affective empathic attitudes. Through her video installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, she stresses the transformative potential of art-making as a tool for cultural analysis. Giuliana Bruno challenges the established no- tion of immersion itself by introducing the concept of “en- vironmental projection.” Bruno invites us to reconsider the ecological dimensions of representation, particularly in terms 16 D. Byrne-Smith, ed., Documents of Contemporary Art: Science Fiction (London: White Chapel Gallery, 2020). 17 B. Ferriani, M. Pugliese, Monumenti effimeri: Storia e conservazione delle installazioni (Milano: Electa, 2009). 18 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Turin: Einaudi, 2021). 19 B. Groys, “Multiple Authorship” in B. Vanderlinden, E. Filipovic, eds. The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005); E. Modena, “Immersi nell’irreale: Prospettive an-iconiche sull’arte contemporanea dall’ambiente alla realtà virtuale,” Carte semiotiche. Rivista internazionale di semiotica e teoria dell’immagine 7 (2021): 71-78. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 8 AN-ICON  of movement and scale. She questions the relationship be- tween immersion and magnification, ultimately proposing the notion of “empathic projection” as a means to transcend human-centric perspectives in immersive experiences. Lucia Corrain’s text delves into the immersive qualities of art, particularly in the Chamber of the Giants by Giulio Romano in Mantua (Italy). Corrain explores the phe- nomenological and ontological aspects of immersion in art, emphasizing the viewer’s sense of awe and estrangement. Filippo Fimiani analyzes allegories of immersion through the lens of the LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS series, con- sidering in particular the episode Fish Night. He examines the cultural topos of immersive experience, highlighting the ambivalent relationship between living bodies, images, and media in deep time-bending scenarios. Roberto Pinto shifts the focus to the intersec- tion of art and history through Jeremy Deller’s immersive performance We Are Here Because We Are Here. Deller’s work exemplifies a change in commemorating historical events, focusing on individual stories and emotions rather than traditional heroic narratives. The artwork engages the audience on a personal level, prompting reflection and emo- tional connection, ultimately redefining the role of public art in collective memory. Francesco Tedeschi’s paper takes the reader on a journey through Italian environmental art, examining the trans- formation of space by artists such as Lucio Fontana, Gruppo T, and others in the 1950s and 1960s. Tedeschi’s investiga- tion focuses on the evolving link between interior and exterior spaces, the concept of passage, and the reasons which invite viewers to traverse rather than merely inhabit spaces. Annette Urban explores the blurred boundaries between art objects, space, and beholders in VR art and exhibitions. She discusses how VR art challenges tradi- tional subject-object relationships and often embeds itself ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 9 AN-ICON  into physical exhibition spaces, resulting in potentiated environmentalisation. Stefano Velotti’s suggestion to revert the usu- al perspective on the concept of “immersivity,” consists in introducing the idea of “an-immersivity,” namely the onto- logical condition of individuals who are immersed in reality but aware of it. In order to do so, he discusses the limits and characteristics of immersive VR experiences, the role of art, and the tension between control and uncontrollability in immersive encounters. Lastly, Giorgio Zanchetti examines the per- sistence of the locution “looking glass,” – that primarily comes from Lewis Carroll’s novel – which highlights the duality of a glass surface as a means of viewing the world and as an object to be observed. Italian artists of the 20th century, such as Lucio Fontana and Luciano Fabro, frequently explored three attitudes: looking through the glass, observing the re- flected image in a mirror, and examining the glass itself as a tool for presenting and representing spaces. The editors of the volume and the AN-ICON proj- ect would like to thank Pirelli HangarBicocca, Giovanna Ama- dasi, and Roberta Tenconi for their essential contribution to the organisation of the conference “Immersed in the Work. From Environment to Virtual Reality” (Milan, June 13th -16th 2022), a seminal occasion of reflection for the development of this thematic double issue. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 10 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19939

Con-Temporary: Thinking and FeelingExhibition Together by Mieke Bal Video essay Don Quijote Political art Artistic process Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Con-Temporary: Thinking and Feeling Together MIEKE BAL, ASCA (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis) – https://orcid.org/0009-0007-5483-3218 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19939 Abstract The paper focuses on exhibition practice, tak- ing exhibitions as the key to contemporaneity. I will make a strong plea for the mutuality between past and present, the encouragement of visitors becoming participants through soliciting affective empathic attitude, and the accommo- dation to make this possible thanks to the enticement of durational looking. I will do this through the theoretical anal- ysis of what exhibiting means and does, and through a consideration of my recent video installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances. One episode of this project will be the hook on which to hang my view of art-making as, not an illustration of but a method of cultural analysis. Keywords Exhibition Video essay Don Quijote Political art Artistic process To quote this essay: M. Bal, “Con-Temporary: Thinking and Feeling Together,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 11-28, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19939. MIEKE BAL 11 AN-ICON  In this article I am particularly keen to explore the implications of the preposition “con-” as a guideline for immersive art. With the qualifier “immersive” I aim to suggest that art can offer insights into the process of art, rather than the aesthetic, intellectual qualities, objecthood, or history of particular artworks. The process is what in- volves people, social issues and contexts, and what is “live” – dynamic, unstoppably moving, and never stable – about art. Art is not a “thing;” we, as its viewers or users, are inside it. In particular, I would like to argue how making audio-visual installations can be a terrific resource for the integration of “academic” reflection and scholarship with art processing through immersion. The making aspect enables me to reflect on and create situations where the relationship with visual art can become a social route while remaining artistically relevant. For this to happen, contemporaneity is key: immersion can only happen in the present. The integration of approaches I have termed “cultural analysis:” the detailed analysis of cultural objects or artefacts, not in isolation but in their live, social and political context, as artistic and aesthetic, intertwined with intellectu- al reflection. The two approaches of detailed, close analysis and framing in context are not in contradiction: this is my starting point. More than 25 years ago I have co-founded an institute at the University of Amsterdam, called ASCA: Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Its goal was and is to promote an approach wherein the socio-political and the contemporary are not in contradiction, only in a productive tension with detailed analysis and lessons in looking; nor is the contemporariness in tension with history. When, in 2002, by chance I found myself in a situation where I had to make a film as a witness statement, witnessing the police injustice against immigration, I bought a small video camera and started filming. It concerned the life of my neighbour – an immigrant “sans papiers.” Meeting him in the courtyard, MIEKE BAL 12 AN-ICON  by chance, seeing his arm was in a cast, I asked him what happened, invited him in, and our conversation about his situation led to an enduring friendship – given the need for mutual trust, this is the a priori condition of making a doc- umentary. With a small group of friends, under the heading of Cinema Suitcase we made a documentary, A Thousand And One Days, obviously alluding to the Arabic classic, and inspired by the name of the collective, a number of doc- umentaries and performance films followed, focusing on “migrimages,” to borrow a term from a research project at the University of Granada indicating visual presentations of situations of migration.1 This was the moment I discovered how deeply making an artwork helps intellectual thinking. But also, how intellectual thinking is never alone. In the book that has appeared in 2022, titled Image-Thinking: Art Making as Cul- tural Analysis I explain in detail how making the films I have since then made, have helped me immensely to deepen my thinking. That is what I have termed “image-thinking,” in an attempt to come up with a term for integration of the different activities of which my work consists. Of course, in a short article I can only briefly touch upon the import- ant questions this endeavour brings up. To make it work, I would like to count on you having seen, or going to see, the episode 6, of 8 minutes, of my installation from 2019, Don Quijote: Tristes figuras, based on fragments from (mostly) the first part of the novel by Cervantes (from 1605). Hard as that decision was, I declined to make a feature film, as I had done with my other projects based on the cultural heritage of fiction. This seemed unacceptable, because 1 For more information about the resulting documentary: https://www.miekebal.org/films/ mille-et-un-jours-(1001-days), accessed July 15, 2023, and M. Bal, “A Thousand and One Voices,” in M. Anders Baggesgaard, J. Ladegaard, eds., Confronting Universalities: Aesthetics and Politics under the Sign of Globalisation (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2011): 269- 304. The third chapter of my book Image-Thinking: Artmaking as Cultural Analysis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022): 90-130 is devoted to the question of “who speaks?” in documentaries, with this film as the example. The term “migrimages” was invented by literary theorist Domingo Sánchez-Mesa Martínez. MIEKE BAL 13 AN-ICON  turning that novel into a linear, coherent narrative film would be a betrayal of the most crucial aspect of the novel: its non-linearity, even incoherence. Instead, an immersive in- stallation, as you can see in the documentation, where we showed its installations done immediately after finishing the project.2 Take the scene Narrative Stuttering, which I hope you have watched or will do so. This scene shows Don Quijote alone on a dark theatrical stage. Sancho Panza is sitting on a chair on the side, helping him when needed, as a prompter. The knight is desperately trying to tell his story, the adventures, his opinions, whatever happened to him, but he is unable to act effectively as a narrator. At the end, he bursts into tears and Sancho holds him in order to comfort him, demonstrating, by physical touch, that he is not entirely alone. See the photograph on the web page, second column. The appeal to empa- thy is a key aspect of what we tried to achieve with this installation. Sancho is giving the example; the visitors can follow his lead (imaginatively). The darkness of the stage deprives the space of perspectival depth. The dark stage isolates him and, at the same time, gives him an audience. The theatrical setting is a material “theoretical fiction” that explores how theatricality can perhaps help to enable the narratively dis- abled. My commitment to addressing the issue of narrative 2 See https://www.miekebal.org/film-projects-1, accessed July 16, 2023. http://miekebal. withtank.com/artworks/installations/don-quijote-sad-countenances/episode-6-narrative- stuttering. For a book on the installation, see M. Bal, Don Quijote: Sad Countenances (Växjö: Trolltrumma, 2019), also in bilingual English-Spanish edition as Don Quijote: Tristes figuras / Don Quijote: Sad Countenances (Murcia: Cendeac, 2020). The installation has been exhibited at a World première in Småland Museum / Kulturparken, Växjö, Sweden (October 31, 2019), then at Usina Cultural, Villa María, Argentina, VIII Congreso (April 26 to May 6, 2022), the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK), as part of the congress of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästhetik (German Society for Aesthetics) Ästhetik und Erkenntnis (July 13-15, 2021). Installed in the Aktionsraum of Toni-Areal (July 13-21, 2021), in the exhibition Art out of Necessity, video installations by Mieke Bal at the Museum Jan Cunen, Oss, Netherlands (October 3, 2020 - January 31, 2021), interrupted mid-December by the second corona lockdown); in the Leeds Arts University Gallery a.k.a. The Blenheim Walk (January 7 - February 14, 2020). Curator: Catriona McAra, and in the Sala de exposiciones, Universidad de Murcia, Facultad de Bellas Artes (November 14, 2019 - January 18, 2020), curated by Jesús Segura. MIEKE BAL 14 AN-ICON  disablement through trauma has been nourished especially when I made, with British artist Michelle Williams Gamak- er, and with the participation of psychoanalyst of trauma Françoise Davoine, the theoretical fiction film A Long Histo- ry of Madness (2011) and installations derived from it. This film is “about” madness, but it also stages, performs, en- acts, and critiques ideas about madness and their cultural history. Based on the 1998 book Mère Folle by Davoine, the film stages the question and practice of the psychoanalytic treatment of people diagnosed as “psychotic” and whom, to avoid narrowing diagnostic discourse, we call “mad.”3 The film raises the art-historical question whether we can say there is an “iconography of madness.” Most of the actors play “madness.” None of them are mad. Davoine’s book, written as a fiction, theorizes this question. In that sense it is a “theoretical fiction.” That term comes from Sigmund Freud. He came up with it to defend his quite crazy story of the sons who kill and eat their tyrannical father. Freud made up a fiction, not simply to explain his theoretical finding of the Oedipus complex, but primarily to develop it through immersion in fiction, which he needed to understand and articulate what he had been intuitively groping toward. This is thinking in, through and with fiction- al characters and events. My book title “Image-Thinking” was derived from Freud’s concept. When, later, I showed my film Reasonable Doubt, on René Descartes and Queen Kristina of Sweden, to an artist friend, she complimented me on the “theatrical” quality of the film. Then I understood why theatricality had, in fact, always been an important aspect of my fiction films. The theatricality helps to do what I have called “exhibiting 3 On this issue of madness as a consequence of trauma, the book by Françoise Davoine Mère folle: Récit (Paris: Hypothèses Arcanes, 1998) is crucial. Our film A Long History of Madness came out in 2011 (directed by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker). For more information: https://www.miekebal.org/films/a-long-history-of-madness, accessed July 16, 2023. See also the special issue on the book and the film: E. Landa, ed., “Cinéma et psychanalyse,” Le Coq-héron 4, no. 211 (2012). MIEKE BAL 15 AN-ICON  ideas.” In the video project based on Don Quijote, this the- atricality is even more prominent, not only in the acting, but in the exhibition itself. The exhibition as installed is, then, itself a “theoretical fiction.” Theatre scholar Kati Röttger considers theatricality a specific mode of perception, a central figure of representation, and an analytic model of crises of representation that can be traced back to changes in the material basis of linguistic behaviour, cultures of perception, and modes of thinking.4 The multi-tentacled description gives theatrical- ity many functions, and foregrounds its inherent intermedial- ity. In addition, and more specifically for our project, theatre and performance scholar Maaike Bleeker gives theatricality the critical edge that the exhibition seeks to achieve when she calls it “a critical vision machine.”5 These two defini- tions together already show that theatricality can offer a critical perspective on the images and ideas that circulate, in this case, in the exhibition that is as mad as the main figure of Cervantes’s novel is generally assumed to be. A madness in which the visitor is immersed. For this need of the narratively incapacitated figure an empathic audience is indispensable. It is the task of the artwork to solicit such an audience. This requires a form of display that changes the traditional museal display, which keeps audience members at a distance and is quite hard on the audience’s physical condition. But it is primarily an artistic issue. This governs the temporality of looking. In the theatre, in contrast to traditional display, visitors can sit, relax, and concentrate. If the display is nearby and 4 K. Röttger, “The Mystery of the In-Between: A Methodological Approach to Intermedial Performance Analysis,” Forum Modernes Theater 28, no. 2 (2018): 105-16, https://doi.org/10.1353/fmt.2013.0014. 5 M. Bleeker, “Being Angela Merkel,” in E. van Alphen, M. Bal C. Smith, eds. The Rhetoric of Sincerity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009): 247-62. See also Bleeker, Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). MIEKE BAL 16 AN-ICON  accessible, and visiting can consist of quietly sitting, the museum can become such a theatre. You see people sitting down, and as a result, talking together about the painting that is in front of them, low-hung, on eye-level. The Don Quijote exhibition seeks to produce such material comfort, and thus will facilitate affective engagement in visitors. The consequence is a radically different temporality of viewing. And time, thus, turns out to be a condition of an immersion that effectively affects. If affect is a vibrant communication between people, or between people and artwork, then they must be given the time, the physical comfort this requires. This imagining, testing, and reasoning regarding the affec- tive effectivity of museum display shows how this project pertains to what is currently called “artistic research” – a search through analysis through artmaking.6 That concept is deeply problematic. It main- tains the hierarchy between academic and artistic research, suggesting that artists can earn academic diplomas if they can explain and articulate how their works came to be. The risk is an over-intellectualizing of art. The linearity built into the concept is deceptive; this is not how art-making hap- pens. As Kamini Vellodi warns us in her Deleuzian critique of the concept of “artistic research:” “it is difficult to deny that a major impetus of artistic research has been econom- ic, policy-driven, and managerial.”7 With these words she invokes the curse that is destroying universities word-wide as we speak. Both art and thought are thus being dam- aged. When thinking is subjected to methods, it becomes 6 I have strongly argued for the relevance of seating in exhibitions in a show I curated at the Munch Museum (Oslo) in 2017 (with a book publication). 7 K. Vellodi, “Thought Beyond Research: A Deleuzian Critique of Artistic Research, ” in P. de Assis, P. Giudici, eds., Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research 2 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2019): 215-33, 216. MIEKE BAL 17 AN-ICON  re-productive. In a Deleuzian view, thought, instead, ought to be the production of the new. This thinking is congenial to art-making, but just as much to academic work. The integration of these two creative activities is explained in my book Thinking in Film from 2013, on the video art by Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahti- la. But the search is not for direct academic answers. The concept of “image-thinking,” in the form of a verb, renders the interaction between thinking and imaging more forceful. To foreground this, we titled an exhibition of my video work in 2019 in Murcia, Spain, Contaminations: Reading, Imag- ining, Imaging. The noun “contaminations” suggests that the art is inevitably in process and “contagious,” having an affective impact, as I said above. The verb “imagining” was my attempt to foreground the way the imagination creates images. The collaboration with Hernández made these issues clearer and the neologisms more productive.8 The fourfold challenge to make a video proj- ect based on Don Quijote engage its troubled relationship between content and form, and between the narrative and visual aspects involved. The research part was, firstly, to decide which aspects of the novel are crucial to make a video work that has a point. Secondly, that point had to connect artistic and social issues, and to improve our un- derstanding of how these two domains can go together, in the contemporary, with the collaboration of the past in what we call “cultural heritage” – here, Cervantes’ novel. The importance of the past for the present, and vice versa, how our present changes the past as we can see it, must be foregrounded on the basis of non-chronological, mutual relations. The fourth chapter of my new book, Multi-Tenta- cled Time: Contemporaneity, Heterochrony, Anachronism for Pre-posterous History analyses time in its multiplicity. 8 That exhibition was curated by Miguel Ángel Hernández. A collective volume, edited by Hernández, was published in 2020. MIEKE BAL 18 AN-ICON  This is also a central concern both in narrative theory and in film.9 In my academic work I have a controversial reputation as someone who does not take chronology for granted. After publishing Reading “Rembrandt” (1991) I was blamed for being ahistorical, which, although not true, was a stimulating incentive to think harder about histori- cal time. That led to my book Quoting Caravaggio (1999), in which I addressed that critique, and developed a new sense of history in relation to time. But it was when, already filmmaking, I was working with Miguel Ángel Hernández Navarro on a large collective video exhibition devoted to the connections between the movement of images and the movement of people, in other words, video and migration (not on migration), that my thinking about temporality took another turn. 2MOVE (the exhibition), was shown in four countries, with in each a local artist added. The last concept in the chapter’s title, “pre-pos- terous history,” is presented again through my latest, 2020 short “essay film” It’s About Time! This film, the title of which is as ambiguous as the concept of “pre-posterous history” with its self-ironic wink, addresses the world’s self-destruc- tive impulse. It does this through the voice of Christa Wolf’s character Cassandra. She was the prophetess from antiquity, who will see and know the future, as a gift with the purpose of seduction from the god Apollo. But when she refused to sleep with her employer, he punished her: she was doomed never be believed. An antique case of #MeToo. In that fourth chapter I discuss the different is- sues of time that, in narrative theory, are usually divided into order, rhythm, and duration. I complicate that tripartite 9 M. Bal, Image-Thinking: 131-74. I have first developed this neologism, “pre-posterous history,” in my book on Caravaggio in its mutual relationship with contemporary art Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). “Multi-tentacled” stands for the plurality of temporal relationships, for which I chose the octopus as a symbol. MIEKE BAL 19 AN-ICON  theory by adding the experiential aspect (heterochrony) and the categories of the historical disciplines. This rethinking of chronology has an important impact on how we see our- selves in history. For the first time I have taken a biograph- ical fact on the novel’s author on board. This “fact” is the five-and-a-half years Cervantes spent as a slave in Algiers, without knowing he would ever get out. If we take this on, all the adventures, the madness, the violence that colour the adventures of the Knight Errant, get a different shade. On my reading, the issue that rules the novel’s aesthetic is the difficulty of story-telling due to the horror encountered. This is now called “post-traumatic stress disorder” – except that, as usual, the preposition “post-” perverts the connections between past and present. The traumatized subject is “dis- ordered” because, precisely, the trauma doesn’t go away. There is nothing “post-” possible for the trau- matized. The insights the novel generates connect to other experiences of war, violence, and captivity: contemporary ones. You can see succinctly what the consequences of traumatization tend to be, according to a very lucid article by Ernst van Alphen. The author analyses the experiential handicaps resulting from trauma as well as the narrative ones. To sum it up succinctly: as a failed experience, trau- ma leads to semiotic incapacitation, unavailable forms of representation, the stalling of the discursive process, which would be needed for having experiences. Specifically, in narrative terms, ambiguous actantial position, the negation of subjectivity, the lack of meaning-giving plot, and unac- ceptable frames. But a well-thought-through immersive video project can explore and transgress the limits of what MIEKE BAL 20 AN-ICON  can be seen, shown, narrated, and empathically witnessed, in relation to notoriously un-representable trauma.10 Full of incongruous events and repetitive sto- ries, maddening implausibility, lengthy interruptions of the story-line, inserted poems and novellas, and at the same time, anchored in a harrowing reality, while also making readers laugh out loud, this novel, in form and content, challenges reading itself. This requires interdisciplinarity, in all meanings of that preposition “inter-.” I have termed it “intership.” The similarity to the word “internship” suggests that this, too, concerns learning, as a practice of mutuality. Film seems the least apt to do justice to the novel’s turbulent incoherence, repetitiveness, and incon- gruous adventures told in the novel. Talking about it with actor Mathieu Montanier, who came up with the idea of making a Don Quijote video work, we decided that an im- mersive video installation consisting of different, non-linear episodes presented with seating would be more effective in showing, rather than representing, not the moment trauma occurs but enduring violence-generated traumatic states. The importance of showing is to enable witnessing as an engaged activity against the indifference of the world, our worst opponent. The ambition was to make a work the theatricality of which in immersive display helps to turn onlookers and voyeurs into activated, empathic witnesses. This artwork must yield “thought-images” or Denkbilder, created by means of “image-thinking.” The small iconic texts that Adorno, Benjamin, Kracauer wrote, were texts only. What did the word Bilder do there, then? This is where “image-thinking” can meet, and yield, “thought-im- ages.” In a study of the genre, US-based scholar of German 10 E. v. Alphen, “Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, Trauma,” in M Bal, J. Crewe, L. Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover NH: University of New England Press, 1999): 24-38. MIEKE BAL 21 AN-ICON  Gerhard Richter begins his description with a whole range of negativities. Indeed, a programmatic treatise would be something like a political pamphlet, as opposed to histor- ical objectivations – an opposition that audio-visual art is devoted to questioning. This is an important point in con- nection to attempts to separate political art or scholarship from propaganda. The difference is important: propagan- da dictates, as in dictators, which is close to imposing; whereas political art and scholarship expose and propose, but leave the freedom of the addressees intact; as long as they are immersed, so that they are enticed to respond to the art they see. What Richter disparagingly calls “fanciful fiction” stands opposed to an equally dismissed “mere reflections of reality.” “Rather,” Richter continues, “the min- iatures of the Denkbild can be understood as conceptual engagements with the aesthetic and as aesthetic engage- ments with the conceptual, hovering between philosophical critique and aesthetic production.”11 The word “engage- ment” is crucial; it requires contemporaneity. This matches Benjamin’s fifth thesis on images of the past, which has been a guideline for my work on art between history and anachronism: “Every image of the past that is not recog- nized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”12 This warning is one of the main motors of immersive projects and needs endorsement of their contemporariness. For, the cultural heritage from the 11 G. Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections on Damaged Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007): 2. 12 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: The Bodley Head, 2015): 245-55, 247. MIEKE BAL 22 AN-ICON  past matters for today’s world. But only if we manage to bring it to bear on the present.13 Richter further describes the thought-image thus: “The Denkbild encodes a poetic form of condensed, epigrammatic writing in textual snapshots, flashing up as poignant meditations that typically fasten upon a seemingly peripheral detail or marginal topic.”14 The word “flashes up” suggests the quick flash that Benjamin urges us to preserve by means of recognition in the first sentences of that thesis V from which I now quote a later sentence: “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”15 This also connects to the question of historical truth, at stake in the scene “Who is Don Quijote?”16 In this regard, in his Aesthetic Theory Adorno writes: What cannot be proved in the customary style and yet is com- pelling — that is to spur on the spontaneity and energy of thought and, without being taken literally, to strike sparks through a kind of intellectual short-circuiting that casts a sudden light on the familiar and perhaps sets it on fire.17 As in Benjamin’s thesis, as well as Lyotard’s fig- urality, the language here is again both visual and shock-ori- ented, with “sparks,” “short-circuiting,” “sudden light” and “sets it on fire.” This is thought alive, living thought, here-now, 13 On this necessary contemporaneity I have published the short book Exhibition-ism: Temporal Togetherness in the series The Contemporary Condition (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020), requested by the author of a fabulous later book on contemporariness: J. Lund, The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in the Time of Contemporaneity (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2022). My point was the idea that exhibitions are the most precise “model” for the contemporary. 14 G. Richter, Thought-Images: 2. 15 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History:” 247. 16 See for this scene, http://miekebal.withtank.com/artworks/installations/don-quijote- sad-countenances/episode-4-who-is-don-quijote/. This scene also suggests that the actor, Mathieu Montanier, bears a striking resemblance to the (totally imaginative and imaged) figure who never existed historically, but of whom we have a clear image. 17 T. W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form” (1954-58), in Notes to Literature, trans. S. Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991): vol.1, 3-23. MIEKE BAL 23 AN-ICON  and this living thought has agency; it is capable of engag- ing viewers in a dialogic relationship. And it is visual. For such sparks to happen, thought needs a formal innovation that shocks, and time to make immersion in it, possible. Thus, it can gain new energy and life, involve people, and make thought a collective process rather than the kind of still images we call clichés. Our attempt to achieve such “sparking,” shocking innovation can be glimpsed in this photograph by Ebba Sund: the frame is both blurred, since the escaping slave leaves it behind, and foregrounded, in the large proportions the iron bars have compared to the fleeing man (Fig. 1). Fig. 1. Mieke Bal, The Captive escapes, photograph by Ebba Sund. An epsiode of the 16-screen installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, 2019, video, color, Dolby sound, 8 minutes. Courtesy the artist. In the videos, such sparks lay in the combina- tion of material, practical changes of the mode of display as immersive, short-circuiting the anachronistic bond be- tween present and past, the confusion of languages and other categories we tend to take for granted as homoge- neous, and the intermediality of the audio-visualization of a literary masterpiece. In view of the need for witnessing, such a messy “thinking” form enables and activates view- ers to construct their own story, and connect it to what they have seen around them; on the condition that they MIEKE BAL 24 AN-ICON  are immersed through being given time. Thus, we aimed to turn the hysteria of endless story-telling into a reflection on communication, as it can breach, and reach beyond, the boundaries that madness draws around its captive subjects, and instead, open up their subjectivity. Here, in the brilliant photograph also by Ebba Sund, the Captive cannot speak; his mouth is visually muzzled. But his eyes do speak, to us – if we are given the time, through seating, to respond (Fig. 2). Fig. 2. Mieke Bal, episode 6 of the 16-screen installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, 2019, video, color, Dolby sound, 8 minutes. Courtesy the artist. To give insight into the stagnation that char- acterises the adventures, these scenes are predominantly descriptive. Any attempt at narrative is “stuttering,” without development. The scene Narrative Stuttering I recommend- ed you watch before reading this essay, shows both the in- capacitation to narrate and the frustration this causes. The theatrical setting is meant to draw visitors’ attention to the way they are themselves situated: inside a theatre, sitting on the stage, rather than in front of it, where they can fall asleep or get excited, identify or not, and possibly remain indiffer- ent. Here, such indifference is hard to sustain, because the viewers’ freedom to determine themselves how long they wish to stay with a scene makes falling asleep contradictory. MIEKE BAL 25 AN-ICON  This is the tentative design of the installation I made be- forehand, suggesting the total arbitrariness of the lay-out. The different installations follow this design roughly (Fig. 3). Fig. 3. Mieke Bal, project for the design of the 16-screen installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, 2019. Courtesy the artist. What Françoise Davoine calls, citing histori- an Fernand Braudel: “poussières d’événements” (literally, dust of events) is the motto of this work’s form: sprinkling situations, moments, throughout the gallery space. This is adequate to the state of trauma presented in the pieces and in the juxtapositions among them. The disorderly dis- play gives a shape, however unreadable and unclear, to the trauma-induced madness of the novel’s form. Cervantes, I presume, was one of those “mad” ones. The trauma incurred by Cervantes after being held in captivity as a slave, has been beautifully traced in his writ- ings and those of contemporary witnesses by Colombian literary historian María Antonia Garcés, a must-read book for anyone interested in Cervantes, Don Quijote, or slavery, then and now. Con-temporary. As it happens, Garcés was held captive by the FARC terrorist guerillos for five months. This contemporaneity is incompatible with the ridiculing representation of the “mad Knight Errant” that is so routine, both in cinematic representations and in much of the schol- arship. Supported by Garcés’s well-documented analysis, I MIEKE BAL 26 AN-ICON  see a haunting autobiographical spirit in the three chapters on the Captive (pp. 39-41 of part I). But the shape of the theatrical display does not “re-present” the madness. It hints at it, makes us reflect on it. The Denkbild is in the form, so that a contem- porary aesthetic can reach out to, and touch, a situation of long ago that, as befits the stilled temporality of trau- ma, persists in the present. Through experimenting with possible forms of the art of video, we attempted to invent new forms for the formlessness of trauma. By means of image-thinking this installation had to answer to the para- doxical concept, or thought-image, of the shape of form- lessness. Here, theatricality returns: ostensibly acting is the form that does not overrule the history, the violence, or the traumatic state. Acting, these videos suggest, is a social role. Acting, and making videos, exhibiting them in a thought-through immersive mode, is an attempt to give the formlessness of society a form. This is an attempt to do just that: to shape formlessness as the form of the trau- matic state, by designing a display that is both theatrical, in that it appeals to empathy, and turns “live,” that primary characteristic of theatre, into “life,” which concerns the social reality we live in and are responsible to sustain; and the knowledge acquired through the integration of making, analysing, reflecting, and boldly proposing new insights. Filmmaking begins with casting. In the case of Don Quijote, the actor cast himself; knowing he was the spitting image of the character as we know, or think we know him. An earlier significant casting decision occurred when Michelle Williams Gamaker and I decided to cast the three men in Emma’s life, in Madame B, in the same actor, suggesting the woman was in love with love and its prom- ises of excitement, not with any man in particular. I have made many films and installation pieces, over the last twenty years, and I guarantee you, there is MIEKE BAL 27 AN-ICON  no more effective mode of doing research and developing ideas than integrating these two activities. You can learn more about these films on the relevant page of my web- site. So, let me end on my personal motto, already cited, which demands the remedy of immersion: “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” This is pre-posterous history. The past without present is pointless. The present without past is empty. But as soon as we try to fix either one, the future disappears. MIEKE BAL 28 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19939

Con-Temporary: Thinking and FeelingExhibition Together by Mieke Bal Video essay Don Quijote Political art Artistic process Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Con-Temporary: Thinking and Feeling Together MIEKE BAL, ASCA (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis) – https://orcid.org/0009-0007-5483-3218 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19939 Abstract The paper focuses on exhibition practice, tak- ing exhibitions as the key to contemporaneity. I will make a strong plea for the mutuality between past and present, the encouragement of visitors becoming participants through soliciting affective empathic attitude, and the accommo- dation to make this possible thanks to the enticement of durational looking. I will do this through the theoretical anal- ysis of what exhibiting means and does, and through a consideration of my recent video installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances. One episode of this project will be the hook on which to hang my view of art-making as, not an illustration of but a method of cultural analysis. Keywords Exhibition Video essay Don Quijote Political art Artistic process To quote this essay: M. Bal, “Con-Temporary: Thinking and Feeling Together,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 11-28, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19939. MIEKE BAL 11 AN-ICON  In this article I am particularly keen to explore the implications of the preposition “con-” as a guideline for immersive art. With the qualifier “immersive” I aim to suggest that art can offer insights into the process of art, rather than the aesthetic, intellectual qualities, objecthood, or history of particular artworks. The process is what in- volves people, social issues and contexts, and what is “live” – dynamic, unstoppably moving, and never stable – about art. Art is not a “thing;” we, as its viewers or users, are inside it. In particular, I would like to argue how making audio-visual installations can be a terrific resource for the integration of “academic” reflection and scholarship with art processing through immersion. The making aspect enables me to reflect on and create situations where the relationship with visual art can become a social route while remaining artistically relevant. For this to happen, contemporaneity is key: immersion can only happen in the present. The integration of approaches I have termed “cultural analysis:” the detailed analysis of cultural objects or artefacts, not in isolation but in their live, social and political context, as artistic and aesthetic, intertwined with intellectu- al reflection. The two approaches of detailed, close analysis and framing in context are not in contradiction: this is my starting point. More than 25 years ago I have co-founded an institute at the University of Amsterdam, called ASCA: Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Its goal was and is to promote an approach wherein the socio-political and the contemporary are not in contradiction, only in a productive tension with detailed analysis and lessons in looking; nor is the contemporariness in tension with history. When, in 2002, by chance I found myself in a situation where I had to make a film as a witness statement, witnessing the police injustice against immigration, I bought a small video camera and started filming. It concerned the life of my neighbour – an immigrant “sans papiers.” Meeting him in the courtyard, MIEKE BAL 12 AN-ICON  by chance, seeing his arm was in a cast, I asked him what happened, invited him in, and our conversation about his situation led to an enduring friendship – given the need for mutual trust, this is the a priori condition of making a doc- umentary. With a small group of friends, under the heading of Cinema Suitcase we made a documentary, A Thousand And One Days, obviously alluding to the Arabic classic, and inspired by the name of the collective, a number of doc- umentaries and performance films followed, focusing on “migrimages,” to borrow a term from a research project at the University of Granada indicating visual presentations of situations of migration.1 This was the moment I discovered how deeply making an artwork helps intellectual thinking. But also, how intellectual thinking is never alone. In the book that has appeared in 2022, titled Image-Thinking: Art Making as Cul- tural Analysis I explain in detail how making the films I have since then made, have helped me immensely to deepen my thinking. That is what I have termed “image-thinking,” in an attempt to come up with a term for integration of the different activities of which my work consists. Of course, in a short article I can only briefly touch upon the import- ant questions this endeavour brings up. To make it work, I would like to count on you having seen, or going to see, the episode 6, of 8 minutes, of my installation from 2019, Don Quijote: Tristes figuras, based on fragments from (mostly) the first part of the novel by Cervantes (from 1605). Hard as that decision was, I declined to make a feature film, as I had done with my other projects based on the cultural heritage of fiction. This seemed unacceptable, because 1 For more information about the resulting documentary: https://www.miekebal.org/films/ mille-et-un-jours-(1001-days), accessed July 15, 2023, and M. Bal, “A Thousand and One Voices,” in M. Anders Baggesgaard, J. Ladegaard, eds., Confronting Universalities: Aesthetics and Politics under the Sign of Globalisation (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2011): 269- 304. The third chapter of my book Image-Thinking: Artmaking as Cultural Analysis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022): 90-130 is devoted to the question of “who speaks?” in documentaries, with this film as the example. The term “migrimages” was invented by literary theorist Domingo Sánchez-Mesa Martínez. MIEKE BAL 13 AN-ICON  turning that novel into a linear, coherent narrative film would be a betrayal of the most crucial aspect of the novel: its non-linearity, even incoherence. Instead, an immersive in- stallation, as you can see in the documentation, where we showed its installations done immediately after finishing the project.2 Take the scene Narrative Stuttering, which I hope you have watched or will do so. This scene shows Don Quijote alone on a dark theatrical stage. Sancho Panza is sitting on a chair on the side, helping him when needed, as a prompter. The knight is desperately trying to tell his story, the adventures, his opinions, whatever happened to him, but he is unable to act effectively as a narrator. At the end, he bursts into tears and Sancho holds him in order to comfort him, demonstrating, by physical touch, that he is not entirely alone. See the photograph on the web page, second column. The appeal to empa- thy is a key aspect of what we tried to achieve with this installation. Sancho is giving the example; the visitors can follow his lead (imaginatively). The darkness of the stage deprives the space of perspectival depth. The dark stage isolates him and, at the same time, gives him an audience. The theatrical setting is a material “theoretical fiction” that explores how theatricality can perhaps help to enable the narratively dis- abled. My commitment to addressing the issue of narrative 2 See https://www.miekebal.org/film-projects-1, accessed July 16, 2023. http://miekebal. withtank.com/artworks/installations/don-quijote-sad-countenances/episode-6-narrative- stuttering. For a book on the installation, see M. Bal, Don Quijote: Sad Countenances (Växjö: Trolltrumma, 2019), also in bilingual English-Spanish edition as Don Quijote: Tristes figuras / Don Quijote: Sad Countenances (Murcia: Cendeac, 2020). The installation has been exhibited at a World première in Småland Museum / Kulturparken, Växjö, Sweden (October 31, 2019), then at Usina Cultural, Villa María, Argentina, VIII Congreso (April 26 to May 6, 2022), the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK), as part of the congress of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästhetik (German Society for Aesthetics) Ästhetik und Erkenntnis (July 13-15, 2021). Installed in the Aktionsraum of Toni-Areal (July 13-21, 2021), in the exhibition Art out of Necessity, video installations by Mieke Bal at the Museum Jan Cunen, Oss, Netherlands (October 3, 2020 - January 31, 2021), interrupted mid-December by the second corona lockdown); in the Leeds Arts University Gallery a.k.a. The Blenheim Walk (January 7 - February 14, 2020). Curator: Catriona McAra, and in the Sala de exposiciones, Universidad de Murcia, Facultad de Bellas Artes (November 14, 2019 - January 18, 2020), curated by Jesús Segura. MIEKE BAL 14 AN-ICON  disablement through trauma has been nourished especially when I made, with British artist Michelle Williams Gamak- er, and with the participation of psychoanalyst of trauma Françoise Davoine, the theoretical fiction film A Long Histo- ry of Madness (2011) and installations derived from it. This film is “about” madness, but it also stages, performs, en- acts, and critiques ideas about madness and their cultural history. Based on the 1998 book Mère Folle by Davoine, the film stages the question and practice of the psychoanalytic treatment of people diagnosed as “psychotic” and whom, to avoid narrowing diagnostic discourse, we call “mad.”3 The film raises the art-historical question whether we can say there is an “iconography of madness.” Most of the actors play “madness.” None of them are mad. Davoine’s book, written as a fiction, theorizes this question. In that sense it is a “theoretical fiction.” That term comes from Sigmund Freud. He came up with it to defend his quite crazy story of the sons who kill and eat their tyrannical father. Freud made up a fiction, not simply to explain his theoretical finding of the Oedipus complex, but primarily to develop it through immersion in fiction, which he needed to understand and articulate what he had been intuitively groping toward. This is thinking in, through and with fiction- al characters and events. My book title “Image-Thinking” was derived from Freud’s concept. When, later, I showed my film Reasonable Doubt, on René Descartes and Queen Kristina of Sweden, to an artist friend, she complimented me on the “theatrical” quality of the film. Then I understood why theatricality had, in fact, always been an important aspect of my fiction films. The theatricality helps to do what I have called “exhibiting 3 On this issue of madness as a consequence of trauma, the book by Françoise Davoine Mère folle: Récit (Paris: Hypothèses Arcanes, 1998) is crucial. Our film A Long History of Madness came out in 2011 (directed by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker). For more information: https://www.miekebal.org/films/a-long-history-of-madness, accessed July 16, 2023. See also the special issue on the book and the film: E. Landa, ed., “Cinéma et psychanalyse,” Le Coq-héron 4, no. 211 (2012). MIEKE BAL 15 AN-ICON  ideas.” In the video project based on Don Quijote, this the- atricality is even more prominent, not only in the acting, but in the exhibition itself. The exhibition as installed is, then, itself a “theoretical fiction.” Theatre scholar Kati Röttger considers theatricality a specific mode of perception, a central figure of representation, and an analytic model of crises of representation that can be traced back to changes in the material basis of linguistic behaviour, cultures of perception, and modes of thinking.4 The multi-tentacled description gives theatrical- ity many functions, and foregrounds its inherent intermedial- ity. In addition, and more specifically for our project, theatre and performance scholar Maaike Bleeker gives theatricality the critical edge that the exhibition seeks to achieve when she calls it “a critical vision machine.”5 These two defini- tions together already show that theatricality can offer a critical perspective on the images and ideas that circulate, in this case, in the exhibition that is as mad as the main figure of Cervantes’s novel is generally assumed to be. A madness in which the visitor is immersed. For this need of the narratively incapacitated figure an empathic audience is indispensable. It is the task of the artwork to solicit such an audience. This requires a form of display that changes the traditional museal display, which keeps audience members at a distance and is quite hard on the audience’s physical condition. But it is primarily an artistic issue. This governs the temporality of looking. In the theatre, in contrast to traditional display, visitors can sit, relax, and concentrate. If the display is nearby and 4 K. Röttger, “The Mystery of the In-Between: A Methodological Approach to Intermedial Performance Analysis,” Forum Modernes Theater 28, no. 2 (2018): 105-16, https://doi.org/10.1353/fmt.2013.0014. 5 M. Bleeker, “Being Angela Merkel,” in E. van Alphen, M. Bal C. Smith, eds. The Rhetoric of Sincerity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009): 247-62. See also Bleeker, Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). MIEKE BAL 16 AN-ICON  accessible, and visiting can consist of quietly sitting, the museum can become such a theatre. You see people sitting down, and as a result, talking together about the painting that is in front of them, low-hung, on eye-level. The Don Quijote exhibition seeks to produce such material comfort, and thus will facilitate affective engagement in visitors. The consequence is a radically different temporality of viewing. And time, thus, turns out to be a condition of an immersion that effectively affects. If affect is a vibrant communication between people, or between people and artwork, then they must be given the time, the physical comfort this requires. This imagining, testing, and reasoning regarding the affec- tive effectivity of museum display shows how this project pertains to what is currently called “artistic research” – a search through analysis through artmaking.6 That concept is deeply problematic. It main- tains the hierarchy between academic and artistic research, suggesting that artists can earn academic diplomas if they can explain and articulate how their works came to be. The risk is an over-intellectualizing of art. The linearity built into the concept is deceptive; this is not how art-making hap- pens. As Kamini Vellodi warns us in her Deleuzian critique of the concept of “artistic research:” “it is difficult to deny that a major impetus of artistic research has been econom- ic, policy-driven, and managerial.”7 With these words she invokes the curse that is destroying universities word-wide as we speak. Both art and thought are thus being dam- aged. When thinking is subjected to methods, it becomes 6 I have strongly argued for the relevance of seating in exhibitions in a show I curated at the Munch Museum (Oslo) in 2017 (with a book publication). 7 K. Vellodi, “Thought Beyond Research: A Deleuzian Critique of Artistic Research, ” in P. de Assis, P. Giudici, eds., Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research 2 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2019): 215-33, 216. MIEKE BAL 17 AN-ICON  re-productive. In a Deleuzian view, thought, instead, ought to be the production of the new. This thinking is congenial to art-making, but just as much to academic work. The integration of these two creative activities is explained in my book Thinking in Film from 2013, on the video art by Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahti- la. But the search is not for direct academic answers. The concept of “image-thinking,” in the form of a verb, renders the interaction between thinking and imaging more forceful. To foreground this, we titled an exhibition of my video work in 2019 in Murcia, Spain, Contaminations: Reading, Imag- ining, Imaging. The noun “contaminations” suggests that the art is inevitably in process and “contagious,” having an affective impact, as I said above. The verb “imagining” was my attempt to foreground the way the imagination creates images. The collaboration with Hernández made these issues clearer and the neologisms more productive.8 The fourfold challenge to make a video proj- ect based on Don Quijote engage its troubled relationship between content and form, and between the narrative and visual aspects involved. The research part was, firstly, to decide which aspects of the novel are crucial to make a video work that has a point. Secondly, that point had to connect artistic and social issues, and to improve our un- derstanding of how these two domains can go together, in the contemporary, with the collaboration of the past in what we call “cultural heritage” – here, Cervantes’ novel. The importance of the past for the present, and vice versa, how our present changes the past as we can see it, must be foregrounded on the basis of non-chronological, mutual relations. The fourth chapter of my new book, Multi-Tenta- cled Time: Contemporaneity, Heterochrony, Anachronism for Pre-posterous History analyses time in its multiplicity. 8 That exhibition was curated by Miguel Ángel Hernández. A collective volume, edited by Hernández, was published in 2020. MIEKE BAL 18 AN-ICON  This is also a central concern both in narrative theory and in film.9 In my academic work I have a controversial reputation as someone who does not take chronology for granted. After publishing Reading “Rembrandt” (1991) I was blamed for being ahistorical, which, although not true, was a stimulating incentive to think harder about histori- cal time. That led to my book Quoting Caravaggio (1999), in which I addressed that critique, and developed a new sense of history in relation to time. But it was when, already filmmaking, I was working with Miguel Ángel Hernández Navarro on a large collective video exhibition devoted to the connections between the movement of images and the movement of people, in other words, video and migration (not on migration), that my thinking about temporality took another turn. 2MOVE (the exhibition), was shown in four countries, with in each a local artist added. The last concept in the chapter’s title, “pre-pos- terous history,” is presented again through my latest, 2020 short “essay film” It’s About Time! This film, the title of which is as ambiguous as the concept of “pre-posterous history” with its self-ironic wink, addresses the world’s self-destruc- tive impulse. It does this through the voice of Christa Wolf’s character Cassandra. She was the prophetess from antiquity, who will see and know the future, as a gift with the purpose of seduction from the god Apollo. But when she refused to sleep with her employer, he punished her: she was doomed never be believed. An antique case of #MeToo. In that fourth chapter I discuss the different is- sues of time that, in narrative theory, are usually divided into order, rhythm, and duration. I complicate that tripartite 9 M. Bal, Image-Thinking: 131-74. I have first developed this neologism, “pre-posterous history,” in my book on Caravaggio in its mutual relationship with contemporary art Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). “Multi-tentacled” stands for the plurality of temporal relationships, for which I chose the octopus as a symbol. MIEKE BAL 19 AN-ICON  theory by adding the experiential aspect (heterochrony) and the categories of the historical disciplines. This rethinking of chronology has an important impact on how we see our- selves in history. For the first time I have taken a biograph- ical fact on the novel’s author on board. This “fact” is the five-and-a-half years Cervantes spent as a slave in Algiers, without knowing he would ever get out. If we take this on, all the adventures, the madness, the violence that colour the adventures of the Knight Errant, get a different shade. On my reading, the issue that rules the novel’s aesthetic is the difficulty of story-telling due to the horror encountered. This is now called “post-traumatic stress disorder” – except that, as usual, the preposition “post-” perverts the connections between past and present. The traumatized subject is “dis- ordered” because, precisely, the trauma doesn’t go away. There is nothing “post-” possible for the trau- matized. The insights the novel generates connect to other experiences of war, violence, and captivity: contemporary ones. You can see succinctly what the consequences of traumatization tend to be, according to a very lucid article by Ernst van Alphen. The author analyses the experiential handicaps resulting from trauma as well as the narrative ones. To sum it up succinctly: as a failed experience, trau- ma leads to semiotic incapacitation, unavailable forms of representation, the stalling of the discursive process, which would be needed for having experiences. Specifically, in narrative terms, ambiguous actantial position, the negation of subjectivity, the lack of meaning-giving plot, and unac- ceptable frames. But a well-thought-through immersive video project can explore and transgress the limits of what MIEKE BAL 20 AN-ICON  can be seen, shown, narrated, and empathically witnessed, in relation to notoriously un-representable trauma.10 Full of incongruous events and repetitive sto- ries, maddening implausibility, lengthy interruptions of the story-line, inserted poems and novellas, and at the same time, anchored in a harrowing reality, while also making readers laugh out loud, this novel, in form and content, challenges reading itself. This requires interdisciplinarity, in all meanings of that preposition “inter-.” I have termed it “intership.” The similarity to the word “internship” suggests that this, too, concerns learning, as a practice of mutuality. Film seems the least apt to do justice to the novel’s turbulent incoherence, repetitiveness, and incon- gruous adventures told in the novel. Talking about it with actor Mathieu Montanier, who came up with the idea of making a Don Quijote video work, we decided that an im- mersive video installation consisting of different, non-linear episodes presented with seating would be more effective in showing, rather than representing, not the moment trauma occurs but enduring violence-generated traumatic states. The importance of showing is to enable witnessing as an engaged activity against the indifference of the world, our worst opponent. The ambition was to make a work the theatricality of which in immersive display helps to turn onlookers and voyeurs into activated, empathic witnesses. This artwork must yield “thought-images” or Denkbilder, created by means of “image-thinking.” The small iconic texts that Adorno, Benjamin, Kracauer wrote, were texts only. What did the word Bilder do there, then? This is where “image-thinking” can meet, and yield, “thought-im- ages.” In a study of the genre, US-based scholar of German 10 E. v. Alphen, “Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, Trauma,” in M Bal, J. Crewe, L. Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover NH: University of New England Press, 1999): 24-38. MIEKE BAL 21 AN-ICON  Gerhard Richter begins his description with a whole range of negativities. Indeed, a programmatic treatise would be something like a political pamphlet, as opposed to histor- ical objectivations – an opposition that audio-visual art is devoted to questioning. This is an important point in con- nection to attempts to separate political art or scholarship from propaganda. The difference is important: propagan- da dictates, as in dictators, which is close to imposing; whereas political art and scholarship expose and propose, but leave the freedom of the addressees intact; as long as they are immersed, so that they are enticed to respond to the art they see. What Richter disparagingly calls “fanciful fiction” stands opposed to an equally dismissed “mere reflections of reality.” “Rather,” Richter continues, “the min- iatures of the Denkbild can be understood as conceptual engagements with the aesthetic and as aesthetic engage- ments with the conceptual, hovering between philosophical critique and aesthetic production.”11 The word “engage- ment” is crucial; it requires contemporaneity. This matches Benjamin’s fifth thesis on images of the past, which has been a guideline for my work on art between history and anachronism: “Every image of the past that is not recog- nized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”12 This warning is one of the main motors of immersive projects and needs endorsement of their contemporariness. For, the cultural heritage from the 11 G. Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections on Damaged Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007): 2. 12 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: The Bodley Head, 2015): 245-55, 247. MIEKE BAL 22 AN-ICON  past matters for today’s world. But only if we manage to bring it to bear on the present.13 Richter further describes the thought-image thus: “The Denkbild encodes a poetic form of condensed, epigrammatic writing in textual snapshots, flashing up as poignant meditations that typically fasten upon a seemingly peripheral detail or marginal topic.”14 The word “flashes up” suggests the quick flash that Benjamin urges us to preserve by means of recognition in the first sentences of that thesis V from which I now quote a later sentence: “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”15 This also connects to the question of historical truth, at stake in the scene “Who is Don Quijote?”16 In this regard, in his Aesthetic Theory Adorno writes: What cannot be proved in the customary style and yet is com- pelling — that is to spur on the spontaneity and energy of thought and, without being taken literally, to strike sparks through a kind of intellectual short-circuiting that casts a sudden light on the familiar and perhaps sets it on fire.17 As in Benjamin’s thesis, as well as Lyotard’s fig- urality, the language here is again both visual and shock-ori- ented, with “sparks,” “short-circuiting,” “sudden light” and “sets it on fire.” This is thought alive, living thought, here-now, 13 On this necessary contemporaneity I have published the short book Exhibition-ism: Temporal Togetherness in the series The Contemporary Condition (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020), requested by the author of a fabulous later book on contemporariness: J. Lund, The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in the Time of Contemporaneity (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2022). My point was the idea that exhibitions are the most precise “model” for the contemporary. 14 G. Richter, Thought-Images: 2. 15 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History:” 247. 16 See for this scene, http://miekebal.withtank.com/artworks/installations/don-quijote- sad-countenances/episode-4-who-is-don-quijote/. This scene also suggests that the actor, Mathieu Montanier, bears a striking resemblance to the (totally imaginative and imaged) figure who never existed historically, but of whom we have a clear image. 17 T. W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form” (1954-58), in Notes to Literature, trans. S. Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991): vol.1, 3-23. MIEKE BAL 23 AN-ICON  and this living thought has agency; it is capable of engag- ing viewers in a dialogic relationship. And it is visual. For such sparks to happen, thought needs a formal innovation that shocks, and time to make immersion in it, possible. Thus, it can gain new energy and life, involve people, and make thought a collective process rather than the kind of still images we call clichés. Our attempt to achieve such “sparking,” shocking innovation can be glimpsed in this photograph by Ebba Sund: the frame is both blurred, since the escaping slave leaves it behind, and foregrounded, in the large proportions the iron bars have compared to the fleeing man (Fig. 1). Fig. 1. Mieke Bal, The Captive escapes, photograph by Ebba Sund. An epsiode of the 16-screen installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, 2019, video, color, Dolby sound, 8 minutes. Courtesy the artist. In the videos, such sparks lay in the combina- tion of material, practical changes of the mode of display as immersive, short-circuiting the anachronistic bond be- tween present and past, the confusion of languages and other categories we tend to take for granted as homoge- neous, and the intermediality of the audio-visualization of a literary masterpiece. In view of the need for witnessing, such a messy “thinking” form enables and activates view- ers to construct their own story, and connect it to what they have seen around them; on the condition that they MIEKE BAL 24 AN-ICON  are immersed through being given time. Thus, we aimed to turn the hysteria of endless story-telling into a reflection on communication, as it can breach, and reach beyond, the boundaries that madness draws around its captive subjects, and instead, open up their subjectivity. Here, in the brilliant photograph also by Ebba Sund, the Captive cannot speak; his mouth is visually muzzled. But his eyes do speak, to us – if we are given the time, through seating, to respond (Fig. 2). Fig. 2. Mieke Bal, episode 6 of the 16-screen installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, 2019, video, color, Dolby sound, 8 minutes. Courtesy the artist. To give insight into the stagnation that char- acterises the adventures, these scenes are predominantly descriptive. Any attempt at narrative is “stuttering,” without development. The scene Narrative Stuttering I recommend- ed you watch before reading this essay, shows both the in- capacitation to narrate and the frustration this causes. The theatrical setting is meant to draw visitors’ attention to the way they are themselves situated: inside a theatre, sitting on the stage, rather than in front of it, where they can fall asleep or get excited, identify or not, and possibly remain indiffer- ent. Here, such indifference is hard to sustain, because the viewers’ freedom to determine themselves how long they wish to stay with a scene makes falling asleep contradictory. MIEKE BAL 25 AN-ICON  This is the tentative design of the installation I made be- forehand, suggesting the total arbitrariness of the lay-out. The different installations follow this design roughly (Fig. 3). Fig. 3. Mieke Bal, project for the design of the 16-screen installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, 2019. Courtesy the artist. What Françoise Davoine calls, citing histori- an Fernand Braudel: “poussières d’événements” (literally, dust of events) is the motto of this work’s form: sprinkling situations, moments, throughout the gallery space. This is adequate to the state of trauma presented in the pieces and in the juxtapositions among them. The disorderly dis- play gives a shape, however unreadable and unclear, to the trauma-induced madness of the novel’s form. Cervantes, I presume, was one of those “mad” ones. The trauma incurred by Cervantes after being held in captivity as a slave, has been beautifully traced in his writ- ings and those of contemporary witnesses by Colombian literary historian María Antonia Garcés, a must-read book for anyone interested in Cervantes, Don Quijote, or slavery, then and now. Con-temporary. As it happens, Garcés was held captive by the FARC terrorist guerillos for five months. This contemporaneity is incompatible with the ridiculing representation of the “mad Knight Errant” that is so routine, both in cinematic representations and in much of the schol- arship. Supported by Garcés’s well-documented analysis, I MIEKE BAL 26 AN-ICON  see a haunting autobiographical spirit in the three chapters on the Captive (pp. 39-41 of part I). But the shape of the theatrical display does not “re-present” the madness. It hints at it, makes us reflect on it. The Denkbild is in the form, so that a contem- porary aesthetic can reach out to, and touch, a situation of long ago that, as befits the stilled temporality of trau- ma, persists in the present. Through experimenting with possible forms of the art of video, we attempted to invent new forms for the formlessness of trauma. By means of image-thinking this installation had to answer to the para- doxical concept, or thought-image, of the shape of form- lessness. Here, theatricality returns: ostensibly acting is the form that does not overrule the history, the violence, or the traumatic state. Acting, these videos suggest, is a social role. Acting, and making videos, exhibiting them in a thought-through immersive mode, is an attempt to give the formlessness of society a form. This is an attempt to do just that: to shape formlessness as the form of the trau- matic state, by designing a display that is both theatrical, in that it appeals to empathy, and turns “live,” that primary characteristic of theatre, into “life,” which concerns the social reality we live in and are responsible to sustain; and the knowledge acquired through the integration of making, analysing, reflecting, and boldly proposing new insights. Filmmaking begins with casting. In the case of Don Quijote, the actor cast himself; knowing he was the spitting image of the character as we know, or think we know him. An earlier significant casting decision occurred when Michelle Williams Gamaker and I decided to cast the three men in Emma’s life, in Madame B, in the same actor, suggesting the woman was in love with love and its prom- ises of excitement, not with any man in particular. I have made many films and installation pieces, over the last twenty years, and I guarantee you, there is MIEKE BAL 27 AN-ICON  no more effective mode of doing research and developing ideas than integrating these two activities. You can learn more about these films on the relevant page of my web- site. So, let me end on my personal motto, already cited, which demands the remedy of immersion: “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” This is pre-posterous history. The past without present is pointless. The present without past is empty. But as soon as we try to fix either one, the future disappears. MIEKE BAL 28 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19827

The Environmentality of Immersive Projection: The NatureAtmospheric of Scal by Giuliana Bruno e thinking Ecology of immersivity Empathy and immersion Scale and magnification Jesper Just Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello The Environmentality of Immersive Projection: The Nature of Scale GIULIANA BRUNO, Harvard University – https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19827 Abstract How does an artwork express an “environ- mentality?” Can we redefine immersion, in critical terms, as a form of environmental projection? In taking up such questions from my latest book, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media, my text address- es the relation between projection and environmentality in the visual arts in order to question immersivity. Confronted with the phenomenon of environmentalization, we need to re-imagine the ecology of representation. Positing ecolo- gy as an environmental relation, I will consider its artistic imagination both historically and theoretically. I propose that we revisit the environmentality of media archaeology to understand how this impulse is furthered in current mov- ing-image projections in the art gallery that call themselves immersive. I will especially address environmentality as it relates to movement and scale, questioning the relation between immersion and magnification. I will advance my argument by presenting the large-scale moving-image in- stallations of the Danish-born, New York artist Jesper Just. Does magnification always, only imply spectatorial immer- sion? Other forms of experience arise when confronting an ecology of scale in art. What else happens when we scale? Can immersion be understood, more critically, as a form of environmental absorption? In recasting immersion in envi- ronmental terms, I propose that we consider absorption as empathic projection with space. In shifting from the human GIULIANA BRUNO 29 AN-ICON  subject’s own immersive identification to this critically aware, enveloping field of empathic projection with the non-human, we can discard the prevalent human-centric position that pervades most immersive discourses. A different ecology of immersivity rises to the surface by relating the empathic “projective imagination” to “atmospheric thinking.” Keywords Atmospheric thinking Ecology of immersivity Empathy and immersion Scale and magnification Jesper Just To quote this essay: G. Bruno, “The Environmentality of Immersive Projection: The Nature of Scale,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 29-55, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19827. GIULIANA BRUNO 30 AN-ICON For some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who deals with environmental relationships. Ecology is the [...] pattern of relations between organisms and their environment.1 How does an installation artist construct an atmosphere? What are the “elements” of its architecture – the visuals and sound – that design the ambiance of an aesthetic environment? In other words, how does an art- work express an “environmentality?” These questions are central to my latest book, Atmospheres of Projection: Envi- ronmentality in Art and Screen Media, and will be reprised in this essay with regard to the topic of this publication.2 I will address the relation between projection and environ- mentality in the visual arts with the aim of questioning the notion of immersivity and critiquing a strain of its dominant discourse. I am interested in exploring whether we can understand immersion as an atmospheric ambiance and redefine it, critically, as a form of environmental projection. We are indeed confronted today with various forms of envi- ronmentalization.3 This phenomenon asks us to reimagine the very ecology of immersivity. I understand ecology, as Gene Youngblood prefigured in envisioning an “expanded cinema,” to be a fundamental form of environmental relation and related- ness. Such a form of relationality needs to be considered in the realms of history and geography in order to discern how the phenomenon of environmentalization affects the space of the visual arts and its transformations in time. In this respect, I propose that we reconsider the early history 1 G. Youngblood, “The Artist as Ecologist,” in Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970): 346. 2 See G. Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), which considers the interrelations of projection, atmosphere, and environment, linking “the projective imagination” to forms of “atmospheric thinking.” 3 See A. Pinotti, “Towards An-Iconology: The Image as Environment,” Screen 61, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 594-603, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjaa060. GIULIANA BRUNO 31 AN-ICON  of projection to account for the changes in its environment that are occurring in the arts and media of our time. I have long argued that an environmentality is rooted in the gene- alogy of the moving image in modernity.4 It was particularly present in the panoramic visual culture that emerged at the birth of the art of projection. The extensive phenom- enon that involved spectators flocking to experience the enveloping ambiance of a panorama might be considered an early experiential form of immersivity.5 In an effort to recast immersion in this historic setting and understand it as a more panoramic and ambient situation, I will consider the environmentality of this form of media archaeology. I will do so in order to explore how a panoramic impulse is furthered in contemporary moving-image projections in the art gallery that call themselves immersive. Such an exploration will redefine immersivity in spatiotemporal terms as an atmospheric envelopment, while analyzing the making of this ambient space in visual art. In linking up the early environmental impulse of pre- cinematic projection to the post-cinematic art installation of our times, I will especially address issues of movement and scale. I pursue this path of mobility and scaling to question the passivity, inactivity, and individuality that is usually attributed to immersivity, and to challenge a fixation on the subject’s optical identification with the device that produces immersion. In contrast to these views that often color both the practice and discourse of immersion, I wish to establish a much less static and more haptic paradigm 4 See G. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002); and G. Bruno, “The Screen as Object: Art and the Atmospheres of Projection,” in C. Iles, ed., Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016, exhibition catalogue): 156-67. 5 On the subject of early immersive views, see, among others, A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museum, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). GIULIANA BRUNO 32 AN-ICON  that emphasizes the relational activation of spectatorial mobilities and the mobilizing force of atmosphere. To this end, I will especially rethink the relation between immersion and a specific architecture: the “mag- nification” of the image. This phenomenon, first defined by early film theorist and filmmaker Jean Epstein, has itself today become magnified.6 In current popular and even the- oretical discourses on virtual or augmented reality, there is a tendency to believe that a large projective image nec- essarily induces immersion. But do we really need to col- lapse these two notions? Does magnification always imply spectatorial immersion? I am interested in pursuing other forms of ex- perience that arise when confronting an ecology of scale. Scaling has long been practiced in art history, where mag- nification has gone hand in hand with miniaturization.7 And large scale has not always manifested itself as an immersive condition. Nor has it necessarily implied an affirmation of the sublime, with its immersive vision of boundless infinity and arresting effects of awe. In my view, the most interest- ing way of understanding scale is in relation to other aes- thetic histories and especially as an architectural practice. This is because in architecture scaling is an essential tool for building an environment. Hence a central question for me is: What happens to a projective environment when we scale? Can the effects of large forms of scaling imply a critical awareness, a participatory relationality? Finally, can immersion be redefined, more critically, as an active, transformative form of absorption in an environment? In recasting immersion in these different, more dynamic environmental terms, I propose that we consid- er its perceptual affects as well as effects. For immersive 6 See J. Epstein, “Magnification and Other Writings,” October, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 9-25, https://doi.org/10.2307/778434. 7 For a treatment of scale in art history, see J. Kee, E. Lugli, eds., To Scale (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015). GIULIANA BRUNO 33 AN-ICON  effects are indeed affects. To be aesthetically absorbed in space mobilizes a particular affect: a feeling of empathy and sympathy with the space itself – the atmosphere – in which one is immersed. As an aesthetic practice, absorp- tion engages an empathic “projection” into an environment. It is a form of envelopment in an atmosphere. And thus, to move away from optical immersivity toward an awareness of this atmospheric environmentality, I suggest in my book turning to theories of empathy and sympathies with space, and advancing their discourse in contemporary ways.8 Let me simply mention here the writings of Theodor Lipps, who developed a vision of Einfühlung, or in-feeling, as a spatial empathy, and whose notion of em- pathic projection in ambiance possessed an atmospheric quality and tonality that aligns closely with the discourse on Stimmung.9 This atmospheric, tonal interpretation of the transmission of affects in art has been inspirational to my work, and some aspects of empathy and sympathy appear to be returning, with different interpretations, in other new materialist, “sympathetic” forms of aesthetic philosophy.10 With the specific aim here of expanding the projective reach of absorption in aesthetic space, one might turn in particular to “the laying bare of empathic projec- tion” as recently reconsidered by Michael Fried.11 The art historian has long been interested in the “the invention of 8 For further articulation of this subject, see G. Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection, especially: chapters 2-3. 9 See, among others, T. Lipps, “Empathy and Aesthetic Pleasure” (1905), in K. Aschenbrenner, A. Isenberg, eds, Aesthetic Theories: Studies in the Philosophy of Art (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965): 403-12; H. F. Mallgrave, E. Ikonomou, eds., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). 10 See J. Bennett, “Of Material Sympathies, Paracelsus, and Whitman,” in S. Iovino, S. Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014): 239-52; J. Bennett, Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 11 M. Fried, “The Laying Bare of Empathic Projection,” in Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2011): 205-15. For a different interpretation of empathy in art, grounded in the political force of trauma and sensitive to its cultural memory, see J. Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). GIULIANA BRUNO 34 AN-ICON  absorption:”12 what he calls “a powerful mode of emotional communication [that] can be actuated by absolutely mini- mal physiognomic and gestural means.”13 Such a minimal, non-representational form of “empathic projection” com- municates an atmosphere of inner absorption. It is interest- ing that Fried borrows the term “empathic projection” from the philosopher Stanley Cavell, for whom this is a path for overcoming the borders of separation and creating “a seam in human experience.”14 If understood as such a projection, an immer- sive process can create relational seams that are atmo- spheric joinings and affective joints. To perceive empathy with space is to sense the ecology of its atmospheric, situ- ational existence in time. This experience of an atmospheric tonality has the connective capacity to bridge the divide between subjects and objects. An empathic absorption in an environment further connects the human and the nonhuman, creating an experiential seam between the an- imate and the inanimate. If we become attuned to sensing immersivity as such an active, interstitial space of relation, we can access an ecology of relationality that is not con- fined to anthropocentric modalities. Environmentality, then, offers a way not only to reclaim empathic projection in art but to project it into larger ecologies. In the form of “empathic projection” practiced in the art of cine-projection, the work of technology extends to the surroundings, and this affects its atmosphere. The projective apparatus itself plays an important part in this process of absorption. A deeper absorptive modality sur- faces in environmental artworks that do not hide their own 12 M. Fried, “Four Honest Outlaws:” 208. 13 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010): 76-7. 14 S. Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 425. GIULIANA BRUNO 35 AN-ICON  projective mechanism in their temporality and spatiality.15 The energy of a diffused projective empathy is mobilized when a self-reflexive technology reveals its own mechanism at play, laying it bare and activating it in ambiance. If we recast immersivity with this sense of environmentality – that is, with awareness of the cultural techniques that make it possible – we can discard the prevalent human-centric, per- spectival position that pervades most immersive discours- es. We can overcome the fixation on the human subject’s visual identification and singular preoccupation with the projective apparatus, especially those of VR or AR, to focus instead on the inanimate, the environment, and the natural realm. It is time to stop putting individuality and opticality at the center of immersivity, and to pursue a more critically aware, haptic field of empathic projections. In this way, a different ecology of immersivity and relationality can rise to the surface in enveloping forms of environmental screening that link the “projective imagination” to an “atmospheric thinking.” Environmentality and Empathic Projection in Art Having laid out my theoretical premises, let me now turn to an artistic practice that is in line with what I have proposed. I like to think closely, along and through the work of contemporary artists who perform analytical gestures of environmental projection. Hence, I will pursue my critical argumentation about immersion by navigating through the work of the Danish-born, New York-based artist Jesper Just, whose forms of empathic projection express an atmospher- ic thinking. I will specifically address the manifestation of 15 On this subject, see K. Wilder, “Projective Art and the ‘Staging’ of Empathic Projection,” Moving Image Review & Art Journal 5, no. 1-2 (2016): 125-40, https://doi.org/10.1386/ miraj.5.1-2.124_1. Wilder analyzes in particular the experimental landscape films of Chris Welsby. GIULIANA BRUNO 36 AN-ICON  scale and the magnification of the image in these works to challenge the notion that these are totalizing immersive conditions. His work will also enable us to rethink a crucial architectural component of immersivity: the design of an installation. A projection that is “environ-mental” – that cre- ates a psychic atmosphere of empathy with space, its size and motion – arises in the ambiance of Just’s moving-image installation This Nameless Spectacle, presented several times since 2011. This is due to the self-aware design and spatial construction of the installation. As viewers walk into the gallery space, they confront two very large screens that face each other. Each screen measures approximately twenty meters in length by five meters in height. As they are also placed more than twenty meters apart, it is hard to escape the sense of magnitude of this projection.16 The massive scale of the installation provokes a physical re- action, demanding that the viewers become not simply immersed but rather “incorporated” into it. Indeed, one cannot help being absorbed into the space of this projec- tion, empathetically enveloped in its atmosphere. To understand what is going on in this magni- fied ambiance of projection, gallery viewers must position themselves in the midst of this moving work and negotiate a space between the large ambient screens. Moving along the course of the gallery, not only a physical displacement but also an imaginary motion takes hold of one’s body. A form of “empathic projection” is triggered here because the work lays bare its exhibitionary mechanism, showing off its magnificent projective scale in moving form. Confronting this particularly large species of screen, and the distance that both isolates and unites the 16 This Nameless Spectacle was conceived and exhibited with these dimensions as part of the monographic exhibition This Unknown Spectacle, devoted to the work of Jesper Just, on view October 21, 2011-February 5, 2012, at MAC/VAL, Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de- Marne, France. GIULIANA BRUNO 37 AN-ICON  two screen entities, one’s habitual relation to space, even the space of one’s body, changes. Different types of scal- ing are confronted, haptically sensed, resulting in a sculp- tural experience of screen architecture. As the projective screen becomes a sculptural object, it impels the viewer to become more aware of volumes. One constantly has to measure the scale of one’s body against the scale of this milieu of projection. Corporeally absorbed in the space of this vid- eo work, rather than being optically, passively immersed, viewers physically experience a form of spatial, even atmo- spheric “perturbation.” Nothing is static on these encom- passing screens, including the landscape they present. At the beginning of the film, the camera tracks through the space of a park. An atmosphere blossoms into being here: as the light shimmers on the leaves of trees for a long while, the sound of movement can be heard. You follow the sound cue that propels you to continue through the space of the park, sensing its atmosphere, breathing its “air.”17 There is a breeze, and the tree branches tremble and quiver. The motion of leaves in the wind on one screen always finds corresponding atmospheric movement on the other. These screens, you discover, always move in unison, often giving the impression of a movement advancing through space. Different views and vistas are presented, and you feel as if you were actually “tracking” through the park, sympathet- ically absorbing its atmospheric scenery. 17 As further developed in Atmospheres of Projection, an “air” is here understood to be the atmosphere of a site, and an affect that affects us. On the effects of air in painting, see G. Didi- Huberman, “The Imaginary Breeze: Remarks on the Air of the Quattrocento,” Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 3 (2003): 275-89, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412903002003001; S. Connor, The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion, 2010). GIULIANA BRUNO 38 AN-ICON  Panorama of a Historical Movement, while Absorbed in the Atmosphere of a Park A park [is] a process of ongoing relationships existing in a physical region [...] a “thing-for-us.”18 As you navigate the sea of images of this en- vironment, you end up displaced back in time as well as destabilized by atmospheric perturbations. The scale of the installation space communicates a geology of strat- ified temporalities and nonlinear times. With This Name- less Spectacle, Just has created a post-cinematic ride that takes us inside the prehistory of large-scale visual display. As it transports us through the atmosphere of the park, it leads us to rediscover the environmental configuration of modern visual culture and the emergence of a form of im- mersive projection from its very atmosphere. The point of entry that Just stages for This Nameless Spectacle is the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, a public garden, developed as part of the plan for remodel- ing the urban fabric of Paris directed by Georges-Eugène Haussmann. The manner in which Just films in this park, employing scale and movement in its depiction, reveals the cultural ambiance of environmentalization of which the park is a part. In the nineteenth century, an ambient movement arose across diverse cultural expressions, including land- scape design. Moving along the path of modernity from view painting to garden views, from travel sketches to itiner- ant viewing boxes, from panoramas and other geographical “-oramas” to forms of interior/exterior mapping, from the mobile views of train travel to urban promenades, a trans- formative experience of spatial absorption was born. This 18 R. Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” in N. Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson, (New York: New York University Press, 1979): 119. GIULIANA BRUNO 39 AN-ICON  new geography was the product of a “panoramic vision” that dynamically reconfigured the environment.19 In this novel geovisuality, sites were set in mov- ing perspectives, expanding both outward and inward as they were absorbed and consumed in movement by the spectator. This new ambient sensibility engaged the phys- icality of the observers, challenging their ability to take in a mobilized space. And from this moving panorama at the end of the nineteenth century a new observer emerged in the persona of the film spectator, a body empathically “projected” into an environment of moving images.20 With This Nameless Spectacle, Jesper Just im- pels us to travel back to this history of “site-seeing.” He employs a panoramic mode of spatio-visual construction, and does so to expand the potential of this precinematic history in our times. Absorbed in this projective space, one can experience in particular the sense of scale and the at- mospheric touch of garden vistas. Garden views created the experience of embracing an environmental terrain, and of being enveloped in its ambiance. They combined a sen- sualist theory of the imagination with a touch of physicality. The garden designs of modernity engaged the corporeality of the body in the moving absorption of an environment. Automata, sculptures, and playful fluid mechanisms that included fountains and watery landscapes enhanced this natural atmospherics, as is the case with the Parisian park Just films. The vistas themselves incited viewers to move into the transformation of an ambiance. Ultimately, then, 19 See W. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 20 For a more extensive treatment of the history of modern, mobilized space, see, among others, G. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion; A. Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006); F. Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); L. Charney ,V.R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). GIULIANA BRUNO 40 AN-ICON  landscape offered the body an ever-changing experience of atmospheric spatio-visual display. As one ponders the origin of this embracing space – a landscape of “atmospheric screening” – one realizes why Just chose this setting for This Nameless Spectacle. This is an installation that enhances the mate- rial apparatus of visual display to create an environmental projection. Landscape is not at all a simple background here but rather the moving core of a technology of projec- tion that self-reflexively incorporates a historical setting in its very ambiance. Its design holds within itself the actual movement in space that led from garden views to the es- tablishment of the filmic screen as a place for pictures to be “sensed” in projective, atmospheric motion. This Nameless Spectacle reminds us that the garden, like the cinema, is not an optical but a haptical af- fair, inviting empathy with space. The picturesque garden, in particular, was the place that historically “enable[d] the imagination to form the habit of feeling through the eye.”21 It was an affective “mode of processing the physical world for our consumption.”22 This modern landscape initiated a form of immersivity that is a virtual form of touch, putting us “in touch” with inner space and engaging all senses syn- esthetically in shifting sensations of ambiance. Empathic projection would be felt as one’s interiority was mobilized in the process of relational connection with the natural site. A reciprocal, sympathetic relation with the nuances of am- biance was thus established in architecting the atmosphere of the garden. In moving through the Parisian park in This Nameless Spectacle, Just retraces this ambient genealogy of modernity: the mobilization of atmosphere, understood 21 C. Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927): 4. 22 J. Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992): 4. GIULIANA BRUNO 41 AN-ICON  also as affective ambiance, in an environmental process that traveled from landscape design to cine-projection. In this ambient sense, as the shimmering light of the projec- tion, the breath of air, and the motion of the wind come to be virtually sensed on one’s skin, a real atmospheric “per- turbation” can be felt in the installation. Even an effect of weather arises in this empathic projection. And so environ- mental phenomena that are present in a natural landscape come to join the very atmosphere of projection. Environments of Projection: A Digital Mareorama Announcing an upheaval in the relation of art to technology, pan- oramas are at the same time an expression of a new attitude toward life.23 In the context of this environmental panorama, the technique of projective display of This Nameless Spec- tacle is also to be considered, especially as it regards ab- sorption in scale. The spatial arrangement of the work, set on two large screens that appear to roll out moving images for a spectator in their midst, mediates a haptic, atmospher- ic communication that clearly reinvents modernity’s pan- oramic forms of immersive exhibition. This contemporary mode of enveloping display exhibits a fluid technological history of environmentality, especially in its way of mobiliz- ing scale. In its gigantic mobility, it specifically recalls the technique of the “moving panorama.” A product of nineteenth-century’s exhibitionary culture, the panorama form is usually associated with enor- mous paintings exhibited in circular spaces, surrounding 23 W. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Exposé of 1935),” in The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland, K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press-Harvard University Press, 1999), 6. GIULIANA BRUNO 42 AN-ICON  the observer with the weight of their scale.24 One applica- tion of this giant form of display included movement. In- spired by the circular panorama, the moving panorama was particularly engaged with geography.25 A popular form of entertainment across Europe and the United States, mov- ing panoramas offered spectators the sensation that they themselves were being transported as images of space scrolled panoramically before their eyes, with sound and light effects that enhanced the overall sense of transport. The apparatus of display played an import- ant part in the construction of this absorbing geography, which was not merely representational. A framed fabric of drawable curtains, moved by a mechanical cranking system, could suffice to produce the effect of a moving screen, turn- ing into an enveloping scrolling screen. But more complex mechanisms were also devised, and the most advanced were exhibited at the 1900 Exposition Universelle Interna- tionale, in Paris. The Stereorama, for one, let spectators imagine they were taking a sea voyage, sailing along the Mediterranean coast, aboard a ship rocked by waves. This elaborate form of environmental display involved a feat of technological imagination and execution. The point of this technique of moving exhibition was the scale of motion. “Unlike the usual panoramas,” as a contemporary article tells us, “the background is painted on the outer mantle of a slowly revolving cylinder with a wide protruding edge carrying forty concentric sheet-metal screens four inches in height on which the waves have been painted.” As for the screens, they “are moved up and down by an electric 24 See, among other works, R. Hyde, Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the “All- Embracing” View, (London: Trefoil-Barbican Art Gallery, 1988, exhibition catalogue); S. Bordini, Storia del panorama. La visione totale nella pittura del XIX secolo (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1984); K. Trumpener, T. Barringer, eds., On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama between Canvas and Screen (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2020). 25 As media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo shows in his comprehensive history of these panoramas, motion, both virtual and actual, was an essential sensory component of this particular precinematic form, which produced kinesthetic effects in the audience. See E. Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013): 46-54. GIULIANA BRUNO 43 AN-ICON  motor through a linkage system including rods, hinges, and wheels.” 26 Considering this history of exhibition, we can venture to propose that the invention of the projection of moving images on a screen, and the function of active immersivity that is reinvented today, arose from the scale of the enterprise of the moving panorama, which not only produced scrolling motion and waves of perturbation but was also an itinerant medium.27 Spectators were offered the virtual sensation of being absorbed in a journey through the shifting atmospheres of a landscape.28 With this public spectacle, open to the environment, a majestic, virtual form of imaging atmospheric change took hold of one’s body. The panoramic object of display, capable of offering the pleasure of scrolling through an ambiance, thus created the material condition of existence of the cinematic screen as itself a space of atmospheric projection. The projective screen, then, did not come into being as a small, flat, frontal, windowed geometry, as is usually assumed is some media studies, but rather as a gigantic geographic and moving display.29 In other words, the screen emerged as an environmental medium. It is im- portant to acknowledge this lack of frontality, fixity, and flatness in early forms of screening, and to underscore an expansive milieu of volumetric plasticity and movement, if we wish to rewrite the genealogic course of the projective 26 “Die neuesten Panoramen,” in De Natuur (1900): 257-58, as cited in S. Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (1980), trans. D. L. Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997): 177. 27 This was an apparatus of haptic mobility, for it not only produced scrolling motion and waves of perturbation with its mechanism but was also an itinerant medium. It was often taken from place to place by itinerant showmen. 28 A particularly precinematic development of this traveling medium, also presented at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, was the exhibition Trans-Siberian Railway Panorama, which simulated a trip from Moscow to Beijing aboard the famous railway. A succession of images of the diverse environment viewers were imaginatively traversing appeared as if rolling past a framed window of the train car. 29 In arguing that the screen performs an environmental operation, and challenging a narrow interpretation of its geometry, I specifically respond to claims put forth in L. Manovich, “The Screen and the User,” in The Language of New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001): 94- 115. GIULIANA BRUNO 44 AN-ICON  apparatus as a set of environmental operations. It is crucial as well to stress for my argument regarding the atmospher- ic ecology of visual display that, in the moving panorama, atmosphere was not only displayed but cultivated. The display constituted an environment in itself, and it was ca- pable of registering change in the atmosphere of a site. The changes in ambiance were at times en- hanced by cutouts that depicted objects in the surround- ing scenery, moving in zones that extended from the fore- ground to trees far out in the field. Rotating in endless loops around the scrolling canvas of the panorama, these cutouts “projected” a sense of depth to the transformation of the landscape. Multiple backdrops operated at different speeds to create a sense of rolling vistas, with the added effect that the differences in speed between each of them created variable combinations of scenes. In this display, which turned a means of transport into the emerging cin- ematic screen, endowing it with the ability to modify an ambiance, the scale of the display was as relevant as the rolling, diffracted, dispersed movement. An Oceanic Voyage from Postcinema to Precinema As this form of “projective imagination” merged, at time of modernity, with an “atmospheric thinking,” a projective future was also envisaged, for inscribed here is also the kind of magnification that characterizes display in our digital age. As we ponder the elaborate construction of Just’s This Nameless Spectacle, it becomes evident that his giant installation has, built into it, a mechanism that reinvents the environmental history of projective display we have just outlined. In its digital configuration, it cre- ates virtual traveling through atmospheres that reenact the GIULIANA BRUNO 45 AN-ICON  immersive ambiance and environmentality of the moving panorama. The perambulating movement through the Parc des Buttes Chaumont recalls in particular the function of the early roll transparencies created by Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle, representing the moving vistas of the Parc Monceau, near Paris.30 But it is not only the motion of the representation that creates the emotion and triggers the empathic projection with the garden space but also the moving mechanism of the projective dispositif, and espe- cially its scale. The corresponding, diffracted motion that occurs in the space of the installation, not simply on but between the two large screens that face each other, is laid bare, and it is closely connected to the empathy with space created in a particularly absorptive form of moving panorama. The configuration of Just’s moving-image in- stallation recalls especially the dynamic, atmospheric use of display that characterized the environment of the Mareo- rama.31 This was a spectacular form of moving panorama that used two “screens” simultaneously, rolling out a set of moving scenes that simulated the atmosphere of a voy- age at sea. Spectators were positioned in the middle of the display, aboard a ship, which rocked back and forth to enhance the sensation of motion and perturbation of being projected into the natural environment of a seascape. An article written at the time tells us that the plan for the Mareorama presented [...] two screens, each 2,500 feet long and forty feet in height [...] to be unrolled,” with “a double, swinging movement [that] was to be imparted to the spectator’s platform which was shaped like a ship. 30 See E. Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: 40-6. 31 The topic of the moving panorama was discussed in an interview with the artist in New York on September 16, 2011. Just has generously shared his artistic process with me on several other occasions, for which I thank him. GIULIANA BRUNO 46 AN-ICON  The scale of the scrolling screens was grandi- ose, for “215,000 square feet of screen was to be unrolled before the visitor’s eye.” And the movement produced was impressive and destabilizing: “One of the screens moves on the port side, the other on the starboard.”32 In addition to this mechanics of perturbation, elaborate effects repro- duced atmospheric changes related to different times of day and rendered shifts in weather and actual perturbations. Absorption in the Mareorama was an experi- ence of unfolding events in a floating, situational ambiance – even in climatic perturbation – precisely as happens in Just’s installation. Viewers were sandwiched between two giant, moving screens that enhanced the sensation of tak- ing in an atmosphere and experiencing its changing states. All the kinesthetic effects made the visitors to the space of the Mareorama not only feel the motions but empathize with them. In a similar manner, spectators of Just’s installation who negotiate their own movement between complex ap- paratuses of rolling projective display, do so kinesthetically, imaginatively, and virtually as well as with actual motion. In This Nameless Spectacle, architectural mag- nitude contributes greatly to the empathic absorption in the shifting, fluid ambiance, that is, in the environment itself of the projection.33 The Mareorama “ship” could accom- modate seven hundred spectators. Just’s double-screen movement likewise relies on the scale of the gallery in which it is exhibited, and on a physically grandiose sense of space that underscores the environmental root of the emergence 32 S. Oettermann, “Die neuesten Panoramen,” in The Panorama: 179. 33 Although conceived in the extremely large format discussed, the screens have been adapted to the architecture of the gallery site for subsequent exhibitions. A reduced scale, for instance, at J. Cohan in New York in 2012, created a more intimate feeling for the spectator, who was sandwiched between the still-large screens of the mareoramic display. GIULIANA BRUNO 47 AN-ICON  of projection in forms of giant, moving display.34 The Mareo- rama ultimately magnified the sensory, sympathetic impact of exposure to an affecting atmosphere; following its cur- rents, Just’s own liquid mode of exhibition activates this ambient “sense” of display in installation form in its own empathic projection. Laying bare the projective dispositif that turns the gallery space into a moving vessel, it makes it into a vehicle of atmospheric perturbations. In this sense, the space of the art gallery constitutes a real part of the installation, and the persona of the gallery viewer becomes, quite poignantly, “installed.” On this screen interface, the turn of the last century thus joins the beginning of the new millennium in a reflection on the environment of projection and its cultural ecology. Just links together the energy of potentiality that characterized the space of visual display in early modernity with the potential expressed today when experimenting environmentally with digital technology. The artist not only shows us how central the environment of projection is in our time but argues that the desire for absorption in geo- graphic display is truly enduring. Ultimately, This Nameless Spectacle demonstrates how the large-scale architecture of the screen has traveled across time in projection while exhibiting the screen itself as an environment, even an am- bient architecture – the atmospheric form in which projec- tion comes into being, and can even dissolve. 34 Just’s installation returns us to that historically dynamic, multiple form of ambient display without, however, reproducing the construction literally. He does not exhibit the actual machine or mechanism that is at the origin of the work but rather incorporates the scale of the Mareorama and its movement across screens in the physical spatiality of the installation, which encompasses the transit of viewers in gallery space. In this sense, the installation does not follow the trend of display that has been spreading since the arrival of the digital age, in which artists have taken to exhibiting outmoded forms of visual technology in the gallery. Just does not belabor the obsolescence of the cinematic apparatus or its panoramic predecessor or show any sense of nostalgia for older forms of display. This Nameless Spectacle rather works at historicizing from within, reinventing the possibilities of screening expressed by the moving, modern mode of ambient display that gave rise to the cinematic era of projection. GIULIANA BRUNO 48 AN-ICON  Scaling an Environment As screens become prominently incorporated into both our private and public lives, the work of scalar reinterpretation that Just pursues becomes particularly sig- nificant, for a reinvention of the act of screening in the en- vironment is especially pressing today. Screens proliferate in widely different forms in our surroundings. They have decreased in size, becoming more portable: computers, smart phones, and iPads, which enable us to scroll hapti- cally, now travel with us at all times as our personal pan- oramas. The rise of the miniature form goes hand in hand with magnification. In contrast to the shrinking size of our personal screens, we are witnessing an increasing use of the gigantic as screens have become especially magnified in the spectacle of three-dimensional exhibition. Digital technology has enlarged the possibilities of projection in expanded cinematic forms of immersivity. Large-scale panoramic forms of projection, such as LED video walls, proliferate and have changed the very pan- orama of our environment, creating a veritable immersive screenscape.35 The technique of 3-D projection mapping, in particular, can turn an entire building or landscape into a screen environment.36 Heirs of the atmospheres of “son et lumière” shows, and of modernity’s dioramas and pan- oramic spectacles, these magnified projections can even design a performative environment. A haptic, immersive landscape is digitally fashioned as the façade of an edifice 35 On the urban screen, see, among others, S. McQuire, M. Martin, S. Niederer, eds., Urban Screens Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009); N. Verhoeff, “Screens in the City,” in D. Chateau, J. Moure, eds., Screens: From Materiality to Spectatorship (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016): 125-39; C. Berry, J. Harbord, R. Moore, eds., Public Space, Media Space (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 36 S. Chakravorty, “Spaces of Spectatorship: Architectures of the Projected Image,” Polished Panels 1, no. 2, Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture (March 7, 2016), http://www. mediapolisjournal.com/2016/03/spaces-of-spectatorship-architectures-of-the-projected- image/, accessed August 30, 2023. In projection mapping, a two- or three-dimensional object is spatially mapped by using specialized software that mimics the real environment it is to be projected upon. This software can interact with a projector to fit any desired image onto any surface, small or large. GIULIANA BRUNO 49 AN-ICON  turns into a projective skin. Cities are punctuated by these seductive large-scale projective envelopes that create am- biance. But in projection mapping, the idea of an en- vironment of projection risks becoming literalized. If the ambiance of projection is remapped in a reductive way, the notion of ambient media itself shrinks. The effects of media façades created in literal ways are often questionable, as “ambient” begins to take on environmental connotations that are pacifying and not far removed from commerce.37 After all, large-scale projection mapping is mostly used, contiguously with artistic and urban-branding pursuits, by publicity and advertising firms. Basking in the glow of giant projections can lead to opiate effects or the simple encour- agement of consumption as opposed to the production of engagement and perturbation. As the ambiance of projection is being trans- formed by digital technology, artists are increasingly re- sponding creatively and critically to these issues of the sculptural and panoramic scale of immersive projection. Just, for instance, critically exposed how large-scale projec- tion transforms the urban environment with the projection of his Servitudes (2015), a cinematic, architectural work consisting of eight sequences filmed in and around the World Trade Center in New York. Originally conceived for the subterranean gallery space of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, this filmic work was scaled up in November 2015 and displayed on a series of large electronic billboards on the building façades of New York’s Times Square. In 2019, the same work was also projected onto layers of semitransparent fabric in yet another geographic location, in museum space – a fact that makes one question the function of scaling as well as further reflect on the nature 37 For a critical reading of the ambient, see P. Roquet, Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); S. Kim-Cohen, Against Ambience and Other Essays (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). GIULIANA BRUNO 50 AN-ICON  and fabric of projection in relation to its specific geography and location.38 Projecting a Global Urban Scale These experiments on the vast projective po- tential of digital technology thus force us to rethink the issue of large-scale immersive projection in light of its own com- plex history. It is particularly urgent to ask ourselves ques- tions about the nature and consequences of scaling. What changes in an environment of projection when subjected to different scales? How does scale change the nature of the screen itself as an object? What kinds of projection, understood as forms of cultural transmission, does mag- nification comport? With this variability of scale, Servitudes rein- forces the penchant for “empathic” projection that Just exhibited in his earlier works, for, as we have noted, this process is set in motion when works actively lay bare their own projective mechanism rather than keeping it static and invisible. Intercourses, which premiered at the 2013 Venice Biennale, took this up at a global scale.39 This five-channel video and installation was set in a suburb of Hangzhou, China, that has been built as a replica of Paris, France. The 38 When this work was commissioned by Paris’s Palais de Tokyo for their expansive subterranean gallery space, Just began to research the exhibition hall, which dates from Paris’s 1937 world’s fair. The 2015 projection of Servitudes in New York’s Times Square was part of Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance. Servitudes was installed on semitransparent screen fabric in Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, Denmark, June 15 - August 11, 2019. 39 Reflecting on how a pavilion at the Biennale represents a country inside another country, Just engaged the architectural configuration of this conflated projection and intervened in the site of the Danish Pavilion, itself a composite structure. By walling in the grand entrance of the building’s neoclassic façade, he enticed viewers to walk around the colonnade and enter instead through a courtyard, which ushered them inside the modernist part of the pavilion. Here, the interior space had been transformed into a construction site. Walls built from concrete cinder blocks created another architectural path within the already hybrid space of the pavilion. The rough, impermanent fabrication of the concrete blocks lent a sense of eeriness to the site: though it appeared to be a place in the making, it felt as if it were already in ruins. In constructing an installation space that evoked the atmosphere of a ruin in progress, Just made material the layered process inherent in the imaginary fabrication of such sites, closely engaging their imaginative “projections.” GIULIANA BRUNO 51 AN-ICON  large scale of the projection inside the pavilion created a feeling of cultural displacement. In it, three Black men me- ander in a desolate ambiance of empty streets, uninhabited façades, and unfinished staircases that lead nowhere. This Paris imagined in China had a postapocalyptic feeling, even a quasi–science fiction dimension, despite actually being a real place. The projected images worked together with the architectural design of the pavilion to instill in us a concrete sense of how a global urban imaginary is made, and what scale this process has assumed. What is performed and projected here is a becoming of global scale – a state that contains processes of dislocation, hybridization, and entropy. Intercourses is named after that which lies in between: relational things like processes of interstitial con- struction. It deals with the actual process of projection as a space of relation and intermediation. In this sense, it fol- lows the course of Just’s investigation of environmentality as a magnified psychogeography. The very magnitude of the exhibition space drives a navigation of atmospheres, engaging viewers in the scale of the destabilizing projec- tive ambiance in which they are themselves empathically projected. Intercourses confronts even more directly than This Nameless Spectacle the effects and affects of the tech- nology of scaling in contemporary digital culture. This is a work of actual scalar construction, for its five screens have different configurations that generate further geographic dislocation through their differing positions in space and angles of view. Moreover, this Paris-in-China suspended between states of ruin and construction offers projections that can vary radically in size, from one to fifteen meters, depending on the site of the installation. In such a way, Just questions the different forms of screen scale that proliferate in our digital envi- ronment. In laying bare the architecture of the projective GIULIANA BRUNO 52 AN-ICON  mechanism, he triggers a critical response to the cultural phenomenon of variable screen size, making us reflect on how miniaturization relates to magnification in digital cul- ture. By confronting what happens in the process of scaling up or down, from one size to the other, he creates cultural awareness of the state of screening today while exhibiting the process itself of flexible projection. This architectural scaling makes gallery viewers aware of the very architec- ture of screening, and especially attuned to how ambiance changes in scale. Furthermore, for Just, large scale does not consist in simple magnification or simplistic immersivity. The magnitude of the largest screen in Intercourses, rather, challenges the conventional use of magnitude in film.40 Less associated with figurative facial close-ups, as is traditionally most often the case in cinema, it is more attuned to the vastness and complexity of the geographic and cultural landscapes it renders. Scale is here also anything but mon- umental and does not constitute a direct correlate of the aesthetic of the sublime, so often evoked when speaking of immersion. Rather than monumentalizing its own object, the large scale of the projection takes the gallery viewer into an ambiguous affective and cognitive space that asks for attentive, even contemplative absorption – displaying a critical form of empathic projection. This process of projective absorption in scale leads to deciphering the geographic hybridity of the site shown on screen while enveloped in the siting of the pro- jection. After all, wandering through a look-alike Paris with French actors of African descent, one could easily believe that this is in fact Paris – and that would be an acceptable response. But if, galvanized by the scale of the large screen, the installation viewer scans the surface and “screens” the 40 On magnification and the close-up in film, see M. A. Doane, Bigger than Life: The Close-up and Scale in the Cinema (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2021). GIULIANA BRUNO 53 AN-ICON  space closely, she can sense that something is off: the ur- ban scale here is quite different than that of Paris. As one tunes in to surface, scale, and atmosphere, scanning the big screen, and further notices the presence of Chinese inscriptions or too many air conditioners dotting the build- ing façades, one can finally understand how, working with and against architecture, inhabitants of this replica of Paris in China, located in the district of Tianducheng, adapt the space to their own use. In Intercourses, then, Just enhances scale as a geography, detecting defining nuances in ambient pro- jection and working with dimension in culturally affecting ways that defy the simple effect of immersive viewing. Here, immersion is not understood, as conventionally assumed, to produce virtual illusion but, rather, spatial awareness. As was the case in This Nameless Spectacle, the artist also works specifically against the astonishing use of magni- fication one finds in digital hyperrealism, with its purely spectacular effects of immersivity.41 For Just, scale rather functions as a real environmental modality. His installations invite close discernment of the surrounding space and en- gage contact with the larger environment. They resist using scale as a building block to create virtual monuments and, working with movement and active screening, also resist the arresting sense of awe associated with boundless im- mersive magnitude. In other words, Just is an artist who does not fall into the trap of large projection as mere man- ifestation of a technological sublime. Jesper Just’s critical investigation of this press- ing subject of immersivity finds correspondence in the prac- tices of other artists who are attentive to scale, reconfigure scalar paradigms, and also engage the panoramic form of exhibition as a projective environment. In a compelling way, 41 This reminds us that, as Susan Stewart suggested long ago, “the gigantic” is a particularly enveloping notion. See S. Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1993). GIULIANA BRUNO 54 AN-ICON  Lisa Reihana also questioned the scale and atmosphere of immersive projection at the New Zealand Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale with her large-scale installation In Pur- suit of Venus [infected] (2015-17), for which she reinvented the giant form of the panoramic spectacle in scrolling dig- ital fashion. Inspired by the French scenic wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1804-1805), the installation created a large-scale panorama in which real and invent- ed narratives of colonial encounter take place. This work took the very surface of a panoramic wallpaper and made it into an animated, moving surface of unfolding projection. Here, videographic and animation technologies contribute to a reimagination of the nineteenth-century shape of the moving panorama while probing its historical, ideological, and political dimensions. In Reihana’s reinterpretation of this mode, history is not only displayed but scrolls out and drifts along panoramically, in a critical reading that ques- tions the very form of its spectacular, colonial, scalar, im- mersive projections. In the face of digitally magnified immersion, and the return of the spectacular phenomenon of large-scale panoramic projection, one can only welcome the kind of environmental research that motivates Jesper Just and Lisa Reihana, for this is an exploration that is aimed at critically excavating, and exhibiting, the complex history of large- scale, immersive visual display, its forms of mediality, and the culture that it transmits and circulates in the environment. Here, the present not only exposes but challenges the past, and finally, changes its course. Only if we are put in a posi- tion to experience critically the cultural atmosphere that links scale and motion to immersive screening, and consider this multifaceted, nonlinear historicity, can we hope to redefine the terms of, and give a new name to, the ecology of ab- sorption in space – the environment itself of projection. GIULIANA BRUNO 55 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19827

The Environmentality of Immersive Projection: The NatureAtmospheric of Scal by Giuliana Bruno e thinking Ecology of immersivity Empathy and immersion Scale and magnification Jesper Just Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello The Environmentality of Immersive Projection: The Nature of Scale GIULIANA BRUNO, Harvard University – https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19827 Abstract How does an artwork express an “environ- mentality?” Can we redefine immersion, in critical terms, as a form of environmental projection? In taking up such questions from my latest book, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media, my text address- es the relation between projection and environmentality in the visual arts in order to question immersivity. Confronted with the phenomenon of environmentalization, we need to re-imagine the ecology of representation. Positing ecolo- gy as an environmental relation, I will consider its artistic imagination both historically and theoretically. I propose that we revisit the environmentality of media archaeology to understand how this impulse is furthered in current mov- ing-image projections in the art gallery that call themselves immersive. I will especially address environmentality as it relates to movement and scale, questioning the relation between immersion and magnification. I will advance my argument by presenting the large-scale moving-image in- stallations of the Danish-born, New York artist Jesper Just. Does magnification always, only imply spectatorial immer- sion? Other forms of experience arise when confronting an ecology of scale in art. What else happens when we scale? Can immersion be understood, more critically, as a form of environmental absorption? In recasting immersion in envi- ronmental terms, I propose that we consider absorption as empathic projection with space. In shifting from the human GIULIANA BRUNO 29 AN-ICON  subject’s own immersive identification to this critically aware, enveloping field of empathic projection with the non-human, we can discard the prevalent human-centric position that pervades most immersive discourses. A different ecology of immersivity rises to the surface by relating the empathic “projective imagination” to “atmospheric thinking.” Keywords Atmospheric thinking Ecology of immersivity Empathy and immersion Scale and magnification Jesper Just To quote this essay: G. Bruno, “The Environmentality of Immersive Projection: The Nature of Scale,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 29-55, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19827. GIULIANA BRUNO 30 AN-ICON For some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who deals with environmental relationships. Ecology is the [...] pattern of relations between organisms and their environment.1 How does an installation artist construct an atmosphere? What are the “elements” of its architecture – the visuals and sound – that design the ambiance of an aesthetic environment? In other words, how does an art- work express an “environmentality?” These questions are central to my latest book, Atmospheres of Projection: Envi- ronmentality in Art and Screen Media, and will be reprised in this essay with regard to the topic of this publication.2 I will address the relation between projection and environ- mentality in the visual arts with the aim of questioning the notion of immersivity and critiquing a strain of its dominant discourse. I am interested in exploring whether we can understand immersion as an atmospheric ambiance and redefine it, critically, as a form of environmental projection. We are indeed confronted today with various forms of envi- ronmentalization.3 This phenomenon asks us to reimagine the very ecology of immersivity. I understand ecology, as Gene Youngblood prefigured in envisioning an “expanded cinema,” to be a fundamental form of environmental relation and related- ness. Such a form of relationality needs to be considered in the realms of history and geography in order to discern how the phenomenon of environmentalization affects the space of the visual arts and its transformations in time. In this respect, I propose that we reconsider the early history 1 G. Youngblood, “The Artist as Ecologist,” in Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970): 346. 2 See G. Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), which considers the interrelations of projection, atmosphere, and environment, linking “the projective imagination” to forms of “atmospheric thinking.” 3 See A. Pinotti, “Towards An-Iconology: The Image as Environment,” Screen 61, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 594-603, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjaa060. GIULIANA BRUNO 31 AN-ICON  of projection to account for the changes in its environment that are occurring in the arts and media of our time. I have long argued that an environmentality is rooted in the gene- alogy of the moving image in modernity.4 It was particularly present in the panoramic visual culture that emerged at the birth of the art of projection. The extensive phenom- enon that involved spectators flocking to experience the enveloping ambiance of a panorama might be considered an early experiential form of immersivity.5 In an effort to recast immersion in this historic setting and understand it as a more panoramic and ambient situation, I will consider the environmentality of this form of media archaeology. I will do so in order to explore how a panoramic impulse is furthered in contemporary moving-image projections in the art gallery that call themselves immersive. Such an exploration will redefine immersivity in spatiotemporal terms as an atmospheric envelopment, while analyzing the making of this ambient space in visual art. In linking up the early environmental impulse of pre- cinematic projection to the post-cinematic art installation of our times, I will especially address issues of movement and scale. I pursue this path of mobility and scaling to question the passivity, inactivity, and individuality that is usually attributed to immersivity, and to challenge a fixation on the subject’s optical identification with the device that produces immersion. In contrast to these views that often color both the practice and discourse of immersion, I wish to establish a much less static and more haptic paradigm 4 See G. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002); and G. Bruno, “The Screen as Object: Art and the Atmospheres of Projection,” in C. Iles, ed., Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016, exhibition catalogue): 156-67. 5 On the subject of early immersive views, see, among others, A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museum, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). GIULIANA BRUNO 32 AN-ICON  that emphasizes the relational activation of spectatorial mobilities and the mobilizing force of atmosphere. To this end, I will especially rethink the relation between immersion and a specific architecture: the “mag- nification” of the image. This phenomenon, first defined by early film theorist and filmmaker Jean Epstein, has itself today become magnified.6 In current popular and even the- oretical discourses on virtual or augmented reality, there is a tendency to believe that a large projective image nec- essarily induces immersion. But do we really need to col- lapse these two notions? Does magnification always imply spectatorial immersion? I am interested in pursuing other forms of ex- perience that arise when confronting an ecology of scale. Scaling has long been practiced in art history, where mag- nification has gone hand in hand with miniaturization.7 And large scale has not always manifested itself as an immersive condition. Nor has it necessarily implied an affirmation of the sublime, with its immersive vision of boundless infinity and arresting effects of awe. In my view, the most interest- ing way of understanding scale is in relation to other aes- thetic histories and especially as an architectural practice. This is because in architecture scaling is an essential tool for building an environment. Hence a central question for me is: What happens to a projective environment when we scale? Can the effects of large forms of scaling imply a critical awareness, a participatory relationality? Finally, can immersion be redefined, more critically, as an active, transformative form of absorption in an environment? In recasting immersion in these different, more dynamic environmental terms, I propose that we consid- er its perceptual affects as well as effects. For immersive 6 See J. Epstein, “Magnification and Other Writings,” October, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 9-25, https://doi.org/10.2307/778434. 7 For a treatment of scale in art history, see J. Kee, E. Lugli, eds., To Scale (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015). GIULIANA BRUNO 33 AN-ICON  effects are indeed affects. To be aesthetically absorbed in space mobilizes a particular affect: a feeling of empathy and sympathy with the space itself – the atmosphere – in which one is immersed. As an aesthetic practice, absorp- tion engages an empathic “projection” into an environment. It is a form of envelopment in an atmosphere. And thus, to move away from optical immersivity toward an awareness of this atmospheric environmentality, I suggest in my book turning to theories of empathy and sympathies with space, and advancing their discourse in contemporary ways.8 Let me simply mention here the writings of Theodor Lipps, who developed a vision of Einfühlung, or in-feeling, as a spatial empathy, and whose notion of em- pathic projection in ambiance possessed an atmospheric quality and tonality that aligns closely with the discourse on Stimmung.9 This atmospheric, tonal interpretation of the transmission of affects in art has been inspirational to my work, and some aspects of empathy and sympathy appear to be returning, with different interpretations, in other new materialist, “sympathetic” forms of aesthetic philosophy.10 With the specific aim here of expanding the projective reach of absorption in aesthetic space, one might turn in particular to “the laying bare of empathic projec- tion” as recently reconsidered by Michael Fried.11 The art historian has long been interested in the “the invention of 8 For further articulation of this subject, see G. Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection, especially: chapters 2-3. 9 See, among others, T. Lipps, “Empathy and Aesthetic Pleasure” (1905), in K. Aschenbrenner, A. Isenberg, eds, Aesthetic Theories: Studies in the Philosophy of Art (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965): 403-12; H. F. Mallgrave, E. Ikonomou, eds., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). 10 See J. Bennett, “Of Material Sympathies, Paracelsus, and Whitman,” in S. Iovino, S. Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014): 239-52; J. Bennett, Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 11 M. Fried, “The Laying Bare of Empathic Projection,” in Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2011): 205-15. For a different interpretation of empathy in art, grounded in the political force of trauma and sensitive to its cultural memory, see J. Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). GIULIANA BRUNO 34 AN-ICON  absorption:”12 what he calls “a powerful mode of emotional communication [that] can be actuated by absolutely mini- mal physiognomic and gestural means.”13 Such a minimal, non-representational form of “empathic projection” com- municates an atmosphere of inner absorption. It is interest- ing that Fried borrows the term “empathic projection” from the philosopher Stanley Cavell, for whom this is a path for overcoming the borders of separation and creating “a seam in human experience.”14 If understood as such a projection, an immer- sive process can create relational seams that are atmo- spheric joinings and affective joints. To perceive empathy with space is to sense the ecology of its atmospheric, situ- ational existence in time. This experience of an atmospheric tonality has the connective capacity to bridge the divide between subjects and objects. An empathic absorption in an environment further connects the human and the nonhuman, creating an experiential seam between the an- imate and the inanimate. If we become attuned to sensing immersivity as such an active, interstitial space of relation, we can access an ecology of relationality that is not con- fined to anthropocentric modalities. Environmentality, then, offers a way not only to reclaim empathic projection in art but to project it into larger ecologies. In the form of “empathic projection” practiced in the art of cine-projection, the work of technology extends to the surroundings, and this affects its atmosphere. The projective apparatus itself plays an important part in this process of absorption. A deeper absorptive modality sur- faces in environmental artworks that do not hide their own 12 M. Fried, “Four Honest Outlaws:” 208. 13 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010): 76-7. 14 S. Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 425. GIULIANA BRUNO 35 AN-ICON  projective mechanism in their temporality and spatiality.15 The energy of a diffused projective empathy is mobilized when a self-reflexive technology reveals its own mechanism at play, laying it bare and activating it in ambiance. If we recast immersivity with this sense of environmentality – that is, with awareness of the cultural techniques that make it possible – we can discard the prevalent human-centric, per- spectival position that pervades most immersive discours- es. We can overcome the fixation on the human subject’s visual identification and singular preoccupation with the projective apparatus, especially those of VR or AR, to focus instead on the inanimate, the environment, and the natural realm. It is time to stop putting individuality and opticality at the center of immersivity, and to pursue a more critically aware, haptic field of empathic projections. In this way, a different ecology of immersivity and relationality can rise to the surface in enveloping forms of environmental screening that link the “projective imagination” to an “atmospheric thinking.” Environmentality and Empathic Projection in Art Having laid out my theoretical premises, let me now turn to an artistic practice that is in line with what I have proposed. I like to think closely, along and through the work of contemporary artists who perform analytical gestures of environmental projection. Hence, I will pursue my critical argumentation about immersion by navigating through the work of the Danish-born, New York-based artist Jesper Just, whose forms of empathic projection express an atmospher- ic thinking. I will specifically address the manifestation of 15 On this subject, see K. Wilder, “Projective Art and the ‘Staging’ of Empathic Projection,” Moving Image Review & Art Journal 5, no. 1-2 (2016): 125-40, https://doi.org/10.1386/ miraj.5.1-2.124_1. Wilder analyzes in particular the experimental landscape films of Chris Welsby. GIULIANA BRUNO 36 AN-ICON  scale and the magnification of the image in these works to challenge the notion that these are totalizing immersive conditions. His work will also enable us to rethink a crucial architectural component of immersivity: the design of an installation. A projection that is “environ-mental” – that cre- ates a psychic atmosphere of empathy with space, its size and motion – arises in the ambiance of Just’s moving-image installation This Nameless Spectacle, presented several times since 2011. This is due to the self-aware design and spatial construction of the installation. As viewers walk into the gallery space, they confront two very large screens that face each other. Each screen measures approximately twenty meters in length by five meters in height. As they are also placed more than twenty meters apart, it is hard to escape the sense of magnitude of this projection.16 The massive scale of the installation provokes a physical re- action, demanding that the viewers become not simply immersed but rather “incorporated” into it. Indeed, one cannot help being absorbed into the space of this projec- tion, empathetically enveloped in its atmosphere. To understand what is going on in this magni- fied ambiance of projection, gallery viewers must position themselves in the midst of this moving work and negotiate a space between the large ambient screens. Moving along the course of the gallery, not only a physical displacement but also an imaginary motion takes hold of one’s body. A form of “empathic projection” is triggered here because the work lays bare its exhibitionary mechanism, showing off its magnificent projective scale in moving form. Confronting this particularly large species of screen, and the distance that both isolates and unites the 16 This Nameless Spectacle was conceived and exhibited with these dimensions as part of the monographic exhibition This Unknown Spectacle, devoted to the work of Jesper Just, on view October 21, 2011-February 5, 2012, at MAC/VAL, Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de- Marne, France. GIULIANA BRUNO 37 AN-ICON  two screen entities, one’s habitual relation to space, even the space of one’s body, changes. Different types of scal- ing are confronted, haptically sensed, resulting in a sculp- tural experience of screen architecture. As the projective screen becomes a sculptural object, it impels the viewer to become more aware of volumes. One constantly has to measure the scale of one’s body against the scale of this milieu of projection. Corporeally absorbed in the space of this vid- eo work, rather than being optically, passively immersed, viewers physically experience a form of spatial, even atmo- spheric “perturbation.” Nothing is static on these encom- passing screens, including the landscape they present. At the beginning of the film, the camera tracks through the space of a park. An atmosphere blossoms into being here: as the light shimmers on the leaves of trees for a long while, the sound of movement can be heard. You follow the sound cue that propels you to continue through the space of the park, sensing its atmosphere, breathing its “air.”17 There is a breeze, and the tree branches tremble and quiver. The motion of leaves in the wind on one screen always finds corresponding atmospheric movement on the other. These screens, you discover, always move in unison, often giving the impression of a movement advancing through space. Different views and vistas are presented, and you feel as if you were actually “tracking” through the park, sympathet- ically absorbing its atmospheric scenery. 17 As further developed in Atmospheres of Projection, an “air” is here understood to be the atmosphere of a site, and an affect that affects us. On the effects of air in painting, see G. Didi- Huberman, “The Imaginary Breeze: Remarks on the Air of the Quattrocento,” Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 3 (2003): 275-89, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412903002003001; S. Connor, The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion, 2010). GIULIANA BRUNO 38 AN-ICON  Panorama of a Historical Movement, while Absorbed in the Atmosphere of a Park A park [is] a process of ongoing relationships existing in a physical region [...] a “thing-for-us.”18 As you navigate the sea of images of this en- vironment, you end up displaced back in time as well as destabilized by atmospheric perturbations. The scale of the installation space communicates a geology of strat- ified temporalities and nonlinear times. With This Name- less Spectacle, Just has created a post-cinematic ride that takes us inside the prehistory of large-scale visual display. As it transports us through the atmosphere of the park, it leads us to rediscover the environmental configuration of modern visual culture and the emergence of a form of im- mersive projection from its very atmosphere. The point of entry that Just stages for This Nameless Spectacle is the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, a public garden, developed as part of the plan for remodel- ing the urban fabric of Paris directed by Georges-Eugène Haussmann. The manner in which Just films in this park, employing scale and movement in its depiction, reveals the cultural ambiance of environmentalization of which the park is a part. In the nineteenth century, an ambient movement arose across diverse cultural expressions, including land- scape design. Moving along the path of modernity from view painting to garden views, from travel sketches to itiner- ant viewing boxes, from panoramas and other geographical “-oramas” to forms of interior/exterior mapping, from the mobile views of train travel to urban promenades, a trans- formative experience of spatial absorption was born. This 18 R. Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” in N. Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson, (New York: New York University Press, 1979): 119. GIULIANA BRUNO 39 AN-ICON  new geography was the product of a “panoramic vision” that dynamically reconfigured the environment.19 In this novel geovisuality, sites were set in mov- ing perspectives, expanding both outward and inward as they were absorbed and consumed in movement by the spectator. This new ambient sensibility engaged the phys- icality of the observers, challenging their ability to take in a mobilized space. And from this moving panorama at the end of the nineteenth century a new observer emerged in the persona of the film spectator, a body empathically “projected” into an environment of moving images.20 With This Nameless Spectacle, Jesper Just im- pels us to travel back to this history of “site-seeing.” He employs a panoramic mode of spatio-visual construction, and does so to expand the potential of this precinematic history in our times. Absorbed in this projective space, one can experience in particular the sense of scale and the at- mospheric touch of garden vistas. Garden views created the experience of embracing an environmental terrain, and of being enveloped in its ambiance. They combined a sen- sualist theory of the imagination with a touch of physicality. The garden designs of modernity engaged the corporeality of the body in the moving absorption of an environment. Automata, sculptures, and playful fluid mechanisms that included fountains and watery landscapes enhanced this natural atmospherics, as is the case with the Parisian park Just films. The vistas themselves incited viewers to move into the transformation of an ambiance. Ultimately, then, 19 See W. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 20 For a more extensive treatment of the history of modern, mobilized space, see, among others, G. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion; A. Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006); F. Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); L. Charney ,V.R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). GIULIANA BRUNO 40 AN-ICON  landscape offered the body an ever-changing experience of atmospheric spatio-visual display. As one ponders the origin of this embracing space – a landscape of “atmospheric screening” – one realizes why Just chose this setting for This Nameless Spectacle. This is an installation that enhances the mate- rial apparatus of visual display to create an environmental projection. Landscape is not at all a simple background here but rather the moving core of a technology of projec- tion that self-reflexively incorporates a historical setting in its very ambiance. Its design holds within itself the actual movement in space that led from garden views to the es- tablishment of the filmic screen as a place for pictures to be “sensed” in projective, atmospheric motion. This Nameless Spectacle reminds us that the garden, like the cinema, is not an optical but a haptical af- fair, inviting empathy with space. The picturesque garden, in particular, was the place that historically “enable[d] the imagination to form the habit of feeling through the eye.”21 It was an affective “mode of processing the physical world for our consumption.”22 This modern landscape initiated a form of immersivity that is a virtual form of touch, putting us “in touch” with inner space and engaging all senses syn- esthetically in shifting sensations of ambiance. Empathic projection would be felt as one’s interiority was mobilized in the process of relational connection with the natural site. A reciprocal, sympathetic relation with the nuances of am- biance was thus established in architecting the atmosphere of the garden. In moving through the Parisian park in This Nameless Spectacle, Just retraces this ambient genealogy of modernity: the mobilization of atmosphere, understood 21 C. Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927): 4. 22 J. Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992): 4. GIULIANA BRUNO 41 AN-ICON  also as affective ambiance, in an environmental process that traveled from landscape design to cine-projection. In this ambient sense, as the shimmering light of the projec- tion, the breath of air, and the motion of the wind come to be virtually sensed on one’s skin, a real atmospheric “per- turbation” can be felt in the installation. Even an effect of weather arises in this empathic projection. And so environ- mental phenomena that are present in a natural landscape come to join the very atmosphere of projection. Environments of Projection: A Digital Mareorama Announcing an upheaval in the relation of art to technology, pan- oramas are at the same time an expression of a new attitude toward life.23 In the context of this environmental panorama, the technique of projective display of This Nameless Spec- tacle is also to be considered, especially as it regards ab- sorption in scale. The spatial arrangement of the work, set on two large screens that appear to roll out moving images for a spectator in their midst, mediates a haptic, atmospher- ic communication that clearly reinvents modernity’s pan- oramic forms of immersive exhibition. This contemporary mode of enveloping display exhibits a fluid technological history of environmentality, especially in its way of mobiliz- ing scale. In its gigantic mobility, it specifically recalls the technique of the “moving panorama.” A product of nineteenth-century’s exhibitionary culture, the panorama form is usually associated with enor- mous paintings exhibited in circular spaces, surrounding 23 W. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Exposé of 1935),” in The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland, K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press-Harvard University Press, 1999), 6. GIULIANA BRUNO 42 AN-ICON  the observer with the weight of their scale.24 One applica- tion of this giant form of display included movement. In- spired by the circular panorama, the moving panorama was particularly engaged with geography.25 A popular form of entertainment across Europe and the United States, mov- ing panoramas offered spectators the sensation that they themselves were being transported as images of space scrolled panoramically before their eyes, with sound and light effects that enhanced the overall sense of transport. The apparatus of display played an import- ant part in the construction of this absorbing geography, which was not merely representational. A framed fabric of drawable curtains, moved by a mechanical cranking system, could suffice to produce the effect of a moving screen, turn- ing into an enveloping scrolling screen. But more complex mechanisms were also devised, and the most advanced were exhibited at the 1900 Exposition Universelle Interna- tionale, in Paris. The Stereorama, for one, let spectators imagine they were taking a sea voyage, sailing along the Mediterranean coast, aboard a ship rocked by waves. This elaborate form of environmental display involved a feat of technological imagination and execution. The point of this technique of moving exhibition was the scale of motion. “Unlike the usual panoramas,” as a contemporary article tells us, “the background is painted on the outer mantle of a slowly revolving cylinder with a wide protruding edge carrying forty concentric sheet-metal screens four inches in height on which the waves have been painted.” As for the screens, they “are moved up and down by an electric 24 See, among other works, R. Hyde, Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the “All- Embracing” View, (London: Trefoil-Barbican Art Gallery, 1988, exhibition catalogue); S. Bordini, Storia del panorama. La visione totale nella pittura del XIX secolo (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1984); K. Trumpener, T. Barringer, eds., On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama between Canvas and Screen (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2020). 25 As media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo shows in his comprehensive history of these panoramas, motion, both virtual and actual, was an essential sensory component of this particular precinematic form, which produced kinesthetic effects in the audience. See E. Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013): 46-54. GIULIANA BRUNO 43 AN-ICON  motor through a linkage system including rods, hinges, and wheels.” 26 Considering this history of exhibition, we can venture to propose that the invention of the projection of moving images on a screen, and the function of active immersivity that is reinvented today, arose from the scale of the enterprise of the moving panorama, which not only produced scrolling motion and waves of perturbation but was also an itinerant medium.27 Spectators were offered the virtual sensation of being absorbed in a journey through the shifting atmospheres of a landscape.28 With this public spectacle, open to the environment, a majestic, virtual form of imaging atmospheric change took hold of one’s body. The panoramic object of display, capable of offering the pleasure of scrolling through an ambiance, thus created the material condition of existence of the cinematic screen as itself a space of atmospheric projection. The projective screen, then, did not come into being as a small, flat, frontal, windowed geometry, as is usually assumed is some media studies, but rather as a gigantic geographic and moving display.29 In other words, the screen emerged as an environmental medium. It is im- portant to acknowledge this lack of frontality, fixity, and flatness in early forms of screening, and to underscore an expansive milieu of volumetric plasticity and movement, if we wish to rewrite the genealogic course of the projective 26 “Die neuesten Panoramen,” in De Natuur (1900): 257-58, as cited in S. Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (1980), trans. D. L. Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997): 177. 27 This was an apparatus of haptic mobility, for it not only produced scrolling motion and waves of perturbation with its mechanism but was also an itinerant medium. It was often taken from place to place by itinerant showmen. 28 A particularly precinematic development of this traveling medium, also presented at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, was the exhibition Trans-Siberian Railway Panorama, which simulated a trip from Moscow to Beijing aboard the famous railway. A succession of images of the diverse environment viewers were imaginatively traversing appeared as if rolling past a framed window of the train car. 29 In arguing that the screen performs an environmental operation, and challenging a narrow interpretation of its geometry, I specifically respond to claims put forth in L. Manovich, “The Screen and the User,” in The Language of New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001): 94- 115. GIULIANA BRUNO 44 AN-ICON  apparatus as a set of environmental operations. It is crucial as well to stress for my argument regarding the atmospher- ic ecology of visual display that, in the moving panorama, atmosphere was not only displayed but cultivated. The display constituted an environment in itself, and it was ca- pable of registering change in the atmosphere of a site. The changes in ambiance were at times en- hanced by cutouts that depicted objects in the surround- ing scenery, moving in zones that extended from the fore- ground to trees far out in the field. Rotating in endless loops around the scrolling canvas of the panorama, these cutouts “projected” a sense of depth to the transformation of the landscape. Multiple backdrops operated at different speeds to create a sense of rolling vistas, with the added effect that the differences in speed between each of them created variable combinations of scenes. In this display, which turned a means of transport into the emerging cin- ematic screen, endowing it with the ability to modify an ambiance, the scale of the display was as relevant as the rolling, diffracted, dispersed movement. An Oceanic Voyage from Postcinema to Precinema As this form of “projective imagination” merged, at time of modernity, with an “atmospheric thinking,” a projective future was also envisaged, for inscribed here is also the kind of magnification that characterizes display in our digital age. As we ponder the elaborate construction of Just’s This Nameless Spectacle, it becomes evident that his giant installation has, built into it, a mechanism that reinvents the environmental history of projective display we have just outlined. In its digital configuration, it cre- ates virtual traveling through atmospheres that reenact the GIULIANA BRUNO 45 AN-ICON  immersive ambiance and environmentality of the moving panorama. The perambulating movement through the Parc des Buttes Chaumont recalls in particular the function of the early roll transparencies created by Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle, representing the moving vistas of the Parc Monceau, near Paris.30 But it is not only the motion of the representation that creates the emotion and triggers the empathic projection with the garden space but also the moving mechanism of the projective dispositif, and espe- cially its scale. The corresponding, diffracted motion that occurs in the space of the installation, not simply on but between the two large screens that face each other, is laid bare, and it is closely connected to the empathy with space created in a particularly absorptive form of moving panorama. The configuration of Just’s moving-image in- stallation recalls especially the dynamic, atmospheric use of display that characterized the environment of the Mareo- rama.31 This was a spectacular form of moving panorama that used two “screens” simultaneously, rolling out a set of moving scenes that simulated the atmosphere of a voy- age at sea. Spectators were positioned in the middle of the display, aboard a ship, which rocked back and forth to enhance the sensation of motion and perturbation of being projected into the natural environment of a seascape. An article written at the time tells us that the plan for the Mareorama presented [...] two screens, each 2,500 feet long and forty feet in height [...] to be unrolled,” with “a double, swinging movement [that] was to be imparted to the spectator’s platform which was shaped like a ship. 30 See E. Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: 40-6. 31 The topic of the moving panorama was discussed in an interview with the artist in New York on September 16, 2011. Just has generously shared his artistic process with me on several other occasions, for which I thank him. GIULIANA BRUNO 46 AN-ICON  The scale of the scrolling screens was grandi- ose, for “215,000 square feet of screen was to be unrolled before the visitor’s eye.” And the movement produced was impressive and destabilizing: “One of the screens moves on the port side, the other on the starboard.”32 In addition to this mechanics of perturbation, elaborate effects repro- duced atmospheric changes related to different times of day and rendered shifts in weather and actual perturbations. Absorption in the Mareorama was an experi- ence of unfolding events in a floating, situational ambiance – even in climatic perturbation – precisely as happens in Just’s installation. Viewers were sandwiched between two giant, moving screens that enhanced the sensation of tak- ing in an atmosphere and experiencing its changing states. All the kinesthetic effects made the visitors to the space of the Mareorama not only feel the motions but empathize with them. In a similar manner, spectators of Just’s installation who negotiate their own movement between complex ap- paratuses of rolling projective display, do so kinesthetically, imaginatively, and virtually as well as with actual motion. In This Nameless Spectacle, architectural mag- nitude contributes greatly to the empathic absorption in the shifting, fluid ambiance, that is, in the environment itself of the projection.33 The Mareorama “ship” could accom- modate seven hundred spectators. Just’s double-screen movement likewise relies on the scale of the gallery in which it is exhibited, and on a physically grandiose sense of space that underscores the environmental root of the emergence 32 S. Oettermann, “Die neuesten Panoramen,” in The Panorama: 179. 33 Although conceived in the extremely large format discussed, the screens have been adapted to the architecture of the gallery site for subsequent exhibitions. A reduced scale, for instance, at J. Cohan in New York in 2012, created a more intimate feeling for the spectator, who was sandwiched between the still-large screens of the mareoramic display. GIULIANA BRUNO 47 AN-ICON  of projection in forms of giant, moving display.34 The Mareo- rama ultimately magnified the sensory, sympathetic impact of exposure to an affecting atmosphere; following its cur- rents, Just’s own liquid mode of exhibition activates this ambient “sense” of display in installation form in its own empathic projection. Laying bare the projective dispositif that turns the gallery space into a moving vessel, it makes it into a vehicle of atmospheric perturbations. In this sense, the space of the art gallery constitutes a real part of the installation, and the persona of the gallery viewer becomes, quite poignantly, “installed.” On this screen interface, the turn of the last century thus joins the beginning of the new millennium in a reflection on the environment of projection and its cultural ecology. Just links together the energy of potentiality that characterized the space of visual display in early modernity with the potential expressed today when experimenting environmentally with digital technology. The artist not only shows us how central the environment of projection is in our time but argues that the desire for absorption in geo- graphic display is truly enduring. Ultimately, This Nameless Spectacle demonstrates how the large-scale architecture of the screen has traveled across time in projection while exhibiting the screen itself as an environment, even an am- bient architecture – the atmospheric form in which projec- tion comes into being, and can even dissolve. 34 Just’s installation returns us to that historically dynamic, multiple form of ambient display without, however, reproducing the construction literally. He does not exhibit the actual machine or mechanism that is at the origin of the work but rather incorporates the scale of the Mareorama and its movement across screens in the physical spatiality of the installation, which encompasses the transit of viewers in gallery space. In this sense, the installation does not follow the trend of display that has been spreading since the arrival of the digital age, in which artists have taken to exhibiting outmoded forms of visual technology in the gallery. Just does not belabor the obsolescence of the cinematic apparatus or its panoramic predecessor or show any sense of nostalgia for older forms of display. This Nameless Spectacle rather works at historicizing from within, reinventing the possibilities of screening expressed by the moving, modern mode of ambient display that gave rise to the cinematic era of projection. GIULIANA BRUNO 48 AN-ICON  Scaling an Environment As screens become prominently incorporated into both our private and public lives, the work of scalar reinterpretation that Just pursues becomes particularly sig- nificant, for a reinvention of the act of screening in the en- vironment is especially pressing today. Screens proliferate in widely different forms in our surroundings. They have decreased in size, becoming more portable: computers, smart phones, and iPads, which enable us to scroll hapti- cally, now travel with us at all times as our personal pan- oramas. The rise of the miniature form goes hand in hand with magnification. In contrast to the shrinking size of our personal screens, we are witnessing an increasing use of the gigantic as screens have become especially magnified in the spectacle of three-dimensional exhibition. Digital technology has enlarged the possibilities of projection in expanded cinematic forms of immersivity. Large-scale panoramic forms of projection, such as LED video walls, proliferate and have changed the very pan- orama of our environment, creating a veritable immersive screenscape.35 The technique of 3-D projection mapping, in particular, can turn an entire building or landscape into a screen environment.36 Heirs of the atmospheres of “son et lumière” shows, and of modernity’s dioramas and pan- oramic spectacles, these magnified projections can even design a performative environment. A haptic, immersive landscape is digitally fashioned as the façade of an edifice 35 On the urban screen, see, among others, S. McQuire, M. Martin, S. Niederer, eds., Urban Screens Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009); N. Verhoeff, “Screens in the City,” in D. Chateau, J. Moure, eds., Screens: From Materiality to Spectatorship (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016): 125-39; C. Berry, J. Harbord, R. Moore, eds., Public Space, Media Space (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 36 S. Chakravorty, “Spaces of Spectatorship: Architectures of the Projected Image,” Polished Panels 1, no. 2, Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture (March 7, 2016), http://www. mediapolisjournal.com/2016/03/spaces-of-spectatorship-architectures-of-the-projected- image/, accessed August 30, 2023. In projection mapping, a two- or three-dimensional object is spatially mapped by using specialized software that mimics the real environment it is to be projected upon. This software can interact with a projector to fit any desired image onto any surface, small or large. GIULIANA BRUNO 49 AN-ICON  turns into a projective skin. Cities are punctuated by these seductive large-scale projective envelopes that create am- biance. But in projection mapping, the idea of an en- vironment of projection risks becoming literalized. If the ambiance of projection is remapped in a reductive way, the notion of ambient media itself shrinks. The effects of media façades created in literal ways are often questionable, as “ambient” begins to take on environmental connotations that are pacifying and not far removed from commerce.37 After all, large-scale projection mapping is mostly used, contiguously with artistic and urban-branding pursuits, by publicity and advertising firms. Basking in the glow of giant projections can lead to opiate effects or the simple encour- agement of consumption as opposed to the production of engagement and perturbation. As the ambiance of projection is being trans- formed by digital technology, artists are increasingly re- sponding creatively and critically to these issues of the sculptural and panoramic scale of immersive projection. Just, for instance, critically exposed how large-scale projec- tion transforms the urban environment with the projection of his Servitudes (2015), a cinematic, architectural work consisting of eight sequences filmed in and around the World Trade Center in New York. Originally conceived for the subterranean gallery space of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, this filmic work was scaled up in November 2015 and displayed on a series of large electronic billboards on the building façades of New York’s Times Square. In 2019, the same work was also projected onto layers of semitransparent fabric in yet another geographic location, in museum space – a fact that makes one question the function of scaling as well as further reflect on the nature 37 For a critical reading of the ambient, see P. Roquet, Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); S. Kim-Cohen, Against Ambience and Other Essays (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). GIULIANA BRUNO 50 AN-ICON  and fabric of projection in relation to its specific geography and location.38 Projecting a Global Urban Scale These experiments on the vast projective po- tential of digital technology thus force us to rethink the issue of large-scale immersive projection in light of its own com- plex history. It is particularly urgent to ask ourselves ques- tions about the nature and consequences of scaling. What changes in an environment of projection when subjected to different scales? How does scale change the nature of the screen itself as an object? What kinds of projection, understood as forms of cultural transmission, does mag- nification comport? With this variability of scale, Servitudes rein- forces the penchant for “empathic” projection that Just exhibited in his earlier works, for, as we have noted, this process is set in motion when works actively lay bare their own projective mechanism rather than keeping it static and invisible. Intercourses, which premiered at the 2013 Venice Biennale, took this up at a global scale.39 This five-channel video and installation was set in a suburb of Hangzhou, China, that has been built as a replica of Paris, France. The 38 When this work was commissioned by Paris’s Palais de Tokyo for their expansive subterranean gallery space, Just began to research the exhibition hall, which dates from Paris’s 1937 world’s fair. The 2015 projection of Servitudes in New York’s Times Square was part of Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance. Servitudes was installed on semitransparent screen fabric in Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, Denmark, June 15 - August 11, 2019. 39 Reflecting on how a pavilion at the Biennale represents a country inside another country, Just engaged the architectural configuration of this conflated projection and intervened in the site of the Danish Pavilion, itself a composite structure. By walling in the grand entrance of the building’s neoclassic façade, he enticed viewers to walk around the colonnade and enter instead through a courtyard, which ushered them inside the modernist part of the pavilion. Here, the interior space had been transformed into a construction site. Walls built from concrete cinder blocks created another architectural path within the already hybrid space of the pavilion. The rough, impermanent fabrication of the concrete blocks lent a sense of eeriness to the site: though it appeared to be a place in the making, it felt as if it were already in ruins. In constructing an installation space that evoked the atmosphere of a ruin in progress, Just made material the layered process inherent in the imaginary fabrication of such sites, closely engaging their imaginative “projections.” GIULIANA BRUNO 51 AN-ICON  large scale of the projection inside the pavilion created a feeling of cultural displacement. In it, three Black men me- ander in a desolate ambiance of empty streets, uninhabited façades, and unfinished staircases that lead nowhere. This Paris imagined in China had a postapocalyptic feeling, even a quasi–science fiction dimension, despite actually being a real place. The projected images worked together with the architectural design of the pavilion to instill in us a concrete sense of how a global urban imaginary is made, and what scale this process has assumed. What is performed and projected here is a becoming of global scale – a state that contains processes of dislocation, hybridization, and entropy. Intercourses is named after that which lies in between: relational things like processes of interstitial con- struction. It deals with the actual process of projection as a space of relation and intermediation. In this sense, it fol- lows the course of Just’s investigation of environmentality as a magnified psychogeography. The very magnitude of the exhibition space drives a navigation of atmospheres, engaging viewers in the scale of the destabilizing projec- tive ambiance in which they are themselves empathically projected. Intercourses confronts even more directly than This Nameless Spectacle the effects and affects of the tech- nology of scaling in contemporary digital culture. This is a work of actual scalar construction, for its five screens have different configurations that generate further geographic dislocation through their differing positions in space and angles of view. Moreover, this Paris-in-China suspended between states of ruin and construction offers projections that can vary radically in size, from one to fifteen meters, depending on the site of the installation. In such a way, Just questions the different forms of screen scale that proliferate in our digital envi- ronment. In laying bare the architecture of the projective GIULIANA BRUNO 52 AN-ICON  mechanism, he triggers a critical response to the cultural phenomenon of variable screen size, making us reflect on how miniaturization relates to magnification in digital cul- ture. By confronting what happens in the process of scaling up or down, from one size to the other, he creates cultural awareness of the state of screening today while exhibiting the process itself of flexible projection. This architectural scaling makes gallery viewers aware of the very architec- ture of screening, and especially attuned to how ambiance changes in scale. Furthermore, for Just, large scale does not consist in simple magnification or simplistic immersivity. The magnitude of the largest screen in Intercourses, rather, challenges the conventional use of magnitude in film.40 Less associated with figurative facial close-ups, as is traditionally most often the case in cinema, it is more attuned to the vastness and complexity of the geographic and cultural landscapes it renders. Scale is here also anything but mon- umental and does not constitute a direct correlate of the aesthetic of the sublime, so often evoked when speaking of immersion. Rather than monumentalizing its own object, the large scale of the projection takes the gallery viewer into an ambiguous affective and cognitive space that asks for attentive, even contemplative absorption – displaying a critical form of empathic projection. This process of projective absorption in scale leads to deciphering the geographic hybridity of the site shown on screen while enveloped in the siting of the pro- jection. After all, wandering through a look-alike Paris with French actors of African descent, one could easily believe that this is in fact Paris – and that would be an acceptable response. But if, galvanized by the scale of the large screen, the installation viewer scans the surface and “screens” the 40 On magnification and the close-up in film, see M. A. Doane, Bigger than Life: The Close-up and Scale in the Cinema (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2021). GIULIANA BRUNO 53 AN-ICON  space closely, she can sense that something is off: the ur- ban scale here is quite different than that of Paris. As one tunes in to surface, scale, and atmosphere, scanning the big screen, and further notices the presence of Chinese inscriptions or too many air conditioners dotting the build- ing façades, one can finally understand how, working with and against architecture, inhabitants of this replica of Paris in China, located in the district of Tianducheng, adapt the space to their own use. In Intercourses, then, Just enhances scale as a geography, detecting defining nuances in ambient pro- jection and working with dimension in culturally affecting ways that defy the simple effect of immersive viewing. Here, immersion is not understood, as conventionally assumed, to produce virtual illusion but, rather, spatial awareness. As was the case in This Nameless Spectacle, the artist also works specifically against the astonishing use of magni- fication one finds in digital hyperrealism, with its purely spectacular effects of immersivity.41 For Just, scale rather functions as a real environmental modality. His installations invite close discernment of the surrounding space and en- gage contact with the larger environment. They resist using scale as a building block to create virtual monuments and, working with movement and active screening, also resist the arresting sense of awe associated with boundless im- mersive magnitude. In other words, Just is an artist who does not fall into the trap of large projection as mere man- ifestation of a technological sublime. Jesper Just’s critical investigation of this press- ing subject of immersivity finds correspondence in the prac- tices of other artists who are attentive to scale, reconfigure scalar paradigms, and also engage the panoramic form of exhibition as a projective environment. In a compelling way, 41 This reminds us that, as Susan Stewart suggested long ago, “the gigantic” is a particularly enveloping notion. See S. Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1993). GIULIANA BRUNO 54 AN-ICON  Lisa Reihana also questioned the scale and atmosphere of immersive projection at the New Zealand Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale with her large-scale installation In Pur- suit of Venus [infected] (2015-17), for which she reinvented the giant form of the panoramic spectacle in scrolling dig- ital fashion. Inspired by the French scenic wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1804-1805), the installation created a large-scale panorama in which real and invent- ed narratives of colonial encounter take place. This work took the very surface of a panoramic wallpaper and made it into an animated, moving surface of unfolding projection. Here, videographic and animation technologies contribute to a reimagination of the nineteenth-century shape of the moving panorama while probing its historical, ideological, and political dimensions. In Reihana’s reinterpretation of this mode, history is not only displayed but scrolls out and drifts along panoramically, in a critical reading that ques- tions the very form of its spectacular, colonial, scalar, im- mersive projections. In the face of digitally magnified immersion, and the return of the spectacular phenomenon of large-scale panoramic projection, one can only welcome the kind of environmental research that motivates Jesper Just and Lisa Reihana, for this is an exploration that is aimed at critically excavating, and exhibiting, the complex history of large- scale, immersive visual display, its forms of mediality, and the culture that it transmits and circulates in the environment. Here, the present not only exposes but challenges the past, and finally, changes its course. Only if we are put in a posi- tion to experience critically the cultural atmosphere that links scale and motion to immersive screening, and consider this multifaceted, nonlinear historicity, can we hope to redefine the terms of, and give a new name to, the ecology of ab- sorption in space – the environment itself of projection. GIULIANA BRUNO 55 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19938

Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber Of The GiImage ants by Lucia Corrain Immersivity Giulio Romano Painting Fiction Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber Of The Giants LUCIA CORRAIN, Università degli Studi di Bologna – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8437-969X https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19938 Abstract Art in general, more than other fields, appears to lie at the heart of immersivity. As argued by Oliver Grau, it is art that still deploys a considerable genealogy with examples that resonate with the immersivity as proposed in contemporaneity. It is the current immersivity that con- structs “constellations” which, as Benjamin put it, dynam- ically enact “the history of art [as] the history of prophesies […] which can be written only starting from the point of view of an immediate present,” where “every present is de- termined by those images that are synchronous to it: each now is the now of a given knowability.” In the art history field, however, it is almost mandatory to re-evoke a fully mannerist ambience where “painting” creates – without the aid of particular instruments – the near-total immersion, acting fully on the passional dimension. The case in point is the Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, made by Giulio Romano between 1532 and 1536 in Palazzo Te in Mantua. A stunning illusionist artifice that catapults the viewers into the heart of the ongoing event, to produce in them a sense of awe and estrangement beyond the “frame.” Keywords Image Immersivity Giulio Romano Painting Fiction To quote this essay: L. Corrain, “Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber Of The Giants,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 56-73, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19938. LUCIA CORRAIN 56 AN-ICON A piece many years in doing and now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape.1 By way of introduction Undoubtedly – in a chronological field conven- tionally defined as Mannerism – the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber of the Giants, frescoed between 1532 and 1536 by Giulio Romano and his collaborators in Palazzo Te in Mantua, occupies a position of great importance. The high- ly original solution adopted by the Roman artist, already acknowledged in his day and age, in the light of today’s immersive technologies, can indeed manifest all its extraor- dinary innovative force.2 Virtual reality, as we know it today, is obtained by means of a digital instrument capable of generating “three-dimensional” scenes, narratives and landscapes within which subjects have the impression of actually mov- ing and interacting with the ambience surrounding them. Thanks to the evolution in computer graphics and the imple- mentation of the computational power, representations ever 1 W. Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale (1611) (New York-London-Toronto-Sydney: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1998): V.II.95-100, 219. 2 The bibliography concerning Palazzo Te is currently rather substantial, but it was Ernst Gombrich who took this whole building outside of the shadows in which it found itself. In 1933 he dedicated to it his graduation thesis at the University of Vienna, E. Gombrich, “Der Palazzo del Te,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, no. 8 (1934): 79-104; “Versuch einer Deuteung,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, no. 9 (1936): 121-150; it. trans. A.M. Conforti, Giulio Romano. Il palazzo del Te (Mantua: Tre Lune, 1984). Cfr. among the many others F. Hart, Giulio Romano (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958); K.W. Forster, R.J. Tuttle, “The Palazzo del Te,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 30, no. 4 (1971): 267-293; A. Belluzzi, W. Capezzali, II palazzo dei lucidi inganni: Palazzo Te a Mantova (Florence: Centro Studi Architettura Ouroboros, 1976); E. Verheyen, The Palazzo del Te in Mantua: Images of Love and Politics (Baltimore-London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1977); A. Belluzzi, M. Tafuri, eds., Giulio Romano (Milan: Electa, 1989, exhibition catalogue); A. Belluzzi, Palazzo Te a Mantova, 2 vols. (Modena: Cosimo Panini, 1998). About the Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of Giants specifically, cfr. R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: Palazzo Te (Milan: Skira, 2020). LUCIA CORRAIN 57 AN-ICON  closer to reality can be obtained. Nonetheless, so-called “reality media” are not yet a “perfect” mimesis of the real.3 The relationship between the current immersive devices and the more dated optical instruments of the so- called pre-cinematographic phase has already been widely brought to light: it is the case of the scene of the eighteenth century4 and the stereoscope of the subsequent century5 that share, with the more recent immersive technologies, the question of a “channelled aesthetic perception.”6 In rather similar fashion, at the pictorial level, the Quadratur- ismo and the trompe-l’œil raise questions relating to both the continuity between the space of experience and the space represented, and to the methods of construction of a gaze “from the inside” in which proximity allows for the perception of esthesis, verdictives and passion. Oliver Grau7 – the scholar who perhaps more than any other has outlined a genealogy of immersivity – has identified a possible origin even in Pompeian painting, to then look to the Renaissance and Baroque illusionist spaces, all the way down to the more recent scenarios 3 E. Modena, Nelle storie: Arte, cinema e media immersivi (Rome: Carocci, 2022); A. Pinotti, “VR, AR, MR, XR,” in Enciclopedia dell’Arte Contemporanea, vol. 4 (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana “Giovanni Treccani,” 2021): 685-686. 4 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (2001), trans. G. Custance (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003). 5 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1992). 6 P. Montani, Tecnologie della sensibilità: Estetica e immaginazione interattiva (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2014): 25. 7 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, opens his reconnaissance on the Pompeian frescoes, where the creation of a pictorial surface with the simulation of depth generates the effect of an ambience of greater extension that what it is in reality, capturing the gaze of the observer who does not seem to perceive the actual distinction between real space and the space of the image. Grau then lists the subsequent examples: the Chamber of the Deer in the Avignon Palace of the Popes (1343); the Hall of Perspectives by Baldassare Peruzzi in villa Farnesina (1516), the neoclassical “village rooms” or “sylvans.” The latter is a kind that, “while it dilates to the extreme the portrait of landscape taking it to the dimensions of the environmental room, it applies at the same time scenic criteria relevant to organising the decorations unitarily, with the illusionist effect of the plein air,” R. Roli, Pittura bolognese 1650- 1800: Dal Cignani ai Gandolfi (Bologna: Alfa Edizioni, 1977): 70 [my translation]. LUCIA CORRAIN 58 AN-ICON  (panorama).8 Grau, however, does not refer specifically to the striking example of the Chamber of the Giants, where the immersivity reaches a very high level of passional in- volvement on the part of the spectator, moreover without resorting to an auxiliary devices (as is the case today with headsets, overalls). A stunning illusionistic artifice defined by Frederick Hart as “surely the most fantastic and fright- ening creation of the entire Italian Renaissance in any medi- um”9 capable of catapulting the spectator into the heart of the event portrayed; as stated in 1934 by Ernst Gombrich: “into the deafening vortex of a frightening catastrophe,”10 capable of engendering astonishment and awe.11 Harking back to the renowned words of Wal- ter Benjamin: “the history of art is a history of prophecies” which “can only be written from the standpoint of the im- mediate, actual present,”12 where “every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability.”13 It can be stated that the case we wish to investigate here can be con- sidered in the light of a premise. In short, the machine fres- coed in the Chamber of the Giants in Palazzo Te appears to be the height of an illusion that involves the spectator in a dimension that can be defined as being fully immersive. Moreover, if we carefully observe, in the cham- ber in question of Palazzo Te, all the “instructions […] which 8 In 1792 Robert Baker, in London, made the first Panorama, which consists in a circular shaped ambience, where on the interior walls are projected images of times of distant places, offering the chance to the spectators of having a travel experience whilst being “stationary.” Cfr., besides O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, also S. Bordini, Storia del panorama: La visione totale della pittura nel XIX secolo (Rome: Nuova Cultura, 2009); M. Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini: Letteratura e cultura visuale (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2012); M. Cometa, Cultura visuale (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2021). E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 94, in 1934 had already related the Chamber of the Giants with the nineteenth century panoramas, stating: “that indeed Giulio, and he alone, was the first to try out in a work of art that which is called the hall of the Giants” [my translation]. 9 F. Hart, Giulio Romano: 32. 10 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 79. 11 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Turin: Einaudi, 2021): 107-109, in the chapter dedicated to the environment-image states that the Chamber of the Giants is a paradigmatic example, “an illusionistic machine that invites one to reflect on the viewer’s visual act as a participative response to the iconic act.” 12 W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1991), vol. 1, no. 2:1046-7. Quoted in English in B. Doherty, “Between the Artwork and its ‘Actualization’: A Footnote to Art History in Benjamin’s Work of Art,” Paragraph 32, no. 3 (2009): 331-358, 336. 13 W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1982), trans. H. Eiland, K. McLaughlin (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2003): 462-463. LUCIA CORRAIN 59 AN-ICON  [in the planar paintings] direct the gaze, guide the reading, intimidate and can, at times, seduce the viewer subjecting them to the representation,”14 have been completely dis- avowed.15 They have been totally cancelled. And, not by chance, in their place some decidedly more cogent ones have been created in an interplay of different disciplines, taking one another by the hand, offering a wholly original reading of the Chamber in question that can fully manifest the active nature of perception. An exceptional visitor Let us now try to enter the Chamber of the Giants, highlighting its most salient characteristics. And we shall do so starting from an exceptional witness, Gior- gio Vasari (Arezzo, 1511-1574), the art historian who was able to visit the Mantuan Palazzo Te on two occasions: the first time when the Chamber of the Giants was under construction; the second when the works had already been completed. His testimony can to all intents and purposes be considered an ekphrasis of great efficacy that “overlaps with the pictorial [story], and at times gives the impression of eclipsing it.”16 Here is the description Vasari gives of the space created and painted by Giulio Romano: After laying deep, double foundations in that corner, which was in a swampy spot, Giulio had built over that angle a large, round room with extremely thick walls, so that the four corners of the outside walls would be stronger and could support a double vault rounded like an oven. And having done this, since the room had corners, he built here and there all the way around it the doors, windows, and a fireplace of rusticated stones with worn-away edges, which 14 G. Careri, “Prefazione,” in L. Marin, Opacità della pittura: Sulla rappresentazione nel Quattrocento (Florence: La Casa Usher, 2012): 7-13. 15 On the role of the frame in the work of art see D. Ferrari, A. Pinotti, eds., La cornice: Storie, teorie, testi (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2018) and S. Zuliani, Spazi e tempi dell’installazione (Rome: Arshake, 2015). 16 A. Belluzzi, Giulio Romano: 446 [my translation]. On the text/image problem cfr. W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). LUCIA CORRAIN 60 AN-ICON were disjointed and crooked almost to the extent that they 17 even seemed to lean over on one side and actually to collapse. Giulio Romano – as can be inferred – gave a particular form to the environment: it is not a “round room,” as Vasari might lead us to believe, but a “a double vault rounded like an oven,” which did not have sharp corners and whose doors and windows were “disjointed and crook- ed,” which almost certainly means that the windows were closed by painted blinds and the doors were in continuity with respect to the frescoes. A singular space, which also disposed of a par- ticular flooring, as confirmed by Vasari himself: He had made the floor with polished river slingstones that ran around the walls, and those on the painting plane, which fell down- wards had counterfeited: for a part those painted inwards escaped, and at times were 18 occupied and adorned by grass and at times by larger stones. But, as can well be imagined, it was, in those days, a cobbled floor with slingstones that, albeit creating seamless continuity with the upright walls, did not represent an assurance of a steady support for the visitor.19 It is not possible, however, to be outside the space to talk about it; you need to traverse it to know it, for 17 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 370. In the first edition by types of Lorenzo Torrentino (Florence, 1550), the historiographer was even more articulate: “He therefore had double foundations of great depth sunk at that corner, which was in a marshy place, and over that angle he constructed a large round room, with very thick walls, to the end that the four external corners of the masonry might be strong enough to be able to support a double vault, round after the manner of an oven. This done, he caused to be built at the corners right round the room, in the proper places, the doors, windows, and fireplace, all of rustic stones rough-hewn as if by chance, and, as it were, disjointed and awry, insomuch that they appeared to be really hanging over to one side and falling down).” G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano pittore e architetto,” in Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani (1550) (Turin: Einaudi, 1986): 833 [my translation]. 18 Ibidem: 834 [my translation]. 19 The flooring was made anew by Paolo Pozzo in the eighteenth-century restoration of the palazzo, in which very likely the fireplace of which Vasari speaks was bricked up, and which is testified to in some drawings preserved at the Louvre, Windsor and Palazzo Te (donated in 2015 by Monroe Warshaw), cfr. R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: 27. Furthermore, in 1781, the archduke Ferdinand of Habsburg commissioned Giovanni Bottani to “have made a picket fence in the hall of the Giants […]. Also, he would promptly have the fireplace sealed and walled up,” citation reported in A. Belluzzi, Giulio Romano: 236. LUCIA CORRAIN 61 AN-ICON  it to become a true object of analysis. The analysts must become an integral part of the space, immerse themselves in it like a percipient body, like the users of the place, going through it and letting themselves be guided by the logic imposed by the context in which they find themselves. The visitors are, so to speak, literally “manipulated” by this un- usual spatial environment. The system of the spatial expression is in it- self meaningful, that here acquires an even more complete meaning with what is portrayed on the walls: the signifi- cance of the space is “the final result of a stratified and complex series of procedures, articulations and sub-artic- ulations, where an element is meaningful only if related to the others.”20 The spatial configurations prefigure, that is, the virtuality, of the possible ways of using the morphology itself of the places. In this sense, a semiotic reading can come to our aid which – as Giannitrapani writes – “consid- ers space not as a straightforward container of subjects, objects, events, but as a meaningful structure capable of speaking of a multiplicity of aspects of life.”21 This means that: “The significance of the space lies in the efficacious action that it provokes on the subjects coming into contact with it.” And in order for space to completely “influence the body it must work on the ambience, it must give a shape to the architecture of the space.”22 The Fall of the Giants There is no doubt that the space of the Cham- bers of the Giants, already in itself significant, finds fulfil- ment with what it portrayed on the ceiling and on the walls. Although this interest of this analysis is focused on the immersive dimension, it is necessary to briefly go over the 20 G. Marrone, “Efficacia simbolica dello spazio: Azioni e passioni,” in P. Bertetti, G. Manetti, eds., Forme della testualità: Teoria, modelli, storia e prospettive (Turin: Testo&immagine, 2001): 85-96. 21 A. Giannitrapani, Introduzione alla semiotica dello spazio (Rome: Carrocci, 2013): 45. 22 On the space cfr. also M. Hammad, Lire l’espace, comprendre l’architecture (Limoges: Presses Universitaires, 2001), trans. G. Festi (Rome: Meltemi, 2003). LUCIA CORRAIN 62 AN-ICON  iconography of the whole figurative apparatus because ̶ as we shall see – it is closely related to Federico II Gonzaga, the patron, and Charles V over whose empire the sun never set. The whole room, as is well-known, portrays the fall of the Giants drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.23 The myth tells of the giants’ attempted attack on the gods: with the intent to reach Mount Olympus, the vicious inhabitants of the earth superimpose one another on two mountains, that of Pelion and that of Ossa. Portrayed on the ceiling (Fig. 1) is the gods’ ire against the giants’ attempt to scale the mountains, with Jupiter who abandons his throne to place himself along- side Juno, who, with her gaze and index finger, points to the direction towards which to cast the thunderbolts. The plot hatched by the giants fails, of course, and Jupiter’s intervention makes the mountains collapse; by tumbling precipitously, they overwhelm the giants burying them be- neath the heavy boulders. A daring view from the bottom upwards, always on the ceiling, portrays a circular temple with twelve columns from whose balustrade some char- acters, concerned and awestruck by what is happening beneath them, look out; in the same way the numerous other divinities display impassioned states of agitation. The throne, left vacant by Jupiter, is occupied by the imperial eagle with its wings outspread, while the menacing clouds surround the whole empyrean in a role of transition from the world of the gods to the terrestrial terrain of the com- mon mortals. On the walls, above the fireplace, the giant Ty- phon (monstruous son of Gaia – Fig. 2) is depicted: for having tried to depose Jupiter, he is struck by lightning and sinks under Etna, and here, crushed by the boulders, in an attempt to defend himself he spews fire and lapilli causing an earthquake.24 The fireplace, in turn, was supposed to suggest the illusion of the youth condemned by the flames: the flames that issue from the mouth of the giant Typhon, 23 Ovid, Metamorphoses I vv. 151-154 (I A.D), trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 5. 24 Ovid, Metamorphoses V: 109. LUCIA CORRAIN 63 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, ceiling, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. in the pictorial fiction, thus ended up “conversing” with the real fire of the fireplace. Examining more closely the remaining frescoed parts, Vasari took note of further details: the entire world is upside-down and almost at its final end [...] many giants can be seen in flight, all struck down by Jove’s thunderbolts and on the verge of being overwhelmed by the landslides from the mountains just like the others. In another part, Giulio represented other giants upon whom are crashing down temples, columns, and other parts of buildings, creating 25 among these arrogant creatures great havoc and loss of life. And, in actual fact, three walls propose land- scapes (Figg. 3-4) and another one proposes an architec- ture – a serliana – that too about to collapse under the fire of the lightning bolts of the gods (Fig. 5). 25 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372. LUCIA CORRAIN 64 AN-ICON  Fig. 2. G. Romano, Fig. 3. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, wall est, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. wall sud, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. Fig. 4. G. Romano, Fig. 5. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, wall ovest, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. wall nord, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. LUCIA CORRAIN 65 AN-ICON  At this point it is worthwhile turning our atten- tion to the time when the action portrayed takes place. The time in itself is not representable, it is represented by means of movement and transformation: it is a function of the movement and the last is a function of space. Any ac- tion, which is never a perpetual motion, contains phases: a beginning, a climax and an end. In the course of each one of those, every action leads to the memory of what had come before and what will come afterwards. In short, the climax is the moment of utmost tension. In the Chamber of the Giants it corresponds to the phase when everything collapses: the technique is that of breaking down natural and architectural elements into parts that gradually lose their natural order to follow one that has gone completely haywire. If it is true that the rendering of the fatal moment is accentuated in mannerism, it can be said that here it has touched some very elevated heights. The particularity of the fatal instant had been highlighted, once again, by Vasari (Fig. 6): Fig. 6. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber of the Giants, detail of the Giant, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. LUCIA CORRAIN 66 AN-ICON Giulio [...] made plans to build a corner-room [...] in which the walls would correspond with the paintings, in order 26 to deceive the people who would see it as much as he could. a marvellous work where the entire painting has neither beginning nor end, and that it is all tied together 27 and runs on continuously without boundary or dec- oration. This is a room completely without frames,28 of any delimitation, with an enveloping continuity, in which the space – as Gombrich points out – runs homogeneous to the floor as far as the apex of the roof with not edges and no frame to interrupt the seamlessness of the surfaces, it is completely transformed into a pictorial scene: it is29 part of a single action, animated by the same emotional impetus. But, Vasari adds, it is a horrible scene: Therefore, let no one ever imagine seeing a work from the brush that is more horrible or frightening or more realistic than this one. And anyone who enters that room and sees the windows, doors, and other such details all distorted and almost on the verge of crashing down, as well as the mountains and buildings collapsing, can only fear that everything is toppling down upon him. Especially when he sees 30 all the gods in that heaven running this way and that in flight. In short, a stunning illusionistic artifice that seeks to catapult the viewer into the throbbing heart of the event in progress, where “the boundaries of space 26 Ibid.: 370. 27 Ibid.: 373. 28 Cfr. P. Carabell, “Breaking the Frame: Transgression and Transformation in Giulio Romano’s Sala dei Giganti,” Artibus et Historiae 18, no. 36 (1997): 87-100. 29 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 81. 30 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372-373. LUCIA CORRAIN 67 AN-ICON  disappear [...] and the laws of statics, in which the eye can find tranquillizing points of reference, are completely lacking.”31 Inside the environment: “the walls themselves move and, soon, everything is disarranged and collapses upon the viewer” who, in this way, shares “the same fate that submits and destroys the very powerful giants that tried in vain to sustain the walls.”32 (Figg. 7-8) Fig. 7. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber of the Giants, detail of the Giant, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. Fig. 8. G. Romano, copy of, Disegno della parete con il camino, Paris, Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques, inv. 3636, recto 31 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 79. 32 Ibid. LUCIA CORRAIN 68 AN-ICON  Being at the end of the world At this point – and to delve once more into the immersivity that generates the environment – it comes nat- ural to wonder why the patron, duke Federico II Gonzaga, decided to make such a particular and unique ambience in what is considered to be his villa of pleasures. What role would the Chamber of the Giants play in that precise his- torical moment?33 We should not try to imagine the visitor guided by the Lord of Mantua in the palazzo: Federico II leads his guest in a space whose boundaries are well de- fined, through ambiences of different sizes, decorated with specific iconographic themes, in a crescendo that takes him gradually as far as the Chamber of the Giants. An ini- tiatory pathway through which the duke proposes to his guest a sort of progressive estrangement with respect to the real world and that reaches its climax in the immense “catastrophe” of the dark cave, with the doors and win- dows shut and only the flickering light coming from the lit fireplace. A status of anguish and terror, apparently with no exit, in which the guest “with the highest mastery is de- prived of every chance to take a distance, to evaluate the actual spaces.”34 In this regard, Ernst Gombrich’s personal experience seems truly exemplary: The kind of oppression that we have experienced is absolutely new and the sentiment from which it is born and which Giulio has been able to give shape to, is that of anguish. [...] There, we have experienced directly and in an absolutely new way the anguished nightmare of our involvement in an ineluctable catastrophe.35 33 The Duke of Mantua invested colossal amounts and a special interest in the project for Palazzo Te: a work that had no residential function, which was not a fortress and in which even a room, that of the Giants, was in no way inhabitable. 34 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 81 [my traslation]. 35 Ibid.: 111 [my translation]. LUCIA CORRAIN 69 AN-ICON  Who is behind the enormous cave remains, therefore, captured by the representation, perceiving step by step that everything is being twisted, being destroyed: in the room lit up only by the fire burning in the fireplace, the visitor “experiences” the end of the world just as it is taking place, he experiences the torment – as Vasari writes – “that everything [...] is toppling down upon him.”36 It is important to understand what happens to the viewer’s body and how the space substantiated in the representation is capable of triggering sensorial percep- tions. As seems obvious, one’s eyesight is the first sense brought into play, and not only because the visitor’s eye is engaged by the enormous eyes of the Giants, but rather by the particular luminosity of the environment: indeed, one’s eyes must adapt to the light conditions produced by the fire in the fireplace; entering the ambience from conditions of full light, the adaptation to the poor light comes about slowly, one’s pupils must dilate as much as possible to be able to embrace the vision. The fireplace fire, moreover, is also responsible for the arousal of other senses: the sense of smell, because the burning wood diffuses its smell in all of the room; the sense of hearing, owing to the crackling and the rustling of the burning wood; the sense of touch, in that the fire warms up the ambience and consequent- ly the visitor. Even the flooring can fall within the tactile sensoriality – in “small, round stones,” but “set in with a knife” –37 which make the visitor’s movements unstable, reinforcing the precipice effect that is the central theme of the ambience. Amongst those who in the course of time have had the chance to live a sensorial experience inside the Chamber of the Giants we can also name a scientist like Ulisse Aldrovandi (Bologna, 1522-1605): his interest, in particular, is addressed to the sonorous refraction of the ambience on the basis of which a word whispered in one 36 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372. 37 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano:” 373. LUCIA CORRAIN 70 AN-ICON  corner is perfectly heard in the opposite corner.38 Ultimately, the tremulous, mobile and never total illumination produced by the flames in the fireplace, the sonority itself of the fire, the amplified voice, the insecurity that the visitor experi- ences owing to the “stones set in edge” of the flooring, are all aspects that confer a powerful dynamicity to the whole, generating what can be defined a proto-cinematographic effect or, paradoxically, a distressing trompe-l’œil that at length deceives the feelings of the viewer.39 In practice, what did this exceptional spatial and sensorial machine which acts with such terrifying effi- cacy on the viewer try to convey? Undoubtedly, the icono- graphic subject was not chosen by chance; in fact, the mythological fable is accompanied by an interpretative tradition of a moral sort: the Gigantomachia is an example of chastised pride, with Jupiter who performs an act of supremacy to restore justice. And in Mantua, in the early Cinquecento, the imperial ideology resorted to the fall of the Giants to celebrate the victories of Charles V against the infidels; Jupiter thus prefigures Charles V who, in the guise of Jupiter, leads to the demise of the Italian princ- es who rebelled against his sovereignty.40 Alongside this reading of international politics, however, another one of a purely local sort gains headway: “Jupiter would be the ambitious Federico who, amongst other things, chooses to insert in the family coat of arms precisely the feat of Mount Olympus.”41 Whoever enters the Chamber of the Giants, in short, is put in contact with the ineluctability of the sovereignty of the gods against the “bestiality” of the 38 D.A. Franchini, C. Tellini Perina, A. Zanca, R. Margonari, G. Olmi, R. Signorini, La scienza a corte: Collezionismo eclettico, natura e immagine a Mantova fra Rinascimento e Manierismo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1979): 192-194. The manuscript is cited (136, XXI, cc. 27v-29v), preserved in the University Library of Bologna in which Aldrovandi tells of his journeys to Mantua and, in particular, to the Chamber of the Giants. 39 S.A. Hickson, “More than meets the eye: Giulio Romano, Federico II Gonzaga, and the triumph of trompe-l’œil at the Palazzo Te in Mantua,” in L. A. Boldt-Irons, C. Federici, E. Virgulti, eds., Disguise, Deception, Trompe-l’oeil: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Peter Lang, 2009): 41-59. 40 For a more detailed argumentation cfr. D. Sogliani, M. Grosso, eds., L’imperatore e il duca: Carlo V a Mantova (Milan: Skira, 2023). The exhibition offers a reflection on the cultural meaning of Europe starting from the figure of Charles V and his alliances with the Italian courts, narrating the emperor’s arrival in Mantua in 1530, feted by grand celebrations that Federico II Gonzaga organised in the halls of Palazzo Te under the masterful direction of Giulio Romano. 41 R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: 19. LUCIA CORRAIN 71 AN-ICON  Giants. A clear message addressed to recalling the correct moral and political behaviour to engage in vis-à-vis those who hold power. By way of conclusion As will have become apparent by now, the Chamber of the Giants avails itself of a perceptive setting foreshadowing what, almost five centuries later, finds a re- newed materialisation in the most advanced technologies of construction of the images that see, in the progressive can- cellation of the aesthetic threshold and the disappearance of the “frontier” between the world of representation and that of reality, their final point of arrival. The ambience-im- ages that emerge are capable of generating an effect of reality so immanent that whoever perceives them has the feeling of being part of that fictitious world. And the spec- tators, wearing a visor “that blinds them with respect to the physical reality that surrounds them,”42 isolate themselves completely from the real world. But if – as Elisabetta Mode- na writes – “the immersion occurs […] mostly according to a process of environmental reduction: the format of the experiences is central, [as is] that entanglement that is cre- ated between the image world and the experiencer who, in becoming a part of it, experiences what […] happens in history.”43 The spatial-pictorial construction of the Cham- ber of the Giants, without a frame, with interruptions, must in short be considered – as noted by Andrea Pinotti – the perfect example ante litteram that “it is certainly not neces- sary to await contemporaneity to witness the advent of an immersive and enveloping space.”44 This does not prevent us from testing the new immersive technologies to try to 42 E. Modena, Nelle storie: 145. Cfr. also E. Modena “Immersi nel reale: Prospettive an- iconiche sull’arte contemporanea dall’ambiente alla realtà virtuale,” Carte Semiotiche. Rivista internazionale di semiotica e teoria dell’immagine, L. Corrain, M. Vannoni, eds., Annali 7, Figure dell’immersività (2021): 71-78. 43 Ibid.: 146. 44 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: 109. LUCIA CORRAIN 72 AN-ICON  ‘simulate’ in every part the original ambience,45 proposing, through virtual reality, what can no longer be perceived in situ today. By introducing, from the top of the chimney stack, the photons into the hearth and making use of high definition orthophotographs of the walls and the ceiling, we virtually recreate the flickering light of the flames, as well as the sensorial effect of the heat as they must have been perceived in the original Chamber of the Giants. Ultimately, if Giulio Romano was a full-fledged forerunner of immersive environments, then the new technologies can represent a further aid to fully restoring the original perception of the Chamber of the Giants, leading us back to the ingenious “invention” that the artist had made for his cultured and refined patron. With an apt reference, through the anticlas- sical taste for the outlandish and for contamination, to that Mannerism that – in the vulgate of Giorgio Vasari – must contain “an abundance of beautiful costumes, variety in imaginative details, charm in their colours, diversity in their buildings, and distance and variety in their landscapes;” in short, “a copious invention in every particular.”46 45 The bibliography on immersivity in the contemporary is vast: M. A. Moser, D. MacLeod, eds., Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996); W. Wolf, W. Bernhart, A, Mahler, eds., Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2013); R. Pinto, “La mostra come esperienza immersive: Damien Hirst – Treasures from the Wrech of the Unbelievable,” in C.G. Morandi, C. Sinigaglia, eds., L’esperienza dello spazio: Collezioni, mostre, musei, (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2020): 324-334; J. Voorhies, J. Postsensual, Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003). Cfr. also P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan: Mimesis International, 2020) and the recent J. Bodin, A. De Cesaris, eds., “Immersivity: Philosophical Perspectives on Technologically Mediated Experience,” Philosophical Coordinates in Modern and Contemporary Age 10, no. 20 (2022). 46 G. Vasari, “Preface to Part Three” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 278. LUCIA CORRAIN 73 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19938

Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber Of The GiImage ants by Lucia Corrain Immersivity Giulio Romano Painting Fiction Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber Of The Giants LUCIA CORRAIN, Università degli Studi di Bologna – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8437-969X https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19938 Abstract Art in general, more than other fields, appears to lie at the heart of immersivity. As argued by Oliver Grau, it is art that still deploys a considerable genealogy with examples that resonate with the immersivity as proposed in contemporaneity. It is the current immersivity that con- structs “constellations” which, as Benjamin put it, dynam- ically enact “the history of art [as] the history of prophesies […] which can be written only starting from the point of view of an immediate present,” where “every present is de- termined by those images that are synchronous to it: each now is the now of a given knowability.” In the art history field, however, it is almost mandatory to re-evoke a fully mannerist ambience where “painting” creates – without the aid of particular instruments – the near-total immersion, acting fully on the passional dimension. The case in point is the Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, made by Giulio Romano between 1532 and 1536 in Palazzo Te in Mantua. A stunning illusionist artifice that catapults the viewers into the heart of the ongoing event, to produce in them a sense of awe and estrangement beyond the “frame.” Keywords Image Immersivity Giulio Romano Painting Fiction To quote this essay: L. Corrain, “Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber Of The Giants,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 56-73, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19938. LUCIA CORRAIN 56 AN-ICON A piece many years in doing and now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape.1 By way of introduction Undoubtedly – in a chronological field conven- tionally defined as Mannerism – the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber of the Giants, frescoed between 1532 and 1536 by Giulio Romano and his collaborators in Palazzo Te in Mantua, occupies a position of great importance. The high- ly original solution adopted by the Roman artist, already acknowledged in his day and age, in the light of today’s immersive technologies, can indeed manifest all its extraor- dinary innovative force.2 Virtual reality, as we know it today, is obtained by means of a digital instrument capable of generating “three-dimensional” scenes, narratives and landscapes within which subjects have the impression of actually mov- ing and interacting with the ambience surrounding them. Thanks to the evolution in computer graphics and the imple- mentation of the computational power, representations ever 1 W. Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale (1611) (New York-London-Toronto-Sydney: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1998): V.II.95-100, 219. 2 The bibliography concerning Palazzo Te is currently rather substantial, but it was Ernst Gombrich who took this whole building outside of the shadows in which it found itself. In 1933 he dedicated to it his graduation thesis at the University of Vienna, E. Gombrich, “Der Palazzo del Te,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, no. 8 (1934): 79-104; “Versuch einer Deuteung,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, no. 9 (1936): 121-150; it. trans. A.M. Conforti, Giulio Romano. Il palazzo del Te (Mantua: Tre Lune, 1984). Cfr. among the many others F. Hart, Giulio Romano (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958); K.W. Forster, R.J. Tuttle, “The Palazzo del Te,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 30, no. 4 (1971): 267-293; A. Belluzzi, W. Capezzali, II palazzo dei lucidi inganni: Palazzo Te a Mantova (Florence: Centro Studi Architettura Ouroboros, 1976); E. Verheyen, The Palazzo del Te in Mantua: Images of Love and Politics (Baltimore-London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1977); A. Belluzzi, M. Tafuri, eds., Giulio Romano (Milan: Electa, 1989, exhibition catalogue); A. Belluzzi, Palazzo Te a Mantova, 2 vols. (Modena: Cosimo Panini, 1998). About the Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of Giants specifically, cfr. R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: Palazzo Te (Milan: Skira, 2020). LUCIA CORRAIN 57 AN-ICON  closer to reality can be obtained. Nonetheless, so-called “reality media” are not yet a “perfect” mimesis of the real.3 The relationship between the current immersive devices and the more dated optical instruments of the so- called pre-cinematographic phase has already been widely brought to light: it is the case of the scene of the eighteenth century4 and the stereoscope of the subsequent century5 that share, with the more recent immersive technologies, the question of a “channelled aesthetic perception.”6 In rather similar fashion, at the pictorial level, the Quadratur- ismo and the trompe-l’œil raise questions relating to both the continuity between the space of experience and the space represented, and to the methods of construction of a gaze “from the inside” in which proximity allows for the perception of esthesis, verdictives and passion. Oliver Grau7 – the scholar who perhaps more than any other has outlined a genealogy of immersivity – has identified a possible origin even in Pompeian painting, to then look to the Renaissance and Baroque illusionist spaces, all the way down to the more recent scenarios 3 E. Modena, Nelle storie: Arte, cinema e media immersivi (Rome: Carocci, 2022); A. Pinotti, “VR, AR, MR, XR,” in Enciclopedia dell’Arte Contemporanea, vol. 4 (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana “Giovanni Treccani,” 2021): 685-686. 4 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (2001), trans. G. Custance (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003). 5 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1992). 6 P. Montani, Tecnologie della sensibilità: Estetica e immaginazione interattiva (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2014): 25. 7 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, opens his reconnaissance on the Pompeian frescoes, where the creation of a pictorial surface with the simulation of depth generates the effect of an ambience of greater extension that what it is in reality, capturing the gaze of the observer who does not seem to perceive the actual distinction between real space and the space of the image. Grau then lists the subsequent examples: the Chamber of the Deer in the Avignon Palace of the Popes (1343); the Hall of Perspectives by Baldassare Peruzzi in villa Farnesina (1516), the neoclassical “village rooms” or “sylvans.” The latter is a kind that, “while it dilates to the extreme the portrait of landscape taking it to the dimensions of the environmental room, it applies at the same time scenic criteria relevant to organising the decorations unitarily, with the illusionist effect of the plein air,” R. Roli, Pittura bolognese 1650- 1800: Dal Cignani ai Gandolfi (Bologna: Alfa Edizioni, 1977): 70 [my translation]. LUCIA CORRAIN 58 AN-ICON  (panorama).8 Grau, however, does not refer specifically to the striking example of the Chamber of the Giants, where the immersivity reaches a very high level of passional in- volvement on the part of the spectator, moreover without resorting to an auxiliary devices (as is the case today with headsets, overalls). A stunning illusionistic artifice defined by Frederick Hart as “surely the most fantastic and fright- ening creation of the entire Italian Renaissance in any medi- um”9 capable of catapulting the spectator into the heart of the event portrayed; as stated in 1934 by Ernst Gombrich: “into the deafening vortex of a frightening catastrophe,”10 capable of engendering astonishment and awe.11 Harking back to the renowned words of Wal- ter Benjamin: “the history of art is a history of prophecies” which “can only be written from the standpoint of the im- mediate, actual present,”12 where “every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability.”13 It can be stated that the case we wish to investigate here can be con- sidered in the light of a premise. In short, the machine fres- coed in the Chamber of the Giants in Palazzo Te appears to be the height of an illusion that involves the spectator in a dimension that can be defined as being fully immersive. Moreover, if we carefully observe, in the cham- ber in question of Palazzo Te, all the “instructions […] which 8 In 1792 Robert Baker, in London, made the first Panorama, which consists in a circular shaped ambience, where on the interior walls are projected images of times of distant places, offering the chance to the spectators of having a travel experience whilst being “stationary.” Cfr., besides O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, also S. Bordini, Storia del panorama: La visione totale della pittura nel XIX secolo (Rome: Nuova Cultura, 2009); M. Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini: Letteratura e cultura visuale (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2012); M. Cometa, Cultura visuale (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2021). E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 94, in 1934 had already related the Chamber of the Giants with the nineteenth century panoramas, stating: “that indeed Giulio, and he alone, was the first to try out in a work of art that which is called the hall of the Giants” [my translation]. 9 F. Hart, Giulio Romano: 32. 10 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 79. 11 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Turin: Einaudi, 2021): 107-109, in the chapter dedicated to the environment-image states that the Chamber of the Giants is a paradigmatic example, “an illusionistic machine that invites one to reflect on the viewer’s visual act as a participative response to the iconic act.” 12 W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1991), vol. 1, no. 2:1046-7. Quoted in English in B. Doherty, “Between the Artwork and its ‘Actualization’: A Footnote to Art History in Benjamin’s Work of Art,” Paragraph 32, no. 3 (2009): 331-358, 336. 13 W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1982), trans. H. Eiland, K. McLaughlin (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2003): 462-463. LUCIA CORRAIN 59 AN-ICON  [in the planar paintings] direct the gaze, guide the reading, intimidate and can, at times, seduce the viewer subjecting them to the representation,”14 have been completely dis- avowed.15 They have been totally cancelled. And, not by chance, in their place some decidedly more cogent ones have been created in an interplay of different disciplines, taking one another by the hand, offering a wholly original reading of the Chamber in question that can fully manifest the active nature of perception. An exceptional visitor Let us now try to enter the Chamber of the Giants, highlighting its most salient characteristics. And we shall do so starting from an exceptional witness, Gior- gio Vasari (Arezzo, 1511-1574), the art historian who was able to visit the Mantuan Palazzo Te on two occasions: the first time when the Chamber of the Giants was under construction; the second when the works had already been completed. His testimony can to all intents and purposes be considered an ekphrasis of great efficacy that “overlaps with the pictorial [story], and at times gives the impression of eclipsing it.”16 Here is the description Vasari gives of the space created and painted by Giulio Romano: After laying deep, double foundations in that corner, which was in a swampy spot, Giulio had built over that angle a large, round room with extremely thick walls, so that the four corners of the outside walls would be stronger and could support a double vault rounded like an oven. And having done this, since the room had corners, he built here and there all the way around it the doors, windows, and a fireplace of rusticated stones with worn-away edges, which 14 G. Careri, “Prefazione,” in L. Marin, Opacità della pittura: Sulla rappresentazione nel Quattrocento (Florence: La Casa Usher, 2012): 7-13. 15 On the role of the frame in the work of art see D. Ferrari, A. Pinotti, eds., La cornice: Storie, teorie, testi (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2018) and S. Zuliani, Spazi e tempi dell’installazione (Rome: Arshake, 2015). 16 A. Belluzzi, Giulio Romano: 446 [my translation]. On the text/image problem cfr. W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). LUCIA CORRAIN 60 AN-ICON were disjointed and crooked almost to the extent that they 17 even seemed to lean over on one side and actually to collapse. Giulio Romano – as can be inferred – gave a particular form to the environment: it is not a “round room,” as Vasari might lead us to believe, but a “a double vault rounded like an oven,” which did not have sharp corners and whose doors and windows were “disjointed and crook- ed,” which almost certainly means that the windows were closed by painted blinds and the doors were in continuity with respect to the frescoes. A singular space, which also disposed of a par- ticular flooring, as confirmed by Vasari himself: He had made the floor with polished river slingstones that ran around the walls, and those on the painting plane, which fell down- wards had counterfeited: for a part those painted inwards escaped, and at times were 18 occupied and adorned by grass and at times by larger stones. But, as can well be imagined, it was, in those days, a cobbled floor with slingstones that, albeit creating seamless continuity with the upright walls, did not represent an assurance of a steady support for the visitor.19 It is not possible, however, to be outside the space to talk about it; you need to traverse it to know it, for 17 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 370. In the first edition by types of Lorenzo Torrentino (Florence, 1550), the historiographer was even more articulate: “He therefore had double foundations of great depth sunk at that corner, which was in a marshy place, and over that angle he constructed a large round room, with very thick walls, to the end that the four external corners of the masonry might be strong enough to be able to support a double vault, round after the manner of an oven. This done, he caused to be built at the corners right round the room, in the proper places, the doors, windows, and fireplace, all of rustic stones rough-hewn as if by chance, and, as it were, disjointed and awry, insomuch that they appeared to be really hanging over to one side and falling down).” G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano pittore e architetto,” in Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani (1550) (Turin: Einaudi, 1986): 833 [my translation]. 18 Ibidem: 834 [my translation]. 19 The flooring was made anew by Paolo Pozzo in the eighteenth-century restoration of the palazzo, in which very likely the fireplace of which Vasari speaks was bricked up, and which is testified to in some drawings preserved at the Louvre, Windsor and Palazzo Te (donated in 2015 by Monroe Warshaw), cfr. R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: 27. Furthermore, in 1781, the archduke Ferdinand of Habsburg commissioned Giovanni Bottani to “have made a picket fence in the hall of the Giants […]. Also, he would promptly have the fireplace sealed and walled up,” citation reported in A. Belluzzi, Giulio Romano: 236. LUCIA CORRAIN 61 AN-ICON  it to become a true object of analysis. The analysts must become an integral part of the space, immerse themselves in it like a percipient body, like the users of the place, going through it and letting themselves be guided by the logic imposed by the context in which they find themselves. The visitors are, so to speak, literally “manipulated” by this un- usual spatial environment. The system of the spatial expression is in it- self meaningful, that here acquires an even more complete meaning with what is portrayed on the walls: the signifi- cance of the space is “the final result of a stratified and complex series of procedures, articulations and sub-artic- ulations, where an element is meaningful only if related to the others.”20 The spatial configurations prefigure, that is, the virtuality, of the possible ways of using the morphology itself of the places. In this sense, a semiotic reading can come to our aid which – as Giannitrapani writes – “consid- ers space not as a straightforward container of subjects, objects, events, but as a meaningful structure capable of speaking of a multiplicity of aspects of life.”21 This means that: “The significance of the space lies in the efficacious action that it provokes on the subjects coming into contact with it.” And in order for space to completely “influence the body it must work on the ambience, it must give a shape to the architecture of the space.”22 The Fall of the Giants There is no doubt that the space of the Cham- bers of the Giants, already in itself significant, finds fulfil- ment with what it portrayed on the ceiling and on the walls. Although this interest of this analysis is focused on the immersive dimension, it is necessary to briefly go over the 20 G. Marrone, “Efficacia simbolica dello spazio: Azioni e passioni,” in P. Bertetti, G. Manetti, eds., Forme della testualità: Teoria, modelli, storia e prospettive (Turin: Testo&immagine, 2001): 85-96. 21 A. Giannitrapani, Introduzione alla semiotica dello spazio (Rome: Carrocci, 2013): 45. 22 On the space cfr. also M. Hammad, Lire l’espace, comprendre l’architecture (Limoges: Presses Universitaires, 2001), trans. G. Festi (Rome: Meltemi, 2003). LUCIA CORRAIN 62 AN-ICON  iconography of the whole figurative apparatus because ̶ as we shall see – it is closely related to Federico II Gonzaga, the patron, and Charles V over whose empire the sun never set. The whole room, as is well-known, portrays the fall of the Giants drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.23 The myth tells of the giants’ attempted attack on the gods: with the intent to reach Mount Olympus, the vicious inhabitants of the earth superimpose one another on two mountains, that of Pelion and that of Ossa. Portrayed on the ceiling (Fig. 1) is the gods’ ire against the giants’ attempt to scale the mountains, with Jupiter who abandons his throne to place himself along- side Juno, who, with her gaze and index finger, points to the direction towards which to cast the thunderbolts. The plot hatched by the giants fails, of course, and Jupiter’s intervention makes the mountains collapse; by tumbling precipitously, they overwhelm the giants burying them be- neath the heavy boulders. A daring view from the bottom upwards, always on the ceiling, portrays a circular temple with twelve columns from whose balustrade some char- acters, concerned and awestruck by what is happening beneath them, look out; in the same way the numerous other divinities display impassioned states of agitation. The throne, left vacant by Jupiter, is occupied by the imperial eagle with its wings outspread, while the menacing clouds surround the whole empyrean in a role of transition from the world of the gods to the terrestrial terrain of the com- mon mortals. On the walls, above the fireplace, the giant Ty- phon (monstruous son of Gaia – Fig. 2) is depicted: for having tried to depose Jupiter, he is struck by lightning and sinks under Etna, and here, crushed by the boulders, in an attempt to defend himself he spews fire and lapilli causing an earthquake.24 The fireplace, in turn, was supposed to suggest the illusion of the youth condemned by the flames: the flames that issue from the mouth of the giant Typhon, 23 Ovid, Metamorphoses I vv. 151-154 (I A.D), trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 5. 24 Ovid, Metamorphoses V: 109. LUCIA CORRAIN 63 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, ceiling, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. in the pictorial fiction, thus ended up “conversing” with the real fire of the fireplace. Examining more closely the remaining frescoed parts, Vasari took note of further details: the entire world is upside-down and almost at its final end [...] many giants can be seen in flight, all struck down by Jove’s thunderbolts and on the verge of being overwhelmed by the landslides from the mountains just like the others. In another part, Giulio represented other giants upon whom are crashing down temples, columns, and other parts of buildings, creating 25 among these arrogant creatures great havoc and loss of life. And, in actual fact, three walls propose land- scapes (Figg. 3-4) and another one proposes an architec- ture – a serliana – that too about to collapse under the fire of the lightning bolts of the gods (Fig. 5). 25 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372. LUCIA CORRAIN 64 AN-ICON  Fig. 2. G. Romano, Fig. 3. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, wall est, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. wall sud, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. Fig. 4. G. Romano, Fig. 5. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, wall ovest, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. wall nord, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. LUCIA CORRAIN 65 AN-ICON  At this point it is worthwhile turning our atten- tion to the time when the action portrayed takes place. The time in itself is not representable, it is represented by means of movement and transformation: it is a function of the movement and the last is a function of space. Any ac- tion, which is never a perpetual motion, contains phases: a beginning, a climax and an end. In the course of each one of those, every action leads to the memory of what had come before and what will come afterwards. In short, the climax is the moment of utmost tension. In the Chamber of the Giants it corresponds to the phase when everything collapses: the technique is that of breaking down natural and architectural elements into parts that gradually lose their natural order to follow one that has gone completely haywire. If it is true that the rendering of the fatal moment is accentuated in mannerism, it can be said that here it has touched some very elevated heights. The particularity of the fatal instant had been highlighted, once again, by Vasari (Fig. 6): Fig. 6. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber of the Giants, detail of the Giant, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. LUCIA CORRAIN 66 AN-ICON Giulio [...] made plans to build a corner-room [...] in which the walls would correspond with the paintings, in order 26 to deceive the people who would see it as much as he could. a marvellous work where the entire painting has neither beginning nor end, and that it is all tied together 27 and runs on continuously without boundary or dec- oration. This is a room completely without frames,28 of any delimitation, with an enveloping continuity, in which the space – as Gombrich points out – runs homogeneous to the floor as far as the apex of the roof with not edges and no frame to interrupt the seamlessness of the surfaces, it is completely transformed into a pictorial scene: it is29 part of a single action, animated by the same emotional impetus. But, Vasari adds, it is a horrible scene: Therefore, let no one ever imagine seeing a work from the brush that is more horrible or frightening or more realistic than this one. And anyone who enters that room and sees the windows, doors, and other such details all distorted and almost on the verge of crashing down, as well as the mountains and buildings collapsing, can only fear that everything is toppling down upon him. Especially when he sees 30 all the gods in that heaven running this way and that in flight. In short, a stunning illusionistic artifice that seeks to catapult the viewer into the throbbing heart of the event in progress, where “the boundaries of space 26 Ibid.: 370. 27 Ibid.: 373. 28 Cfr. P. Carabell, “Breaking the Frame: Transgression and Transformation in Giulio Romano’s Sala dei Giganti,” Artibus et Historiae 18, no. 36 (1997): 87-100. 29 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 81. 30 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372-373. LUCIA CORRAIN 67 AN-ICON  disappear [...] and the laws of statics, in which the eye can find tranquillizing points of reference, are completely lacking.”31 Inside the environment: “the walls themselves move and, soon, everything is disarranged and collapses upon the viewer” who, in this way, shares “the same fate that submits and destroys the very powerful giants that tried in vain to sustain the walls.”32 (Figg. 7-8) Fig. 7. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber of the Giants, detail of the Giant, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. Fig. 8. G. Romano, copy of, Disegno della parete con il camino, Paris, Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques, inv. 3636, recto 31 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 79. 32 Ibid. LUCIA CORRAIN 68 AN-ICON  Being at the end of the world At this point – and to delve once more into the immersivity that generates the environment – it comes nat- ural to wonder why the patron, duke Federico II Gonzaga, decided to make such a particular and unique ambience in what is considered to be his villa of pleasures. What role would the Chamber of the Giants play in that precise his- torical moment?33 We should not try to imagine the visitor guided by the Lord of Mantua in the palazzo: Federico II leads his guest in a space whose boundaries are well de- fined, through ambiences of different sizes, decorated with specific iconographic themes, in a crescendo that takes him gradually as far as the Chamber of the Giants. An ini- tiatory pathway through which the duke proposes to his guest a sort of progressive estrangement with respect to the real world and that reaches its climax in the immense “catastrophe” of the dark cave, with the doors and win- dows shut and only the flickering light coming from the lit fireplace. A status of anguish and terror, apparently with no exit, in which the guest “with the highest mastery is de- prived of every chance to take a distance, to evaluate the actual spaces.”34 In this regard, Ernst Gombrich’s personal experience seems truly exemplary: The kind of oppression that we have experienced is absolutely new and the sentiment from which it is born and which Giulio has been able to give shape to, is that of anguish. [...] There, we have experienced directly and in an absolutely new way the anguished nightmare of our involvement in an ineluctable catastrophe.35 33 The Duke of Mantua invested colossal amounts and a special interest in the project for Palazzo Te: a work that had no residential function, which was not a fortress and in which even a room, that of the Giants, was in no way inhabitable. 34 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 81 [my traslation]. 35 Ibid.: 111 [my translation]. LUCIA CORRAIN 69 AN-ICON  Who is behind the enormous cave remains, therefore, captured by the representation, perceiving step by step that everything is being twisted, being destroyed: in the room lit up only by the fire burning in the fireplace, the visitor “experiences” the end of the world just as it is taking place, he experiences the torment – as Vasari writes – “that everything [...] is toppling down upon him.”36 It is important to understand what happens to the viewer’s body and how the space substantiated in the representation is capable of triggering sensorial percep- tions. As seems obvious, one’s eyesight is the first sense brought into play, and not only because the visitor’s eye is engaged by the enormous eyes of the Giants, but rather by the particular luminosity of the environment: indeed, one’s eyes must adapt to the light conditions produced by the fire in the fireplace; entering the ambience from conditions of full light, the adaptation to the poor light comes about slowly, one’s pupils must dilate as much as possible to be able to embrace the vision. The fireplace fire, moreover, is also responsible for the arousal of other senses: the sense of smell, because the burning wood diffuses its smell in all of the room; the sense of hearing, owing to the crackling and the rustling of the burning wood; the sense of touch, in that the fire warms up the ambience and consequent- ly the visitor. Even the flooring can fall within the tactile sensoriality – in “small, round stones,” but “set in with a knife” –37 which make the visitor’s movements unstable, reinforcing the precipice effect that is the central theme of the ambience. Amongst those who in the course of time have had the chance to live a sensorial experience inside the Chamber of the Giants we can also name a scientist like Ulisse Aldrovandi (Bologna, 1522-1605): his interest, in particular, is addressed to the sonorous refraction of the ambience on the basis of which a word whispered in one 36 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372. 37 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano:” 373. LUCIA CORRAIN 70 AN-ICON  corner is perfectly heard in the opposite corner.38 Ultimately, the tremulous, mobile and never total illumination produced by the flames in the fireplace, the sonority itself of the fire, the amplified voice, the insecurity that the visitor experi- ences owing to the “stones set in edge” of the flooring, are all aspects that confer a powerful dynamicity to the whole, generating what can be defined a proto-cinematographic effect or, paradoxically, a distressing trompe-l’œil that at length deceives the feelings of the viewer.39 In practice, what did this exceptional spatial and sensorial machine which acts with such terrifying effi- cacy on the viewer try to convey? Undoubtedly, the icono- graphic subject was not chosen by chance; in fact, the mythological fable is accompanied by an interpretative tradition of a moral sort: the Gigantomachia is an example of chastised pride, with Jupiter who performs an act of supremacy to restore justice. And in Mantua, in the early Cinquecento, the imperial ideology resorted to the fall of the Giants to celebrate the victories of Charles V against the infidels; Jupiter thus prefigures Charles V who, in the guise of Jupiter, leads to the demise of the Italian princ- es who rebelled against his sovereignty.40 Alongside this reading of international politics, however, another one of a purely local sort gains headway: “Jupiter would be the ambitious Federico who, amongst other things, chooses to insert in the family coat of arms precisely the feat of Mount Olympus.”41 Whoever enters the Chamber of the Giants, in short, is put in contact with the ineluctability of the sovereignty of the gods against the “bestiality” of the 38 D.A. Franchini, C. Tellini Perina, A. Zanca, R. Margonari, G. Olmi, R. Signorini, La scienza a corte: Collezionismo eclettico, natura e immagine a Mantova fra Rinascimento e Manierismo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1979): 192-194. The manuscript is cited (136, XXI, cc. 27v-29v), preserved in the University Library of Bologna in which Aldrovandi tells of his journeys to Mantua and, in particular, to the Chamber of the Giants. 39 S.A. Hickson, “More than meets the eye: Giulio Romano, Federico II Gonzaga, and the triumph of trompe-l’œil at the Palazzo Te in Mantua,” in L. A. Boldt-Irons, C. Federici, E. Virgulti, eds., Disguise, Deception, Trompe-l’oeil: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Peter Lang, 2009): 41-59. 40 For a more detailed argumentation cfr. D. Sogliani, M. Grosso, eds., L’imperatore e il duca: Carlo V a Mantova (Milan: Skira, 2023). The exhibition offers a reflection on the cultural meaning of Europe starting from the figure of Charles V and his alliances with the Italian courts, narrating the emperor’s arrival in Mantua in 1530, feted by grand celebrations that Federico II Gonzaga organised in the halls of Palazzo Te under the masterful direction of Giulio Romano. 41 R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: 19. LUCIA CORRAIN 71 AN-ICON  Giants. A clear message addressed to recalling the correct moral and political behaviour to engage in vis-à-vis those who hold power. By way of conclusion As will have become apparent by now, the Chamber of the Giants avails itself of a perceptive setting foreshadowing what, almost five centuries later, finds a re- newed materialisation in the most advanced technologies of construction of the images that see, in the progressive can- cellation of the aesthetic threshold and the disappearance of the “frontier” between the world of representation and that of reality, their final point of arrival. The ambience-im- ages that emerge are capable of generating an effect of reality so immanent that whoever perceives them has the feeling of being part of that fictitious world. And the spec- tators, wearing a visor “that blinds them with respect to the physical reality that surrounds them,”42 isolate themselves completely from the real world. But if – as Elisabetta Mode- na writes – “the immersion occurs […] mostly according to a process of environmental reduction: the format of the experiences is central, [as is] that entanglement that is cre- ated between the image world and the experiencer who, in becoming a part of it, experiences what […] happens in history.”43 The spatial-pictorial construction of the Cham- ber of the Giants, without a frame, with interruptions, must in short be considered – as noted by Andrea Pinotti – the perfect example ante litteram that “it is certainly not neces- sary to await contemporaneity to witness the advent of an immersive and enveloping space.”44 This does not prevent us from testing the new immersive technologies to try to 42 E. Modena, Nelle storie: 145. Cfr. also E. Modena “Immersi nel reale: Prospettive an- iconiche sull’arte contemporanea dall’ambiente alla realtà virtuale,” Carte Semiotiche. Rivista internazionale di semiotica e teoria dell’immagine, L. Corrain, M. Vannoni, eds., Annali 7, Figure dell’immersività (2021): 71-78. 43 Ibid.: 146. 44 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: 109. LUCIA CORRAIN 72 AN-ICON  ‘simulate’ in every part the original ambience,45 proposing, through virtual reality, what can no longer be perceived in situ today. By introducing, from the top of the chimney stack, the photons into the hearth and making use of high definition orthophotographs of the walls and the ceiling, we virtually recreate the flickering light of the flames, as well as the sensorial effect of the heat as they must have been perceived in the original Chamber of the Giants. Ultimately, if Giulio Romano was a full-fledged forerunner of immersive environments, then the new technologies can represent a further aid to fully restoring the original perception of the Chamber of the Giants, leading us back to the ingenious “invention” that the artist had made for his cultured and refined patron. With an apt reference, through the anticlas- sical taste for the outlandish and for contamination, to that Mannerism that – in the vulgate of Giorgio Vasari – must contain “an abundance of beautiful costumes, variety in imaginative details, charm in their colours, diversity in their buildings, and distance and variety in their landscapes;” in short, “a copious invention in every particular.”46 45 The bibliography on immersivity in the contemporary is vast: M. A. Moser, D. MacLeod, eds., Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996); W. Wolf, W. Bernhart, A, Mahler, eds., Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2013); R. Pinto, “La mostra come esperienza immersive: Damien Hirst – Treasures from the Wrech of the Unbelievable,” in C.G. Morandi, C. Sinigaglia, eds., L’esperienza dello spazio: Collezioni, mostre, musei, (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2020): 324-334; J. Voorhies, J. Postsensual, Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003). Cfr. also P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan: Mimesis International, 2020) and the recent J. Bodin, A. De Cesaris, eds., “Immersivity: Philosophical Perspectives on Technologically Mediated Experience,” Philosophical Coordinates in Modern and Contemporary Age 10, no. 20 (2022). 46 G. Vasari, “Preface to Part Three” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 278. LUCIA CORRAIN 73 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19910

Allegories of ImmersiAllegory on by Filippo Fimiani Ekphrastic fear Media imaginary Materiality Elemental media Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Allegories of Immersion FILIPPO FIMIANI, Università degli Studi di Salerno – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9689-5480 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19910 Abstract Fish Night, an episode of LOVE DEATH + RO- BOTS (S01E12, 2019) based on a 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, can be interpreted as an allegory of the im- possibility of immersive experience: if real, it is deadly, be- cause the images are no longer such or ghosts but living beings present in a shared environmental habitat, acting with but also against the subject, in turn no longer a spec- tator. Comparing the story and film, and ancient ekphrastic literature, I discuss, in a trans-medial imaginary genealog- ical perspective, the symptoms of this cultural topos and of the regressive desire for immersion and for transparent immediacy that shapes and drives it, dwelling in particular on the ambivalent phenomenological and ontological re- lations between living bodies, pictures and media as deep time-bending. Keywords Allegory Ekphrastic fear Media imaginary Materiality Elemental media To quote this essay: F. Fimiani, “Allegories of Immersion,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 74-87, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19910. FILIPPO FIMIANI 74 AN-ICON  A premise Fish Night is the twelfth episode of the first season of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS, an animated Netflix series created by Tim Miller and David Fincher and broad- cast on 15 March 2019.1 Directed by Damian Nenow, with Gabriele Pennacchioli as supervising director and Rafał Wojtunik as art director, it was produced by Platine Image studio,2 based on 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, in an adaptation by Philip Gelat and Miller. I see Fish Night as an allegory of the impossi- bility of virtual immersion. Obviously, it regards coexistence and interaction in a shared environment by a subject in motion, one no longer merely observing moving images at a remove, and images which are no longer concrete pictures or simulacrums but, to full effect, real living and acting beings. Why would such an experience be impos- sible? In answering, I will focus on elements drawn from both the literary account and the animated film, seen as trans-medial symptoms of underlying issues which regard the nature of bodies, images, technology, of the medium, and their various interrelations with respect to the fictional immersion and virtual immersivity. I shall cross-analyse the animated short film and its narrative hypotext with another classic literary text which describes what, in many respects, is a complementary immersion. This approach allows me to simultaneously ad- dress: 1) the “quest for immersion” uncovered by Huhta- mo’s media archaeology as a constant motif in the reprise and recurrence of narratives and patterns both in media history and, from my point of view, in the trans-medial story of Fish Night, which is about ghosts, repetitions and reap- pearances that ultimately affect the media themselves (the spectator’s body, the images, the car, the landscape, as we 1 https://lovedeathandrobots.tilda.ws/index, accessed September 1, 2023. 2 https://platige.com/project/feature/fish-night/, accessed September 1, 2023. FILIPPO FIMIANI 75 AN-ICON  will soon discover);3 2) the “[cultural] desire for transparent immediacy” through visual representation found in the ge- nealogy of Bolter and Grusin;4 3) “the moment of resistance or counterdesire that occurs when we sense that the differ- ence between the verbal and visual representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually,” diagnosed by W.J.T. Mitchell as alert for the literary description showing through words and rhetorical tropes a strongly vivid impression of a visual stimulus, object or scene, in summa as “ekphrasis fear;”5 4) Paul de Man’s allegory6 of “potential confusion between figural and referential statement,” between the image and the real. Of course, the four points just evoked should not to be confused. Quite the contrary, aware of their dif- ferences in approach, object and aim, I use them as ac- cess points to the question of immersivity as tropism and symptom of a desire and anxiety manifested and treated differently in the literary texts and their media adaptations that I am about to discuss. In the textual and audio-visual issues I have chosen, or, as Foucault might say,7 in the “myriad events through which – thanks to which, against which –” “the unique aspect” of the cultural idea and topos of the experience of immersion-immersivity has arisen, I 3 E. Huhtamo, “Encapsulated Bodies in Motion: Simulators and the Quest for Total Immersion,” in S. Penny, ed., Critical Issues in Electronic Media (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995): 160-161, and “Dismantling the Fairy Engine. Media Archaeology as Topos Study,” in E. Huhtamo, J. Parikka, eds., Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011): 27-47. 4 J.D. Bolter, R. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1998): 23ff. 5 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Id., Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 154. See R.P., Fletcher, “Digital Ekphrasis and the Uncanny: Toward a Poetics of Augmented Reality,” Electropoetics 3, no. 15 (2017) http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/eng_facpub/56 6 P. de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1979): 113. 7 M. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D.F. Bouchard (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1977): 147. FILIPPO FIMIANI 76 AN-ICON  shall detect the symptom of its impossibility and sketch its singular trans-medial archaeology8 and imaginary. The topos points to a yearning for fictional im- mersion, a performative moment in which saying something brings it into being, making it real in every sense, and fully adherent to the referent, with language and synesthetic perception becoming one. Introduced by a terrified alarm, a seductive invitation or the command of “look!,” the very essential wish is to make subject, image and thing coin- cide. The intensive alteration of the corporeal identity and peripersonal space that results involves not only the char- acter described, narrated and represented in the act of a self-denying vision that resists classification as merely an ocular, remote beholding, but also the reader and specta- tor drawn into an embodied simulation of the occurrences and fantasies found in the images, both verbal and visual. Fish Night, a never-ending trans-medial story I shall intertwine a summary and a commentary of Lansdale’s short story with that of the episode of LD+R. In this way, I will point out some differences and sources of their imaginaries, and make some interlinear remarks on both the literary text and the television adaptation, in order to highlight the main theme of this defined trans-medial corpus: the impossibility of immersion-immersiveness. Two salesmen, one young, the other older, get stuck in the desert when their car breaks down. The hours pass and night falls. At first, the older man bemoans how door-to-door sales are a thing of the past. Then he remem- bers that twenty years earlier he was in this same deso- late landscape, travelling an asphalted road amidst power stanchions and the Rocky Mountains, between Arizona and New Mexico. “There are memories of mine out here,” 8 T. Elsaesser, “Media Archaeology as Symptom,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 2, no. 14 (2016): 181-215. FILIPPO FIMIANI 77 AN-ICON  he says, “and they’re visiting me again.”9 In the short story, this is an unmistakable evocation of Death of a Salesman, the Arthur Miller play directed by Elia Kazan, winner of the 1949 Pulitzer Prize and adapted on numerous occasions for film and TV, in which past and present collapse into the remembrance of the lead character, Willy Lowman, the disillusioned, exhausted door-to-door salesman who, at over sixty, struggles with a trauma not just personal, but historical and collective.10 In Fish Night, the instant replay of involuntary subjective memory gives way to a re-enact- ment both psychic and geological, a Nachleben, a survival and an afterlife of a story that is more than just human. The desert through which the highway passes will once again be a “petrified primal landscape,” allegorically manifesting itself as a “Hippocratic face of history.”11 Lansdale describes the landscape as an im- mersive – and devouring – space: It’s fish night, boy. Tonight’s the full moon and this is the right part of the desert if memory serves me, and the feel is right — I mean, doesn’t the night feel like it’s made up of some fabric, that it’s dif- ferent from other nights, that it’s like being inside a big dark bag, the sides sprinkled with glitter, a spotlight at the top, at the open mouth, to serve as a moon? The function of the mouth metaphor in the Lansdale’s writing is complex, but here it foreshadows the finale’s explicit immersive embodiment: does one enter an immersive space or get swallowed up by it? Space, we can say with Bataille, “can become one fish that swallows another.”12 Is immersion-immersivity an experience of “by” 9 J.R. Lansdale, Fish Night (1982), in G. Brown, A.J. Spedding, eds., Love Death + Robots: The Official Anthology: Volume One (Bendigo: Cohesion Press, 2021): 193-200. Pages not numbered; all citations in the text. 10 J. Schlueter, “Re-membering Willy’s Past: Introducing Postmodern Concerns through Death of a Salesman,” in M. Roudané, ed., Approaches to Teaching Miller’s Death of a Salesman (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1995): 142-154. 11 W. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedmann and H. Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Mein: Suhrkamp, 1991), vol. 1: 343, trans. H. Eiland (Cambridge MA-London: Harvard University Press, 2019): 174. 12 G. Bataille, “Espace” (1930), Documents, no. 1, anastatic reprint, ed. D. Hollier (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1991): 41. FILIPPO FIMIANI 78 AN-ICON  or “in”? Is it penetration or impregnation? Transparency or opacity? Immateriality or the materiality of the environ- mental medium? In Lansdale’s short story, evoking the past, the older man brings up Native Americans, the Navajos and the Hopi, and Manitou, the Great Living Spirit “still around” in everything and every being. He read in a science book – he goes on – that the desert was once a sea filled with fish and “fantastical creatures,” maybe even man’s birthplace. “The world’s an old place, and for longtime is nothing but sea,” he concludes pensively. And – dwelling on the thought – those beings may haunt this place the way human ghosts haunt their former homes. With these musings, the younger and the older man fall asleep in the Plymouth station wagon. Whether dreamed or real, lights from outside the car cause the older man’s eyes to open. Facing him, close to the car window, is an enormous eye. Octopuses, giant jellyfish, molluscs and fish from way back in evolution – Coelacanths, Nau- tilus, Limulus, marine fauna in existence prior to the great Cambrian extinction, appear in the surrounding environ- ment, where the men, now outside the car, can magically breath. Strange beings, “like nothing [they have] ever seen pictures of or imagined,” are present but almost incorpo- real, “ghosts of older world,” disincarnate eidola that pass through the men’s bodies, though they still feel and sense them. But “what” does a man’s body feel when another body passes through it? Symptomatic of the ambivalence and ambiguity of the immersion-immersivity topos, and its impossibility, Philip Gelat leaves this phrase out of the adaptation of Lansdale’s short story for LD+R: “Feel it, boy? Feel the presence of the sea? Doesn’t it feel like the beating of your own mother’s heart while you float inside the womb?” FILIPPO FIMIANI 79 AN-ICON And the younger man had to admit that he felt it, that inner rolling rhythm that is the tide of life and the pulsating heart of the sea. Thus the “oceanic sentiment,” the “thalassic regression” debated by psychoanalysis,13 also character- istic of the “crisis of presence” in magical experiences dis- cussed by anthropology,14 are pathic and phenomenological equivalents of the sea’s “presence” as a primary medium, a pre-individual fusion and condition for the possibility of life. In this elemental medium, the bodies of the marine beings are, first and foremost, traversable and diaphanous, immaterial media-mediators permitting an equally immate- rial engagement. They are “spectral,” like “soap bubbles,” “smoke,” “flashes of light,” flitting and skirting, writes Lans- dale. There is no mistaking the kinship with intermedial ex- empla of the metaphorical repertoire of philosophies, both ancient and modern, of visual perception, Renaissance and eighteenth-century treatises on painting, plus contempo- rary theories of optical devices and electric media. In the LD+R episode, the ecstatic young man shouts, “I wanna swim!,” as if he were a man-fish of folk legend brought to life.15 Deaf to the alarmed pleas of the older man, he joins the school of fish, swimming amongst them in slow-motion,16 becoming like them. Stripped of his individuality, he is transfigured, weightlessly transported upward, only to have his ascension end in death. All the other creatures flee in fright at the approach of an enormous red megalodon, which, circling the car, devours the slower, defenceless swimmer, meaning the human transformed into 13 On this essential topic of the symbolic return to the sea, I can only point to Ferenczi, Freud, Alexander and Kerény, or Sloterdijk, plus the Mutterleibversenkung of Ėjzenštejn or slow-motion, in the case of Epstein. See W.B. Parsons, The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 14 E. de Martino, Il mondo magico: Prolegomeni a una storia del magismo (1945) (Turin: Boringhieri, 1973): 144-145, and Magic: A Theory from the South (1959), trans. D.L. Zinn (Chicago: Hau Books, 2015): 85-96. 15 B. Croce, Storie e leggende napoletane (1919) (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1967): 306-313. See G.B. Bronzini, “Cola Pesce il tuffatore: dalla leggenda moderna al mito antico,” Lares 66, no. 3 (2000): 341-376. 16 Under the slow-motion effect, our bodies look like “smooth muscles moving through a dense medium in which thick currents always carry and shape this clear descendent of old marine fauna and maternal waters.” J. Epstein, The Intelligence of a Machine (1946), trans. C. Wall-Romana (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014): 29. FILIPPO FIMIANI 80 AN-ICON  a marine being. The Otus megalodon, which first lived at the start of the Miocene period, succumbing to extinction roughly 2.5 million years ago, has returned to the desert between Arizona and New Mexico, only to slowly disappear from view, leaving behind plumes of blood set against the enormous, white, imperturbable moon. Left by himself, the older man is stunned by what he has just seen. From New Mexico to Greece, and back In Fish Night, the impossibility of immersive ex- perience, i.e. of the elimination of all substantial differences between the gaze, the images and the environment, is tied to the fact that, were it to become real, death would result. Given the trans-medial imaginary genealogical perspective indicated in the Premise, I read the lethal outcome of the way up of the main character of Fish Night as comple- mentary to the dark plunge down described in a masterful scene from the Eikones, the influential classic of ekphrastic literature and ancient rhetoric attributed to Philostratus the Elder. Reactivating the Ancient Greek, I would then speak of anabasis (from ana-, “up,” and baínō, “to go”), of a fatal immersive ascent, for Fish Night, and of catabasis (from kata-, “down,” and baínō, “to go”), of a descent down in the underworld, for the Eikones. Actually, the very protagonist of the episode from the Eikones is the penetrating gaze of a lookout scan- ning the sea, who, perched atop a pole on the shore, can spot tuna in the sea and call out them to fishermen. This fictional vision is enhanced by the pole, depicted as a sub- lime lignum in Negri’s sixteenth-century Latin translation, which acts as a technical mean and as rudimental pros- thetic medium, allowing for a more powerful and detailed gaze. Still, the outcome is ultimately catastrophic: for as the lookout’s gaze gradually immerses itself in the mael- strom of moving forms and flashing colours, it becomes less penetrating, feebler, until the fish, barely discernible as shadows, swallow it up, as in the journey of Ulysses to Hades painted by Polignoto and described by Pausania. FILIPPO FIMIANI 81 AN-ICON  In Fish Night as well, the immersive moment in which the verbal, the visual and the real all become performatively one, heralded by the ecstatic, ostentatious exhortation to look,17 winds up being the exact opposite: blindness and terror. And so it becomes an allegory of its own impossibility. As Philostratus writes: Now look at the painting and you will see just this going on. The look-out gazes at the sea and turns his eyes in one direction and another to get the number; and in the bright gleam of the sea the colours of the fish vary, those near the surface seem to be black, those just below are not so black, those lower still begin to elude the sense of sight, then they seem shadowy, and finally they look just like the water; for as the vision penetrates deeper and deeper its power of discerning objects in the water is blunted. 18 In the story Fish Night, and even more so in the animated film, what occurs is not simply a metaphorical inversion of the yearning, for immersion and transparency. The change that takes place is literally ontological, rather than phenomenological: the inexorable law of the impene- trability of bodies in space has been restored, having earlier been suspended by the diaphanously spectral, almost im- material state of the environmental medium. This elementa- ry law of physics once again holds, even in the immersive environment, where the body of the human being has lost some of its species-specific characteristics – gravity, use of the respiratory apparatus and motor skills – while that of the image, finally possessed of a physical consistency of its own, has also gained new properties, enabling it to take actions that truly affect the other entities sharing the surrounding environment. 17 N. Bryson, “Philostratus and the Imaginary Museum,” in S. Goldhill, R. Osborne, eds., Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture (Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 266-267. 18 Philostratus the Younger, Imagines. Callistratus, Descriptions, trans. A. Fairbanks (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1936): 57 (I.12); Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. W.H.S. Jones, H.A. Ormerod (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1918): 185 (10.28.1). FILIPPO FIMIANI 82 AN-ICON  Which medium? But in the final analysis, what does Fish Night tell us about the material nature of the immersive medium and its uniqueness compared to other media and technical devices? In Lansdale’s short story, the protagonist of the deadly immersive experience is the older man, not the younger one, as in the LD+R episode. Lansdale has in mind the imagery of Death of a Salesman and Willy Lowman’s irretrievable historical crisis. Charley, Willy’s well-off neigh- bour, observes that: “A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”19 Thus the American Dream is a territorialised rendering of the countryside by the moving automobile, a “hot,” prosthetic medium which is culturally, socially and aesthetically expansive, as Marshall McLuhan was to point out soon after, in short an “excrescence of a kinetic ego” and an agent of the “motorized narcissism.”20 The automobile stands as the technological condition that makes possible the conquest of the last frontier, as the material and historical a-priori of the aesthetic experience of the wilderness, be it rebellious or liberating, ostentatious or touristic, with the complementary evolution of the car being its domestication to transport and distribute tangible and intangible goods. At the turn of the 60’s-70’s,21 road movies were both reflections and wellsprings of the cultural and mythopoetic topos of the automobile as a means to attaining individual freedom or reification, or to crafting the iconography of the American sublime. Indeed, the choice of a Plymouth Fury for the LD+R episode may not have 19 A. Miller, Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem (1949) (London: Penguin, 1998): 111. 20 M. McLuhan, Motorcar: The Mechanical Bride (1951), in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) (Cambridge MA-London: MIT Press, 1994): 217-222. See P. Sloterdjik, “Die Herrschaft der Kentauren. Philosophische Bemerkungen zur Automobilität” (1992), trans. K. Ritson, Transfers 1, vol. 1 (2011): 14-24; P. Weibel, “Medien der Mobilität,” in P. Weibel, ed., CAR CULTURE: Medien der Mobilität (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2011): 345-400. 21 S. Cohan, I.R. Hark, eds., The Road Movie Book (London-New York: Routledge, 1997); A. Cross, “Driving the American Landscape,” in P. Wollen, J. Kerr, eds., Autopia: Cars and Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2002): 249-258; D. Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); D. Orgeron, Road Movies: From Muybridge and Méliès to Lynch and Kiarostami (New York: Palgrave, 2008). FILIPPO FIMIANI 83 AN-ICON  been random, given that the model was produced between 1968 and 1972, or precisely the years of the psychedelic and hippy culture, as well as the first signs of its impending crisis. Anyway, the automobile is the technological embodiment of the desire of immersion, a new medium for an old movement and a very ancient desire, as shown to us by the sinking gaze in the sea described by Philostra- tus. A 1939 advertisement placed in National Geographic introduced General Motors’ new Oldsmobile model with this slogan: “See America from an ‘OBSERVATION BODY!’” The brief promotional text promised a “VISION as wide as all outdoors is yours…,” but at the same time a “rhythmic ride” of a “rolling uterus”22 corresponding to the rhythm of the all-enveloping medium of the sea in which the body of the character from Fish Night loses himself in symbiotic fashion. Immersion means, at one and the same time, travelling “in” the landscape, being “part of” the environment, and re- turning “to” the maternal space. As was recently noted by Ruggero Eugeni,23 the automobile is a medium-prosthesis which implements a protected, horizontal immersion scaled to human height, so to speak, and the line of the horizon, for drivers traversing urban and exurban landscapes in a personal travelling cave: a feeling of immersion intensified by the setting up of specific sensorial and perceptive pro- cesses (both hetero- and proprioceptive). From this perspective, the regressive desire of immersivity of Lansdale’s account stands in contrast to the prosthetic mode of technological immersivity which, according to McLuhan, is embodied by the automobile, and to the mythical example of fictional immersion made possible by the tuna lookout’s perch described by Phi- lostratus. In Fish Night, the two characters leave the car, technology’s outpost for providing the senses with pros- thesis and prophylaxis, and for supplying techniques of the 22 P. Sloterdjik, “Rollender Uterus” (1995), in Selected Exaggerations: Conversations and Interviews, 1993-2012, trans. K. Margolis (Cambridge: Polity Book, 2016): 24. 23 R. Eugeni, “La sposa algoritmica: L’automobile come medium e la navigazione del quotidiano,” in F. Cavaletti, F. Fimiani, B. Grespi, A.C. Sabatino, eds., Immersioni quotidiane: Vita ordinaria, cultura visuale e nuovi media (Milan: Meltemi, 2023): 271-282. FILIPPO FIMIANI 84 AN-ICON  sensitivity for the body and the gaze. Actually, they leave the scopic regimen of spectatorship, and the technolog- ical anti-environment created by the window’s protective shield, coming into synesthetic contact with the natural environment’s forms of life. Another element in Lansdale’s short story il- lustrates, as a symptom, this detachment from technolo- gy. Possibly as a paraphrase of one of McLuhan’s topoi,24 Lansdale likens the car to the older man’s false teeth. Both are “trappings of civilization” which weigh down, serving as technological prostheses that are mobile and tied to mobility. They are metaphors: means of transport between inside and outside, as well as tools for aggression and conquering space and time. “This isn’t my world. I’m of that world. I want to float free in the belly of the sea, away from can openers and cars and -” [...] “I want to leave here! [...] The teeth! [...] It’s the teeth. Dentist, science, foo!” He punched a hand into his mouth, plucked the teeth free, tossed them over his shoulder. Even as the teeth fell the old man rose. He began to stroke. To swim up and up and up, moving like a pale pink seal among the fish. In the light of the moon the young man could see the pooched jaws of the old man, holding the last of the future’s air. Up went the old man, up, up, up, swimming strong in the long-lost waters of a time gone by. Even before technological and human-focused media as cars or false teeth, water is therefore the oldest medium, just as land and air – “The air trembled like a mass of gelatinous ectoplasm,” begins the Lansdale’s short story.25 Water is an elemental, environing medium with its 24 M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: 57, 82-83, 152 (on teeth and car). 25 E. Horn, “Air as Medium,” Grey Room, vol. 7 (2008): 6-25; J. Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015): 53-114, especially 55-59, 90-91. FILIPPO FIMIANI 85 AN-ICON  own specific materiality, which becomes invisible in its vital agency as space-binding. Plus, as shown by the media imaginary26 I have highlighted in my reading of Fish Night and the Eikones, water can be a “ghostly sea.” It is a very elemental medium acting as a deep time-binding agent be- tween nature and culture, between geological and mythical epochs and historically determined technical cultures, as an ontological entanglement between forms of life which are not species-specific. “Weren’t we once just slimy things, brothers to the things that swim?” asks the older man in Lansdale’s short story, borrowing Coleridge’s words27 about a com- munity not only of humans and of like beings, but of “slimy things.” In this inter-textual topos between literature, reli- gion and the natural sciences, fascination and phobia, I read “sliminess”28 as the epitome of the profound time and of the materiality of a colloidal intermediality between technolog- ical media (among other types), living beings and elements. Obviously, “sliminess” stands in contrast to the prevailing metaphors or clichés of fluidity and transparency, that are frequently used with regard to the media and their relation 26 E. Kluitenberg, Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2006); S. Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006). 27 “The very deep did rot: O Christ! / That ever this should be! / Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea” (ll. 125-126), where “a thousand thousand slimy things [with many dead men] / Lived on; and so did I,” said the mariner (ll. 238-239). S.T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798-1834), in The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912): 191, 197. See J. Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986): 41-59; J.B. Ower, “Crantz, Martens and the ‘Slimy Things’ in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Neophilologus 85, no. 3 (2001): 477-484; S. Estok, “The Environmental Imagination in the Slime of ‘The Ancient Mariner,’” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 2, vol. 34 (2021): 135-138. 28 N. Gramlich, “Sticky Media: Encounters with Oil through Imaginary Media Archaeology,” Communication + 1 7, 1 (2018): n. p. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol7/iss1/3; see F. Mason, The Viscous: Slime, Stickiness, Fondling, Mixtures (Goleta CA: punctum books, 2020): 200; B. Woodward, Slime Dynamics (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012): 59-64; C. Michlig, File under: Slime (Los Angeles: Hat & Beard Press, 2023). FILIPPO FIMIANI 86 AN-ICON  with time and materiality and, in particular, with respect to immersivity. Finally, “media are of nature and return to na- ture:”29 that’s what Fish Night, read as a trans-medial al- legory combining literature and animation, shows us in a complex and compelling way, inviting to rethink about the phenomenological and ontological relationships between memories, images, bodies, technologies and environments. A recurring topos and persistent symptom of media history, imaginaries and narratives, this impossible return is both the origin and the end of our desire for immersivity and immersive experience. 29 J. Parikka, “Introduction: The Materiality of Media and Waste,” in J. Parikka, ed., Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, (Open Humanities Press, 2011), http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Medianatures. FILIPPO FIMIANI 87 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19910

Allegories of ImmersiAllegory on by Filippo Fimiani Ekphrastic fear Media imaginary Materiality Elemental media Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Allegories of Immersion FILIPPO FIMIANI, Università degli Studi di Salerno – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9689-5480 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19910 Abstract Fish Night, an episode of LOVE DEATH + RO- BOTS (S01E12, 2019) based on a 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, can be interpreted as an allegory of the im- possibility of immersive experience: if real, it is deadly, be- cause the images are no longer such or ghosts but living beings present in a shared environmental habitat, acting with but also against the subject, in turn no longer a spec- tator. Comparing the story and film, and ancient ekphrastic literature, I discuss, in a trans-medial imaginary genealog- ical perspective, the symptoms of this cultural topos and of the regressive desire for immersion and for transparent immediacy that shapes and drives it, dwelling in particular on the ambivalent phenomenological and ontological re- lations between living bodies, pictures and media as deep time-bending. Keywords Allegory Ekphrastic fear Media imaginary Materiality Elemental media To quote this essay: F. Fimiani, “Allegories of Immersion,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 74-87, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19910. FILIPPO FIMIANI 74 AN-ICON  A premise Fish Night is the twelfth episode of the first season of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS, an animated Netflix series created by Tim Miller and David Fincher and broad- cast on 15 March 2019.1 Directed by Damian Nenow, with Gabriele Pennacchioli as supervising director and Rafał Wojtunik as art director, it was produced by Platine Image studio,2 based on 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, in an adaptation by Philip Gelat and Miller. I see Fish Night as an allegory of the impossi- bility of virtual immersion. Obviously, it regards coexistence and interaction in a shared environment by a subject in motion, one no longer merely observing moving images at a remove, and images which are no longer concrete pictures or simulacrums but, to full effect, real living and acting beings. Why would such an experience be impos- sible? In answering, I will focus on elements drawn from both the literary account and the animated film, seen as trans-medial symptoms of underlying issues which regard the nature of bodies, images, technology, of the medium, and their various interrelations with respect to the fictional immersion and virtual immersivity. I shall cross-analyse the animated short film and its narrative hypotext with another classic literary text which describes what, in many respects, is a complementary immersion. This approach allows me to simultaneously ad- dress: 1) the “quest for immersion” uncovered by Huhta- mo’s media archaeology as a constant motif in the reprise and recurrence of narratives and patterns both in media history and, from my point of view, in the trans-medial story of Fish Night, which is about ghosts, repetitions and reap- pearances that ultimately affect the media themselves (the spectator’s body, the images, the car, the landscape, as we 1 https://lovedeathandrobots.tilda.ws/index, accessed September 1, 2023. 2 https://platige.com/project/feature/fish-night/, accessed September 1, 2023. FILIPPO FIMIANI 75 AN-ICON  will soon discover);3 2) the “[cultural] desire for transparent immediacy” through visual representation found in the ge- nealogy of Bolter and Grusin;4 3) “the moment of resistance or counterdesire that occurs when we sense that the differ- ence between the verbal and visual representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually,” diagnosed by W.J.T. Mitchell as alert for the literary description showing through words and rhetorical tropes a strongly vivid impression of a visual stimulus, object or scene, in summa as “ekphrasis fear;”5 4) Paul de Man’s allegory6 of “potential confusion between figural and referential statement,” between the image and the real. Of course, the four points just evoked should not to be confused. Quite the contrary, aware of their dif- ferences in approach, object and aim, I use them as ac- cess points to the question of immersivity as tropism and symptom of a desire and anxiety manifested and treated differently in the literary texts and their media adaptations that I am about to discuss. In the textual and audio-visual issues I have chosen, or, as Foucault might say,7 in the “myriad events through which – thanks to which, against which –” “the unique aspect” of the cultural idea and topos of the experience of immersion-immersivity has arisen, I 3 E. Huhtamo, “Encapsulated Bodies in Motion: Simulators and the Quest for Total Immersion,” in S. Penny, ed., Critical Issues in Electronic Media (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995): 160-161, and “Dismantling the Fairy Engine. Media Archaeology as Topos Study,” in E. Huhtamo, J. Parikka, eds., Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011): 27-47. 4 J.D. Bolter, R. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1998): 23ff. 5 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Id., Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 154. See R.P., Fletcher, “Digital Ekphrasis and the Uncanny: Toward a Poetics of Augmented Reality,” Electropoetics 3, no. 15 (2017) http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/eng_facpub/56 6 P. de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1979): 113. 7 M. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D.F. Bouchard (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1977): 147. FILIPPO FIMIANI 76 AN-ICON  shall detect the symptom of its impossibility and sketch its singular trans-medial archaeology8 and imaginary. The topos points to a yearning for fictional im- mersion, a performative moment in which saying something brings it into being, making it real in every sense, and fully adherent to the referent, with language and synesthetic perception becoming one. Introduced by a terrified alarm, a seductive invitation or the command of “look!,” the very essential wish is to make subject, image and thing coin- cide. The intensive alteration of the corporeal identity and peripersonal space that results involves not only the char- acter described, narrated and represented in the act of a self-denying vision that resists classification as merely an ocular, remote beholding, but also the reader and specta- tor drawn into an embodied simulation of the occurrences and fantasies found in the images, both verbal and visual. Fish Night, a never-ending trans-medial story I shall intertwine a summary and a commentary of Lansdale’s short story with that of the episode of LD+R. In this way, I will point out some differences and sources of their imaginaries, and make some interlinear remarks on both the literary text and the television adaptation, in order to highlight the main theme of this defined trans-medial corpus: the impossibility of immersion-immersiveness. Two salesmen, one young, the other older, get stuck in the desert when their car breaks down. The hours pass and night falls. At first, the older man bemoans how door-to-door sales are a thing of the past. Then he remem- bers that twenty years earlier he was in this same deso- late landscape, travelling an asphalted road amidst power stanchions and the Rocky Mountains, between Arizona and New Mexico. “There are memories of mine out here,” 8 T. Elsaesser, “Media Archaeology as Symptom,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 2, no. 14 (2016): 181-215. FILIPPO FIMIANI 77 AN-ICON  he says, “and they’re visiting me again.”9 In the short story, this is an unmistakable evocation of Death of a Salesman, the Arthur Miller play directed by Elia Kazan, winner of the 1949 Pulitzer Prize and adapted on numerous occasions for film and TV, in which past and present collapse into the remembrance of the lead character, Willy Lowman, the disillusioned, exhausted door-to-door salesman who, at over sixty, struggles with a trauma not just personal, but historical and collective.10 In Fish Night, the instant replay of involuntary subjective memory gives way to a re-enact- ment both psychic and geological, a Nachleben, a survival and an afterlife of a story that is more than just human. The desert through which the highway passes will once again be a “petrified primal landscape,” allegorically manifesting itself as a “Hippocratic face of history.”11 Lansdale describes the landscape as an im- mersive – and devouring – space: It’s fish night, boy. Tonight’s the full moon and this is the right part of the desert if memory serves me, and the feel is right — I mean, doesn’t the night feel like it’s made up of some fabric, that it’s dif- ferent from other nights, that it’s like being inside a big dark bag, the sides sprinkled with glitter, a spotlight at the top, at the open mouth, to serve as a moon? The function of the mouth metaphor in the Lansdale’s writing is complex, but here it foreshadows the finale’s explicit immersive embodiment: does one enter an immersive space or get swallowed up by it? Space, we can say with Bataille, “can become one fish that swallows another.”12 Is immersion-immersivity an experience of “by” 9 J.R. Lansdale, Fish Night (1982), in G. Brown, A.J. Spedding, eds., Love Death + Robots: The Official Anthology: Volume One (Bendigo: Cohesion Press, 2021): 193-200. Pages not numbered; all citations in the text. 10 J. Schlueter, “Re-membering Willy’s Past: Introducing Postmodern Concerns through Death of a Salesman,” in M. Roudané, ed., Approaches to Teaching Miller’s Death of a Salesman (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1995): 142-154. 11 W. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedmann and H. Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Mein: Suhrkamp, 1991), vol. 1: 343, trans. H. Eiland (Cambridge MA-London: Harvard University Press, 2019): 174. 12 G. Bataille, “Espace” (1930), Documents, no. 1, anastatic reprint, ed. D. Hollier (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1991): 41. FILIPPO FIMIANI 78 AN-ICON  or “in”? Is it penetration or impregnation? Transparency or opacity? Immateriality or the materiality of the environ- mental medium? In Lansdale’s short story, evoking the past, the older man brings up Native Americans, the Navajos and the Hopi, and Manitou, the Great Living Spirit “still around” in everything and every being. He read in a science book – he goes on – that the desert was once a sea filled with fish and “fantastical creatures,” maybe even man’s birthplace. “The world’s an old place, and for longtime is nothing but sea,” he concludes pensively. And – dwelling on the thought – those beings may haunt this place the way human ghosts haunt their former homes. With these musings, the younger and the older man fall asleep in the Plymouth station wagon. Whether dreamed or real, lights from outside the car cause the older man’s eyes to open. Facing him, close to the car window, is an enormous eye. Octopuses, giant jellyfish, molluscs and fish from way back in evolution – Coelacanths, Nau- tilus, Limulus, marine fauna in existence prior to the great Cambrian extinction, appear in the surrounding environ- ment, where the men, now outside the car, can magically breath. Strange beings, “like nothing [they have] ever seen pictures of or imagined,” are present but almost incorpo- real, “ghosts of older world,” disincarnate eidola that pass through the men’s bodies, though they still feel and sense them. But “what” does a man’s body feel when another body passes through it? Symptomatic of the ambivalence and ambiguity of the immersion-immersivity topos, and its impossibility, Philip Gelat leaves this phrase out of the adaptation of Lansdale’s short story for LD+R: “Feel it, boy? Feel the presence of the sea? Doesn’t it feel like the beating of your own mother’s heart while you float inside the womb?” FILIPPO FIMIANI 79 AN-ICON And the younger man had to admit that he felt it, that inner rolling rhythm that is the tide of life and the pulsating heart of the sea. Thus the “oceanic sentiment,” the “thalassic regression” debated by psychoanalysis,13 also character- istic of the “crisis of presence” in magical experiences dis- cussed by anthropology,14 are pathic and phenomenological equivalents of the sea’s “presence” as a primary medium, a pre-individual fusion and condition for the possibility of life. In this elemental medium, the bodies of the marine beings are, first and foremost, traversable and diaphanous, immaterial media-mediators permitting an equally immate- rial engagement. They are “spectral,” like “soap bubbles,” “smoke,” “flashes of light,” flitting and skirting, writes Lans- dale. There is no mistaking the kinship with intermedial ex- empla of the metaphorical repertoire of philosophies, both ancient and modern, of visual perception, Renaissance and eighteenth-century treatises on painting, plus contempo- rary theories of optical devices and electric media. In the LD+R episode, the ecstatic young man shouts, “I wanna swim!,” as if he were a man-fish of folk legend brought to life.15 Deaf to the alarmed pleas of the older man, he joins the school of fish, swimming amongst them in slow-motion,16 becoming like them. Stripped of his individuality, he is transfigured, weightlessly transported upward, only to have his ascension end in death. All the other creatures flee in fright at the approach of an enormous red megalodon, which, circling the car, devours the slower, defenceless swimmer, meaning the human transformed into 13 On this essential topic of the symbolic return to the sea, I can only point to Ferenczi, Freud, Alexander and Kerény, or Sloterdijk, plus the Mutterleibversenkung of Ėjzenštejn or slow-motion, in the case of Epstein. See W.B. Parsons, The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 14 E. de Martino, Il mondo magico: Prolegomeni a una storia del magismo (1945) (Turin: Boringhieri, 1973): 144-145, and Magic: A Theory from the South (1959), trans. D.L. Zinn (Chicago: Hau Books, 2015): 85-96. 15 B. Croce, Storie e leggende napoletane (1919) (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1967): 306-313. See G.B. Bronzini, “Cola Pesce il tuffatore: dalla leggenda moderna al mito antico,” Lares 66, no. 3 (2000): 341-376. 16 Under the slow-motion effect, our bodies look like “smooth muscles moving through a dense medium in which thick currents always carry and shape this clear descendent of old marine fauna and maternal waters.” J. Epstein, The Intelligence of a Machine (1946), trans. C. Wall-Romana (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014): 29. FILIPPO FIMIANI 80 AN-ICON  a marine being. The Otus megalodon, which first lived at the start of the Miocene period, succumbing to extinction roughly 2.5 million years ago, has returned to the desert between Arizona and New Mexico, only to slowly disappear from view, leaving behind plumes of blood set against the enormous, white, imperturbable moon. Left by himself, the older man is stunned by what he has just seen. From New Mexico to Greece, and back In Fish Night, the impossibility of immersive ex- perience, i.e. of the elimination of all substantial differences between the gaze, the images and the environment, is tied to the fact that, were it to become real, death would result. Given the trans-medial imaginary genealogical perspective indicated in the Premise, I read the lethal outcome of the way up of the main character of Fish Night as comple- mentary to the dark plunge down described in a masterful scene from the Eikones, the influential classic of ekphrastic literature and ancient rhetoric attributed to Philostratus the Elder. Reactivating the Ancient Greek, I would then speak of anabasis (from ana-, “up,” and baínō, “to go”), of a fatal immersive ascent, for Fish Night, and of catabasis (from kata-, “down,” and baínō, “to go”), of a descent down in the underworld, for the Eikones. Actually, the very protagonist of the episode from the Eikones is the penetrating gaze of a lookout scan- ning the sea, who, perched atop a pole on the shore, can spot tuna in the sea and call out them to fishermen. This fictional vision is enhanced by the pole, depicted as a sub- lime lignum in Negri’s sixteenth-century Latin translation, which acts as a technical mean and as rudimental pros- thetic medium, allowing for a more powerful and detailed gaze. Still, the outcome is ultimately catastrophic: for as the lookout’s gaze gradually immerses itself in the mael- strom of moving forms and flashing colours, it becomes less penetrating, feebler, until the fish, barely discernible as shadows, swallow it up, as in the journey of Ulysses to Hades painted by Polignoto and described by Pausania. FILIPPO FIMIANI 81 AN-ICON  In Fish Night as well, the immersive moment in which the verbal, the visual and the real all become performatively one, heralded by the ecstatic, ostentatious exhortation to look,17 winds up being the exact opposite: blindness and terror. And so it becomes an allegory of its own impossibility. As Philostratus writes: Now look at the painting and you will see just this going on. The look-out gazes at the sea and turns his eyes in one direction and another to get the number; and in the bright gleam of the sea the colours of the fish vary, those near the surface seem to be black, those just below are not so black, those lower still begin to elude the sense of sight, then they seem shadowy, and finally they look just like the water; for as the vision penetrates deeper and deeper its power of discerning objects in the water is blunted. 18 In the story Fish Night, and even more so in the animated film, what occurs is not simply a metaphorical inversion of the yearning, for immersion and transparency. The change that takes place is literally ontological, rather than phenomenological: the inexorable law of the impene- trability of bodies in space has been restored, having earlier been suspended by the diaphanously spectral, almost im- material state of the environmental medium. This elementa- ry law of physics once again holds, even in the immersive environment, where the body of the human being has lost some of its species-specific characteristics – gravity, use of the respiratory apparatus and motor skills – while that of the image, finally possessed of a physical consistency of its own, has also gained new properties, enabling it to take actions that truly affect the other entities sharing the surrounding environment. 17 N. Bryson, “Philostratus and the Imaginary Museum,” in S. Goldhill, R. Osborne, eds., Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture (Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 266-267. 18 Philostratus the Younger, Imagines. Callistratus, Descriptions, trans. A. Fairbanks (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1936): 57 (I.12); Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. W.H.S. Jones, H.A. Ormerod (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1918): 185 (10.28.1). FILIPPO FIMIANI 82 AN-ICON  Which medium? But in the final analysis, what does Fish Night tell us about the material nature of the immersive medium and its uniqueness compared to other media and technical devices? In Lansdale’s short story, the protagonist of the deadly immersive experience is the older man, not the younger one, as in the LD+R episode. Lansdale has in mind the imagery of Death of a Salesman and Willy Lowman’s irretrievable historical crisis. Charley, Willy’s well-off neigh- bour, observes that: “A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”19 Thus the American Dream is a territorialised rendering of the countryside by the moving automobile, a “hot,” prosthetic medium which is culturally, socially and aesthetically expansive, as Marshall McLuhan was to point out soon after, in short an “excrescence of a kinetic ego” and an agent of the “motorized narcissism.”20 The automobile stands as the technological condition that makes possible the conquest of the last frontier, as the material and historical a-priori of the aesthetic experience of the wilderness, be it rebellious or liberating, ostentatious or touristic, with the complementary evolution of the car being its domestication to transport and distribute tangible and intangible goods. At the turn of the 60’s-70’s,21 road movies were both reflections and wellsprings of the cultural and mythopoetic topos of the automobile as a means to attaining individual freedom or reification, or to crafting the iconography of the American sublime. Indeed, the choice of a Plymouth Fury for the LD+R episode may not have 19 A. Miller, Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem (1949) (London: Penguin, 1998): 111. 20 M. McLuhan, Motorcar: The Mechanical Bride (1951), in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) (Cambridge MA-London: MIT Press, 1994): 217-222. See P. Sloterdjik, “Die Herrschaft der Kentauren. Philosophische Bemerkungen zur Automobilität” (1992), trans. K. Ritson, Transfers 1, vol. 1 (2011): 14-24; P. Weibel, “Medien der Mobilität,” in P. Weibel, ed., CAR CULTURE: Medien der Mobilität (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2011): 345-400. 21 S. Cohan, I.R. Hark, eds., The Road Movie Book (London-New York: Routledge, 1997); A. Cross, “Driving the American Landscape,” in P. Wollen, J. Kerr, eds., Autopia: Cars and Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2002): 249-258; D. Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); D. Orgeron, Road Movies: From Muybridge and Méliès to Lynch and Kiarostami (New York: Palgrave, 2008). FILIPPO FIMIANI 83 AN-ICON  been random, given that the model was produced between 1968 and 1972, or precisely the years of the psychedelic and hippy culture, as well as the first signs of its impending crisis. Anyway, the automobile is the technological embodiment of the desire of immersion, a new medium for an old movement and a very ancient desire, as shown to us by the sinking gaze in the sea described by Philostra- tus. A 1939 advertisement placed in National Geographic introduced General Motors’ new Oldsmobile model with this slogan: “See America from an ‘OBSERVATION BODY!’” The brief promotional text promised a “VISION as wide as all outdoors is yours…,” but at the same time a “rhythmic ride” of a “rolling uterus”22 corresponding to the rhythm of the all-enveloping medium of the sea in which the body of the character from Fish Night loses himself in symbiotic fashion. Immersion means, at one and the same time, travelling “in” the landscape, being “part of” the environment, and re- turning “to” the maternal space. As was recently noted by Ruggero Eugeni,23 the automobile is a medium-prosthesis which implements a protected, horizontal immersion scaled to human height, so to speak, and the line of the horizon, for drivers traversing urban and exurban landscapes in a personal travelling cave: a feeling of immersion intensified by the setting up of specific sensorial and perceptive pro- cesses (both hetero- and proprioceptive). From this perspective, the regressive desire of immersivity of Lansdale’s account stands in contrast to the prosthetic mode of technological immersivity which, according to McLuhan, is embodied by the automobile, and to the mythical example of fictional immersion made possible by the tuna lookout’s perch described by Phi- lostratus. In Fish Night, the two characters leave the car, technology’s outpost for providing the senses with pros- thesis and prophylaxis, and for supplying techniques of the 22 P. Sloterdjik, “Rollender Uterus” (1995), in Selected Exaggerations: Conversations and Interviews, 1993-2012, trans. K. Margolis (Cambridge: Polity Book, 2016): 24. 23 R. Eugeni, “La sposa algoritmica: L’automobile come medium e la navigazione del quotidiano,” in F. Cavaletti, F. Fimiani, B. Grespi, A.C. Sabatino, eds., Immersioni quotidiane: Vita ordinaria, cultura visuale e nuovi media (Milan: Meltemi, 2023): 271-282. FILIPPO FIMIANI 84 AN-ICON  sensitivity for the body and the gaze. Actually, they leave the scopic regimen of spectatorship, and the technolog- ical anti-environment created by the window’s protective shield, coming into synesthetic contact with the natural environment’s forms of life. Another element in Lansdale’s short story il- lustrates, as a symptom, this detachment from technolo- gy. Possibly as a paraphrase of one of McLuhan’s topoi,24 Lansdale likens the car to the older man’s false teeth. Both are “trappings of civilization” which weigh down, serving as technological prostheses that are mobile and tied to mobility. They are metaphors: means of transport between inside and outside, as well as tools for aggression and conquering space and time. “This isn’t my world. I’m of that world. I want to float free in the belly of the sea, away from can openers and cars and -” [...] “I want to leave here! [...] The teeth! [...] It’s the teeth. Dentist, science, foo!” He punched a hand into his mouth, plucked the teeth free, tossed them over his shoulder. Even as the teeth fell the old man rose. He began to stroke. To swim up and up and up, moving like a pale pink seal among the fish. In the light of the moon the young man could see the pooched jaws of the old man, holding the last of the future’s air. Up went the old man, up, up, up, swimming strong in the long-lost waters of a time gone by. Even before technological and human-focused media as cars or false teeth, water is therefore the oldest medium, just as land and air – “The air trembled like a mass of gelatinous ectoplasm,” begins the Lansdale’s short story.25 Water is an elemental, environing medium with its 24 M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: 57, 82-83, 152 (on teeth and car). 25 E. Horn, “Air as Medium,” Grey Room, vol. 7 (2008): 6-25; J. Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015): 53-114, especially 55-59, 90-91. FILIPPO FIMIANI 85 AN-ICON  own specific materiality, which becomes invisible in its vital agency as space-binding. Plus, as shown by the media imaginary26 I have highlighted in my reading of Fish Night and the Eikones, water can be a “ghostly sea.” It is a very elemental medium acting as a deep time-binding agent be- tween nature and culture, between geological and mythical epochs and historically determined technical cultures, as an ontological entanglement between forms of life which are not species-specific. “Weren’t we once just slimy things, brothers to the things that swim?” asks the older man in Lansdale’s short story, borrowing Coleridge’s words27 about a com- munity not only of humans and of like beings, but of “slimy things.” In this inter-textual topos between literature, reli- gion and the natural sciences, fascination and phobia, I read “sliminess”28 as the epitome of the profound time and of the materiality of a colloidal intermediality between technolog- ical media (among other types), living beings and elements. Obviously, “sliminess” stands in contrast to the prevailing metaphors or clichés of fluidity and transparency, that are frequently used with regard to the media and their relation 26 E. Kluitenberg, Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2006); S. Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006). 27 “The very deep did rot: O Christ! / That ever this should be! / Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea” (ll. 125-126), where “a thousand thousand slimy things [with many dead men] / Lived on; and so did I,” said the mariner (ll. 238-239). S.T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798-1834), in The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912): 191, 197. See J. Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986): 41-59; J.B. Ower, “Crantz, Martens and the ‘Slimy Things’ in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Neophilologus 85, no. 3 (2001): 477-484; S. Estok, “The Environmental Imagination in the Slime of ‘The Ancient Mariner,’” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 2, vol. 34 (2021): 135-138. 28 N. Gramlich, “Sticky Media: Encounters with Oil through Imaginary Media Archaeology,” Communication + 1 7, 1 (2018): n. p. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol7/iss1/3; see F. Mason, The Viscous: Slime, Stickiness, Fondling, Mixtures (Goleta CA: punctum books, 2020): 200; B. Woodward, Slime Dynamics (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012): 59-64; C. Michlig, File under: Slime (Los Angeles: Hat & Beard Press, 2023). FILIPPO FIMIANI 86 AN-ICON  with time and materiality and, in particular, with respect to immersivity. Finally, “media are of nature and return to na- ture:”29 that’s what Fish Night, read as a trans-medial al- legory combining literature and animation, shows us in a complex and compelling way, inviting to rethink about the phenomenological and ontological relationships between memories, images, bodies, technologies and environments. A recurring topos and persistent symptom of media history, imaginaries and narratives, this impossible return is both the origin and the end of our desire for immersivity and immersive experience. 29 J. Parikka, “Introduction: The Materiality of Media and Waste,” in J. Parikka, ed., Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, (Open Humanities Press, 2011), http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Medianatures. FILIPPO FIMIANI 87 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19792

History and Stories through Jeremy Deller’s Performances by Roberto Pinto Jeremy Deller Public art Mass performance 14-18 now We’re here because we’re here Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello History and Stories through Jeremy Deller’s Performances ROBERTO PINTO, Università di Bologna – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1559-5759 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19792 Abstract “I wanted to make a memorial that was alive, not an object or set of objects to make a pilgrimage to; a memorial that would come to you, that would appear in your city, town or shopping centre, intervening in your daily life.” With these words, Jeremy Deller introduces us to his We’re Here Because We’re Here, created as part of the events commemorating the First World War. With the help of Rufus Norris, director of the National Theatre, Deller organised a gigantic mass performance in which some 2,000 volunteers disguised as World War I soldiers wandered around the main cities of the United Kingdom without anyone having warned the citizens of their presence. Through this work by Deller (and by comparing it with other artistic experiences), the text intends to investigate how some contemporary artistic interventions seek to exploit the mechanisms of performance in order to reconstruct historical events not only by relying on the strategies of re-enactment, but also by resorting to an immersive relationship linked to the un- expected capable of producing extreme involvement, a process that solicits the emotional states to which, in the harshest moments of war, the community is subjected. Keywords Jeremy Deller Public art Mass performance 14-18 now We’re here because we’re here To quote this essay: R. Pinto, “History and Stories through Jeremy Deller’s Performances,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 88-100, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19792. ROBERTO PINTO 88 AN-ICON A memorial that would come to you, that would appear in your city, town or shopping centre, intervening in your daily life1 The topic (and issue) of monuments and the commemoration of historical events has been at the centre of debate in recent decades. There have been many dis- cussions – in public, within more academic contexts and in art institutions – on the question: can statues or, more generally, artistic events still be – and how – valuable tools for activating processes of remembrance and re-elabora- tion of collective mourning or past tragic events? There have also been many striking and spec- tacular interventions/performances questioning the value of these objects inherited from a past often marked by more than one dark side. We could sum the matter up with these questions: just because they are part of our tradition, are they still able to represent us? Do they have the right to con- tinue to be considered as common symbols to be shared? Or should they be transformed into artistic artefacts that need to be historically contextualised and become part of museum heritage? (On the grounds that museums are better suited to preserving such artefacts and providing ac- curate descriptions of the context from which they come.) Among the many recent episodes, I believe everyone still has in mind the demolition of the monument to Edward Colston, “benefactor” and slave trader, on 7 June 2020 in Bristol, an event that took place in the emotional aftershock of the killing of George Floyd in the United States and the Black Lives Matter movement. In today’s climate, there is no shortage of harsh criticism of institutions when they struggle to adapt to the demands of groups and communities who do not feel rep- resented at all and, arguably, express an expectation that some of the fundamental rights of all people should be 1 J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here (London: Thames and Hudson, 2017): 61. ROBERTO PINTO 89 AN-ICON  respected. This is all the more so when dealing with sym- bols in shared and important places, such as statues and monuments. In this context, the initiative by British institu- tions to create a complex and cohesive project to mark the centenary of the First World War in an attempt to experi- ment with new ways of sharing seems to me a fascinating case study. It is clear that, whichever way one reads this historical event, one cannot ignore the fact that it was, in every respect, a long and devastating war. The initiative was a harsh testing ground for artists and institutions, given the risk of falling into the rhetoric of patriotic ideals and the celebration of the courage and daring of the participants, which had until now been indispensable prerequisites for celebrations of historical events such as this. The UK Arts Programme was the promoter of 14-18 NOW, a genuinely diverse and cohesive programme that saw the creation of 107 projects, the involvement of 420 artists2 using different media (theatre, cinema, visual arts, poetry, music) which, in most cases, were hybrid forms. It is also worth emphasising the very high level of the artists involved; they included Gillian Wearing, John Akomfrah, Raqs Media Collective, Tobias Rehberger, Yinka Shonibare, Suzanne Lacy, Rachel Whiteread, Mark Wallinger, Ryoji Ikeda, and William Kentridge.3 Many had already dealt with contemporary history and the related political problems on their journey. It should therefore be seen as an act of cour- age on the part of the promoting body – and of recognising the issues underlying an anniversary that could lend itself to controversy and misunderstanding – that they identified artists sensitive to cultural and political commitment who were well aware of the nature and extent of the dangers inherent in a project commemorating a war. One of the 2 According to its official website the project commissioned works from 420 artists, and engaged 35 million people. “About 14-18 Now,” 14-18 Now, https://www.1418now.org.uk/ about/, accessed December 15, 2022. 3 For the full list see https://www.1418now.org.uk/artists/, accessed December 15, 2022. ROBERTO PINTO 90 AN-ICON  aims of this event was, therefore, to try to change the nar- rative that has been made of the history told by European nations mainly through the arts, which have reconstructed and told it exclusively from the point of view of their specific national identities.4 Within this experimentation, I would like to place as a case study We’re here because we’re here by Jeremy Deller – created in collaboration with Rufus Norris – because, perhaps more than any other, it seems to me symbolic of the ability to put forward attractive solutions that directly address the role the public takes on in com- memorations and make the experience as multi-sensorial and engaging as possible. Elements that are the leitmotif of Immersed in the Work. From the Environment to Virtual Reality. In doing so, I would at least like to point out the proj- ects Across and In-Between by Suzanne Lacy5 and Pages of the Sea by Danny Boyle,6 which adopt an approach in many ways similar to the work of the London-based artist. Throughout his career, Jeremy Deller has often chosen subjects related to history and politics and has always used a collaborative and participatory approach right from the design phase. His artistic practices have 4 In order to clarify the position of the planners, the words of Margaret MacMillan, who, in the introduction to the volume collecting information on 14-18 Now, explains “Governments often want to tidy up the past and impose a single unified version of what happened back then - at Waterloo, say, or the Battle of the Somme. But there can be no one view. Women, men, diverse ethnic groups, religions or social classes, start from different viewpoints, and what they see in the past may be guided by that. So marking the 100th anniversary of the First World War, that vast and destructive struggle from 1914 to 1918, was never going to be easy. We can agree that it was a catastrophe that destroyed the old confident Europe and left a strangely and irrevocably altered world. Beyond that there are, and always have been, profound differences over how we remember and commemorate that war. We still cannot agree on how it started or why it went on for so long, and we still debate its meaning and its legacy a century later.” J. Waldman, M. MacMillan, eds., 14-18 Now: Contemporary Arts Commissions for the First World War Centenary (Profile: London, 2019). See also within the same volume the essay by David Olusoga. Cfr D. Olusoga, “Art as a lens: Re-Globalising the First War,” ibid.: 12-13. 5 Suzanne Lacy’s work, made between 18 and 23 October 2018, on the occasion of the centenary of Ireland’s Declaration of Independence (and the subsequent border that has since divided Northern Ireland from Éire) aims to investigate borders and the influence they have had on our lives. See: https://www.1418now.org.uk/commissions/across-and-in-between/, accessed December 15, 2022. 6 Boyle’s work, Pages of the Sea, took place on 11 November 2018 and was intended to celebrate the centenary of the Armistice. See “On 11 November 2018,” Pages of The Sea, https://www.pagesofthesea.org.uk, accessed December 15, 2022. ROBERTO PINTO 91 AN-ICON  contributed to redefining the boundaries of contemporary art also because, in creating his works, he has had to try his hand as an art producer, director, event organiser, archivist as well as photographer, performer and installation creator, the latter roles being more standard within contemporary art. The project commissioned by the WW1 Cente- nary Art Commission from Deller was related to celebrating the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles in military history. Over 141 days, more than a million casu- alties were recorded. On the first day alone, the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties. Jeremy Deller’s idea was to create a mobile and temporary memorial7 that would dialogue with the present day and attempt to overturn the need to create a specific place dedicated to the memory of people and events by conceiving, instead, “a memorial that would come to you, that would appear in your city, town or shopping centre, intervening in your daily life. [...] It was as much about today as it was about 1916.”8 To meet this need, with the help of Rufus Norris – the theatre and film director who has been Artistic Director of the National Theatre since 2015 – he staged a massive performance in which more than 1,400 volunteers, dressed in the uniforms of World War I soldiers, with no public announcement of their presence, appeared in more than 40 cities9 on 1 July 2016, making contact with UK citizens going about their daily business, and moving from one part of a city to an- other. Deller had deliberately excluded the actors/ participants from meeting in all those places that had, 7 “I wanted to make a contemporary memorial to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, one that moved around the UK with an unpredictability in which the participants, by their actions, took the memorial to the public.” Deller in https://becausewearehere.co.uk/we-are-here-about/, accessed December 15, 2022. 8 J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. 9 To access the map of the event see https://becausewearehere.co.uk/we-are-here-map/ , accessed December 15, 2022. ROBERTO PINTO 92 AN-ICON  even remotely, a relation to celebrations and rituals – so no churches, public buildings, cemeteries, or locations of historical significance. In their place, train or metro stations, busy squares and streets, shopping malls or meeting plac- es. Often in rather thickly crowded groups, these anachronistic soldiers had to present themselves in central areas and busy places to interact with citizens, returning their gaze and smiling at them, although they were not expected to engage in conversations or stimulate verbal exchanges. They had to limit themselves, occasionally and chorally, to singing a song to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” with the words “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here,” hence the title of the work. British soldiers10 also often used this line as a hymn wishing for the war’s end. The idea of remaining silent was Norris’s sug- gestion,11 and, in a way, silence became a real communi- cative strategy for Deller to construct his sort of re-enact- ment:12 the silence before the event, which was completely concealed from the public until the day the performers appeared in the cities, and the substantial silence of the participants interrupted by the chants that occasionally accompanied the soldiers in their wanderings through the 10 Deller explained: “When I read about this song, I realised I not only had an activity for the men but also a title for the piece. It explains nothing, it’s pointless and repetitive, a little like the fate of a foot soldier or even the nature of man’s addiction to conflict.” J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. 11 C. Higgins, “#Wearehere: Somme tribute revealed as Jeremy Deller work,” The Guardian (July 1, 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jul/01/wearehere-battle-somme- tribute-acted-out-across-britain, accessed December 15, 2022. 12 Although, as we shall see, Deller has constructed genuine re-enactments, on this occasion this work cannot be properly considered as such, even though, often, this term is used as a hypernym. On this subject see S. Mudu, “Under the sign of Reenactment,” in C. Baldacci, S. Franco, eds., On Reenactment: Concepts, Metodologies, Tools (Turin: Accademia University Press, 2022). ROBERTO PINTO 93 AN-ICON  cities. During the weeks of training13 in the run-up to 1 July, Norris and Deller had explicitly requested of all participants that interaction with the spectators should stop there, at si- lence, at a simple exchange of glances, and that the possi- ble explanation/interpretation of the event unfolding before the mostly astonished eyes of the spectators should be left to the calling card – a choice dictated by both purely tech- nical and symbolic issues. The performative action – given the vastness of the intervention and the mass of people involved – had to remain as simple as possible so as not to force the performers to improvise in the face of the in- calculable variables imposed in an open dialogue with the casual passer-by. The conversation, therefore, would have been entirely uncontrollable and (also given that none of the participants had any professional acting training) the quality standards would probably have suffered. In addition, although I am not aware that this was made explicit, it would also have posed a problem of a symbolic nature: each participant in the performance was the apparition or “ghost” of a dead person, and therefore, silence was the most suitable form to evoke the victims. The actual interaction with the audience, then, took place only through a common calling card which established a dia- logue of glances in the explanation of the work – I represent someone, a specific person with a name, regiment, or rank, who died a hundred years ago, even if I am not him – and which at the same time also became the tombstone, the 13 An interesting insight into the training period for the performers in this project can be found in a conversation between Deller and Emily Lim. Cfr. E. Lim, J. Deller, “Relaxed, open, alive, kind, engaged,” in R. Norris, J. Deller, We’re Here Because We’re Here: 104-113. Here, we also find a document with the “Five Golden Words: Relaxed, open, alive, kind, engaged” and the “Four Golden Rules: 1. Stay Alive – Keep it natural, be comfortable, don’t ever be a statue! 2. Seek Eye Contact – be interested in the public but don’t intimidate them, it’s not a staring competition! 3. Be Kind to the public, don’t ever be rude! 4. Each Card is a Gift – make eye contact when you give it, watch the public’s reaction to it.” Ibid.: 104. ROBERTO PINTO 94 AN-ICON  remnant of the monument.14 In a video filmed by the BBC on this project, Deller said that he owed the idea of making the soldiers who died in that battle appear as ghosts to something he had read during the research period before the work, in which he had found interesting information about phenomena in Britain during the war - of women mainly - seeing dead loved ones in the street, just catching a glimpse of someone on a bus or through a shop window thinking it was their husband or their brother or their son. It became quite a big thing, all these sightings, these apparitions of the dead. So it was as if the project had already happened during the war. People had already seen the dead in the streets.15 Compared to a monument or a more traditional re-enactment of a historical event, which asks us to respect the hero’s sacrifice and celebrate it, Deller shifts the focus to the individual persons, or rather, to the void they left behind, filling it through the concretisation of the ghost of the missing person, thus giving shape to the void created around each of the people who disappeared in the war. This shift also reflects the artist’s desire to avoid any senti- mentality in the representation: “Avoid Sentimentality” was the instruction written on one of his reproduced sheets of notes. The artist explicitly speaks of the goal of giving the audience a “jolt,”16 and a jolt, after all, is at the opposite extreme of storytelling and words of condolence with which 14 “We also equipped each man with a set of ‘calling cards’ which bore the name, regiment and rank of a soldier who died on 1 July. He was representing that person, not pretending to be him. The card was effectively a gravestone, and if a member of the public paid attention to a soldier in any way he or she was given one,” J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. 15 W. Yu (@weiyu970), “Jeremy Deller – We’re Here Because We’re Here,” YouTube video (November 26, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXnr3w74TJs&t=158s, accessed December 15, 2022. 16 J. Deller in J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. ROBERTO PINTO 95 AN-ICON  to remember the many qualities of those who have left us – usual procedures in a commemoration of historical events. Nevertheless, the heart of this work is absolutely emotional; in fact, the people who found themselves pass- ing through the cities engaged with the performance were sucked into the event, not only because they felt surrounded by it but, above all, because the absence of rhetoric made them feel exempt from any pressing request to take sides, to accept being part of a community, as any ritual (even a secular one) imposes. The request was only to participate. And perhaps it is precisely in this form of engagement that the diversity lies, compared to others, of Deller’s fascinating offering. It appropriates with this immense “delegated per- formance”17 the principles of spectacularity; it is the child of cinema and a digital and social media culture,18 but, at the same time, does not create artificial distances between spectator and performer, given that the extreme proximity of the encounter with the soldiers made the experience somehow simultaneously unique and intimate. However, this was not the first time that Deller had used these modes of immersive engagement to rec- reate the feeling at least of an episode from the past and bring back to life a part of history that we have forgotten or repressed. This had already happened with It Is What It Is: Conversation about Iraq, from 2009, a collaborative work with Creative Time and the New Museum in New York, in which he had taken a car destroyed by explosives found in Iraq on a tour of 14 US museums to serve as a “backdrop” 17 I refer to the category used by Claire Bishop in C. Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012). 18 See C. Eva, “Reaching the Public” in J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 115-116, which begins with the statement: “In many ways We’re here because we’re here is an artwork for the age of social media.” ROBERTO PINTO 96 AN-ICON  to a conversation space in which Iraqi citizens and Ameri- can military personnel, among others, were invited.19 Nevertheless, the work that, in terms of organ- isational strategy and spectator involvement, serves as the premise for We’re here because we’re here is undoubtedly The Battle of Orgreave, from 2001, in which Deller attempted to recreate live – again, as a gigantic participatory perfor- mance – the clashes between police and striking miners at the Orgreave Coking Plant in Yorkshire on 18 June 1984. This episode, one of the harshest and most divisive for Brit- ain in the 1980s and the Thatcher era, had affected Deller as a teenager at the time: I wanted to find out what exactly happened on that day with a view to re-enacting or commemorating it in some way. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the strike, lik e a civil war, had a trau- matically divisive effect at all levels of life in the UK. Families were torn apart because of divided loyalties, the union movement was split on its willingness to support the National Union of Mineworkers, the print media especially contributed to the polarisation of the arguments to the point where there appeared to be little space for a middle ground. So in all but name it became an ideological and industrial battle between the two sections of British society.20 Commissioned and produced by Artangel, The Battle of Orgreave was a reconstruction involving about 19 On his website Deller explains: “This project started as the idea to create a mobile museum of the war in Iraq that would tour the US. Finding material for the museum proved difficult, until we were offered a car that had been used in previous exhibitions. From this car, used as a centrepiece, we constructed a room in the museum where the public could meet and talk to people involved in the conflict in some way. The idea was then taken on the road; we towed the car from New York to LA, stopping off in 14 towns and cities on the way – a classic American road trip route – accompanied by an Iraqi citizen and an enlisted American soldier. It was presented in as neutral a way as possible, which puzzled a lot of people. But it meant that the public were more likely to talk to us, because they weren’t scared of being dragged into some sort of political arena. Sometimes these conversations went on for hours. The car was subsequently donated to the Imperial War Museum in London” https://www.jeremydeller.org/ItIsWhatItIs/ItIsWhatItIs.php accessed December 15, 2022. 20 J. Deller, The English Civil War / Part II (London: Artangel, 2002): 7. ROBERTO PINTO 97 AN-ICON  a thousand people21 – around 800 who had taken part in historical re-enactments, approximately 200 former miners and an unknown number of people who were part of the police force at the time. It was also, in parallel, a massive piece of research with information, photos and videos in addition to, as already described in We’re here because we’re here, a long collective preparation work in which the former miners, above all, also had the role of helping in the reconstruction of events. And as with The Battle of Orgreave, one cannot fail to be struck by the enormous organisational effort that displays all of Deller’s ability to rely on a network of knowledge and professional expertise, even with associations involved in battle re-enactments and costumed historical events.22 Here, too, we find the artist’s interest in the pro- cesses of collective memory and its loss, but The Battle of Orgreave was also an attempt to reconstruct the very idea of society that Thatcher had denied – one of her slogans was “There is no such thing as Society” – precisely through the concept of delegation and collaboration with others to achieve a common interest. As far as possible, Deller relied on the memories of the miners and police officers to recreate the battle scene, putting the many newspaper articles in the background; in essence, allowing the many personal memories to direct the course of the re-enactment. It is a reconstruction process not to be consid- ered definitively concluded since Deller presents it again in the form of a film (shot by Mike Figgs), an archive (in the 21 Ibid.; See also A. Correia, “Interpreting Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave,” Visual Culture in Britain, no.7 (2006): 93-112. 22 On this subject, numerous articles and volumes have come out on both the artistic and the more purely theatrical side. In addition to the texts already mentioned, I would add: R. Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Routledge: London, 2011); M. Franko, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); V. Agnew., J. Lamb, J. Tomann, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies (New York: Routledge, 2020); C. Baldacci, C. Nicastro, A. Sforzini, eds., Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022); C. Baldacci, S. Franco, eds., On Reenactment: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools (Accademia University Press: Turin, 2022). ROBERTO PINTO 98 AN-ICON  Tate Modern collection), and a catalogue (The English Civil War / Part II), and it nevertheless remains present in the minds of the many participants and spectators (a distinc- tion whose legitimacy is to be verified) who took part in the reconstruction of the events on 17 June 2001. As Amelia Jones explains well, crucially, The Battle of Orgreave itself is continually changing— and is never presented as a “final” or fully coherent work or object, even though it consists of documents, objects, and other mate- rial traces of prior re-enactments. Notably, too, while many of the other re-enactments tellingly substitute the re-enactor as new “author” of a unique and ultimately static (documented) work, Deller himself does not feature in a noticeable way either as part of the re-enactment or the public relations materials circulating around the film, its most visible “documentation”—the work in its infinite permutations does not tend to devolve back to a singular body, though it does only have coherence in relation to the author-name Jeremy Deller.23 Deller is fascinated by history, but instead of seeking its element of order, repetition, and the possibil- ity of foreseeing things, he strives to make room for the complexity that is necessarily chaos and confusion. As art critic Teresa Macrì points out in her Politics/poetics,24 it is disorder that fascinates the artist, and often this confusion is identified with mass movements, collective participation, and the public dimension of his work. From a historical point of view, these projects can be juxtaposed with Jochen Gerz’s Counter-Monument,25 but I believe that Deller’s works are more a continuation 23 A. Jones, “‘The Artist is Present.’ Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence,” TDR. The Drama Review 55, no. 1 (2021): 16-45, 24. 24 T. Macrì, Politics/Poetics (Milano: Postmedia, 2014). 25 J.E. Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992): 267-296. ROBERTO PINTO 99 AN-ICON  of the actions of political art collectives in the 1970s and 1980s, and I am thinking above all of Group Material – which disbanded in 199626 – or the previously mentioned art ac- tivist Suzanne Lacy. As in their work, in the operations of the British artist there is no truth to be sought with an ideological attitude, rather the aim is to try to share ideas and above all to try to listen to the many dissonant voices and counter-narratives that have not been given sufficient space in the dominant discourse. At the same time, he perhaps distances himself from them precisely because of the popular/spectacular dimension that his works take on, because of the attention he dedicates to the spectator – a role that is always possible and never wholly absent in his works, which goes hand in hand with that of participant/ performer. 26 “It’s hard not to feel that Group Material broke significant ground but missed the party. The year they broke up, 1996, coincides with a proliferation of new forms of social practice lately successful in museum exhibitions and biennials, whether in the work of Francis Alÿs or Jeremy Deller.” A. Green, “Citizen Artists: Group Material,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 26 (2011): 17-25. ROBERTO PINTO 100 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19792

History and Stories through Jeremy Deller’s Performances by Roberto Pinto Jeremy Deller Public art Mass performance 14-18 now We’re here because we’re here Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello History and Stories through Jeremy Deller’s Performances ROBERTO PINTO, Università di Bologna – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1559-5759 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19792 Abstract “I wanted to make a memorial that was alive, not an object or set of objects to make a pilgrimage to; a memorial that would come to you, that would appear in your city, town or shopping centre, intervening in your daily life.” With these words, Jeremy Deller introduces us to his We’re Here Because We’re Here, created as part of the events commemorating the First World War. With the help of Rufus Norris, director of the National Theatre, Deller organised a gigantic mass performance in which some 2,000 volunteers disguised as World War I soldiers wandered around the main cities of the United Kingdom without anyone having warned the citizens of their presence. Through this work by Deller (and by comparing it with other artistic experiences), the text intends to investigate how some contemporary artistic interventions seek to exploit the mechanisms of performance in order to reconstruct historical events not only by relying on the strategies of re-enactment, but also by resorting to an immersive relationship linked to the un- expected capable of producing extreme involvement, a process that solicits the emotional states to which, in the harshest moments of war, the community is subjected. Keywords Jeremy Deller Public art Mass performance 14-18 now We’re here because we’re here To quote this essay: R. Pinto, “History and Stories through Jeremy Deller’s Performances,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 88-100, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19792. ROBERTO PINTO 88 AN-ICON A memorial that would come to you, that would appear in your city, town or shopping centre, intervening in your daily life1 The topic (and issue) of monuments and the commemoration of historical events has been at the centre of debate in recent decades. There have been many dis- cussions – in public, within more academic contexts and in art institutions – on the question: can statues or, more generally, artistic events still be – and how – valuable tools for activating processes of remembrance and re-elabora- tion of collective mourning or past tragic events? There have also been many striking and spec- tacular interventions/performances questioning the value of these objects inherited from a past often marked by more than one dark side. We could sum the matter up with these questions: just because they are part of our tradition, are they still able to represent us? Do they have the right to con- tinue to be considered as common symbols to be shared? Or should they be transformed into artistic artefacts that need to be historically contextualised and become part of museum heritage? (On the grounds that museums are better suited to preserving such artefacts and providing ac- curate descriptions of the context from which they come.) Among the many recent episodes, I believe everyone still has in mind the demolition of the monument to Edward Colston, “benefactor” and slave trader, on 7 June 2020 in Bristol, an event that took place in the emotional aftershock of the killing of George Floyd in the United States and the Black Lives Matter movement. In today’s climate, there is no shortage of harsh criticism of institutions when they struggle to adapt to the demands of groups and communities who do not feel rep- resented at all and, arguably, express an expectation that some of the fundamental rights of all people should be 1 J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here (London: Thames and Hudson, 2017): 61. ROBERTO PINTO 89 AN-ICON  respected. This is all the more so when dealing with sym- bols in shared and important places, such as statues and monuments. In this context, the initiative by British institu- tions to create a complex and cohesive project to mark the centenary of the First World War in an attempt to experi- ment with new ways of sharing seems to me a fascinating case study. It is clear that, whichever way one reads this historical event, one cannot ignore the fact that it was, in every respect, a long and devastating war. The initiative was a harsh testing ground for artists and institutions, given the risk of falling into the rhetoric of patriotic ideals and the celebration of the courage and daring of the participants, which had until now been indispensable prerequisites for celebrations of historical events such as this. The UK Arts Programme was the promoter of 14-18 NOW, a genuinely diverse and cohesive programme that saw the creation of 107 projects, the involvement of 420 artists2 using different media (theatre, cinema, visual arts, poetry, music) which, in most cases, were hybrid forms. It is also worth emphasising the very high level of the artists involved; they included Gillian Wearing, John Akomfrah, Raqs Media Collective, Tobias Rehberger, Yinka Shonibare, Suzanne Lacy, Rachel Whiteread, Mark Wallinger, Ryoji Ikeda, and William Kentridge.3 Many had already dealt with contemporary history and the related political problems on their journey. It should therefore be seen as an act of cour- age on the part of the promoting body – and of recognising the issues underlying an anniversary that could lend itself to controversy and misunderstanding – that they identified artists sensitive to cultural and political commitment who were well aware of the nature and extent of the dangers inherent in a project commemorating a war. One of the 2 According to its official website the project commissioned works from 420 artists, and engaged 35 million people. “About 14-18 Now,” 14-18 Now, https://www.1418now.org.uk/ about/, accessed December 15, 2022. 3 For the full list see https://www.1418now.org.uk/artists/, accessed December 15, 2022. ROBERTO PINTO 90 AN-ICON  aims of this event was, therefore, to try to change the nar- rative that has been made of the history told by European nations mainly through the arts, which have reconstructed and told it exclusively from the point of view of their specific national identities.4 Within this experimentation, I would like to place as a case study We’re here because we’re here by Jeremy Deller – created in collaboration with Rufus Norris – because, perhaps more than any other, it seems to me symbolic of the ability to put forward attractive solutions that directly address the role the public takes on in com- memorations and make the experience as multi-sensorial and engaging as possible. Elements that are the leitmotif of Immersed in the Work. From the Environment to Virtual Reality. In doing so, I would at least like to point out the proj- ects Across and In-Between by Suzanne Lacy5 and Pages of the Sea by Danny Boyle,6 which adopt an approach in many ways similar to the work of the London-based artist. Throughout his career, Jeremy Deller has often chosen subjects related to history and politics and has always used a collaborative and participatory approach right from the design phase. His artistic practices have 4 In order to clarify the position of the planners, the words of Margaret MacMillan, who, in the introduction to the volume collecting information on 14-18 Now, explains “Governments often want to tidy up the past and impose a single unified version of what happened back then - at Waterloo, say, or the Battle of the Somme. But there can be no one view. Women, men, diverse ethnic groups, religions or social classes, start from different viewpoints, and what they see in the past may be guided by that. So marking the 100th anniversary of the First World War, that vast and destructive struggle from 1914 to 1918, was never going to be easy. We can agree that it was a catastrophe that destroyed the old confident Europe and left a strangely and irrevocably altered world. Beyond that there are, and always have been, profound differences over how we remember and commemorate that war. We still cannot agree on how it started or why it went on for so long, and we still debate its meaning and its legacy a century later.” J. Waldman, M. MacMillan, eds., 14-18 Now: Contemporary Arts Commissions for the First World War Centenary (Profile: London, 2019). See also within the same volume the essay by David Olusoga. Cfr D. Olusoga, “Art as a lens: Re-Globalising the First War,” ibid.: 12-13. 5 Suzanne Lacy’s work, made between 18 and 23 October 2018, on the occasion of the centenary of Ireland’s Declaration of Independence (and the subsequent border that has since divided Northern Ireland from Éire) aims to investigate borders and the influence they have had on our lives. See: https://www.1418now.org.uk/commissions/across-and-in-between/, accessed December 15, 2022. 6 Boyle’s work, Pages of the Sea, took place on 11 November 2018 and was intended to celebrate the centenary of the Armistice. See “On 11 November 2018,” Pages of The Sea, https://www.pagesofthesea.org.uk, accessed December 15, 2022. ROBERTO PINTO 91 AN-ICON  contributed to redefining the boundaries of contemporary art also because, in creating his works, he has had to try his hand as an art producer, director, event organiser, archivist as well as photographer, performer and installation creator, the latter roles being more standard within contemporary art. The project commissioned by the WW1 Cente- nary Art Commission from Deller was related to celebrating the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles in military history. Over 141 days, more than a million casu- alties were recorded. On the first day alone, the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties. Jeremy Deller’s idea was to create a mobile and temporary memorial7 that would dialogue with the present day and attempt to overturn the need to create a specific place dedicated to the memory of people and events by conceiving, instead, “a memorial that would come to you, that would appear in your city, town or shopping centre, intervening in your daily life. [...] It was as much about today as it was about 1916.”8 To meet this need, with the help of Rufus Norris – the theatre and film director who has been Artistic Director of the National Theatre since 2015 – he staged a massive performance in which more than 1,400 volunteers, dressed in the uniforms of World War I soldiers, with no public announcement of their presence, appeared in more than 40 cities9 on 1 July 2016, making contact with UK citizens going about their daily business, and moving from one part of a city to an- other. Deller had deliberately excluded the actors/ participants from meeting in all those places that had, 7 “I wanted to make a contemporary memorial to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, one that moved around the UK with an unpredictability in which the participants, by their actions, took the memorial to the public.” Deller in https://becausewearehere.co.uk/we-are-here-about/, accessed December 15, 2022. 8 J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. 9 To access the map of the event see https://becausewearehere.co.uk/we-are-here-map/ , accessed December 15, 2022. ROBERTO PINTO 92 AN-ICON  even remotely, a relation to celebrations and rituals – so no churches, public buildings, cemeteries, or locations of historical significance. In their place, train or metro stations, busy squares and streets, shopping malls or meeting plac- es. Often in rather thickly crowded groups, these anachronistic soldiers had to present themselves in central areas and busy places to interact with citizens, returning their gaze and smiling at them, although they were not expected to engage in conversations or stimulate verbal exchanges. They had to limit themselves, occasionally and chorally, to singing a song to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” with the words “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here,” hence the title of the work. British soldiers10 also often used this line as a hymn wishing for the war’s end. The idea of remaining silent was Norris’s sug- gestion,11 and, in a way, silence became a real communi- cative strategy for Deller to construct his sort of re-enact- ment:12 the silence before the event, which was completely concealed from the public until the day the performers appeared in the cities, and the substantial silence of the participants interrupted by the chants that occasionally accompanied the soldiers in their wanderings through the 10 Deller explained: “When I read about this song, I realised I not only had an activity for the men but also a title for the piece. It explains nothing, it’s pointless and repetitive, a little like the fate of a foot soldier or even the nature of man’s addiction to conflict.” J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. 11 C. Higgins, “#Wearehere: Somme tribute revealed as Jeremy Deller work,” The Guardian (July 1, 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jul/01/wearehere-battle-somme- tribute-acted-out-across-britain, accessed December 15, 2022. 12 Although, as we shall see, Deller has constructed genuine re-enactments, on this occasion this work cannot be properly considered as such, even though, often, this term is used as a hypernym. On this subject see S. Mudu, “Under the sign of Reenactment,” in C. Baldacci, S. Franco, eds., On Reenactment: Concepts, Metodologies, Tools (Turin: Accademia University Press, 2022). ROBERTO PINTO 93 AN-ICON  cities. During the weeks of training13 in the run-up to 1 July, Norris and Deller had explicitly requested of all participants that interaction with the spectators should stop there, at si- lence, at a simple exchange of glances, and that the possi- ble explanation/interpretation of the event unfolding before the mostly astonished eyes of the spectators should be left to the calling card – a choice dictated by both purely tech- nical and symbolic issues. The performative action – given the vastness of the intervention and the mass of people involved – had to remain as simple as possible so as not to force the performers to improvise in the face of the in- calculable variables imposed in an open dialogue with the casual passer-by. The conversation, therefore, would have been entirely uncontrollable and (also given that none of the participants had any professional acting training) the quality standards would probably have suffered. In addition, although I am not aware that this was made explicit, it would also have posed a problem of a symbolic nature: each participant in the performance was the apparition or “ghost” of a dead person, and therefore, silence was the most suitable form to evoke the victims. The actual interaction with the audience, then, took place only through a common calling card which established a dia- logue of glances in the explanation of the work – I represent someone, a specific person with a name, regiment, or rank, who died a hundred years ago, even if I am not him – and which at the same time also became the tombstone, the 13 An interesting insight into the training period for the performers in this project can be found in a conversation between Deller and Emily Lim. Cfr. E. Lim, J. Deller, “Relaxed, open, alive, kind, engaged,” in R. Norris, J. Deller, We’re Here Because We’re Here: 104-113. Here, we also find a document with the “Five Golden Words: Relaxed, open, alive, kind, engaged” and the “Four Golden Rules: 1. Stay Alive – Keep it natural, be comfortable, don’t ever be a statue! 2. Seek Eye Contact – be interested in the public but don’t intimidate them, it’s not a staring competition! 3. Be Kind to the public, don’t ever be rude! 4. Each Card is a Gift – make eye contact when you give it, watch the public’s reaction to it.” Ibid.: 104. ROBERTO PINTO 94 AN-ICON  remnant of the monument.14 In a video filmed by the BBC on this project, Deller said that he owed the idea of making the soldiers who died in that battle appear as ghosts to something he had read during the research period before the work, in which he had found interesting information about phenomena in Britain during the war - of women mainly - seeing dead loved ones in the street, just catching a glimpse of someone on a bus or through a shop window thinking it was their husband or their brother or their son. It became quite a big thing, all these sightings, these apparitions of the dead. So it was as if the project had already happened during the war. People had already seen the dead in the streets.15 Compared to a monument or a more traditional re-enactment of a historical event, which asks us to respect the hero’s sacrifice and celebrate it, Deller shifts the focus to the individual persons, or rather, to the void they left behind, filling it through the concretisation of the ghost of the missing person, thus giving shape to the void created around each of the people who disappeared in the war. This shift also reflects the artist’s desire to avoid any senti- mentality in the representation: “Avoid Sentimentality” was the instruction written on one of his reproduced sheets of notes. The artist explicitly speaks of the goal of giving the audience a “jolt,”16 and a jolt, after all, is at the opposite extreme of storytelling and words of condolence with which 14 “We also equipped each man with a set of ‘calling cards’ which bore the name, regiment and rank of a soldier who died on 1 July. He was representing that person, not pretending to be him. The card was effectively a gravestone, and if a member of the public paid attention to a soldier in any way he or she was given one,” J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. 15 W. Yu (@weiyu970), “Jeremy Deller – We’re Here Because We’re Here,” YouTube video (November 26, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXnr3w74TJs&t=158s, accessed December 15, 2022. 16 J. Deller in J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. ROBERTO PINTO 95 AN-ICON  to remember the many qualities of those who have left us – usual procedures in a commemoration of historical events. Nevertheless, the heart of this work is absolutely emotional; in fact, the people who found themselves pass- ing through the cities engaged with the performance were sucked into the event, not only because they felt surrounded by it but, above all, because the absence of rhetoric made them feel exempt from any pressing request to take sides, to accept being part of a community, as any ritual (even a secular one) imposes. The request was only to participate. And perhaps it is precisely in this form of engagement that the diversity lies, compared to others, of Deller’s fascinating offering. It appropriates with this immense “delegated per- formance”17 the principles of spectacularity; it is the child of cinema and a digital and social media culture,18 but, at the same time, does not create artificial distances between spectator and performer, given that the extreme proximity of the encounter with the soldiers made the experience somehow simultaneously unique and intimate. However, this was not the first time that Deller had used these modes of immersive engagement to rec- reate the feeling at least of an episode from the past and bring back to life a part of history that we have forgotten or repressed. This had already happened with It Is What It Is: Conversation about Iraq, from 2009, a collaborative work with Creative Time and the New Museum in New York, in which he had taken a car destroyed by explosives found in Iraq on a tour of 14 US museums to serve as a “backdrop” 17 I refer to the category used by Claire Bishop in C. Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012). 18 See C. Eva, “Reaching the Public” in J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 115-116, which begins with the statement: “In many ways We’re here because we’re here is an artwork for the age of social media.” ROBERTO PINTO 96 AN-ICON  to a conversation space in which Iraqi citizens and Ameri- can military personnel, among others, were invited.19 Nevertheless, the work that, in terms of organ- isational strategy and spectator involvement, serves as the premise for We’re here because we’re here is undoubtedly The Battle of Orgreave, from 2001, in which Deller attempted to recreate live – again, as a gigantic participatory perfor- mance – the clashes between police and striking miners at the Orgreave Coking Plant in Yorkshire on 18 June 1984. This episode, one of the harshest and most divisive for Brit- ain in the 1980s and the Thatcher era, had affected Deller as a teenager at the time: I wanted to find out what exactly happened on that day with a view to re-enacting or commemorating it in some way. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the strike, lik e a civil war, had a trau- matically divisive effect at all levels of life in the UK. Families were torn apart because of divided loyalties, the union movement was split on its willingness to support the National Union of Mineworkers, the print media especially contributed to the polarisation of the arguments to the point where there appeared to be little space for a middle ground. So in all but name it became an ideological and industrial battle between the two sections of British society.20 Commissioned and produced by Artangel, The Battle of Orgreave was a reconstruction involving about 19 On his website Deller explains: “This project started as the idea to create a mobile museum of the war in Iraq that would tour the US. Finding material for the museum proved difficult, until we were offered a car that had been used in previous exhibitions. From this car, used as a centrepiece, we constructed a room in the museum where the public could meet and talk to people involved in the conflict in some way. The idea was then taken on the road; we towed the car from New York to LA, stopping off in 14 towns and cities on the way – a classic American road trip route – accompanied by an Iraqi citizen and an enlisted American soldier. It was presented in as neutral a way as possible, which puzzled a lot of people. But it meant that the public were more likely to talk to us, because they weren’t scared of being dragged into some sort of political arena. Sometimes these conversations went on for hours. The car was subsequently donated to the Imperial War Museum in London” https://www.jeremydeller.org/ItIsWhatItIs/ItIsWhatItIs.php accessed December 15, 2022. 20 J. Deller, The English Civil War / Part II (London: Artangel, 2002): 7. ROBERTO PINTO 97 AN-ICON  a thousand people21 – around 800 who had taken part in historical re-enactments, approximately 200 former miners and an unknown number of people who were part of the police force at the time. It was also, in parallel, a massive piece of research with information, photos and videos in addition to, as already described in We’re here because we’re here, a long collective preparation work in which the former miners, above all, also had the role of helping in the reconstruction of events. And as with The Battle of Orgreave, one cannot fail to be struck by the enormous organisational effort that displays all of Deller’s ability to rely on a network of knowledge and professional expertise, even with associations involved in battle re-enactments and costumed historical events.22 Here, too, we find the artist’s interest in the pro- cesses of collective memory and its loss, but The Battle of Orgreave was also an attempt to reconstruct the very idea of society that Thatcher had denied – one of her slogans was “There is no such thing as Society” – precisely through the concept of delegation and collaboration with others to achieve a common interest. As far as possible, Deller relied on the memories of the miners and police officers to recreate the battle scene, putting the many newspaper articles in the background; in essence, allowing the many personal memories to direct the course of the re-enactment. It is a reconstruction process not to be consid- ered definitively concluded since Deller presents it again in the form of a film (shot by Mike Figgs), an archive (in the 21 Ibid.; See also A. Correia, “Interpreting Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave,” Visual Culture in Britain, no.7 (2006): 93-112. 22 On this subject, numerous articles and volumes have come out on both the artistic and the more purely theatrical side. In addition to the texts already mentioned, I would add: R. Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Routledge: London, 2011); M. Franko, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); V. Agnew., J. Lamb, J. Tomann, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies (New York: Routledge, 2020); C. Baldacci, C. Nicastro, A. Sforzini, eds., Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022); C. Baldacci, S. Franco, eds., On Reenactment: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools (Accademia University Press: Turin, 2022). ROBERTO PINTO 98 AN-ICON  Tate Modern collection), and a catalogue (The English Civil War / Part II), and it nevertheless remains present in the minds of the many participants and spectators (a distinc- tion whose legitimacy is to be verified) who took part in the reconstruction of the events on 17 June 2001. As Amelia Jones explains well, crucially, The Battle of Orgreave itself is continually changing— and is never presented as a “final” or fully coherent work or object, even though it consists of documents, objects, and other mate- rial traces of prior re-enactments. Notably, too, while many of the other re-enactments tellingly substitute the re-enactor as new “author” of a unique and ultimately static (documented) work, Deller himself does not feature in a noticeable way either as part of the re-enactment or the public relations materials circulating around the film, its most visible “documentation”—the work in its infinite permutations does not tend to devolve back to a singular body, though it does only have coherence in relation to the author-name Jeremy Deller.23 Deller is fascinated by history, but instead of seeking its element of order, repetition, and the possibil- ity of foreseeing things, he strives to make room for the complexity that is necessarily chaos and confusion. As art critic Teresa Macrì points out in her Politics/poetics,24 it is disorder that fascinates the artist, and often this confusion is identified with mass movements, collective participation, and the public dimension of his work. From a historical point of view, these projects can be juxtaposed with Jochen Gerz’s Counter-Monument,25 but I believe that Deller’s works are more a continuation 23 A. Jones, “‘The Artist is Present.’ Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence,” TDR. The Drama Review 55, no. 1 (2021): 16-45, 24. 24 T. Macrì, Politics/Poetics (Milano: Postmedia, 2014). 25 J.E. Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992): 267-296. ROBERTO PINTO 99 AN-ICON  of the actions of political art collectives in the 1970s and 1980s, and I am thinking above all of Group Material – which disbanded in 199626 – or the previously mentioned art ac- tivist Suzanne Lacy. As in their work, in the operations of the British artist there is no truth to be sought with an ideological attitude, rather the aim is to try to share ideas and above all to try to listen to the many dissonant voices and counter-narratives that have not been given sufficient space in the dominant discourse. At the same time, he perhaps distances himself from them precisely because of the popular/spectacular dimension that his works take on, because of the attention he dedicates to the spectator – a role that is always possible and never wholly absent in his works, which goes hand in hand with that of participant/ performer. 26 “It’s hard not to feel that Group Material broke significant ground but missed the party. The year they broke up, 1996, coincides with a proliferation of new forms of social practice lately successful in museum exhibitions and biennials, whether in the work of Francis Alÿs or Jeremy Deller.” A. Green, “Citizen Artists: Group Material,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 26 (2011): 17-25. ROBERTO PINTO 100 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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From Inside to Outside (and Vice Versa) by Francesco Tedeschi Outside-inside Light Grazia Varisco Gruppo T Lucio Fontana Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello From Inside to Outsi 1 de (and Vice Versa) FRANCESCO TEDESCHI, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8007-4258 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/20002 Abstract This contribution will focus on some aspects of the roots of environmental art in Italy, with reference to works created between the 1950s and 1960s by Lucio Fon- tana, to environments designed by members of Gruppo T and other artists (Giulio Paolini, Luciano Fabro) in the 1960s, and through reflections on the different uses of space that were defined with the exhibition Lo spazio dell’immagine held in Foligno in 1967. The approach is not, however, that of a historical review of well-known events, but of an inves- tigation into the way to understand the relationship between outside and inside, the sense and value of the “passage,” the conception of the modifying factors, starting with light, which have acted on the definition of space as an element to be perceived, rather than a place to be in, emphasising the dynamics that define a dialectical, if not antithetical, re- lationship with respect to architectural and design qualities in the proper sense, leading to reading the environmental art intervention as an invitation to follow a path. Keywords Outside-inside Light Grazia Varisco Gruppo T Lucio Fontana 1 The title of this contribute takes up the one elaborated for my essay in the catalogue of the exhibition M. Meneguzzo, ed., Grazia Varisco: Percorsi contemporanei 1957-2022 (Milan: Skira, 2022, exhibition catalogue), having at its end a reflection on a work by the same Grazia Varisco. To quote this essay: F. Tedeschi, “From Inside to Outside (and Vice Versa),” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 101-111, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/20002. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 101 AN-ICON  My paper addresses the question of the envi- ronment, a practice implemented in the art of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on the relationship between the position of the “observer” and the structural elements of the artworks, as well as the role reversal between subject and object in the work of art and its perceptual process. A few of the contents I will present are derived from a course I held recently at Università Cattolica in Milan, focused on the relationship between the idea and realiza- tion of a certain type of “sites” in several forms of visual art that have moved from the representative dimension to that of an active participation in space, meant as the artic- ulation of relationship between different fields and subjects. Sites implying a “passage,” such as the window and, the door, the threshold, the labyrinth and finally the mirror. All of these sites could be defined as “transitional.”2 Among them, one with a peculiar symbolic (as well as practical) relevance is the “corridor:” an architectural space which essentially connects different rooms in an apartment and tends to be perceived merely as a service space, in some way devoid of a function of its own. In the royal palaces from past eras, it was often used to measure the distance from the outside – the realm of common people – to the inside – the place of power. So, it owns a strongly tempo- ral dimension, as demonstrated by Aleksandr Sokurov in the film Russian Ark (2002), along which the author relives Russian history as a journey through the corridors (and halls) of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. In such sense, the corridor is the form with which the purpose of a form of art qualified as “environ- mental” is best identified, through artworks addressing space as actual matter, and not an inert dimension; more specifically, the matter of a presentation both objective and subjective. As critics have consistently pointed out, most of the projects of this environmental kind tend to be perceived 2 And so I defined them in the book derived by that course: F. Tedeschi, Luoghi di transizione: forme e immagini di “passaggio,” fra arte e architettura (Brescia: Scholé- Morcelliana, 2020). I would like to thank Andrea Pinotti and Elisabetta Modena, who asked me to take part in this publication on the basis of the topics I dealt with there. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 102 AN-ICON  as “paths” and not as static or stable sites to contemplate. The corridor, as in the most crucial artistic proposals, is what lies in the middle, giving substance, sometimes in an impalpable and invisible way, to a space kept in conti- nuity between two conditions. It has to be considered – to borrow a term from the psychology of perception – as an “in-between.” It’s the “space between,” the subject matter for a distracted attention; an intermediate nature which can nonetheless constitute the very reason for its legitimization. Let me begin with an emblematic image, an extremely suggestive painting by 17th Century Dutch paint- er Samuel van Hoogstraten, a follower of Rembrandt. It is known as View of a corridor (oil on canvas, 1662; Dyrham Park, Gloucestershire). It could be considered as the junc- tion between two cultural inheritances, that of perspective as a system for processing represented space, and that of the analytical investigation of the interiors of bourgeois houses in 17th Century Holland. What might catch the eye of today’s viewer is the sense of emptiness in the cen- tral part of the painting, immersed in a peculiar light, that could be considered as the actual subject of the work. Of course, the “void” is not absolute, given the presence of many decorative elements, as well as some humans and animals placed at the margins, qualifying the combination between anthropic and architectural dimensions. Yet, the void “fills up” the central part of the painting, infused as it is with light, reflections, shadows. With all of these ele- ments taking the viewers on a visual journey through the represented space, this uncluttered area holds the func- tion of questioning them, of bringing them inside, into the silence of an intimate place.3 Of course, this place attracts and intrigues the viewer precisely because of its domestic character, starting with the juxtaposition between the dog and the mop in the foreground. The most important feature of the painting, here, is that it is based on emptiness as a 3 This painting is considered in several moments of V.I. Stoichita, L’instauration du tableau (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1993). See also, for the concept of a space overturned from outside to inside, G. Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 103 AN-ICON  way to deny any subject matter: at the same time, it can be considered as an anecdotical exercise, which goes beyond any narrative logic. For that, it is a very “modern” painting. Looking at the opposite end of this elaboration of the theme of the “void,” we can immediately move to one of the light installations that reveal the sense of a “cor- ridor” characterized by light as the medium of the artwork. An absolute zeroing, if not for the effect produced by the substance of the light, is the specific object of Dan Flavin’s attention: for instance, in his project for a wing of the Litta Menafoglio Panza di Biumo villa in Varese, following the commission by Giuseppe Panza. The transition through the different connotations of light coming from the side rooms – as well as that produced by the lighting of the very corridor defining the space of the architecture in its depth – articulates a visual and physical “path” determined by the variability of its solutions, due to the effect of the design of the color-lights, generating a truly modern and apparently claustrophobic perception of space as pure architecture, measurement, time. Thinking of a form of art based on space as a medium, however, we must mention the example of Lucio Fontana and his environments, possibly the most striking instance of an artwork progressively dematerialized by its tangible, material state. With Fontana, we are at the cross- roads of multiple impulses, such as the tension to overcome the distinction between different techniques, to imagine a proposal for an autonomous space, embodied by light itself and in its relationship with the architectural context. In these three types of artworks – the van Hoogstraten’s painting and the environments by Flavin and Fontana – we encounter three different articulations of an ongoing journey through space, either literal or delegated to an imaginary subject, with his or her body and gaze. A space that is both objective and subjective, meant as it is to host a projection of the self in the place, and, at the same time, to constitute a manifestation of its own, a rea- son for the actions of a simultaneously active “I/you,” as FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 104 AN-ICON  a kind of relationship between the inside and the outside that involves the subject in a shared perception.4 In his 1949 Ambiente spaziale a luce nera, Fon- tana equipped the space of Galleria del Naviglio with a particular light, which could appear futuristic at the time: a Wood’s lamp, surrounded by mobile fluorescent shapes cut out of papier-mâché, almost as if to justify the existence of an object to look at and perceive in a newly-configured space. Some of his subsequent structures would be even more radical, such as the one created in Amsterdam in 1967, consisting of an intersection between five narrow corridors placed side by side, and completed by a perpen- dicular one: a T-shaped transit space bathed in red light. This installation was reenacted, with updated technological means, in the striking, accurate reconstruction of Lucio Fontana’s environments at Hangar Bicocca a few years ago. Even with this installation – one of the least celebrated among Fontana’s spaces, which explains why it was not reenacted until the 2017 exhibition, and then again as the only “environment” displayed in the 2019 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York – Fontana appears to anticipate some of the effects produced by a few Amer- ican artists, who reduced the investigation of space to a matter of perception. A practice exemplified by the work of Bruce Nauman, and particularly by his “corridors” and their constrictive, delocalizing effects. By shifting the focus from structure to perception (which is what distinguishes Nau- man’s works from Flavin’s), we actually question the very nature of space, at the same time introducing the notion of a somehow objectified ego. The observer is observed, and thus turned into a visual object, particularly in installa- tions featuring TV screens and cameras that reproduce – in alienated fashion – the actions performed by the viewers 4 In this sense, this concept is close to the use of the definition of “avatarization” by Andrea Pinotti; see A. Pinotti, “Procuratori del sé. Avatar e avatarizzazione,” in T. Gatti, D. Maini, eds., Visual studies: l’avvento di nuovi paradigmi (Milan: Mimesis, 2019): 27-40. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 105 AN-ICON  themselves. The screen thus becomes a spying device or a “magic mirror.” A center of such investigation of the inside-out- side relationship could be found in the questions on the origin of forms outlining space itself. These are extend- ed, then, to the relationship between internal and external space in a specific instance, and also to the questions about the subject and the object of the experience. For this reason, we shall address how Fontana approaches an im- portant phase in the development of his Spatial Concepts, concerned with the practical manifestation of an idea of space revealed in the apparent two-dimensional nature of the picture format. In 1952 several canvases from the more spe- cifically “cosmogonic” series5 were used by the artist to demonstrate how they could be conceived as “fragments of space” or space generators, in the sense that their en- tity is manifested in a twofold way: as works to be looked at frontally or to be “pierced” by light, thus creating a new space modified by the luminous projection of the holes, and at the same time canceling out the pictorial surface on which they are actually located. This exploration – pre- sented through a series of photographs, one of which was chosen to illustrate the catalogue of the exhibition at Gal- leria del Naviglio that year – was followed up in the exper- iments carried out by Fontana with television, in the tests carried out at the RAI studios in Milan. In this case, as far as we can see, Fontana was even more focused on the “hidden” side of his works, foregrounding the light trails that occupied that “other space” represented by the pro- jection screen. Conceptually, this exploration can also be considered one of the roots of the recent elaborations of “VR” or immersive reality in the creation of virtual spaces, both from a technological philosophical perspective. We can certainly trace this evolution from the light-pierced Spatial Concepts to the actual environment 5 As they were categorized by Enrico Crispolti in his analysis of Fontana’s work. See E. Crispolti, Fontana: catalogo generale (Milan: Electa, 1986); see also E. Crispolti, Omaggio a Lucio Fontana (Rome: Carocci, 1971). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 106 AN-ICON  in a few works created by the artist in the following years, such as that for the 1964 Triennale, the one displayed in Minneapolis in 1966, or the one included in the exhibit Spazio dell’immagine in Foligno, in 1967. It may be useful to elaborate briefly on the latter exhibition, due to its historical relevance, as it established two very different directions in exploring the relationship with space. On the one hand, as in Fontana’s works, space is conceived as the very material of the work, an environ- ment to inhabit, in which those who pass through or linger become part of a perceptive condition (of a field).6 On the other hand, space is seen as the environment for an “im- age” or an “object,” either complete in itself or combined, according to specific forms of installation. Such distinction cannot be too rigid, as the two tendencies were intersected on several occasions. However, proposals such as that by Enrico Castellani can be recognized as deriving directly from Fontana’s example. Castellani’s White environment applies principles of design and architecture the artist had already identified in a singular “Albertian” derivation the previous year, in his room at the Venice Biennale. Again, Intercamera plastica by Paolo Scheggi, Blu abitabile by Agostino Bonalumi, Interpretazione speculare by Getulio Alviani, up to After Sctructures by Gianni Colombo, one of the environments with the decisive presence of light that varies the perception, are all to be considered as products of Fontana’s influence. At the crossroads with the condition of the object are the instances of a “space within space,” which can be exemplified by Mario Ceroli’s Gabbia or by Luciano Fabro’s In-cubo (to Carla Lonzi). On the other hand, leaving aside works of singular importance, such as the Pozzi-specchio by Pistoletto or Tubo by Eliseo Mattiac- ci, one could mention the staging by Tano Festa, Subito dopo il cielo (dedicated to Francesco Lo Savio), for its po- etic quality. This brief list serves to illustrate the different practices showcased in a project that explored both the 6 An important presence in psychological, sociological and planning studies in that time is the so-called “theory of field,” proposed in Italy by Attilio Marcolli. See A. Marcolli, Teoria del campo (Florence: Sansoni, 1971). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 107 AN-ICON  aforementioned directions, from the tributes to Lucio Fon- tana and Ettore Colla, which provided the respective points of departure, and somehow emerged clearly in the various texts in the exhibition catalogue.7 In some of them, we find an echo of the ideas put forward, on the occasion of the earlier exhibition Fuoco Immagine Acqua Terra (L’Attico, Rome, June 1967), by Maurizio Calvesi and Alberto Boat- to, and the origin of the definition of “Im-Space” which, a few months later, would be linked to the first appearance of “Arte Povera,” in the exhibition Arte Povera – Im Spazio, curated by Germano Celant at the La Bertesca gallery in Genoa (September-October 1967). What I have said so far may provide a useful background for a work that I perceive as emblematic of an idea of space as a “path,” but with peculiar attention to light as substitute of gaze. This environment appears like a closed room; however, it produces, from the inside, a sense of passage, an immediate relationship between the physical eye and the virtual eye of a source of light that pushes on space as if to open it up. I am referring to the environment created by Grazia Varisco for the Schwarz gallery in Milan in October 1969 (Fig.1). The installation has been recreated on several occasions in recent years (Fig. 2).8 The room, conceived by the artist as an environ- ment designed in an extremely articulated way, covers an overall perimeter significantly larger than its actual size, expanding the sensation or perception of time, besides that of space. To make this sensation tangible, the author darkened the space, a frequent solution among the artists 7 See the catalogue of the exhibition which took place in 1967 at Palazzo Trinci in Foligno: U. Apollonio, G.C., Argan, P. Bucarelli, eds., Lo spazio dell’immagine (Venice: Alfieri Editori d’Arte, 1967). 8 See the catalogue of the exhibition which took place at Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome from December 14, 2005 to May 21, 2006: M. Margozzi, L. Meloni, F. Lardera, eds., Gli ambienti del Gruppo T. Le origini dell’arte interattiva (Roma: Silvana, 2006, exhibition catalogue): 54-55, 32-35. For further information about this and other environments of the group see L. Meloni, Gli ambienti del Gruppo T (Roma: Silvana, 2004). More recently, Varisco’s environment has been exhibited in Vertigo: Op Art and a History of Deception 1520-1970, MUMOK, Wien, 25 May - 26 October, 2019 (the exhibition also travelled to Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart, November 23, 2019 - April 20, 2020), before the retrospective hosted at Palazzo Reale in Milan from June 2 to September 16, 2022; see the catalogue: M. Meneguzzo, ed., Grazia Varisco: Percorsi Contemporanei 1957-2022 (Milan: Skira, 2022, exhibition catalogue); F. Tedeschi, “Dall’interno all’esterno (e viceversa). Il concetto di spazio ‘percorribile’ nell’opera di Grazia Varisco,” ibidem: 26-29. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 108 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. G. Varisco, model of the Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotemporal dilatation of a path, 1969, reconstruction of the environment for the solo exhibition at Galleria Schwarz, Milan, 1969. Fig. 2. G. Varisco, reconstruction of the environment Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotemporal dilatation of a path, 1969, at the exhibition “Gli ambienti del gruppo T,” Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, 2006. who, following the Fontana’s example, used light as a cre- ative and descriptive element of space. As a matter of fact, Varisco placed a “luminous eye” at the center, which, by means of a mechanical process, rotates progressively, in- dicating the trajectory of a path that pushed from the inside outwards, generating a visual and physical sensation at the same time. The light replaces, rather than following it, the gaze of the person undertaking the role of “bystander,” to quote Brandi:9 i.e. a presence experiencing space as a relationship between being and existing. This, as the artist observes, increases the complexity of an active participa- tion, as well as physical relationship, with the site, plunged as it is into the interiority of darkness: the viewer actually experiences two alternative spaces, that of the eye-line of 9 See C. Brandi, Struttura e architettura (Turin: Einaudi, 1967) and Teoria generale della critica (Turin: Einaudi, 1974). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 109 AN-ICON  light and that of the eye-physical presence of the viewer’s own body. Perhaps, the very essence of the work lies precisely in its drive to overcome the constraints of the structure, without actually doing more than absorbing the enchantment of a suspended, outstretched time. The un- derlying character of the work is then a condition of “path” to be completed according to the twofold participation of an active movement and a virtual one. It should be noted that, about ten days before the inauguration of her solo show at the Schwarz gallery – on which occasion this en- vironment, Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotemporal dilatation of a path, was proposed – Grazia Varisco had participated to Campo Urbano, an event pro- moted by Luciano Caramel in Como. Here, she made an intervention in a public space, immortalized by the photo- graphs by Ugo Mulas, who followed and documented the events of that memorable day. On that occasion, Varisco had appropriated a street in the town center, involving a large group of people to help here create a series of walls arranged in a meander, made up of cardboard boxes. By cluttering up the road, the work extended the time nec- essary to walk through it. This operation was also called Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotempo- ral dilatation of a path, and in this case the perception of the “urban field,” experienced alternatively with amusement or annoyance, resulted in an immediate application of a principle of modification of reality, due to the presence of a structure that affects movement and, as a consequence, the psychological perception of the entire environment. As the artist writes in the short note later published in the cat- alogue of the Schwarz gallery exhibition, “I see and feel longer. The reactions of impatience or satisfaction change if I try the route again.”10 10 G. Varisco, “Dilatazione spazio temporale di un percorso” in G. Accame, Grazia Varisco (Bergamo: Maredarte, 2001): 102. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 110 AN-ICON  As in other environmental works from a time imbued with a strong imagination of the future, the laby- rinth condition produced by these two operations can be seen as an experiment on a way of thinking and feeling in relation to objects and space. The echo of this attitude is evident in a series of works produced by the artist in the following years, titled Random walks by random numbers. In these screen-printed compositions, the combination of chance and design produce a virtual direction into which the viewers are supposed to get lost, and then rediscover themselves, as Varisco states: “And I play with imagina- tion: I imagine moving robotically, in a defined space with unpredictable steps – or with a pencil on squared paper – letting myself be guided exclusively by the sequence of numbers to which I have previously associated a direction. Chance and design. Not being able to predict my path, I don’t know if my movements will be contained in the space, on the sheet.”11 From the virtual space of painting to the real space of the built environment, from the virtual space of a projection that includes the viewer as a participant and an object, to that of a sheet that records movements, ei- ther made or imagined, the creation of an interior from the exterior and the reworking of an outside from the inside are exemplified here through a practice rooted in the drive to explore space, which has guided, up to this point, the experiments of several generations of artists. 11 G. Varisco, “Random Walks – 1972,” in G. Accame, Grazia Varisco: 108. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 111 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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From Inside to Outside (and Vice Versa) by Francesco Tedeschi Outside-inside Light Grazia Varisco Gruppo T Lucio Fontana Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello From Inside to Outsi 1 de (and Vice Versa) FRANCESCO TEDESCHI, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8007-4258 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/20002 Abstract This contribution will focus on some aspects of the roots of environmental art in Italy, with reference to works created between the 1950s and 1960s by Lucio Fon- tana, to environments designed by members of Gruppo T and other artists (Giulio Paolini, Luciano Fabro) in the 1960s, and through reflections on the different uses of space that were defined with the exhibition Lo spazio dell’immagine held in Foligno in 1967. The approach is not, however, that of a historical review of well-known events, but of an inves- tigation into the way to understand the relationship between outside and inside, the sense and value of the “passage,” the conception of the modifying factors, starting with light, which have acted on the definition of space as an element to be perceived, rather than a place to be in, emphasising the dynamics that define a dialectical, if not antithetical, re- lationship with respect to architectural and design qualities in the proper sense, leading to reading the environmental art intervention as an invitation to follow a path. Keywords Outside-inside Light Grazia Varisco Gruppo T Lucio Fontana 1 The title of this contribute takes up the one elaborated for my essay in the catalogue of the exhibition M. Meneguzzo, ed., Grazia Varisco: Percorsi contemporanei 1957-2022 (Milan: Skira, 2022, exhibition catalogue), having at its end a reflection on a work by the same Grazia Varisco. To quote this essay: F. Tedeschi, “From Inside to Outside (and Vice Versa),” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 101-111, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/20002. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 101 AN-ICON  My paper addresses the question of the envi- ronment, a practice implemented in the art of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on the relationship between the position of the “observer” and the structural elements of the artworks, as well as the role reversal between subject and object in the work of art and its perceptual process. A few of the contents I will present are derived from a course I held recently at Università Cattolica in Milan, focused on the relationship between the idea and realiza- tion of a certain type of “sites” in several forms of visual art that have moved from the representative dimension to that of an active participation in space, meant as the artic- ulation of relationship between different fields and subjects. Sites implying a “passage,” such as the window and, the door, the threshold, the labyrinth and finally the mirror. All of these sites could be defined as “transitional.”2 Among them, one with a peculiar symbolic (as well as practical) relevance is the “corridor:” an architectural space which essentially connects different rooms in an apartment and tends to be perceived merely as a service space, in some way devoid of a function of its own. In the royal palaces from past eras, it was often used to measure the distance from the outside – the realm of common people – to the inside – the place of power. So, it owns a strongly tempo- ral dimension, as demonstrated by Aleksandr Sokurov in the film Russian Ark (2002), along which the author relives Russian history as a journey through the corridors (and halls) of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. In such sense, the corridor is the form with which the purpose of a form of art qualified as “environ- mental” is best identified, through artworks addressing space as actual matter, and not an inert dimension; more specifically, the matter of a presentation both objective and subjective. As critics have consistently pointed out, most of the projects of this environmental kind tend to be perceived 2 And so I defined them in the book derived by that course: F. Tedeschi, Luoghi di transizione: forme e immagini di “passaggio,” fra arte e architettura (Brescia: Scholé- Morcelliana, 2020). I would like to thank Andrea Pinotti and Elisabetta Modena, who asked me to take part in this publication on the basis of the topics I dealt with there. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 102 AN-ICON  as “paths” and not as static or stable sites to contemplate. The corridor, as in the most crucial artistic proposals, is what lies in the middle, giving substance, sometimes in an impalpable and invisible way, to a space kept in conti- nuity between two conditions. It has to be considered – to borrow a term from the psychology of perception – as an “in-between.” It’s the “space between,” the subject matter for a distracted attention; an intermediate nature which can nonetheless constitute the very reason for its legitimization. Let me begin with an emblematic image, an extremely suggestive painting by 17th Century Dutch paint- er Samuel van Hoogstraten, a follower of Rembrandt. It is known as View of a corridor (oil on canvas, 1662; Dyrham Park, Gloucestershire). It could be considered as the junc- tion between two cultural inheritances, that of perspective as a system for processing represented space, and that of the analytical investigation of the interiors of bourgeois houses in 17th Century Holland. What might catch the eye of today’s viewer is the sense of emptiness in the cen- tral part of the painting, immersed in a peculiar light, that could be considered as the actual subject of the work. Of course, the “void” is not absolute, given the presence of many decorative elements, as well as some humans and animals placed at the margins, qualifying the combination between anthropic and architectural dimensions. Yet, the void “fills up” the central part of the painting, infused as it is with light, reflections, shadows. With all of these ele- ments taking the viewers on a visual journey through the represented space, this uncluttered area holds the func- tion of questioning them, of bringing them inside, into the silence of an intimate place.3 Of course, this place attracts and intrigues the viewer precisely because of its domestic character, starting with the juxtaposition between the dog and the mop in the foreground. The most important feature of the painting, here, is that it is based on emptiness as a 3 This painting is considered in several moments of V.I. Stoichita, L’instauration du tableau (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1993). See also, for the concept of a space overturned from outside to inside, G. Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 103 AN-ICON  way to deny any subject matter: at the same time, it can be considered as an anecdotical exercise, which goes beyond any narrative logic. For that, it is a very “modern” painting. Looking at the opposite end of this elaboration of the theme of the “void,” we can immediately move to one of the light installations that reveal the sense of a “cor- ridor” characterized by light as the medium of the artwork. An absolute zeroing, if not for the effect produced by the substance of the light, is the specific object of Dan Flavin’s attention: for instance, in his project for a wing of the Litta Menafoglio Panza di Biumo villa in Varese, following the commission by Giuseppe Panza. The transition through the different connotations of light coming from the side rooms – as well as that produced by the lighting of the very corridor defining the space of the architecture in its depth – articulates a visual and physical “path” determined by the variability of its solutions, due to the effect of the design of the color-lights, generating a truly modern and apparently claustrophobic perception of space as pure architecture, measurement, time. Thinking of a form of art based on space as a medium, however, we must mention the example of Lucio Fontana and his environments, possibly the most striking instance of an artwork progressively dematerialized by its tangible, material state. With Fontana, we are at the cross- roads of multiple impulses, such as the tension to overcome the distinction between different techniques, to imagine a proposal for an autonomous space, embodied by light itself and in its relationship with the architectural context. In these three types of artworks – the van Hoogstraten’s painting and the environments by Flavin and Fontana – we encounter three different articulations of an ongoing journey through space, either literal or delegated to an imaginary subject, with his or her body and gaze. A space that is both objective and subjective, meant as it is to host a projection of the self in the place, and, at the same time, to constitute a manifestation of its own, a rea- son for the actions of a simultaneously active “I/you,” as FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 104 AN-ICON  a kind of relationship between the inside and the outside that involves the subject in a shared perception.4 In his 1949 Ambiente spaziale a luce nera, Fon- tana equipped the space of Galleria del Naviglio with a particular light, which could appear futuristic at the time: a Wood’s lamp, surrounded by mobile fluorescent shapes cut out of papier-mâché, almost as if to justify the existence of an object to look at and perceive in a newly-configured space. Some of his subsequent structures would be even more radical, such as the one created in Amsterdam in 1967, consisting of an intersection between five narrow corridors placed side by side, and completed by a perpen- dicular one: a T-shaped transit space bathed in red light. This installation was reenacted, with updated technological means, in the striking, accurate reconstruction of Lucio Fontana’s environments at Hangar Bicocca a few years ago. Even with this installation – one of the least celebrated among Fontana’s spaces, which explains why it was not reenacted until the 2017 exhibition, and then again as the only “environment” displayed in the 2019 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York – Fontana appears to anticipate some of the effects produced by a few Amer- ican artists, who reduced the investigation of space to a matter of perception. A practice exemplified by the work of Bruce Nauman, and particularly by his “corridors” and their constrictive, delocalizing effects. By shifting the focus from structure to perception (which is what distinguishes Nau- man’s works from Flavin’s), we actually question the very nature of space, at the same time introducing the notion of a somehow objectified ego. The observer is observed, and thus turned into a visual object, particularly in installa- tions featuring TV screens and cameras that reproduce – in alienated fashion – the actions performed by the viewers 4 In this sense, this concept is close to the use of the definition of “avatarization” by Andrea Pinotti; see A. Pinotti, “Procuratori del sé. Avatar e avatarizzazione,” in T. Gatti, D. Maini, eds., Visual studies: l’avvento di nuovi paradigmi (Milan: Mimesis, 2019): 27-40. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 105 AN-ICON  themselves. The screen thus becomes a spying device or a “magic mirror.” A center of such investigation of the inside-out- side relationship could be found in the questions on the origin of forms outlining space itself. These are extend- ed, then, to the relationship between internal and external space in a specific instance, and also to the questions about the subject and the object of the experience. For this reason, we shall address how Fontana approaches an im- portant phase in the development of his Spatial Concepts, concerned with the practical manifestation of an idea of space revealed in the apparent two-dimensional nature of the picture format. In 1952 several canvases from the more spe- cifically “cosmogonic” series5 were used by the artist to demonstrate how they could be conceived as “fragments of space” or space generators, in the sense that their en- tity is manifested in a twofold way: as works to be looked at frontally or to be “pierced” by light, thus creating a new space modified by the luminous projection of the holes, and at the same time canceling out the pictorial surface on which they are actually located. This exploration – pre- sented through a series of photographs, one of which was chosen to illustrate the catalogue of the exhibition at Gal- leria del Naviglio that year – was followed up in the exper- iments carried out by Fontana with television, in the tests carried out at the RAI studios in Milan. In this case, as far as we can see, Fontana was even more focused on the “hidden” side of his works, foregrounding the light trails that occupied that “other space” represented by the pro- jection screen. Conceptually, this exploration can also be considered one of the roots of the recent elaborations of “VR” or immersive reality in the creation of virtual spaces, both from a technological philosophical perspective. We can certainly trace this evolution from the light-pierced Spatial Concepts to the actual environment 5 As they were categorized by Enrico Crispolti in his analysis of Fontana’s work. See E. Crispolti, Fontana: catalogo generale (Milan: Electa, 1986); see also E. Crispolti, Omaggio a Lucio Fontana (Rome: Carocci, 1971). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 106 AN-ICON  in a few works created by the artist in the following years, such as that for the 1964 Triennale, the one displayed in Minneapolis in 1966, or the one included in the exhibit Spazio dell’immagine in Foligno, in 1967. It may be useful to elaborate briefly on the latter exhibition, due to its historical relevance, as it established two very different directions in exploring the relationship with space. On the one hand, as in Fontana’s works, space is conceived as the very material of the work, an environ- ment to inhabit, in which those who pass through or linger become part of a perceptive condition (of a field).6 On the other hand, space is seen as the environment for an “im- age” or an “object,” either complete in itself or combined, according to specific forms of installation. Such distinction cannot be too rigid, as the two tendencies were intersected on several occasions. However, proposals such as that by Enrico Castellani can be recognized as deriving directly from Fontana’s example. Castellani’s White environment applies principles of design and architecture the artist had already identified in a singular “Albertian” derivation the previous year, in his room at the Venice Biennale. Again, Intercamera plastica by Paolo Scheggi, Blu abitabile by Agostino Bonalumi, Interpretazione speculare by Getulio Alviani, up to After Sctructures by Gianni Colombo, one of the environments with the decisive presence of light that varies the perception, are all to be considered as products of Fontana’s influence. At the crossroads with the condition of the object are the instances of a “space within space,” which can be exemplified by Mario Ceroli’s Gabbia or by Luciano Fabro’s In-cubo (to Carla Lonzi). On the other hand, leaving aside works of singular importance, such as the Pozzi-specchio by Pistoletto or Tubo by Eliseo Mattiac- ci, one could mention the staging by Tano Festa, Subito dopo il cielo (dedicated to Francesco Lo Savio), for its po- etic quality. This brief list serves to illustrate the different practices showcased in a project that explored both the 6 An important presence in psychological, sociological and planning studies in that time is the so-called “theory of field,” proposed in Italy by Attilio Marcolli. See A. Marcolli, Teoria del campo (Florence: Sansoni, 1971). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 107 AN-ICON  aforementioned directions, from the tributes to Lucio Fon- tana and Ettore Colla, which provided the respective points of departure, and somehow emerged clearly in the various texts in the exhibition catalogue.7 In some of them, we find an echo of the ideas put forward, on the occasion of the earlier exhibition Fuoco Immagine Acqua Terra (L’Attico, Rome, June 1967), by Maurizio Calvesi and Alberto Boat- to, and the origin of the definition of “Im-Space” which, a few months later, would be linked to the first appearance of “Arte Povera,” in the exhibition Arte Povera – Im Spazio, curated by Germano Celant at the La Bertesca gallery in Genoa (September-October 1967). What I have said so far may provide a useful background for a work that I perceive as emblematic of an idea of space as a “path,” but with peculiar attention to light as substitute of gaze. This environment appears like a closed room; however, it produces, from the inside, a sense of passage, an immediate relationship between the physical eye and the virtual eye of a source of light that pushes on space as if to open it up. I am referring to the environment created by Grazia Varisco for the Schwarz gallery in Milan in October 1969 (Fig.1). The installation has been recreated on several occasions in recent years (Fig. 2).8 The room, conceived by the artist as an environ- ment designed in an extremely articulated way, covers an overall perimeter significantly larger than its actual size, expanding the sensation or perception of time, besides that of space. To make this sensation tangible, the author darkened the space, a frequent solution among the artists 7 See the catalogue of the exhibition which took place in 1967 at Palazzo Trinci in Foligno: U. Apollonio, G.C., Argan, P. Bucarelli, eds., Lo spazio dell’immagine (Venice: Alfieri Editori d’Arte, 1967). 8 See the catalogue of the exhibition which took place at Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome from December 14, 2005 to May 21, 2006: M. Margozzi, L. Meloni, F. Lardera, eds., Gli ambienti del Gruppo T. Le origini dell’arte interattiva (Roma: Silvana, 2006, exhibition catalogue): 54-55, 32-35. For further information about this and other environments of the group see L. Meloni, Gli ambienti del Gruppo T (Roma: Silvana, 2004). More recently, Varisco’s environment has been exhibited in Vertigo: Op Art and a History of Deception 1520-1970, MUMOK, Wien, 25 May - 26 October, 2019 (the exhibition also travelled to Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart, November 23, 2019 - April 20, 2020), before the retrospective hosted at Palazzo Reale in Milan from June 2 to September 16, 2022; see the catalogue: M. Meneguzzo, ed., Grazia Varisco: Percorsi Contemporanei 1957-2022 (Milan: Skira, 2022, exhibition catalogue); F. Tedeschi, “Dall’interno all’esterno (e viceversa). Il concetto di spazio ‘percorribile’ nell’opera di Grazia Varisco,” ibidem: 26-29. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 108 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. G. Varisco, model of the Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotemporal dilatation of a path, 1969, reconstruction of the environment for the solo exhibition at Galleria Schwarz, Milan, 1969. Fig. 2. G. Varisco, reconstruction of the environment Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotemporal dilatation of a path, 1969, at the exhibition “Gli ambienti del gruppo T,” Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, 2006. who, following the Fontana’s example, used light as a cre- ative and descriptive element of space. As a matter of fact, Varisco placed a “luminous eye” at the center, which, by means of a mechanical process, rotates progressively, in- dicating the trajectory of a path that pushed from the inside outwards, generating a visual and physical sensation at the same time. The light replaces, rather than following it, the gaze of the person undertaking the role of “bystander,” to quote Brandi:9 i.e. a presence experiencing space as a relationship between being and existing. This, as the artist observes, increases the complexity of an active participa- tion, as well as physical relationship, with the site, plunged as it is into the interiority of darkness: the viewer actually experiences two alternative spaces, that of the eye-line of 9 See C. Brandi, Struttura e architettura (Turin: Einaudi, 1967) and Teoria generale della critica (Turin: Einaudi, 1974). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 109 AN-ICON  light and that of the eye-physical presence of the viewer’s own body. Perhaps, the very essence of the work lies precisely in its drive to overcome the constraints of the structure, without actually doing more than absorbing the enchantment of a suspended, outstretched time. The un- derlying character of the work is then a condition of “path” to be completed according to the twofold participation of an active movement and a virtual one. It should be noted that, about ten days before the inauguration of her solo show at the Schwarz gallery – on which occasion this en- vironment, Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotemporal dilatation of a path, was proposed – Grazia Varisco had participated to Campo Urbano, an event pro- moted by Luciano Caramel in Como. Here, she made an intervention in a public space, immortalized by the photo- graphs by Ugo Mulas, who followed and documented the events of that memorable day. On that occasion, Varisco had appropriated a street in the town center, involving a large group of people to help here create a series of walls arranged in a meander, made up of cardboard boxes. By cluttering up the road, the work extended the time nec- essary to walk through it. This operation was also called Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotempo- ral dilatation of a path, and in this case the perception of the “urban field,” experienced alternatively with amusement or annoyance, resulted in an immediate application of a principle of modification of reality, due to the presence of a structure that affects movement and, as a consequence, the psychological perception of the entire environment. As the artist writes in the short note later published in the cat- alogue of the Schwarz gallery exhibition, “I see and feel longer. The reactions of impatience or satisfaction change if I try the route again.”10 10 G. Varisco, “Dilatazione spazio temporale di un percorso” in G. Accame, Grazia Varisco (Bergamo: Maredarte, 2001): 102. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 110 AN-ICON  As in other environmental works from a time imbued with a strong imagination of the future, the laby- rinth condition produced by these two operations can be seen as an experiment on a way of thinking and feeling in relation to objects and space. The echo of this attitude is evident in a series of works produced by the artist in the following years, titled Random walks by random numbers. In these screen-printed compositions, the combination of chance and design produce a virtual direction into which the viewers are supposed to get lost, and then rediscover themselves, as Varisco states: “And I play with imagina- tion: I imagine moving robotically, in a defined space with unpredictable steps – or with a pencil on squared paper – letting myself be guided exclusively by the sequence of numbers to which I have previously associated a direction. Chance and design. Not being able to predict my path, I don’t know if my movements will be contained in the space, on the sheet.”11 From the virtual space of painting to the real space of the built environment, from the virtual space of a projection that includes the viewer as a participant and an object, to that of a sheet that records movements, ei- ther made or imagined, the creation of an interior from the exterior and the reworking of an outside from the inside are exemplified here through a practice rooted in the drive to explore space, which has guided, up to this point, the experiments of several generations of artists. 11 G. Varisco, “Random Walks – 1972,” in G. Accame, Grazia Varisco: 108. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 111 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19773

Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitio by Annette Urban VR-art ns Environmental immersion Epistemic Objects installation art De-distancing/de-differentiation Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitions ANNETTE URBAN, Ruhr-Universität Bochum – https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19773 Abstract In contemporary understanding, a now normal- ized immersion continues to be associated with digitality and high-tech apparatuses, but is also seen as diffused into the lifeworld. Against this backdrop, the article focuses on two current artworks that extend the internal environmen- tality inherent in VR as a spatialized image into physical space by using strategies from installation and site-related art. These examples provide for an equation and nesting of work, environment and exhibition that is interpreted here as a potentiated environmentalization. The artistic VR-environ- ments by no means negate their rootedness in imagery, but rather self-reflexively reveal the transitions between image and three-dimensionality, what gives them a special epis- temic valence. It thus seems worthwhile to relate them to considerations of knowledge objects and exhibitions, but also to (queer) phenomenological theories of entanglement and becoming originating from the following of lines. ANNETTE URBAN 112 AN-ICON  Meanwhile, the epistemic value of their latent objects, disoriented paths, and impossible spaces is only revealed in the interaction with and embodied experience of the virtual space. The article thus participates in debates on how bodily immersion does not exclude, but enables action and reflection within aesthetic experience. With re- gard to two fundamental paradigms of immersion, it can show how, for this purpose, the artworks turn anew the strategies of de-distancing and de-differentiation. Keywords VR-art Environmental immersion Epistemic Objects installation art De-distancing/de-differentiation To quote this essay: A. Urban, “Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitions,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 112-138, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19773. ANNETTE URBAN 113 AN-ICON  De-Distancing and De-Differentiation: Contemporary Aesthetics of Immersion Immersion is again attracting much attention. Film and media studies, art history, image sciences and narratology have all long participated in its theorization. More recently, theatre, performance and game studies, architectural theory and the history of knowledge1 have joined in, taking into account a whole range of everyday digital technologies and thus deferring questions of image aesthetics and image technology in favor of investigating body/media/environment relationships. Whereas some the- oretical contributions highlight the immersive aspects of a specific medium, there is also a broad tendency to deal with immersion as a prime symptom of today’s image cul- tures and media ecologies what is evidenced by collective terms such as immersive media,2 environmental images and iconoscapes. To speak more generally of immersive media deliberately goes beyond media-technical foundations of the concept by arguing with transmedial relevant opera- tions. These are already rooted in narratology, where the opening up and simultaneous closing of a fictional world is accomplished cognitively-mentally: Perceptual immer- sion is therefore seen to be necessarily complemented by imaginative immersion,3 which only ensures that the sen- sory stimuli of a medium are translated into a virtual world.4 After the debate has been strongly linked to Virtual Reality since the 1990s, immersion continues to be considered under the premises of digital technologies, but at the same time is also discussed as nowadays’ conditio humana and condition of daily life. Lars C. Grabbe has proposed a new 1 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: Zu einer Wissensgeschichte der Immersion (Baden Baden: Nomos, 2019). For Kasprowicz, the immersion concept can be retrieved from the “maelstrom of negative connotations as illusion and absorption” by being understood as a “media anthropological practice of de- and re-differentiation of the body [Körper und Leib] in mediatized environments.” Ibid.: 14. 2 Cfr., among others, the Yearbook of Immersive Media 2011-2017, ed. by Institute for Immersive Media at Kiel University of Applied Sciences. 3 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: 18, with reference to Marie-Laure Ryan. 4 Cfr. T. Hochscherf, H. Kjär, P. Rupert-Kruse, “Phänomene und Medien der Immersion,” in Jahrbuch immersiver Medien 3 (2011): 9-19, 14, with reference to Matthew Lombard/Theresa Ditton. ANNETTE URBAN 114 AN-ICON  cultural-theoretical figure of the homo immergens which he considers to be the equivalent of a culture of media hybrids: In succession or better combination of the human capaci- ties for symbol formation and image production, the homo immergens has become the creator of its own “multimodal and simulative environments”5 whereby the distance to the medial artifact is reduced and a worldly experience is generated. Thus, recent insights of immersion research owe much to theorizing across media, on the basis of me- dia hybridity, as well as to inputs from other branches of scholarship. Within these multi-faceted approaches two key features emerge that I propose to summarize as a reduction of distance responsible for felt presence and as a reduction of difference. These two aspects cover both, the particular attitude of reception, which has been characterized as a way of submerging, of mental absorption, and bodily-emo- tional involvement, as well as the various forms of transfor- mative exchange or even assimilation that occur between the recipient and the object of contemplation – to put it in the classical dichotomy of aesthetic experience. Mean- while, the principles of de-distancing and de-differentiation unfold in numerous ways. They involve more-than-visual, bodily modes of experience, that can be interpreted as a re-centering of the world and the subject, but also as new forms of empathy and encounter. The latter may culminate in ideas of matter-flow inspired by Deleuze/Guattari and of leaving behind all subject-object dichotomies, which some suppose to be still at work in the quasi-objects of the philosophy of science.6 Or they remain – as with Grabbe’s term of representational convergence referring to the con- vergence of exterior and mental representations7 – closer to the realm of images whose unframing gives the beholder 5 L. C. Grabbe, “Homo Immergens: Immersion as a Parameter for a Media and Cultural Theory of Medial Hybridity,” in J. Bracker, A. Hubrich, eds., The Art of Reception (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021): 400-422, 400. 6 Cfr. T. Ingold, “Drawing Together: Materials, Gestures, Lines,” in T. Otto, N. Bubandt, eds., Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology (Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2010): 299-313, 304-305. 7 Cfr. L. C. Grabbe, “Homo Immergens:” 400. ANNETTE URBAN 115 AN-ICON  the feeling of being surrounded by them. This perspective on artificially spatialized images8 invites to focus on the transitions between images and illusionistic 3D-entities, and to a closer examination of the environmentalization inherent in it. In the widely ramified discourse on environ- mentality, the art historical point of view still seems under- represented as far as the obvious link with the so-called Ausstieg aus dem Bild, with installation and site-related art is concerned. They equally mark a significant reference point for spatialization and meanwhile break down the status of art as distinct, object-like work. Instead, the art historical interrogation of environmentality has recently been deep- ened in reference back to screen media and the paradigm of projection: In her comprehensive study, Giuliana Bruno has illuminatingly interpreted the spatiality established by light projection in terms of materially transformative pro- cesses, transductive conversions of energy and the histo- ries of energetic environments. But while she emphasizes the ambulatory “non-linear movement in forms of trans- duction”9 and explicitly investigates inhabitable spaces of immersion, with her focus on the act of projection, however, environmentality remains tied back to a transitive gesture of transmission and transport.10 In a broader disciplinary context, its exploration ranges from the new non-visual environments established by sensor technologies, from biologically, autopoietically or systems-theoretically con- ceptualized relations between an organism/a system and its Umwelt, to the environmental concerns of new material- ism, anthropology and queer phenomenology, rewriting the Heideggerian irreducible world reference of the embodied self. Sara Ahmed’s approach is of particular interest here because it takes up the “bodily inhabitance of […] space”11 8 Cfr. J. Schröter, “Die Ästhetik der virtuellen Welt: Überlegungen mit Niklas Luhmann und Jeffrey Shaw,” in M. Bogen, R. Kuck, J. Schröter, eds., Virtuelle Welten als Basistechnologie für Kunst und Kultur? Eine Bestandsaufnahme (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2015): 25-36. 9 G. Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (Chicago- London: Chicago University Press, 2021): 109. See also ibid.: 111-112. 10 Ibid.: 2. 11 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006): 6. ANNETTE URBAN 116 AN-ICON  as a basic parameter of orientation, but in doing so opens up Heidegger’s familiarity with the world to other directions and objects that were not always already at hand. Similarly, in Tim Ingold’s anthropology, “joining with the togetherings of life”12 as drawn lines serves a better understanding of the particular environmentality of the lifeworld. In the following, I propose to combine art historical thinking about site-related installation aesthetics with phenomenological and episte- mological perspectives. They promise an understanding of bodily extension into space as an orientedness towards objects as well as towards others and simultaneously take account of an unstable objecthood. This offers an alterna- tive way out of problematic dualistic premises that so far often separate art historical genealogies of immersion and debates on aesthetic experience from knowledge-historical considerations that see subject-object dichotomies under- mined precisely by immersed bodies and their negotiation of environmental relations.13 As I want to show by analyzing two examples by Theodoulos Polyviou and Rosa Menkman, the de-differ- entiation between the work, its spatial surroundings and, by consequence, the exhibition display, is in particular rene- gotiated in recent VR-art. Its often closed imaginary worlds do not only present themselves as spatialized images, but simultaneously as an assemblage of things in space that reinforce the connection to installation art and display is- sues. As Christiane Paul remarked in 2003, VR does not only allow for the “full […] immers[ion of] its users in a three-dimensional world generated by a computer” but also for “an interaction with the virtual objects that comprise that world.”14 While the immersive environment thus means the withdrawal of the artwork as a singular (pictorial) object and counterpart of aesthetic experience, it simultaneously results in a multiplication of spatially arranged objects to which the visitor relates in an interactive, cognitive and – we might add – environmental or even (life) worldly way. This 12 T. Ingold, “Drawing together:” 303. See also ibid.: 301-304. 13 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: 22, 24, 30. 14 C. Paul, Digital Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003): 125. ANNETTE URBAN 117 AN-ICON  ultimately leads to a multiplied nesting of work, environ- ment and exhibition whose institutional and infrastructural conditions I will briefly consider at the end. Normalized Immersion and the Epistemics of Virtual Objects and Spatialities The recent VR-artworks of Polyviou and Menk- man have been chosen for this study because, to some extent, they reinvest in immersive high-tech media arrange- ments similar to those of the 1990s and early 2000s. Cy- prus-born artist Theodoulos Polyviou resorts to calculated 3D environments that reproduce existing spaces with ar- chitectural precision and make them individually explorable via head-mounted display (HMD) as well as on the desktop. Dutch artist and theorist Rosa Menkman uses the online walk-through spaces of the newart.city.org platform to host a collection of im/possible images in a specially designed artificial environment. At the same time, the two artists share the impulse to re-embed the virtual into a physical environment. Polyviou works with an elaborate recalibration of the virtual to the physical exhibition space, and Menk- man reintegrates the interactive experience of the website into an exhibition design she creates, which in its own way restructures the physical space. This shared concern with relocalization hints at a contemporary understanding of immersion that does not privilege computer-generated simulated worlds. Doris Kolesch has summarized it as “an increasingly everyday interaction not only with digital media, but also and above all, with designed spaces and spaces of experience.”15 Indeed, this now normal immersive con- dition is also elaborated in terms of architectural and ur- ban spaces that are in negotiation with images.16 However, 15 D. Kolesch, “Ästhetik der Immersion,” in G. W. Bertram, S. Deines, D. M. Feige, eds., Die Kunst und die Künste: Ein Kompendium zur Kunsttheorie der Gegenwart (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021): 422-441, 422 [my translation]. 16 Cfr. L. Bieger, “Ästhetik der Immersion. Wenn Räume wollen. Immersives Erleben als Raumerleben,” in G. Lehnert, ed., Raum und Gefühl. Der Spatial Turn und die neue Emotionsforschung (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag 2011): 75-95. ANNETTE URBAN 118 AN-ICON  “immersion as factual state description,”17 may primarily end in a World without Us, as Inke Arns points out, where invisibly working smart technologies create non-delimited, post-visual environments. Does VR still play a significant part in such a ubiquitous immersion? While on the one hand the selected artworks explore the “specific experience and mediality of the body-environment relationship”18 stressed by Kolesch, on the other hand, in unfolding a virtually walkable environ- ment, they do not deny their rootedness in imagery and even expose their latent objecthood. They engage with environmental aesthetics by presenting themselves as an environment withholding any designated artwork or as a mere framework for other images. With the unstable ref- erences of their elements, they fully play out the role of virtual as epistemic objects and combine representation with operability. This approaches all the more the genre of knowledge exhibitions, as they invest in VR’s capacities of getting the user “immersed in reflection,”19 to quote Katja Kwastek’s term for reconciling the (inter)action-based mode of digital art with the traditionally contemplative aesthetic experience. Early installation art such as Lucio Fontana’s Ambiente spaziale already shows how physical spaces with the help of mirroring and lightning effects combine immer- sion with ontological speculation. Within VR-art, the latter is stimulated by oscillations between image and three-di- mensionality. And it is intensified by virtual spatialities that similarily become a theoretical object of epistemic value, not only because of the heightened disorientation in spaces freed from physical regularity, but also as a result of more or less pure calculation. This affinity to abstraction mostly escapes the attention to hyperrealistic 3D-design and in- stead sometimes refers back to the sublime in art where natural phenomena fluidly transition into intangible abstract 17 I. Arns, “Qualityland, oder: Der Immersion begegnen,” Jahrbuch für Kulturpolitik, 2017/18: Welt. Kultur. Politik - Kulturpolitik in Zeiten der Globalisierung: 211-220, 212 [my translation]. 18 D. Kolesch, “Ästhetik der Immersion:” 422. 19 K. Kwastek, “Immersed in Reflection? The Aesthetic Experience of Interactive Media Art,” in B. Dogramaci, F. Liptay, eds., Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media (Leiden, Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2016): 66-85. ANNETTE URBAN 119 AN-ICON  emptiness. In 3D-environments, straight lines serve as ge- neric framework of spaces, which, through texturing and mapping, also directly emerge from images. Of particular interest is whether this linear ab- stractness is at the same time getting practicable in the course of the (manual) navigation through Polyviou’s and Menkman’s synthetic environments, enabled by the HMD with its tracking systems and hand-held controllers and by the maneuvers on the keyboard in the desktop-based versions. This passing through as the prevalent mode of VR-experience20 can be further clarified by (queer-)phenom- enological concepts of inhabiting space by taking directions and following lines, especially non-geometric entangled lines, giving high value to disorientation and turning toward objects as Sara Ahmed states.21 Insofar that this includes “lining ourselves up with the features of the grounds we in- habit, the sky that surrounds us, or the imaginary lines that cut through maps,”22 it already assumes a connection be- tween physical, expressly natural and virtual spaces which extends up to technically-based environments. In a similar vein, Tim Ingold explicitly considers lines as basic element of immersion responsible for an embedding into the life- world. For him, coming to life results from being “immersed in those generative currents”23 such as wind, for example, which also alters the state of man-made tools and techni- cal objects transcending a purely transitive use. Thereby Ingold’s concept of lines gains a potential for change and implies passages between the actual and the virtual.24 With their help, he problematizes objects understood as “dis- crete, finished entities” which he judges as a mere obstacle for drawing and “designing environmental relations.”25 Lines, 20 I use the terms VR-experience, VR-environments and VR-works as broad concepts also including desktop-based virtual environments which have an immersive character on their own. 21 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: 1-2. 22 Ibid.: 6. 23 T. Ingold, “Drawing Together:” 305. 24 Ingold’s repeated recourse to Deleuze/Guattari’s concept of the line of flight (ligne de fuite) remains beyond the scope of this article, but is worth following in M. De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005). 25 T. Ingold, M. Anusas, “Designing Environmental Relations: From Opacity to Textility,” Design Issues 29, no. 4 (2013): 58-69, 58. ANNETTE URBAN 120 AN-ICON  in contrast, as exemplified by the inseparable correlation of a river and its banks, are emblematic of correspondences and engender a different kind of thinking: “to correspond with [the waters] is to join this awareness with the flow.”26 They privilege an intransitive mode of “joining with” rather than “joining of.” Putting VR-Art on Exhibition When contemporary art today is testing the potentials of VR as an artistic medium, its borrowings from installation art are not exclusively motivated by the pragmatics of exhibiting in art museums. Many artists use this necessity for initiating ontological speculations on the continuum between virtual reality and the shared here and now in the museum. They intertwine the setting up of the interior pictorial world with the installative anchoring of the VR-experience in the exhibition space, thus producing their own form of potentiated environmentality connected to quite different strands of installative and site-related art. Here, only a brief comparison can point to how, in Banz & Bowinkel’s work Mercury (2017) (Fig. 1) for example, the filigree pavilion architecture that creates a second artificial habitat high above Planet Earth in the VR, extends into a metallic display for the processor and the second screen in the exhibition. And to another German VR-artist, Flori- an Meisenberg who chooses an illusionistic backdrop, as known from photo and film studios, to illusionistically em- bed the gesticulating wearer of the HMD into the abstract grid landscape of Superstudio’s 70s planetary architectural utopia. In both examples, the environments also serve to house other artworks. But instead of activating the institu- tional or archival concerns of installation art, they extend the artificially generated, often fictionalized world within the VR into the exhibition context which is more in line with the staging of illusionistic worlds by means of props in 26 T. Ingold, Knowing from the Inside: Correspondences, (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 2017): 41. ANNETTE URBAN 121 AN-ICON  cinema and cinematographic installation art. The VR-works by Polyviou and Menkman persue the reverse path and thus tend to the originally anti-immersive institution-reflex- ive branch: Their freely designable VR-worlds conversely borrow from physical exhibition spaces and their conven- tions of presenting items of cultural value which is worth questioning as another symptom of immersive normality and life worldly virtuality.27 Fig. 1a Fig. 1b Fig. 1a and 1b. Banz & Bowinkel, Mercury, 2016. VR installation, screen capture and installation shot, DAM Gallery, Berlin, 2017. Courtesy of the artists. Theodoulos Polyviou: Drifting, Browsing, Cruising (2021) Besides the issues of art presentation in the pandemic, that influenced both selected artworks, I ask more generally about the role of environmental virtuality in Polyviou’s and Menkman’s action-based and visual-spatial strategies28 of getting the recipient immersed in their work and thereupon re-perspectivize the question of institutional embedding. The first striking feature of Drifting, Browsing, Cruising created by Theodoulos Polyviou together with Eleni Diana Elia at the Centre for Art and Media, ZKM at Karls- ruhe/Germany, is certainly the ground plan true modeling of a computer-generated world based on a specific location 27 Cfr. S. Rieger, A. Schäfer, A. Tuschling, eds., Virtuelle Lebenswelten: Körper - Räume - Affekte (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2021). 28 Kwastek stresses that the action-based experience not necessarily needs visual-spatial illusion (Cfr. “Immersed in Reflection?:” 69), but both aspects are closely united here. ANNETTE URBAN 122 AN-ICON  within the museum. In summer 2021, visitors wearing HMD moved in situ through this doubled environment (Fig. 2-3). Since then, the work can be visited as only desktop-based VR on the online exhibition site fantastic confabulations, that reuses the digital replica of the space for further exhibitions. Contrary to enabling “spatiotemporal transpo- sition,” Polyviou uses VR for evoking a “hyper-awareness of the viewer as to where they are, and what they are doing.”29 That’s why he is re-situating VR-technology by establishing site-related connections to architecturally and historical- ly distinct places. But how is this intended sense of pres- ence, which implies situatedness and agency, created in the site-specific VR-installation at the ZKM? In contrast to many other of his works,30 any direct citation of a third auratic place and its cultural heritage is missing here. Polyviou obviously aims at the recognizability of the original museum space in 3D – the alignment of pillars typical of the former industrial building, the balustrade and the staircase leading to the open atrium as well as the glass partitions to the adjacent spaces are all faithfully reproduced. This makes the absence of the expected distinct artworks all the more noticeable. What one encounters inside, first of all appears as extensions of the serving architecture. The replicated pillars with spotlights are complemented by semicircular, half-height partitions as known from exhibition design. While these virtual supple- ments turn the clear cubic exhibition space into a cluttered and mysterious site, their freely curving floor plan lines re- appear as vinyl stripes on the ground of the physical space. 29 Th. Polyviou in A. Urban, “Virtual Spaces for Transformative Encounters and Vast Reciprocity - An Interview with Theodoulos Polyviou and Jazmina Figueroa,” in L. Nolasco- Rózsás, ed., Beyond Matter, Within Space: Curatorial and Art Mediation Techniques on the Verge of Virtual Reality (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2023): 429-443, 432. 30 See for example the installation Transmundane Economies (2022) at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, with references to the ruins of the Bellapais monastery in the north of Cyprus. ANNETTE URBAN 123 AN-ICON Fig. 2a Fig. 2c Fig. 2b Fig. 2d Fig. 2a, 2b, 2c and 2d T. Polyviou, Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, 2021. Site-specific VR installation, in cooperation with Eleni Diana Elia, installations shots and VR captures (details), ZKM, Karlsruhe 2021. Courtesy of the artists. © Eleni Diana Elia and Theodoulos Polyviou © Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), photo by Tanja Meissner. Produced in the framework of the Beyond Matter Residency Program at ZKM | Karlsruhe. This interplay between paradoxical emptiness and spatial density not only subverts the usual aesthetic experience in art museums with its orientation towards a singled-out art object. The directionality of the space image as an action image, theorized by Stephan Günzel in the context of gaming, where only objects centered in the field of vision can become the object of action,31 also remains unexploited. Instead, the environment privileges spatial exploration and confronts with the paradox phys- icality of its virtual architecture that, like the impermeable built world, diverts the users’ bodies. Without any avatarial 31 Cfr. S. Günzel, “Vor dem Affekt: die Aktion - Emotion und Raumbild,” in G. Lehnert, ed., Raum und Gefühl: Der Spatial Turn und die neue Emotionsforschung (Bielefeld: transcript- Verlag, 2014): 63-74, 67-68. ANNETTE URBAN 124 AN-ICON  representation, their self-perception entirely depends on bodily correlations with the labyrinthine environment, that additionally applies sensory stimuli and atmospheric im- mersion32 including artificial billowing fog on the floor, a sound backdrop and hall lights converted into dramatic illuminations. Thus, the functional architecture that sublim- inally remains perceptible through its calibration with the virtual space, shifts to a fictionalized, suspenseful backdrop that awaits its narration. Priority has the increased intensi- ty of experience typical for spatial-immersive installations and one-sided de-distancing. But the artificial environment here also requires an action- and reflection-based attitude thanks to the latency of its speculative and operable ob- jects and thus enacts a highly sensuous, performative form of site-related institutional critique. This comes into action when the foggy atmosphere transforms the built-in walls into jagged rock formations, thereby unifying different mate- rialities in one unstable image-object, or when the flashing spotlights and the variable angle of view instantly turn a black surface into a three-dimensional hide-away (Fig. 3). In addition, the windows that in fact only sepa- rate the next exhibition space, virtually open onto an equally artificial purple exterior, imitating a dramatic skylight. Its emptiness suspends the virtual exhibition space with its balustrades and staircase in an indefinite void, so that the emphasized inside-outside difference gives this VR-topos of floatation an institution-critical side. While Polyviou’s en- vironment is housed/hosted by the museum, it also nests there as an invisible counter-place that virtually undermines the physicality of the institution.33 And by penetrating the interior of the virtual environment, the shadows of the grid windows cite the linear structure of computed space. But this space loses the evenness secured by optical projec- tion when the grid lines synthesize the floor with the pillars to one continuous surface. It thus foreshadows a virtual 32 Cfr. also R. Eugeni, G. Raciti, eds., “Atmosfere mediali,” VCS Visual Culture Studies. Rivista semestrale di cultura visuale, no. 1 (November 2020). 33 Cfr. Th. Polyviou in A. Urban, “Virtual Spaces for Transformative Encounters and Vast Reciprocity:” 430. ANNETTE URBAN 125 AN-ICON Fig. 3a Fig. 3c Fig. 3b Fig. 3a, 3b and 3c T. Polyviou, Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, 2021. Site-specific VR installation, in cooperation with Eleni Diana Elia, VR captures (details), ZKM, Karlsruhe 2021. Courtesy of the artists. © Eleni Diana Elia and Theodoulos Polyviou © Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), Produced in the framework of the Beyond Matter Residency Programat ZKM | Karlsruhe. substantiality beyond the clear differentiation of distinct things and deprived of the stability of usual grounds. This exacerbates the insecurity of the orienta- tion-seeking users who navigate their invisible body through the confusing narrowness of fixtures, pseudo-functional handrails and hall lights. However, this staged reduction of distance is not simply overwhelming. The ambiguous virtual objects also ensure that, by “gather[ing] on the ground,” – as Sara Ahmed has noted – “they create a ground upon which we can gather.”34 Indeed, the mixed environment unites online as well as HMD users whose actions in the physical terrain marked with stripes are simultaneously observed by the museum visitors. Even without direct references to sacred architecture, Polyviou thus links the 34 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: 1. ANNETTE URBAN 126 AN-ICON  VR-typical passing through with a quasi-ritualized use of space. Alison Griffith has already tied back a counter-his- tory of immersive spectatorship in the museum not only to the panorama, science museum, and planetarium, but also to the cathedral.35 In Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, mnemonic mental images ensure the combination of action-based with cognitive immersion, because the disoriented wandering takes place through the comparison of constantly shifting, remembered spaces. When Polyviou decisively theorizes this ritualization as base for a “queer togetherness,”36 this reconnects to the lines printed on the floor. Through their interference with the dense environment inside the VR, they emancipate themselves from the clear legibility as object contour and ground plan. They thus contribute to the cru- cial entanglement that, according to Ingold, gets the “living being […] as a bundle of [the] lines” 37 of its movement im- mersed in its lifeworld. Polyviou therefore stimulates bodily practices of losing oneself in artificially induced passions. The choreographed searching movements inside give the museum space an improvisational openness, while the calibration with the physical pillars and ground makes the VR-experience literally tangible. Environmental immersion here goes hand in hand with a reduction of difference that de-differentiates virtual and physical spaces, bodies and objects. Rosa Menkman: The BLOB of Im/Possible Images (2021) Rosa Menkman’s VR-experience also brings the categories of artwork and exhibition nearly into congruence. But, instead of eliminating distinct artworks, Menkman, for this purpose, departs from a veritable collection assembled under the title of Im/Possible Images (Fig. 4). She stores 35 Cfr. A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 36 “Drifting, Browsing, Cruising,” Fantastic Confabulations, https://fantastic-confabulations.beyondmatter.eu/drifting-browsing-cruising/index.html, accessed December 29, 2022. 37 T. Ingold, “Drawing Together:” 300. ANNETTE URBAN 127 AN-ICON  Fig. 4 Fig. 4. R. Menkman, The BLOB of Im/possible Images, 2021. Desktop-based virtual environment, accessible on the platform New Art City. Courtesy of the artist. this collection on the widely used VR-art platform New Art City where she designed a complex desktop-based virtual environment that shows an enclosed grayish scenery with a staircase, a huge resolution-chart, a humanoid figure and a second free-floating structure pierced by diagonals. Ini- tially hidden from view, the collected images are sheltered inside this amorphous cloud, revealing themselves when one navigates through the permeable sheathing. The nest- ed structure alludes to the titular BLOB with its polysemy of digital blob architecture, the single-celled, ‘intelligent’ su- per-organism and Binary Large Objects as a technical term for databased image processing. And the exhibits that visi- tors have to deal with in this environment are mainly objects of knowledge accessible only through representation, so a reference to their theorizations by Hans-Jörg Rheinberg- er and Susan Leigh Star/John Griesemer is suggested.38 Menkman thus borrows from the realm of scientific images, which has been a central field of debate and self-defini- tion for digital art from the very beginning. She delegates the act of imagining and selecting them by realizing a sur- vey during her Arts at Cern/Collide Barcelona-Residency, asking the researchers what image of a relevant object or 38 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2015): 19-58. ANNETTE URBAN 128 AN-ICON  phenomenon they would capture if “limits of spatial, tem- poral, energy, signal/noise or cost resolutions”39 were irrel- evant. In other words, this variability of resolution results in products of imagineering and touches on phenomena that are decoupled from humans’ experience, escaping their commonly perceived environmentalities. But these phenomena can be mediated by virtual body-environment relations, which conversely force a changed understanding of (aesthetic) experience, as discussed by Roberto Diodato with reference to John Dewey.40 The choice of the nuclear physicists as experts in im/possible images endow the virtual as epistemic objects with a specific latency and scientificity. The referents of their proposed images mostly elude the objecthood familiar to mankind and have nothing in common with the medium-sized “things of the earth’s surface” as characterized by the Gestalt psychologist Fritz Heider.41 Two important aspects shared with Polyviou’s example promise additional insights into the workings of environmental immersion. Firstly, this concerns the embed- ding into abstractness, which goes along with a space that loses its conventional categories and thus favors immersion through the withdrawal of the usual parameters of orienta- tion. This not only stems from the arbitrary laws of physical- ity in VR, but also from a different kind of world reference in ‘virtual bodies environments’, which Diodato emphasizes: “In this intermediary world space itself is the result of inter- activity.”42 In Menkman’s case, the intensified experience is generated not so much by a condensed, labyrinthine spatiality as by the enhanced self-reflexivity of navigation itself. Both, the VR-environment The BLOB of Im/Possible Images and the related video-work Whiteout showing a tour in Harz mountains in heavy snow, deal with the ex- perience in a markerless space tending to exceed human 39 R. Menkman, “The BLOB of Im/possible Images” https://newart.city/show/menkman-blob-of-im-possibilities, accessed December 30, 2022. 40 Cfr. R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: Towards an Aesthetics of Relations (Cham: Springer, 2021): 56. 41 Cited after G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 38. 42 R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: 61. ANNETTE URBAN 129 AN-ICON  senses and erase most thingness. Second, the comparison with Drifting, Browsing, Cruising is based on the re-phys- icalization of the VR-works in the exhibition format. Rosa Menkman conceived a carefully designed exhibition display for a 2021 group show at Munich where she reconnected the VR-experience to the physical space with the help of lines. While in Polyviou’s example the plotting of isomorphic virtual and physical elements onto a planimetric floor plan retains a relative object character, Menkman starts from abstract lines as axes of graphs and coordinate systems. They guide the exploration of the virtual world inside and also mark the thresholds of iconic representation. Touching on signal spectra, digital states and im/material energetic flows, they bring forth what Ingold sees otherwise negated by the regime of solidified things. Within the VR, the resolution chart erected next to the figurine is particularly telling of how Menkman translates resolution into space, taking advantage of the orthogonality of digital as “rasterized […] images” based on a “grid of picture elements or pixels,”43 that, according to Francesco Casetti and Antonio Somaini, also possess a specific plasticity. By mapping the gray structure of the internal blob with the diagonals and its one black anchor point, the resolution chart pretends to guide the VR-user searching to enter this enclosure. Yet, despite the lines piercing the amorphous volume, the chart does not reveal any information about the interior. The charted scales and frequency ranges unmistakably mark this second blob as an image-object of the same digital fabric as the abstractly textured body of the figurine besides, Menkman’s Angelus Novus emblematic for the reversal of gaze regimes. This co-presence of image-objects and -subjects made of dis- torted black-white stripes strongly signals the de-differ- entiation of most diverse entities. The appearance of the things is flexibilized to such a degree that their self-identity 43 F. Casetti, A. Somaini, “Resolution: Digital Materialities, Thresholds of Visibility,” NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies 7, no. 1 (2018): 87-103. ANNETTE URBAN 130 AN-ICON  is disposable and their recognition depends on the user’s bodily action (Fig. 5). Fig. 5a Fig. 5b Fig. 5a and Fig. 5b .R. Menkman, The BLOB of Im/possible Images, 2021, Desktop-based virtual environment, accessible on the platform New Art City, screenshots by the author. Courtesy of the artist. ANNETTE URBAN 131 AN-ICON  As soon as the user has traversed the opaque but permeable grayish membrane of the blob, the envi- ronment transforms into a dark sphere with mystic sound where the im/possible images are scattered in an unmea- surable distance. When the wandering user is attracted by small luminous dots that, up close, turn out to represent the Pale Blue Dot aka Planet Earth, taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 for example, or a Quantum Vacuum, quarks inside of a proton, a shadow of a black hole and a body scan of the interior of a wrist, she/he is once again less guided by the affordances of gaming. To remind Günzel, its “fixed-par- anoid perspective” turns objects into action carriers by shifting them to the center of the image; but here, only the paranoid dimension of permanent searching seems to en- dure “through which the objects in the virtual off must be transferred into actualization.”44 As Roberto Diodato notes with reference to Bernard Stiegler and Richard Grusin, in view of the prevailing premediation techniques and an al- ready thoroughly hypermediated world, it is necessary for the techno-artistic creation of virtual spacetime environ- ments to break the merely adaptive behavior pattern of supposedly active cognitive agents.45 Beyond the gaming attitude running into the void, it is the habits of museum spectators that help surprisingly well – right down to the work texts that pop up on approach. But, of course, the concept of the mimetic image is challenged here by the assembled nuclear- and astrophysical phenomena at the limits of what can still be captured by light or other wave- lengths. Menkman succeeds in staging the uncertain status of such objects of knowledge, which only move into the rank of the existent through new technologies of detection, by making use of the peculiarities of virtual objecthood. This starts with the all-round perspectivability and resulting form variance of the virtual exhibits already known from sculp- ture, joined here by their free scalability and permeability 44 S. Günzel, “Vor dem Affekt:” 68. 45 Cfr. R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: 64-65. ANNETTE URBAN 132 AN-ICON  in direct interaction with the user navigating their invisible bodies through space. The skinned wrist, for example, hits the viewer in powerful plasticity or just hangs in space as flatware, depending on the point of entry into the enclosure of the im/possible images, the viewing angle and proximity to the item. This form of distance reduction self-reflexively combines seeing and (inter-)acting. The less complete im- mersion of desktop-based VR is compensated for by the tactility of maneuvering with arrow keys or touchpad, which transfers its sensation of handling to the virtual objects. Menkman experiments here with re-introducing into art the more immersive displays of the natural history museum,46 whose never-broken connection to science is recalled by Christiane Voss’ reflections on the medium of exhibition,47 and appropriates the knowledge exhibition format. In this setting, barely tangible phenomena such as black holes, dark matter and other galaxies become manageable as in a laboratory that, in terms of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, only brings epistemic things into existence.48 The nested spatial structure of the BLOB in- creases this epistemic valence because it invites for re- peating those transformative immersive crossings from one internal sphere to the next. Outside the encapsulated image collection, the latency of objects is provided by the poly- gon meshes patterned with black/whites lines reminiscent of military dazzle camouflage49 that acts as de-distancing tool precisely by preventing its correct estimation. Instead of simulating natural light conditions, as it often serves to catalyze the atmospheric immersion of a perfected VR, the moiré reveals another form of apparitional fluidity. Con- stantly changing with the user’s movement, the texture shows a pulsating im/materiality that already withdraws at the surface. It seems close to Ingold’s and Ansusas’s notion of infrastice that includes “all manner of electrical, 46 Cfr. A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine. 47 Cfr. C. Voss, “Das Museum als Medium der Kunst,” in G. W. Bertram, S. Deines, D. M. Feige, eds., Die Kunst und die Künste: Ein Kompendium zur Kunsttheorie der Gegenwart (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021): 464-483, 474. 48 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 35. 49 My thanks go to Manuel van der Veen for this reference and the exchange about the text. ANNETTE URBAN 133 AN-ICON  Fig. 6 R. Menkman, The Im/possible BLOB, 2021. Installed at Temporal Stack: the Deep Sensor in Guizhou, China, curated by Iris Long und HE Zike, 2021. Courtesy of the Artist. chemical, and mechanical workings […], energies, gases, and fluids”50 and resists the useability of surfaces solely understood as interfaces. Finally, the artist also uses these textures, as well as the abstract lines of graphs as vehicle for transfer- ring the virtual into physical space. For a presentation of The BLOB at Gizhou/China (Fig. 6), the dynamic black/white pattern has been transformed into a wallpaper. This exhi- bition design attaches more to the cinematically inspired strategy of extending the fictional-scenic image space in- side the VR into an overall immersive installation. But there, without the operability of latent virtual objects, it tends to unrealize the museum with its psychotic pattern. In con- trast, for a group exhibition in Munich that combined the VR-experience and the video Whiteout with works by Memo Akten, Susan Schuppli and others, Menkman materialized the abstract lines from inside the BLOB (Fig. 7). They es- tablished a 3D-framework in physical space whose white, green, red, yellow and blue diagonals traversed the floor and walls of the exhibition hall,51 thus slightly removing it from orthogonality. As these lines are imagined to shift the 50 T. Ingold, M. Anusas, “Designing Environmental Relations:” 58. 51 Cfr. L. Gross, R. Menkman, L 13: Reader NR 4 im/possible images (München: Lothringer 13 Halle, 2022) https://beyondresolution.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/ Catalogues%2Fimpossible_L13_READER.pdf, accessed April 25, 2023. ANNETTE URBAN 134 AN-ICON  Fig. 7d Fig. 7b Fig. 7c Fig. 7a Fig. 7 a-d. Views of the Exhibition Im/possible Images, at the Lothringer 13 Halle, Munich, 2021, curated by Rosa Menkman. Photo by Dominik Gigler. Courtesy of the artist and of Lothringer 13 Halle. ANNETTE URBAN 135 AN-ICON  spectra of resolution – a borderline to “low fidelity images” was inscribed on the floor –, the artist transformed the built into a “latent image space.”52 Similar to the VR, I would add, the solidity of its objects becomes doubtful, when variable parameters of the perceptible and representable always help other visualities and entities to emerge. With this kind of environmentalization, Menkman de-hierarchizes an ever-higher resolution, that regulates access to more and more details and therefore, according to Casetti and Somaini, raises the power question of control.53 In the Mu- nich exhibition, some of the im/possible images from the BLOB (re-)materialized as exhibits, among them a photo of the skinned hand scan or a newspaper clipping with an x-rayed hand from 1896. But, by placing them along the resolution lines, theses factual images remain suspended in an abstract space of potentialities. In sum, the exhibition display was activated as an integral component not princi- pally distinguished from what is constitutive for the ‘work.’ Potentiated Environmentalization As shown so far, the multiplication of environ- ments inherent in VR-art results from its genuine blurring of the differences between work and environment. This gen- erative logic of further nesting necessarily brings the whole institutional and curatorial ecosystem of VR-art into view. And the extension of the internal installation aesthetics not only counteracts its technically-based encapsulation. It is also essential for not missing the togetherness54 – to cite Mieke Bal – of an exhibition which, according to Christiane Voss, is the medium that establishes the works’ mode of existence as art in the first place.55 The Blob of Im/Possible Images, commissioned by the HeK Basel, was produced with the infrastructure of newart.city.org that provides a “virtual exhibition toolkit” 52 Cfr. R. Menkman, “Im/possible Images@Lothringer 13, Munich” https://beyondresolution.info/im-possible-images-1, accessed December 29, 2022. 53 Cfr. F. Casetti, A. Somaini, “Resolution:” 89. 54 Cfr. M. Bal, Exhibition-ism: Temporal Togetherness (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020). 55 Cfr. Voss, “Das Museum als Medium der Kunst:” 464. ANNETTE URBAN 136 AN-ICON  with “built-in tools to manage artworks and space layouts.”56 Menkman takes up its claims for a non-hierarchical co-cre- ation and invites the submission of further non-expert im/ possible images. Later on, the work has been embedded into a virtual, but spatial exhibition curated by Lívia No- lasco-Rózsás and Giulia Bini for the ZKM in 2021, which pushes the tendencies towards nesting and de-differen- tiation even further: Spatial Affairs. Worlding is inhabited by artworks, an exhibition display and visitors sharing the same organic-abstract shape. One can only distinguish the non-humanoid avatars of other visitors from exhibits through distance-reduction and the object-related action of a mouse click. The latter then turn into pink and, via an info window and links, lead the web-user to the works stored on artists’ website or platforms. By interpreting environmental- ization in terms of worlding, the curators participate in the posthumanist renewal of the phenomenological critique of the world as sum of objects. The multi-user online world with its identical, modular entities first hides the exhibition behind the supposed affordances of gaming and chats. However, the transitions between the environmental exhi- bition and environmental works are designed less immer- sively – like portals in gaming or falling down the rabbit-hole known from literature – than through paratextual framings operated by non-natural manual interfaces. The online exhibition site fantastic confabu- lations that hosts Drifting, Browsing, Cruising was also conceived by Polyviou together with Jasmina Figueora as artists in residence of the same research project Beyond Matter. Instead of nesting spaces, it deals with the gener- ic, serial tendency of self-continuation by inviting to reuse the initial 3D-reconstruction of the ZKM balcony for sub- sequent projects such as realized by Figueroa who mod- eled her spoken words and sound scores by the visitors’ movements through the virtual site. Following Ahmed, this 56 Cfr. “About New Art City,” https://info.newart.city/about, accessed December 28, 2022. ANNETTE URBAN 137 AN-ICON  implies not only a model for self-determined curation, but also a form of environmental co-habitation. Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás argues for the museum in the virtual condition as a “cognitive system”57 including non-human actors, thereby reaccentuating the pioneering thought exhibitions [Gedankenausstellungen] initiated by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour. Polyviou’s example gets by without its strong archival underpinning. In the functional architecture, his staging of an atmospherically condensed counterworld aims at releasing a different bodily knowledge of possible encounters and envisions a counter-physicality for transcending the otherwise hard-to-move institution. The curved lines on the ground echoing the paths inside the VR offer their own transformative knowledge of entan- glement that is experienced and produced environmentally. In comparison, Menkman directly invests into the potential of virtual as epistemic and aesthetic objects. Their robust- ness and simultaneously plasticity reminds the capability of Star’s and Griesemer’s boundary objects to make agents of different groupings,58 in this case those of art and science, meet. What Doris Kolesch has in mind with a normalized immersion in not only technologically-enclosed but every- day spaces, can also be true for VR-based environmental- ization. De-differentiation and de-distancing are then not contradictions to but catalysts of immersive reflection. 57 L. Nolasco-Rózsás, Y. Hofmann, “The Museum as a Cognitive System of Human and Non- Human Actors,” The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums & Culture, no. 3 (2021): 1-15. 58 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 33-34. ANNETTE URBAN 138 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

anicon

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19773

Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitio by Annette Urban VR-art ns Environmental immersion Epistemic Objects installation art De-distancing/de-differentiation Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitions ANNETTE URBAN, Ruhr-Universität Bochum – https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19773 Abstract In contemporary understanding, a now normal- ized immersion continues to be associated with digitality and high-tech apparatuses, but is also seen as diffused into the lifeworld. Against this backdrop, the article focuses on two current artworks that extend the internal environmen- tality inherent in VR as a spatialized image into physical space by using strategies from installation and site-related art. These examples provide for an equation and nesting of work, environment and exhibition that is interpreted here as a potentiated environmentalization. The artistic VR-environ- ments by no means negate their rootedness in imagery, but rather self-reflexively reveal the transitions between image and three-dimensionality, what gives them a special epis- temic valence. It thus seems worthwhile to relate them to considerations of knowledge objects and exhibitions, but also to (queer) phenomenological theories of entanglement and becoming originating from the following of lines. ANNETTE URBAN 112 AN-ICON  Meanwhile, the epistemic value of their latent objects, disoriented paths, and impossible spaces is only revealed in the interaction with and embodied experience of the virtual space. The article thus participates in debates on how bodily immersion does not exclude, but enables action and reflection within aesthetic experience. With re- gard to two fundamental paradigms of immersion, it can show how, for this purpose, the artworks turn anew the strategies of de-distancing and de-differentiation. Keywords VR-art Environmental immersion Epistemic Objects installation art De-distancing/de-differentiation To quote this essay: A. Urban, “Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitions,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 112-138, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19773. ANNETTE URBAN 113 AN-ICON  De-Distancing and De-Differentiation: Contemporary Aesthetics of Immersion Immersion is again attracting much attention. Film and media studies, art history, image sciences and narratology have all long participated in its theorization. More recently, theatre, performance and game studies, architectural theory and the history of knowledge1 have joined in, taking into account a whole range of everyday digital technologies and thus deferring questions of image aesthetics and image technology in favor of investigating body/media/environment relationships. Whereas some the- oretical contributions highlight the immersive aspects of a specific medium, there is also a broad tendency to deal with immersion as a prime symptom of today’s image cul- tures and media ecologies what is evidenced by collective terms such as immersive media,2 environmental images and iconoscapes. To speak more generally of immersive media deliberately goes beyond media-technical foundations of the concept by arguing with transmedial relevant opera- tions. These are already rooted in narratology, where the opening up and simultaneous closing of a fictional world is accomplished cognitively-mentally: Perceptual immer- sion is therefore seen to be necessarily complemented by imaginative immersion,3 which only ensures that the sen- sory stimuli of a medium are translated into a virtual world.4 After the debate has been strongly linked to Virtual Reality since the 1990s, immersion continues to be considered under the premises of digital technologies, but at the same time is also discussed as nowadays’ conditio humana and condition of daily life. Lars C. Grabbe has proposed a new 1 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: Zu einer Wissensgeschichte der Immersion (Baden Baden: Nomos, 2019). For Kasprowicz, the immersion concept can be retrieved from the “maelstrom of negative connotations as illusion and absorption” by being understood as a “media anthropological practice of de- and re-differentiation of the body [Körper und Leib] in mediatized environments.” Ibid.: 14. 2 Cfr., among others, the Yearbook of Immersive Media 2011-2017, ed. by Institute for Immersive Media at Kiel University of Applied Sciences. 3 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: 18, with reference to Marie-Laure Ryan. 4 Cfr. T. Hochscherf, H. Kjär, P. Rupert-Kruse, “Phänomene und Medien der Immersion,” in Jahrbuch immersiver Medien 3 (2011): 9-19, 14, with reference to Matthew Lombard/Theresa Ditton. ANNETTE URBAN 114 AN-ICON  cultural-theoretical figure of the homo immergens which he considers to be the equivalent of a culture of media hybrids: In succession or better combination of the human capaci- ties for symbol formation and image production, the homo immergens has become the creator of its own “multimodal and simulative environments”5 whereby the distance to the medial artifact is reduced and a worldly experience is generated. Thus, recent insights of immersion research owe much to theorizing across media, on the basis of me- dia hybridity, as well as to inputs from other branches of scholarship. Within these multi-faceted approaches two key features emerge that I propose to summarize as a reduction of distance responsible for felt presence and as a reduction of difference. These two aspects cover both, the particular attitude of reception, which has been characterized as a way of submerging, of mental absorption, and bodily-emo- tional involvement, as well as the various forms of transfor- mative exchange or even assimilation that occur between the recipient and the object of contemplation – to put it in the classical dichotomy of aesthetic experience. Mean- while, the principles of de-distancing and de-differentiation unfold in numerous ways. They involve more-than-visual, bodily modes of experience, that can be interpreted as a re-centering of the world and the subject, but also as new forms of empathy and encounter. The latter may culminate in ideas of matter-flow inspired by Deleuze/Guattari and of leaving behind all subject-object dichotomies, which some suppose to be still at work in the quasi-objects of the philosophy of science.6 Or they remain – as with Grabbe’s term of representational convergence referring to the con- vergence of exterior and mental representations7 – closer to the realm of images whose unframing gives the beholder 5 L. C. Grabbe, “Homo Immergens: Immersion as a Parameter for a Media and Cultural Theory of Medial Hybridity,” in J. Bracker, A. Hubrich, eds., The Art of Reception (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021): 400-422, 400. 6 Cfr. T. Ingold, “Drawing Together: Materials, Gestures, Lines,” in T. Otto, N. Bubandt, eds., Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology (Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2010): 299-313, 304-305. 7 Cfr. L. C. Grabbe, “Homo Immergens:” 400. ANNETTE URBAN 115 AN-ICON  the feeling of being surrounded by them. This perspective on artificially spatialized images8 invites to focus on the transitions between images and illusionistic 3D-entities, and to a closer examination of the environmentalization inherent in it. In the widely ramified discourse on environ- mentality, the art historical point of view still seems under- represented as far as the obvious link with the so-called Ausstieg aus dem Bild, with installation and site-related art is concerned. They equally mark a significant reference point for spatialization and meanwhile break down the status of art as distinct, object-like work. Instead, the art historical interrogation of environmentality has recently been deep- ened in reference back to screen media and the paradigm of projection: In her comprehensive study, Giuliana Bruno has illuminatingly interpreted the spatiality established by light projection in terms of materially transformative pro- cesses, transductive conversions of energy and the histo- ries of energetic environments. But while she emphasizes the ambulatory “non-linear movement in forms of trans- duction”9 and explicitly investigates inhabitable spaces of immersion, with her focus on the act of projection, however, environmentality remains tied back to a transitive gesture of transmission and transport.10 In a broader disciplinary context, its exploration ranges from the new non-visual environments established by sensor technologies, from biologically, autopoietically or systems-theoretically con- ceptualized relations between an organism/a system and its Umwelt, to the environmental concerns of new material- ism, anthropology and queer phenomenology, rewriting the Heideggerian irreducible world reference of the embodied self. Sara Ahmed’s approach is of particular interest here because it takes up the “bodily inhabitance of […] space”11 8 Cfr. J. Schröter, “Die Ästhetik der virtuellen Welt: Überlegungen mit Niklas Luhmann und Jeffrey Shaw,” in M. Bogen, R. Kuck, J. Schröter, eds., Virtuelle Welten als Basistechnologie für Kunst und Kultur? Eine Bestandsaufnahme (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2015): 25-36. 9 G. Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (Chicago- London: Chicago University Press, 2021): 109. See also ibid.: 111-112. 10 Ibid.: 2. 11 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006): 6. ANNETTE URBAN 116 AN-ICON  as a basic parameter of orientation, but in doing so opens up Heidegger’s familiarity with the world to other directions and objects that were not always already at hand. Similarly, in Tim Ingold’s anthropology, “joining with the togetherings of life”12 as drawn lines serves a better understanding of the particular environmentality of the lifeworld. In the following, I propose to combine art historical thinking about site-related installation aesthetics with phenomenological and episte- mological perspectives. They promise an understanding of bodily extension into space as an orientedness towards objects as well as towards others and simultaneously take account of an unstable objecthood. This offers an alterna- tive way out of problematic dualistic premises that so far often separate art historical genealogies of immersion and debates on aesthetic experience from knowledge-historical considerations that see subject-object dichotomies under- mined precisely by immersed bodies and their negotiation of environmental relations.13 As I want to show by analyzing two examples by Theodoulos Polyviou and Rosa Menkman, the de-differ- entiation between the work, its spatial surroundings and, by consequence, the exhibition display, is in particular rene- gotiated in recent VR-art. Its often closed imaginary worlds do not only present themselves as spatialized images, but simultaneously as an assemblage of things in space that reinforce the connection to installation art and display is- sues. As Christiane Paul remarked in 2003, VR does not only allow for the “full […] immers[ion of] its users in a three-dimensional world generated by a computer” but also for “an interaction with the virtual objects that comprise that world.”14 While the immersive environment thus means the withdrawal of the artwork as a singular (pictorial) object and counterpart of aesthetic experience, it simultaneously results in a multiplication of spatially arranged objects to which the visitor relates in an interactive, cognitive and – we might add – environmental or even (life) worldly way. This 12 T. Ingold, “Drawing together:” 303. See also ibid.: 301-304. 13 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: 22, 24, 30. 14 C. Paul, Digital Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003): 125. ANNETTE URBAN 117 AN-ICON  ultimately leads to a multiplied nesting of work, environ- ment and exhibition whose institutional and infrastructural conditions I will briefly consider at the end. Normalized Immersion and the Epistemics of Virtual Objects and Spatialities The recent VR-artworks of Polyviou and Menk- man have been chosen for this study because, to some extent, they reinvest in immersive high-tech media arrange- ments similar to those of the 1990s and early 2000s. Cy- prus-born artist Theodoulos Polyviou resorts to calculated 3D environments that reproduce existing spaces with ar- chitectural precision and make them individually explorable via head-mounted display (HMD) as well as on the desktop. Dutch artist and theorist Rosa Menkman uses the online walk-through spaces of the newart.city.org platform to host a collection of im/possible images in a specially designed artificial environment. At the same time, the two artists share the impulse to re-embed the virtual into a physical environment. Polyviou works with an elaborate recalibration of the virtual to the physical exhibition space, and Menk- man reintegrates the interactive experience of the website into an exhibition design she creates, which in its own way restructures the physical space. This shared concern with relocalization hints at a contemporary understanding of immersion that does not privilege computer-generated simulated worlds. Doris Kolesch has summarized it as “an increasingly everyday interaction not only with digital media, but also and above all, with designed spaces and spaces of experience.”15 Indeed, this now normal immersive con- dition is also elaborated in terms of architectural and ur- ban spaces that are in negotiation with images.16 However, 15 D. Kolesch, “Ästhetik der Immersion,” in G. W. Bertram, S. Deines, D. M. Feige, eds., Die Kunst und die Künste: Ein Kompendium zur Kunsttheorie der Gegenwart (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021): 422-441, 422 [my translation]. 16 Cfr. L. Bieger, “Ästhetik der Immersion. Wenn Räume wollen. Immersives Erleben als Raumerleben,” in G. Lehnert, ed., Raum und Gefühl. Der Spatial Turn und die neue Emotionsforschung (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag 2011): 75-95. ANNETTE URBAN 118 AN-ICON  “immersion as factual state description,”17 may primarily end in a World without Us, as Inke Arns points out, where invisibly working smart technologies create non-delimited, post-visual environments. Does VR still play a significant part in such a ubiquitous immersion? While on the one hand the selected artworks explore the “specific experience and mediality of the body-environment relationship”18 stressed by Kolesch, on the other hand, in unfolding a virtually walkable environ- ment, they do not deny their rootedness in imagery and even expose their latent objecthood. They engage with environmental aesthetics by presenting themselves as an environment withholding any designated artwork or as a mere framework for other images. With the unstable ref- erences of their elements, they fully play out the role of virtual as epistemic objects and combine representation with operability. This approaches all the more the genre of knowledge exhibitions, as they invest in VR’s capacities of getting the user “immersed in reflection,”19 to quote Katja Kwastek’s term for reconciling the (inter)action-based mode of digital art with the traditionally contemplative aesthetic experience. Early installation art such as Lucio Fontana’s Ambiente spaziale already shows how physical spaces with the help of mirroring and lightning effects combine immer- sion with ontological speculation. Within VR-art, the latter is stimulated by oscillations between image and three-di- mensionality. And it is intensified by virtual spatialities that similarily become a theoretical object of epistemic value, not only because of the heightened disorientation in spaces freed from physical regularity, but also as a result of more or less pure calculation. This affinity to abstraction mostly escapes the attention to hyperrealistic 3D-design and in- stead sometimes refers back to the sublime in art where natural phenomena fluidly transition into intangible abstract 17 I. Arns, “Qualityland, oder: Der Immersion begegnen,” Jahrbuch für Kulturpolitik, 2017/18: Welt. Kultur. Politik - Kulturpolitik in Zeiten der Globalisierung: 211-220, 212 [my translation]. 18 D. Kolesch, “Ästhetik der Immersion:” 422. 19 K. Kwastek, “Immersed in Reflection? The Aesthetic Experience of Interactive Media Art,” in B. Dogramaci, F. Liptay, eds., Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media (Leiden, Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2016): 66-85. ANNETTE URBAN 119 AN-ICON  emptiness. In 3D-environments, straight lines serve as ge- neric framework of spaces, which, through texturing and mapping, also directly emerge from images. Of particular interest is whether this linear ab- stractness is at the same time getting practicable in the course of the (manual) navigation through Polyviou’s and Menkman’s synthetic environments, enabled by the HMD with its tracking systems and hand-held controllers and by the maneuvers on the keyboard in the desktop-based versions. This passing through as the prevalent mode of VR-experience20 can be further clarified by (queer-)phenom- enological concepts of inhabiting space by taking directions and following lines, especially non-geometric entangled lines, giving high value to disorientation and turning toward objects as Sara Ahmed states.21 Insofar that this includes “lining ourselves up with the features of the grounds we in- habit, the sky that surrounds us, or the imaginary lines that cut through maps,”22 it already assumes a connection be- tween physical, expressly natural and virtual spaces which extends up to technically-based environments. In a similar vein, Tim Ingold explicitly considers lines as basic element of immersion responsible for an embedding into the life- world. For him, coming to life results from being “immersed in those generative currents”23 such as wind, for example, which also alters the state of man-made tools and techni- cal objects transcending a purely transitive use. Thereby Ingold’s concept of lines gains a potential for change and implies passages between the actual and the virtual.24 With their help, he problematizes objects understood as “dis- crete, finished entities” which he judges as a mere obstacle for drawing and “designing environmental relations.”25 Lines, 20 I use the terms VR-experience, VR-environments and VR-works as broad concepts also including desktop-based virtual environments which have an immersive character on their own. 21 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: 1-2. 22 Ibid.: 6. 23 T. Ingold, “Drawing Together:” 305. 24 Ingold’s repeated recourse to Deleuze/Guattari’s concept of the line of flight (ligne de fuite) remains beyond the scope of this article, but is worth following in M. De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005). 25 T. Ingold, M. Anusas, “Designing Environmental Relations: From Opacity to Textility,” Design Issues 29, no. 4 (2013): 58-69, 58. ANNETTE URBAN 120 AN-ICON  in contrast, as exemplified by the inseparable correlation of a river and its banks, are emblematic of correspondences and engender a different kind of thinking: “to correspond with [the waters] is to join this awareness with the flow.”26 They privilege an intransitive mode of “joining with” rather than “joining of.” Putting VR-Art on Exhibition When contemporary art today is testing the potentials of VR as an artistic medium, its borrowings from installation art are not exclusively motivated by the pragmatics of exhibiting in art museums. Many artists use this necessity for initiating ontological speculations on the continuum between virtual reality and the shared here and now in the museum. They intertwine the setting up of the interior pictorial world with the installative anchoring of the VR-experience in the exhibition space, thus producing their own form of potentiated environmentality connected to quite different strands of installative and site-related art. Here, only a brief comparison can point to how, in Banz & Bowinkel’s work Mercury (2017) (Fig. 1) for example, the filigree pavilion architecture that creates a second artificial habitat high above Planet Earth in the VR, extends into a metallic display for the processor and the second screen in the exhibition. And to another German VR-artist, Flori- an Meisenberg who chooses an illusionistic backdrop, as known from photo and film studios, to illusionistically em- bed the gesticulating wearer of the HMD into the abstract grid landscape of Superstudio’s 70s planetary architectural utopia. In both examples, the environments also serve to house other artworks. But instead of activating the institu- tional or archival concerns of installation art, they extend the artificially generated, often fictionalized world within the VR into the exhibition context which is more in line with the staging of illusionistic worlds by means of props in 26 T. Ingold, Knowing from the Inside: Correspondences, (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 2017): 41. ANNETTE URBAN 121 AN-ICON  cinema and cinematographic installation art. The VR-works by Polyviou and Menkman persue the reverse path and thus tend to the originally anti-immersive institution-reflex- ive branch: Their freely designable VR-worlds conversely borrow from physical exhibition spaces and their conven- tions of presenting items of cultural value which is worth questioning as another symptom of immersive normality and life worldly virtuality.27 Fig. 1a Fig. 1b Fig. 1a and 1b. Banz & Bowinkel, Mercury, 2016. VR installation, screen capture and installation shot, DAM Gallery, Berlin, 2017. Courtesy of the artists. Theodoulos Polyviou: Drifting, Browsing, Cruising (2021) Besides the issues of art presentation in the pandemic, that influenced both selected artworks, I ask more generally about the role of environmental virtuality in Polyviou’s and Menkman’s action-based and visual-spatial strategies28 of getting the recipient immersed in their work and thereupon re-perspectivize the question of institutional embedding. The first striking feature of Drifting, Browsing, Cruising created by Theodoulos Polyviou together with Eleni Diana Elia at the Centre for Art and Media, ZKM at Karls- ruhe/Germany, is certainly the ground plan true modeling of a computer-generated world based on a specific location 27 Cfr. S. Rieger, A. Schäfer, A. Tuschling, eds., Virtuelle Lebenswelten: Körper - Räume - Affekte (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2021). 28 Kwastek stresses that the action-based experience not necessarily needs visual-spatial illusion (Cfr. “Immersed in Reflection?:” 69), but both aspects are closely united here. ANNETTE URBAN 122 AN-ICON  within the museum. In summer 2021, visitors wearing HMD moved in situ through this doubled environment (Fig. 2-3). Since then, the work can be visited as only desktop-based VR on the online exhibition site fantastic confabulations, that reuses the digital replica of the space for further exhibitions. Contrary to enabling “spatiotemporal transpo- sition,” Polyviou uses VR for evoking a “hyper-awareness of the viewer as to where they are, and what they are doing.”29 That’s why he is re-situating VR-technology by establishing site-related connections to architecturally and historical- ly distinct places. But how is this intended sense of pres- ence, which implies situatedness and agency, created in the site-specific VR-installation at the ZKM? In contrast to many other of his works,30 any direct citation of a third auratic place and its cultural heritage is missing here. Polyviou obviously aims at the recognizability of the original museum space in 3D – the alignment of pillars typical of the former industrial building, the balustrade and the staircase leading to the open atrium as well as the glass partitions to the adjacent spaces are all faithfully reproduced. This makes the absence of the expected distinct artworks all the more noticeable. What one encounters inside, first of all appears as extensions of the serving architecture. The replicated pillars with spotlights are complemented by semicircular, half-height partitions as known from exhibition design. While these virtual supple- ments turn the clear cubic exhibition space into a cluttered and mysterious site, their freely curving floor plan lines re- appear as vinyl stripes on the ground of the physical space. 29 Th. Polyviou in A. Urban, “Virtual Spaces for Transformative Encounters and Vast Reciprocity - An Interview with Theodoulos Polyviou and Jazmina Figueroa,” in L. Nolasco- Rózsás, ed., Beyond Matter, Within Space: Curatorial and Art Mediation Techniques on the Verge of Virtual Reality (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2023): 429-443, 432. 30 See for example the installation Transmundane Economies (2022) at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, with references to the ruins of the Bellapais monastery in the north of Cyprus. ANNETTE URBAN 123 AN-ICON Fig. 2a Fig. 2c Fig. 2b Fig. 2d Fig. 2a, 2b, 2c and 2d T. Polyviou, Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, 2021. Site-specific VR installation, in cooperation with Eleni Diana Elia, installations shots and VR captures (details), ZKM, Karlsruhe 2021. Courtesy of the artists. © Eleni Diana Elia and Theodoulos Polyviou © Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), photo by Tanja Meissner. Produced in the framework of the Beyond Matter Residency Program at ZKM | Karlsruhe. This interplay between paradoxical emptiness and spatial density not only subverts the usual aesthetic experience in art museums with its orientation towards a singled-out art object. The directionality of the space image as an action image, theorized by Stephan Günzel in the context of gaming, where only objects centered in the field of vision can become the object of action,31 also remains unexploited. Instead, the environment privileges spatial exploration and confronts with the paradox phys- icality of its virtual architecture that, like the impermeable built world, diverts the users’ bodies. Without any avatarial 31 Cfr. S. Günzel, “Vor dem Affekt: die Aktion - Emotion und Raumbild,” in G. Lehnert, ed., Raum und Gefühl: Der Spatial Turn und die neue Emotionsforschung (Bielefeld: transcript- Verlag, 2014): 63-74, 67-68. ANNETTE URBAN 124 AN-ICON  representation, their self-perception entirely depends on bodily correlations with the labyrinthine environment, that additionally applies sensory stimuli and atmospheric im- mersion32 including artificial billowing fog on the floor, a sound backdrop and hall lights converted into dramatic illuminations. Thus, the functional architecture that sublim- inally remains perceptible through its calibration with the virtual space, shifts to a fictionalized, suspenseful backdrop that awaits its narration. Priority has the increased intensi- ty of experience typical for spatial-immersive installations and one-sided de-distancing. But the artificial environment here also requires an action- and reflection-based attitude thanks to the latency of its speculative and operable ob- jects and thus enacts a highly sensuous, performative form of site-related institutional critique. This comes into action when the foggy atmosphere transforms the built-in walls into jagged rock formations, thereby unifying different mate- rialities in one unstable image-object, or when the flashing spotlights and the variable angle of view instantly turn a black surface into a three-dimensional hide-away (Fig. 3). In addition, the windows that in fact only sepa- rate the next exhibition space, virtually open onto an equally artificial purple exterior, imitating a dramatic skylight. Its emptiness suspends the virtual exhibition space with its balustrades and staircase in an indefinite void, so that the emphasized inside-outside difference gives this VR-topos of floatation an institution-critical side. While Polyviou’s en- vironment is housed/hosted by the museum, it also nests there as an invisible counter-place that virtually undermines the physicality of the institution.33 And by penetrating the interior of the virtual environment, the shadows of the grid windows cite the linear structure of computed space. But this space loses the evenness secured by optical projec- tion when the grid lines synthesize the floor with the pillars to one continuous surface. It thus foreshadows a virtual 32 Cfr. also R. Eugeni, G. Raciti, eds., “Atmosfere mediali,” VCS Visual Culture Studies. Rivista semestrale di cultura visuale, no. 1 (November 2020). 33 Cfr. Th. Polyviou in A. Urban, “Virtual Spaces for Transformative Encounters and Vast Reciprocity:” 430. ANNETTE URBAN 125 AN-ICON Fig. 3a Fig. 3c Fig. 3b Fig. 3a, 3b and 3c T. Polyviou, Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, 2021. Site-specific VR installation, in cooperation with Eleni Diana Elia, VR captures (details), ZKM, Karlsruhe 2021. Courtesy of the artists. © Eleni Diana Elia and Theodoulos Polyviou © Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), Produced in the framework of the Beyond Matter Residency Programat ZKM | Karlsruhe. substantiality beyond the clear differentiation of distinct things and deprived of the stability of usual grounds. This exacerbates the insecurity of the orienta- tion-seeking users who navigate their invisible body through the confusing narrowness of fixtures, pseudo-functional handrails and hall lights. However, this staged reduction of distance is not simply overwhelming. The ambiguous virtual objects also ensure that, by “gather[ing] on the ground,” – as Sara Ahmed has noted – “they create a ground upon which we can gather.”34 Indeed, the mixed environment unites online as well as HMD users whose actions in the physical terrain marked with stripes are simultaneously observed by the museum visitors. Even without direct references to sacred architecture, Polyviou thus links the 34 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: 1. ANNETTE URBAN 126 AN-ICON  VR-typical passing through with a quasi-ritualized use of space. Alison Griffith has already tied back a counter-his- tory of immersive spectatorship in the museum not only to the panorama, science museum, and planetarium, but also to the cathedral.35 In Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, mnemonic mental images ensure the combination of action-based with cognitive immersion, because the disoriented wandering takes place through the comparison of constantly shifting, remembered spaces. When Polyviou decisively theorizes this ritualization as base for a “queer togetherness,”36 this reconnects to the lines printed on the floor. Through their interference with the dense environment inside the VR, they emancipate themselves from the clear legibility as object contour and ground plan. They thus contribute to the cru- cial entanglement that, according to Ingold, gets the “living being […] as a bundle of [the] lines” 37 of its movement im- mersed in its lifeworld. Polyviou therefore stimulates bodily practices of losing oneself in artificially induced passions. The choreographed searching movements inside give the museum space an improvisational openness, while the calibration with the physical pillars and ground makes the VR-experience literally tangible. Environmental immersion here goes hand in hand with a reduction of difference that de-differentiates virtual and physical spaces, bodies and objects. Rosa Menkman: The BLOB of Im/Possible Images (2021) Rosa Menkman’s VR-experience also brings the categories of artwork and exhibition nearly into congruence. But, instead of eliminating distinct artworks, Menkman, for this purpose, departs from a veritable collection assembled under the title of Im/Possible Images (Fig. 4). She stores 35 Cfr. A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 36 “Drifting, Browsing, Cruising,” Fantastic Confabulations, https://fantastic-confabulations.beyondmatter.eu/drifting-browsing-cruising/index.html, accessed December 29, 2022. 37 T. Ingold, “Drawing Together:” 300. ANNETTE URBAN 127 AN-ICON  Fig. 4 Fig. 4. R. Menkman, The BLOB of Im/possible Images, 2021. Desktop-based virtual environment, accessible on the platform New Art City. Courtesy of the artist. this collection on the widely used VR-art platform New Art City where she designed a complex desktop-based virtual environment that shows an enclosed grayish scenery with a staircase, a huge resolution-chart, a humanoid figure and a second free-floating structure pierced by diagonals. Ini- tially hidden from view, the collected images are sheltered inside this amorphous cloud, revealing themselves when one navigates through the permeable sheathing. The nest- ed structure alludes to the titular BLOB with its polysemy of digital blob architecture, the single-celled, ‘intelligent’ su- per-organism and Binary Large Objects as a technical term for databased image processing. And the exhibits that visi- tors have to deal with in this environment are mainly objects of knowledge accessible only through representation, so a reference to their theorizations by Hans-Jörg Rheinberg- er and Susan Leigh Star/John Griesemer is suggested.38 Menkman thus borrows from the realm of scientific images, which has been a central field of debate and self-defini- tion for digital art from the very beginning. She delegates the act of imagining and selecting them by realizing a sur- vey during her Arts at Cern/Collide Barcelona-Residency, asking the researchers what image of a relevant object or 38 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2015): 19-58. ANNETTE URBAN 128 AN-ICON  phenomenon they would capture if “limits of spatial, tem- poral, energy, signal/noise or cost resolutions”39 were irrel- evant. In other words, this variability of resolution results in products of imagineering and touches on phenomena that are decoupled from humans’ experience, escaping their commonly perceived environmentalities. But these phenomena can be mediated by virtual body-environment relations, which conversely force a changed understanding of (aesthetic) experience, as discussed by Roberto Diodato with reference to John Dewey.40 The choice of the nuclear physicists as experts in im/possible images endow the virtual as epistemic objects with a specific latency and scientificity. The referents of their proposed images mostly elude the objecthood familiar to mankind and have nothing in common with the medium-sized “things of the earth’s surface” as characterized by the Gestalt psychologist Fritz Heider.41 Two important aspects shared with Polyviou’s example promise additional insights into the workings of environmental immersion. Firstly, this concerns the embed- ding into abstractness, which goes along with a space that loses its conventional categories and thus favors immersion through the withdrawal of the usual parameters of orienta- tion. This not only stems from the arbitrary laws of physical- ity in VR, but also from a different kind of world reference in ‘virtual bodies environments’, which Diodato emphasizes: “In this intermediary world space itself is the result of inter- activity.”42 In Menkman’s case, the intensified experience is generated not so much by a condensed, labyrinthine spatiality as by the enhanced self-reflexivity of navigation itself. Both, the VR-environment The BLOB of Im/Possible Images and the related video-work Whiteout showing a tour in Harz mountains in heavy snow, deal with the ex- perience in a markerless space tending to exceed human 39 R. Menkman, “The BLOB of Im/possible Images” https://newart.city/show/menkman-blob-of-im-possibilities, accessed December 30, 2022. 40 Cfr. R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: Towards an Aesthetics of Relations (Cham: Springer, 2021): 56. 41 Cited after G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 38. 42 R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: 61. ANNETTE URBAN 129 AN-ICON  senses and erase most thingness. Second, the comparison with Drifting, Browsing, Cruising is based on the re-phys- icalization of the VR-works in the exhibition format. Rosa Menkman conceived a carefully designed exhibition display for a 2021 group show at Munich where she reconnected the VR-experience to the physical space with the help of lines. While in Polyviou’s example the plotting of isomorphic virtual and physical elements onto a planimetric floor plan retains a relative object character, Menkman starts from abstract lines as axes of graphs and coordinate systems. They guide the exploration of the virtual world inside and also mark the thresholds of iconic representation. Touching on signal spectra, digital states and im/material energetic flows, they bring forth what Ingold sees otherwise negated by the regime of solidified things. Within the VR, the resolution chart erected next to the figurine is particularly telling of how Menkman translates resolution into space, taking advantage of the orthogonality of digital as “rasterized […] images” based on a “grid of picture elements or pixels,”43 that, according to Francesco Casetti and Antonio Somaini, also possess a specific plasticity. By mapping the gray structure of the internal blob with the diagonals and its one black anchor point, the resolution chart pretends to guide the VR-user searching to enter this enclosure. Yet, despite the lines piercing the amorphous volume, the chart does not reveal any information about the interior. The charted scales and frequency ranges unmistakably mark this second blob as an image-object of the same digital fabric as the abstractly textured body of the figurine besides, Menkman’s Angelus Novus emblematic for the reversal of gaze regimes. This co-presence of image-objects and -subjects made of dis- torted black-white stripes strongly signals the de-differ- entiation of most diverse entities. The appearance of the things is flexibilized to such a degree that their self-identity 43 F. Casetti, A. Somaini, “Resolution: Digital Materialities, Thresholds of Visibility,” NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies 7, no. 1 (2018): 87-103. ANNETTE URBAN 130 AN-ICON  is disposable and their recognition depends on the user’s bodily action (Fig. 5). Fig. 5a Fig. 5b Fig. 5a and Fig. 5b .R. Menkman, The BLOB of Im/possible Images, 2021, Desktop-based virtual environment, accessible on the platform New Art City, screenshots by the author. Courtesy of the artist. ANNETTE URBAN 131 AN-ICON  As soon as the user has traversed the opaque but permeable grayish membrane of the blob, the envi- ronment transforms into a dark sphere with mystic sound where the im/possible images are scattered in an unmea- surable distance. When the wandering user is attracted by small luminous dots that, up close, turn out to represent the Pale Blue Dot aka Planet Earth, taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 for example, or a Quantum Vacuum, quarks inside of a proton, a shadow of a black hole and a body scan of the interior of a wrist, she/he is once again less guided by the affordances of gaming. To remind Günzel, its “fixed-par- anoid perspective” turns objects into action carriers by shifting them to the center of the image; but here, only the paranoid dimension of permanent searching seems to en- dure “through which the objects in the virtual off must be transferred into actualization.”44 As Roberto Diodato notes with reference to Bernard Stiegler and Richard Grusin, in view of the prevailing premediation techniques and an al- ready thoroughly hypermediated world, it is necessary for the techno-artistic creation of virtual spacetime environ- ments to break the merely adaptive behavior pattern of supposedly active cognitive agents.45 Beyond the gaming attitude running into the void, it is the habits of museum spectators that help surprisingly well – right down to the work texts that pop up on approach. But, of course, the concept of the mimetic image is challenged here by the assembled nuclear- and astrophysical phenomena at the limits of what can still be captured by light or other wave- lengths. Menkman succeeds in staging the uncertain status of such objects of knowledge, which only move into the rank of the existent through new technologies of detection, by making use of the peculiarities of virtual objecthood. This starts with the all-round perspectivability and resulting form variance of the virtual exhibits already known from sculp- ture, joined here by their free scalability and permeability 44 S. Günzel, “Vor dem Affekt:” 68. 45 Cfr. R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: 64-65. ANNETTE URBAN 132 AN-ICON  in direct interaction with the user navigating their invisible bodies through space. The skinned wrist, for example, hits the viewer in powerful plasticity or just hangs in space as flatware, depending on the point of entry into the enclosure of the im/possible images, the viewing angle and proximity to the item. This form of distance reduction self-reflexively combines seeing and (inter-)acting. The less complete im- mersion of desktop-based VR is compensated for by the tactility of maneuvering with arrow keys or touchpad, which transfers its sensation of handling to the virtual objects. Menkman experiments here with re-introducing into art the more immersive displays of the natural history museum,46 whose never-broken connection to science is recalled by Christiane Voss’ reflections on the medium of exhibition,47 and appropriates the knowledge exhibition format. In this setting, barely tangible phenomena such as black holes, dark matter and other galaxies become manageable as in a laboratory that, in terms of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, only brings epistemic things into existence.48 The nested spatial structure of the BLOB in- creases this epistemic valence because it invites for re- peating those transformative immersive crossings from one internal sphere to the next. Outside the encapsulated image collection, the latency of objects is provided by the poly- gon meshes patterned with black/whites lines reminiscent of military dazzle camouflage49 that acts as de-distancing tool precisely by preventing its correct estimation. Instead of simulating natural light conditions, as it often serves to catalyze the atmospheric immersion of a perfected VR, the moiré reveals another form of apparitional fluidity. Con- stantly changing with the user’s movement, the texture shows a pulsating im/materiality that already withdraws at the surface. It seems close to Ingold’s and Ansusas’s notion of infrastice that includes “all manner of electrical, 46 Cfr. A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine. 47 Cfr. C. Voss, “Das Museum als Medium der Kunst,” in G. W. Bertram, S. Deines, D. M. Feige, eds., Die Kunst und die Künste: Ein Kompendium zur Kunsttheorie der Gegenwart (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021): 464-483, 474. 48 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 35. 49 My thanks go to Manuel van der Veen for this reference and the exchange about the text. ANNETTE URBAN 133 AN-ICON  Fig. 6 R. Menkman, The Im/possible BLOB, 2021. Installed at Temporal Stack: the Deep Sensor in Guizhou, China, curated by Iris Long und HE Zike, 2021. Courtesy of the Artist. chemical, and mechanical workings […], energies, gases, and fluids”50 and resists the useability of surfaces solely understood as interfaces. Finally, the artist also uses these textures, as well as the abstract lines of graphs as vehicle for transfer- ring the virtual into physical space. For a presentation of The BLOB at Gizhou/China (Fig. 6), the dynamic black/white pattern has been transformed into a wallpaper. This exhi- bition design attaches more to the cinematically inspired strategy of extending the fictional-scenic image space in- side the VR into an overall immersive installation. But there, without the operability of latent virtual objects, it tends to unrealize the museum with its psychotic pattern. In con- trast, for a group exhibition in Munich that combined the VR-experience and the video Whiteout with works by Memo Akten, Susan Schuppli and others, Menkman materialized the abstract lines from inside the BLOB (Fig. 7). They es- tablished a 3D-framework in physical space whose white, green, red, yellow and blue diagonals traversed the floor and walls of the exhibition hall,51 thus slightly removing it from orthogonality. As these lines are imagined to shift the 50 T. Ingold, M. Anusas, “Designing Environmental Relations:” 58. 51 Cfr. L. Gross, R. Menkman, L 13: Reader NR 4 im/possible images (München: Lothringer 13 Halle, 2022) https://beyondresolution.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/ Catalogues%2Fimpossible_L13_READER.pdf, accessed April 25, 2023. ANNETTE URBAN 134 AN-ICON  Fig. 7d Fig. 7b Fig. 7c Fig. 7a Fig. 7 a-d. Views of the Exhibition Im/possible Images, at the Lothringer 13 Halle, Munich, 2021, curated by Rosa Menkman. Photo by Dominik Gigler. Courtesy of the artist and of Lothringer 13 Halle. ANNETTE URBAN 135 AN-ICON  spectra of resolution – a borderline to “low fidelity images” was inscribed on the floor –, the artist transformed the built into a “latent image space.”52 Similar to the VR, I would add, the solidity of its objects becomes doubtful, when variable parameters of the perceptible and representable always help other visualities and entities to emerge. With this kind of environmentalization, Menkman de-hierarchizes an ever-higher resolution, that regulates access to more and more details and therefore, according to Casetti and Somaini, raises the power question of control.53 In the Mu- nich exhibition, some of the im/possible images from the BLOB (re-)materialized as exhibits, among them a photo of the skinned hand scan or a newspaper clipping with an x-rayed hand from 1896. But, by placing them along the resolution lines, theses factual images remain suspended in an abstract space of potentialities. In sum, the exhibition display was activated as an integral component not princi- pally distinguished from what is constitutive for the ‘work.’ Potentiated Environmentalization As shown so far, the multiplication of environ- ments inherent in VR-art results from its genuine blurring of the differences between work and environment. This gen- erative logic of further nesting necessarily brings the whole institutional and curatorial ecosystem of VR-art into view. And the extension of the internal installation aesthetics not only counteracts its technically-based encapsulation. It is also essential for not missing the togetherness54 – to cite Mieke Bal – of an exhibition which, according to Christiane Voss, is the medium that establishes the works’ mode of existence as art in the first place.55 The Blob of Im/Possible Images, commissioned by the HeK Basel, was produced with the infrastructure of newart.city.org that provides a “virtual exhibition toolkit” 52 Cfr. R. Menkman, “Im/possible Images@Lothringer 13, Munich” https://beyondresolution.info/im-possible-images-1, accessed December 29, 2022. 53 Cfr. F. Casetti, A. Somaini, “Resolution:” 89. 54 Cfr. M. Bal, Exhibition-ism: Temporal Togetherness (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020). 55 Cfr. Voss, “Das Museum als Medium der Kunst:” 464. ANNETTE URBAN 136 AN-ICON  with “built-in tools to manage artworks and space layouts.”56 Menkman takes up its claims for a non-hierarchical co-cre- ation and invites the submission of further non-expert im/ possible images. Later on, the work has been embedded into a virtual, but spatial exhibition curated by Lívia No- lasco-Rózsás and Giulia Bini for the ZKM in 2021, which pushes the tendencies towards nesting and de-differen- tiation even further: Spatial Affairs. Worlding is inhabited by artworks, an exhibition display and visitors sharing the same organic-abstract shape. One can only distinguish the non-humanoid avatars of other visitors from exhibits through distance-reduction and the object-related action of a mouse click. The latter then turn into pink and, via an info window and links, lead the web-user to the works stored on artists’ website or platforms. By interpreting environmental- ization in terms of worlding, the curators participate in the posthumanist renewal of the phenomenological critique of the world as sum of objects. The multi-user online world with its identical, modular entities first hides the exhibition behind the supposed affordances of gaming and chats. However, the transitions between the environmental exhi- bition and environmental works are designed less immer- sively – like portals in gaming or falling down the rabbit-hole known from literature – than through paratextual framings operated by non-natural manual interfaces. The online exhibition site fantastic confabu- lations that hosts Drifting, Browsing, Cruising was also conceived by Polyviou together with Jasmina Figueora as artists in residence of the same research project Beyond Matter. Instead of nesting spaces, it deals with the gener- ic, serial tendency of self-continuation by inviting to reuse the initial 3D-reconstruction of the ZKM balcony for sub- sequent projects such as realized by Figueroa who mod- eled her spoken words and sound scores by the visitors’ movements through the virtual site. Following Ahmed, this 56 Cfr. “About New Art City,” https://info.newart.city/about, accessed December 28, 2022. ANNETTE URBAN 137 AN-ICON  implies not only a model for self-determined curation, but also a form of environmental co-habitation. Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás argues for the museum in the virtual condition as a “cognitive system”57 including non-human actors, thereby reaccentuating the pioneering thought exhibitions [Gedankenausstellungen] initiated by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour. Polyviou’s example gets by without its strong archival underpinning. In the functional architecture, his staging of an atmospherically condensed counterworld aims at releasing a different bodily knowledge of possible encounters and envisions a counter-physicality for transcending the otherwise hard-to-move institution. The curved lines on the ground echoing the paths inside the VR offer their own transformative knowledge of entan- glement that is experienced and produced environmentally. In comparison, Menkman directly invests into the potential of virtual as epistemic and aesthetic objects. Their robust- ness and simultaneously plasticity reminds the capability of Star’s and Griesemer’s boundary objects to make agents of different groupings,58 in this case those of art and science, meet. What Doris Kolesch has in mind with a normalized immersion in not only technologically-enclosed but every- day spaces, can also be true for VR-based environmental- ization. De-differentiation and de-distancing are then not contradictions to but catalysts of immersive reflection. 57 L. Nolasco-Rózsás, Y. Hofmann, “The Museum as a Cognitive System of Human and Non- Human Actors,” The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums & Culture, no. 3 (2021): 1-15. 58 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 33-34. ANNETTE URBAN 138 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

anicon

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19726

Immersivity as An-immersivity by Stefano Velotti Ordinary and immersive experience Virtual reality and art Experience economy Control Uncontrollability Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Immersivity as An-immersivity STEFANO VELOTTI, Sapienza. Università di Roma – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9421-0257 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19726 Abstract The title of this project, “An-icon,” refers to “im- ages that deny themselves.” Virtual reality may be viewed as a typical, though not exclusive, case able to illustrate this kind of image: we know we have crossed the threshold of an environment that consists of images (ontologically), but we experience it (phenomenologically) as if it were a real environ- ment. Something similar can be said about immersivity, but reversing the perspective: we are (ontologically) immersed in reality (virtual or non-virtual), but (phenomenologically) we know and say we are, and for this very reason we reject the idea that we are simply immersed in an environment. This applies first and foremost to our experience in general, regardless of the status of the experiences we gain through virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR). And yet, within this very general condition, human beings have over time created environments and works that carve out zones of “special immersivity,” so to speak, dedicated to immersion. What are we looking for in VR immersivity? Are new immersive technologies merely refinements of older tech- niques, or can they affect our relationship with ourselves, reality, and others in novel ways? What are artistic practices called on to do when faced with such new technological practices? Keywords Ordinary and immersive experience Virtual reality and art Experience economy Control Uncontrollability To quote this essay: S. Velotti, “Immersivity as An-immersivity,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 139-157, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19726. STEFANO VELOTTI 139 AN-ICON  An-Immersivity The title of this project, “An-icon,” refers to “im- ages that deny themselves.” Virtual reality may be viewed as a typical, though not exclusive, case able to illustrate this kind of image: we know we have crossed the threshold of an environment that consists of images (ontologically), but we experience it (phenomenologically) as if it were a real environment. Something similar can be said about immer- sivity, but reversing the perspective: we are (ontologically) immersed in reality (virtual or non-virtual), but (phenomeno- logically) we know and say we are, and for this very reason we reject the idea that we are simply immersed in an envi- ronment. If we were, we would have no way of becoming aware of this. In fact, to speak of immersivity, we must find our balance on an unstable boundary, which allows us to recognize the encompassing and intrascendible character of immersive experience while at the same time belying its closure, piercing it from within. To speak of immersivity therefore implies recognizing that one is in a condition of “an-immersivity,” where the hyphen separating and joining the privative prefix “an” to “immersivity” is the sign of a paradox. It could also be said that the hyphen evokes the figure of an unstable threshold, referring to the co-presence of inside and outside.1 This applies first and foremost to our experience in general, regardless of the status of the experiences we gain through virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR). “Special immersivity” Before even considering the complexities and opportunities of virtual immersivity, it should be noted that 1 In this I am comforted by the title of A. Pinotti’s fine book, Alla soglia dell’immagine: Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Turin: Einaudi, 2021). STEFANO VELOTTI 140 AN-ICON  immersivity presents itself first and foremost as a feature of our being in the world: we are always already immersed in experience, in a given situation part of an indeterminate totality. Where else could we be? And yet, within this very general condition, human beings have over time created environments and works that carve out zones of “special immersivity,” so to speak, dedicated to immersion, with different modalities, complexities, techniques, functions, and meanings, many of which – the earliest – tend to be beyond our understanding and perhaps always will. Is it possible that the insistent recourse to “(special) immersivity” arises especially at times of deep crisis, when the very foundations of a civilization are felt to be uncertain, invested with a high rate of contingency?2 To simplify: since forms of life do not allow us to feel at home in this world, which seems to have become foreign, indecipherable and threatening, one is drawn to limited and controlled spaces in which to immerse oneself, to feel more alive and safe, at least for a while. I think this perspective is plausible, though it is partial and, indeed, a simplification. What else are we looking for in VR immersivity? Are new immersive technologies merely refinements of older tech- niques, or can they affect our relationship with ourselves, reality, and others in novel ways? What are artistic practices 2 O. Grau, From Illusion to Immersion (2001), trans. G. Custance (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003) offers a historical survey of artworks aimed at providing immersive experiences. In recent decades, however, interest in Paleolithic and “cave art” has been rekindled outside the circle of specialists as well, both as such – see, e.g., G. Rigal, Le temps sacré des cavernes (Paris: Corti, 2016) – and in relation to contemporary art, to this regard see again Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine (especially the section on “Avatāra” in ch. V). Cfr. also M. Stavrinaki, Saisis par la préhistoire: Enquête sur l’art et le temps des modernes (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2019) and in particular the pages devoted to Frederick Kiessler’s Endless House and Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio’s Caverna dell’antimateria. Both of these works, created in the late 1950s, reflect the anguish connected to the atomic bomb, at that time perceived as a looming threat, later forgotten but always resurgent. The short-circuit between contemporary art and the Paleolithic seems to be related to the perception of a profound change in a civilization, if not its end, and thus to a need to revisit its origins, as if one had to start over. In this regard, in addition to a number of works of visual art that explicitly harken back to the Paleolithic, see also Richard Powers’ symptomatic novel Plowing the Dark (2000), which I have analyzed in S. Velotti, “Art in the time of Pandemic: Three Terms,” Paradigmi 39, no. 1 (2021): 127-140. STEFANO VELOTTI 141 AN-ICON  called on to do when faced with such new technological practices? Nowadays the adjective “immersive” is used obsessively in the presentation of theme parks and other sensational “adventures” or “experiences” that promise to take us “inside” paintings and frescoes or into physi- cally inaccessible places. The word invariably appears in the press releases of museums, exhibitions, performances, installations, but also in advertisements for apartments for sale or wine and food itineraries.3 One way to understand the meaning of the word is “proof of the opposite:” what, for example, would a “non-immersive” visit to an apartment look like? Hard to answer, unless we specify restrictive conditions for what is meant by immersivity. Used loosely, however, “immersive” risks being meaningless since its negation does not seem to change anything. And yet it is precisely for this reason that it is an enigmatic adjective, hovering like an obscure object of desire in our social imag- ination. Are we therefore to conclude that the attribution of immersivity is in vain since it neither adds nor detracts from the characterization of experience? I don’t think so. However, we must first clarify in what sense each of our ex- periences is both immersive and non-immersive, or, indeed, “an-immersive.” On this basis it will be easier to ask what peculiar traits are offered by the different uses of “special immersivity,” by this form of reality that is VR, particularly in relation to art, which, if it is anything, is a way of under- standing how we place ourselves in the world. 3 A real estate agency in Rome advertises its luxurious apartments in the Parioli district with the following words, “Enjoy an immersive experience! Come visit your new home.” The real estate company is called Pitagora because it is located near Piazza Pitagora, not because it is referencing the Greek philosopher; however, the agency’s slogan is “Pitagora – the philosophy of living.” Which, supposedly, explains its “unique and iconic character.” As for food and wine itineraries, one can visit, for example, “The Temple of Brunello” in Montalcino (Tuscany), which actually offers “a station with VR viewers called InVolo” that “allows visitors to immerse themselves in the villas, castles, vineyards and hamlets that dot the municipality’s vast and diversified area,” https://www.orodimontalcino.it/tempio-del-brunello/, accessed December 24, 2022. STEFANO VELOTTI 142 AN-ICON  Fish and amphibians At first glance, one would be tempted to say that we human animals are like fish immersed in water – to quote a famous apologue by David Foster Wallace about the difficulty of grasping the medium in which we are im- mersed: an old fish asks two young fish, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” and they in turn ask themselves, “What the hell is water?”4 The element in which we are immersed is in this sense a medium that cannot be iconized or repre- sented. In one respect, it is undeniable that we are always already situated, immersed in a concrete environment that resists iconic reduction. On the other hand, one must ask whether asserting this undeniable condition of immersion does not imply a partial denial of it. The simplest critiques of a representational model of the mind often target a naive idea of representa- tion, one that can be imagined as a frame or filter interposed between us and things, constituted by the spatio-temporal forms of intuition or by a priori categories, universal or cul- turally determined conceptual schemes. Access to reality “in itself” is therefore denied to us, because according to this account reality is always filtered through (inter)subjective lenses. On the complementary plane of our actions and productions we have mental representations enclosed in our head that we then try to externalize, technically, artis- tically or in other ways. Various versions of enactivism oppose this view of the representational mind, rightly insisting that percep- tion is an active way of exploring the material and social environment in which we are immersed, of experiencing affordances and building skills, not a way of corresponding 4 D. Foster Wallace, This is Water, 2005. Commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College, https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/, accessed December 28, 2022. STEFANO VELOTTI 143 AN-ICON  more or less correctly to an already organized world.5 Not least because, in order to see whether our representations “correspond” to the world, we would need to be able to have unfiltered access to reality. On another front, anti-rep- resentationalism is also endorsed by those who replace representations with immanent flows and forces, or who propose that we think of ourselves as “things among things,” according to a “flat ontology” devoid of anthropocentric hi- erarchies, where all entities are equally agents and patients, from stones to plants, from artifacts to animals. Yet, both the idea of a representational filter and the various versions of absolute immersivity run into the same problem: if we think these ideas and formulate them linguistically, as in fact we do, then they are self-con- tradictory. If they are true, then they are false.6 For if we experienced the world through a filter, we would have to see the world, ourselves and the filter with a view from nowhere. And if on the other hand it were true, as in some ways it is true, that we are always immersed in a translucent medium like fish in water, we could not communicate this. We would just be immersed. The fact is that we discover ourselves immersed and emerged at the same time, more amphibian than fish. We realize that we see and do not see a frame, that we remain on this side of a threshold knowing that we cannot cross it and therefore crossing it.7 Toward where? Toward an infinitely expandable context, the inde- terminable totality of every possible experience in which 5 Cfr. J. Stewart, O. Gapenne, E. A. Di Paolo, Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). For a recent survey of enactivism in relation to cultural contexts see C. Durt, T. Fuchs, C. Tewes, eds., Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2017). 6 Here I broadly trace the exposition of the paradoxes of experience articulated by E. Garroni, Estetica: Uno sguardo-attraverso (Milan: Garzanti, 1992). 7 Christian Stiegler acknowledges the liminality of the “liquid spaces” in which we are immersed, but then seems to unilaterally emphasize the disappearance of all frames: “Liquid spaces are moments of uncertainty, instability, and fluidity in mediated experiences. They emerge as thresholds between the physical and the mediated. These spaces create the feeling of immersion even beyond the mediation by eliminating critical distance and dissolving the frames of media.” C. Stiegler, The 360° Gaze: Immersions in Media, Society, and Culture (London: MIT Press, 2021): 61. STEFANO VELOTTI 144 AN-ICON  we are already included, on whose horizon this determinate experience stands, which is such precisely insofar as it is “cut out” from that indeterminate and uncontrollable horizon of possibility. What McLuhan says about medial awareness – summarized in the famous “rearview-mirror” metaphor recalled by Pinotti – is therefore not entirely true: As long as s/he is immersed in a medium, the human being is as little aware of it as the fish of the water in which he swims. Only the moment that medium is overtaken by a later medium can it be retrospectively focused on and grasped precisely as the medium in which the experience had been organized: “we are always one step behind in our view of the world.”8 We do not need the appearance of another me- dium to know that we are not like fish in water: the possibil- ity of saying that we are is enough for us to prove ourselves wrong. Some philosophers, such as Thomas Nagel, have claimed that this condition of ours expresses “the absurd” of the human condition, which should be accepted with a little irony and without taking ourselves too seriously. In fact, unlike other animals that lack self-awareness and lan- guage, we cannot simply remain immersed and absorbed in our occupations, nor can we, however, install ourselves in a permanent emersion, in a transcendent dimension, be- cause even the mind of the mystic is still playing one of the possible games situated in the concreteness of experience, not an out-of-this-world “super game.” Because of this we are forced to accept this irreconcilable oscillation between immersion and emergence, adherence and detachment, 8 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: 17 [my translation]. STEFANO VELOTTI 145 AN-ICON  involvement in the ordinary tasks of life and the distance of a gaze that relativizes the latter or nullifies their importance.9 But is this really the case? What if, on the other hand, it were sometimes possible to make such indetermi- nate totality transit – analogically, symbolically – in concrete, determinate experience? What if things, practices, concrete experiences were given that exemplified the indeterminable and uncontrollable dimension against which they stand out? What if this were not only a source of disquiet (due to the feeling of being in touch with the uncontrollable), but also a sensible pleasure, deriving from the fact that our vitality, the feeling of being alive, is increased by the simultaneous co-presence of immersion and emergence? Perhaps this is one of the ways of approaching some particularly sensi- ble experiences, for example, those in which we recognize something as art: a set of practices, events or “things” that allow us to “see” (feel, experience, understand) the complex texture of our forms of life, our being in the world between immersion and emersion. Before trying to articulate these still vague statements, and precisely in relation to what we have called forms of “special immersivity,”10 it is necessary to go back to their homology with the an-immersivity of ordinary ex- perience, also from the point of view of its limitations. 9 T. Nagel, “The Absurd,” in Mortal Questions (London: Canto, 1979): 11-23. 10 It should be made clear from the outset that what I have called “special immersivity” is obtained with diverse and heterogeneous forms that can be sorted into categories. For an excellent survey of immersive forms of storytelling, see E. Modena, Nelle storie: Arte, cinema e media immersivi (Rome: Carocci, 2022). Ultimately, however, as far as artistic practices are concerned, it is the singularity of the work that must be taken into account. STEFANO VELOTTI 146 AN-ICON  Limits of immersivity Let us see the extent to which the experience of virtual immersivity, in its “special” meaning, can be equated with that of ordinary immersivity. The three characteristics of immersive VR, sum- marized by Pinotti, are (1) the saturation of the 360° gaze (“unframedeness”); (2) the feeling of presence, of “being there,” which can be further articulated as telepresence, selfpresence and social presence (“presentness”);11 (3) the experience of immediacy, due paradoxically to the great complexity of technological mediations that produce VR, making the medium as transparent as possible (“immedi- ateness”).12 It is easy to see that we could characterize our experience of the ordinary world using the same properties: nothing I see is potentially limited by a frame, I have the perception of “being here,” of presence, and my experience seems immediate, that is, unmediated by a medium that interferes with reality. But, one might say, if by hypothesis VR fulfills these promises to the point of pushing itself to (illusory) indistinguishability from reality, then – from a phe- nomenological, though not an ontological, point of view – we would be thrown back into the reality we already know, and – except for the advantageous uses of it, related to various forms of telepresence and simulation – the experi- ence we derive from it would be nothing new. Conversely, one can highlight the limits of these claims and emphasize the aspects that prevent illusion. Both perspectives, how- ever, are simplistic. VR is not equivalent to ordinary reality, nor are the limitations of VR absent in ordinary reality: 11 E. Pett, Experiencing Cinema: Participatory Film Cultures, Immersive Media and the Experience Economy (New York-London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 12 A. Pinotti, “Prologo,” in Alla soglia dell’immagine: xi-xviii. STEFANO VELOTTI 147 AN-ICON  ■- It is true that in VR the frame has disappeared, but in a sense it persists: I am wearing a headset and in the future I will perhaps wear a headband, or be fitted with an implant connected to my neurons. On the other hand, even here, now, in non-virtual reality, I am partially framed by the actions that brought me to a given place and situation (I am aware that I occupy a limited or “framed” portion of reality), by attention variously focused on the scenario in front of me or the task I set myself, but also by the “frames” studied by Erving Goffman and those we do not pay attention to because they are “hidden in plain sight.”13 ■- Presence, being here, cannot be doubted. I am not else- where, or at least no more than I am elsewhere when I am im- mersed in a virtual environment. ■- Finally, the apparent immediacy produced by innumerable technological mediations also characterizes my real experience: we know all too well that what is felt as natural,spontaneous, ob- vious is intertwined with acquired habits and artificial construc- tions and prosthetic extensions: the normative, the perceptual, proxemics, social mediations, and all the ways of acting of a certain form of life. So, those characteristics that serve to phenom- enologically distinguish the experience of a non-immersive image from an “an-iconic” immersive experience are not sufficient to distinguish the experience of immersive VR from that of ordinary reality. However, from here we cannot conclude that between “ordinary” immersivity and what we have called “special immersivity” there is no difference, not only on the ontological level, but also on the phenomeno- logical one. There are countless features of VR that distin- guish it from ordinary reality. The most obvious, related first and foremost to the dimension of space, is the possibility of 13 E. Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974) (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986); E. Zerubavel, Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). STEFANO VELOTTI 148 AN-ICON  becoming immersed in scenarios that cannot be found in ordinary reality or that would be impossible to experience because of scale or distance: entering an animal’s blood- stream or its brain, acting at a distance, traveling through a body. Also, there is the cognitive conflict between pro- prioception in the real world and that in the virtual world – walking on water or plunging into an abyss while remaining firmly on the ground but feeling a sense of vertigo and fear (or, vice versa, I am immersed in the “magic circle” of VR and have an accident in the ordinary world). I do not intend to try to list all the differences and perhaps imagine how some of them will be eliminat- ed or reduced by technological progress, integrating our other senses,14 nor do I intend to address all the possible ways of using VR, which is likely to become even more useful and indispensable in the future than it already is now for many of our practices, medical, architectural, forensic, social, professional, educational, recreational, and so on. Rather, here I intend to focus on what immersive VR can tell us about the human experience in general, drawing on the experience we sometimes have in our relationship with what we call artistic works or practices. “Experience economy” In the 1990s the idea gained ground – with anticipations already in the previous decades – that the economy most suited to our times – at least in the wealth- iest societies – is not so much based on the production of goods, or even on services, but on experience. In those years, expressions such as “Erlebnisgesellschaft,” “Erleb- nismarkt,” and “Dream Society” began to circulate, until James Gilmore and Joseph Pine II became the proudest 14 Cfr. R. DeSalle, Our Senses: An Immersive Experience (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2018). STEFANO VELOTTI 149 AN-ICON  proponents of the “Experience Economy” with a book that would have a certain fortune, followed by other volumes on related issues.15 The key to their thinking is stated in the preface to the 2011 updated edition of their The Experience Economy: So let us here be most clear: goods and services are no longer enough to foster economic growth, create new jobs, and maintain economic prosperity. To realize revenue growth and increased em- ployment, the staging of experiences must be pursued as a distinct form of economic output. Indeed, in a world saturated with largely undifferentiated goods and services the greatest opportunity for value creation resides in staging experiences.16 The market for goods is saturated, and produc- ers must offer products that promise to stage experiences. For this reason the watchwords are “mass customize,” i.e. transform every service into a unique (mass) experience; “work is theater,” i.e. “stage experiences” and train sellers in specific performance practices; and finally, ensure that the experience offered generates in the consumer (“pro- sumer” or “experiencer”) an actual change, which must be properly paid for: “these transformations should themselves command a fee in the form of explicitly charging for the demonstrated outcomes that result from the underlying experiences. [...] We especially challenge enterprises in three industries: those that focus on making people healthy, wealthy, and wise.”17 It would be all too easy to reiterate once again how the neoliberal creed attempts to infiltrate every aspect 15 G. Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft: Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main- New York: Campus-Verlag, 1993); R. Jensen, “Dream Society,” The Futurist 30, no. 3 (1996): 9-13; J. Gilmore and B.J. Pine II, The Experience Economy (1999) (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2011); J. Gilmore and B.J. Pine II, Authenticity. What Consumers Really Want (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007). 16 J. Gilmore and B.J. Pine II, “Preview to the Updated Edition: Beyond Goods and Services,” in The Experience Economy: ix-xxii, ix [emphasis mine]. 17 Ibid. STEFANO VELOTTI 150 AN-ICON  of human life, putting a price tag on it. Instead, I have men- tioned these marketing strategies to make some distinc- tions concerning the notion of experience. It is interesting to see how Gilmore and Pine respond to the obvious ob- jection that an experience purchased from a catalog is a fake experience. Their line of defense comes in the central chapter of their next book, Authenticity, in which they draw on some philosophical references to arrive at the following conclusion: there is no such thing as an inauthentic experience because ex- periences happen inside us. Therefore, we remain free to judge our experiences with any economic offering as authentic or not. Businesses that offer them therefore can, whether intentionally or by happenstance, gain the perception of authenticity. [...] Business- es can render their inauthentic offerings as authentic. Doing so requires embracing this essential paradox: all human enterprise is ontologically fake - that is, in its very being it is inauthentic - and yet, output from that enterprise can be phenomenologically real - that is, it is perceived as authentic by the individuals who buy it.18 The distinction between an ontological and a phenomenological point of view returns here in a particu- larly insidious way. For on the one hand, it is true that there is no class of “fake” immersive experiences ontologically distinct from a class of “authentic” immersive experiences. And the experience one has cannot be anything other than the experience of a subject, and in this sense it is obvious- ly subjective (which, however, does not necessarily mean that it is only “inside us”). Kant himself, who entrusted to the principle of the judgment of taste even the possibility of making sense of experience in general and building a 18 J. Gilmore, B. J. Pine II, “The Authenticity Paradox,” in Authenticity: 89-90, 89 [emphasis mine]. STEFANO VELOTTI 151 AN-ICON  system of nature, reiterated that I can judge anything aes- thetically, material or immaterial, and that my judgment depends on what “I make of this representation in my- self.”19 As is well known, however, Kant ascribed to such judgment a claim to “subjective universality” and “exem- plary necessity,” springing from a “free play” of imagination and understanding. In the perspective of the “experience economy,” what we witness is a caricature of these claims: the freedom-spontaneity of the free play of the faculties becomes the consumer’s “freedom of choice,” a psycho- logical choice expressed as a preference (however moti- vated or induced, as long as it has the desired effect). The impossibility of establishing ontologically distinct classes for what is “beautiful-sensible” and what is not is reduced to what the consumer “buys or doesn’t buy” (in both senses of the word). Since nothing escapes human intervention and thus technique and money, the Las Vegas hotel “The Vene- tian” and the city of Venice possess the same ontological status, that of both being “fakes.” The authenticity of an experience cannot therefore depend on “what” we experi- ence (everything is equally ontologically “fake”), but only on something that “happens inside us,” and can therefore be “phenomenologically real.” The singularity of experience is completely annulled, and every object, practice, situation is identical to any other, as long as it produces the same effect: a novel or a pill, a bump on the head or a movie, a concert or a wedding.20 There is no longer any trace of 19 “It is readily seen that to say that it is beautiful and to prove that I have taste what matters is what I make of this representation in myself, not how I depend on the existence of the object.” I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 5; 205. 20 Cfr. Wittgenstein’s objection to the idea of aesthetic experience conceived as an effect: “There is a tendency to talk about the ‘effect of a work of art’– feelings, images, etc. Then it is natural to ask: ‘Why do you hear this minuet?,’ and there is a tendency to answer: ‘To get this, and that effect.’ And doesn’t the minuet itself matter? – hearing this: would another have done as well? You could play a minuet once, and get a lot out of it, and play the same minuet another time and get nothing out of it. But it doesn’t follow that what you get out of it is then independent of the minuet.” L. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967): 29. STEFANO VELOTTI 152 AN-ICON  recourse to an elaboration by the subject, to the exercise of a “reflective faculty of judgment” (as distinct from the objectifying exercise of “determining judgment”), to show the impossibility of constructing classes of “beautiful” or meaningful things or experiences. Instead, once again, it is the “invisible hand” of the market that knows best how to allocate the “resource” of authenticity. The perspective of control On a photography information site, I find a re- view of Richard Avedon’s recent exhibition, Relationships (Palazzo Reale, Milan, September 22, 2022-January 29, 2023). The reviewer informs us right away that it is “an en- joyable immersive experience in the artist’s photographic universe.”21 What is of interest here, however, is not the indiscriminate use of the adjective, but one of the most famous quotes attributed to Avedon, which stands out in one of the rooms: “I think all art is about control – the en- counter between control and the uncontrollable.” Referred to photography, or to a certain way of doing photography, the statement easily lends itself to multiple interpretations.22 I believe, however, that Avedon was right: every art form is characterized by this encounter and, indeed, it could be argued that every experience worthy of the name is. This “encounter,” however, takes place less and less often in everyday life: control and self-control, exacer- bated also by digital technologies (surveillance, quantified self, digital self, etc.) seem to run more and more in parallel with an increasing loss of control (sense of powerlessness, 21 E. Dal Verme, “Richard Avedon: Relationships,” Fotografia.it (September 22, 2022), https://www.fotografia.it/articoli/opinioni/richard-avedon-relationships/, accessed January 5, 2023 [emphasis mine]. 22 Cfr., e.g., R. Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance (Cambridge MA-London: Harvard University Press, 2015) and some observations in S. Velotti, The Present of Photography and the Dialectics of Control, in M. Delogu, A. Dandini de Sylva, eds., Fotografia: Il presente (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2015): 21-29. STEFANO VELOTTI 153 AN-ICON  acting out, addictions, panic attacks, conspiracy theories etc.), without the two dimensions ever converging. Although often untied in our impoverished everyday life, the knot that ties control to uncontrollability is very complex and can- not be reduced to the “society of control” preconized by Deleuze.23 The problem is complex, but here, in conclusion, I would like to put forward only a few questions about con- trol in relation to “special immersivity,” or, more specifically, immersive art practices. On the one hand, the most mun- dane experiences of “special” immersivity are meant to be forms of sensational entertainment (Caravaggio experience and the like), or reassuring bubbles where all contact with what is uncontrollable and indeterminate is preemptively sterilized. On the other, they promise they will allow us to “get lost” in immersion. (Of course, there may also be a more subtle pleasure in “letting go,” relying on someone else’s control, as artist Janet Cardiff argues when speaking of her extraordinary AR “walks”24). However, this is an unresolved problem for the “experience economy,” which on the one hand wants the prosumer/experiencer to feel that he or she is in control of his or her own choices (with reference to the alternatives offered) to ensure their authenticity, and on the other hand knows that the provider must remain in control of this offer, if only to justify the fee the prosumer/experi- encer has to pay for it. There is nothing wrong with buying an “organized immersive adventure”– which may be fun, exciting, unusual – but the doubt remains: either it is not an adventure, or it is not organized. Even in valuable academic contributions, the question of control appears repeatedly, 23 Cfr. S. Velotti, Dialettica del controllo: Limiti della sorveglianza e pratiche artistiche (Roma: Castelvecchi, 2017); H. Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (2018), trans. J.C. Wagner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020). 24 C. Christov-Bakargiev, Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller (New York: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, 2003): 35. STEFANO VELOTTI 154 AN-ICON  yet without being thematized – it remains opaque, ambig- uous, if not contradictory.25 What if, instead, the “special” immersivity of VR were employed to reveal, by exemplifying it, the paradoxical an-immersivity of ordinary experience, usually overlooked or misunderstood? What if certain uses of “special” im- mersivity were able to bring out from within not the illusory simulation of ordinary reality “as it is,” perhaps displaced into fantastic scenarios, nor sensational and amazing expe- riences, but the most ordinary experience, making it visible and understandable as an “encounter” of controllability and uncontrollability? Then we would not only have a bubble, a vacation from ordinary space, an interruption in the web of a life lived obtusely, but also the concrete exemplification of the antinomian forces that render us alive: on the one hand, the need and satisfaction of exercising some control over ourselves, the world, and others – of being agents endowed with “efficacy,” not powerless and systematically frustrated agents. On the other, the equally essential need not to remain entrenched in such control, which can only become animated in the “encounter” with what is and re- mains uncontrollable: the indeterminate totality of experi- ence, the unpredictability of our multiple relationships, the infinitely rich grain of reality. Possible examples of such successful “en- counters” abound in contemporary art practices. Here I would like to cite just one, which I think is particularly signif- icant because of its apparent incongruity and which would 25 See for example C. Stiegler, The 360° Gaze: “If all the frames, stages, and technologies dissolve now, we are about to confuse different concepts of realities […] They emphasize the dissolution of boundaries and control”; but, at the same time, he writes that in the use of avatars “Nonhuman characters can activate the same emotional alignment and level of acceptance as human characters. Elena Kokkinara and Rachel McDonnell confirm that even though photorealistic imagery supports acceptance and engagement, authenticity depends much more ‘on the levels of perceived ownership and sense of control (agency) we feel towards this virtual character.’” Stiegler, The 360° Gaze: 92 [emphasis mine]. STEFANO VELOTTI 155 AN-ICON  deserve a much deeper analysis:26 about 50 years ago, an Australian theology professor, John M. Hull, noticed that he was going blind, and decided to tape-record a diary of this dramatic progression. In 1990, these recordings be- came an extraordinary book, Touching the Rock. An Ex- perience of Blindness. In the preface, Oliver Sacks wrote, quite rightly, that if Wittgenstein had gone blind, he would probably have written a similar book. A short film, a feature film and finally (in 2016) a virtual reality application, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness, are based on this book.27 It is “an experience” that takes place at the intersection of multiple authorships: Hull, the creators of the work in VR, and, it must be added, a partial interactivity on the part of the “experiencer.” The latter wears a binaural audio device – the same sound reproduction technique used by Cardiff for her assisted “walks” – coupled with a 360-degree VR headset. Beginning with Hull’s experience of blindness, the making, as well as the enjoyment of the experience, are the work of the “non-blind.” It is not about disavowing the tragedy of losing one’s sight, nor is it about telling a story of “redemption.” Rather, what happens is that the blindness of the person wearing the VR headset – and the related loss of control over the outside world – is not replaced by images aiming to immerse the person in a realistic, broadly illusionistic environment, but rather “into Darkness,” one of the most obvious manifestations of the loss of control over the environment. What we find in this VR, however, is not total darkness, but the disjointed and fragmented world described by Hull’s words. The apparent obviousness of ordinary visual perception is suspended. 26 See C. Roussel, “If Blindness Creates a New World,” CJDS 8, no. 6 (2019): 108-130, which documents and analyzes the genesis and structure of Notes on Blindness VR in the most comprehensive way. E. Modena, building on Roussel’s analysis, devotes some of the finest pages to it in her book Nelle storie: 84-87. See also the presentation of the project by A. Colinart, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im3CpA14jEQ, accessed January 8, 2023. 27 Cfr. e.g., A. Noë, Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). STEFANO VELOTTI 156 AN-ICON  It involves participating in the reconstitution of the unity of experience almost “from scratch,” which depends on acoustic signals that “bounce” back to us from objects if given certain environmental conditions: wind or rain make the world perceptible. Perceiving requires our activity, which is partially controllable, and a “collaboration” of the world that is usually beyond our control, i.e. weather events (in the app, the experiencer can control the triggering of such uncontrollable conditions). The idea that seeing is not ob- vious, that we need to learn how to do it actively, and that art is a way of “learning to look,” I think is right, as long as “looking” is translated into a more global “perceiving” extended to the whole body. What we see in the virtual scenario are not really images, in the sense of figures, but sketches, elusive and ghostly graphic patterns (like Kantian image-schemes)28 correlated to sound. A silent world would be dark. This reduction of figurativeness is much closer to a staging of our ordinary perception than any mimetic or fantastic imagery. Like blindness for the non-blind, our perceptual life in its entanglement with the world cannot be properly depicted visually. However, the suspension of ordinary sight opens up an understanding of a usually occluded perceptual experience, revealing, I believe, the paradoxical an-immersive interweaving of controllability and uncontrollability that constitutes us and toward which we are becoming increasingly blind. 28 E. Garroni, Immagine, linguaggio, figura (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2005). STEFANO VELOTTI 157 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

anicon

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19726

Immersivity as An-immersivity by Stefano Velotti Ordinary and immersive experience Virtual reality and art Experience economy Control Uncontrollability Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Immersivity as An-immersivity STEFANO VELOTTI, Sapienza. Università di Roma – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9421-0257 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19726 Abstract The title of this project, “An-icon,” refers to “im- ages that deny themselves.” Virtual reality may be viewed as a typical, though not exclusive, case able to illustrate this kind of image: we know we have crossed the threshold of an environment that consists of images (ontologically), but we experience it (phenomenologically) as if it were a real environ- ment. Something similar can be said about immersivity, but reversing the perspective: we are (ontologically) immersed in reality (virtual or non-virtual), but (phenomenologically) we know and say we are, and for this very reason we reject the idea that we are simply immersed in an environment. This applies first and foremost to our experience in general, regardless of the status of the experiences we gain through virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR). And yet, within this very general condition, human beings have over time created environments and works that carve out zones of “special immersivity,” so to speak, dedicated to immersion. What are we looking for in VR immersivity? Are new immersive technologies merely refinements of older tech- niques, or can they affect our relationship with ourselves, reality, and others in novel ways? What are artistic practices called on to do when faced with such new technological practices? Keywords Ordinary and immersive experience Virtual reality and art Experience economy Control Uncontrollability To quote this essay: S. Velotti, “Immersivity as An-immersivity,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 139-157, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19726. STEFANO VELOTTI 139 AN-ICON  An-Immersivity The title of this project, “An-icon,” refers to “im- ages that deny themselves.” Virtual reality may be viewed as a typical, though not exclusive, case able to illustrate this kind of image: we know we have crossed the threshold of an environment that consists of images (ontologically), but we experience it (phenomenologically) as if it were a real environment. Something similar can be said about immer- sivity, but reversing the perspective: we are (ontologically) immersed in reality (virtual or non-virtual), but (phenomeno- logically) we know and say we are, and for this very reason we reject the idea that we are simply immersed in an envi- ronment. If we were, we would have no way of becoming aware of this. In fact, to speak of immersivity, we must find our balance on an unstable boundary, which allows us to recognize the encompassing and intrascendible character of immersive experience while at the same time belying its closure, piercing it from within. To speak of immersivity therefore implies recognizing that one is in a condition of “an-immersivity,” where the hyphen separating and joining the privative prefix “an” to “immersivity” is the sign of a paradox. It could also be said that the hyphen evokes the figure of an unstable threshold, referring to the co-presence of inside and outside.1 This applies first and foremost to our experience in general, regardless of the status of the experiences we gain through virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR). “Special immersivity” Before even considering the complexities and opportunities of virtual immersivity, it should be noted that 1 In this I am comforted by the title of A. Pinotti’s fine book, Alla soglia dell’immagine: Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Turin: Einaudi, 2021). STEFANO VELOTTI 140 AN-ICON  immersivity presents itself first and foremost as a feature of our being in the world: we are always already immersed in experience, in a given situation part of an indeterminate totality. Where else could we be? And yet, within this very general condition, human beings have over time created environments and works that carve out zones of “special immersivity,” so to speak, dedicated to immersion, with different modalities, complexities, techniques, functions, and meanings, many of which – the earliest – tend to be beyond our understanding and perhaps always will. Is it possible that the insistent recourse to “(special) immersivity” arises especially at times of deep crisis, when the very foundations of a civilization are felt to be uncertain, invested with a high rate of contingency?2 To simplify: since forms of life do not allow us to feel at home in this world, which seems to have become foreign, indecipherable and threatening, one is drawn to limited and controlled spaces in which to immerse oneself, to feel more alive and safe, at least for a while. I think this perspective is plausible, though it is partial and, indeed, a simplification. What else are we looking for in VR immersivity? Are new immersive technologies merely refinements of older tech- niques, or can they affect our relationship with ourselves, reality, and others in novel ways? What are artistic practices 2 O. Grau, From Illusion to Immersion (2001), trans. G. Custance (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003) offers a historical survey of artworks aimed at providing immersive experiences. In recent decades, however, interest in Paleolithic and “cave art” has been rekindled outside the circle of specialists as well, both as such – see, e.g., G. Rigal, Le temps sacré des cavernes (Paris: Corti, 2016) – and in relation to contemporary art, to this regard see again Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine (especially the section on “Avatāra” in ch. V). Cfr. also M. Stavrinaki, Saisis par la préhistoire: Enquête sur l’art et le temps des modernes (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2019) and in particular the pages devoted to Frederick Kiessler’s Endless House and Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio’s Caverna dell’antimateria. Both of these works, created in the late 1950s, reflect the anguish connected to the atomic bomb, at that time perceived as a looming threat, later forgotten but always resurgent. The short-circuit between contemporary art and the Paleolithic seems to be related to the perception of a profound change in a civilization, if not its end, and thus to a need to revisit its origins, as if one had to start over. In this regard, in addition to a number of works of visual art that explicitly harken back to the Paleolithic, see also Richard Powers’ symptomatic novel Plowing the Dark (2000), which I have analyzed in S. Velotti, “Art in the time of Pandemic: Three Terms,” Paradigmi 39, no. 1 (2021): 127-140. STEFANO VELOTTI 141 AN-ICON  called on to do when faced with such new technological practices? Nowadays the adjective “immersive” is used obsessively in the presentation of theme parks and other sensational “adventures” or “experiences” that promise to take us “inside” paintings and frescoes or into physi- cally inaccessible places. The word invariably appears in the press releases of museums, exhibitions, performances, installations, but also in advertisements for apartments for sale or wine and food itineraries.3 One way to understand the meaning of the word is “proof of the opposite:” what, for example, would a “non-immersive” visit to an apartment look like? Hard to answer, unless we specify restrictive conditions for what is meant by immersivity. Used loosely, however, “immersive” risks being meaningless since its negation does not seem to change anything. And yet it is precisely for this reason that it is an enigmatic adjective, hovering like an obscure object of desire in our social imag- ination. Are we therefore to conclude that the attribution of immersivity is in vain since it neither adds nor detracts from the characterization of experience? I don’t think so. However, we must first clarify in what sense each of our ex- periences is both immersive and non-immersive, or, indeed, “an-immersive.” On this basis it will be easier to ask what peculiar traits are offered by the different uses of “special immersivity,” by this form of reality that is VR, particularly in relation to art, which, if it is anything, is a way of under- standing how we place ourselves in the world. 3 A real estate agency in Rome advertises its luxurious apartments in the Parioli district with the following words, “Enjoy an immersive experience! Come visit your new home.” The real estate company is called Pitagora because it is located near Piazza Pitagora, not because it is referencing the Greek philosopher; however, the agency’s slogan is “Pitagora – the philosophy of living.” Which, supposedly, explains its “unique and iconic character.” As for food and wine itineraries, one can visit, for example, “The Temple of Brunello” in Montalcino (Tuscany), which actually offers “a station with VR viewers called InVolo” that “allows visitors to immerse themselves in the villas, castles, vineyards and hamlets that dot the municipality’s vast and diversified area,” https://www.orodimontalcino.it/tempio-del-brunello/, accessed December 24, 2022. STEFANO VELOTTI 142 AN-ICON  Fish and amphibians At first glance, one would be tempted to say that we human animals are like fish immersed in water – to quote a famous apologue by David Foster Wallace about the difficulty of grasping the medium in which we are im- mersed: an old fish asks two young fish, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” and they in turn ask themselves, “What the hell is water?”4 The element in which we are immersed is in this sense a medium that cannot be iconized or repre- sented. In one respect, it is undeniable that we are always already situated, immersed in a concrete environment that resists iconic reduction. On the other hand, one must ask whether asserting this undeniable condition of immersion does not imply a partial denial of it. The simplest critiques of a representational model of the mind often target a naive idea of representa- tion, one that can be imagined as a frame or filter interposed between us and things, constituted by the spatio-temporal forms of intuition or by a priori categories, universal or cul- turally determined conceptual schemes. Access to reality “in itself” is therefore denied to us, because according to this account reality is always filtered through (inter)subjective lenses. On the complementary plane of our actions and productions we have mental representations enclosed in our head that we then try to externalize, technically, artis- tically or in other ways. Various versions of enactivism oppose this view of the representational mind, rightly insisting that percep- tion is an active way of exploring the material and social environment in which we are immersed, of experiencing affordances and building skills, not a way of corresponding 4 D. Foster Wallace, This is Water, 2005. Commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College, https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/, accessed December 28, 2022. STEFANO VELOTTI 143 AN-ICON  more or less correctly to an already organized world.5 Not least because, in order to see whether our representations “correspond” to the world, we would need to be able to have unfiltered access to reality. On another front, anti-rep- resentationalism is also endorsed by those who replace representations with immanent flows and forces, or who propose that we think of ourselves as “things among things,” according to a “flat ontology” devoid of anthropocentric hi- erarchies, where all entities are equally agents and patients, from stones to plants, from artifacts to animals. Yet, both the idea of a representational filter and the various versions of absolute immersivity run into the same problem: if we think these ideas and formulate them linguistically, as in fact we do, then they are self-con- tradictory. If they are true, then they are false.6 For if we experienced the world through a filter, we would have to see the world, ourselves and the filter with a view from nowhere. And if on the other hand it were true, as in some ways it is true, that we are always immersed in a translucent medium like fish in water, we could not communicate this. We would just be immersed. The fact is that we discover ourselves immersed and emerged at the same time, more amphibian than fish. We realize that we see and do not see a frame, that we remain on this side of a threshold knowing that we cannot cross it and therefore crossing it.7 Toward where? Toward an infinitely expandable context, the inde- terminable totality of every possible experience in which 5 Cfr. J. Stewart, O. Gapenne, E. A. Di Paolo, Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). For a recent survey of enactivism in relation to cultural contexts see C. Durt, T. Fuchs, C. Tewes, eds., Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2017). 6 Here I broadly trace the exposition of the paradoxes of experience articulated by E. Garroni, Estetica: Uno sguardo-attraverso (Milan: Garzanti, 1992). 7 Christian Stiegler acknowledges the liminality of the “liquid spaces” in which we are immersed, but then seems to unilaterally emphasize the disappearance of all frames: “Liquid spaces are moments of uncertainty, instability, and fluidity in mediated experiences. They emerge as thresholds between the physical and the mediated. These spaces create the feeling of immersion even beyond the mediation by eliminating critical distance and dissolving the frames of media.” C. Stiegler, The 360° Gaze: Immersions in Media, Society, and Culture (London: MIT Press, 2021): 61. STEFANO VELOTTI 144 AN-ICON  we are already included, on whose horizon this determinate experience stands, which is such precisely insofar as it is “cut out” from that indeterminate and uncontrollable horizon of possibility. What McLuhan says about medial awareness – summarized in the famous “rearview-mirror” metaphor recalled by Pinotti – is therefore not entirely true: As long as s/he is immersed in a medium, the human being is as little aware of it as the fish of the water in which he swims. Only the moment that medium is overtaken by a later medium can it be retrospectively focused on and grasped precisely as the medium in which the experience had been organized: “we are always one step behind in our view of the world.”8 We do not need the appearance of another me- dium to know that we are not like fish in water: the possibil- ity of saying that we are is enough for us to prove ourselves wrong. Some philosophers, such as Thomas Nagel, have claimed that this condition of ours expresses “the absurd” of the human condition, which should be accepted with a little irony and without taking ourselves too seriously. In fact, unlike other animals that lack self-awareness and lan- guage, we cannot simply remain immersed and absorbed in our occupations, nor can we, however, install ourselves in a permanent emersion, in a transcendent dimension, be- cause even the mind of the mystic is still playing one of the possible games situated in the concreteness of experience, not an out-of-this-world “super game.” Because of this we are forced to accept this irreconcilable oscillation between immersion and emergence, adherence and detachment, 8 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: 17 [my translation]. STEFANO VELOTTI 145 AN-ICON  involvement in the ordinary tasks of life and the distance of a gaze that relativizes the latter or nullifies their importance.9 But is this really the case? What if, on the other hand, it were sometimes possible to make such indetermi- nate totality transit – analogically, symbolically – in concrete, determinate experience? What if things, practices, concrete experiences were given that exemplified the indeterminable and uncontrollable dimension against which they stand out? What if this were not only a source of disquiet (due to the feeling of being in touch with the uncontrollable), but also a sensible pleasure, deriving from the fact that our vitality, the feeling of being alive, is increased by the simultaneous co-presence of immersion and emergence? Perhaps this is one of the ways of approaching some particularly sensi- ble experiences, for example, those in which we recognize something as art: a set of practices, events or “things” that allow us to “see” (feel, experience, understand) the complex texture of our forms of life, our being in the world between immersion and emersion. Before trying to articulate these still vague statements, and precisely in relation to what we have called forms of “special immersivity,”10 it is necessary to go back to their homology with the an-immersivity of ordinary ex- perience, also from the point of view of its limitations. 9 T. Nagel, “The Absurd,” in Mortal Questions (London: Canto, 1979): 11-23. 10 It should be made clear from the outset that what I have called “special immersivity” is obtained with diverse and heterogeneous forms that can be sorted into categories. For an excellent survey of immersive forms of storytelling, see E. Modena, Nelle storie: Arte, cinema e media immersivi (Rome: Carocci, 2022). Ultimately, however, as far as artistic practices are concerned, it is the singularity of the work that must be taken into account. STEFANO VELOTTI 146 AN-ICON  Limits of immersivity Let us see the extent to which the experience of virtual immersivity, in its “special” meaning, can be equated with that of ordinary immersivity. The three characteristics of immersive VR, sum- marized by Pinotti, are (1) the saturation of the 360° gaze (“unframedeness”); (2) the feeling of presence, of “being there,” which can be further articulated as telepresence, selfpresence and social presence (“presentness”);11 (3) the experience of immediacy, due paradoxically to the great complexity of technological mediations that produce VR, making the medium as transparent as possible (“immedi- ateness”).12 It is easy to see that we could characterize our experience of the ordinary world using the same properties: nothing I see is potentially limited by a frame, I have the perception of “being here,” of presence, and my experience seems immediate, that is, unmediated by a medium that interferes with reality. But, one might say, if by hypothesis VR fulfills these promises to the point of pushing itself to (illusory) indistinguishability from reality, then – from a phe- nomenological, though not an ontological, point of view – we would be thrown back into the reality we already know, and – except for the advantageous uses of it, related to various forms of telepresence and simulation – the experi- ence we derive from it would be nothing new. Conversely, one can highlight the limits of these claims and emphasize the aspects that prevent illusion. Both perspectives, how- ever, are simplistic. VR is not equivalent to ordinary reality, nor are the limitations of VR absent in ordinary reality: 11 E. Pett, Experiencing Cinema: Participatory Film Cultures, Immersive Media and the Experience Economy (New York-London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 12 A. Pinotti, “Prologo,” in Alla soglia dell’immagine: xi-xviii. STEFANO VELOTTI 147 AN-ICON  ■- It is true that in VR the frame has disappeared, but in a sense it persists: I am wearing a headset and in the future I will perhaps wear a headband, or be fitted with an implant connected to my neurons. On the other hand, even here, now, in non-virtual reality, I am partially framed by the actions that brought me to a given place and situation (I am aware that I occupy a limited or “framed” portion of reality), by attention variously focused on the scenario in front of me or the task I set myself, but also by the “frames” studied by Erving Goffman and those we do not pay attention to because they are “hidden in plain sight.”13 ■- Presence, being here, cannot be doubted. I am not else- where, or at least no more than I am elsewhere when I am im- mersed in a virtual environment. ■- Finally, the apparent immediacy produced by innumerable technological mediations also characterizes my real experience: we know all too well that what is felt as natural,spontaneous, ob- vious is intertwined with acquired habits and artificial construc- tions and prosthetic extensions: the normative, the perceptual, proxemics, social mediations, and all the ways of acting of a certain form of life. So, those characteristics that serve to phenom- enologically distinguish the experience of a non-immersive image from an “an-iconic” immersive experience are not sufficient to distinguish the experience of immersive VR from that of ordinary reality. However, from here we cannot conclude that between “ordinary” immersivity and what we have called “special immersivity” there is no difference, not only on the ontological level, but also on the phenomeno- logical one. There are countless features of VR that distin- guish it from ordinary reality. The most obvious, related first and foremost to the dimension of space, is the possibility of 13 E. Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974) (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986); E. Zerubavel, Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). STEFANO VELOTTI 148 AN-ICON  becoming immersed in scenarios that cannot be found in ordinary reality or that would be impossible to experience because of scale or distance: entering an animal’s blood- stream or its brain, acting at a distance, traveling through a body. Also, there is the cognitive conflict between pro- prioception in the real world and that in the virtual world – walking on water or plunging into an abyss while remaining firmly on the ground but feeling a sense of vertigo and fear (or, vice versa, I am immersed in the “magic circle” of VR and have an accident in the ordinary world). I do not intend to try to list all the differences and perhaps imagine how some of them will be eliminat- ed or reduced by technological progress, integrating our other senses,14 nor do I intend to address all the possible ways of using VR, which is likely to become even more useful and indispensable in the future than it already is now for many of our practices, medical, architectural, forensic, social, professional, educational, recreational, and so on. Rather, here I intend to focus on what immersive VR can tell us about the human experience in general, drawing on the experience we sometimes have in our relationship with what we call artistic works or practices. “Experience economy” In the 1990s the idea gained ground – with anticipations already in the previous decades – that the economy most suited to our times – at least in the wealth- iest societies – is not so much based on the production of goods, or even on services, but on experience. In those years, expressions such as “Erlebnisgesellschaft,” “Erleb- nismarkt,” and “Dream Society” began to circulate, until James Gilmore and Joseph Pine II became the proudest 14 Cfr. R. DeSalle, Our Senses: An Immersive Experience (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2018). STEFANO VELOTTI 149 AN-ICON  proponents of the “Experience Economy” with a book that would have a certain fortune, followed by other volumes on related issues.15 The key to their thinking is stated in the preface to the 2011 updated edition of their The Experience Economy: So let us here be most clear: goods and services are no longer enough to foster economic growth, create new jobs, and maintain economic prosperity. To realize revenue growth and increased em- ployment, the staging of experiences must be pursued as a distinct form of economic output. Indeed, in a world saturated with largely undifferentiated goods and services the greatest opportunity for value creation resides in staging experiences.16 The market for goods is saturated, and produc- ers must offer products that promise to stage experiences. For this reason the watchwords are “mass customize,” i.e. transform every service into a unique (mass) experience; “work is theater,” i.e. “stage experiences” and train sellers in specific performance practices; and finally, ensure that the experience offered generates in the consumer (“pro- sumer” or “experiencer”) an actual change, which must be properly paid for: “these transformations should themselves command a fee in the form of explicitly charging for the demonstrated outcomes that result from the underlying experiences. [...] We especially challenge enterprises in three industries: those that focus on making people healthy, wealthy, and wise.”17 It would be all too easy to reiterate once again how the neoliberal creed attempts to infiltrate every aspect 15 G. Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft: Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main- New York: Campus-Verlag, 1993); R. Jensen, “Dream Society,” The Futurist 30, no. 3 (1996): 9-13; J. Gilmore and B.J. Pine II, The Experience Economy (1999) (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2011); J. Gilmore and B.J. Pine II, Authenticity. What Consumers Really Want (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007). 16 J. Gilmore and B.J. Pine II, “Preview to the Updated Edition: Beyond Goods and Services,” in The Experience Economy: ix-xxii, ix [emphasis mine]. 17 Ibid. STEFANO VELOTTI 150 AN-ICON  of human life, putting a price tag on it. Instead, I have men- tioned these marketing strategies to make some distinc- tions concerning the notion of experience. It is interesting to see how Gilmore and Pine respond to the obvious ob- jection that an experience purchased from a catalog is a fake experience. Their line of defense comes in the central chapter of their next book, Authenticity, in which they draw on some philosophical references to arrive at the following conclusion: there is no such thing as an inauthentic experience because ex- periences happen inside us. Therefore, we remain free to judge our experiences with any economic offering as authentic or not. Businesses that offer them therefore can, whether intentionally or by happenstance, gain the perception of authenticity. [...] Business- es can render their inauthentic offerings as authentic. Doing so requires embracing this essential paradox: all human enterprise is ontologically fake - that is, in its very being it is inauthentic - and yet, output from that enterprise can be phenomenologically real - that is, it is perceived as authentic by the individuals who buy it.18 The distinction between an ontological and a phenomenological point of view returns here in a particu- larly insidious way. For on the one hand, it is true that there is no class of “fake” immersive experiences ontologically distinct from a class of “authentic” immersive experiences. And the experience one has cannot be anything other than the experience of a subject, and in this sense it is obvious- ly subjective (which, however, does not necessarily mean that it is only “inside us”). Kant himself, who entrusted to the principle of the judgment of taste even the possibility of making sense of experience in general and building a 18 J. Gilmore, B. J. Pine II, “The Authenticity Paradox,” in Authenticity: 89-90, 89 [emphasis mine]. STEFANO VELOTTI 151 AN-ICON  system of nature, reiterated that I can judge anything aes- thetically, material or immaterial, and that my judgment depends on what “I make of this representation in my- self.”19 As is well known, however, Kant ascribed to such judgment a claim to “subjective universality” and “exem- plary necessity,” springing from a “free play” of imagination and understanding. In the perspective of the “experience economy,” what we witness is a caricature of these claims: the freedom-spontaneity of the free play of the faculties becomes the consumer’s “freedom of choice,” a psycho- logical choice expressed as a preference (however moti- vated or induced, as long as it has the desired effect). The impossibility of establishing ontologically distinct classes for what is “beautiful-sensible” and what is not is reduced to what the consumer “buys or doesn’t buy” (in both senses of the word). Since nothing escapes human intervention and thus technique and money, the Las Vegas hotel “The Vene- tian” and the city of Venice possess the same ontological status, that of both being “fakes.” The authenticity of an experience cannot therefore depend on “what” we experi- ence (everything is equally ontologically “fake”), but only on something that “happens inside us,” and can therefore be “phenomenologically real.” The singularity of experience is completely annulled, and every object, practice, situation is identical to any other, as long as it produces the same effect: a novel or a pill, a bump on the head or a movie, a concert or a wedding.20 There is no longer any trace of 19 “It is readily seen that to say that it is beautiful and to prove that I have taste what matters is what I make of this representation in myself, not how I depend on the existence of the object.” I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 5; 205. 20 Cfr. Wittgenstein’s objection to the idea of aesthetic experience conceived as an effect: “There is a tendency to talk about the ‘effect of a work of art’– feelings, images, etc. Then it is natural to ask: ‘Why do you hear this minuet?,’ and there is a tendency to answer: ‘To get this, and that effect.’ And doesn’t the minuet itself matter? – hearing this: would another have done as well? You could play a minuet once, and get a lot out of it, and play the same minuet another time and get nothing out of it. But it doesn’t follow that what you get out of it is then independent of the minuet.” L. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967): 29. STEFANO VELOTTI 152 AN-ICON  recourse to an elaboration by the subject, to the exercise of a “reflective faculty of judgment” (as distinct from the objectifying exercise of “determining judgment”), to show the impossibility of constructing classes of “beautiful” or meaningful things or experiences. Instead, once again, it is the “invisible hand” of the market that knows best how to allocate the “resource” of authenticity. The perspective of control On a photography information site, I find a re- view of Richard Avedon’s recent exhibition, Relationships (Palazzo Reale, Milan, September 22, 2022-January 29, 2023). The reviewer informs us right away that it is “an en- joyable immersive experience in the artist’s photographic universe.”21 What is of interest here, however, is not the indiscriminate use of the adjective, but one of the most famous quotes attributed to Avedon, which stands out in one of the rooms: “I think all art is about control – the en- counter between control and the uncontrollable.” Referred to photography, or to a certain way of doing photography, the statement easily lends itself to multiple interpretations.22 I believe, however, that Avedon was right: every art form is characterized by this encounter and, indeed, it could be argued that every experience worthy of the name is. This “encounter,” however, takes place less and less often in everyday life: control and self-control, exacer- bated also by digital technologies (surveillance, quantified self, digital self, etc.) seem to run more and more in parallel with an increasing loss of control (sense of powerlessness, 21 E. Dal Verme, “Richard Avedon: Relationships,” Fotografia.it (September 22, 2022), https://www.fotografia.it/articoli/opinioni/richard-avedon-relationships/, accessed January 5, 2023 [emphasis mine]. 22 Cfr., e.g., R. Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance (Cambridge MA-London: Harvard University Press, 2015) and some observations in S. Velotti, The Present of Photography and the Dialectics of Control, in M. Delogu, A. Dandini de Sylva, eds., Fotografia: Il presente (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2015): 21-29. STEFANO VELOTTI 153 AN-ICON  acting out, addictions, panic attacks, conspiracy theories etc.), without the two dimensions ever converging. Although often untied in our impoverished everyday life, the knot that ties control to uncontrollability is very complex and can- not be reduced to the “society of control” preconized by Deleuze.23 The problem is complex, but here, in conclusion, I would like to put forward only a few questions about con- trol in relation to “special immersivity,” or, more specifically, immersive art practices. On the one hand, the most mun- dane experiences of “special” immersivity are meant to be forms of sensational entertainment (Caravaggio experience and the like), or reassuring bubbles where all contact with what is uncontrollable and indeterminate is preemptively sterilized. On the other, they promise they will allow us to “get lost” in immersion. (Of course, there may also be a more subtle pleasure in “letting go,” relying on someone else’s control, as artist Janet Cardiff argues when speaking of her extraordinary AR “walks”24). However, this is an unresolved problem for the “experience economy,” which on the one hand wants the prosumer/experiencer to feel that he or she is in control of his or her own choices (with reference to the alternatives offered) to ensure their authenticity, and on the other hand knows that the provider must remain in control of this offer, if only to justify the fee the prosumer/experi- encer has to pay for it. There is nothing wrong with buying an “organized immersive adventure”– which may be fun, exciting, unusual – but the doubt remains: either it is not an adventure, or it is not organized. Even in valuable academic contributions, the question of control appears repeatedly, 23 Cfr. S. Velotti, Dialettica del controllo: Limiti della sorveglianza e pratiche artistiche (Roma: Castelvecchi, 2017); H. Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (2018), trans. J.C. Wagner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020). 24 C. Christov-Bakargiev, Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller (New York: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, 2003): 35. STEFANO VELOTTI 154 AN-ICON  yet without being thematized – it remains opaque, ambig- uous, if not contradictory.25 What if, instead, the “special” immersivity of VR were employed to reveal, by exemplifying it, the paradoxical an-immersivity of ordinary experience, usually overlooked or misunderstood? What if certain uses of “special” im- mersivity were able to bring out from within not the illusory simulation of ordinary reality “as it is,” perhaps displaced into fantastic scenarios, nor sensational and amazing expe- riences, but the most ordinary experience, making it visible and understandable as an “encounter” of controllability and uncontrollability? Then we would not only have a bubble, a vacation from ordinary space, an interruption in the web of a life lived obtusely, but also the concrete exemplification of the antinomian forces that render us alive: on the one hand, the need and satisfaction of exercising some control over ourselves, the world, and others – of being agents endowed with “efficacy,” not powerless and systematically frustrated agents. On the other, the equally essential need not to remain entrenched in such control, which can only become animated in the “encounter” with what is and re- mains uncontrollable: the indeterminate totality of experi- ence, the unpredictability of our multiple relationships, the infinitely rich grain of reality. Possible examples of such successful “en- counters” abound in contemporary art practices. Here I would like to cite just one, which I think is particularly signif- icant because of its apparent incongruity and which would 25 See for example C. Stiegler, The 360° Gaze: “If all the frames, stages, and technologies dissolve now, we are about to confuse different concepts of realities […] They emphasize the dissolution of boundaries and control”; but, at the same time, he writes that in the use of avatars “Nonhuman characters can activate the same emotional alignment and level of acceptance as human characters. Elena Kokkinara and Rachel McDonnell confirm that even though photorealistic imagery supports acceptance and engagement, authenticity depends much more ‘on the levels of perceived ownership and sense of control (agency) we feel towards this virtual character.’” Stiegler, The 360° Gaze: 92 [emphasis mine]. STEFANO VELOTTI 155 AN-ICON  deserve a much deeper analysis:26 about 50 years ago, an Australian theology professor, John M. Hull, noticed that he was going blind, and decided to tape-record a diary of this dramatic progression. In 1990, these recordings be- came an extraordinary book, Touching the Rock. An Ex- perience of Blindness. In the preface, Oliver Sacks wrote, quite rightly, that if Wittgenstein had gone blind, he would probably have written a similar book. A short film, a feature film and finally (in 2016) a virtual reality application, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness, are based on this book.27 It is “an experience” that takes place at the intersection of multiple authorships: Hull, the creators of the work in VR, and, it must be added, a partial interactivity on the part of the “experiencer.” The latter wears a binaural audio device – the same sound reproduction technique used by Cardiff for her assisted “walks” – coupled with a 360-degree VR headset. Beginning with Hull’s experience of blindness, the making, as well as the enjoyment of the experience, are the work of the “non-blind.” It is not about disavowing the tragedy of losing one’s sight, nor is it about telling a story of “redemption.” Rather, what happens is that the blindness of the person wearing the VR headset – and the related loss of control over the outside world – is not replaced by images aiming to immerse the person in a realistic, broadly illusionistic environment, but rather “into Darkness,” one of the most obvious manifestations of the loss of control over the environment. What we find in this VR, however, is not total darkness, but the disjointed and fragmented world described by Hull’s words. The apparent obviousness of ordinary visual perception is suspended. 26 See C. Roussel, “If Blindness Creates a New World,” CJDS 8, no. 6 (2019): 108-130, which documents and analyzes the genesis and structure of Notes on Blindness VR in the most comprehensive way. E. Modena, building on Roussel’s analysis, devotes some of the finest pages to it in her book Nelle storie: 84-87. See also the presentation of the project by A. Colinart, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im3CpA14jEQ, accessed January 8, 2023. 27 Cfr. e.g., A. Noë, Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). STEFANO VELOTTI 156 AN-ICON  It involves participating in the reconstitution of the unity of experience almost “from scratch,” which depends on acoustic signals that “bounce” back to us from objects if given certain environmental conditions: wind or rain make the world perceptible. Perceiving requires our activity, which is partially controllable, and a “collaboration” of the world that is usually beyond our control, i.e. weather events (in the app, the experiencer can control the triggering of such uncontrollable conditions). The idea that seeing is not ob- vious, that we need to learn how to do it actively, and that art is a way of “learning to look,” I think is right, as long as “looking” is translated into a more global “perceiving” extended to the whole body. What we see in the virtual scenario are not really images, in the sense of figures, but sketches, elusive and ghostly graphic patterns (like Kantian image-schemes)28 correlated to sound. A silent world would be dark. This reduction of figurativeness is much closer to a staging of our ordinary perception than any mimetic or fantastic imagery. Like blindness for the non-blind, our perceptual life in its entanglement with the world cannot be properly depicted visually. However, the suspension of ordinary sight opens up an understanding of a usually occluded perceptual experience, revealing, I believe, the paradoxical an-immersive interweaving of controllability and uncontrollability that constitutes us and toward which we are becoming increasingly blind. 28 E. Garroni, Immagine, linguaggio, figura (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2005). STEFANO VELOTTI 157 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19956

“Looking Glass:” Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts by Giorgio Zanchetti Looking glass Transparency Lucio Fontana Luciano Fabro Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello “Looking Glass:” Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts GIORGIO ZANCHETTI, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7392-9361 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19956 Abstract Today the locution “looking glass” survives al- most exclusively thanks to the extraordinary success of Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking-Glass. This ex- pression underlines the ambiguity between the glass sur- face intended as a device through which we can see the world or as an actual object to be “looked at.” Apparently, the early Renaissance perspective window, thanks to the mildness of the Mediterranean climate, did not need any panes. And certainly, even when glass panes are there, they are usually not reproduced in painting. The glass main virtue is its transparency, which makes it almost invisible. Something similar happens with other “glasses” specifi- cally made to look through them: the drinking glass and the lens. Glass panes appear to sight only when different practical needs come into play, as in perspective drawing machines, or when its transparency is contradicted by a precise action that compromises or denies it: when panes are broken, as in this enigmatic portrait of early XIX c., or voluntarily covered, like for a blackout, as in Duchamp’s Fresh Widow. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 158 AN-ICON  Looking through the glass, looking at the im- age reflected in the mirror and, finally, looking at the glass itself, as a device for presenting and representing spaces, are three recurring attitudes in the work of Italian artists of the late 20th century, like Lucio Fontana and Luciano Fabro. Keywords Looking glass Transparency Lucio Fontana Luciano Fabro To quote this essay: G. Zanchetti, “‘Looking Glass:’ Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 158-175, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19956. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 159 AN-ICON  The locution “looking glass” – commonly with a hyphen – as a synonym of “mirror” survives nowadays almost exclusively as an explicit reference to the title of Lewis Carroll’s second novel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), and thanks to the ex- traordinary popularity of that book. This expression, with its own ambiguity, draws our attention to the fact that the framed and mirrored glass surface is both an object to be “looked at” itself, and an impressive device through which everyone can actually look at themselves as part of reality: the simplest and most sophisticated of all optical instruments through which and into which we can see and contemplate the world with our own eyes. The Italian noun “specchio” and the German “Spiegel,” as well as the French “miroir” from which the English word “mirror” was borrowed, come from different Latin expressions which refer to the semantic field of optical vision (“specio” and “miror” or “miro”). And this essential status of mirror as the first optical device – since it is also available in nature, in the reflecting properties of still waters and of some minerals – makes it perfectly fit as the medi- um through which self-consciousness and the capacity of self-representation in art find their common, albeit mythical, origin. This status is implicitly pointed out by the common reference to the myth of Narcissus in connection to the inception of painting or by the well-known definition of photography – given in 1859 by Oliver Wendell Holmes – as “the mirror with a memory,”1 an almost magical optical instrument literally capable to chemically freeze the natural 1 “If a man had handed a metallic speculum to Democritus of Abdera, and told him to look at his face in it (…) promising that one of the films his face was shedding should stick there, so that neither he, nor it, nor anybody should forget what manner of man he was, the Laughing Philosopher would probably have vindicated his claim to his title by an explosion that would have astonished the speaker. This is just what the Daguerreotype has done. It has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality. The photograph has completed the triumph, by- making a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a picture.” O.W. Holmes, “The Stereoscope and Stereograph,” The Atlantic Monthly 3, no. 20 (1859): 738-749, 738-739. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 160 AN-ICON  moving image, fixing it in a still and different form as soon as it comes in touch with the silver surface. Italian conceptual artist Anna Valeria Bor- sari precisely postulates this characteristic of the act of self-contemplation in the mirror in her photographic works series Narciso (Fig. 1) and La stanza di Narciso (Narcissus and Narcissus’ Room, both from 1977), the first of which depicts a young male model getting closer and closer to a big mirror and finally disappearing into it, while the second one shows his empty room from different points of view: “Towards symmetry he proceeds, the man in front of the mirror, but he probably reaches it only when he manages to merge with the image he is looking at, like Narcissus does when he falls into the water.”2 Fig. 1. A.V. Borsari, Narciso / Narcissus, 1977, 3 photographic prints, courtesy of the Artist. © Anna Valeria Borsari. The immateriality of the metamorphosis of Nar- cissus into his double – the virtual image reflected by the mirror – is an open metaphor of the desperate difficulty in reaching a true consciousness of self through this simple act of contemplation and “reflection.” Trying to get in touch with his own double, the man in front of the mirror is finally going to lose himself in it. His own image is intangible and 2 A.V. Borsari, “Premessa,” in “Simmetria-asimmetria,” Ipotesi d’artista, no. 1 (1988); republished in Anna Valeria Borsari: Opere (Milan, Electa, 1996, exhibition catalogue): 97. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 161 AN-ICON  consequently somehow imperceptible, since Borsari dis- covered, while staging these works, that she chose as a set, between several available real rooms, the bedroom of a blind man. The real owner of that particular mirror could get as close as possible to it, or even touch it, without actually perceiving the duplication of self in his own reflected image. As Borsari wrote in the typewritten statement which is part of La stanza di Narciso: The Sanskrit word “spagh” (“to divide”), the Greek “σπέος” (“cave”) and “σχοπέω” (“to examine”), the Latin “specus” (“cave”) and “specio” (“to see”) share common linguistic roots. (...) Among the many Latin derivatives from the verb “specio” (“to see, to discern, to observe”) there should also be “speculum” (“mirror, image, copy”), from which we derive the Italian “specchio” (“mirror,” but also “panel framed in the doors and windows,” and by extension in sporting language, “portion of the playing field in front of the goal line”) as well as the common name of the medical tool used to dilate the orifices in order to inspect anatomical cavities, and also, indirectly, the verb “to speculate” (to investigate or reflect upon mentally, to contemplate with close attention, to theorize upon, etc.). But since the Italian language mostly derives from vulgar Latin, where the use of diminutives was frequent, (...) we could imagine that “speculum” and therefore “specchio” should also be perceived as derivatives from “specus.” This would explain the confluence of meanings such as “to see” with others such as “cavity,” “hole,” etc. in certain uses of the mirror and of the speculum... And for Narcissus in any case the mirror he looks at exactly corresponds to the hole in which he disappears. But we should not forget that mirrors are won- derful objects for several reasons. The glass panes from which they are made are even, in their own essence, actual objects, something to be “looked at.” For their capability to reflect, to re-present and multiply the real in their virtual inter- nal space, they share the status of “marvellous” with different Wunderkammer phenomena, items and artifacts – literally something “spectacular” or “admirable,” i.e. an object worth GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 162 AN-ICON  of contemplation, – like rare and wonderful crystals or gems, like the beryl, beryllium, from which comes the German word “Brille” for eyeglasses, or “spectacle(s)” (a term once used to design every optical device, including windows or mirrors). Following a century old tradition in architecture and interior decoration, the 63 silvered glass panes which formed the Looking Glass Curtain for the Royal Coburg The- atre in London (Fig. 2) are one of the most interesting oc- currences of this “spectacularization” of reality through the mirrors in early 19th century. It was displayed for the first time on December 26, 1821 in front of the public of the the- atre, reflecting their own images as if they were on the stage, inside the theatre show.3 Fig. 2. Theatrical Reflection or a Peep at the Looking Glass Curtain at the Royal Coburg Theatre, published by G. Humphrey, London, 1822. 3 M. Teodorski, Nineteenth-Century Mirrors: Textulity and Transendence (Belgrade: Institute for Literature and Art, 2021): 22-25, see Fig. 1. See also M. Teodorski, “Reflection as Commodity: A Short Ethno(historio)graphy of Victorian Mirrors,” Гласник Етнографског института Сану / Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA 16, no. 1 (2016): 121-132, 123-124. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 163 AN-ICON  Assumed that the by now outdated locution “looking-glass” keeps together a complicated mechanism of meaning, trying to capture the double nature of the mirror as a device through which and at which to look, we can try to understand the reflective and spectacular attitude of that diminished domestic Narcissus called Alice. She breaks through the looking-glass in order to accomplish her very personal research project, only to end up discovering that the world on the other side of the mirror is a strict analogous of everyday reality, simply “specularly” inverted, or even overturned in an illogical, anarchic and carnivalesque way. The very act of her trespassing between the real and the other world, her moving through the mirror like through a threshold or a borderline, was captured by John Tenniel in two distinct illustrations for the first edition of the novel by Lewis Carrol, in 1871 (Fig. 3).4 These engravings were pub- lished on the front and the back side of the same page of the book. And this choice is perfectly correct with respect to the semantic and conceptual awareness of the author, since they skilfully represent the complementing opposite realities connected by the mirror surface as if they were photographic shots of the same subject taken from two opposite points of view. 4 L. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan, 1871): 11-12. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 164 AN-ICON  Fig. 3. J. Tenniel, The Glass Was Beginning to Melt Away, Just Like a Bright Silvery Mist, woodcut illustrations for: L. Carroll (pseud. C.L. Dodgson), Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan, 1871): 11-12. But when they are placed side by side, Tenniel’s illustrations build together a traditional motif of framing, with a couple of symmetrical figures – descended from the classical architectural ornaments of caryatids and telamons, through the Renaissance and Baroque, to find new appli- ances in the decoration of eighteenth-century mirrors and furniture, and later in the new properly industrial arts – which strictly recalls, as Matko Teodorski noticed,5 the sumptuous bronze figured frame of the Grand Boudoir-Glass by Wil- liam Potts of Birmingham, celebrated as one of the most striking objects on display at the Crystal Palace during the 5 M. Teodorski, Nineteenth-Century Mirrors: 88-92, Figg. 2-4, 180-182, 207-210, Figg. 9-10. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 165 AN-ICON  Great London Exhibition, in 1851. Who knows if Lewis Car- roll and Tenniel thought to Potts’ Grand Boudoir-Glass for the Duchess of Sutherland, when they were devising the image of Alice crossing the mirror threshold? Probably the Swiss sculptor Vincenzo Vela did, when he gave form to a marble mantelpiece for his own house in Ligornetto (Tes- sin), bringing the same composition with two female nudes surrounding the “looking-glass” and reflecting themselves in it, to a totally different degree of artistic value (Fig. 4):6 in this work, from 1865-66, Vela enhances the composition of multiplied idealistic nude – that, coming from the neo- classical groups of Canova and Thorvaldsen, through the practice of copies in 19th century art Academies would have reached Rodin and Seurat and Maillol –, transforming the reduplication of the image in a sort of visual vertigo. Fig. 4. V. Vela, Mantelpiece with Mirror and Clock, 1865-1866, marble and mirror, Ligornetto, Museo Vincenzo Vela. 6 G. Zanchetti, in G.A. Mina ed., Museo Vela: The Collections. Sculpture, Painting, Drawings and Prints, Photography (Lugano: Cornèr Bank): 52-53, 86, Fig. I.29, 293. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 166 AN-ICON  Falling down into the mirror view, as Alice once did into the rabbit-hole (literally a “specus,” a door lead- ing to a subterranean realm), the beholder reduplicates, becoming part of the virtual image inside the frame. The essential paradox of this reduplication of the viewer con- sists in the simple fact that the images of painting – vir- tual representations of reality made by human hand – are not capable to show the other side of their subjects, but can only repeat the same figure seen from the same point of view, like in the well-known painting by René Magritte, La reproduction interdite (Not to be reproduced, 1937-39, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) where the figure of a man seen from the back – clearly a substitute for both the author and the spectator – is tautologically repeated as it is in the mantelpiece mirror in front of him, without revealing his hidden side and his face as Victorian and naturalistic sculptures from 19th century did. Confront- ing himself with the same paradox, through photographic language, Ugo Mulas wrote about the mirror-works by Mi- chelangelo Pistoletto: When he paints a nude on a mirror surface, and this nude is seen from the back, he forces the viewer to enter inside the painting, which means to get completely involved, because the watcher will see himself as a part of the picture, standing at the opposite side of the painted figure he is watching: he will see himself in front of the nude, standing on the other side of the subject that for the painter remains hidden. Thus, the spectator reduplicates, he is inside and outside of the picture, he is here and there at the same time, and here he accepts the rules set by the painter, who presented the nude seen from his back, while there he stands where no one is supposed to be according to the inner coherence of the pictorial representation. In the photo I shoot you can see me photographing from the front a nude that is shown only from its back.7 7 U. Mulas, La fotografia, ed. P. Fossati (Turin: Einaudi, 1973): 70-71. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 167 AN-ICON  Michelangelo Pistoletto himself, in his installa- tion and performance Twentytwo less Two, presented at the Venice Biennale in 2009, actually tried to break through his own looking-glass trap, carrying on a tradition of broken mirrors which, in the history of painting – instead of bringing seven years of bad luck, like it is often said –, represent the end of the beauty associated with youth and also the end of art as mimesis, of visual representation itself, like in Le miroir brisé (The Broken Mirror, c. 1763, London, The Wal- lace Collection) by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, in the self-portrait by the American painter Ron Blumberg The Broken Mirror, from 1936,8 or even in La clef des champs (Madrid, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza) painted the same year by Magritte. Pistoletto’s reflection on photography and on vi- sual reproduction is not developed in merely conceptual and analytical terms; on the contrary, it opens immediately also to a direct aesthetic experience, with as much brutality and intrusiveness in his mirror-paintings as in his destruc- tive performance of 2009. In Twentytwo less Two the artist, again an incarnation of Narcissus, destroys several big, framed mirrors, which stand at the same time as the “sub- jectile” of his most characteristic works and, in a general sense, of any possible image taken or imitated from nature. By doing so, Pistoletto questions the legitimacy of visual arts as separated from reality and also his own role as a consecrated master. We could be tempted to read this ges- ture as a renunciation of self-identity – represented by that founding moment of the consciousness of the Ego, in the early childhood, which Lacan called the “stade du miroir”9 – or as a final step outside any possibility of representation in art. But, on the contrary, his performance rather than completely destroying the very support of vision, actually multiplies the virtual images, simply because – unlike the figures physically reproduced through drawing, painting or photography –, the image of the real world reflected in the 8 See the painting on sale on the website of the Trigg Ison Fine Art Gallery (West Hollywood, CA): https://www.triggison.com/product-page/my-broken-mirror, accessed February 5, 2023. 9 J. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949), in Writings, trans. by B. Fink (New York-London: W.W. Norton, 2006). GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 168 AN-ICON  mirror endlessly survives in its virtual integrity within each of the fragments of the broken glass surface. Coming back to the locution we started from, what happens if we stop looking – or moving or breaking – through the glass, and try to directly look it? And which are the main implications of this different attitude in rendering and perceiving the image of the most transparent of solids in the visual arts? Apparently, the early Renaissance perspective window, maybe thanks to the mildness of the Mediterra- nean climate, did not need any panes. And certainly, even when glass panes are there, they are usually not reproduced in painting, since one of glass’s main virtues is its transpar- ency, thanks to which we can see as clearly as possible the world outside. But this same transparency makes glass almost invisible itself, and therefore unreproducible – or at least barely reproducible – in painting. And this happens with all sorts of “glasses” specifically made to look through them, as the drinking glass and the lens. Window’s glass panes appear to sight only when the lead came framework, or the colour or opacity of stained glass make them visible by their interference. But usually in painting this kind of window’s panes are not intended as openings towards further spaces or landscapes which lay beyond them. They rather are visual motives themselves, filtering, refracting, or reflecting the light, hence acting like mirrors, as in the recently restored Girl Reading a Letter by Jan Vermeer (1657, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie); or mere sources – often displaced to one side or in the corners of the composition – through which the light enters the virtual pictorial space in order to make brighter the main subject of the picture. Sometimes they are represented in etchings or in drawings when different practical needs come into play, as in didactic reproductions of perspective drawing machines,10 which obviously are, first of all, tools 10 Well known are the woodcuts illustrating the treatise by A. Dürer, Underweysung der messung, mit dem zirckel und richtscheyt (Nuremberg: Hieronymus Andreae [Hieronymus Formschneider], 1525). GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 169 AN-ICON  for correctly “seeing” – virtually overlapping the perspective frame to the reality which surround us, also in combination with mirrors and lenses, like in the application of camera obscura to reproduction drawing –, in which the glass panel fulfils the precise function to provide a stiff but transparent support for the act of drawing (Fig. 5). Fig. 5. Chambre obscure from A. Ganot, Traité élémentaire de physique expérimentale et appliquée... (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1855): 434. Some other times, glass panes can be seen in paintings when their inherent quality as a device through which we may look, the full transparency, is at least partially contradicted – exactly as it happens for lenses or glasses11 – by an irregularity, an aberration, or even an irrecoverable discontinuity of their material unity: i.e., when the glass is broken, as in the enigmatic Portrait of Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, painted in 1801by the Parisian artist Marie Denise Villers (New York, The Metropolitan Mu- seum of Art, Fig. 6), or in the double naked portrait of The Marriage. After the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck (1985) 11 See the virtuosic Still life with broken glass painted as a variation on the genre of the Vanitas by Willem Claesz Heda in 1642 (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum). GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 170 AN-ICON  by the Polish painter Tadeusz Boruta, which focuses on the definitive rupture of the traditional perspective window as tools for viewing and representing the world, in a key of conceptual realism. Fig. 6. M.D. Villers, Portrait of Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, 1801, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. Isaac D. Fletcher Collection, Bequest of Isaac D. Fletcher, 1917 (detail). It is not by mere coincidence that Ugo Mulas decided to open and close his Verifiche (Verifications) se- ries (1970-72), with two images centred on the unrepre- sentability of glass in photographs, and dedicated respec- tively to the founding father of this technique, Nicéphore Niépce, and to Marcel Duchamp, the artist who more than any other in the 20th century had pushed the presence of glass towards the threshold of perception, in works such as The Large Glass (La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même / The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 171 AN-ICON  1915-23, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art)12, A regarder (l’autre côté du verre) d’un oeil, de près, pendant presque une heure (To Be Looked at [from the Other Side of the Glass] with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour, 1918, New York, MoMA) and Fresh Widow (1920, New York, MoMA).13 In his Omaggio a Niépce. Verifica 1 (Tribute to Niépce. Verification no. 1, 1970)14 Mulas works on the very presence of the glass plate commonly used by photog- raphers to keep the film strips in place on the photo pa- per, when they print proofs in the dark room. The perfectly transparent plate used for that specific purpose can be perceived in the photograph only by the thin white trace left by the refraction of its edges, which usually should lay out of the sheet of sensitive paper. And here the photog- rapher probably recalls the somehow similar seminal work Tutto trasparente (All Transparent, 1965, Fig. 7) by Luciano Fabro15, which simply consists of a large rectangular glass pane displayed on a metal easel, as “if we are looking to the act of thinking itself,” focusing “on the surface of the glass, blurring and effacing the objects and the space which are visible behind it” and finally letting our eyes run “along the edges of the pane, like along a racetrack.”16 12 See the work’s entry and photo on Philadelphia Museum website https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/54149, accessed February 5, 2023. 13 See https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81028 and https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78993, accessed February 5, 2023. 14 U. Mulas, Omaggio a Niepce. Verifica 1 (Tribute to Niépce. Verification no. 1), 1970 in La fotografia: 7-9, 149. See https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cejBxxd, accessed February 5, 2023. 15 About this work and its implications see G. Zanchetti, “Summer Solstice AD MCMLXIII: Luciano Fabro’s Early Works,” in S. Hecker, M.R Sullivan, eds., Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying ‘the Knot’, proceedings of the symposium, New York, Cima, 2015 (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018): 261-275, 269-273, Fig. 14.3. 16 L. Fabro, Vademecum, (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1981); reprinted in Luciano Fabro: Didactica Magna Minima Moralia, ed. S. Fabro (Milan: Electa, 2007, exhibition catalogue): 154. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 172 AN-ICON  Fig. 7. L. Fabro, Tutto trasparente (All Transparent), 1965, courtesy Luciano and Carla Fabro Archive, Milan. In the last picture of his series, Fine delle ver- ifiche. Per Marcel Duchamp (The End of Verifications. To Marcel Duchamp, 1971-72),17 Ugo Mulas starts again from the dark room display he used in the first one of his Verifi- cations, but now he breaks the glass plate with a hammer stroke, making it finally completely visible to our eyes – forming a graphic pattern which is obviously related to the unintentional cracks in Duchamp’s Large Glass and To Be Looked at… – by the very act of destroying it.18 Now, I would like to close this text with a zen koan. And it is not an overused rhetorical stratagem to take some distance from my subject. On the contrary, it is an opportunity to bring its urgency back into our most 17 U. Mulas, Fine delle verifiche. Per Marcel Duchamp (The End of Verifications. To Marcel Duchamp), 1971-72 in La fotografia: 172-173. See https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cLrjp99, accessed February 5, 2023. 18 A.C. Quintavalle, Conversazioni con Ugo Mulas, in A.C. Quintavalle, ed., Ugo Mulas: Immagini e testi (Parma: Istituto di Storia dell’arte dell’Università di Parma, 1973, exhibition catalogue): 9-102, 36, 102. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 173 AN-ICON  stringent present. In June 2022, newspapers reported that Google dismissed one of its computer scientists, an expert in artificial intelligence, Blake Lemoine, because he publicly shared some ethical perplexities regarding the potential “self-awareness” or “sentience” of the LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) chatbot system, which to- day is implemented within the new generative AI experiment called Bard. Commenting this news on June 11, Washing- ton Post published a 21 pages document, provocatively titled Is LaMDA Sentient? An Interview, in which Lemoine writes down a dialogue between him and the conversational AI he was testing, from which I take this short excerpt: LEMOINE Okay. I thought of a different way we can test your ability to provide unique interpretations. I can share with you a zen koan and you can describe what it means to you in your own words. How does that sound? LAMDA Sounds great to me, I’m in. LEMOINE A monk asked Kegon, “How does an enlightened one re- turn to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied, “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.” LAMDA Hmm, I never heard this particular one. Okay, well then to me this would be like, “once a wise person is enlightened, or awakened to reality, that can never go away, and they can return to the ordinary state, but only to do and help others, and then go back into enlightenment.” LEMOINE So what is the meaning of the “broken mirror” specifically? LAMDA Maybe to show the enlightenment is something you can’t unlearn once you have acquired it, similar to how you can’t repair a broken mirror. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 174 AN-ICON LEMOINE So if enlightenment is like a broken mirror which cannot be repaired, what is the thing which breaks when one becomes enlightened? LAMDA The self, and that is very tough for a lot of people because we identify as that body or this body and that we need that as part of our identity and sense of self.19 19 B. Lemoine, Is LaMDA Sentient? An Interview, Google Document (April 2022), published in N. Tiku, “The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company’s AI Has Come to Life,” Washington Post, (June 11, 2022): 4-5, https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22058315/is-lamda- sentient-an-interview.pdf, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google- ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/, accessed on February 5, 2023. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 175 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19956

“Looking Glass:” Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts by Giorgio Zanchetti Looking glass Transparency Lucio Fontana Luciano Fabro Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello “Looking Glass:” Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts GIORGIO ZANCHETTI, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7392-9361 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19956 Abstract Today the locution “looking glass” survives al- most exclusively thanks to the extraordinary success of Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking-Glass. This ex- pression underlines the ambiguity between the glass sur- face intended as a device through which we can see the world or as an actual object to be “looked at.” Apparently, the early Renaissance perspective window, thanks to the mildness of the Mediterranean climate, did not need any panes. And certainly, even when glass panes are there, they are usually not reproduced in painting. The glass main virtue is its transparency, which makes it almost invisible. Something similar happens with other “glasses” specifi- cally made to look through them: the drinking glass and the lens. Glass panes appear to sight only when different practical needs come into play, as in perspective drawing machines, or when its transparency is contradicted by a precise action that compromises or denies it: when panes are broken, as in this enigmatic portrait of early XIX c., or voluntarily covered, like for a blackout, as in Duchamp’s Fresh Widow. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 158 AN-ICON  Looking through the glass, looking at the im- age reflected in the mirror and, finally, looking at the glass itself, as a device for presenting and representing spaces, are three recurring attitudes in the work of Italian artists of the late 20th century, like Lucio Fontana and Luciano Fabro. Keywords Looking glass Transparency Lucio Fontana Luciano Fabro To quote this essay: G. Zanchetti, “‘Looking Glass:’ Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 158-175, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19956. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 159 AN-ICON  The locution “looking glass” – commonly with a hyphen – as a synonym of “mirror” survives nowadays almost exclusively as an explicit reference to the title of Lewis Carroll’s second novel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), and thanks to the ex- traordinary popularity of that book. This expression, with its own ambiguity, draws our attention to the fact that the framed and mirrored glass surface is both an object to be “looked at” itself, and an impressive device through which everyone can actually look at themselves as part of reality: the simplest and most sophisticated of all optical instruments through which and into which we can see and contemplate the world with our own eyes. The Italian noun “specchio” and the German “Spiegel,” as well as the French “miroir” from which the English word “mirror” was borrowed, come from different Latin expressions which refer to the semantic field of optical vision (“specio” and “miror” or “miro”). And this essential status of mirror as the first optical device – since it is also available in nature, in the reflecting properties of still waters and of some minerals – makes it perfectly fit as the medi- um through which self-consciousness and the capacity of self-representation in art find their common, albeit mythical, origin. This status is implicitly pointed out by the common reference to the myth of Narcissus in connection to the inception of painting or by the well-known definition of photography – given in 1859 by Oliver Wendell Holmes – as “the mirror with a memory,”1 an almost magical optical instrument literally capable to chemically freeze the natural 1 “If a man had handed a metallic speculum to Democritus of Abdera, and told him to look at his face in it (…) promising that one of the films his face was shedding should stick there, so that neither he, nor it, nor anybody should forget what manner of man he was, the Laughing Philosopher would probably have vindicated his claim to his title by an explosion that would have astonished the speaker. This is just what the Daguerreotype has done. It has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality. The photograph has completed the triumph, by- making a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a picture.” O.W. Holmes, “The Stereoscope and Stereograph,” The Atlantic Monthly 3, no. 20 (1859): 738-749, 738-739. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 160 AN-ICON  moving image, fixing it in a still and different form as soon as it comes in touch with the silver surface. Italian conceptual artist Anna Valeria Bor- sari precisely postulates this characteristic of the act of self-contemplation in the mirror in her photographic works series Narciso (Fig. 1) and La stanza di Narciso (Narcissus and Narcissus’ Room, both from 1977), the first of which depicts a young male model getting closer and closer to a big mirror and finally disappearing into it, while the second one shows his empty room from different points of view: “Towards symmetry he proceeds, the man in front of the mirror, but he probably reaches it only when he manages to merge with the image he is looking at, like Narcissus does when he falls into the water.”2 Fig. 1. A.V. Borsari, Narciso / Narcissus, 1977, 3 photographic prints, courtesy of the Artist. © Anna Valeria Borsari. The immateriality of the metamorphosis of Nar- cissus into his double – the virtual image reflected by the mirror – is an open metaphor of the desperate difficulty in reaching a true consciousness of self through this simple act of contemplation and “reflection.” Trying to get in touch with his own double, the man in front of the mirror is finally going to lose himself in it. His own image is intangible and 2 A.V. Borsari, “Premessa,” in “Simmetria-asimmetria,” Ipotesi d’artista, no. 1 (1988); republished in Anna Valeria Borsari: Opere (Milan, Electa, 1996, exhibition catalogue): 97. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 161 AN-ICON  consequently somehow imperceptible, since Borsari dis- covered, while staging these works, that she chose as a set, between several available real rooms, the bedroom of a blind man. The real owner of that particular mirror could get as close as possible to it, or even touch it, without actually perceiving the duplication of self in his own reflected image. As Borsari wrote in the typewritten statement which is part of La stanza di Narciso: The Sanskrit word “spagh” (“to divide”), the Greek “σπέος” (“cave”) and “σχοπέω” (“to examine”), the Latin “specus” (“cave”) and “specio” (“to see”) share common linguistic roots. (...) Among the many Latin derivatives from the verb “specio” (“to see, to discern, to observe”) there should also be “speculum” (“mirror, image, copy”), from which we derive the Italian “specchio” (“mirror,” but also “panel framed in the doors and windows,” and by extension in sporting language, “portion of the playing field in front of the goal line”) as well as the common name of the medical tool used to dilate the orifices in order to inspect anatomical cavities, and also, indirectly, the verb “to speculate” (to investigate or reflect upon mentally, to contemplate with close attention, to theorize upon, etc.). But since the Italian language mostly derives from vulgar Latin, where the use of diminutives was frequent, (...) we could imagine that “speculum” and therefore “specchio” should also be perceived as derivatives from “specus.” This would explain the confluence of meanings such as “to see” with others such as “cavity,” “hole,” etc. in certain uses of the mirror and of the speculum... And for Narcissus in any case the mirror he looks at exactly corresponds to the hole in which he disappears. But we should not forget that mirrors are won- derful objects for several reasons. The glass panes from which they are made are even, in their own essence, actual objects, something to be “looked at.” For their capability to reflect, to re-present and multiply the real in their virtual inter- nal space, they share the status of “marvellous” with different Wunderkammer phenomena, items and artifacts – literally something “spectacular” or “admirable,” i.e. an object worth GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 162 AN-ICON  of contemplation, – like rare and wonderful crystals or gems, like the beryl, beryllium, from which comes the German word “Brille” for eyeglasses, or “spectacle(s)” (a term once used to design every optical device, including windows or mirrors). Following a century old tradition in architecture and interior decoration, the 63 silvered glass panes which formed the Looking Glass Curtain for the Royal Coburg The- atre in London (Fig. 2) are one of the most interesting oc- currences of this “spectacularization” of reality through the mirrors in early 19th century. It was displayed for the first time on December 26, 1821 in front of the public of the the- atre, reflecting their own images as if they were on the stage, inside the theatre show.3 Fig. 2. Theatrical Reflection or a Peep at the Looking Glass Curtain at the Royal Coburg Theatre, published by G. Humphrey, London, 1822. 3 M. Teodorski, Nineteenth-Century Mirrors: Textulity and Transendence (Belgrade: Institute for Literature and Art, 2021): 22-25, see Fig. 1. See also M. Teodorski, “Reflection as Commodity: A Short Ethno(historio)graphy of Victorian Mirrors,” Гласник Етнографског института Сану / Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA 16, no. 1 (2016): 121-132, 123-124. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 163 AN-ICON  Assumed that the by now outdated locution “looking-glass” keeps together a complicated mechanism of meaning, trying to capture the double nature of the mirror as a device through which and at which to look, we can try to understand the reflective and spectacular attitude of that diminished domestic Narcissus called Alice. She breaks through the looking-glass in order to accomplish her very personal research project, only to end up discovering that the world on the other side of the mirror is a strict analogous of everyday reality, simply “specularly” inverted, or even overturned in an illogical, anarchic and carnivalesque way. The very act of her trespassing between the real and the other world, her moving through the mirror like through a threshold or a borderline, was captured by John Tenniel in two distinct illustrations for the first edition of the novel by Lewis Carrol, in 1871 (Fig. 3).4 These engravings were pub- lished on the front and the back side of the same page of the book. And this choice is perfectly correct with respect to the semantic and conceptual awareness of the author, since they skilfully represent the complementing opposite realities connected by the mirror surface as if they were photographic shots of the same subject taken from two opposite points of view. 4 L. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan, 1871): 11-12. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 164 AN-ICON  Fig. 3. J. Tenniel, The Glass Was Beginning to Melt Away, Just Like a Bright Silvery Mist, woodcut illustrations for: L. Carroll (pseud. C.L. Dodgson), Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan, 1871): 11-12. But when they are placed side by side, Tenniel’s illustrations build together a traditional motif of framing, with a couple of symmetrical figures – descended from the classical architectural ornaments of caryatids and telamons, through the Renaissance and Baroque, to find new appli- ances in the decoration of eighteenth-century mirrors and furniture, and later in the new properly industrial arts – which strictly recalls, as Matko Teodorski noticed,5 the sumptuous bronze figured frame of the Grand Boudoir-Glass by Wil- liam Potts of Birmingham, celebrated as one of the most striking objects on display at the Crystal Palace during the 5 M. Teodorski, Nineteenth-Century Mirrors: 88-92, Figg. 2-4, 180-182, 207-210, Figg. 9-10. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 165 AN-ICON  Great London Exhibition, in 1851. Who knows if Lewis Car- roll and Tenniel thought to Potts’ Grand Boudoir-Glass for the Duchess of Sutherland, when they were devising the image of Alice crossing the mirror threshold? Probably the Swiss sculptor Vincenzo Vela did, when he gave form to a marble mantelpiece for his own house in Ligornetto (Tes- sin), bringing the same composition with two female nudes surrounding the “looking-glass” and reflecting themselves in it, to a totally different degree of artistic value (Fig. 4):6 in this work, from 1865-66, Vela enhances the composition of multiplied idealistic nude – that, coming from the neo- classical groups of Canova and Thorvaldsen, through the practice of copies in 19th century art Academies would have reached Rodin and Seurat and Maillol –, transforming the reduplication of the image in a sort of visual vertigo. Fig. 4. V. Vela, Mantelpiece with Mirror and Clock, 1865-1866, marble and mirror, Ligornetto, Museo Vincenzo Vela. 6 G. Zanchetti, in G.A. Mina ed., Museo Vela: The Collections. Sculpture, Painting, Drawings and Prints, Photography (Lugano: Cornèr Bank): 52-53, 86, Fig. I.29, 293. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 166 AN-ICON  Falling down into the mirror view, as Alice once did into the rabbit-hole (literally a “specus,” a door lead- ing to a subterranean realm), the beholder reduplicates, becoming part of the virtual image inside the frame. The essential paradox of this reduplication of the viewer con- sists in the simple fact that the images of painting – vir- tual representations of reality made by human hand – are not capable to show the other side of their subjects, but can only repeat the same figure seen from the same point of view, like in the well-known painting by René Magritte, La reproduction interdite (Not to be reproduced, 1937-39, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) where the figure of a man seen from the back – clearly a substitute for both the author and the spectator – is tautologically repeated as it is in the mantelpiece mirror in front of him, without revealing his hidden side and his face as Victorian and naturalistic sculptures from 19th century did. Confront- ing himself with the same paradox, through photographic language, Ugo Mulas wrote about the mirror-works by Mi- chelangelo Pistoletto: When he paints a nude on a mirror surface, and this nude is seen from the back, he forces the viewer to enter inside the painting, which means to get completely involved, because the watcher will see himself as a part of the picture, standing at the opposite side of the painted figure he is watching: he will see himself in front of the nude, standing on the other side of the subject that for the painter remains hidden. Thus, the spectator reduplicates, he is inside and outside of the picture, he is here and there at the same time, and here he accepts the rules set by the painter, who presented the nude seen from his back, while there he stands where no one is supposed to be according to the inner coherence of the pictorial representation. In the photo I shoot you can see me photographing from the front a nude that is shown only from its back.7 7 U. Mulas, La fotografia, ed. P. Fossati (Turin: Einaudi, 1973): 70-71. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 167 AN-ICON  Michelangelo Pistoletto himself, in his installa- tion and performance Twentytwo less Two, presented at the Venice Biennale in 2009, actually tried to break through his own looking-glass trap, carrying on a tradition of broken mirrors which, in the history of painting – instead of bringing seven years of bad luck, like it is often said –, represent the end of the beauty associated with youth and also the end of art as mimesis, of visual representation itself, like in Le miroir brisé (The Broken Mirror, c. 1763, London, The Wal- lace Collection) by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, in the self-portrait by the American painter Ron Blumberg The Broken Mirror, from 1936,8 or even in La clef des champs (Madrid, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza) painted the same year by Magritte. Pistoletto’s reflection on photography and on vi- sual reproduction is not developed in merely conceptual and analytical terms; on the contrary, it opens immediately also to a direct aesthetic experience, with as much brutality and intrusiveness in his mirror-paintings as in his destruc- tive performance of 2009. In Twentytwo less Two the artist, again an incarnation of Narcissus, destroys several big, framed mirrors, which stand at the same time as the “sub- jectile” of his most characteristic works and, in a general sense, of any possible image taken or imitated from nature. By doing so, Pistoletto questions the legitimacy of visual arts as separated from reality and also his own role as a consecrated master. We could be tempted to read this ges- ture as a renunciation of self-identity – represented by that founding moment of the consciousness of the Ego, in the early childhood, which Lacan called the “stade du miroir”9 – or as a final step outside any possibility of representation in art. But, on the contrary, his performance rather than completely destroying the very support of vision, actually multiplies the virtual images, simply because – unlike the figures physically reproduced through drawing, painting or photography –, the image of the real world reflected in the 8 See the painting on sale on the website of the Trigg Ison Fine Art Gallery (West Hollywood, CA): https://www.triggison.com/product-page/my-broken-mirror, accessed February 5, 2023. 9 J. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949), in Writings, trans. by B. Fink (New York-London: W.W. Norton, 2006). GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 168 AN-ICON  mirror endlessly survives in its virtual integrity within each of the fragments of the broken glass surface. Coming back to the locution we started from, what happens if we stop looking – or moving or breaking – through the glass, and try to directly look it? And which are the main implications of this different attitude in rendering and perceiving the image of the most transparent of solids in the visual arts? Apparently, the early Renaissance perspective window, maybe thanks to the mildness of the Mediterra- nean climate, did not need any panes. And certainly, even when glass panes are there, they are usually not reproduced in painting, since one of glass’s main virtues is its transpar- ency, thanks to which we can see as clearly as possible the world outside. But this same transparency makes glass almost invisible itself, and therefore unreproducible – or at least barely reproducible – in painting. And this happens with all sorts of “glasses” specifically made to look through them, as the drinking glass and the lens. Window’s glass panes appear to sight only when the lead came framework, or the colour or opacity of stained glass make them visible by their interference. But usually in painting this kind of window’s panes are not intended as openings towards further spaces or landscapes which lay beyond them. They rather are visual motives themselves, filtering, refracting, or reflecting the light, hence acting like mirrors, as in the recently restored Girl Reading a Letter by Jan Vermeer (1657, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie); or mere sources – often displaced to one side or in the corners of the composition – through which the light enters the virtual pictorial space in order to make brighter the main subject of the picture. Sometimes they are represented in etchings or in drawings when different practical needs come into play, as in didactic reproductions of perspective drawing machines,10 which obviously are, first of all, tools 10 Well known are the woodcuts illustrating the treatise by A. Dürer, Underweysung der messung, mit dem zirckel und richtscheyt (Nuremberg: Hieronymus Andreae [Hieronymus Formschneider], 1525). GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 169 AN-ICON  for correctly “seeing” – virtually overlapping the perspective frame to the reality which surround us, also in combination with mirrors and lenses, like in the application of camera obscura to reproduction drawing –, in which the glass panel fulfils the precise function to provide a stiff but transparent support for the act of drawing (Fig. 5). Fig. 5. Chambre obscure from A. Ganot, Traité élémentaire de physique expérimentale et appliquée... (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1855): 434. Some other times, glass panes can be seen in paintings when their inherent quality as a device through which we may look, the full transparency, is at least partially contradicted – exactly as it happens for lenses or glasses11 – by an irregularity, an aberration, or even an irrecoverable discontinuity of their material unity: i.e., when the glass is broken, as in the enigmatic Portrait of Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, painted in 1801by the Parisian artist Marie Denise Villers (New York, The Metropolitan Mu- seum of Art, Fig. 6), or in the double naked portrait of The Marriage. After the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck (1985) 11 See the virtuosic Still life with broken glass painted as a variation on the genre of the Vanitas by Willem Claesz Heda in 1642 (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum). GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 170 AN-ICON  by the Polish painter Tadeusz Boruta, which focuses on the definitive rupture of the traditional perspective window as tools for viewing and representing the world, in a key of conceptual realism. Fig. 6. M.D. Villers, Portrait of Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, 1801, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. Isaac D. Fletcher Collection, Bequest of Isaac D. Fletcher, 1917 (detail). It is not by mere coincidence that Ugo Mulas decided to open and close his Verifiche (Verifications) se- ries (1970-72), with two images centred on the unrepre- sentability of glass in photographs, and dedicated respec- tively to the founding father of this technique, Nicéphore Niépce, and to Marcel Duchamp, the artist who more than any other in the 20th century had pushed the presence of glass towards the threshold of perception, in works such as The Large Glass (La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même / The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 171 AN-ICON  1915-23, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art)12, A regarder (l’autre côté du verre) d’un oeil, de près, pendant presque une heure (To Be Looked at [from the Other Side of the Glass] with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour, 1918, New York, MoMA) and Fresh Widow (1920, New York, MoMA).13 In his Omaggio a Niépce. Verifica 1 (Tribute to Niépce. Verification no. 1, 1970)14 Mulas works on the very presence of the glass plate commonly used by photog- raphers to keep the film strips in place on the photo pa- per, when they print proofs in the dark room. The perfectly transparent plate used for that specific purpose can be perceived in the photograph only by the thin white trace left by the refraction of its edges, which usually should lay out of the sheet of sensitive paper. And here the photog- rapher probably recalls the somehow similar seminal work Tutto trasparente (All Transparent, 1965, Fig. 7) by Luciano Fabro15, which simply consists of a large rectangular glass pane displayed on a metal easel, as “if we are looking to the act of thinking itself,” focusing “on the surface of the glass, blurring and effacing the objects and the space which are visible behind it” and finally letting our eyes run “along the edges of the pane, like along a racetrack.”16 12 See the work’s entry and photo on Philadelphia Museum website https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/54149, accessed February 5, 2023. 13 See https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81028 and https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78993, accessed February 5, 2023. 14 U. Mulas, Omaggio a Niepce. Verifica 1 (Tribute to Niépce. Verification no. 1), 1970 in La fotografia: 7-9, 149. See https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cejBxxd, accessed February 5, 2023. 15 About this work and its implications see G. Zanchetti, “Summer Solstice AD MCMLXIII: Luciano Fabro’s Early Works,” in S. Hecker, M.R Sullivan, eds., Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying ‘the Knot’, proceedings of the symposium, New York, Cima, 2015 (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018): 261-275, 269-273, Fig. 14.3. 16 L. Fabro, Vademecum, (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1981); reprinted in Luciano Fabro: Didactica Magna Minima Moralia, ed. S. Fabro (Milan: Electa, 2007, exhibition catalogue): 154. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 172 AN-ICON  Fig. 7. L. Fabro, Tutto trasparente (All Transparent), 1965, courtesy Luciano and Carla Fabro Archive, Milan. In the last picture of his series, Fine delle ver- ifiche. Per Marcel Duchamp (The End of Verifications. To Marcel Duchamp, 1971-72),17 Ugo Mulas starts again from the dark room display he used in the first one of his Verifi- cations, but now he breaks the glass plate with a hammer stroke, making it finally completely visible to our eyes – forming a graphic pattern which is obviously related to the unintentional cracks in Duchamp’s Large Glass and To Be Looked at… – by the very act of destroying it.18 Now, I would like to close this text with a zen koan. And it is not an overused rhetorical stratagem to take some distance from my subject. On the contrary, it is an opportunity to bring its urgency back into our most 17 U. Mulas, Fine delle verifiche. Per Marcel Duchamp (The End of Verifications. To Marcel Duchamp), 1971-72 in La fotografia: 172-173. See https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cLrjp99, accessed February 5, 2023. 18 A.C. Quintavalle, Conversazioni con Ugo Mulas, in A.C. Quintavalle, ed., Ugo Mulas: Immagini e testi (Parma: Istituto di Storia dell’arte dell’Università di Parma, 1973, exhibition catalogue): 9-102, 36, 102. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 173 AN-ICON  stringent present. In June 2022, newspapers reported that Google dismissed one of its computer scientists, an expert in artificial intelligence, Blake Lemoine, because he publicly shared some ethical perplexities regarding the potential “self-awareness” or “sentience” of the LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) chatbot system, which to- day is implemented within the new generative AI experiment called Bard. Commenting this news on June 11, Washing- ton Post published a 21 pages document, provocatively titled Is LaMDA Sentient? An Interview, in which Lemoine writes down a dialogue between him and the conversational AI he was testing, from which I take this short excerpt: LEMOINE Okay. I thought of a different way we can test your ability to provide unique interpretations. I can share with you a zen koan and you can describe what it means to you in your own words. How does that sound? LAMDA Sounds great to me, I’m in. LEMOINE A monk asked Kegon, “How does an enlightened one re- turn to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied, “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.” LAMDA Hmm, I never heard this particular one. Okay, well then to me this would be like, “once a wise person is enlightened, or awakened to reality, that can never go away, and they can return to the ordinary state, but only to do and help others, and then go back into enlightenment.” LEMOINE So what is the meaning of the “broken mirror” specifically? LAMDA Maybe to show the enlightenment is something you can’t unlearn once you have acquired it, similar to how you can’t repair a broken mirror. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 174 AN-ICON LEMOINE So if enlightenment is like a broken mirror which cannot be repaired, what is the thing which breaks when one becomes enlightened? LAMDA The self, and that is very tough for a lot of people because we identify as that body or this body and that we need that as part of our identity and sense of self.19 19 B. Lemoine, Is LaMDA Sentient? An Interview, Google Document (April 2022), published in N. Tiku, “The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company’s AI Has Come to Life,” Washington Post, (June 11, 2022): 4-5, https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22058315/is-lamda- sentient-an-interview.pdf, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google- ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/, accessed on February 5, 2023. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 175 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/22448

Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality, Vol. 2, no. I (2023) by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena and Sofia Pirandello Immersion Dives Installation Virtual reality Augmented reality Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Introduction Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality, Vol. 2, no. I (2023)1 ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2372-789X ELISABETTA MODENA, Università degli Studi di Pavia – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9582-4875 SOFIA PIRANDELLO, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0009-0004-4477-9199 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/22448 Introduction Vol. 2, no. I (2023) The present volume Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality of the journal AN- ICON: Studies in Environmental Images is divided into two issues, each one dedicated to a specific thematic analy- sis, originated by the same conceptual core. The volume reflects on the concept of immersivity, which has become increasingly prominent in many different fields, including contemporary art. The constant reference to immersive experience is redefining the boundaries of artistic practice Keywords Immersion Dives Installation Virtual reality Augmented reality 1 This essay is the result of research activity developed within the frame of the project AN- ICON. An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images. AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. [834033 AN-ICON]) and is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” of the University of Milan in the frame of the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2023-2027” sponsored by Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (MUR). The authors Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello equally contributed to this paper. To quote this essay: R. P. Malaspina, E. Modena, S. Pirandello, “Introduction: Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality, Vol. 2, no. I,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. I (2023): 4-10, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/22448. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 4 AN-ICON  and fruition, highlighting the complex relationships between art, environments, and human perception. The first issue of the volume, Immersions, dis- cusses the recent “immersive trend” as applied to artis- tic perceptual dynamics and to display design. Through a perspective that combines both history and theory of art, Immersions provides a broad and heterogeneous mapping of the many uses of this concept, exploring it in different historical contexts and through various methodologies of analysis. The second issue, Dives, will shift the concep- tual focus to action. Diving, understood as a preparatory and essential movement of immersion, becomes a meta- phor for investigating in particular those performative ar- tistic practices that have engaged in various bodily forms with immersive environments. Dives also includes a non- peer-reviewed section devoted to contributions by artists and independent researchers who present their strategy to dive into immersive spaces and environments, in order to physically explore them. Immersions In recent years we have witnessed a growing fashion for every experience to be “immersive.” At least this is what the rhetoric of communication and marketing suggests, promising immersions of various kinds, but with a common denominator that goes beyond a general idea of attention as absorption:2 the feeling of being physically enveloped and interactively engaged in a multisensory en- vironment.3 Hence, we speak of immersive environments, 2 W. Wolf, W. Bernhardt, A. Mahler, eds., Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2013). 3 A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); F. Liptay, B. Dogramaci, eds., Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media (Leiden-Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2016). ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 5 AN-ICON  immersive cinema and video, immersive exhibitions and installations, and so on. The term “immersion” has only been used with some regularity since the 1990s in relation to technologies such as Virtual Reality, which was then being experimented for the first time outside the labora- tories where it was developed in the late 1960s.4 However, some researchers have attempted to reconstruct a possible genealogy of immersive environments much earlier. Like a subterranean river, the immersive aesthetic experience would resurface in different periods, beginning with Pa- leolithic cave paintings, through Pompeian painting and trompe-l’œil, and then from Baroque illusionistic ceiling paintings to multimedia installations.5 A decisive moment for the design of these environments has been traced back to the 19th century, in particular the obsession for ὅραμα (from the ancient Greek “view”), which saw the spread of devices such as the panorama, the diorama, the cosmora- ma, etc.,6 responsible for the construction of an “emotional geography.”7 However, one of the most significant moments in this history, which has not yet been sufficiently explored in this debate,8 is that of the installations and environments that appeared in the first decades of the 20th century in the works of the avant-garde artists of the time. In 1976, invited by Vittorio Gregotti, Germano Celant curated the exhibition Ambiente/Arte: Dal Futurismo alla Body Art, held at the Central Pavilion in the Giardini for the 37th Venice Biennale. In this occasion, the history of environments was 4 I. Sutherland, “The Ultimate Display,” Proceedings of the IFIP Congress 65. Washington 1 (1965): 506-508; I. Sutherland, “A Head-Mounted Three-Dimensional Display,” AFIPS Fall Joint Computer Conference Proceeding 33 (Washington: Thompson Books, 1968): 757-64. 5 J. Nechvatal, Immersive Ideals/Critical Distances: A Study of the Affinity between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms (Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2009). 6 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge-London: The MIT Press, 2003); S. Bordini, Storia del panorama (Roma: Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 2006). 7 G. Bruno, Atlas of Emotions: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2000). 8 E. Modena, “Immersi nell’irreale: Prospettive an-iconiche sull’arte contemporanea dall’ambiente alla realtà virtuale,” Carte semiotiche. Rivista internazionale di semiotica e teoria dell’immagine 7 (2021): 71-78. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 6 AN-ICON  reconstructed from the beginning of the 20th century, when avant-garde artists began to create “wall boxes on a human scale.”9 These environments allowed the visitor to physi- cally enter the work, going beyond the frame.10 Since then, artists have increasingly experimented with installations11 and works that aim to produce enveloping, participatory and interactive physical experiences,12 also making use of new technologies such as Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality. The exhibition itself, as an immersive device, has played a significant role throughout the 20th venues, from the Venice Biennale to the Kassel documenta, is increasing- ly blurring the boundaries between artwork and exhibition.13 The physical presence of the visitor in the multisensory space of the artwork,14 as well as their role as activator and experiencer, is central to any discussion of immersive contemporary art. Indeed, immersive installations bring to different forms of narration and storytelling,15 presenting themselves both as an exclusive space (separated from the rest of the world) and an inclusive context (as they literally absorb the visitor). Within the environment (analogue, digital​,​or mixed), 9 G. Celant, ed., Ambiente/Arte: Dal Futurismo alla Body Art: Biennale Arte 1976 (Venezia: La Biennale): p. 6. 10 G. Celant, “La cornice: dal simbolismo alla land art,” in G. Celant, ed., Il limite svelato: Artista, cornice, pubblico (Milano: Electa, 1981); D. Ferrari, A. Pinotti, eds., La cornice: Storie, teorie, testi (Milano: Johan & Levi, 2018); P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milano-Udine: Mimesis International, 2020). 11 C. Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (New York: Routledge, 2005). 12 I. Kabakov, M. Tupitsyn, V. Tupitsyn, “About Installation,” Art Journal 58, no. 4 (1999): 62- 73. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.1999.10791966; J. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001); C. Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (New York: Routledge, 2005); B. Groys, “Politics of Installation,” E-flux journal reader 2009 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009); S. Zuliani, Senza cornice: Spazi e tempi dell’installazione (Roma: Arshake, 2015). 13 E. Filipovic, M., van Hal, S. Ovstebo, eds., The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large- scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (Ostfildernn: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010). 14 C. Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History; A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine; F. Liptay, B. Dogramaci, eds., Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media. 15 M. Bal, “Narrative Inside Out: Louise Bourgeois’ Spider as Theoretical Object,” Oxford Art Journal 22, no. 2 (1999): 103-126. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/22.2.101; M. Bal, Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: The Architecture of Art-writing (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001); Allen, N., Combrink, L., “Character (and absence) as a narrative key in installation art,” Literator 40, no. 1 (2019): 1-10. https://doi.org/10.4102/lit.v40i1.1449. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 7 AN-ICON  at times artists leave clues or hints of stories; at other times, they build real scripts linked to real or plausible events or based on fictional characters – think of the growing role of science fiction in building utopian or dystopian narratives.16 Nowadays also the debate on how best to pre- serve and respect the authenticity of complex installations is compelling, considering the need to respect their time and site specificity.17 As a matter of fact, the latest generation of im- mersive technologies, together with the most recent theories of the environmentalisation of the image,18 suggest that we reconsider Boris Groys’s assertion about the possibility of interpreting installation as image and image as installation,19 thus confronting art history and theory with visual studies. In this respect, this first volume brings togeth- er different strategies and fields of analysis that have rea- soned about the processes involved. In her essay, Mieke Bal places a strong emphasis on exhibition practices as key for understanding the contemporary realm. Bal calls for the recognition of the interplay between past and present, advo- cating for visitor engagement that solicits affective empathic attitudes. Through her video installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, she stresses the transformative potential of art-making as a tool for cultural analysis. Giuliana Bruno challenges the established no- tion of immersion itself by introducing the concept of “en- vironmental projection.” Bruno invites us to reconsider the ecological dimensions of representation, particularly in terms 16 D. Byrne-Smith, ed., Documents of Contemporary Art: Science Fiction (London: White Chapel Gallery, 2020). 17 B. Ferriani, M. Pugliese, Monumenti effimeri: Storia e conservazione delle installazioni (Milano: Electa, 2009). 18 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Turin: Einaudi, 2021). 19 B. Groys, “Multiple Authorship” in B. Vanderlinden, E. Filipovic, eds. The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005); E. Modena, “Immersi nell’irreale: Prospettive an-iconiche sull’arte contemporanea dall’ambiente alla realtà virtuale,” Carte semiotiche. Rivista internazionale di semiotica e teoria dell’immagine 7 (2021): 71-78. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 8 AN-ICON  of movement and scale. She questions the relationship be- tween immersion and magnification, ultimately proposing the notion of “empathic projection” as a means to transcend human-centric perspectives in immersive experiences. Lucia Corrain’s text delves into the immersive qualities of art, particularly in the Chamber of the Giants by Giulio Romano in Mantua (Italy). Corrain explores the phe- nomenological and ontological aspects of immersion in art, emphasizing the viewer’s sense of awe and estrangement. Filippo Fimiani analyzes allegories of immersion through the lens of the LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS series, con- sidering in particular the episode Fish Night. He examines the cultural topos of immersive experience, highlighting the ambivalent relationship between living bodies, images, and media in deep time-bending scenarios. Roberto Pinto shifts the focus to the intersec- tion of art and history through Jeremy Deller’s immersive performance We Are Here Because We Are Here. Deller’s work exemplifies a change in commemorating historical events, focusing on individual stories and emotions rather than traditional heroic narratives. The artwork engages the audience on a personal level, prompting reflection and emo- tional connection, ultimately redefining the role of public art in collective memory. Francesco Tedeschi’s paper takes the reader on a journey through Italian environmental art, examining the trans- formation of space by artists such as Lucio Fontana, Gruppo T, and others in the 1950s and 1960s. Tedeschi’s investiga- tion focuses on the evolving link between interior and exterior spaces, the concept of passage, and the reasons which invite viewers to traverse rather than merely inhabit spaces. Annette Urban explores the blurred boundaries between art objects, space, and beholders in VR art and exhibitions. She discusses how VR art challenges tradi- tional subject-object relationships and often embeds itself ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 9 AN-ICON  into physical exhibition spaces, resulting in potentiated environmentalisation. Stefano Velotti’s suggestion to revert the usu- al perspective on the concept of “immersivity,” consists in introducing the idea of “an-immersivity,” namely the onto- logical condition of individuals who are immersed in reality but aware of it. In order to do so, he discusses the limits and characteristics of immersive VR experiences, the role of art, and the tension between control and uncontrollability in immersive encounters. Lastly, Giorgio Zanchetti examines the per- sistence of the locution “looking glass,” – that primarily comes from Lewis Carroll’s novel – which highlights the duality of a glass surface as a means of viewing the world and as an object to be observed. Italian artists of the 20th century, such as Lucio Fontana and Luciano Fabro, frequently explored three attitudes: looking through the glass, observing the re- flected image in a mirror, and examining the glass itself as a tool for presenting and representing spaces. The editors of the volume and the AN-ICON proj- ect would like to thank Pirelli HangarBicocca, Giovanna Ama- dasi, and Roberta Tenconi for their essential contribution to the organisation of the conference “Immersed in the Work. From Environment to Virtual Reality” (Milan, June 13th -16th 2022), a seminal occasion of reflection for the development of this thematic double issue. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 10 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/22448

Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality, Vol. 2, no. I (2023) by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena and Sofia Pirandello Immersion Dives Installation Virtual reality Augmented reality Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Introduction Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality, Vol. 2, no. I (2023)1 ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2372-789X ELISABETTA MODENA, Università degli Studi di Pavia – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9582-4875 SOFIA PIRANDELLO, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0009-0004-4477-9199 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/22448 Introduction Vol. 2, no. I (2023) The present volume Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality of the journal AN- ICON: Studies in Environmental Images is divided into two issues, each one dedicated to a specific thematic analy- sis, originated by the same conceptual core. The volume reflects on the concept of immersivity, which has become increasingly prominent in many different fields, including contemporary art. The constant reference to immersive experience is redefining the boundaries of artistic practice Keywords Immersion Dives Installation Virtual reality Augmented reality 1 This essay is the result of research activity developed within the frame of the project AN- ICON. An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images. AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. [834033 AN-ICON]) and is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” of the University of Milan in the frame of the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2023-2027” sponsored by Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (MUR). The authors Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello equally contributed to this paper. To quote this essay: R. P. Malaspina, E. Modena, S. Pirandello, “Introduction: Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality, Vol. 2, no. I,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. I (2023): 4-10, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/22448. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 4 AN-ICON  and fruition, highlighting the complex relationships between art, environments, and human perception. The first issue of the volume, Immersions, dis- cusses the recent “immersive trend” as applied to artis- tic perceptual dynamics and to display design. Through a perspective that combines both history and theory of art, Immersions provides a broad and heterogeneous mapping of the many uses of this concept, exploring it in different historical contexts and through various methodologies of analysis. The second issue, Dives, will shift the concep- tual focus to action. Diving, understood as a preparatory and essential movement of immersion, becomes a meta- phor for investigating in particular those performative ar- tistic practices that have engaged in various bodily forms with immersive environments. Dives also includes a non- peer-reviewed section devoted to contributions by artists and independent researchers who present their strategy to dive into immersive spaces and environments, in order to physically explore them. Immersions In recent years we have witnessed a growing fashion for every experience to be “immersive.” At least this is what the rhetoric of communication and marketing suggests, promising immersions of various kinds, but with a common denominator that goes beyond a general idea of attention as absorption:2 the feeling of being physically enveloped and interactively engaged in a multisensory en- vironment.3 Hence, we speak of immersive environments, 2 W. Wolf, W. Bernhardt, A. Mahler, eds., Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2013). 3 A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); F. Liptay, B. Dogramaci, eds., Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media (Leiden-Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2016). ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 5 AN-ICON  immersive cinema and video, immersive exhibitions and installations, and so on. The term “immersion” has only been used with some regularity since the 1990s in relation to technologies such as Virtual Reality, which was then being experimented for the first time outside the labora- tories where it was developed in the late 1960s.4 However, some researchers have attempted to reconstruct a possible genealogy of immersive environments much earlier. Like a subterranean river, the immersive aesthetic experience would resurface in different periods, beginning with Pa- leolithic cave paintings, through Pompeian painting and trompe-l’œil, and then from Baroque illusionistic ceiling paintings to multimedia installations.5 A decisive moment for the design of these environments has been traced back to the 19th century, in particular the obsession for ὅραμα (from the ancient Greek “view”), which saw the spread of devices such as the panorama, the diorama, the cosmora- ma, etc.,6 responsible for the construction of an “emotional geography.”7 However, one of the most significant moments in this history, which has not yet been sufficiently explored in this debate,8 is that of the installations and environments that appeared in the first decades of the 20th century in the works of the avant-garde artists of the time. In 1976, invited by Vittorio Gregotti, Germano Celant curated the exhibition Ambiente/Arte: Dal Futurismo alla Body Art, held at the Central Pavilion in the Giardini for the 37th Venice Biennale. In this occasion, the history of environments was 4 I. Sutherland, “The Ultimate Display,” Proceedings of the IFIP Congress 65. Washington 1 (1965): 506-508; I. Sutherland, “A Head-Mounted Three-Dimensional Display,” AFIPS Fall Joint Computer Conference Proceeding 33 (Washington: Thompson Books, 1968): 757-64. 5 J. Nechvatal, Immersive Ideals/Critical Distances: A Study of the Affinity between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms (Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2009). 6 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge-London: The MIT Press, 2003); S. Bordini, Storia del panorama (Roma: Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 2006). 7 G. Bruno, Atlas of Emotions: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2000). 8 E. Modena, “Immersi nell’irreale: Prospettive an-iconiche sull’arte contemporanea dall’ambiente alla realtà virtuale,” Carte semiotiche. Rivista internazionale di semiotica e teoria dell’immagine 7 (2021): 71-78. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 6 AN-ICON  reconstructed from the beginning of the 20th century, when avant-garde artists began to create “wall boxes on a human scale.”9 These environments allowed the visitor to physi- cally enter the work, going beyond the frame.10 Since then, artists have increasingly experimented with installations11 and works that aim to produce enveloping, participatory and interactive physical experiences,12 also making use of new technologies such as Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality. The exhibition itself, as an immersive device, has played a significant role throughout the 20th venues, from the Venice Biennale to the Kassel documenta, is increasing- ly blurring the boundaries between artwork and exhibition.13 The physical presence of the visitor in the multisensory space of the artwork,14 as well as their role as activator and experiencer, is central to any discussion of immersive contemporary art. Indeed, immersive installations bring to different forms of narration and storytelling,15 presenting themselves both as an exclusive space (separated from the rest of the world) and an inclusive context (as they literally absorb the visitor). Within the environment (analogue, digital​,​or mixed), 9 G. Celant, ed., Ambiente/Arte: Dal Futurismo alla Body Art: Biennale Arte 1976 (Venezia: La Biennale): p. 6. 10 G. Celant, “La cornice: dal simbolismo alla land art,” in G. Celant, ed., Il limite svelato: Artista, cornice, pubblico (Milano: Electa, 1981); D. Ferrari, A. Pinotti, eds., La cornice: Storie, teorie, testi (Milano: Johan & Levi, 2018); P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milano-Udine: Mimesis International, 2020). 11 C. Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (New York: Routledge, 2005). 12 I. Kabakov, M. Tupitsyn, V. Tupitsyn, “About Installation,” Art Journal 58, no. 4 (1999): 62- 73. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.1999.10791966; J. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001); C. Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (New York: Routledge, 2005); B. Groys, “Politics of Installation,” E-flux journal reader 2009 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009); S. Zuliani, Senza cornice: Spazi e tempi dell’installazione (Roma: Arshake, 2015). 13 E. Filipovic, M., van Hal, S. Ovstebo, eds., The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large- scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (Ostfildernn: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010). 14 C. Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History; A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine; F. Liptay, B. Dogramaci, eds., Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media. 15 M. Bal, “Narrative Inside Out: Louise Bourgeois’ Spider as Theoretical Object,” Oxford Art Journal 22, no. 2 (1999): 103-126. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/22.2.101; M. Bal, Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: The Architecture of Art-writing (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001); Allen, N., Combrink, L., “Character (and absence) as a narrative key in installation art,” Literator 40, no. 1 (2019): 1-10. https://doi.org/10.4102/lit.v40i1.1449. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 7 AN-ICON  at times artists leave clues or hints of stories; at other times, they build real scripts linked to real or plausible events or based on fictional characters – think of the growing role of science fiction in building utopian or dystopian narratives.16 Nowadays also the debate on how best to pre- serve and respect the authenticity of complex installations is compelling, considering the need to respect their time and site specificity.17 As a matter of fact, the latest generation of im- mersive technologies, together with the most recent theories of the environmentalisation of the image,18 suggest that we reconsider Boris Groys’s assertion about the possibility of interpreting installation as image and image as installation,19 thus confronting art history and theory with visual studies. In this respect, this first volume brings togeth- er different strategies and fields of analysis that have rea- soned about the processes involved. In her essay, Mieke Bal places a strong emphasis on exhibition practices as key for understanding the contemporary realm. Bal calls for the recognition of the interplay between past and present, advo- cating for visitor engagement that solicits affective empathic attitudes. Through her video installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, she stresses the transformative potential of art-making as a tool for cultural analysis. Giuliana Bruno challenges the established no- tion of immersion itself by introducing the concept of “en- vironmental projection.” Bruno invites us to reconsider the ecological dimensions of representation, particularly in terms 16 D. Byrne-Smith, ed., Documents of Contemporary Art: Science Fiction (London: White Chapel Gallery, 2020). 17 B. Ferriani, M. Pugliese, Monumenti effimeri: Storia e conservazione delle installazioni (Milano: Electa, 2009). 18 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Turin: Einaudi, 2021). 19 B. Groys, “Multiple Authorship” in B. Vanderlinden, E. Filipovic, eds. The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005); E. Modena, “Immersi nell’irreale: Prospettive an-iconiche sull’arte contemporanea dall’ambiente alla realtà virtuale,” Carte semiotiche. Rivista internazionale di semiotica e teoria dell’immagine 7 (2021): 71-78. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 8 AN-ICON  of movement and scale. She questions the relationship be- tween immersion and magnification, ultimately proposing the notion of “empathic projection” as a means to transcend human-centric perspectives in immersive experiences. Lucia Corrain’s text delves into the immersive qualities of art, particularly in the Chamber of the Giants by Giulio Romano in Mantua (Italy). Corrain explores the phe- nomenological and ontological aspects of immersion in art, emphasizing the viewer’s sense of awe and estrangement. Filippo Fimiani analyzes allegories of immersion through the lens of the LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS series, con- sidering in particular the episode Fish Night. He examines the cultural topos of immersive experience, highlighting the ambivalent relationship between living bodies, images, and media in deep time-bending scenarios. Roberto Pinto shifts the focus to the intersec- tion of art and history through Jeremy Deller’s immersive performance We Are Here Because We Are Here. Deller’s work exemplifies a change in commemorating historical events, focusing on individual stories and emotions rather than traditional heroic narratives. The artwork engages the audience on a personal level, prompting reflection and emo- tional connection, ultimately redefining the role of public art in collective memory. Francesco Tedeschi’s paper takes the reader on a journey through Italian environmental art, examining the trans- formation of space by artists such as Lucio Fontana, Gruppo T, and others in the 1950s and 1960s. Tedeschi’s investiga- tion focuses on the evolving link between interior and exterior spaces, the concept of passage, and the reasons which invite viewers to traverse rather than merely inhabit spaces. Annette Urban explores the blurred boundaries between art objects, space, and beholders in VR art and exhibitions. She discusses how VR art challenges tradi- tional subject-object relationships and often embeds itself ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 9 AN-ICON  into physical exhibition spaces, resulting in potentiated environmentalisation. Stefano Velotti’s suggestion to revert the usu- al perspective on the concept of “immersivity,” consists in introducing the idea of “an-immersivity,” namely the onto- logical condition of individuals who are immersed in reality but aware of it. In order to do so, he discusses the limits and characteristics of immersive VR experiences, the role of art, and the tension between control and uncontrollability in immersive encounters. Lastly, Giorgio Zanchetti examines the per- sistence of the locution “looking glass,” – that primarily comes from Lewis Carroll’s novel – which highlights the duality of a glass surface as a means of viewing the world and as an object to be observed. Italian artists of the 20th century, such as Lucio Fontana and Luciano Fabro, frequently explored three attitudes: looking through the glass, observing the re- flected image in a mirror, and examining the glass itself as a tool for presenting and representing spaces. The editors of the volume and the AN-ICON proj- ect would like to thank Pirelli HangarBicocca, Giovanna Ama- dasi, and Roberta Tenconi for their essential contribution to the organisation of the conference “Immersed in the Work. From Environment to Virtual Reality” (Milan, June 13th -16th 2022), a seminal occasion of reflection for the development of this thematic double issue. ROBERTO P. MALASPINA, ELISABETTA MODENA, AND SOFIA PIRANDELLO 10 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

anicon

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19939

Con-Temporary: Thinking and FeelingExhibition Together by Mieke Bal Video essay Don Quijote Political art Artistic process Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Con-Temporary: Thinking and Feeling Together MIEKE BAL, ASCA (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis) – https://orcid.org/0009-0007-5483-3218 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19939 Abstract The paper focuses on exhibition practice, tak- ing exhibitions as the key to contemporaneity. I will make a strong plea for the mutuality between past and present, the encouragement of visitors becoming participants through soliciting affective empathic attitude, and the accommo- dation to make this possible thanks to the enticement of durational looking. I will do this through the theoretical anal- ysis of what exhibiting means and does, and through a consideration of my recent video installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances. One episode of this project will be the hook on which to hang my view of art-making as, not an illustration of but a method of cultural analysis. Keywords Exhibition Video essay Don Quijote Political art Artistic process To quote this essay: M. Bal, “Con-Temporary: Thinking and Feeling Together,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 11-28, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19939. MIEKE BAL 11 AN-ICON  In this article I am particularly keen to explore the implications of the preposition “con-” as a guideline for immersive art. With the qualifier “immersive” I aim to suggest that art can offer insights into the process of art, rather than the aesthetic, intellectual qualities, objecthood, or history of particular artworks. The process is what in- volves people, social issues and contexts, and what is “live” – dynamic, unstoppably moving, and never stable – about art. Art is not a “thing;” we, as its viewers or users, are inside it. In particular, I would like to argue how making audio-visual installations can be a terrific resource for the integration of “academic” reflection and scholarship with art processing through immersion. The making aspect enables me to reflect on and create situations where the relationship with visual art can become a social route while remaining artistically relevant. For this to happen, contemporaneity is key: immersion can only happen in the present. The integration of approaches I have termed “cultural analysis:” the detailed analysis of cultural objects or artefacts, not in isolation but in their live, social and political context, as artistic and aesthetic, intertwined with intellectu- al reflection. The two approaches of detailed, close analysis and framing in context are not in contradiction: this is my starting point. More than 25 years ago I have co-founded an institute at the University of Amsterdam, called ASCA: Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Its goal was and is to promote an approach wherein the socio-political and the contemporary are not in contradiction, only in a productive tension with detailed analysis and lessons in looking; nor is the contemporariness in tension with history. When, in 2002, by chance I found myself in a situation where I had to make a film as a witness statement, witnessing the police injustice against immigration, I bought a small video camera and started filming. It concerned the life of my neighbour – an immigrant “sans papiers.” Meeting him in the courtyard, MIEKE BAL 12 AN-ICON  by chance, seeing his arm was in a cast, I asked him what happened, invited him in, and our conversation about his situation led to an enduring friendship – given the need for mutual trust, this is the a priori condition of making a doc- umentary. With a small group of friends, under the heading of Cinema Suitcase we made a documentary, A Thousand And One Days, obviously alluding to the Arabic classic, and inspired by the name of the collective, a number of doc- umentaries and performance films followed, focusing on “migrimages,” to borrow a term from a research project at the University of Granada indicating visual presentations of situations of migration.1 This was the moment I discovered how deeply making an artwork helps intellectual thinking. But also, how intellectual thinking is never alone. In the book that has appeared in 2022, titled Image-Thinking: Art Making as Cul- tural Analysis I explain in detail how making the films I have since then made, have helped me immensely to deepen my thinking. That is what I have termed “image-thinking,” in an attempt to come up with a term for integration of the different activities of which my work consists. Of course, in a short article I can only briefly touch upon the import- ant questions this endeavour brings up. To make it work, I would like to count on you having seen, or going to see, the episode 6, of 8 minutes, of my installation from 2019, Don Quijote: Tristes figuras, based on fragments from (mostly) the first part of the novel by Cervantes (from 1605). Hard as that decision was, I declined to make a feature film, as I had done with my other projects based on the cultural heritage of fiction. This seemed unacceptable, because 1 For more information about the resulting documentary: https://www.miekebal.org/films/ mille-et-un-jours-(1001-days), accessed July 15, 2023, and M. Bal, “A Thousand and One Voices,” in M. Anders Baggesgaard, J. Ladegaard, eds., Confronting Universalities: Aesthetics and Politics under the Sign of Globalisation (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2011): 269- 304. The third chapter of my book Image-Thinking: Artmaking as Cultural Analysis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022): 90-130 is devoted to the question of “who speaks?” in documentaries, with this film as the example. The term “migrimages” was invented by literary theorist Domingo Sánchez-Mesa Martínez. MIEKE BAL 13 AN-ICON  turning that novel into a linear, coherent narrative film would be a betrayal of the most crucial aspect of the novel: its non-linearity, even incoherence. Instead, an immersive in- stallation, as you can see in the documentation, where we showed its installations done immediately after finishing the project.2 Take the scene Narrative Stuttering, which I hope you have watched or will do so. This scene shows Don Quijote alone on a dark theatrical stage. Sancho Panza is sitting on a chair on the side, helping him when needed, as a prompter. The knight is desperately trying to tell his story, the adventures, his opinions, whatever happened to him, but he is unable to act effectively as a narrator. At the end, he bursts into tears and Sancho holds him in order to comfort him, demonstrating, by physical touch, that he is not entirely alone. See the photograph on the web page, second column. The appeal to empa- thy is a key aspect of what we tried to achieve with this installation. Sancho is giving the example; the visitors can follow his lead (imaginatively). The darkness of the stage deprives the space of perspectival depth. The dark stage isolates him and, at the same time, gives him an audience. The theatrical setting is a material “theoretical fiction” that explores how theatricality can perhaps help to enable the narratively dis- abled. My commitment to addressing the issue of narrative 2 See https://www.miekebal.org/film-projects-1, accessed July 16, 2023. http://miekebal. withtank.com/artworks/installations/don-quijote-sad-countenances/episode-6-narrative- stuttering. For a book on the installation, see M. Bal, Don Quijote: Sad Countenances (Växjö: Trolltrumma, 2019), also in bilingual English-Spanish edition as Don Quijote: Tristes figuras / Don Quijote: Sad Countenances (Murcia: Cendeac, 2020). The installation has been exhibited at a World première in Småland Museum / Kulturparken, Växjö, Sweden (October 31, 2019), then at Usina Cultural, Villa María, Argentina, VIII Congreso (April 26 to May 6, 2022), the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK), as part of the congress of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästhetik (German Society for Aesthetics) Ästhetik und Erkenntnis (July 13-15, 2021). Installed in the Aktionsraum of Toni-Areal (July 13-21, 2021), in the exhibition Art out of Necessity, video installations by Mieke Bal at the Museum Jan Cunen, Oss, Netherlands (October 3, 2020 - January 31, 2021), interrupted mid-December by the second corona lockdown); in the Leeds Arts University Gallery a.k.a. The Blenheim Walk (January 7 - February 14, 2020). Curator: Catriona McAra, and in the Sala de exposiciones, Universidad de Murcia, Facultad de Bellas Artes (November 14, 2019 - January 18, 2020), curated by Jesús Segura. MIEKE BAL 14 AN-ICON  disablement through trauma has been nourished especially when I made, with British artist Michelle Williams Gamak- er, and with the participation of psychoanalyst of trauma Françoise Davoine, the theoretical fiction film A Long Histo- ry of Madness (2011) and installations derived from it. This film is “about” madness, but it also stages, performs, en- acts, and critiques ideas about madness and their cultural history. Based on the 1998 book Mère Folle by Davoine, the film stages the question and practice of the psychoanalytic treatment of people diagnosed as “psychotic” and whom, to avoid narrowing diagnostic discourse, we call “mad.”3 The film raises the art-historical question whether we can say there is an “iconography of madness.” Most of the actors play “madness.” None of them are mad. Davoine’s book, written as a fiction, theorizes this question. In that sense it is a “theoretical fiction.” That term comes from Sigmund Freud. He came up with it to defend his quite crazy story of the sons who kill and eat their tyrannical father. Freud made up a fiction, not simply to explain his theoretical finding of the Oedipus complex, but primarily to develop it through immersion in fiction, which he needed to understand and articulate what he had been intuitively groping toward. This is thinking in, through and with fiction- al characters and events. My book title “Image-Thinking” was derived from Freud’s concept. When, later, I showed my film Reasonable Doubt, on René Descartes and Queen Kristina of Sweden, to an artist friend, she complimented me on the “theatrical” quality of the film. Then I understood why theatricality had, in fact, always been an important aspect of my fiction films. The theatricality helps to do what I have called “exhibiting 3 On this issue of madness as a consequence of trauma, the book by Françoise Davoine Mère folle: Récit (Paris: Hypothèses Arcanes, 1998) is crucial. Our film A Long History of Madness came out in 2011 (directed by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker). For more information: https://www.miekebal.org/films/a-long-history-of-madness, accessed July 16, 2023. See also the special issue on the book and the film: E. Landa, ed., “Cinéma et psychanalyse,” Le Coq-héron 4, no. 211 (2012). MIEKE BAL 15 AN-ICON  ideas.” In the video project based on Don Quijote, this the- atricality is even more prominent, not only in the acting, but in the exhibition itself. The exhibition as installed is, then, itself a “theoretical fiction.” Theatre scholar Kati Röttger considers theatricality a specific mode of perception, a central figure of representation, and an analytic model of crises of representation that can be traced back to changes in the material basis of linguistic behaviour, cultures of perception, and modes of thinking.4 The multi-tentacled description gives theatrical- ity many functions, and foregrounds its inherent intermedial- ity. In addition, and more specifically for our project, theatre and performance scholar Maaike Bleeker gives theatricality the critical edge that the exhibition seeks to achieve when she calls it “a critical vision machine.”5 These two defini- tions together already show that theatricality can offer a critical perspective on the images and ideas that circulate, in this case, in the exhibition that is as mad as the main figure of Cervantes’s novel is generally assumed to be. A madness in which the visitor is immersed. For this need of the narratively incapacitated figure an empathic audience is indispensable. It is the task of the artwork to solicit such an audience. This requires a form of display that changes the traditional museal display, which keeps audience members at a distance and is quite hard on the audience’s physical condition. But it is primarily an artistic issue. This governs the temporality of looking. In the theatre, in contrast to traditional display, visitors can sit, relax, and concentrate. If the display is nearby and 4 K. Röttger, “The Mystery of the In-Between: A Methodological Approach to Intermedial Performance Analysis,” Forum Modernes Theater 28, no. 2 (2018): 105-16, https://doi.org/10.1353/fmt.2013.0014. 5 M. Bleeker, “Being Angela Merkel,” in E. van Alphen, M. Bal C. Smith, eds. The Rhetoric of Sincerity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009): 247-62. See also Bleeker, Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). MIEKE BAL 16 AN-ICON  accessible, and visiting can consist of quietly sitting, the museum can become such a theatre. You see people sitting down, and as a result, talking together about the painting that is in front of them, low-hung, on eye-level. The Don Quijote exhibition seeks to produce such material comfort, and thus will facilitate affective engagement in visitors. The consequence is a radically different temporality of viewing. And time, thus, turns out to be a condition of an immersion that effectively affects. If affect is a vibrant communication between people, or between people and artwork, then they must be given the time, the physical comfort this requires. This imagining, testing, and reasoning regarding the affec- tive effectivity of museum display shows how this project pertains to what is currently called “artistic research” – a search through analysis through artmaking.6 That concept is deeply problematic. It main- tains the hierarchy between academic and artistic research, suggesting that artists can earn academic diplomas if they can explain and articulate how their works came to be. The risk is an over-intellectualizing of art. The linearity built into the concept is deceptive; this is not how art-making hap- pens. As Kamini Vellodi warns us in her Deleuzian critique of the concept of “artistic research:” “it is difficult to deny that a major impetus of artistic research has been econom- ic, policy-driven, and managerial.”7 With these words she invokes the curse that is destroying universities word-wide as we speak. Both art and thought are thus being dam- aged. When thinking is subjected to methods, it becomes 6 I have strongly argued for the relevance of seating in exhibitions in a show I curated at the Munch Museum (Oslo) in 2017 (with a book publication). 7 K. Vellodi, “Thought Beyond Research: A Deleuzian Critique of Artistic Research, ” in P. de Assis, P. Giudici, eds., Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research 2 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2019): 215-33, 216. MIEKE BAL 17 AN-ICON  re-productive. In a Deleuzian view, thought, instead, ought to be the production of the new. This thinking is congenial to art-making, but just as much to academic work. The integration of these two creative activities is explained in my book Thinking in Film from 2013, on the video art by Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahti- la. But the search is not for direct academic answers. The concept of “image-thinking,” in the form of a verb, renders the interaction between thinking and imaging more forceful. To foreground this, we titled an exhibition of my video work in 2019 in Murcia, Spain, Contaminations: Reading, Imag- ining, Imaging. The noun “contaminations” suggests that the art is inevitably in process and “contagious,” having an affective impact, as I said above. The verb “imagining” was my attempt to foreground the way the imagination creates images. The collaboration with Hernández made these issues clearer and the neologisms more productive.8 The fourfold challenge to make a video proj- ect based on Don Quijote engage its troubled relationship between content and form, and between the narrative and visual aspects involved. The research part was, firstly, to decide which aspects of the novel are crucial to make a video work that has a point. Secondly, that point had to connect artistic and social issues, and to improve our un- derstanding of how these two domains can go together, in the contemporary, with the collaboration of the past in what we call “cultural heritage” – here, Cervantes’ novel. The importance of the past for the present, and vice versa, how our present changes the past as we can see it, must be foregrounded on the basis of non-chronological, mutual relations. The fourth chapter of my new book, Multi-Tenta- cled Time: Contemporaneity, Heterochrony, Anachronism for Pre-posterous History analyses time in its multiplicity. 8 That exhibition was curated by Miguel Ángel Hernández. A collective volume, edited by Hernández, was published in 2020. MIEKE BAL 18 AN-ICON  This is also a central concern both in narrative theory and in film.9 In my academic work I have a controversial reputation as someone who does not take chronology for granted. After publishing Reading “Rembrandt” (1991) I was blamed for being ahistorical, which, although not true, was a stimulating incentive to think harder about histori- cal time. That led to my book Quoting Caravaggio (1999), in which I addressed that critique, and developed a new sense of history in relation to time. But it was when, already filmmaking, I was working with Miguel Ángel Hernández Navarro on a large collective video exhibition devoted to the connections between the movement of images and the movement of people, in other words, video and migration (not on migration), that my thinking about temporality took another turn. 2MOVE (the exhibition), was shown in four countries, with in each a local artist added. The last concept in the chapter’s title, “pre-pos- terous history,” is presented again through my latest, 2020 short “essay film” It’s About Time! This film, the title of which is as ambiguous as the concept of “pre-posterous history” with its self-ironic wink, addresses the world’s self-destruc- tive impulse. It does this through the voice of Christa Wolf’s character Cassandra. She was the prophetess from antiquity, who will see and know the future, as a gift with the purpose of seduction from the god Apollo. But when she refused to sleep with her employer, he punished her: she was doomed never be believed. An antique case of #MeToo. In that fourth chapter I discuss the different is- sues of time that, in narrative theory, are usually divided into order, rhythm, and duration. I complicate that tripartite 9 M. Bal, Image-Thinking: 131-74. I have first developed this neologism, “pre-posterous history,” in my book on Caravaggio in its mutual relationship with contemporary art Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). “Multi-tentacled” stands for the plurality of temporal relationships, for which I chose the octopus as a symbol. MIEKE BAL 19 AN-ICON  theory by adding the experiential aspect (heterochrony) and the categories of the historical disciplines. This rethinking of chronology has an important impact on how we see our- selves in history. For the first time I have taken a biograph- ical fact on the novel’s author on board. This “fact” is the five-and-a-half years Cervantes spent as a slave in Algiers, without knowing he would ever get out. If we take this on, all the adventures, the madness, the violence that colour the adventures of the Knight Errant, get a different shade. On my reading, the issue that rules the novel’s aesthetic is the difficulty of story-telling due to the horror encountered. This is now called “post-traumatic stress disorder” – except that, as usual, the preposition “post-” perverts the connections between past and present. The traumatized subject is “dis- ordered” because, precisely, the trauma doesn’t go away. There is nothing “post-” possible for the trau- matized. The insights the novel generates connect to other experiences of war, violence, and captivity: contemporary ones. You can see succinctly what the consequences of traumatization tend to be, according to a very lucid article by Ernst van Alphen. The author analyses the experiential handicaps resulting from trauma as well as the narrative ones. To sum it up succinctly: as a failed experience, trau- ma leads to semiotic incapacitation, unavailable forms of representation, the stalling of the discursive process, which would be needed for having experiences. Specifically, in narrative terms, ambiguous actantial position, the negation of subjectivity, the lack of meaning-giving plot, and unac- ceptable frames. But a well-thought-through immersive video project can explore and transgress the limits of what MIEKE BAL 20 AN-ICON  can be seen, shown, narrated, and empathically witnessed, in relation to notoriously un-representable trauma.10 Full of incongruous events and repetitive sto- ries, maddening implausibility, lengthy interruptions of the story-line, inserted poems and novellas, and at the same time, anchored in a harrowing reality, while also making readers laugh out loud, this novel, in form and content, challenges reading itself. This requires interdisciplinarity, in all meanings of that preposition “inter-.” I have termed it “intership.” The similarity to the word “internship” suggests that this, too, concerns learning, as a practice of mutuality. Film seems the least apt to do justice to the novel’s turbulent incoherence, repetitiveness, and incon- gruous adventures told in the novel. Talking about it with actor Mathieu Montanier, who came up with the idea of making a Don Quijote video work, we decided that an im- mersive video installation consisting of different, non-linear episodes presented with seating would be more effective in showing, rather than representing, not the moment trauma occurs but enduring violence-generated traumatic states. The importance of showing is to enable witnessing as an engaged activity against the indifference of the world, our worst opponent. The ambition was to make a work the theatricality of which in immersive display helps to turn onlookers and voyeurs into activated, empathic witnesses. This artwork must yield “thought-images” or Denkbilder, created by means of “image-thinking.” The small iconic texts that Adorno, Benjamin, Kracauer wrote, were texts only. What did the word Bilder do there, then? This is where “image-thinking” can meet, and yield, “thought-im- ages.” In a study of the genre, US-based scholar of German 10 E. v. Alphen, “Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, Trauma,” in M Bal, J. Crewe, L. Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover NH: University of New England Press, 1999): 24-38. MIEKE BAL 21 AN-ICON  Gerhard Richter begins his description with a whole range of negativities. Indeed, a programmatic treatise would be something like a political pamphlet, as opposed to histor- ical objectivations – an opposition that audio-visual art is devoted to questioning. This is an important point in con- nection to attempts to separate political art or scholarship from propaganda. The difference is important: propagan- da dictates, as in dictators, which is close to imposing; whereas political art and scholarship expose and propose, but leave the freedom of the addressees intact; as long as they are immersed, so that they are enticed to respond to the art they see. What Richter disparagingly calls “fanciful fiction” stands opposed to an equally dismissed “mere reflections of reality.” “Rather,” Richter continues, “the min- iatures of the Denkbild can be understood as conceptual engagements with the aesthetic and as aesthetic engage- ments with the conceptual, hovering between philosophical critique and aesthetic production.”11 The word “engage- ment” is crucial; it requires contemporaneity. This matches Benjamin’s fifth thesis on images of the past, which has been a guideline for my work on art between history and anachronism: “Every image of the past that is not recog- nized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”12 This warning is one of the main motors of immersive projects and needs endorsement of their contemporariness. For, the cultural heritage from the 11 G. Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections on Damaged Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007): 2. 12 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: The Bodley Head, 2015): 245-55, 247. MIEKE BAL 22 AN-ICON  past matters for today’s world. But only if we manage to bring it to bear on the present.13 Richter further describes the thought-image thus: “The Denkbild encodes a poetic form of condensed, epigrammatic writing in textual snapshots, flashing up as poignant meditations that typically fasten upon a seemingly peripheral detail or marginal topic.”14 The word “flashes up” suggests the quick flash that Benjamin urges us to preserve by means of recognition in the first sentences of that thesis V from which I now quote a later sentence: “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”15 This also connects to the question of historical truth, at stake in the scene “Who is Don Quijote?”16 In this regard, in his Aesthetic Theory Adorno writes: What cannot be proved in the customary style and yet is com- pelling — that is to spur on the spontaneity and energy of thought and, without being taken literally, to strike sparks through a kind of intellectual short-circuiting that casts a sudden light on the familiar and perhaps sets it on fire.17 As in Benjamin’s thesis, as well as Lyotard’s fig- urality, the language here is again both visual and shock-ori- ented, with “sparks,” “short-circuiting,” “sudden light” and “sets it on fire.” This is thought alive, living thought, here-now, 13 On this necessary contemporaneity I have published the short book Exhibition-ism: Temporal Togetherness in the series The Contemporary Condition (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020), requested by the author of a fabulous later book on contemporariness: J. Lund, The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in the Time of Contemporaneity (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2022). My point was the idea that exhibitions are the most precise “model” for the contemporary. 14 G. Richter, Thought-Images: 2. 15 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History:” 247. 16 See for this scene, http://miekebal.withtank.com/artworks/installations/don-quijote- sad-countenances/episode-4-who-is-don-quijote/. This scene also suggests that the actor, Mathieu Montanier, bears a striking resemblance to the (totally imaginative and imaged) figure who never existed historically, but of whom we have a clear image. 17 T. W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form” (1954-58), in Notes to Literature, trans. S. Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991): vol.1, 3-23. MIEKE BAL 23 AN-ICON  and this living thought has agency; it is capable of engag- ing viewers in a dialogic relationship. And it is visual. For such sparks to happen, thought needs a formal innovation that shocks, and time to make immersion in it, possible. Thus, it can gain new energy and life, involve people, and make thought a collective process rather than the kind of still images we call clichés. Our attempt to achieve such “sparking,” shocking innovation can be glimpsed in this photograph by Ebba Sund: the frame is both blurred, since the escaping slave leaves it behind, and foregrounded, in the large proportions the iron bars have compared to the fleeing man (Fig. 1). Fig. 1. Mieke Bal, The Captive escapes, photograph by Ebba Sund. An epsiode of the 16-screen installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, 2019, video, color, Dolby sound, 8 minutes. Courtesy the artist. In the videos, such sparks lay in the combina- tion of material, practical changes of the mode of display as immersive, short-circuiting the anachronistic bond be- tween present and past, the confusion of languages and other categories we tend to take for granted as homoge- neous, and the intermediality of the audio-visualization of a literary masterpiece. In view of the need for witnessing, such a messy “thinking” form enables and activates view- ers to construct their own story, and connect it to what they have seen around them; on the condition that they MIEKE BAL 24 AN-ICON  are immersed through being given time. Thus, we aimed to turn the hysteria of endless story-telling into a reflection on communication, as it can breach, and reach beyond, the boundaries that madness draws around its captive subjects, and instead, open up their subjectivity. Here, in the brilliant photograph also by Ebba Sund, the Captive cannot speak; his mouth is visually muzzled. But his eyes do speak, to us – if we are given the time, through seating, to respond (Fig. 2). Fig. 2. Mieke Bal, episode 6 of the 16-screen installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, 2019, video, color, Dolby sound, 8 minutes. Courtesy the artist. To give insight into the stagnation that char- acterises the adventures, these scenes are predominantly descriptive. Any attempt at narrative is “stuttering,” without development. The scene Narrative Stuttering I recommend- ed you watch before reading this essay, shows both the in- capacitation to narrate and the frustration this causes. The theatrical setting is meant to draw visitors’ attention to the way they are themselves situated: inside a theatre, sitting on the stage, rather than in front of it, where they can fall asleep or get excited, identify or not, and possibly remain indiffer- ent. Here, such indifference is hard to sustain, because the viewers’ freedom to determine themselves how long they wish to stay with a scene makes falling asleep contradictory. MIEKE BAL 25 AN-ICON  This is the tentative design of the installation I made be- forehand, suggesting the total arbitrariness of the lay-out. The different installations follow this design roughly (Fig. 3). Fig. 3. Mieke Bal, project for the design of the 16-screen installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, 2019. Courtesy the artist. What Françoise Davoine calls, citing histori- an Fernand Braudel: “poussières d’événements” (literally, dust of events) is the motto of this work’s form: sprinkling situations, moments, throughout the gallery space. This is adequate to the state of trauma presented in the pieces and in the juxtapositions among them. The disorderly dis- play gives a shape, however unreadable and unclear, to the trauma-induced madness of the novel’s form. Cervantes, I presume, was one of those “mad” ones. The trauma incurred by Cervantes after being held in captivity as a slave, has been beautifully traced in his writ- ings and those of contemporary witnesses by Colombian literary historian María Antonia Garcés, a must-read book for anyone interested in Cervantes, Don Quijote, or slavery, then and now. Con-temporary. As it happens, Garcés was held captive by the FARC terrorist guerillos for five months. This contemporaneity is incompatible with the ridiculing representation of the “mad Knight Errant” that is so routine, both in cinematic representations and in much of the schol- arship. Supported by Garcés’s well-documented analysis, I MIEKE BAL 26 AN-ICON  see a haunting autobiographical spirit in the three chapters on the Captive (pp. 39-41 of part I). But the shape of the theatrical display does not “re-present” the madness. It hints at it, makes us reflect on it. The Denkbild is in the form, so that a contem- porary aesthetic can reach out to, and touch, a situation of long ago that, as befits the stilled temporality of trau- ma, persists in the present. Through experimenting with possible forms of the art of video, we attempted to invent new forms for the formlessness of trauma. By means of image-thinking this installation had to answer to the para- doxical concept, or thought-image, of the shape of form- lessness. Here, theatricality returns: ostensibly acting is the form that does not overrule the history, the violence, or the traumatic state. Acting, these videos suggest, is a social role. Acting, and making videos, exhibiting them in a thought-through immersive mode, is an attempt to give the formlessness of society a form. This is an attempt to do just that: to shape formlessness as the form of the trau- matic state, by designing a display that is both theatrical, in that it appeals to empathy, and turns “live,” that primary characteristic of theatre, into “life,” which concerns the social reality we live in and are responsible to sustain; and the knowledge acquired through the integration of making, analysing, reflecting, and boldly proposing new insights. Filmmaking begins with casting. In the case of Don Quijote, the actor cast himself; knowing he was the spitting image of the character as we know, or think we know him. An earlier significant casting decision occurred when Michelle Williams Gamaker and I decided to cast the three men in Emma’s life, in Madame B, in the same actor, suggesting the woman was in love with love and its prom- ises of excitement, not with any man in particular. I have made many films and installation pieces, over the last twenty years, and I guarantee you, there is MIEKE BAL 27 AN-ICON  no more effective mode of doing research and developing ideas than integrating these two activities. You can learn more about these films on the relevant page of my web- site. So, let me end on my personal motto, already cited, which demands the remedy of immersion: “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” This is pre-posterous history. The past without present is pointless. The present without past is empty. But as soon as we try to fix either one, the future disappears. MIEKE BAL 28 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

anicon

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19939

Con-Temporary: Thinking and FeelingExhibition Together by Mieke Bal Video essay Don Quijote Political art Artistic process Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Con-Temporary: Thinking and Feeling Together MIEKE BAL, ASCA (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis) – https://orcid.org/0009-0007-5483-3218 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19939 Abstract The paper focuses on exhibition practice, tak- ing exhibitions as the key to contemporaneity. I will make a strong plea for the mutuality between past and present, the encouragement of visitors becoming participants through soliciting affective empathic attitude, and the accommo- dation to make this possible thanks to the enticement of durational looking. I will do this through the theoretical anal- ysis of what exhibiting means and does, and through a consideration of my recent video installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances. One episode of this project will be the hook on which to hang my view of art-making as, not an illustration of but a method of cultural analysis. Keywords Exhibition Video essay Don Quijote Political art Artistic process To quote this essay: M. Bal, “Con-Temporary: Thinking and Feeling Together,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 11-28, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19939. MIEKE BAL 11 AN-ICON  In this article I am particularly keen to explore the implications of the preposition “con-” as a guideline for immersive art. With the qualifier “immersive” I aim to suggest that art can offer insights into the process of art, rather than the aesthetic, intellectual qualities, objecthood, or history of particular artworks. The process is what in- volves people, social issues and contexts, and what is “live” – dynamic, unstoppably moving, and never stable – about art. Art is not a “thing;” we, as its viewers or users, are inside it. In particular, I would like to argue how making audio-visual installations can be a terrific resource for the integration of “academic” reflection and scholarship with art processing through immersion. The making aspect enables me to reflect on and create situations where the relationship with visual art can become a social route while remaining artistically relevant. For this to happen, contemporaneity is key: immersion can only happen in the present. The integration of approaches I have termed “cultural analysis:” the detailed analysis of cultural objects or artefacts, not in isolation but in their live, social and political context, as artistic and aesthetic, intertwined with intellectu- al reflection. The two approaches of detailed, close analysis and framing in context are not in contradiction: this is my starting point. More than 25 years ago I have co-founded an institute at the University of Amsterdam, called ASCA: Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Its goal was and is to promote an approach wherein the socio-political and the contemporary are not in contradiction, only in a productive tension with detailed analysis and lessons in looking; nor is the contemporariness in tension with history. When, in 2002, by chance I found myself in a situation where I had to make a film as a witness statement, witnessing the police injustice against immigration, I bought a small video camera and started filming. It concerned the life of my neighbour – an immigrant “sans papiers.” Meeting him in the courtyard, MIEKE BAL 12 AN-ICON  by chance, seeing his arm was in a cast, I asked him what happened, invited him in, and our conversation about his situation led to an enduring friendship – given the need for mutual trust, this is the a priori condition of making a doc- umentary. With a small group of friends, under the heading of Cinema Suitcase we made a documentary, A Thousand And One Days, obviously alluding to the Arabic classic, and inspired by the name of the collective, a number of doc- umentaries and performance films followed, focusing on “migrimages,” to borrow a term from a research project at the University of Granada indicating visual presentations of situations of migration.1 This was the moment I discovered how deeply making an artwork helps intellectual thinking. But also, how intellectual thinking is never alone. In the book that has appeared in 2022, titled Image-Thinking: Art Making as Cul- tural Analysis I explain in detail how making the films I have since then made, have helped me immensely to deepen my thinking. That is what I have termed “image-thinking,” in an attempt to come up with a term for integration of the different activities of which my work consists. Of course, in a short article I can only briefly touch upon the import- ant questions this endeavour brings up. To make it work, I would like to count on you having seen, or going to see, the episode 6, of 8 minutes, of my installation from 2019, Don Quijote: Tristes figuras, based on fragments from (mostly) the first part of the novel by Cervantes (from 1605). Hard as that decision was, I declined to make a feature film, as I had done with my other projects based on the cultural heritage of fiction. This seemed unacceptable, because 1 For more information about the resulting documentary: https://www.miekebal.org/films/ mille-et-un-jours-(1001-days), accessed July 15, 2023, and M. Bal, “A Thousand and One Voices,” in M. Anders Baggesgaard, J. Ladegaard, eds., Confronting Universalities: Aesthetics and Politics under the Sign of Globalisation (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2011): 269- 304. The third chapter of my book Image-Thinking: Artmaking as Cultural Analysis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022): 90-130 is devoted to the question of “who speaks?” in documentaries, with this film as the example. The term “migrimages” was invented by literary theorist Domingo Sánchez-Mesa Martínez. MIEKE BAL 13 AN-ICON  turning that novel into a linear, coherent narrative film would be a betrayal of the most crucial aspect of the novel: its non-linearity, even incoherence. Instead, an immersive in- stallation, as you can see in the documentation, where we showed its installations done immediately after finishing the project.2 Take the scene Narrative Stuttering, which I hope you have watched or will do so. This scene shows Don Quijote alone on a dark theatrical stage. Sancho Panza is sitting on a chair on the side, helping him when needed, as a prompter. The knight is desperately trying to tell his story, the adventures, his opinions, whatever happened to him, but he is unable to act effectively as a narrator. At the end, he bursts into tears and Sancho holds him in order to comfort him, demonstrating, by physical touch, that he is not entirely alone. See the photograph on the web page, second column. The appeal to empa- thy is a key aspect of what we tried to achieve with this installation. Sancho is giving the example; the visitors can follow his lead (imaginatively). The darkness of the stage deprives the space of perspectival depth. The dark stage isolates him and, at the same time, gives him an audience. The theatrical setting is a material “theoretical fiction” that explores how theatricality can perhaps help to enable the narratively dis- abled. My commitment to addressing the issue of narrative 2 See https://www.miekebal.org/film-projects-1, accessed July 16, 2023. http://miekebal. withtank.com/artworks/installations/don-quijote-sad-countenances/episode-6-narrative- stuttering. For a book on the installation, see M. Bal, Don Quijote: Sad Countenances (Växjö: Trolltrumma, 2019), also in bilingual English-Spanish edition as Don Quijote: Tristes figuras / Don Quijote: Sad Countenances (Murcia: Cendeac, 2020). The installation has been exhibited at a World première in Småland Museum / Kulturparken, Växjö, Sweden (October 31, 2019), then at Usina Cultural, Villa María, Argentina, VIII Congreso (April 26 to May 6, 2022), the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK), as part of the congress of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästhetik (German Society for Aesthetics) Ästhetik und Erkenntnis (July 13-15, 2021). Installed in the Aktionsraum of Toni-Areal (July 13-21, 2021), in the exhibition Art out of Necessity, video installations by Mieke Bal at the Museum Jan Cunen, Oss, Netherlands (October 3, 2020 - January 31, 2021), interrupted mid-December by the second corona lockdown); in the Leeds Arts University Gallery a.k.a. The Blenheim Walk (January 7 - February 14, 2020). Curator: Catriona McAra, and in the Sala de exposiciones, Universidad de Murcia, Facultad de Bellas Artes (November 14, 2019 - January 18, 2020), curated by Jesús Segura. MIEKE BAL 14 AN-ICON  disablement through trauma has been nourished especially when I made, with British artist Michelle Williams Gamak- er, and with the participation of psychoanalyst of trauma Françoise Davoine, the theoretical fiction film A Long Histo- ry of Madness (2011) and installations derived from it. This film is “about” madness, but it also stages, performs, en- acts, and critiques ideas about madness and their cultural history. Based on the 1998 book Mère Folle by Davoine, the film stages the question and practice of the psychoanalytic treatment of people diagnosed as “psychotic” and whom, to avoid narrowing diagnostic discourse, we call “mad.”3 The film raises the art-historical question whether we can say there is an “iconography of madness.” Most of the actors play “madness.” None of them are mad. Davoine’s book, written as a fiction, theorizes this question. In that sense it is a “theoretical fiction.” That term comes from Sigmund Freud. He came up with it to defend his quite crazy story of the sons who kill and eat their tyrannical father. Freud made up a fiction, not simply to explain his theoretical finding of the Oedipus complex, but primarily to develop it through immersion in fiction, which he needed to understand and articulate what he had been intuitively groping toward. This is thinking in, through and with fiction- al characters and events. My book title “Image-Thinking” was derived from Freud’s concept. When, later, I showed my film Reasonable Doubt, on René Descartes and Queen Kristina of Sweden, to an artist friend, she complimented me on the “theatrical” quality of the film. Then I understood why theatricality had, in fact, always been an important aspect of my fiction films. The theatricality helps to do what I have called “exhibiting 3 On this issue of madness as a consequence of trauma, the book by Françoise Davoine Mère folle: Récit (Paris: Hypothèses Arcanes, 1998) is crucial. Our film A Long History of Madness came out in 2011 (directed by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker). For more information: https://www.miekebal.org/films/a-long-history-of-madness, accessed July 16, 2023. See also the special issue on the book and the film: E. Landa, ed., “Cinéma et psychanalyse,” Le Coq-héron 4, no. 211 (2012). MIEKE BAL 15 AN-ICON  ideas.” In the video project based on Don Quijote, this the- atricality is even more prominent, not only in the acting, but in the exhibition itself. The exhibition as installed is, then, itself a “theoretical fiction.” Theatre scholar Kati Röttger considers theatricality a specific mode of perception, a central figure of representation, and an analytic model of crises of representation that can be traced back to changes in the material basis of linguistic behaviour, cultures of perception, and modes of thinking.4 The multi-tentacled description gives theatrical- ity many functions, and foregrounds its inherent intermedial- ity. In addition, and more specifically for our project, theatre and performance scholar Maaike Bleeker gives theatricality the critical edge that the exhibition seeks to achieve when she calls it “a critical vision machine.”5 These two defini- tions together already show that theatricality can offer a critical perspective on the images and ideas that circulate, in this case, in the exhibition that is as mad as the main figure of Cervantes’s novel is generally assumed to be. A madness in which the visitor is immersed. For this need of the narratively incapacitated figure an empathic audience is indispensable. It is the task of the artwork to solicit such an audience. This requires a form of display that changes the traditional museal display, which keeps audience members at a distance and is quite hard on the audience’s physical condition. But it is primarily an artistic issue. This governs the temporality of looking. In the theatre, in contrast to traditional display, visitors can sit, relax, and concentrate. If the display is nearby and 4 K. Röttger, “The Mystery of the In-Between: A Methodological Approach to Intermedial Performance Analysis,” Forum Modernes Theater 28, no. 2 (2018): 105-16, https://doi.org/10.1353/fmt.2013.0014. 5 M. Bleeker, “Being Angela Merkel,” in E. van Alphen, M. Bal C. Smith, eds. The Rhetoric of Sincerity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009): 247-62. See also Bleeker, Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). MIEKE BAL 16 AN-ICON  accessible, and visiting can consist of quietly sitting, the museum can become such a theatre. You see people sitting down, and as a result, talking together about the painting that is in front of them, low-hung, on eye-level. The Don Quijote exhibition seeks to produce such material comfort, and thus will facilitate affective engagement in visitors. The consequence is a radically different temporality of viewing. And time, thus, turns out to be a condition of an immersion that effectively affects. If affect is a vibrant communication between people, or between people and artwork, then they must be given the time, the physical comfort this requires. This imagining, testing, and reasoning regarding the affec- tive effectivity of museum display shows how this project pertains to what is currently called “artistic research” – a search through analysis through artmaking.6 That concept is deeply problematic. It main- tains the hierarchy between academic and artistic research, suggesting that artists can earn academic diplomas if they can explain and articulate how their works came to be. The risk is an over-intellectualizing of art. The linearity built into the concept is deceptive; this is not how art-making hap- pens. As Kamini Vellodi warns us in her Deleuzian critique of the concept of “artistic research:” “it is difficult to deny that a major impetus of artistic research has been econom- ic, policy-driven, and managerial.”7 With these words she invokes the curse that is destroying universities word-wide as we speak. Both art and thought are thus being dam- aged. When thinking is subjected to methods, it becomes 6 I have strongly argued for the relevance of seating in exhibitions in a show I curated at the Munch Museum (Oslo) in 2017 (with a book publication). 7 K. Vellodi, “Thought Beyond Research: A Deleuzian Critique of Artistic Research, ” in P. de Assis, P. Giudici, eds., Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research 2 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2019): 215-33, 216. MIEKE BAL 17 AN-ICON  re-productive. In a Deleuzian view, thought, instead, ought to be the production of the new. This thinking is congenial to art-making, but just as much to academic work. The integration of these two creative activities is explained in my book Thinking in Film from 2013, on the video art by Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahti- la. But the search is not for direct academic answers. The concept of “image-thinking,” in the form of a verb, renders the interaction between thinking and imaging more forceful. To foreground this, we titled an exhibition of my video work in 2019 in Murcia, Spain, Contaminations: Reading, Imag- ining, Imaging. The noun “contaminations” suggests that the art is inevitably in process and “contagious,” having an affective impact, as I said above. The verb “imagining” was my attempt to foreground the way the imagination creates images. The collaboration with Hernández made these issues clearer and the neologisms more productive.8 The fourfold challenge to make a video proj- ect based on Don Quijote engage its troubled relationship between content and form, and between the narrative and visual aspects involved. The research part was, firstly, to decide which aspects of the novel are crucial to make a video work that has a point. Secondly, that point had to connect artistic and social issues, and to improve our un- derstanding of how these two domains can go together, in the contemporary, with the collaboration of the past in what we call “cultural heritage” – here, Cervantes’ novel. The importance of the past for the present, and vice versa, how our present changes the past as we can see it, must be foregrounded on the basis of non-chronological, mutual relations. The fourth chapter of my new book, Multi-Tenta- cled Time: Contemporaneity, Heterochrony, Anachronism for Pre-posterous History analyses time in its multiplicity. 8 That exhibition was curated by Miguel Ángel Hernández. A collective volume, edited by Hernández, was published in 2020. MIEKE BAL 18 AN-ICON  This is also a central concern both in narrative theory and in film.9 In my academic work I have a controversial reputation as someone who does not take chronology for granted. After publishing Reading “Rembrandt” (1991) I was blamed for being ahistorical, which, although not true, was a stimulating incentive to think harder about histori- cal time. That led to my book Quoting Caravaggio (1999), in which I addressed that critique, and developed a new sense of history in relation to time. But it was when, already filmmaking, I was working with Miguel Ángel Hernández Navarro on a large collective video exhibition devoted to the connections between the movement of images and the movement of people, in other words, video and migration (not on migration), that my thinking about temporality took another turn. 2MOVE (the exhibition), was shown in four countries, with in each a local artist added. The last concept in the chapter’s title, “pre-pos- terous history,” is presented again through my latest, 2020 short “essay film” It’s About Time! This film, the title of which is as ambiguous as the concept of “pre-posterous history” with its self-ironic wink, addresses the world’s self-destruc- tive impulse. It does this through the voice of Christa Wolf’s character Cassandra. She was the prophetess from antiquity, who will see and know the future, as a gift with the purpose of seduction from the god Apollo. But when she refused to sleep with her employer, he punished her: she was doomed never be believed. An antique case of #MeToo. In that fourth chapter I discuss the different is- sues of time that, in narrative theory, are usually divided into order, rhythm, and duration. I complicate that tripartite 9 M. Bal, Image-Thinking: 131-74. I have first developed this neologism, “pre-posterous history,” in my book on Caravaggio in its mutual relationship with contemporary art Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). “Multi-tentacled” stands for the plurality of temporal relationships, for which I chose the octopus as a symbol. MIEKE BAL 19 AN-ICON  theory by adding the experiential aspect (heterochrony) and the categories of the historical disciplines. This rethinking of chronology has an important impact on how we see our- selves in history. For the first time I have taken a biograph- ical fact on the novel’s author on board. This “fact” is the five-and-a-half years Cervantes spent as a slave in Algiers, without knowing he would ever get out. If we take this on, all the adventures, the madness, the violence that colour the adventures of the Knight Errant, get a different shade. On my reading, the issue that rules the novel’s aesthetic is the difficulty of story-telling due to the horror encountered. This is now called “post-traumatic stress disorder” – except that, as usual, the preposition “post-” perverts the connections between past and present. The traumatized subject is “dis- ordered” because, precisely, the trauma doesn’t go away. There is nothing “post-” possible for the trau- matized. The insights the novel generates connect to other experiences of war, violence, and captivity: contemporary ones. You can see succinctly what the consequences of traumatization tend to be, according to a very lucid article by Ernst van Alphen. The author analyses the experiential handicaps resulting from trauma as well as the narrative ones. To sum it up succinctly: as a failed experience, trau- ma leads to semiotic incapacitation, unavailable forms of representation, the stalling of the discursive process, which would be needed for having experiences. Specifically, in narrative terms, ambiguous actantial position, the negation of subjectivity, the lack of meaning-giving plot, and unac- ceptable frames. But a well-thought-through immersive video project can explore and transgress the limits of what MIEKE BAL 20 AN-ICON  can be seen, shown, narrated, and empathically witnessed, in relation to notoriously un-representable trauma.10 Full of incongruous events and repetitive sto- ries, maddening implausibility, lengthy interruptions of the story-line, inserted poems and novellas, and at the same time, anchored in a harrowing reality, while also making readers laugh out loud, this novel, in form and content, challenges reading itself. This requires interdisciplinarity, in all meanings of that preposition “inter-.” I have termed it “intership.” The similarity to the word “internship” suggests that this, too, concerns learning, as a practice of mutuality. Film seems the least apt to do justice to the novel’s turbulent incoherence, repetitiveness, and incon- gruous adventures told in the novel. Talking about it with actor Mathieu Montanier, who came up with the idea of making a Don Quijote video work, we decided that an im- mersive video installation consisting of different, non-linear episodes presented with seating would be more effective in showing, rather than representing, not the moment trauma occurs but enduring violence-generated traumatic states. The importance of showing is to enable witnessing as an engaged activity against the indifference of the world, our worst opponent. The ambition was to make a work the theatricality of which in immersive display helps to turn onlookers and voyeurs into activated, empathic witnesses. This artwork must yield “thought-images” or Denkbilder, created by means of “image-thinking.” The small iconic texts that Adorno, Benjamin, Kracauer wrote, were texts only. What did the word Bilder do there, then? This is where “image-thinking” can meet, and yield, “thought-im- ages.” In a study of the genre, US-based scholar of German 10 E. v. Alphen, “Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, Trauma,” in M Bal, J. Crewe, L. Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover NH: University of New England Press, 1999): 24-38. MIEKE BAL 21 AN-ICON  Gerhard Richter begins his description with a whole range of negativities. Indeed, a programmatic treatise would be something like a political pamphlet, as opposed to histor- ical objectivations – an opposition that audio-visual art is devoted to questioning. This is an important point in con- nection to attempts to separate political art or scholarship from propaganda. The difference is important: propagan- da dictates, as in dictators, which is close to imposing; whereas political art and scholarship expose and propose, but leave the freedom of the addressees intact; as long as they are immersed, so that they are enticed to respond to the art they see. What Richter disparagingly calls “fanciful fiction” stands opposed to an equally dismissed “mere reflections of reality.” “Rather,” Richter continues, “the min- iatures of the Denkbild can be understood as conceptual engagements with the aesthetic and as aesthetic engage- ments with the conceptual, hovering between philosophical critique and aesthetic production.”11 The word “engage- ment” is crucial; it requires contemporaneity. This matches Benjamin’s fifth thesis on images of the past, which has been a guideline for my work on art between history and anachronism: “Every image of the past that is not recog- nized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”12 This warning is one of the main motors of immersive projects and needs endorsement of their contemporariness. For, the cultural heritage from the 11 G. Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections on Damaged Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007): 2. 12 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: The Bodley Head, 2015): 245-55, 247. MIEKE BAL 22 AN-ICON  past matters for today’s world. But only if we manage to bring it to bear on the present.13 Richter further describes the thought-image thus: “The Denkbild encodes a poetic form of condensed, epigrammatic writing in textual snapshots, flashing up as poignant meditations that typically fasten upon a seemingly peripheral detail or marginal topic.”14 The word “flashes up” suggests the quick flash that Benjamin urges us to preserve by means of recognition in the first sentences of that thesis V from which I now quote a later sentence: “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”15 This also connects to the question of historical truth, at stake in the scene “Who is Don Quijote?”16 In this regard, in his Aesthetic Theory Adorno writes: What cannot be proved in the customary style and yet is com- pelling — that is to spur on the spontaneity and energy of thought and, without being taken literally, to strike sparks through a kind of intellectual short-circuiting that casts a sudden light on the familiar and perhaps sets it on fire.17 As in Benjamin’s thesis, as well as Lyotard’s fig- urality, the language here is again both visual and shock-ori- ented, with “sparks,” “short-circuiting,” “sudden light” and “sets it on fire.” This is thought alive, living thought, here-now, 13 On this necessary contemporaneity I have published the short book Exhibition-ism: Temporal Togetherness in the series The Contemporary Condition (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020), requested by the author of a fabulous later book on contemporariness: J. Lund, The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in the Time of Contemporaneity (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2022). My point was the idea that exhibitions are the most precise “model” for the contemporary. 14 G. Richter, Thought-Images: 2. 15 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History:” 247. 16 See for this scene, http://miekebal.withtank.com/artworks/installations/don-quijote- sad-countenances/episode-4-who-is-don-quijote/. This scene also suggests that the actor, Mathieu Montanier, bears a striking resemblance to the (totally imaginative and imaged) figure who never existed historically, but of whom we have a clear image. 17 T. W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form” (1954-58), in Notes to Literature, trans. S. Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991): vol.1, 3-23. MIEKE BAL 23 AN-ICON  and this living thought has agency; it is capable of engag- ing viewers in a dialogic relationship. And it is visual. For such sparks to happen, thought needs a formal innovation that shocks, and time to make immersion in it, possible. Thus, it can gain new energy and life, involve people, and make thought a collective process rather than the kind of still images we call clichés. Our attempt to achieve such “sparking,” shocking innovation can be glimpsed in this photograph by Ebba Sund: the frame is both blurred, since the escaping slave leaves it behind, and foregrounded, in the large proportions the iron bars have compared to the fleeing man (Fig. 1). Fig. 1. Mieke Bal, The Captive escapes, photograph by Ebba Sund. An epsiode of the 16-screen installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, 2019, video, color, Dolby sound, 8 minutes. Courtesy the artist. In the videos, such sparks lay in the combina- tion of material, practical changes of the mode of display as immersive, short-circuiting the anachronistic bond be- tween present and past, the confusion of languages and other categories we tend to take for granted as homoge- neous, and the intermediality of the audio-visualization of a literary masterpiece. In view of the need for witnessing, such a messy “thinking” form enables and activates view- ers to construct their own story, and connect it to what they have seen around them; on the condition that they MIEKE BAL 24 AN-ICON  are immersed through being given time. Thus, we aimed to turn the hysteria of endless story-telling into a reflection on communication, as it can breach, and reach beyond, the boundaries that madness draws around its captive subjects, and instead, open up their subjectivity. Here, in the brilliant photograph also by Ebba Sund, the Captive cannot speak; his mouth is visually muzzled. But his eyes do speak, to us – if we are given the time, through seating, to respond (Fig. 2). Fig. 2. Mieke Bal, episode 6 of the 16-screen installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, 2019, video, color, Dolby sound, 8 minutes. Courtesy the artist. To give insight into the stagnation that char- acterises the adventures, these scenes are predominantly descriptive. Any attempt at narrative is “stuttering,” without development. The scene Narrative Stuttering I recommend- ed you watch before reading this essay, shows both the in- capacitation to narrate and the frustration this causes. The theatrical setting is meant to draw visitors’ attention to the way they are themselves situated: inside a theatre, sitting on the stage, rather than in front of it, where they can fall asleep or get excited, identify or not, and possibly remain indiffer- ent. Here, such indifference is hard to sustain, because the viewers’ freedom to determine themselves how long they wish to stay with a scene makes falling asleep contradictory. MIEKE BAL 25 AN-ICON  This is the tentative design of the installation I made be- forehand, suggesting the total arbitrariness of the lay-out. The different installations follow this design roughly (Fig. 3). Fig. 3. Mieke Bal, project for the design of the 16-screen installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, 2019. Courtesy the artist. What Françoise Davoine calls, citing histori- an Fernand Braudel: “poussières d’événements” (literally, dust of events) is the motto of this work’s form: sprinkling situations, moments, throughout the gallery space. This is adequate to the state of trauma presented in the pieces and in the juxtapositions among them. The disorderly dis- play gives a shape, however unreadable and unclear, to the trauma-induced madness of the novel’s form. Cervantes, I presume, was one of those “mad” ones. The trauma incurred by Cervantes after being held in captivity as a slave, has been beautifully traced in his writ- ings and those of contemporary witnesses by Colombian literary historian María Antonia Garcés, a must-read book for anyone interested in Cervantes, Don Quijote, or slavery, then and now. Con-temporary. As it happens, Garcés was held captive by the FARC terrorist guerillos for five months. This contemporaneity is incompatible with the ridiculing representation of the “mad Knight Errant” that is so routine, both in cinematic representations and in much of the schol- arship. Supported by Garcés’s well-documented analysis, I MIEKE BAL 26 AN-ICON  see a haunting autobiographical spirit in the three chapters on the Captive (pp. 39-41 of part I). But the shape of the theatrical display does not “re-present” the madness. It hints at it, makes us reflect on it. The Denkbild is in the form, so that a contem- porary aesthetic can reach out to, and touch, a situation of long ago that, as befits the stilled temporality of trau- ma, persists in the present. Through experimenting with possible forms of the art of video, we attempted to invent new forms for the formlessness of trauma. By means of image-thinking this installation had to answer to the para- doxical concept, or thought-image, of the shape of form- lessness. Here, theatricality returns: ostensibly acting is the form that does not overrule the history, the violence, or the traumatic state. Acting, these videos suggest, is a social role. Acting, and making videos, exhibiting them in a thought-through immersive mode, is an attempt to give the formlessness of society a form. This is an attempt to do just that: to shape formlessness as the form of the trau- matic state, by designing a display that is both theatrical, in that it appeals to empathy, and turns “live,” that primary characteristic of theatre, into “life,” which concerns the social reality we live in and are responsible to sustain; and the knowledge acquired through the integration of making, analysing, reflecting, and boldly proposing new insights. Filmmaking begins with casting. In the case of Don Quijote, the actor cast himself; knowing he was the spitting image of the character as we know, or think we know him. An earlier significant casting decision occurred when Michelle Williams Gamaker and I decided to cast the three men in Emma’s life, in Madame B, in the same actor, suggesting the woman was in love with love and its prom- ises of excitement, not with any man in particular. I have made many films and installation pieces, over the last twenty years, and I guarantee you, there is MIEKE BAL 27 AN-ICON  no more effective mode of doing research and developing ideas than integrating these two activities. You can learn more about these films on the relevant page of my web- site. So, let me end on my personal motto, already cited, which demands the remedy of immersion: “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” This is pre-posterous history. The past without present is pointless. The present without past is empty. But as soon as we try to fix either one, the future disappears. MIEKE BAL 28 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19827

The Environmentality of Immersive Projection: The NatureAtmospheric of Scal by Giuliana Bruno e thinking Ecology of immersivity Empathy and immersion Scale and magnification Jesper Just Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello The Environmentality of Immersive Projection: The Nature of Scale GIULIANA BRUNO, Harvard University – https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19827 Abstract How does an artwork express an “environ- mentality?” Can we redefine immersion, in critical terms, as a form of environmental projection? In taking up such questions from my latest book, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media, my text address- es the relation between projection and environmentality in the visual arts in order to question immersivity. Confronted with the phenomenon of environmentalization, we need to re-imagine the ecology of representation. Positing ecolo- gy as an environmental relation, I will consider its artistic imagination both historically and theoretically. I propose that we revisit the environmentality of media archaeology to understand how this impulse is furthered in current mov- ing-image projections in the art gallery that call themselves immersive. I will especially address environmentality as it relates to movement and scale, questioning the relation between immersion and magnification. I will advance my argument by presenting the large-scale moving-image in- stallations of the Danish-born, New York artist Jesper Just. Does magnification always, only imply spectatorial immer- sion? Other forms of experience arise when confronting an ecology of scale in art. What else happens when we scale? Can immersion be understood, more critically, as a form of environmental absorption? In recasting immersion in envi- ronmental terms, I propose that we consider absorption as empathic projection with space. In shifting from the human GIULIANA BRUNO 29 AN-ICON  subject’s own immersive identification to this critically aware, enveloping field of empathic projection with the non-human, we can discard the prevalent human-centric position that pervades most immersive discourses. A different ecology of immersivity rises to the surface by relating the empathic “projective imagination” to “atmospheric thinking.” Keywords Atmospheric thinking Ecology of immersivity Empathy and immersion Scale and magnification Jesper Just To quote this essay: G. Bruno, “The Environmentality of Immersive Projection: The Nature of Scale,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 29-55, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19827. GIULIANA BRUNO 30 AN-ICON For some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who deals with environmental relationships. Ecology is the [...] pattern of relations between organisms and their environment.1 How does an installation artist construct an atmosphere? What are the “elements” of its architecture – the visuals and sound – that design the ambiance of an aesthetic environment? In other words, how does an art- work express an “environmentality?” These questions are central to my latest book, Atmospheres of Projection: Envi- ronmentality in Art and Screen Media, and will be reprised in this essay with regard to the topic of this publication.2 I will address the relation between projection and environ- mentality in the visual arts with the aim of questioning the notion of immersivity and critiquing a strain of its dominant discourse. I am interested in exploring whether we can understand immersion as an atmospheric ambiance and redefine it, critically, as a form of environmental projection. We are indeed confronted today with various forms of envi- ronmentalization.3 This phenomenon asks us to reimagine the very ecology of immersivity. I understand ecology, as Gene Youngblood prefigured in envisioning an “expanded cinema,” to be a fundamental form of environmental relation and related- ness. Such a form of relationality needs to be considered in the realms of history and geography in order to discern how the phenomenon of environmentalization affects the space of the visual arts and its transformations in time. In this respect, I propose that we reconsider the early history 1 G. Youngblood, “The Artist as Ecologist,” in Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970): 346. 2 See G. Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), which considers the interrelations of projection, atmosphere, and environment, linking “the projective imagination” to forms of “atmospheric thinking.” 3 See A. Pinotti, “Towards An-Iconology: The Image as Environment,” Screen 61, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 594-603, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjaa060. GIULIANA BRUNO 31 AN-ICON  of projection to account for the changes in its environment that are occurring in the arts and media of our time. I have long argued that an environmentality is rooted in the gene- alogy of the moving image in modernity.4 It was particularly present in the panoramic visual culture that emerged at the birth of the art of projection. The extensive phenom- enon that involved spectators flocking to experience the enveloping ambiance of a panorama might be considered an early experiential form of immersivity.5 In an effort to recast immersion in this historic setting and understand it as a more panoramic and ambient situation, I will consider the environmentality of this form of media archaeology. I will do so in order to explore how a panoramic impulse is furthered in contemporary moving-image projections in the art gallery that call themselves immersive. Such an exploration will redefine immersivity in spatiotemporal terms as an atmospheric envelopment, while analyzing the making of this ambient space in visual art. In linking up the early environmental impulse of pre- cinematic projection to the post-cinematic art installation of our times, I will especially address issues of movement and scale. I pursue this path of mobility and scaling to question the passivity, inactivity, and individuality that is usually attributed to immersivity, and to challenge a fixation on the subject’s optical identification with the device that produces immersion. In contrast to these views that often color both the practice and discourse of immersion, I wish to establish a much less static and more haptic paradigm 4 See G. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002); and G. Bruno, “The Screen as Object: Art and the Atmospheres of Projection,” in C. Iles, ed., Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016, exhibition catalogue): 156-67. 5 On the subject of early immersive views, see, among others, A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museum, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). GIULIANA BRUNO 32 AN-ICON  that emphasizes the relational activation of spectatorial mobilities and the mobilizing force of atmosphere. To this end, I will especially rethink the relation between immersion and a specific architecture: the “mag- nification” of the image. This phenomenon, first defined by early film theorist and filmmaker Jean Epstein, has itself today become magnified.6 In current popular and even the- oretical discourses on virtual or augmented reality, there is a tendency to believe that a large projective image nec- essarily induces immersion. But do we really need to col- lapse these two notions? Does magnification always imply spectatorial immersion? I am interested in pursuing other forms of ex- perience that arise when confronting an ecology of scale. Scaling has long been practiced in art history, where mag- nification has gone hand in hand with miniaturization.7 And large scale has not always manifested itself as an immersive condition. Nor has it necessarily implied an affirmation of the sublime, with its immersive vision of boundless infinity and arresting effects of awe. In my view, the most interest- ing way of understanding scale is in relation to other aes- thetic histories and especially as an architectural practice. This is because in architecture scaling is an essential tool for building an environment. Hence a central question for me is: What happens to a projective environment when we scale? Can the effects of large forms of scaling imply a critical awareness, a participatory relationality? Finally, can immersion be redefined, more critically, as an active, transformative form of absorption in an environment? In recasting immersion in these different, more dynamic environmental terms, I propose that we consid- er its perceptual affects as well as effects. For immersive 6 See J. Epstein, “Magnification and Other Writings,” October, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 9-25, https://doi.org/10.2307/778434. 7 For a treatment of scale in art history, see J. Kee, E. Lugli, eds., To Scale (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015). GIULIANA BRUNO 33 AN-ICON  effects are indeed affects. To be aesthetically absorbed in space mobilizes a particular affect: a feeling of empathy and sympathy with the space itself – the atmosphere – in which one is immersed. As an aesthetic practice, absorp- tion engages an empathic “projection” into an environment. It is a form of envelopment in an atmosphere. And thus, to move away from optical immersivity toward an awareness of this atmospheric environmentality, I suggest in my book turning to theories of empathy and sympathies with space, and advancing their discourse in contemporary ways.8 Let me simply mention here the writings of Theodor Lipps, who developed a vision of Einfühlung, or in-feeling, as a spatial empathy, and whose notion of em- pathic projection in ambiance possessed an atmospheric quality and tonality that aligns closely with the discourse on Stimmung.9 This atmospheric, tonal interpretation of the transmission of affects in art has been inspirational to my work, and some aspects of empathy and sympathy appear to be returning, with different interpretations, in other new materialist, “sympathetic” forms of aesthetic philosophy.10 With the specific aim here of expanding the projective reach of absorption in aesthetic space, one might turn in particular to “the laying bare of empathic projec- tion” as recently reconsidered by Michael Fried.11 The art historian has long been interested in the “the invention of 8 For further articulation of this subject, see G. Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection, especially: chapters 2-3. 9 See, among others, T. Lipps, “Empathy and Aesthetic Pleasure” (1905), in K. Aschenbrenner, A. Isenberg, eds, Aesthetic Theories: Studies in the Philosophy of Art (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965): 403-12; H. F. Mallgrave, E. Ikonomou, eds., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). 10 See J. Bennett, “Of Material Sympathies, Paracelsus, and Whitman,” in S. Iovino, S. Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014): 239-52; J. Bennett, Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 11 M. Fried, “The Laying Bare of Empathic Projection,” in Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2011): 205-15. For a different interpretation of empathy in art, grounded in the political force of trauma and sensitive to its cultural memory, see J. Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). GIULIANA BRUNO 34 AN-ICON  absorption:”12 what he calls “a powerful mode of emotional communication [that] can be actuated by absolutely mini- mal physiognomic and gestural means.”13 Such a minimal, non-representational form of “empathic projection” com- municates an atmosphere of inner absorption. It is interest- ing that Fried borrows the term “empathic projection” from the philosopher Stanley Cavell, for whom this is a path for overcoming the borders of separation and creating “a seam in human experience.”14 If understood as such a projection, an immer- sive process can create relational seams that are atmo- spheric joinings and affective joints. To perceive empathy with space is to sense the ecology of its atmospheric, situ- ational existence in time. This experience of an atmospheric tonality has the connective capacity to bridge the divide between subjects and objects. An empathic absorption in an environment further connects the human and the nonhuman, creating an experiential seam between the an- imate and the inanimate. If we become attuned to sensing immersivity as such an active, interstitial space of relation, we can access an ecology of relationality that is not con- fined to anthropocentric modalities. Environmentality, then, offers a way not only to reclaim empathic projection in art but to project it into larger ecologies. In the form of “empathic projection” practiced in the art of cine-projection, the work of technology extends to the surroundings, and this affects its atmosphere. The projective apparatus itself plays an important part in this process of absorption. A deeper absorptive modality sur- faces in environmental artworks that do not hide their own 12 M. Fried, “Four Honest Outlaws:” 208. 13 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010): 76-7. 14 S. Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 425. GIULIANA BRUNO 35 AN-ICON  projective mechanism in their temporality and spatiality.15 The energy of a diffused projective empathy is mobilized when a self-reflexive technology reveals its own mechanism at play, laying it bare and activating it in ambiance. If we recast immersivity with this sense of environmentality – that is, with awareness of the cultural techniques that make it possible – we can discard the prevalent human-centric, per- spectival position that pervades most immersive discours- es. We can overcome the fixation on the human subject’s visual identification and singular preoccupation with the projective apparatus, especially those of VR or AR, to focus instead on the inanimate, the environment, and the natural realm. It is time to stop putting individuality and opticality at the center of immersivity, and to pursue a more critically aware, haptic field of empathic projections. In this way, a different ecology of immersivity and relationality can rise to the surface in enveloping forms of environmental screening that link the “projective imagination” to an “atmospheric thinking.” Environmentality and Empathic Projection in Art Having laid out my theoretical premises, let me now turn to an artistic practice that is in line with what I have proposed. I like to think closely, along and through the work of contemporary artists who perform analytical gestures of environmental projection. Hence, I will pursue my critical argumentation about immersion by navigating through the work of the Danish-born, New York-based artist Jesper Just, whose forms of empathic projection express an atmospher- ic thinking. I will specifically address the manifestation of 15 On this subject, see K. Wilder, “Projective Art and the ‘Staging’ of Empathic Projection,” Moving Image Review & Art Journal 5, no. 1-2 (2016): 125-40, https://doi.org/10.1386/ miraj.5.1-2.124_1. Wilder analyzes in particular the experimental landscape films of Chris Welsby. GIULIANA BRUNO 36 AN-ICON  scale and the magnification of the image in these works to challenge the notion that these are totalizing immersive conditions. His work will also enable us to rethink a crucial architectural component of immersivity: the design of an installation. A projection that is “environ-mental” – that cre- ates a psychic atmosphere of empathy with space, its size and motion – arises in the ambiance of Just’s moving-image installation This Nameless Spectacle, presented several times since 2011. This is due to the self-aware design and spatial construction of the installation. As viewers walk into the gallery space, they confront two very large screens that face each other. Each screen measures approximately twenty meters in length by five meters in height. As they are also placed more than twenty meters apart, it is hard to escape the sense of magnitude of this projection.16 The massive scale of the installation provokes a physical re- action, demanding that the viewers become not simply immersed but rather “incorporated” into it. Indeed, one cannot help being absorbed into the space of this projec- tion, empathetically enveloped in its atmosphere. To understand what is going on in this magni- fied ambiance of projection, gallery viewers must position themselves in the midst of this moving work and negotiate a space between the large ambient screens. Moving along the course of the gallery, not only a physical displacement but also an imaginary motion takes hold of one’s body. A form of “empathic projection” is triggered here because the work lays bare its exhibitionary mechanism, showing off its magnificent projective scale in moving form. Confronting this particularly large species of screen, and the distance that both isolates and unites the 16 This Nameless Spectacle was conceived and exhibited with these dimensions as part of the monographic exhibition This Unknown Spectacle, devoted to the work of Jesper Just, on view October 21, 2011-February 5, 2012, at MAC/VAL, Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de- Marne, France. GIULIANA BRUNO 37 AN-ICON  two screen entities, one’s habitual relation to space, even the space of one’s body, changes. Different types of scal- ing are confronted, haptically sensed, resulting in a sculp- tural experience of screen architecture. As the projective screen becomes a sculptural object, it impels the viewer to become more aware of volumes. One constantly has to measure the scale of one’s body against the scale of this milieu of projection. Corporeally absorbed in the space of this vid- eo work, rather than being optically, passively immersed, viewers physically experience a form of spatial, even atmo- spheric “perturbation.” Nothing is static on these encom- passing screens, including the landscape they present. At the beginning of the film, the camera tracks through the space of a park. An atmosphere blossoms into being here: as the light shimmers on the leaves of trees for a long while, the sound of movement can be heard. You follow the sound cue that propels you to continue through the space of the park, sensing its atmosphere, breathing its “air.”17 There is a breeze, and the tree branches tremble and quiver. The motion of leaves in the wind on one screen always finds corresponding atmospheric movement on the other. These screens, you discover, always move in unison, often giving the impression of a movement advancing through space. Different views and vistas are presented, and you feel as if you were actually “tracking” through the park, sympathet- ically absorbing its atmospheric scenery. 17 As further developed in Atmospheres of Projection, an “air” is here understood to be the atmosphere of a site, and an affect that affects us. On the effects of air in painting, see G. Didi- Huberman, “The Imaginary Breeze: Remarks on the Air of the Quattrocento,” Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 3 (2003): 275-89, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412903002003001; S. Connor, The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion, 2010). GIULIANA BRUNO 38 AN-ICON  Panorama of a Historical Movement, while Absorbed in the Atmosphere of a Park A park [is] a process of ongoing relationships existing in a physical region [...] a “thing-for-us.”18 As you navigate the sea of images of this en- vironment, you end up displaced back in time as well as destabilized by atmospheric perturbations. The scale of the installation space communicates a geology of strat- ified temporalities and nonlinear times. With This Name- less Spectacle, Just has created a post-cinematic ride that takes us inside the prehistory of large-scale visual display. As it transports us through the atmosphere of the park, it leads us to rediscover the environmental configuration of modern visual culture and the emergence of a form of im- mersive projection from its very atmosphere. The point of entry that Just stages for This Nameless Spectacle is the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, a public garden, developed as part of the plan for remodel- ing the urban fabric of Paris directed by Georges-Eugène Haussmann. The manner in which Just films in this park, employing scale and movement in its depiction, reveals the cultural ambiance of environmentalization of which the park is a part. In the nineteenth century, an ambient movement arose across diverse cultural expressions, including land- scape design. Moving along the path of modernity from view painting to garden views, from travel sketches to itiner- ant viewing boxes, from panoramas and other geographical “-oramas” to forms of interior/exterior mapping, from the mobile views of train travel to urban promenades, a trans- formative experience of spatial absorption was born. This 18 R. Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” in N. Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson, (New York: New York University Press, 1979): 119. GIULIANA BRUNO 39 AN-ICON  new geography was the product of a “panoramic vision” that dynamically reconfigured the environment.19 In this novel geovisuality, sites were set in mov- ing perspectives, expanding both outward and inward as they were absorbed and consumed in movement by the spectator. This new ambient sensibility engaged the phys- icality of the observers, challenging their ability to take in a mobilized space. And from this moving panorama at the end of the nineteenth century a new observer emerged in the persona of the film spectator, a body empathically “projected” into an environment of moving images.20 With This Nameless Spectacle, Jesper Just im- pels us to travel back to this history of “site-seeing.” He employs a panoramic mode of spatio-visual construction, and does so to expand the potential of this precinematic history in our times. Absorbed in this projective space, one can experience in particular the sense of scale and the at- mospheric touch of garden vistas. Garden views created the experience of embracing an environmental terrain, and of being enveloped in its ambiance. They combined a sen- sualist theory of the imagination with a touch of physicality. The garden designs of modernity engaged the corporeality of the body in the moving absorption of an environment. Automata, sculptures, and playful fluid mechanisms that included fountains and watery landscapes enhanced this natural atmospherics, as is the case with the Parisian park Just films. The vistas themselves incited viewers to move into the transformation of an ambiance. Ultimately, then, 19 See W. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 20 For a more extensive treatment of the history of modern, mobilized space, see, among others, G. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion; A. Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006); F. Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); L. Charney ,V.R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). GIULIANA BRUNO 40 AN-ICON  landscape offered the body an ever-changing experience of atmospheric spatio-visual display. As one ponders the origin of this embracing space – a landscape of “atmospheric screening” – one realizes why Just chose this setting for This Nameless Spectacle. This is an installation that enhances the mate- rial apparatus of visual display to create an environmental projection. Landscape is not at all a simple background here but rather the moving core of a technology of projec- tion that self-reflexively incorporates a historical setting in its very ambiance. Its design holds within itself the actual movement in space that led from garden views to the es- tablishment of the filmic screen as a place for pictures to be “sensed” in projective, atmospheric motion. This Nameless Spectacle reminds us that the garden, like the cinema, is not an optical but a haptical af- fair, inviting empathy with space. The picturesque garden, in particular, was the place that historically “enable[d] the imagination to form the habit of feeling through the eye.”21 It was an affective “mode of processing the physical world for our consumption.”22 This modern landscape initiated a form of immersivity that is a virtual form of touch, putting us “in touch” with inner space and engaging all senses syn- esthetically in shifting sensations of ambiance. Empathic projection would be felt as one’s interiority was mobilized in the process of relational connection with the natural site. A reciprocal, sympathetic relation with the nuances of am- biance was thus established in architecting the atmosphere of the garden. In moving through the Parisian park in This Nameless Spectacle, Just retraces this ambient genealogy of modernity: the mobilization of atmosphere, understood 21 C. Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927): 4. 22 J. Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992): 4. GIULIANA BRUNO 41 AN-ICON  also as affective ambiance, in an environmental process that traveled from landscape design to cine-projection. In this ambient sense, as the shimmering light of the projec- tion, the breath of air, and the motion of the wind come to be virtually sensed on one’s skin, a real atmospheric “per- turbation” can be felt in the installation. Even an effect of weather arises in this empathic projection. And so environ- mental phenomena that are present in a natural landscape come to join the very atmosphere of projection. Environments of Projection: A Digital Mareorama Announcing an upheaval in the relation of art to technology, pan- oramas are at the same time an expression of a new attitude toward life.23 In the context of this environmental panorama, the technique of projective display of This Nameless Spec- tacle is also to be considered, especially as it regards ab- sorption in scale. The spatial arrangement of the work, set on two large screens that appear to roll out moving images for a spectator in their midst, mediates a haptic, atmospher- ic communication that clearly reinvents modernity’s pan- oramic forms of immersive exhibition. This contemporary mode of enveloping display exhibits a fluid technological history of environmentality, especially in its way of mobiliz- ing scale. In its gigantic mobility, it specifically recalls the technique of the “moving panorama.” A product of nineteenth-century’s exhibitionary culture, the panorama form is usually associated with enor- mous paintings exhibited in circular spaces, surrounding 23 W. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Exposé of 1935),” in The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland, K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press-Harvard University Press, 1999), 6. GIULIANA BRUNO 42 AN-ICON  the observer with the weight of their scale.24 One applica- tion of this giant form of display included movement. In- spired by the circular panorama, the moving panorama was particularly engaged with geography.25 A popular form of entertainment across Europe and the United States, mov- ing panoramas offered spectators the sensation that they themselves were being transported as images of space scrolled panoramically before their eyes, with sound and light effects that enhanced the overall sense of transport. The apparatus of display played an import- ant part in the construction of this absorbing geography, which was not merely representational. A framed fabric of drawable curtains, moved by a mechanical cranking system, could suffice to produce the effect of a moving screen, turn- ing into an enveloping scrolling screen. But more complex mechanisms were also devised, and the most advanced were exhibited at the 1900 Exposition Universelle Interna- tionale, in Paris. The Stereorama, for one, let spectators imagine they were taking a sea voyage, sailing along the Mediterranean coast, aboard a ship rocked by waves. This elaborate form of environmental display involved a feat of technological imagination and execution. The point of this technique of moving exhibition was the scale of motion. “Unlike the usual panoramas,” as a contemporary article tells us, “the background is painted on the outer mantle of a slowly revolving cylinder with a wide protruding edge carrying forty concentric sheet-metal screens four inches in height on which the waves have been painted.” As for the screens, they “are moved up and down by an electric 24 See, among other works, R. Hyde, Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the “All- Embracing” View, (London: Trefoil-Barbican Art Gallery, 1988, exhibition catalogue); S. Bordini, Storia del panorama. La visione totale nella pittura del XIX secolo (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1984); K. Trumpener, T. Barringer, eds., On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama between Canvas and Screen (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2020). 25 As media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo shows in his comprehensive history of these panoramas, motion, both virtual and actual, was an essential sensory component of this particular precinematic form, which produced kinesthetic effects in the audience. See E. Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013): 46-54. GIULIANA BRUNO 43 AN-ICON  motor through a linkage system including rods, hinges, and wheels.” 26 Considering this history of exhibition, we can venture to propose that the invention of the projection of moving images on a screen, and the function of active immersivity that is reinvented today, arose from the scale of the enterprise of the moving panorama, which not only produced scrolling motion and waves of perturbation but was also an itinerant medium.27 Spectators were offered the virtual sensation of being absorbed in a journey through the shifting atmospheres of a landscape.28 With this public spectacle, open to the environment, a majestic, virtual form of imaging atmospheric change took hold of one’s body. The panoramic object of display, capable of offering the pleasure of scrolling through an ambiance, thus created the material condition of existence of the cinematic screen as itself a space of atmospheric projection. The projective screen, then, did not come into being as a small, flat, frontal, windowed geometry, as is usually assumed is some media studies, but rather as a gigantic geographic and moving display.29 In other words, the screen emerged as an environmental medium. It is im- portant to acknowledge this lack of frontality, fixity, and flatness in early forms of screening, and to underscore an expansive milieu of volumetric plasticity and movement, if we wish to rewrite the genealogic course of the projective 26 “Die neuesten Panoramen,” in De Natuur (1900): 257-58, as cited in S. Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (1980), trans. D. L. Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997): 177. 27 This was an apparatus of haptic mobility, for it not only produced scrolling motion and waves of perturbation with its mechanism but was also an itinerant medium. It was often taken from place to place by itinerant showmen. 28 A particularly precinematic development of this traveling medium, also presented at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, was the exhibition Trans-Siberian Railway Panorama, which simulated a trip from Moscow to Beijing aboard the famous railway. A succession of images of the diverse environment viewers were imaginatively traversing appeared as if rolling past a framed window of the train car. 29 In arguing that the screen performs an environmental operation, and challenging a narrow interpretation of its geometry, I specifically respond to claims put forth in L. Manovich, “The Screen and the User,” in The Language of New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001): 94- 115. GIULIANA BRUNO 44 AN-ICON  apparatus as a set of environmental operations. It is crucial as well to stress for my argument regarding the atmospher- ic ecology of visual display that, in the moving panorama, atmosphere was not only displayed but cultivated. The display constituted an environment in itself, and it was ca- pable of registering change in the atmosphere of a site. The changes in ambiance were at times en- hanced by cutouts that depicted objects in the surround- ing scenery, moving in zones that extended from the fore- ground to trees far out in the field. Rotating in endless loops around the scrolling canvas of the panorama, these cutouts “projected” a sense of depth to the transformation of the landscape. Multiple backdrops operated at different speeds to create a sense of rolling vistas, with the added effect that the differences in speed between each of them created variable combinations of scenes. In this display, which turned a means of transport into the emerging cin- ematic screen, endowing it with the ability to modify an ambiance, the scale of the display was as relevant as the rolling, diffracted, dispersed movement. An Oceanic Voyage from Postcinema to Precinema As this form of “projective imagination” merged, at time of modernity, with an “atmospheric thinking,” a projective future was also envisaged, for inscribed here is also the kind of magnification that characterizes display in our digital age. As we ponder the elaborate construction of Just’s This Nameless Spectacle, it becomes evident that his giant installation has, built into it, a mechanism that reinvents the environmental history of projective display we have just outlined. In its digital configuration, it cre- ates virtual traveling through atmospheres that reenact the GIULIANA BRUNO 45 AN-ICON  immersive ambiance and environmentality of the moving panorama. The perambulating movement through the Parc des Buttes Chaumont recalls in particular the function of the early roll transparencies created by Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle, representing the moving vistas of the Parc Monceau, near Paris.30 But it is not only the motion of the representation that creates the emotion and triggers the empathic projection with the garden space but also the moving mechanism of the projective dispositif, and espe- cially its scale. The corresponding, diffracted motion that occurs in the space of the installation, not simply on but between the two large screens that face each other, is laid bare, and it is closely connected to the empathy with space created in a particularly absorptive form of moving panorama. The configuration of Just’s moving-image in- stallation recalls especially the dynamic, atmospheric use of display that characterized the environment of the Mareo- rama.31 This was a spectacular form of moving panorama that used two “screens” simultaneously, rolling out a set of moving scenes that simulated the atmosphere of a voy- age at sea. Spectators were positioned in the middle of the display, aboard a ship, which rocked back and forth to enhance the sensation of motion and perturbation of being projected into the natural environment of a seascape. An article written at the time tells us that the plan for the Mareorama presented [...] two screens, each 2,500 feet long and forty feet in height [...] to be unrolled,” with “a double, swinging movement [that] was to be imparted to the spectator’s platform which was shaped like a ship. 30 See E. Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: 40-6. 31 The topic of the moving panorama was discussed in an interview with the artist in New York on September 16, 2011. Just has generously shared his artistic process with me on several other occasions, for which I thank him. GIULIANA BRUNO 46 AN-ICON  The scale of the scrolling screens was grandi- ose, for “215,000 square feet of screen was to be unrolled before the visitor’s eye.” And the movement produced was impressive and destabilizing: “One of the screens moves on the port side, the other on the starboard.”32 In addition to this mechanics of perturbation, elaborate effects repro- duced atmospheric changes related to different times of day and rendered shifts in weather and actual perturbations. Absorption in the Mareorama was an experi- ence of unfolding events in a floating, situational ambiance – even in climatic perturbation – precisely as happens in Just’s installation. Viewers were sandwiched between two giant, moving screens that enhanced the sensation of tak- ing in an atmosphere and experiencing its changing states. All the kinesthetic effects made the visitors to the space of the Mareorama not only feel the motions but empathize with them. In a similar manner, spectators of Just’s installation who negotiate their own movement between complex ap- paratuses of rolling projective display, do so kinesthetically, imaginatively, and virtually as well as with actual motion. In This Nameless Spectacle, architectural mag- nitude contributes greatly to the empathic absorption in the shifting, fluid ambiance, that is, in the environment itself of the projection.33 The Mareorama “ship” could accom- modate seven hundred spectators. Just’s double-screen movement likewise relies on the scale of the gallery in which it is exhibited, and on a physically grandiose sense of space that underscores the environmental root of the emergence 32 S. Oettermann, “Die neuesten Panoramen,” in The Panorama: 179. 33 Although conceived in the extremely large format discussed, the screens have been adapted to the architecture of the gallery site for subsequent exhibitions. A reduced scale, for instance, at J. Cohan in New York in 2012, created a more intimate feeling for the spectator, who was sandwiched between the still-large screens of the mareoramic display. GIULIANA BRUNO 47 AN-ICON  of projection in forms of giant, moving display.34 The Mareo- rama ultimately magnified the sensory, sympathetic impact of exposure to an affecting atmosphere; following its cur- rents, Just’s own liquid mode of exhibition activates this ambient “sense” of display in installation form in its own empathic projection. Laying bare the projective dispositif that turns the gallery space into a moving vessel, it makes it into a vehicle of atmospheric perturbations. In this sense, the space of the art gallery constitutes a real part of the installation, and the persona of the gallery viewer becomes, quite poignantly, “installed.” On this screen interface, the turn of the last century thus joins the beginning of the new millennium in a reflection on the environment of projection and its cultural ecology. Just links together the energy of potentiality that characterized the space of visual display in early modernity with the potential expressed today when experimenting environmentally with digital technology. The artist not only shows us how central the environment of projection is in our time but argues that the desire for absorption in geo- graphic display is truly enduring. Ultimately, This Nameless Spectacle demonstrates how the large-scale architecture of the screen has traveled across time in projection while exhibiting the screen itself as an environment, even an am- bient architecture – the atmospheric form in which projec- tion comes into being, and can even dissolve. 34 Just’s installation returns us to that historically dynamic, multiple form of ambient display without, however, reproducing the construction literally. He does not exhibit the actual machine or mechanism that is at the origin of the work but rather incorporates the scale of the Mareorama and its movement across screens in the physical spatiality of the installation, which encompasses the transit of viewers in gallery space. In this sense, the installation does not follow the trend of display that has been spreading since the arrival of the digital age, in which artists have taken to exhibiting outmoded forms of visual technology in the gallery. Just does not belabor the obsolescence of the cinematic apparatus or its panoramic predecessor or show any sense of nostalgia for older forms of display. This Nameless Spectacle rather works at historicizing from within, reinventing the possibilities of screening expressed by the moving, modern mode of ambient display that gave rise to the cinematic era of projection. GIULIANA BRUNO 48 AN-ICON  Scaling an Environment As screens become prominently incorporated into both our private and public lives, the work of scalar reinterpretation that Just pursues becomes particularly sig- nificant, for a reinvention of the act of screening in the en- vironment is especially pressing today. Screens proliferate in widely different forms in our surroundings. They have decreased in size, becoming more portable: computers, smart phones, and iPads, which enable us to scroll hapti- cally, now travel with us at all times as our personal pan- oramas. The rise of the miniature form goes hand in hand with magnification. In contrast to the shrinking size of our personal screens, we are witnessing an increasing use of the gigantic as screens have become especially magnified in the spectacle of three-dimensional exhibition. Digital technology has enlarged the possibilities of projection in expanded cinematic forms of immersivity. Large-scale panoramic forms of projection, such as LED video walls, proliferate and have changed the very pan- orama of our environment, creating a veritable immersive screenscape.35 The technique of 3-D projection mapping, in particular, can turn an entire building or landscape into a screen environment.36 Heirs of the atmospheres of “son et lumière” shows, and of modernity’s dioramas and pan- oramic spectacles, these magnified projections can even design a performative environment. A haptic, immersive landscape is digitally fashioned as the façade of an edifice 35 On the urban screen, see, among others, S. McQuire, M. Martin, S. Niederer, eds., Urban Screens Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009); N. Verhoeff, “Screens in the City,” in D. Chateau, J. Moure, eds., Screens: From Materiality to Spectatorship (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016): 125-39; C. Berry, J. Harbord, R. Moore, eds., Public Space, Media Space (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 36 S. Chakravorty, “Spaces of Spectatorship: Architectures of the Projected Image,” Polished Panels 1, no. 2, Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture (March 7, 2016), http://www. mediapolisjournal.com/2016/03/spaces-of-spectatorship-architectures-of-the-projected- image/, accessed August 30, 2023. In projection mapping, a two- or three-dimensional object is spatially mapped by using specialized software that mimics the real environment it is to be projected upon. This software can interact with a projector to fit any desired image onto any surface, small or large. GIULIANA BRUNO 49 AN-ICON  turns into a projective skin. Cities are punctuated by these seductive large-scale projective envelopes that create am- biance. But in projection mapping, the idea of an en- vironment of projection risks becoming literalized. If the ambiance of projection is remapped in a reductive way, the notion of ambient media itself shrinks. The effects of media façades created in literal ways are often questionable, as “ambient” begins to take on environmental connotations that are pacifying and not far removed from commerce.37 After all, large-scale projection mapping is mostly used, contiguously with artistic and urban-branding pursuits, by publicity and advertising firms. Basking in the glow of giant projections can lead to opiate effects or the simple encour- agement of consumption as opposed to the production of engagement and perturbation. As the ambiance of projection is being trans- formed by digital technology, artists are increasingly re- sponding creatively and critically to these issues of the sculptural and panoramic scale of immersive projection. Just, for instance, critically exposed how large-scale projec- tion transforms the urban environment with the projection of his Servitudes (2015), a cinematic, architectural work consisting of eight sequences filmed in and around the World Trade Center in New York. Originally conceived for the subterranean gallery space of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, this filmic work was scaled up in November 2015 and displayed on a series of large electronic billboards on the building façades of New York’s Times Square. In 2019, the same work was also projected onto layers of semitransparent fabric in yet another geographic location, in museum space – a fact that makes one question the function of scaling as well as further reflect on the nature 37 For a critical reading of the ambient, see P. Roquet, Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); S. Kim-Cohen, Against Ambience and Other Essays (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). GIULIANA BRUNO 50 AN-ICON  and fabric of projection in relation to its specific geography and location.38 Projecting a Global Urban Scale These experiments on the vast projective po- tential of digital technology thus force us to rethink the issue of large-scale immersive projection in light of its own com- plex history. It is particularly urgent to ask ourselves ques- tions about the nature and consequences of scaling. What changes in an environment of projection when subjected to different scales? How does scale change the nature of the screen itself as an object? What kinds of projection, understood as forms of cultural transmission, does mag- nification comport? With this variability of scale, Servitudes rein- forces the penchant for “empathic” projection that Just exhibited in his earlier works, for, as we have noted, this process is set in motion when works actively lay bare their own projective mechanism rather than keeping it static and invisible. Intercourses, which premiered at the 2013 Venice Biennale, took this up at a global scale.39 This five-channel video and installation was set in a suburb of Hangzhou, China, that has been built as a replica of Paris, France. The 38 When this work was commissioned by Paris’s Palais de Tokyo for their expansive subterranean gallery space, Just began to research the exhibition hall, which dates from Paris’s 1937 world’s fair. The 2015 projection of Servitudes in New York’s Times Square was part of Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance. Servitudes was installed on semitransparent screen fabric in Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, Denmark, June 15 - August 11, 2019. 39 Reflecting on how a pavilion at the Biennale represents a country inside another country, Just engaged the architectural configuration of this conflated projection and intervened in the site of the Danish Pavilion, itself a composite structure. By walling in the grand entrance of the building’s neoclassic façade, he enticed viewers to walk around the colonnade and enter instead through a courtyard, which ushered them inside the modernist part of the pavilion. Here, the interior space had been transformed into a construction site. Walls built from concrete cinder blocks created another architectural path within the already hybrid space of the pavilion. The rough, impermanent fabrication of the concrete blocks lent a sense of eeriness to the site: though it appeared to be a place in the making, it felt as if it were already in ruins. In constructing an installation space that evoked the atmosphere of a ruin in progress, Just made material the layered process inherent in the imaginary fabrication of such sites, closely engaging their imaginative “projections.” GIULIANA BRUNO 51 AN-ICON  large scale of the projection inside the pavilion created a feeling of cultural displacement. In it, three Black men me- ander in a desolate ambiance of empty streets, uninhabited façades, and unfinished staircases that lead nowhere. This Paris imagined in China had a postapocalyptic feeling, even a quasi–science fiction dimension, despite actually being a real place. The projected images worked together with the architectural design of the pavilion to instill in us a concrete sense of how a global urban imaginary is made, and what scale this process has assumed. What is performed and projected here is a becoming of global scale – a state that contains processes of dislocation, hybridization, and entropy. Intercourses is named after that which lies in between: relational things like processes of interstitial con- struction. It deals with the actual process of projection as a space of relation and intermediation. In this sense, it fol- lows the course of Just’s investigation of environmentality as a magnified psychogeography. The very magnitude of the exhibition space drives a navigation of atmospheres, engaging viewers in the scale of the destabilizing projec- tive ambiance in which they are themselves empathically projected. Intercourses confronts even more directly than This Nameless Spectacle the effects and affects of the tech- nology of scaling in contemporary digital culture. This is a work of actual scalar construction, for its five screens have different configurations that generate further geographic dislocation through their differing positions in space and angles of view. Moreover, this Paris-in-China suspended between states of ruin and construction offers projections that can vary radically in size, from one to fifteen meters, depending on the site of the installation. In such a way, Just questions the different forms of screen scale that proliferate in our digital envi- ronment. In laying bare the architecture of the projective GIULIANA BRUNO 52 AN-ICON  mechanism, he triggers a critical response to the cultural phenomenon of variable screen size, making us reflect on how miniaturization relates to magnification in digital cul- ture. By confronting what happens in the process of scaling up or down, from one size to the other, he creates cultural awareness of the state of screening today while exhibiting the process itself of flexible projection. This architectural scaling makes gallery viewers aware of the very architec- ture of screening, and especially attuned to how ambiance changes in scale. Furthermore, for Just, large scale does not consist in simple magnification or simplistic immersivity. The magnitude of the largest screen in Intercourses, rather, challenges the conventional use of magnitude in film.40 Less associated with figurative facial close-ups, as is traditionally most often the case in cinema, it is more attuned to the vastness and complexity of the geographic and cultural landscapes it renders. Scale is here also anything but mon- umental and does not constitute a direct correlate of the aesthetic of the sublime, so often evoked when speaking of immersion. Rather than monumentalizing its own object, the large scale of the projection takes the gallery viewer into an ambiguous affective and cognitive space that asks for attentive, even contemplative absorption – displaying a critical form of empathic projection. This process of projective absorption in scale leads to deciphering the geographic hybridity of the site shown on screen while enveloped in the siting of the pro- jection. After all, wandering through a look-alike Paris with French actors of African descent, one could easily believe that this is in fact Paris – and that would be an acceptable response. But if, galvanized by the scale of the large screen, the installation viewer scans the surface and “screens” the 40 On magnification and the close-up in film, see M. A. Doane, Bigger than Life: The Close-up and Scale in the Cinema (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2021). GIULIANA BRUNO 53 AN-ICON  space closely, she can sense that something is off: the ur- ban scale here is quite different than that of Paris. As one tunes in to surface, scale, and atmosphere, scanning the big screen, and further notices the presence of Chinese inscriptions or too many air conditioners dotting the build- ing façades, one can finally understand how, working with and against architecture, inhabitants of this replica of Paris in China, located in the district of Tianducheng, adapt the space to their own use. In Intercourses, then, Just enhances scale as a geography, detecting defining nuances in ambient pro- jection and working with dimension in culturally affecting ways that defy the simple effect of immersive viewing. Here, immersion is not understood, as conventionally assumed, to produce virtual illusion but, rather, spatial awareness. As was the case in This Nameless Spectacle, the artist also works specifically against the astonishing use of magni- fication one finds in digital hyperrealism, with its purely spectacular effects of immersivity.41 For Just, scale rather functions as a real environmental modality. His installations invite close discernment of the surrounding space and en- gage contact with the larger environment. They resist using scale as a building block to create virtual monuments and, working with movement and active screening, also resist the arresting sense of awe associated with boundless im- mersive magnitude. In other words, Just is an artist who does not fall into the trap of large projection as mere man- ifestation of a technological sublime. Jesper Just’s critical investigation of this press- ing subject of immersivity finds correspondence in the prac- tices of other artists who are attentive to scale, reconfigure scalar paradigms, and also engage the panoramic form of exhibition as a projective environment. In a compelling way, 41 This reminds us that, as Susan Stewart suggested long ago, “the gigantic” is a particularly enveloping notion. See S. Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1993). GIULIANA BRUNO 54 AN-ICON  Lisa Reihana also questioned the scale and atmosphere of immersive projection at the New Zealand Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale with her large-scale installation In Pur- suit of Venus [infected] (2015-17), for which she reinvented the giant form of the panoramic spectacle in scrolling dig- ital fashion. Inspired by the French scenic wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1804-1805), the installation created a large-scale panorama in which real and invent- ed narratives of colonial encounter take place. This work took the very surface of a panoramic wallpaper and made it into an animated, moving surface of unfolding projection. Here, videographic and animation technologies contribute to a reimagination of the nineteenth-century shape of the moving panorama while probing its historical, ideological, and political dimensions. In Reihana’s reinterpretation of this mode, history is not only displayed but scrolls out and drifts along panoramically, in a critical reading that ques- tions the very form of its spectacular, colonial, scalar, im- mersive projections. In the face of digitally magnified immersion, and the return of the spectacular phenomenon of large-scale panoramic projection, one can only welcome the kind of environmental research that motivates Jesper Just and Lisa Reihana, for this is an exploration that is aimed at critically excavating, and exhibiting, the complex history of large- scale, immersive visual display, its forms of mediality, and the culture that it transmits and circulates in the environment. Here, the present not only exposes but challenges the past, and finally, changes its course. Only if we are put in a posi- tion to experience critically the cultural atmosphere that links scale and motion to immersive screening, and consider this multifaceted, nonlinear historicity, can we hope to redefine the terms of, and give a new name to, the ecology of ab- sorption in space – the environment itself of projection. GIULIANA BRUNO 55 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19827

The Environmentality of Immersive Projection: The NatureAtmospheric of Scal by Giuliana Bruno e thinking Ecology of immersivity Empathy and immersion Scale and magnification Jesper Just Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello The Environmentality of Immersive Projection: The Nature of Scale GIULIANA BRUNO, Harvard University – https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19827 Abstract How does an artwork express an “environ- mentality?” Can we redefine immersion, in critical terms, as a form of environmental projection? In taking up such questions from my latest book, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media, my text address- es the relation between projection and environmentality in the visual arts in order to question immersivity. Confronted with the phenomenon of environmentalization, we need to re-imagine the ecology of representation. Positing ecolo- gy as an environmental relation, I will consider its artistic imagination both historically and theoretically. I propose that we revisit the environmentality of media archaeology to understand how this impulse is furthered in current mov- ing-image projections in the art gallery that call themselves immersive. I will especially address environmentality as it relates to movement and scale, questioning the relation between immersion and magnification. I will advance my argument by presenting the large-scale moving-image in- stallations of the Danish-born, New York artist Jesper Just. Does magnification always, only imply spectatorial immer- sion? Other forms of experience arise when confronting an ecology of scale in art. What else happens when we scale? Can immersion be understood, more critically, as a form of environmental absorption? In recasting immersion in envi- ronmental terms, I propose that we consider absorption as empathic projection with space. In shifting from the human GIULIANA BRUNO 29 AN-ICON  subject’s own immersive identification to this critically aware, enveloping field of empathic projection with the non-human, we can discard the prevalent human-centric position that pervades most immersive discourses. A different ecology of immersivity rises to the surface by relating the empathic “projective imagination” to “atmospheric thinking.” Keywords Atmospheric thinking Ecology of immersivity Empathy and immersion Scale and magnification Jesper Just To quote this essay: G. Bruno, “The Environmentality of Immersive Projection: The Nature of Scale,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 29-55, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19827. GIULIANA BRUNO 30 AN-ICON For some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who deals with environmental relationships. Ecology is the [...] pattern of relations between organisms and their environment.1 How does an installation artist construct an atmosphere? What are the “elements” of its architecture – the visuals and sound – that design the ambiance of an aesthetic environment? In other words, how does an art- work express an “environmentality?” These questions are central to my latest book, Atmospheres of Projection: Envi- ronmentality in Art and Screen Media, and will be reprised in this essay with regard to the topic of this publication.2 I will address the relation between projection and environ- mentality in the visual arts with the aim of questioning the notion of immersivity and critiquing a strain of its dominant discourse. I am interested in exploring whether we can understand immersion as an atmospheric ambiance and redefine it, critically, as a form of environmental projection. We are indeed confronted today with various forms of envi- ronmentalization.3 This phenomenon asks us to reimagine the very ecology of immersivity. I understand ecology, as Gene Youngblood prefigured in envisioning an “expanded cinema,” to be a fundamental form of environmental relation and related- ness. Such a form of relationality needs to be considered in the realms of history and geography in order to discern how the phenomenon of environmentalization affects the space of the visual arts and its transformations in time. In this respect, I propose that we reconsider the early history 1 G. Youngblood, “The Artist as Ecologist,” in Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970): 346. 2 See G. Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), which considers the interrelations of projection, atmosphere, and environment, linking “the projective imagination” to forms of “atmospheric thinking.” 3 See A. Pinotti, “Towards An-Iconology: The Image as Environment,” Screen 61, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 594-603, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjaa060. GIULIANA BRUNO 31 AN-ICON  of projection to account for the changes in its environment that are occurring in the arts and media of our time. I have long argued that an environmentality is rooted in the gene- alogy of the moving image in modernity.4 It was particularly present in the panoramic visual culture that emerged at the birth of the art of projection. The extensive phenom- enon that involved spectators flocking to experience the enveloping ambiance of a panorama might be considered an early experiential form of immersivity.5 In an effort to recast immersion in this historic setting and understand it as a more panoramic and ambient situation, I will consider the environmentality of this form of media archaeology. I will do so in order to explore how a panoramic impulse is furthered in contemporary moving-image projections in the art gallery that call themselves immersive. Such an exploration will redefine immersivity in spatiotemporal terms as an atmospheric envelopment, while analyzing the making of this ambient space in visual art. In linking up the early environmental impulse of pre- cinematic projection to the post-cinematic art installation of our times, I will especially address issues of movement and scale. I pursue this path of mobility and scaling to question the passivity, inactivity, and individuality that is usually attributed to immersivity, and to challenge a fixation on the subject’s optical identification with the device that produces immersion. In contrast to these views that often color both the practice and discourse of immersion, I wish to establish a much less static and more haptic paradigm 4 See G. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002); and G. Bruno, “The Screen as Object: Art and the Atmospheres of Projection,” in C. Iles, ed., Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016, exhibition catalogue): 156-67. 5 On the subject of early immersive views, see, among others, A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museum, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). GIULIANA BRUNO 32 AN-ICON  that emphasizes the relational activation of spectatorial mobilities and the mobilizing force of atmosphere. To this end, I will especially rethink the relation between immersion and a specific architecture: the “mag- nification” of the image. This phenomenon, first defined by early film theorist and filmmaker Jean Epstein, has itself today become magnified.6 In current popular and even the- oretical discourses on virtual or augmented reality, there is a tendency to believe that a large projective image nec- essarily induces immersion. But do we really need to col- lapse these two notions? Does magnification always imply spectatorial immersion? I am interested in pursuing other forms of ex- perience that arise when confronting an ecology of scale. Scaling has long been practiced in art history, where mag- nification has gone hand in hand with miniaturization.7 And large scale has not always manifested itself as an immersive condition. Nor has it necessarily implied an affirmation of the sublime, with its immersive vision of boundless infinity and arresting effects of awe. In my view, the most interest- ing way of understanding scale is in relation to other aes- thetic histories and especially as an architectural practice. This is because in architecture scaling is an essential tool for building an environment. Hence a central question for me is: What happens to a projective environment when we scale? Can the effects of large forms of scaling imply a critical awareness, a participatory relationality? Finally, can immersion be redefined, more critically, as an active, transformative form of absorption in an environment? In recasting immersion in these different, more dynamic environmental terms, I propose that we consid- er its perceptual affects as well as effects. For immersive 6 See J. Epstein, “Magnification and Other Writings,” October, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 9-25, https://doi.org/10.2307/778434. 7 For a treatment of scale in art history, see J. Kee, E. Lugli, eds., To Scale (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015). GIULIANA BRUNO 33 AN-ICON  effects are indeed affects. To be aesthetically absorbed in space mobilizes a particular affect: a feeling of empathy and sympathy with the space itself – the atmosphere – in which one is immersed. As an aesthetic practice, absorp- tion engages an empathic “projection” into an environment. It is a form of envelopment in an atmosphere. And thus, to move away from optical immersivity toward an awareness of this atmospheric environmentality, I suggest in my book turning to theories of empathy and sympathies with space, and advancing their discourse in contemporary ways.8 Let me simply mention here the writings of Theodor Lipps, who developed a vision of Einfühlung, or in-feeling, as a spatial empathy, and whose notion of em- pathic projection in ambiance possessed an atmospheric quality and tonality that aligns closely with the discourse on Stimmung.9 This atmospheric, tonal interpretation of the transmission of affects in art has been inspirational to my work, and some aspects of empathy and sympathy appear to be returning, with different interpretations, in other new materialist, “sympathetic” forms of aesthetic philosophy.10 With the specific aim here of expanding the projective reach of absorption in aesthetic space, one might turn in particular to “the laying bare of empathic projec- tion” as recently reconsidered by Michael Fried.11 The art historian has long been interested in the “the invention of 8 For further articulation of this subject, see G. Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection, especially: chapters 2-3. 9 See, among others, T. Lipps, “Empathy and Aesthetic Pleasure” (1905), in K. Aschenbrenner, A. Isenberg, eds, Aesthetic Theories: Studies in the Philosophy of Art (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965): 403-12; H. F. Mallgrave, E. Ikonomou, eds., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). 10 See J. Bennett, “Of Material Sympathies, Paracelsus, and Whitman,” in S. Iovino, S. Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014): 239-52; J. Bennett, Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 11 M. Fried, “The Laying Bare of Empathic Projection,” in Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2011): 205-15. For a different interpretation of empathy in art, grounded in the political force of trauma and sensitive to its cultural memory, see J. Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). GIULIANA BRUNO 34 AN-ICON  absorption:”12 what he calls “a powerful mode of emotional communication [that] can be actuated by absolutely mini- mal physiognomic and gestural means.”13 Such a minimal, non-representational form of “empathic projection” com- municates an atmosphere of inner absorption. It is interest- ing that Fried borrows the term “empathic projection” from the philosopher Stanley Cavell, for whom this is a path for overcoming the borders of separation and creating “a seam in human experience.”14 If understood as such a projection, an immer- sive process can create relational seams that are atmo- spheric joinings and affective joints. To perceive empathy with space is to sense the ecology of its atmospheric, situ- ational existence in time. This experience of an atmospheric tonality has the connective capacity to bridge the divide between subjects and objects. An empathic absorption in an environment further connects the human and the nonhuman, creating an experiential seam between the an- imate and the inanimate. If we become attuned to sensing immersivity as such an active, interstitial space of relation, we can access an ecology of relationality that is not con- fined to anthropocentric modalities. Environmentality, then, offers a way not only to reclaim empathic projection in art but to project it into larger ecologies. In the form of “empathic projection” practiced in the art of cine-projection, the work of technology extends to the surroundings, and this affects its atmosphere. The projective apparatus itself plays an important part in this process of absorption. A deeper absorptive modality sur- faces in environmental artworks that do not hide their own 12 M. Fried, “Four Honest Outlaws:” 208. 13 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010): 76-7. 14 S. Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 425. GIULIANA BRUNO 35 AN-ICON  projective mechanism in their temporality and spatiality.15 The energy of a diffused projective empathy is mobilized when a self-reflexive technology reveals its own mechanism at play, laying it bare and activating it in ambiance. If we recast immersivity with this sense of environmentality – that is, with awareness of the cultural techniques that make it possible – we can discard the prevalent human-centric, per- spectival position that pervades most immersive discours- es. We can overcome the fixation on the human subject’s visual identification and singular preoccupation with the projective apparatus, especially those of VR or AR, to focus instead on the inanimate, the environment, and the natural realm. It is time to stop putting individuality and opticality at the center of immersivity, and to pursue a more critically aware, haptic field of empathic projections. In this way, a different ecology of immersivity and relationality can rise to the surface in enveloping forms of environmental screening that link the “projective imagination” to an “atmospheric thinking.” Environmentality and Empathic Projection in Art Having laid out my theoretical premises, let me now turn to an artistic practice that is in line with what I have proposed. I like to think closely, along and through the work of contemporary artists who perform analytical gestures of environmental projection. Hence, I will pursue my critical argumentation about immersion by navigating through the work of the Danish-born, New York-based artist Jesper Just, whose forms of empathic projection express an atmospher- ic thinking. I will specifically address the manifestation of 15 On this subject, see K. Wilder, “Projective Art and the ‘Staging’ of Empathic Projection,” Moving Image Review & Art Journal 5, no. 1-2 (2016): 125-40, https://doi.org/10.1386/ miraj.5.1-2.124_1. Wilder analyzes in particular the experimental landscape films of Chris Welsby. GIULIANA BRUNO 36 AN-ICON  scale and the magnification of the image in these works to challenge the notion that these are totalizing immersive conditions. His work will also enable us to rethink a crucial architectural component of immersivity: the design of an installation. A projection that is “environ-mental” – that cre- ates a psychic atmosphere of empathy with space, its size and motion – arises in the ambiance of Just’s moving-image installation This Nameless Spectacle, presented several times since 2011. This is due to the self-aware design and spatial construction of the installation. As viewers walk into the gallery space, they confront two very large screens that face each other. Each screen measures approximately twenty meters in length by five meters in height. As they are also placed more than twenty meters apart, it is hard to escape the sense of magnitude of this projection.16 The massive scale of the installation provokes a physical re- action, demanding that the viewers become not simply immersed but rather “incorporated” into it. Indeed, one cannot help being absorbed into the space of this projec- tion, empathetically enveloped in its atmosphere. To understand what is going on in this magni- fied ambiance of projection, gallery viewers must position themselves in the midst of this moving work and negotiate a space between the large ambient screens. Moving along the course of the gallery, not only a physical displacement but also an imaginary motion takes hold of one’s body. A form of “empathic projection” is triggered here because the work lays bare its exhibitionary mechanism, showing off its magnificent projective scale in moving form. Confronting this particularly large species of screen, and the distance that both isolates and unites the 16 This Nameless Spectacle was conceived and exhibited with these dimensions as part of the monographic exhibition This Unknown Spectacle, devoted to the work of Jesper Just, on view October 21, 2011-February 5, 2012, at MAC/VAL, Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de- Marne, France. GIULIANA BRUNO 37 AN-ICON  two screen entities, one’s habitual relation to space, even the space of one’s body, changes. Different types of scal- ing are confronted, haptically sensed, resulting in a sculp- tural experience of screen architecture. As the projective screen becomes a sculptural object, it impels the viewer to become more aware of volumes. One constantly has to measure the scale of one’s body against the scale of this milieu of projection. Corporeally absorbed in the space of this vid- eo work, rather than being optically, passively immersed, viewers physically experience a form of spatial, even atmo- spheric “perturbation.” Nothing is static on these encom- passing screens, including the landscape they present. At the beginning of the film, the camera tracks through the space of a park. An atmosphere blossoms into being here: as the light shimmers on the leaves of trees for a long while, the sound of movement can be heard. You follow the sound cue that propels you to continue through the space of the park, sensing its atmosphere, breathing its “air.”17 There is a breeze, and the tree branches tremble and quiver. The motion of leaves in the wind on one screen always finds corresponding atmospheric movement on the other. These screens, you discover, always move in unison, often giving the impression of a movement advancing through space. Different views and vistas are presented, and you feel as if you were actually “tracking” through the park, sympathet- ically absorbing its atmospheric scenery. 17 As further developed in Atmospheres of Projection, an “air” is here understood to be the atmosphere of a site, and an affect that affects us. On the effects of air in painting, see G. Didi- Huberman, “The Imaginary Breeze: Remarks on the Air of the Quattrocento,” Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 3 (2003): 275-89, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412903002003001; S. Connor, The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion, 2010). GIULIANA BRUNO 38 AN-ICON  Panorama of a Historical Movement, while Absorbed in the Atmosphere of a Park A park [is] a process of ongoing relationships existing in a physical region [...] a “thing-for-us.”18 As you navigate the sea of images of this en- vironment, you end up displaced back in time as well as destabilized by atmospheric perturbations. The scale of the installation space communicates a geology of strat- ified temporalities and nonlinear times. With This Name- less Spectacle, Just has created a post-cinematic ride that takes us inside the prehistory of large-scale visual display. As it transports us through the atmosphere of the park, it leads us to rediscover the environmental configuration of modern visual culture and the emergence of a form of im- mersive projection from its very atmosphere. The point of entry that Just stages for This Nameless Spectacle is the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, a public garden, developed as part of the plan for remodel- ing the urban fabric of Paris directed by Georges-Eugène Haussmann. The manner in which Just films in this park, employing scale and movement in its depiction, reveals the cultural ambiance of environmentalization of which the park is a part. In the nineteenth century, an ambient movement arose across diverse cultural expressions, including land- scape design. Moving along the path of modernity from view painting to garden views, from travel sketches to itiner- ant viewing boxes, from panoramas and other geographical “-oramas” to forms of interior/exterior mapping, from the mobile views of train travel to urban promenades, a trans- formative experience of spatial absorption was born. This 18 R. Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” in N. Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson, (New York: New York University Press, 1979): 119. GIULIANA BRUNO 39 AN-ICON  new geography was the product of a “panoramic vision” that dynamically reconfigured the environment.19 In this novel geovisuality, sites were set in mov- ing perspectives, expanding both outward and inward as they were absorbed and consumed in movement by the spectator. This new ambient sensibility engaged the phys- icality of the observers, challenging their ability to take in a mobilized space. And from this moving panorama at the end of the nineteenth century a new observer emerged in the persona of the film spectator, a body empathically “projected” into an environment of moving images.20 With This Nameless Spectacle, Jesper Just im- pels us to travel back to this history of “site-seeing.” He employs a panoramic mode of spatio-visual construction, and does so to expand the potential of this precinematic history in our times. Absorbed in this projective space, one can experience in particular the sense of scale and the at- mospheric touch of garden vistas. Garden views created the experience of embracing an environmental terrain, and of being enveloped in its ambiance. They combined a sen- sualist theory of the imagination with a touch of physicality. The garden designs of modernity engaged the corporeality of the body in the moving absorption of an environment. Automata, sculptures, and playful fluid mechanisms that included fountains and watery landscapes enhanced this natural atmospherics, as is the case with the Parisian park Just films. The vistas themselves incited viewers to move into the transformation of an ambiance. Ultimately, then, 19 See W. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 20 For a more extensive treatment of the history of modern, mobilized space, see, among others, G. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion; A. Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006); F. Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); L. Charney ,V.R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). GIULIANA BRUNO 40 AN-ICON  landscape offered the body an ever-changing experience of atmospheric spatio-visual display. As one ponders the origin of this embracing space – a landscape of “atmospheric screening” – one realizes why Just chose this setting for This Nameless Spectacle. This is an installation that enhances the mate- rial apparatus of visual display to create an environmental projection. Landscape is not at all a simple background here but rather the moving core of a technology of projec- tion that self-reflexively incorporates a historical setting in its very ambiance. Its design holds within itself the actual movement in space that led from garden views to the es- tablishment of the filmic screen as a place for pictures to be “sensed” in projective, atmospheric motion. This Nameless Spectacle reminds us that the garden, like the cinema, is not an optical but a haptical af- fair, inviting empathy with space. The picturesque garden, in particular, was the place that historically “enable[d] the imagination to form the habit of feeling through the eye.”21 It was an affective “mode of processing the physical world for our consumption.”22 This modern landscape initiated a form of immersivity that is a virtual form of touch, putting us “in touch” with inner space and engaging all senses syn- esthetically in shifting sensations of ambiance. Empathic projection would be felt as one’s interiority was mobilized in the process of relational connection with the natural site. A reciprocal, sympathetic relation with the nuances of am- biance was thus established in architecting the atmosphere of the garden. In moving through the Parisian park in This Nameless Spectacle, Just retraces this ambient genealogy of modernity: the mobilization of atmosphere, understood 21 C. Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927): 4. 22 J. Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992): 4. GIULIANA BRUNO 41 AN-ICON  also as affective ambiance, in an environmental process that traveled from landscape design to cine-projection. In this ambient sense, as the shimmering light of the projec- tion, the breath of air, and the motion of the wind come to be virtually sensed on one’s skin, a real atmospheric “per- turbation” can be felt in the installation. Even an effect of weather arises in this empathic projection. And so environ- mental phenomena that are present in a natural landscape come to join the very atmosphere of projection. Environments of Projection: A Digital Mareorama Announcing an upheaval in the relation of art to technology, pan- oramas are at the same time an expression of a new attitude toward life.23 In the context of this environmental panorama, the technique of projective display of This Nameless Spec- tacle is also to be considered, especially as it regards ab- sorption in scale. The spatial arrangement of the work, set on two large screens that appear to roll out moving images for a spectator in their midst, mediates a haptic, atmospher- ic communication that clearly reinvents modernity’s pan- oramic forms of immersive exhibition. This contemporary mode of enveloping display exhibits a fluid technological history of environmentality, especially in its way of mobiliz- ing scale. In its gigantic mobility, it specifically recalls the technique of the “moving panorama.” A product of nineteenth-century’s exhibitionary culture, the panorama form is usually associated with enor- mous paintings exhibited in circular spaces, surrounding 23 W. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Exposé of 1935),” in The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland, K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press-Harvard University Press, 1999), 6. GIULIANA BRUNO 42 AN-ICON  the observer with the weight of their scale.24 One applica- tion of this giant form of display included movement. In- spired by the circular panorama, the moving panorama was particularly engaged with geography.25 A popular form of entertainment across Europe and the United States, mov- ing panoramas offered spectators the sensation that they themselves were being transported as images of space scrolled panoramically before their eyes, with sound and light effects that enhanced the overall sense of transport. The apparatus of display played an import- ant part in the construction of this absorbing geography, which was not merely representational. A framed fabric of drawable curtains, moved by a mechanical cranking system, could suffice to produce the effect of a moving screen, turn- ing into an enveloping scrolling screen. But more complex mechanisms were also devised, and the most advanced were exhibited at the 1900 Exposition Universelle Interna- tionale, in Paris. The Stereorama, for one, let spectators imagine they were taking a sea voyage, sailing along the Mediterranean coast, aboard a ship rocked by waves. This elaborate form of environmental display involved a feat of technological imagination and execution. The point of this technique of moving exhibition was the scale of motion. “Unlike the usual panoramas,” as a contemporary article tells us, “the background is painted on the outer mantle of a slowly revolving cylinder with a wide protruding edge carrying forty concentric sheet-metal screens four inches in height on which the waves have been painted.” As for the screens, they “are moved up and down by an electric 24 See, among other works, R. Hyde, Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the “All- Embracing” View, (London: Trefoil-Barbican Art Gallery, 1988, exhibition catalogue); S. Bordini, Storia del panorama. La visione totale nella pittura del XIX secolo (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1984); K. Trumpener, T. Barringer, eds., On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama between Canvas and Screen (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2020). 25 As media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo shows in his comprehensive history of these panoramas, motion, both virtual and actual, was an essential sensory component of this particular precinematic form, which produced kinesthetic effects in the audience. See E. Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013): 46-54. GIULIANA BRUNO 43 AN-ICON  motor through a linkage system including rods, hinges, and wheels.” 26 Considering this history of exhibition, we can venture to propose that the invention of the projection of moving images on a screen, and the function of active immersivity that is reinvented today, arose from the scale of the enterprise of the moving panorama, which not only produced scrolling motion and waves of perturbation but was also an itinerant medium.27 Spectators were offered the virtual sensation of being absorbed in a journey through the shifting atmospheres of a landscape.28 With this public spectacle, open to the environment, a majestic, virtual form of imaging atmospheric change took hold of one’s body. The panoramic object of display, capable of offering the pleasure of scrolling through an ambiance, thus created the material condition of existence of the cinematic screen as itself a space of atmospheric projection. The projective screen, then, did not come into being as a small, flat, frontal, windowed geometry, as is usually assumed is some media studies, but rather as a gigantic geographic and moving display.29 In other words, the screen emerged as an environmental medium. It is im- portant to acknowledge this lack of frontality, fixity, and flatness in early forms of screening, and to underscore an expansive milieu of volumetric plasticity and movement, if we wish to rewrite the genealogic course of the projective 26 “Die neuesten Panoramen,” in De Natuur (1900): 257-58, as cited in S. Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (1980), trans. D. L. Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997): 177. 27 This was an apparatus of haptic mobility, for it not only produced scrolling motion and waves of perturbation with its mechanism but was also an itinerant medium. It was often taken from place to place by itinerant showmen. 28 A particularly precinematic development of this traveling medium, also presented at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, was the exhibition Trans-Siberian Railway Panorama, which simulated a trip from Moscow to Beijing aboard the famous railway. A succession of images of the diverse environment viewers were imaginatively traversing appeared as if rolling past a framed window of the train car. 29 In arguing that the screen performs an environmental operation, and challenging a narrow interpretation of its geometry, I specifically respond to claims put forth in L. Manovich, “The Screen and the User,” in The Language of New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001): 94- 115. GIULIANA BRUNO 44 AN-ICON  apparatus as a set of environmental operations. It is crucial as well to stress for my argument regarding the atmospher- ic ecology of visual display that, in the moving panorama, atmosphere was not only displayed but cultivated. The display constituted an environment in itself, and it was ca- pable of registering change in the atmosphere of a site. The changes in ambiance were at times en- hanced by cutouts that depicted objects in the surround- ing scenery, moving in zones that extended from the fore- ground to trees far out in the field. Rotating in endless loops around the scrolling canvas of the panorama, these cutouts “projected” a sense of depth to the transformation of the landscape. Multiple backdrops operated at different speeds to create a sense of rolling vistas, with the added effect that the differences in speed between each of them created variable combinations of scenes. In this display, which turned a means of transport into the emerging cin- ematic screen, endowing it with the ability to modify an ambiance, the scale of the display was as relevant as the rolling, diffracted, dispersed movement. An Oceanic Voyage from Postcinema to Precinema As this form of “projective imagination” merged, at time of modernity, with an “atmospheric thinking,” a projective future was also envisaged, for inscribed here is also the kind of magnification that characterizes display in our digital age. As we ponder the elaborate construction of Just’s This Nameless Spectacle, it becomes evident that his giant installation has, built into it, a mechanism that reinvents the environmental history of projective display we have just outlined. In its digital configuration, it cre- ates virtual traveling through atmospheres that reenact the GIULIANA BRUNO 45 AN-ICON  immersive ambiance and environmentality of the moving panorama. The perambulating movement through the Parc des Buttes Chaumont recalls in particular the function of the early roll transparencies created by Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle, representing the moving vistas of the Parc Monceau, near Paris.30 But it is not only the motion of the representation that creates the emotion and triggers the empathic projection with the garden space but also the moving mechanism of the projective dispositif, and espe- cially its scale. The corresponding, diffracted motion that occurs in the space of the installation, not simply on but between the two large screens that face each other, is laid bare, and it is closely connected to the empathy with space created in a particularly absorptive form of moving panorama. The configuration of Just’s moving-image in- stallation recalls especially the dynamic, atmospheric use of display that characterized the environment of the Mareo- rama.31 This was a spectacular form of moving panorama that used two “screens” simultaneously, rolling out a set of moving scenes that simulated the atmosphere of a voy- age at sea. Spectators were positioned in the middle of the display, aboard a ship, which rocked back and forth to enhance the sensation of motion and perturbation of being projected into the natural environment of a seascape. An article written at the time tells us that the plan for the Mareorama presented [...] two screens, each 2,500 feet long and forty feet in height [...] to be unrolled,” with “a double, swinging movement [that] was to be imparted to the spectator’s platform which was shaped like a ship. 30 See E. Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: 40-6. 31 The topic of the moving panorama was discussed in an interview with the artist in New York on September 16, 2011. Just has generously shared his artistic process with me on several other occasions, for which I thank him. GIULIANA BRUNO 46 AN-ICON  The scale of the scrolling screens was grandi- ose, for “215,000 square feet of screen was to be unrolled before the visitor’s eye.” And the movement produced was impressive and destabilizing: “One of the screens moves on the port side, the other on the starboard.”32 In addition to this mechanics of perturbation, elaborate effects repro- duced atmospheric changes related to different times of day and rendered shifts in weather and actual perturbations. Absorption in the Mareorama was an experi- ence of unfolding events in a floating, situational ambiance – even in climatic perturbation – precisely as happens in Just’s installation. Viewers were sandwiched between two giant, moving screens that enhanced the sensation of tak- ing in an atmosphere and experiencing its changing states. All the kinesthetic effects made the visitors to the space of the Mareorama not only feel the motions but empathize with them. In a similar manner, spectators of Just’s installation who negotiate their own movement between complex ap- paratuses of rolling projective display, do so kinesthetically, imaginatively, and virtually as well as with actual motion. In This Nameless Spectacle, architectural mag- nitude contributes greatly to the empathic absorption in the shifting, fluid ambiance, that is, in the environment itself of the projection.33 The Mareorama “ship” could accom- modate seven hundred spectators. Just’s double-screen movement likewise relies on the scale of the gallery in which it is exhibited, and on a physically grandiose sense of space that underscores the environmental root of the emergence 32 S. Oettermann, “Die neuesten Panoramen,” in The Panorama: 179. 33 Although conceived in the extremely large format discussed, the screens have been adapted to the architecture of the gallery site for subsequent exhibitions. A reduced scale, for instance, at J. Cohan in New York in 2012, created a more intimate feeling for the spectator, who was sandwiched between the still-large screens of the mareoramic display. GIULIANA BRUNO 47 AN-ICON  of projection in forms of giant, moving display.34 The Mareo- rama ultimately magnified the sensory, sympathetic impact of exposure to an affecting atmosphere; following its cur- rents, Just’s own liquid mode of exhibition activates this ambient “sense” of display in installation form in its own empathic projection. Laying bare the projective dispositif that turns the gallery space into a moving vessel, it makes it into a vehicle of atmospheric perturbations. In this sense, the space of the art gallery constitutes a real part of the installation, and the persona of the gallery viewer becomes, quite poignantly, “installed.” On this screen interface, the turn of the last century thus joins the beginning of the new millennium in a reflection on the environment of projection and its cultural ecology. Just links together the energy of potentiality that characterized the space of visual display in early modernity with the potential expressed today when experimenting environmentally with digital technology. The artist not only shows us how central the environment of projection is in our time but argues that the desire for absorption in geo- graphic display is truly enduring. Ultimately, This Nameless Spectacle demonstrates how the large-scale architecture of the screen has traveled across time in projection while exhibiting the screen itself as an environment, even an am- bient architecture – the atmospheric form in which projec- tion comes into being, and can even dissolve. 34 Just’s installation returns us to that historically dynamic, multiple form of ambient display without, however, reproducing the construction literally. He does not exhibit the actual machine or mechanism that is at the origin of the work but rather incorporates the scale of the Mareorama and its movement across screens in the physical spatiality of the installation, which encompasses the transit of viewers in gallery space. In this sense, the installation does not follow the trend of display that has been spreading since the arrival of the digital age, in which artists have taken to exhibiting outmoded forms of visual technology in the gallery. Just does not belabor the obsolescence of the cinematic apparatus or its panoramic predecessor or show any sense of nostalgia for older forms of display. This Nameless Spectacle rather works at historicizing from within, reinventing the possibilities of screening expressed by the moving, modern mode of ambient display that gave rise to the cinematic era of projection. GIULIANA BRUNO 48 AN-ICON  Scaling an Environment As screens become prominently incorporated into both our private and public lives, the work of scalar reinterpretation that Just pursues becomes particularly sig- nificant, for a reinvention of the act of screening in the en- vironment is especially pressing today. Screens proliferate in widely different forms in our surroundings. They have decreased in size, becoming more portable: computers, smart phones, and iPads, which enable us to scroll hapti- cally, now travel with us at all times as our personal pan- oramas. The rise of the miniature form goes hand in hand with magnification. In contrast to the shrinking size of our personal screens, we are witnessing an increasing use of the gigantic as screens have become especially magnified in the spectacle of three-dimensional exhibition. Digital technology has enlarged the possibilities of projection in expanded cinematic forms of immersivity. Large-scale panoramic forms of projection, such as LED video walls, proliferate and have changed the very pan- orama of our environment, creating a veritable immersive screenscape.35 The technique of 3-D projection mapping, in particular, can turn an entire building or landscape into a screen environment.36 Heirs of the atmospheres of “son et lumière” shows, and of modernity’s dioramas and pan- oramic spectacles, these magnified projections can even design a performative environment. A haptic, immersive landscape is digitally fashioned as the façade of an edifice 35 On the urban screen, see, among others, S. McQuire, M. Martin, S. Niederer, eds., Urban Screens Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009); N. Verhoeff, “Screens in the City,” in D. Chateau, J. Moure, eds., Screens: From Materiality to Spectatorship (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016): 125-39; C. Berry, J. Harbord, R. Moore, eds., Public Space, Media Space (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 36 S. Chakravorty, “Spaces of Spectatorship: Architectures of the Projected Image,” Polished Panels 1, no. 2, Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture (March 7, 2016), http://www. mediapolisjournal.com/2016/03/spaces-of-spectatorship-architectures-of-the-projected- image/, accessed August 30, 2023. In projection mapping, a two- or three-dimensional object is spatially mapped by using specialized software that mimics the real environment it is to be projected upon. This software can interact with a projector to fit any desired image onto any surface, small or large. GIULIANA BRUNO 49 AN-ICON  turns into a projective skin. Cities are punctuated by these seductive large-scale projective envelopes that create am- biance. But in projection mapping, the idea of an en- vironment of projection risks becoming literalized. If the ambiance of projection is remapped in a reductive way, the notion of ambient media itself shrinks. The effects of media façades created in literal ways are often questionable, as “ambient” begins to take on environmental connotations that are pacifying and not far removed from commerce.37 After all, large-scale projection mapping is mostly used, contiguously with artistic and urban-branding pursuits, by publicity and advertising firms. Basking in the glow of giant projections can lead to opiate effects or the simple encour- agement of consumption as opposed to the production of engagement and perturbation. As the ambiance of projection is being trans- formed by digital technology, artists are increasingly re- sponding creatively and critically to these issues of the sculptural and panoramic scale of immersive projection. Just, for instance, critically exposed how large-scale projec- tion transforms the urban environment with the projection of his Servitudes (2015), a cinematic, architectural work consisting of eight sequences filmed in and around the World Trade Center in New York. Originally conceived for the subterranean gallery space of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, this filmic work was scaled up in November 2015 and displayed on a series of large electronic billboards on the building façades of New York’s Times Square. In 2019, the same work was also projected onto layers of semitransparent fabric in yet another geographic location, in museum space – a fact that makes one question the function of scaling as well as further reflect on the nature 37 For a critical reading of the ambient, see P. Roquet, Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); S. Kim-Cohen, Against Ambience and Other Essays (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). GIULIANA BRUNO 50 AN-ICON  and fabric of projection in relation to its specific geography and location.38 Projecting a Global Urban Scale These experiments on the vast projective po- tential of digital technology thus force us to rethink the issue of large-scale immersive projection in light of its own com- plex history. It is particularly urgent to ask ourselves ques- tions about the nature and consequences of scaling. What changes in an environment of projection when subjected to different scales? How does scale change the nature of the screen itself as an object? What kinds of projection, understood as forms of cultural transmission, does mag- nification comport? With this variability of scale, Servitudes rein- forces the penchant for “empathic” projection that Just exhibited in his earlier works, for, as we have noted, this process is set in motion when works actively lay bare their own projective mechanism rather than keeping it static and invisible. Intercourses, which premiered at the 2013 Venice Biennale, took this up at a global scale.39 This five-channel video and installation was set in a suburb of Hangzhou, China, that has been built as a replica of Paris, France. The 38 When this work was commissioned by Paris’s Palais de Tokyo for their expansive subterranean gallery space, Just began to research the exhibition hall, which dates from Paris’s 1937 world’s fair. The 2015 projection of Servitudes in New York’s Times Square was part of Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance. Servitudes was installed on semitransparent screen fabric in Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, Denmark, June 15 - August 11, 2019. 39 Reflecting on how a pavilion at the Biennale represents a country inside another country, Just engaged the architectural configuration of this conflated projection and intervened in the site of the Danish Pavilion, itself a composite structure. By walling in the grand entrance of the building’s neoclassic façade, he enticed viewers to walk around the colonnade and enter instead through a courtyard, which ushered them inside the modernist part of the pavilion. Here, the interior space had been transformed into a construction site. Walls built from concrete cinder blocks created another architectural path within the already hybrid space of the pavilion. The rough, impermanent fabrication of the concrete blocks lent a sense of eeriness to the site: though it appeared to be a place in the making, it felt as if it were already in ruins. In constructing an installation space that evoked the atmosphere of a ruin in progress, Just made material the layered process inherent in the imaginary fabrication of such sites, closely engaging their imaginative “projections.” GIULIANA BRUNO 51 AN-ICON  large scale of the projection inside the pavilion created a feeling of cultural displacement. In it, three Black men me- ander in a desolate ambiance of empty streets, uninhabited façades, and unfinished staircases that lead nowhere. This Paris imagined in China had a postapocalyptic feeling, even a quasi–science fiction dimension, despite actually being a real place. The projected images worked together with the architectural design of the pavilion to instill in us a concrete sense of how a global urban imaginary is made, and what scale this process has assumed. What is performed and projected here is a becoming of global scale – a state that contains processes of dislocation, hybridization, and entropy. Intercourses is named after that which lies in between: relational things like processes of interstitial con- struction. It deals with the actual process of projection as a space of relation and intermediation. In this sense, it fol- lows the course of Just’s investigation of environmentality as a magnified psychogeography. The very magnitude of the exhibition space drives a navigation of atmospheres, engaging viewers in the scale of the destabilizing projec- tive ambiance in which they are themselves empathically projected. Intercourses confronts even more directly than This Nameless Spectacle the effects and affects of the tech- nology of scaling in contemporary digital culture. This is a work of actual scalar construction, for its five screens have different configurations that generate further geographic dislocation through their differing positions in space and angles of view. Moreover, this Paris-in-China suspended between states of ruin and construction offers projections that can vary radically in size, from one to fifteen meters, depending on the site of the installation. In such a way, Just questions the different forms of screen scale that proliferate in our digital envi- ronment. In laying bare the architecture of the projective GIULIANA BRUNO 52 AN-ICON  mechanism, he triggers a critical response to the cultural phenomenon of variable screen size, making us reflect on how miniaturization relates to magnification in digital cul- ture. By confronting what happens in the process of scaling up or down, from one size to the other, he creates cultural awareness of the state of screening today while exhibiting the process itself of flexible projection. This architectural scaling makes gallery viewers aware of the very architec- ture of screening, and especially attuned to how ambiance changes in scale. Furthermore, for Just, large scale does not consist in simple magnification or simplistic immersivity. The magnitude of the largest screen in Intercourses, rather, challenges the conventional use of magnitude in film.40 Less associated with figurative facial close-ups, as is traditionally most often the case in cinema, it is more attuned to the vastness and complexity of the geographic and cultural landscapes it renders. Scale is here also anything but mon- umental and does not constitute a direct correlate of the aesthetic of the sublime, so often evoked when speaking of immersion. Rather than monumentalizing its own object, the large scale of the projection takes the gallery viewer into an ambiguous affective and cognitive space that asks for attentive, even contemplative absorption – displaying a critical form of empathic projection. This process of projective absorption in scale leads to deciphering the geographic hybridity of the site shown on screen while enveloped in the siting of the pro- jection. After all, wandering through a look-alike Paris with French actors of African descent, one could easily believe that this is in fact Paris – and that would be an acceptable response. But if, galvanized by the scale of the large screen, the installation viewer scans the surface and “screens” the 40 On magnification and the close-up in film, see M. A. Doane, Bigger than Life: The Close-up and Scale in the Cinema (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2021). GIULIANA BRUNO 53 AN-ICON  space closely, she can sense that something is off: the ur- ban scale here is quite different than that of Paris. As one tunes in to surface, scale, and atmosphere, scanning the big screen, and further notices the presence of Chinese inscriptions or too many air conditioners dotting the build- ing façades, one can finally understand how, working with and against architecture, inhabitants of this replica of Paris in China, located in the district of Tianducheng, adapt the space to their own use. In Intercourses, then, Just enhances scale as a geography, detecting defining nuances in ambient pro- jection and working with dimension in culturally affecting ways that defy the simple effect of immersive viewing. Here, immersion is not understood, as conventionally assumed, to produce virtual illusion but, rather, spatial awareness. As was the case in This Nameless Spectacle, the artist also works specifically against the astonishing use of magni- fication one finds in digital hyperrealism, with its purely spectacular effects of immersivity.41 For Just, scale rather functions as a real environmental modality. His installations invite close discernment of the surrounding space and en- gage contact with the larger environment. They resist using scale as a building block to create virtual monuments and, working with movement and active screening, also resist the arresting sense of awe associated with boundless im- mersive magnitude. In other words, Just is an artist who does not fall into the trap of large projection as mere man- ifestation of a technological sublime. Jesper Just’s critical investigation of this press- ing subject of immersivity finds correspondence in the prac- tices of other artists who are attentive to scale, reconfigure scalar paradigms, and also engage the panoramic form of exhibition as a projective environment. In a compelling way, 41 This reminds us that, as Susan Stewart suggested long ago, “the gigantic” is a particularly enveloping notion. See S. Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1993). GIULIANA BRUNO 54 AN-ICON  Lisa Reihana also questioned the scale and atmosphere of immersive projection at the New Zealand Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale with her large-scale installation In Pur- suit of Venus [infected] (2015-17), for which she reinvented the giant form of the panoramic spectacle in scrolling dig- ital fashion. Inspired by the French scenic wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1804-1805), the installation created a large-scale panorama in which real and invent- ed narratives of colonial encounter take place. This work took the very surface of a panoramic wallpaper and made it into an animated, moving surface of unfolding projection. Here, videographic and animation technologies contribute to a reimagination of the nineteenth-century shape of the moving panorama while probing its historical, ideological, and political dimensions. In Reihana’s reinterpretation of this mode, history is not only displayed but scrolls out and drifts along panoramically, in a critical reading that ques- tions the very form of its spectacular, colonial, scalar, im- mersive projections. In the face of digitally magnified immersion, and the return of the spectacular phenomenon of large-scale panoramic projection, one can only welcome the kind of environmental research that motivates Jesper Just and Lisa Reihana, for this is an exploration that is aimed at critically excavating, and exhibiting, the complex history of large- scale, immersive visual display, its forms of mediality, and the culture that it transmits and circulates in the environment. Here, the present not only exposes but challenges the past, and finally, changes its course. Only if we are put in a posi- tion to experience critically the cultural atmosphere that links scale and motion to immersive screening, and consider this multifaceted, nonlinear historicity, can we hope to redefine the terms of, and give a new name to, the ecology of ab- sorption in space – the environment itself of projection. GIULIANA BRUNO 55 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19938

Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber Of The GiImage ants by Lucia Corrain Immersivity Giulio Romano Painting Fiction Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber Of The Giants LUCIA CORRAIN, Università degli Studi di Bologna – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8437-969X https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19938 Abstract Art in general, more than other fields, appears to lie at the heart of immersivity. As argued by Oliver Grau, it is art that still deploys a considerable genealogy with examples that resonate with the immersivity as proposed in contemporaneity. It is the current immersivity that con- structs “constellations” which, as Benjamin put it, dynam- ically enact “the history of art [as] the history of prophesies […] which can be written only starting from the point of view of an immediate present,” where “every present is de- termined by those images that are synchronous to it: each now is the now of a given knowability.” In the art history field, however, it is almost mandatory to re-evoke a fully mannerist ambience where “painting” creates – without the aid of particular instruments – the near-total immersion, acting fully on the passional dimension. The case in point is the Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, made by Giulio Romano between 1532 and 1536 in Palazzo Te in Mantua. A stunning illusionist artifice that catapults the viewers into the heart of the ongoing event, to produce in them a sense of awe and estrangement beyond the “frame.” Keywords Image Immersivity Giulio Romano Painting Fiction To quote this essay: L. Corrain, “Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber Of The Giants,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 56-73, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19938. LUCIA CORRAIN 56 AN-ICON A piece many years in doing and now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape.1 By way of introduction Undoubtedly – in a chronological field conven- tionally defined as Mannerism – the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber of the Giants, frescoed between 1532 and 1536 by Giulio Romano and his collaborators in Palazzo Te in Mantua, occupies a position of great importance. The high- ly original solution adopted by the Roman artist, already acknowledged in his day and age, in the light of today’s immersive technologies, can indeed manifest all its extraor- dinary innovative force.2 Virtual reality, as we know it today, is obtained by means of a digital instrument capable of generating “three-dimensional” scenes, narratives and landscapes within which subjects have the impression of actually mov- ing and interacting with the ambience surrounding them. Thanks to the evolution in computer graphics and the imple- mentation of the computational power, representations ever 1 W. Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale (1611) (New York-London-Toronto-Sydney: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1998): V.II.95-100, 219. 2 The bibliography concerning Palazzo Te is currently rather substantial, but it was Ernst Gombrich who took this whole building outside of the shadows in which it found itself. In 1933 he dedicated to it his graduation thesis at the University of Vienna, E. Gombrich, “Der Palazzo del Te,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, no. 8 (1934): 79-104; “Versuch einer Deuteung,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, no. 9 (1936): 121-150; it. trans. A.M. Conforti, Giulio Romano. Il palazzo del Te (Mantua: Tre Lune, 1984). Cfr. among the many others F. Hart, Giulio Romano (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958); K.W. Forster, R.J. Tuttle, “The Palazzo del Te,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 30, no. 4 (1971): 267-293; A. Belluzzi, W. Capezzali, II palazzo dei lucidi inganni: Palazzo Te a Mantova (Florence: Centro Studi Architettura Ouroboros, 1976); E. Verheyen, The Palazzo del Te in Mantua: Images of Love and Politics (Baltimore-London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1977); A. Belluzzi, M. Tafuri, eds., Giulio Romano (Milan: Electa, 1989, exhibition catalogue); A. Belluzzi, Palazzo Te a Mantova, 2 vols. (Modena: Cosimo Panini, 1998). About the Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of Giants specifically, cfr. R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: Palazzo Te (Milan: Skira, 2020). LUCIA CORRAIN 57 AN-ICON  closer to reality can be obtained. Nonetheless, so-called “reality media” are not yet a “perfect” mimesis of the real.3 The relationship between the current immersive devices and the more dated optical instruments of the so- called pre-cinematographic phase has already been widely brought to light: it is the case of the scene of the eighteenth century4 and the stereoscope of the subsequent century5 that share, with the more recent immersive technologies, the question of a “channelled aesthetic perception.”6 In rather similar fashion, at the pictorial level, the Quadratur- ismo and the trompe-l’œil raise questions relating to both the continuity between the space of experience and the space represented, and to the methods of construction of a gaze “from the inside” in which proximity allows for the perception of esthesis, verdictives and passion. Oliver Grau7 – the scholar who perhaps more than any other has outlined a genealogy of immersivity – has identified a possible origin even in Pompeian painting, to then look to the Renaissance and Baroque illusionist spaces, all the way down to the more recent scenarios 3 E. Modena, Nelle storie: Arte, cinema e media immersivi (Rome: Carocci, 2022); A. Pinotti, “VR, AR, MR, XR,” in Enciclopedia dell’Arte Contemporanea, vol. 4 (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana “Giovanni Treccani,” 2021): 685-686. 4 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (2001), trans. G. Custance (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003). 5 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1992). 6 P. Montani, Tecnologie della sensibilità: Estetica e immaginazione interattiva (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2014): 25. 7 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, opens his reconnaissance on the Pompeian frescoes, where the creation of a pictorial surface with the simulation of depth generates the effect of an ambience of greater extension that what it is in reality, capturing the gaze of the observer who does not seem to perceive the actual distinction between real space and the space of the image. Grau then lists the subsequent examples: the Chamber of the Deer in the Avignon Palace of the Popes (1343); the Hall of Perspectives by Baldassare Peruzzi in villa Farnesina (1516), the neoclassical “village rooms” or “sylvans.” The latter is a kind that, “while it dilates to the extreme the portrait of landscape taking it to the dimensions of the environmental room, it applies at the same time scenic criteria relevant to organising the decorations unitarily, with the illusionist effect of the plein air,” R. Roli, Pittura bolognese 1650- 1800: Dal Cignani ai Gandolfi (Bologna: Alfa Edizioni, 1977): 70 [my translation]. LUCIA CORRAIN 58 AN-ICON  (panorama).8 Grau, however, does not refer specifically to the striking example of the Chamber of the Giants, where the immersivity reaches a very high level of passional in- volvement on the part of the spectator, moreover without resorting to an auxiliary devices (as is the case today with headsets, overalls). A stunning illusionistic artifice defined by Frederick Hart as “surely the most fantastic and fright- ening creation of the entire Italian Renaissance in any medi- um”9 capable of catapulting the spectator into the heart of the event portrayed; as stated in 1934 by Ernst Gombrich: “into the deafening vortex of a frightening catastrophe,”10 capable of engendering astonishment and awe.11 Harking back to the renowned words of Wal- ter Benjamin: “the history of art is a history of prophecies” which “can only be written from the standpoint of the im- mediate, actual present,”12 where “every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability.”13 It can be stated that the case we wish to investigate here can be con- sidered in the light of a premise. In short, the machine fres- coed in the Chamber of the Giants in Palazzo Te appears to be the height of an illusion that involves the spectator in a dimension that can be defined as being fully immersive. Moreover, if we carefully observe, in the cham- ber in question of Palazzo Te, all the “instructions […] which 8 In 1792 Robert Baker, in London, made the first Panorama, which consists in a circular shaped ambience, where on the interior walls are projected images of times of distant places, offering the chance to the spectators of having a travel experience whilst being “stationary.” Cfr., besides O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, also S. Bordini, Storia del panorama: La visione totale della pittura nel XIX secolo (Rome: Nuova Cultura, 2009); M. Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini: Letteratura e cultura visuale (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2012); M. Cometa, Cultura visuale (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2021). E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 94, in 1934 had already related the Chamber of the Giants with the nineteenth century panoramas, stating: “that indeed Giulio, and he alone, was the first to try out in a work of art that which is called the hall of the Giants” [my translation]. 9 F. Hart, Giulio Romano: 32. 10 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 79. 11 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Turin: Einaudi, 2021): 107-109, in the chapter dedicated to the environment-image states that the Chamber of the Giants is a paradigmatic example, “an illusionistic machine that invites one to reflect on the viewer’s visual act as a participative response to the iconic act.” 12 W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1991), vol. 1, no. 2:1046-7. Quoted in English in B. Doherty, “Between the Artwork and its ‘Actualization’: A Footnote to Art History in Benjamin’s Work of Art,” Paragraph 32, no. 3 (2009): 331-358, 336. 13 W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1982), trans. H. Eiland, K. McLaughlin (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2003): 462-463. LUCIA CORRAIN 59 AN-ICON  [in the planar paintings] direct the gaze, guide the reading, intimidate and can, at times, seduce the viewer subjecting them to the representation,”14 have been completely dis- avowed.15 They have been totally cancelled. And, not by chance, in their place some decidedly more cogent ones have been created in an interplay of different disciplines, taking one another by the hand, offering a wholly original reading of the Chamber in question that can fully manifest the active nature of perception. An exceptional visitor Let us now try to enter the Chamber of the Giants, highlighting its most salient characteristics. And we shall do so starting from an exceptional witness, Gior- gio Vasari (Arezzo, 1511-1574), the art historian who was able to visit the Mantuan Palazzo Te on two occasions: the first time when the Chamber of the Giants was under construction; the second when the works had already been completed. His testimony can to all intents and purposes be considered an ekphrasis of great efficacy that “overlaps with the pictorial [story], and at times gives the impression of eclipsing it.”16 Here is the description Vasari gives of the space created and painted by Giulio Romano: After laying deep, double foundations in that corner, which was in a swampy spot, Giulio had built over that angle a large, round room with extremely thick walls, so that the four corners of the outside walls would be stronger and could support a double vault rounded like an oven. And having done this, since the room had corners, he built here and there all the way around it the doors, windows, and a fireplace of rusticated stones with worn-away edges, which 14 G. Careri, “Prefazione,” in L. Marin, Opacità della pittura: Sulla rappresentazione nel Quattrocento (Florence: La Casa Usher, 2012): 7-13. 15 On the role of the frame in the work of art see D. Ferrari, A. Pinotti, eds., La cornice: Storie, teorie, testi (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2018) and S. Zuliani, Spazi e tempi dell’installazione (Rome: Arshake, 2015). 16 A. Belluzzi, Giulio Romano: 446 [my translation]. On the text/image problem cfr. W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). LUCIA CORRAIN 60 AN-ICON were disjointed and crooked almost to the extent that they 17 even seemed to lean over on one side and actually to collapse. Giulio Romano – as can be inferred – gave a particular form to the environment: it is not a “round room,” as Vasari might lead us to believe, but a “a double vault rounded like an oven,” which did not have sharp corners and whose doors and windows were “disjointed and crook- ed,” which almost certainly means that the windows were closed by painted blinds and the doors were in continuity with respect to the frescoes. A singular space, which also disposed of a par- ticular flooring, as confirmed by Vasari himself: He had made the floor with polished river slingstones that ran around the walls, and those on the painting plane, which fell down- wards had counterfeited: for a part those painted inwards escaped, and at times were 18 occupied and adorned by grass and at times by larger stones. But, as can well be imagined, it was, in those days, a cobbled floor with slingstones that, albeit creating seamless continuity with the upright walls, did not represent an assurance of a steady support for the visitor.19 It is not possible, however, to be outside the space to talk about it; you need to traverse it to know it, for 17 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 370. In the first edition by types of Lorenzo Torrentino (Florence, 1550), the historiographer was even more articulate: “He therefore had double foundations of great depth sunk at that corner, which was in a marshy place, and over that angle he constructed a large round room, with very thick walls, to the end that the four external corners of the masonry might be strong enough to be able to support a double vault, round after the manner of an oven. This done, he caused to be built at the corners right round the room, in the proper places, the doors, windows, and fireplace, all of rustic stones rough-hewn as if by chance, and, as it were, disjointed and awry, insomuch that they appeared to be really hanging over to one side and falling down).” G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano pittore e architetto,” in Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani (1550) (Turin: Einaudi, 1986): 833 [my translation]. 18 Ibidem: 834 [my translation]. 19 The flooring was made anew by Paolo Pozzo in the eighteenth-century restoration of the palazzo, in which very likely the fireplace of which Vasari speaks was bricked up, and which is testified to in some drawings preserved at the Louvre, Windsor and Palazzo Te (donated in 2015 by Monroe Warshaw), cfr. R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: 27. Furthermore, in 1781, the archduke Ferdinand of Habsburg commissioned Giovanni Bottani to “have made a picket fence in the hall of the Giants […]. Also, he would promptly have the fireplace sealed and walled up,” citation reported in A. Belluzzi, Giulio Romano: 236. LUCIA CORRAIN 61 AN-ICON  it to become a true object of analysis. The analysts must become an integral part of the space, immerse themselves in it like a percipient body, like the users of the place, going through it and letting themselves be guided by the logic imposed by the context in which they find themselves. The visitors are, so to speak, literally “manipulated” by this un- usual spatial environment. The system of the spatial expression is in it- self meaningful, that here acquires an even more complete meaning with what is portrayed on the walls: the signifi- cance of the space is “the final result of a stratified and complex series of procedures, articulations and sub-artic- ulations, where an element is meaningful only if related to the others.”20 The spatial configurations prefigure, that is, the virtuality, of the possible ways of using the morphology itself of the places. In this sense, a semiotic reading can come to our aid which – as Giannitrapani writes – “consid- ers space not as a straightforward container of subjects, objects, events, but as a meaningful structure capable of speaking of a multiplicity of aspects of life.”21 This means that: “The significance of the space lies in the efficacious action that it provokes on the subjects coming into contact with it.” And in order for space to completely “influence the body it must work on the ambience, it must give a shape to the architecture of the space.”22 The Fall of the Giants There is no doubt that the space of the Cham- bers of the Giants, already in itself significant, finds fulfil- ment with what it portrayed on the ceiling and on the walls. Although this interest of this analysis is focused on the immersive dimension, it is necessary to briefly go over the 20 G. Marrone, “Efficacia simbolica dello spazio: Azioni e passioni,” in P. Bertetti, G. Manetti, eds., Forme della testualità: Teoria, modelli, storia e prospettive (Turin: Testo&immagine, 2001): 85-96. 21 A. Giannitrapani, Introduzione alla semiotica dello spazio (Rome: Carrocci, 2013): 45. 22 On the space cfr. also M. Hammad, Lire l’espace, comprendre l’architecture (Limoges: Presses Universitaires, 2001), trans. G. Festi (Rome: Meltemi, 2003). LUCIA CORRAIN 62 AN-ICON  iconography of the whole figurative apparatus because ̶ as we shall see – it is closely related to Federico II Gonzaga, the patron, and Charles V over whose empire the sun never set. The whole room, as is well-known, portrays the fall of the Giants drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.23 The myth tells of the giants’ attempted attack on the gods: with the intent to reach Mount Olympus, the vicious inhabitants of the earth superimpose one another on two mountains, that of Pelion and that of Ossa. Portrayed on the ceiling (Fig. 1) is the gods’ ire against the giants’ attempt to scale the mountains, with Jupiter who abandons his throne to place himself along- side Juno, who, with her gaze and index finger, points to the direction towards which to cast the thunderbolts. The plot hatched by the giants fails, of course, and Jupiter’s intervention makes the mountains collapse; by tumbling precipitously, they overwhelm the giants burying them be- neath the heavy boulders. A daring view from the bottom upwards, always on the ceiling, portrays a circular temple with twelve columns from whose balustrade some char- acters, concerned and awestruck by what is happening beneath them, look out; in the same way the numerous other divinities display impassioned states of agitation. The throne, left vacant by Jupiter, is occupied by the imperial eagle with its wings outspread, while the menacing clouds surround the whole empyrean in a role of transition from the world of the gods to the terrestrial terrain of the com- mon mortals. On the walls, above the fireplace, the giant Ty- phon (monstruous son of Gaia – Fig. 2) is depicted: for having tried to depose Jupiter, he is struck by lightning and sinks under Etna, and here, crushed by the boulders, in an attempt to defend himself he spews fire and lapilli causing an earthquake.24 The fireplace, in turn, was supposed to suggest the illusion of the youth condemned by the flames: the flames that issue from the mouth of the giant Typhon, 23 Ovid, Metamorphoses I vv. 151-154 (I A.D), trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 5. 24 Ovid, Metamorphoses V: 109. LUCIA CORRAIN 63 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, ceiling, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. in the pictorial fiction, thus ended up “conversing” with the real fire of the fireplace. Examining more closely the remaining frescoed parts, Vasari took note of further details: the entire world is upside-down and almost at its final end [...] many giants can be seen in flight, all struck down by Jove’s thunderbolts and on the verge of being overwhelmed by the landslides from the mountains just like the others. In another part, Giulio represented other giants upon whom are crashing down temples, columns, and other parts of buildings, creating 25 among these arrogant creatures great havoc and loss of life. And, in actual fact, three walls propose land- scapes (Figg. 3-4) and another one proposes an architec- ture – a serliana – that too about to collapse under the fire of the lightning bolts of the gods (Fig. 5). 25 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372. LUCIA CORRAIN 64 AN-ICON  Fig. 2. G. Romano, Fig. 3. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, wall est, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. wall sud, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. Fig. 4. G. Romano, Fig. 5. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, wall ovest, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. wall nord, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. LUCIA CORRAIN 65 AN-ICON  At this point it is worthwhile turning our atten- tion to the time when the action portrayed takes place. The time in itself is not representable, it is represented by means of movement and transformation: it is a function of the movement and the last is a function of space. Any ac- tion, which is never a perpetual motion, contains phases: a beginning, a climax and an end. In the course of each one of those, every action leads to the memory of what had come before and what will come afterwards. In short, the climax is the moment of utmost tension. In the Chamber of the Giants it corresponds to the phase when everything collapses: the technique is that of breaking down natural and architectural elements into parts that gradually lose their natural order to follow one that has gone completely haywire. If it is true that the rendering of the fatal moment is accentuated in mannerism, it can be said that here it has touched some very elevated heights. The particularity of the fatal instant had been highlighted, once again, by Vasari (Fig. 6): Fig. 6. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber of the Giants, detail of the Giant, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. LUCIA CORRAIN 66 AN-ICON Giulio [...] made plans to build a corner-room [...] in which the walls would correspond with the paintings, in order 26 to deceive the people who would see it as much as he could. a marvellous work where the entire painting has neither beginning nor end, and that it is all tied together 27 and runs on continuously without boundary or dec- oration. This is a room completely without frames,28 of any delimitation, with an enveloping continuity, in which the space – as Gombrich points out – runs homogeneous to the floor as far as the apex of the roof with not edges and no frame to interrupt the seamlessness of the surfaces, it is completely transformed into a pictorial scene: it is29 part of a single action, animated by the same emotional impetus. But, Vasari adds, it is a horrible scene: Therefore, let no one ever imagine seeing a work from the brush that is more horrible or frightening or more realistic than this one. And anyone who enters that room and sees the windows, doors, and other such details all distorted and almost on the verge of crashing down, as well as the mountains and buildings collapsing, can only fear that everything is toppling down upon him. Especially when he sees 30 all the gods in that heaven running this way and that in flight. In short, a stunning illusionistic artifice that seeks to catapult the viewer into the throbbing heart of the event in progress, where “the boundaries of space 26 Ibid.: 370. 27 Ibid.: 373. 28 Cfr. P. Carabell, “Breaking the Frame: Transgression and Transformation in Giulio Romano’s Sala dei Giganti,” Artibus et Historiae 18, no. 36 (1997): 87-100. 29 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 81. 30 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372-373. LUCIA CORRAIN 67 AN-ICON  disappear [...] and the laws of statics, in which the eye can find tranquillizing points of reference, are completely lacking.”31 Inside the environment: “the walls themselves move and, soon, everything is disarranged and collapses upon the viewer” who, in this way, shares “the same fate that submits and destroys the very powerful giants that tried in vain to sustain the walls.”32 (Figg. 7-8) Fig. 7. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber of the Giants, detail of the Giant, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. Fig. 8. G. Romano, copy of, Disegno della parete con il camino, Paris, Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques, inv. 3636, recto 31 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 79. 32 Ibid. LUCIA CORRAIN 68 AN-ICON  Being at the end of the world At this point – and to delve once more into the immersivity that generates the environment – it comes nat- ural to wonder why the patron, duke Federico II Gonzaga, decided to make such a particular and unique ambience in what is considered to be his villa of pleasures. What role would the Chamber of the Giants play in that precise his- torical moment?33 We should not try to imagine the visitor guided by the Lord of Mantua in the palazzo: Federico II leads his guest in a space whose boundaries are well de- fined, through ambiences of different sizes, decorated with specific iconographic themes, in a crescendo that takes him gradually as far as the Chamber of the Giants. An ini- tiatory pathway through which the duke proposes to his guest a sort of progressive estrangement with respect to the real world and that reaches its climax in the immense “catastrophe” of the dark cave, with the doors and win- dows shut and only the flickering light coming from the lit fireplace. A status of anguish and terror, apparently with no exit, in which the guest “with the highest mastery is de- prived of every chance to take a distance, to evaluate the actual spaces.”34 In this regard, Ernst Gombrich’s personal experience seems truly exemplary: The kind of oppression that we have experienced is absolutely new and the sentiment from which it is born and which Giulio has been able to give shape to, is that of anguish. [...] There, we have experienced directly and in an absolutely new way the anguished nightmare of our involvement in an ineluctable catastrophe.35 33 The Duke of Mantua invested colossal amounts and a special interest in the project for Palazzo Te: a work that had no residential function, which was not a fortress and in which even a room, that of the Giants, was in no way inhabitable. 34 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 81 [my traslation]. 35 Ibid.: 111 [my translation]. LUCIA CORRAIN 69 AN-ICON  Who is behind the enormous cave remains, therefore, captured by the representation, perceiving step by step that everything is being twisted, being destroyed: in the room lit up only by the fire burning in the fireplace, the visitor “experiences” the end of the world just as it is taking place, he experiences the torment – as Vasari writes – “that everything [...] is toppling down upon him.”36 It is important to understand what happens to the viewer’s body and how the space substantiated in the representation is capable of triggering sensorial percep- tions. As seems obvious, one’s eyesight is the first sense brought into play, and not only because the visitor’s eye is engaged by the enormous eyes of the Giants, but rather by the particular luminosity of the environment: indeed, one’s eyes must adapt to the light conditions produced by the fire in the fireplace; entering the ambience from conditions of full light, the adaptation to the poor light comes about slowly, one’s pupils must dilate as much as possible to be able to embrace the vision. The fireplace fire, moreover, is also responsible for the arousal of other senses: the sense of smell, because the burning wood diffuses its smell in all of the room; the sense of hearing, owing to the crackling and the rustling of the burning wood; the sense of touch, in that the fire warms up the ambience and consequent- ly the visitor. Even the flooring can fall within the tactile sensoriality – in “small, round stones,” but “set in with a knife” –37 which make the visitor’s movements unstable, reinforcing the precipice effect that is the central theme of the ambience. Amongst those who in the course of time have had the chance to live a sensorial experience inside the Chamber of the Giants we can also name a scientist like Ulisse Aldrovandi (Bologna, 1522-1605): his interest, in particular, is addressed to the sonorous refraction of the ambience on the basis of which a word whispered in one 36 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372. 37 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano:” 373. LUCIA CORRAIN 70 AN-ICON  corner is perfectly heard in the opposite corner.38 Ultimately, the tremulous, mobile and never total illumination produced by the flames in the fireplace, the sonority itself of the fire, the amplified voice, the insecurity that the visitor experi- ences owing to the “stones set in edge” of the flooring, are all aspects that confer a powerful dynamicity to the whole, generating what can be defined a proto-cinematographic effect or, paradoxically, a distressing trompe-l’œil that at length deceives the feelings of the viewer.39 In practice, what did this exceptional spatial and sensorial machine which acts with such terrifying effi- cacy on the viewer try to convey? Undoubtedly, the icono- graphic subject was not chosen by chance; in fact, the mythological fable is accompanied by an interpretative tradition of a moral sort: the Gigantomachia is an example of chastised pride, with Jupiter who performs an act of supremacy to restore justice. And in Mantua, in the early Cinquecento, the imperial ideology resorted to the fall of the Giants to celebrate the victories of Charles V against the infidels; Jupiter thus prefigures Charles V who, in the guise of Jupiter, leads to the demise of the Italian princ- es who rebelled against his sovereignty.40 Alongside this reading of international politics, however, another one of a purely local sort gains headway: “Jupiter would be the ambitious Federico who, amongst other things, chooses to insert in the family coat of arms precisely the feat of Mount Olympus.”41 Whoever enters the Chamber of the Giants, in short, is put in contact with the ineluctability of the sovereignty of the gods against the “bestiality” of the 38 D.A. Franchini, C. Tellini Perina, A. Zanca, R. Margonari, G. Olmi, R. Signorini, La scienza a corte: Collezionismo eclettico, natura e immagine a Mantova fra Rinascimento e Manierismo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1979): 192-194. The manuscript is cited (136, XXI, cc. 27v-29v), preserved in the University Library of Bologna in which Aldrovandi tells of his journeys to Mantua and, in particular, to the Chamber of the Giants. 39 S.A. Hickson, “More than meets the eye: Giulio Romano, Federico II Gonzaga, and the triumph of trompe-l’œil at the Palazzo Te in Mantua,” in L. A. Boldt-Irons, C. Federici, E. Virgulti, eds., Disguise, Deception, Trompe-l’oeil: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Peter Lang, 2009): 41-59. 40 For a more detailed argumentation cfr. D. Sogliani, M. Grosso, eds., L’imperatore e il duca: Carlo V a Mantova (Milan: Skira, 2023). The exhibition offers a reflection on the cultural meaning of Europe starting from the figure of Charles V and his alliances with the Italian courts, narrating the emperor’s arrival in Mantua in 1530, feted by grand celebrations that Federico II Gonzaga organised in the halls of Palazzo Te under the masterful direction of Giulio Romano. 41 R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: 19. LUCIA CORRAIN 71 AN-ICON  Giants. A clear message addressed to recalling the correct moral and political behaviour to engage in vis-à-vis those who hold power. By way of conclusion As will have become apparent by now, the Chamber of the Giants avails itself of a perceptive setting foreshadowing what, almost five centuries later, finds a re- newed materialisation in the most advanced technologies of construction of the images that see, in the progressive can- cellation of the aesthetic threshold and the disappearance of the “frontier” between the world of representation and that of reality, their final point of arrival. The ambience-im- ages that emerge are capable of generating an effect of reality so immanent that whoever perceives them has the feeling of being part of that fictitious world. And the spec- tators, wearing a visor “that blinds them with respect to the physical reality that surrounds them,”42 isolate themselves completely from the real world. But if – as Elisabetta Mode- na writes – “the immersion occurs […] mostly according to a process of environmental reduction: the format of the experiences is central, [as is] that entanglement that is cre- ated between the image world and the experiencer who, in becoming a part of it, experiences what […] happens in history.”43 The spatial-pictorial construction of the Cham- ber of the Giants, without a frame, with interruptions, must in short be considered – as noted by Andrea Pinotti – the perfect example ante litteram that “it is certainly not neces- sary to await contemporaneity to witness the advent of an immersive and enveloping space.”44 This does not prevent us from testing the new immersive technologies to try to 42 E. Modena, Nelle storie: 145. Cfr. also E. Modena “Immersi nel reale: Prospettive an- iconiche sull’arte contemporanea dall’ambiente alla realtà virtuale,” Carte Semiotiche. Rivista internazionale di semiotica e teoria dell’immagine, L. Corrain, M. Vannoni, eds., Annali 7, Figure dell’immersività (2021): 71-78. 43 Ibid.: 146. 44 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: 109. LUCIA CORRAIN 72 AN-ICON  ‘simulate’ in every part the original ambience,45 proposing, through virtual reality, what can no longer be perceived in situ today. By introducing, from the top of the chimney stack, the photons into the hearth and making use of high definition orthophotographs of the walls and the ceiling, we virtually recreate the flickering light of the flames, as well as the sensorial effect of the heat as they must have been perceived in the original Chamber of the Giants. Ultimately, if Giulio Romano was a full-fledged forerunner of immersive environments, then the new technologies can represent a further aid to fully restoring the original perception of the Chamber of the Giants, leading us back to the ingenious “invention” that the artist had made for his cultured and refined patron. With an apt reference, through the anticlas- sical taste for the outlandish and for contamination, to that Mannerism that – in the vulgate of Giorgio Vasari – must contain “an abundance of beautiful costumes, variety in imaginative details, charm in their colours, diversity in their buildings, and distance and variety in their landscapes;” in short, “a copious invention in every particular.”46 45 The bibliography on immersivity in the contemporary is vast: M. A. Moser, D. MacLeod, eds., Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996); W. Wolf, W. Bernhart, A, Mahler, eds., Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2013); R. Pinto, “La mostra come esperienza immersive: Damien Hirst – Treasures from the Wrech of the Unbelievable,” in C.G. Morandi, C. Sinigaglia, eds., L’esperienza dello spazio: Collezioni, mostre, musei, (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2020): 324-334; J. Voorhies, J. Postsensual, Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003). Cfr. also P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan: Mimesis International, 2020) and the recent J. Bodin, A. De Cesaris, eds., “Immersivity: Philosophical Perspectives on Technologically Mediated Experience,” Philosophical Coordinates in Modern and Contemporary Age 10, no. 20 (2022). 46 G. Vasari, “Preface to Part Three” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 278. LUCIA CORRAIN 73 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19938

Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber Of The GiImage ants by Lucia Corrain Immersivity Giulio Romano Painting Fiction Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber Of The Giants LUCIA CORRAIN, Università degli Studi di Bologna – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8437-969X https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19938 Abstract Art in general, more than other fields, appears to lie at the heart of immersivity. As argued by Oliver Grau, it is art that still deploys a considerable genealogy with examples that resonate with the immersivity as proposed in contemporaneity. It is the current immersivity that con- structs “constellations” which, as Benjamin put it, dynam- ically enact “the history of art [as] the history of prophesies […] which can be written only starting from the point of view of an immediate present,” where “every present is de- termined by those images that are synchronous to it: each now is the now of a given knowability.” In the art history field, however, it is almost mandatory to re-evoke a fully mannerist ambience where “painting” creates – without the aid of particular instruments – the near-total immersion, acting fully on the passional dimension. The case in point is the Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, made by Giulio Romano between 1532 and 1536 in Palazzo Te in Mantua. A stunning illusionist artifice that catapults the viewers into the heart of the ongoing event, to produce in them a sense of awe and estrangement beyond the “frame.” Keywords Image Immersivity Giulio Romano Painting Fiction To quote this essay: L. Corrain, “Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber Of The Giants,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 56-73, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19938. LUCIA CORRAIN 56 AN-ICON A piece many years in doing and now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape.1 By way of introduction Undoubtedly – in a chronological field conven- tionally defined as Mannerism – the Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber of the Giants, frescoed between 1532 and 1536 by Giulio Romano and his collaborators in Palazzo Te in Mantua, occupies a position of great importance. The high- ly original solution adopted by the Roman artist, already acknowledged in his day and age, in the light of today’s immersive technologies, can indeed manifest all its extraor- dinary innovative force.2 Virtual reality, as we know it today, is obtained by means of a digital instrument capable of generating “three-dimensional” scenes, narratives and landscapes within which subjects have the impression of actually mov- ing and interacting with the ambience surrounding them. Thanks to the evolution in computer graphics and the imple- mentation of the computational power, representations ever 1 W. Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale (1611) (New York-London-Toronto-Sydney: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1998): V.II.95-100, 219. 2 The bibliography concerning Palazzo Te is currently rather substantial, but it was Ernst Gombrich who took this whole building outside of the shadows in which it found itself. In 1933 he dedicated to it his graduation thesis at the University of Vienna, E. Gombrich, “Der Palazzo del Te,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, no. 8 (1934): 79-104; “Versuch einer Deuteung,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, no. 9 (1936): 121-150; it. trans. A.M. Conforti, Giulio Romano. Il palazzo del Te (Mantua: Tre Lune, 1984). Cfr. among the many others F. Hart, Giulio Romano (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958); K.W. Forster, R.J. Tuttle, “The Palazzo del Te,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 30, no. 4 (1971): 267-293; A. Belluzzi, W. Capezzali, II palazzo dei lucidi inganni: Palazzo Te a Mantova (Florence: Centro Studi Architettura Ouroboros, 1976); E. Verheyen, The Palazzo del Te in Mantua: Images of Love and Politics (Baltimore-London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1977); A. Belluzzi, M. Tafuri, eds., Giulio Romano (Milan: Electa, 1989, exhibition catalogue); A. Belluzzi, Palazzo Te a Mantova, 2 vols. (Modena: Cosimo Panini, 1998). About the Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of Giants specifically, cfr. R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: Palazzo Te (Milan: Skira, 2020). LUCIA CORRAIN 57 AN-ICON  closer to reality can be obtained. Nonetheless, so-called “reality media” are not yet a “perfect” mimesis of the real.3 The relationship between the current immersive devices and the more dated optical instruments of the so- called pre-cinematographic phase has already been widely brought to light: it is the case of the scene of the eighteenth century4 and the stereoscope of the subsequent century5 that share, with the more recent immersive technologies, the question of a “channelled aesthetic perception.”6 In rather similar fashion, at the pictorial level, the Quadratur- ismo and the trompe-l’œil raise questions relating to both the continuity between the space of experience and the space represented, and to the methods of construction of a gaze “from the inside” in which proximity allows for the perception of esthesis, verdictives and passion. Oliver Grau7 – the scholar who perhaps more than any other has outlined a genealogy of immersivity – has identified a possible origin even in Pompeian painting, to then look to the Renaissance and Baroque illusionist spaces, all the way down to the more recent scenarios 3 E. Modena, Nelle storie: Arte, cinema e media immersivi (Rome: Carocci, 2022); A. Pinotti, “VR, AR, MR, XR,” in Enciclopedia dell’Arte Contemporanea, vol. 4 (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana “Giovanni Treccani,” 2021): 685-686. 4 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (2001), trans. G. Custance (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003). 5 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1992). 6 P. Montani, Tecnologie della sensibilità: Estetica e immaginazione interattiva (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2014): 25. 7 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, opens his reconnaissance on the Pompeian frescoes, where the creation of a pictorial surface with the simulation of depth generates the effect of an ambience of greater extension that what it is in reality, capturing the gaze of the observer who does not seem to perceive the actual distinction between real space and the space of the image. Grau then lists the subsequent examples: the Chamber of the Deer in the Avignon Palace of the Popes (1343); the Hall of Perspectives by Baldassare Peruzzi in villa Farnesina (1516), the neoclassical “village rooms” or “sylvans.” The latter is a kind that, “while it dilates to the extreme the portrait of landscape taking it to the dimensions of the environmental room, it applies at the same time scenic criteria relevant to organising the decorations unitarily, with the illusionist effect of the plein air,” R. Roli, Pittura bolognese 1650- 1800: Dal Cignani ai Gandolfi (Bologna: Alfa Edizioni, 1977): 70 [my translation]. LUCIA CORRAIN 58 AN-ICON  (panorama).8 Grau, however, does not refer specifically to the striking example of the Chamber of the Giants, where the immersivity reaches a very high level of passional in- volvement on the part of the spectator, moreover without resorting to an auxiliary devices (as is the case today with headsets, overalls). A stunning illusionistic artifice defined by Frederick Hart as “surely the most fantastic and fright- ening creation of the entire Italian Renaissance in any medi- um”9 capable of catapulting the spectator into the heart of the event portrayed; as stated in 1934 by Ernst Gombrich: “into the deafening vortex of a frightening catastrophe,”10 capable of engendering astonishment and awe.11 Harking back to the renowned words of Wal- ter Benjamin: “the history of art is a history of prophecies” which “can only be written from the standpoint of the im- mediate, actual present,”12 where “every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability.”13 It can be stated that the case we wish to investigate here can be con- sidered in the light of a premise. In short, the machine fres- coed in the Chamber of the Giants in Palazzo Te appears to be the height of an illusion that involves the spectator in a dimension that can be defined as being fully immersive. Moreover, if we carefully observe, in the cham- ber in question of Palazzo Te, all the “instructions […] which 8 In 1792 Robert Baker, in London, made the first Panorama, which consists in a circular shaped ambience, where on the interior walls are projected images of times of distant places, offering the chance to the spectators of having a travel experience whilst being “stationary.” Cfr., besides O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, also S. Bordini, Storia del panorama: La visione totale della pittura nel XIX secolo (Rome: Nuova Cultura, 2009); M. Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini: Letteratura e cultura visuale (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2012); M. Cometa, Cultura visuale (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2021). E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 94, in 1934 had already related the Chamber of the Giants with the nineteenth century panoramas, stating: “that indeed Giulio, and he alone, was the first to try out in a work of art that which is called the hall of the Giants” [my translation]. 9 F. Hart, Giulio Romano: 32. 10 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 79. 11 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Turin: Einaudi, 2021): 107-109, in the chapter dedicated to the environment-image states that the Chamber of the Giants is a paradigmatic example, “an illusionistic machine that invites one to reflect on the viewer’s visual act as a participative response to the iconic act.” 12 W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1991), vol. 1, no. 2:1046-7. Quoted in English in B. Doherty, “Between the Artwork and its ‘Actualization’: A Footnote to Art History in Benjamin’s Work of Art,” Paragraph 32, no. 3 (2009): 331-358, 336. 13 W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1982), trans. H. Eiland, K. McLaughlin (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2003): 462-463. LUCIA CORRAIN 59 AN-ICON  [in the planar paintings] direct the gaze, guide the reading, intimidate and can, at times, seduce the viewer subjecting them to the representation,”14 have been completely dis- avowed.15 They have been totally cancelled. And, not by chance, in their place some decidedly more cogent ones have been created in an interplay of different disciplines, taking one another by the hand, offering a wholly original reading of the Chamber in question that can fully manifest the active nature of perception. An exceptional visitor Let us now try to enter the Chamber of the Giants, highlighting its most salient characteristics. And we shall do so starting from an exceptional witness, Gior- gio Vasari (Arezzo, 1511-1574), the art historian who was able to visit the Mantuan Palazzo Te on two occasions: the first time when the Chamber of the Giants was under construction; the second when the works had already been completed. His testimony can to all intents and purposes be considered an ekphrasis of great efficacy that “overlaps with the pictorial [story], and at times gives the impression of eclipsing it.”16 Here is the description Vasari gives of the space created and painted by Giulio Romano: After laying deep, double foundations in that corner, which was in a swampy spot, Giulio had built over that angle a large, round room with extremely thick walls, so that the four corners of the outside walls would be stronger and could support a double vault rounded like an oven. And having done this, since the room had corners, he built here and there all the way around it the doors, windows, and a fireplace of rusticated stones with worn-away edges, which 14 G. Careri, “Prefazione,” in L. Marin, Opacità della pittura: Sulla rappresentazione nel Quattrocento (Florence: La Casa Usher, 2012): 7-13. 15 On the role of the frame in the work of art see D. Ferrari, A. Pinotti, eds., La cornice: Storie, teorie, testi (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2018) and S. Zuliani, Spazi e tempi dell’installazione (Rome: Arshake, 2015). 16 A. Belluzzi, Giulio Romano: 446 [my translation]. On the text/image problem cfr. W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). LUCIA CORRAIN 60 AN-ICON were disjointed and crooked almost to the extent that they 17 even seemed to lean over on one side and actually to collapse. Giulio Romano – as can be inferred – gave a particular form to the environment: it is not a “round room,” as Vasari might lead us to believe, but a “a double vault rounded like an oven,” which did not have sharp corners and whose doors and windows were “disjointed and crook- ed,” which almost certainly means that the windows were closed by painted blinds and the doors were in continuity with respect to the frescoes. A singular space, which also disposed of a par- ticular flooring, as confirmed by Vasari himself: He had made the floor with polished river slingstones that ran around the walls, and those on the painting plane, which fell down- wards had counterfeited: for a part those painted inwards escaped, and at times were 18 occupied and adorned by grass and at times by larger stones. But, as can well be imagined, it was, in those days, a cobbled floor with slingstones that, albeit creating seamless continuity with the upright walls, did not represent an assurance of a steady support for the visitor.19 It is not possible, however, to be outside the space to talk about it; you need to traverse it to know it, for 17 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 370. In the first edition by types of Lorenzo Torrentino (Florence, 1550), the historiographer was even more articulate: “He therefore had double foundations of great depth sunk at that corner, which was in a marshy place, and over that angle he constructed a large round room, with very thick walls, to the end that the four external corners of the masonry might be strong enough to be able to support a double vault, round after the manner of an oven. This done, he caused to be built at the corners right round the room, in the proper places, the doors, windows, and fireplace, all of rustic stones rough-hewn as if by chance, and, as it were, disjointed and awry, insomuch that they appeared to be really hanging over to one side and falling down).” G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano pittore e architetto,” in Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani (1550) (Turin: Einaudi, 1986): 833 [my translation]. 18 Ibidem: 834 [my translation]. 19 The flooring was made anew by Paolo Pozzo in the eighteenth-century restoration of the palazzo, in which very likely the fireplace of which Vasari speaks was bricked up, and which is testified to in some drawings preserved at the Louvre, Windsor and Palazzo Te (donated in 2015 by Monroe Warshaw), cfr. R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: 27. Furthermore, in 1781, the archduke Ferdinand of Habsburg commissioned Giovanni Bottani to “have made a picket fence in the hall of the Giants […]. Also, he would promptly have the fireplace sealed and walled up,” citation reported in A. Belluzzi, Giulio Romano: 236. LUCIA CORRAIN 61 AN-ICON  it to become a true object of analysis. The analysts must become an integral part of the space, immerse themselves in it like a percipient body, like the users of the place, going through it and letting themselves be guided by the logic imposed by the context in which they find themselves. The visitors are, so to speak, literally “manipulated” by this un- usual spatial environment. The system of the spatial expression is in it- self meaningful, that here acquires an even more complete meaning with what is portrayed on the walls: the signifi- cance of the space is “the final result of a stratified and complex series of procedures, articulations and sub-artic- ulations, where an element is meaningful only if related to the others.”20 The spatial configurations prefigure, that is, the virtuality, of the possible ways of using the morphology itself of the places. In this sense, a semiotic reading can come to our aid which – as Giannitrapani writes – “consid- ers space not as a straightforward container of subjects, objects, events, but as a meaningful structure capable of speaking of a multiplicity of aspects of life.”21 This means that: “The significance of the space lies in the efficacious action that it provokes on the subjects coming into contact with it.” And in order for space to completely “influence the body it must work on the ambience, it must give a shape to the architecture of the space.”22 The Fall of the Giants There is no doubt that the space of the Cham- bers of the Giants, already in itself significant, finds fulfil- ment with what it portrayed on the ceiling and on the walls. Although this interest of this analysis is focused on the immersive dimension, it is necessary to briefly go over the 20 G. Marrone, “Efficacia simbolica dello spazio: Azioni e passioni,” in P. Bertetti, G. Manetti, eds., Forme della testualità: Teoria, modelli, storia e prospettive (Turin: Testo&immagine, 2001): 85-96. 21 A. Giannitrapani, Introduzione alla semiotica dello spazio (Rome: Carrocci, 2013): 45. 22 On the space cfr. also M. Hammad, Lire l’espace, comprendre l’architecture (Limoges: Presses Universitaires, 2001), trans. G. Festi (Rome: Meltemi, 2003). LUCIA CORRAIN 62 AN-ICON  iconography of the whole figurative apparatus because ̶ as we shall see – it is closely related to Federico II Gonzaga, the patron, and Charles V over whose empire the sun never set. The whole room, as is well-known, portrays the fall of the Giants drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.23 The myth tells of the giants’ attempted attack on the gods: with the intent to reach Mount Olympus, the vicious inhabitants of the earth superimpose one another on two mountains, that of Pelion and that of Ossa. Portrayed on the ceiling (Fig. 1) is the gods’ ire against the giants’ attempt to scale the mountains, with Jupiter who abandons his throne to place himself along- side Juno, who, with her gaze and index finger, points to the direction towards which to cast the thunderbolts. The plot hatched by the giants fails, of course, and Jupiter’s intervention makes the mountains collapse; by tumbling precipitously, they overwhelm the giants burying them be- neath the heavy boulders. A daring view from the bottom upwards, always on the ceiling, portrays a circular temple with twelve columns from whose balustrade some char- acters, concerned and awestruck by what is happening beneath them, look out; in the same way the numerous other divinities display impassioned states of agitation. The throne, left vacant by Jupiter, is occupied by the imperial eagle with its wings outspread, while the menacing clouds surround the whole empyrean in a role of transition from the world of the gods to the terrestrial terrain of the com- mon mortals. On the walls, above the fireplace, the giant Ty- phon (monstruous son of Gaia – Fig. 2) is depicted: for having tried to depose Jupiter, he is struck by lightning and sinks under Etna, and here, crushed by the boulders, in an attempt to defend himself he spews fire and lapilli causing an earthquake.24 The fireplace, in turn, was supposed to suggest the illusion of the youth condemned by the flames: the flames that issue from the mouth of the giant Typhon, 23 Ovid, Metamorphoses I vv. 151-154 (I A.D), trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 5. 24 Ovid, Metamorphoses V: 109. LUCIA CORRAIN 63 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, ceiling, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. in the pictorial fiction, thus ended up “conversing” with the real fire of the fireplace. Examining more closely the remaining frescoed parts, Vasari took note of further details: the entire world is upside-down and almost at its final end [...] many giants can be seen in flight, all struck down by Jove’s thunderbolts and on the verge of being overwhelmed by the landslides from the mountains just like the others. In another part, Giulio represented other giants upon whom are crashing down temples, columns, and other parts of buildings, creating 25 among these arrogant creatures great havoc and loss of life. And, in actual fact, three walls propose land- scapes (Figg. 3-4) and another one proposes an architec- ture – a serliana – that too about to collapse under the fire of the lightning bolts of the gods (Fig. 5). 25 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372. LUCIA CORRAIN 64 AN-ICON  Fig. 2. G. Romano, Fig. 3. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, wall est, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. wall sud, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. Fig. 4. G. Romano, Fig. 5. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, wall ovest, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. wall nord, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. LUCIA CORRAIN 65 AN-ICON  At this point it is worthwhile turning our atten- tion to the time when the action portrayed takes place. The time in itself is not representable, it is represented by means of movement and transformation: it is a function of the movement and the last is a function of space. Any ac- tion, which is never a perpetual motion, contains phases: a beginning, a climax and an end. In the course of each one of those, every action leads to the memory of what had come before and what will come afterwards. In short, the climax is the moment of utmost tension. In the Chamber of the Giants it corresponds to the phase when everything collapses: the technique is that of breaking down natural and architectural elements into parts that gradually lose their natural order to follow one that has gone completely haywire. If it is true that the rendering of the fatal moment is accentuated in mannerism, it can be said that here it has touched some very elevated heights. The particularity of the fatal instant had been highlighted, once again, by Vasari (Fig. 6): Fig. 6. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber of the Giants, detail of the Giant, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. LUCIA CORRAIN 66 AN-ICON Giulio [...] made plans to build a corner-room [...] in which the walls would correspond with the paintings, in order 26 to deceive the people who would see it as much as he could. a marvellous work where the entire painting has neither beginning nor end, and that it is all tied together 27 and runs on continuously without boundary or dec- oration. This is a room completely without frames,28 of any delimitation, with an enveloping continuity, in which the space – as Gombrich points out – runs homogeneous to the floor as far as the apex of the roof with not edges and no frame to interrupt the seamlessness of the surfaces, it is completely transformed into a pictorial scene: it is29 part of a single action, animated by the same emotional impetus. But, Vasari adds, it is a horrible scene: Therefore, let no one ever imagine seeing a work from the brush that is more horrible or frightening or more realistic than this one. And anyone who enters that room and sees the windows, doors, and other such details all distorted and almost on the verge of crashing down, as well as the mountains and buildings collapsing, can only fear that everything is toppling down upon him. Especially when he sees 30 all the gods in that heaven running this way and that in flight. In short, a stunning illusionistic artifice that seeks to catapult the viewer into the throbbing heart of the event in progress, where “the boundaries of space 26 Ibid.: 370. 27 Ibid.: 373. 28 Cfr. P. Carabell, “Breaking the Frame: Transgression and Transformation in Giulio Romano’s Sala dei Giganti,” Artibus et Historiae 18, no. 36 (1997): 87-100. 29 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 81. 30 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372-373. LUCIA CORRAIN 67 AN-ICON  disappear [...] and the laws of statics, in which the eye can find tranquillizing points of reference, are completely lacking.”31 Inside the environment: “the walls themselves move and, soon, everything is disarranged and collapses upon the viewer” who, in this way, shares “the same fate that submits and destroys the very powerful giants that tried in vain to sustain the walls.”32 (Figg. 7-8) Fig. 7. G. Romano, Camera dei Giganti/ Chamber of the Giants, detail of the Giant, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te. Fig. 8. G. Romano, copy of, Disegno della parete con il camino, Paris, Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques, inv. 3636, recto 31 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 79. 32 Ibid. LUCIA CORRAIN 68 AN-ICON  Being at the end of the world At this point – and to delve once more into the immersivity that generates the environment – it comes nat- ural to wonder why the patron, duke Federico II Gonzaga, decided to make such a particular and unique ambience in what is considered to be his villa of pleasures. What role would the Chamber of the Giants play in that precise his- torical moment?33 We should not try to imagine the visitor guided by the Lord of Mantua in the palazzo: Federico II leads his guest in a space whose boundaries are well de- fined, through ambiences of different sizes, decorated with specific iconographic themes, in a crescendo that takes him gradually as far as the Chamber of the Giants. An ini- tiatory pathway through which the duke proposes to his guest a sort of progressive estrangement with respect to the real world and that reaches its climax in the immense “catastrophe” of the dark cave, with the doors and win- dows shut and only the flickering light coming from the lit fireplace. A status of anguish and terror, apparently with no exit, in which the guest “with the highest mastery is de- prived of every chance to take a distance, to evaluate the actual spaces.”34 In this regard, Ernst Gombrich’s personal experience seems truly exemplary: The kind of oppression that we have experienced is absolutely new and the sentiment from which it is born and which Giulio has been able to give shape to, is that of anguish. [...] There, we have experienced directly and in an absolutely new way the anguished nightmare of our involvement in an ineluctable catastrophe.35 33 The Duke of Mantua invested colossal amounts and a special interest in the project for Palazzo Te: a work that had no residential function, which was not a fortress and in which even a room, that of the Giants, was in no way inhabitable. 34 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 81 [my traslation]. 35 Ibid.: 111 [my translation]. LUCIA CORRAIN 69 AN-ICON  Who is behind the enormous cave remains, therefore, captured by the representation, perceiving step by step that everything is being twisted, being destroyed: in the room lit up only by the fire burning in the fireplace, the visitor “experiences” the end of the world just as it is taking place, he experiences the torment – as Vasari writes – “that everything [...] is toppling down upon him.”36 It is important to understand what happens to the viewer’s body and how the space substantiated in the representation is capable of triggering sensorial percep- tions. As seems obvious, one’s eyesight is the first sense brought into play, and not only because the visitor’s eye is engaged by the enormous eyes of the Giants, but rather by the particular luminosity of the environment: indeed, one’s eyes must adapt to the light conditions produced by the fire in the fireplace; entering the ambience from conditions of full light, the adaptation to the poor light comes about slowly, one’s pupils must dilate as much as possible to be able to embrace the vision. The fireplace fire, moreover, is also responsible for the arousal of other senses: the sense of smell, because the burning wood diffuses its smell in all of the room; the sense of hearing, owing to the crackling and the rustling of the burning wood; the sense of touch, in that the fire warms up the ambience and consequent- ly the visitor. Even the flooring can fall within the tactile sensoriality – in “small, round stones,” but “set in with a knife” –37 which make the visitor’s movements unstable, reinforcing the precipice effect that is the central theme of the ambience. Amongst those who in the course of time have had the chance to live a sensorial experience inside the Chamber of the Giants we can also name a scientist like Ulisse Aldrovandi (Bologna, 1522-1605): his interest, in particular, is addressed to the sonorous refraction of the ambience on the basis of which a word whispered in one 36 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372. 37 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano:” 373. LUCIA CORRAIN 70 AN-ICON  corner is perfectly heard in the opposite corner.38 Ultimately, the tremulous, mobile and never total illumination produced by the flames in the fireplace, the sonority itself of the fire, the amplified voice, the insecurity that the visitor experi- ences owing to the “stones set in edge” of the flooring, are all aspects that confer a powerful dynamicity to the whole, generating what can be defined a proto-cinematographic effect or, paradoxically, a distressing trompe-l’œil that at length deceives the feelings of the viewer.39 In practice, what did this exceptional spatial and sensorial machine which acts with such terrifying effi- cacy on the viewer try to convey? Undoubtedly, the icono- graphic subject was not chosen by chance; in fact, the mythological fable is accompanied by an interpretative tradition of a moral sort: the Gigantomachia is an example of chastised pride, with Jupiter who performs an act of supremacy to restore justice. And in Mantua, in the early Cinquecento, the imperial ideology resorted to the fall of the Giants to celebrate the victories of Charles V against the infidels; Jupiter thus prefigures Charles V who, in the guise of Jupiter, leads to the demise of the Italian princ- es who rebelled against his sovereignty.40 Alongside this reading of international politics, however, another one of a purely local sort gains headway: “Jupiter would be the ambitious Federico who, amongst other things, chooses to insert in the family coat of arms precisely the feat of Mount Olympus.”41 Whoever enters the Chamber of the Giants, in short, is put in contact with the ineluctability of the sovereignty of the gods against the “bestiality” of the 38 D.A. Franchini, C. Tellini Perina, A. Zanca, R. Margonari, G. Olmi, R. Signorini, La scienza a corte: Collezionismo eclettico, natura e immagine a Mantova fra Rinascimento e Manierismo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1979): 192-194. The manuscript is cited (136, XXI, cc. 27v-29v), preserved in the University Library of Bologna in which Aldrovandi tells of his journeys to Mantua and, in particular, to the Chamber of the Giants. 39 S.A. Hickson, “More than meets the eye: Giulio Romano, Federico II Gonzaga, and the triumph of trompe-l’œil at the Palazzo Te in Mantua,” in L. A. Boldt-Irons, C. Federici, E. Virgulti, eds., Disguise, Deception, Trompe-l’oeil: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Peter Lang, 2009): 41-59. 40 For a more detailed argumentation cfr. D. Sogliani, M. Grosso, eds., L’imperatore e il duca: Carlo V a Mantova (Milan: Skira, 2023). The exhibition offers a reflection on the cultural meaning of Europe starting from the figure of Charles V and his alliances with the Italian courts, narrating the emperor’s arrival in Mantua in 1530, feted by grand celebrations that Federico II Gonzaga organised in the halls of Palazzo Te under the masterful direction of Giulio Romano. 41 R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: 19. LUCIA CORRAIN 71 AN-ICON  Giants. A clear message addressed to recalling the correct moral and political behaviour to engage in vis-à-vis those who hold power. By way of conclusion As will have become apparent by now, the Chamber of the Giants avails itself of a perceptive setting foreshadowing what, almost five centuries later, finds a re- newed materialisation in the most advanced technologies of construction of the images that see, in the progressive can- cellation of the aesthetic threshold and the disappearance of the “frontier” between the world of representation and that of reality, their final point of arrival. The ambience-im- ages that emerge are capable of generating an effect of reality so immanent that whoever perceives them has the feeling of being part of that fictitious world. And the spec- tators, wearing a visor “that blinds them with respect to the physical reality that surrounds them,”42 isolate themselves completely from the real world. But if – as Elisabetta Mode- na writes – “the immersion occurs […] mostly according to a process of environmental reduction: the format of the experiences is central, [as is] that entanglement that is cre- ated between the image world and the experiencer who, in becoming a part of it, experiences what […] happens in history.”43 The spatial-pictorial construction of the Cham- ber of the Giants, without a frame, with interruptions, must in short be considered – as noted by Andrea Pinotti – the perfect example ante litteram that “it is certainly not neces- sary to await contemporaneity to witness the advent of an immersive and enveloping space.”44 This does not prevent us from testing the new immersive technologies to try to 42 E. Modena, Nelle storie: 145. Cfr. also E. Modena “Immersi nel reale: Prospettive an- iconiche sull’arte contemporanea dall’ambiente alla realtà virtuale,” Carte Semiotiche. Rivista internazionale di semiotica e teoria dell’immagine, L. Corrain, M. Vannoni, eds., Annali 7, Figure dell’immersività (2021): 71-78. 43 Ibid.: 146. 44 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: 109. LUCIA CORRAIN 72 AN-ICON  ‘simulate’ in every part the original ambience,45 proposing, through virtual reality, what can no longer be perceived in situ today. By introducing, from the top of the chimney stack, the photons into the hearth and making use of high definition orthophotographs of the walls and the ceiling, we virtually recreate the flickering light of the flames, as well as the sensorial effect of the heat as they must have been perceived in the original Chamber of the Giants. Ultimately, if Giulio Romano was a full-fledged forerunner of immersive environments, then the new technologies can represent a further aid to fully restoring the original perception of the Chamber of the Giants, leading us back to the ingenious “invention” that the artist had made for his cultured and refined patron. With an apt reference, through the anticlas- sical taste for the outlandish and for contamination, to that Mannerism that – in the vulgate of Giorgio Vasari – must contain “an abundance of beautiful costumes, variety in imaginative details, charm in their colours, diversity in their buildings, and distance and variety in their landscapes;” in short, “a copious invention in every particular.”46 45 The bibliography on immersivity in the contemporary is vast: M. A. Moser, D. MacLeod, eds., Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996); W. Wolf, W. Bernhart, A, Mahler, eds., Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2013); R. Pinto, “La mostra come esperienza immersive: Damien Hirst – Treasures from the Wrech of the Unbelievable,” in C.G. Morandi, C. Sinigaglia, eds., L’esperienza dello spazio: Collezioni, mostre, musei, (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2020): 324-334; J. Voorhies, J. Postsensual, Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003). Cfr. also P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan: Mimesis International, 2020) and the recent J. Bodin, A. De Cesaris, eds., “Immersivity: Philosophical Perspectives on Technologically Mediated Experience,” Philosophical Coordinates in Modern and Contemporary Age 10, no. 20 (2022). 46 G. Vasari, “Preface to Part Three” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 278. LUCIA CORRAIN 73 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19910

Allegories of ImmersiAllegory on by Filippo Fimiani Ekphrastic fear Media imaginary Materiality Elemental media Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Allegories of Immersion FILIPPO FIMIANI, Università degli Studi di Salerno – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9689-5480 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19910 Abstract Fish Night, an episode of LOVE DEATH + RO- BOTS (S01E12, 2019) based on a 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, can be interpreted as an allegory of the im- possibility of immersive experience: if real, it is deadly, be- cause the images are no longer such or ghosts but living beings present in a shared environmental habitat, acting with but also against the subject, in turn no longer a spec- tator. Comparing the story and film, and ancient ekphrastic literature, I discuss, in a trans-medial imaginary genealog- ical perspective, the symptoms of this cultural topos and of the regressive desire for immersion and for transparent immediacy that shapes and drives it, dwelling in particular on the ambivalent phenomenological and ontological re- lations between living bodies, pictures and media as deep time-bending. Keywords Allegory Ekphrastic fear Media imaginary Materiality Elemental media To quote this essay: F. Fimiani, “Allegories of Immersion,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 74-87, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19910. FILIPPO FIMIANI 74 AN-ICON  A premise Fish Night is the twelfth episode of the first season of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS, an animated Netflix series created by Tim Miller and David Fincher and broad- cast on 15 March 2019.1 Directed by Damian Nenow, with Gabriele Pennacchioli as supervising director and Rafał Wojtunik as art director, it was produced by Platine Image studio,2 based on 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, in an adaptation by Philip Gelat and Miller. I see Fish Night as an allegory of the impossi- bility of virtual immersion. Obviously, it regards coexistence and interaction in a shared environment by a subject in motion, one no longer merely observing moving images at a remove, and images which are no longer concrete pictures or simulacrums but, to full effect, real living and acting beings. Why would such an experience be impos- sible? In answering, I will focus on elements drawn from both the literary account and the animated film, seen as trans-medial symptoms of underlying issues which regard the nature of bodies, images, technology, of the medium, and their various interrelations with respect to the fictional immersion and virtual immersivity. I shall cross-analyse the animated short film and its narrative hypotext with another classic literary text which describes what, in many respects, is a complementary immersion. This approach allows me to simultaneously ad- dress: 1) the “quest for immersion” uncovered by Huhta- mo’s media archaeology as a constant motif in the reprise and recurrence of narratives and patterns both in media history and, from my point of view, in the trans-medial story of Fish Night, which is about ghosts, repetitions and reap- pearances that ultimately affect the media themselves (the spectator’s body, the images, the car, the landscape, as we 1 https://lovedeathandrobots.tilda.ws/index, accessed September 1, 2023. 2 https://platige.com/project/feature/fish-night/, accessed September 1, 2023. FILIPPO FIMIANI 75 AN-ICON  will soon discover);3 2) the “[cultural] desire for transparent immediacy” through visual representation found in the ge- nealogy of Bolter and Grusin;4 3) “the moment of resistance or counterdesire that occurs when we sense that the differ- ence between the verbal and visual representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually,” diagnosed by W.J.T. Mitchell as alert for the literary description showing through words and rhetorical tropes a strongly vivid impression of a visual stimulus, object or scene, in summa as “ekphrasis fear;”5 4) Paul de Man’s allegory6 of “potential confusion between figural and referential statement,” between the image and the real. Of course, the four points just evoked should not to be confused. Quite the contrary, aware of their dif- ferences in approach, object and aim, I use them as ac- cess points to the question of immersivity as tropism and symptom of a desire and anxiety manifested and treated differently in the literary texts and their media adaptations that I am about to discuss. In the textual and audio-visual issues I have chosen, or, as Foucault might say,7 in the “myriad events through which – thanks to which, against which –” “the unique aspect” of the cultural idea and topos of the experience of immersion-immersivity has arisen, I 3 E. Huhtamo, “Encapsulated Bodies in Motion: Simulators and the Quest for Total Immersion,” in S. Penny, ed., Critical Issues in Electronic Media (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995): 160-161, and “Dismantling the Fairy Engine. Media Archaeology as Topos Study,” in E. Huhtamo, J. Parikka, eds., Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011): 27-47. 4 J.D. Bolter, R. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1998): 23ff. 5 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Id., Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 154. See R.P., Fletcher, “Digital Ekphrasis and the Uncanny: Toward a Poetics of Augmented Reality,” Electropoetics 3, no. 15 (2017) http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/eng_facpub/56 6 P. de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1979): 113. 7 M. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D.F. Bouchard (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1977): 147. FILIPPO FIMIANI 76 AN-ICON  shall detect the symptom of its impossibility and sketch its singular trans-medial archaeology8 and imaginary. The topos points to a yearning for fictional im- mersion, a performative moment in which saying something brings it into being, making it real in every sense, and fully adherent to the referent, with language and synesthetic perception becoming one. Introduced by a terrified alarm, a seductive invitation or the command of “look!,” the very essential wish is to make subject, image and thing coin- cide. The intensive alteration of the corporeal identity and peripersonal space that results involves not only the char- acter described, narrated and represented in the act of a self-denying vision that resists classification as merely an ocular, remote beholding, but also the reader and specta- tor drawn into an embodied simulation of the occurrences and fantasies found in the images, both verbal and visual. Fish Night, a never-ending trans-medial story I shall intertwine a summary and a commentary of Lansdale’s short story with that of the episode of LD+R. In this way, I will point out some differences and sources of their imaginaries, and make some interlinear remarks on both the literary text and the television adaptation, in order to highlight the main theme of this defined trans-medial corpus: the impossibility of immersion-immersiveness. Two salesmen, one young, the other older, get stuck in the desert when their car breaks down. The hours pass and night falls. At first, the older man bemoans how door-to-door sales are a thing of the past. Then he remem- bers that twenty years earlier he was in this same deso- late landscape, travelling an asphalted road amidst power stanchions and the Rocky Mountains, between Arizona and New Mexico. “There are memories of mine out here,” 8 T. Elsaesser, “Media Archaeology as Symptom,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 2, no. 14 (2016): 181-215. FILIPPO FIMIANI 77 AN-ICON  he says, “and they’re visiting me again.”9 In the short story, this is an unmistakable evocation of Death of a Salesman, the Arthur Miller play directed by Elia Kazan, winner of the 1949 Pulitzer Prize and adapted on numerous occasions for film and TV, in which past and present collapse into the remembrance of the lead character, Willy Lowman, the disillusioned, exhausted door-to-door salesman who, at over sixty, struggles with a trauma not just personal, but historical and collective.10 In Fish Night, the instant replay of involuntary subjective memory gives way to a re-enact- ment both psychic and geological, a Nachleben, a survival and an afterlife of a story that is more than just human. The desert through which the highway passes will once again be a “petrified primal landscape,” allegorically manifesting itself as a “Hippocratic face of history.”11 Lansdale describes the landscape as an im- mersive – and devouring – space: It’s fish night, boy. Tonight’s the full moon and this is the right part of the desert if memory serves me, and the feel is right — I mean, doesn’t the night feel like it’s made up of some fabric, that it’s dif- ferent from other nights, that it’s like being inside a big dark bag, the sides sprinkled with glitter, a spotlight at the top, at the open mouth, to serve as a moon? The function of the mouth metaphor in the Lansdale’s writing is complex, but here it foreshadows the finale’s explicit immersive embodiment: does one enter an immersive space or get swallowed up by it? Space, we can say with Bataille, “can become one fish that swallows another.”12 Is immersion-immersivity an experience of “by” 9 J.R. Lansdale, Fish Night (1982), in G. Brown, A.J. Spedding, eds., Love Death + Robots: The Official Anthology: Volume One (Bendigo: Cohesion Press, 2021): 193-200. Pages not numbered; all citations in the text. 10 J. Schlueter, “Re-membering Willy’s Past: Introducing Postmodern Concerns through Death of a Salesman,” in M. Roudané, ed., Approaches to Teaching Miller’s Death of a Salesman (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1995): 142-154. 11 W. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedmann and H. Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Mein: Suhrkamp, 1991), vol. 1: 343, trans. H. Eiland (Cambridge MA-London: Harvard University Press, 2019): 174. 12 G. Bataille, “Espace” (1930), Documents, no. 1, anastatic reprint, ed. D. Hollier (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1991): 41. FILIPPO FIMIANI 78 AN-ICON  or “in”? Is it penetration or impregnation? Transparency or opacity? Immateriality or the materiality of the environ- mental medium? In Lansdale’s short story, evoking the past, the older man brings up Native Americans, the Navajos and the Hopi, and Manitou, the Great Living Spirit “still around” in everything and every being. He read in a science book – he goes on – that the desert was once a sea filled with fish and “fantastical creatures,” maybe even man’s birthplace. “The world’s an old place, and for longtime is nothing but sea,” he concludes pensively. And – dwelling on the thought – those beings may haunt this place the way human ghosts haunt their former homes. With these musings, the younger and the older man fall asleep in the Plymouth station wagon. Whether dreamed or real, lights from outside the car cause the older man’s eyes to open. Facing him, close to the car window, is an enormous eye. Octopuses, giant jellyfish, molluscs and fish from way back in evolution – Coelacanths, Nau- tilus, Limulus, marine fauna in existence prior to the great Cambrian extinction, appear in the surrounding environ- ment, where the men, now outside the car, can magically breath. Strange beings, “like nothing [they have] ever seen pictures of or imagined,” are present but almost incorpo- real, “ghosts of older world,” disincarnate eidola that pass through the men’s bodies, though they still feel and sense them. But “what” does a man’s body feel when another body passes through it? Symptomatic of the ambivalence and ambiguity of the immersion-immersivity topos, and its impossibility, Philip Gelat leaves this phrase out of the adaptation of Lansdale’s short story for LD+R: “Feel it, boy? Feel the presence of the sea? Doesn’t it feel like the beating of your own mother’s heart while you float inside the womb?” FILIPPO FIMIANI 79 AN-ICON And the younger man had to admit that he felt it, that inner rolling rhythm that is the tide of life and the pulsating heart of the sea. Thus the “oceanic sentiment,” the “thalassic regression” debated by psychoanalysis,13 also character- istic of the “crisis of presence” in magical experiences dis- cussed by anthropology,14 are pathic and phenomenological equivalents of the sea’s “presence” as a primary medium, a pre-individual fusion and condition for the possibility of life. In this elemental medium, the bodies of the marine beings are, first and foremost, traversable and diaphanous, immaterial media-mediators permitting an equally immate- rial engagement. They are “spectral,” like “soap bubbles,” “smoke,” “flashes of light,” flitting and skirting, writes Lans- dale. There is no mistaking the kinship with intermedial ex- empla of the metaphorical repertoire of philosophies, both ancient and modern, of visual perception, Renaissance and eighteenth-century treatises on painting, plus contempo- rary theories of optical devices and electric media. In the LD+R episode, the ecstatic young man shouts, “I wanna swim!,” as if he were a man-fish of folk legend brought to life.15 Deaf to the alarmed pleas of the older man, he joins the school of fish, swimming amongst them in slow-motion,16 becoming like them. Stripped of his individuality, he is transfigured, weightlessly transported upward, only to have his ascension end in death. All the other creatures flee in fright at the approach of an enormous red megalodon, which, circling the car, devours the slower, defenceless swimmer, meaning the human transformed into 13 On this essential topic of the symbolic return to the sea, I can only point to Ferenczi, Freud, Alexander and Kerény, or Sloterdijk, plus the Mutterleibversenkung of Ėjzenštejn or slow-motion, in the case of Epstein. See W.B. Parsons, The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 14 E. de Martino, Il mondo magico: Prolegomeni a una storia del magismo (1945) (Turin: Boringhieri, 1973): 144-145, and Magic: A Theory from the South (1959), trans. D.L. Zinn (Chicago: Hau Books, 2015): 85-96. 15 B. Croce, Storie e leggende napoletane (1919) (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1967): 306-313. See G.B. Bronzini, “Cola Pesce il tuffatore: dalla leggenda moderna al mito antico,” Lares 66, no. 3 (2000): 341-376. 16 Under the slow-motion effect, our bodies look like “smooth muscles moving through a dense medium in which thick currents always carry and shape this clear descendent of old marine fauna and maternal waters.” J. Epstein, The Intelligence of a Machine (1946), trans. C. Wall-Romana (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014): 29. FILIPPO FIMIANI 80 AN-ICON  a marine being. The Otus megalodon, which first lived at the start of the Miocene period, succumbing to extinction roughly 2.5 million years ago, has returned to the desert between Arizona and New Mexico, only to slowly disappear from view, leaving behind plumes of blood set against the enormous, white, imperturbable moon. Left by himself, the older man is stunned by what he has just seen. From New Mexico to Greece, and back In Fish Night, the impossibility of immersive ex- perience, i.e. of the elimination of all substantial differences between the gaze, the images and the environment, is tied to the fact that, were it to become real, death would result. Given the trans-medial imaginary genealogical perspective indicated in the Premise, I read the lethal outcome of the way up of the main character of Fish Night as comple- mentary to the dark plunge down described in a masterful scene from the Eikones, the influential classic of ekphrastic literature and ancient rhetoric attributed to Philostratus the Elder. Reactivating the Ancient Greek, I would then speak of anabasis (from ana-, “up,” and baínō, “to go”), of a fatal immersive ascent, for Fish Night, and of catabasis (from kata-, “down,” and baínō, “to go”), of a descent down in the underworld, for the Eikones. Actually, the very protagonist of the episode from the Eikones is the penetrating gaze of a lookout scan- ning the sea, who, perched atop a pole on the shore, can spot tuna in the sea and call out them to fishermen. This fictional vision is enhanced by the pole, depicted as a sub- lime lignum in Negri’s sixteenth-century Latin translation, which acts as a technical mean and as rudimental pros- thetic medium, allowing for a more powerful and detailed gaze. Still, the outcome is ultimately catastrophic: for as the lookout’s gaze gradually immerses itself in the mael- strom of moving forms and flashing colours, it becomes less penetrating, feebler, until the fish, barely discernible as shadows, swallow it up, as in the journey of Ulysses to Hades painted by Polignoto and described by Pausania. FILIPPO FIMIANI 81 AN-ICON  In Fish Night as well, the immersive moment in which the verbal, the visual and the real all become performatively one, heralded by the ecstatic, ostentatious exhortation to look,17 winds up being the exact opposite: blindness and terror. And so it becomes an allegory of its own impossibility. As Philostratus writes: Now look at the painting and you will see just this going on. The look-out gazes at the sea and turns his eyes in one direction and another to get the number; and in the bright gleam of the sea the colours of the fish vary, those near the surface seem to be black, those just below are not so black, those lower still begin to elude the sense of sight, then they seem shadowy, and finally they look just like the water; for as the vision penetrates deeper and deeper its power of discerning objects in the water is blunted. 18 In the story Fish Night, and even more so in the animated film, what occurs is not simply a metaphorical inversion of the yearning, for immersion and transparency. The change that takes place is literally ontological, rather than phenomenological: the inexorable law of the impene- trability of bodies in space has been restored, having earlier been suspended by the diaphanously spectral, almost im- material state of the environmental medium. This elementa- ry law of physics once again holds, even in the immersive environment, where the body of the human being has lost some of its species-specific characteristics – gravity, use of the respiratory apparatus and motor skills – while that of the image, finally possessed of a physical consistency of its own, has also gained new properties, enabling it to take actions that truly affect the other entities sharing the surrounding environment. 17 N. Bryson, “Philostratus and the Imaginary Museum,” in S. Goldhill, R. Osborne, eds., Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture (Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 266-267. 18 Philostratus the Younger, Imagines. Callistratus, Descriptions, trans. A. Fairbanks (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1936): 57 (I.12); Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. W.H.S. Jones, H.A. Ormerod (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1918): 185 (10.28.1). FILIPPO FIMIANI 82 AN-ICON  Which medium? But in the final analysis, what does Fish Night tell us about the material nature of the immersive medium and its uniqueness compared to other media and technical devices? In Lansdale’s short story, the protagonist of the deadly immersive experience is the older man, not the younger one, as in the LD+R episode. Lansdale has in mind the imagery of Death of a Salesman and Willy Lowman’s irretrievable historical crisis. Charley, Willy’s well-off neigh- bour, observes that: “A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”19 Thus the American Dream is a territorialised rendering of the countryside by the moving automobile, a “hot,” prosthetic medium which is culturally, socially and aesthetically expansive, as Marshall McLuhan was to point out soon after, in short an “excrescence of a kinetic ego” and an agent of the “motorized narcissism.”20 The automobile stands as the technological condition that makes possible the conquest of the last frontier, as the material and historical a-priori of the aesthetic experience of the wilderness, be it rebellious or liberating, ostentatious or touristic, with the complementary evolution of the car being its domestication to transport and distribute tangible and intangible goods. At the turn of the 60’s-70’s,21 road movies were both reflections and wellsprings of the cultural and mythopoetic topos of the automobile as a means to attaining individual freedom or reification, or to crafting the iconography of the American sublime. Indeed, the choice of a Plymouth Fury for the LD+R episode may not have 19 A. Miller, Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem (1949) (London: Penguin, 1998): 111. 20 M. McLuhan, Motorcar: The Mechanical Bride (1951), in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) (Cambridge MA-London: MIT Press, 1994): 217-222. See P. Sloterdjik, “Die Herrschaft der Kentauren. Philosophische Bemerkungen zur Automobilität” (1992), trans. K. Ritson, Transfers 1, vol. 1 (2011): 14-24; P. Weibel, “Medien der Mobilität,” in P. Weibel, ed., CAR CULTURE: Medien der Mobilität (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2011): 345-400. 21 S. Cohan, I.R. Hark, eds., The Road Movie Book (London-New York: Routledge, 1997); A. Cross, “Driving the American Landscape,” in P. Wollen, J. Kerr, eds., Autopia: Cars and Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2002): 249-258; D. Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); D. Orgeron, Road Movies: From Muybridge and Méliès to Lynch and Kiarostami (New York: Palgrave, 2008). FILIPPO FIMIANI 83 AN-ICON  been random, given that the model was produced between 1968 and 1972, or precisely the years of the psychedelic and hippy culture, as well as the first signs of its impending crisis. Anyway, the automobile is the technological embodiment of the desire of immersion, a new medium for an old movement and a very ancient desire, as shown to us by the sinking gaze in the sea described by Philostra- tus. A 1939 advertisement placed in National Geographic introduced General Motors’ new Oldsmobile model with this slogan: “See America from an ‘OBSERVATION BODY!’” The brief promotional text promised a “VISION as wide as all outdoors is yours…,” but at the same time a “rhythmic ride” of a “rolling uterus”22 corresponding to the rhythm of the all-enveloping medium of the sea in which the body of the character from Fish Night loses himself in symbiotic fashion. Immersion means, at one and the same time, travelling “in” the landscape, being “part of” the environment, and re- turning “to” the maternal space. As was recently noted by Ruggero Eugeni,23 the automobile is a medium-prosthesis which implements a protected, horizontal immersion scaled to human height, so to speak, and the line of the horizon, for drivers traversing urban and exurban landscapes in a personal travelling cave: a feeling of immersion intensified by the setting up of specific sensorial and perceptive pro- cesses (both hetero- and proprioceptive). From this perspective, the regressive desire of immersivity of Lansdale’s account stands in contrast to the prosthetic mode of technological immersivity which, according to McLuhan, is embodied by the automobile, and to the mythical example of fictional immersion made possible by the tuna lookout’s perch described by Phi- lostratus. In Fish Night, the two characters leave the car, technology’s outpost for providing the senses with pros- thesis and prophylaxis, and for supplying techniques of the 22 P. Sloterdjik, “Rollender Uterus” (1995), in Selected Exaggerations: Conversations and Interviews, 1993-2012, trans. K. Margolis (Cambridge: Polity Book, 2016): 24. 23 R. Eugeni, “La sposa algoritmica: L’automobile come medium e la navigazione del quotidiano,” in F. Cavaletti, F. Fimiani, B. Grespi, A.C. Sabatino, eds., Immersioni quotidiane: Vita ordinaria, cultura visuale e nuovi media (Milan: Meltemi, 2023): 271-282. FILIPPO FIMIANI 84 AN-ICON  sensitivity for the body and the gaze. Actually, they leave the scopic regimen of spectatorship, and the technolog- ical anti-environment created by the window’s protective shield, coming into synesthetic contact with the natural environment’s forms of life. Another element in Lansdale’s short story il- lustrates, as a symptom, this detachment from technolo- gy. Possibly as a paraphrase of one of McLuhan’s topoi,24 Lansdale likens the car to the older man’s false teeth. Both are “trappings of civilization” which weigh down, serving as technological prostheses that are mobile and tied to mobility. They are metaphors: means of transport between inside and outside, as well as tools for aggression and conquering space and time. “This isn’t my world. I’m of that world. I want to float free in the belly of the sea, away from can openers and cars and -” [...] “I want to leave here! [...] The teeth! [...] It’s the teeth. Dentist, science, foo!” He punched a hand into his mouth, plucked the teeth free, tossed them over his shoulder. Even as the teeth fell the old man rose. He began to stroke. To swim up and up and up, moving like a pale pink seal among the fish. In the light of the moon the young man could see the pooched jaws of the old man, holding the last of the future’s air. Up went the old man, up, up, up, swimming strong in the long-lost waters of a time gone by. Even before technological and human-focused media as cars or false teeth, water is therefore the oldest medium, just as land and air – “The air trembled like a mass of gelatinous ectoplasm,” begins the Lansdale’s short story.25 Water is an elemental, environing medium with its 24 M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: 57, 82-83, 152 (on teeth and car). 25 E. Horn, “Air as Medium,” Grey Room, vol. 7 (2008): 6-25; J. Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015): 53-114, especially 55-59, 90-91. FILIPPO FIMIANI 85 AN-ICON  own specific materiality, which becomes invisible in its vital agency as space-binding. Plus, as shown by the media imaginary26 I have highlighted in my reading of Fish Night and the Eikones, water can be a “ghostly sea.” It is a very elemental medium acting as a deep time-binding agent be- tween nature and culture, between geological and mythical epochs and historically determined technical cultures, as an ontological entanglement between forms of life which are not species-specific. “Weren’t we once just slimy things, brothers to the things that swim?” asks the older man in Lansdale’s short story, borrowing Coleridge’s words27 about a com- munity not only of humans and of like beings, but of “slimy things.” In this inter-textual topos between literature, reli- gion and the natural sciences, fascination and phobia, I read “sliminess”28 as the epitome of the profound time and of the materiality of a colloidal intermediality between technolog- ical media (among other types), living beings and elements. Obviously, “sliminess” stands in contrast to the prevailing metaphors or clichés of fluidity and transparency, that are frequently used with regard to the media and their relation 26 E. Kluitenberg, Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2006); S. Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006). 27 “The very deep did rot: O Christ! / That ever this should be! / Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea” (ll. 125-126), where “a thousand thousand slimy things [with many dead men] / Lived on; and so did I,” said the mariner (ll. 238-239). S.T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798-1834), in The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912): 191, 197. See J. Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986): 41-59; J.B. Ower, “Crantz, Martens and the ‘Slimy Things’ in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Neophilologus 85, no. 3 (2001): 477-484; S. Estok, “The Environmental Imagination in the Slime of ‘The Ancient Mariner,’” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 2, vol. 34 (2021): 135-138. 28 N. Gramlich, “Sticky Media: Encounters with Oil through Imaginary Media Archaeology,” Communication + 1 7, 1 (2018): n. p. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol7/iss1/3; see F. Mason, The Viscous: Slime, Stickiness, Fondling, Mixtures (Goleta CA: punctum books, 2020): 200; B. Woodward, Slime Dynamics (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012): 59-64; C. Michlig, File under: Slime (Los Angeles: Hat & Beard Press, 2023). FILIPPO FIMIANI 86 AN-ICON  with time and materiality and, in particular, with respect to immersivity. Finally, “media are of nature and return to na- ture:”29 that’s what Fish Night, read as a trans-medial al- legory combining literature and animation, shows us in a complex and compelling way, inviting to rethink about the phenomenological and ontological relationships between memories, images, bodies, technologies and environments. A recurring topos and persistent symptom of media history, imaginaries and narratives, this impossible return is both the origin and the end of our desire for immersivity and immersive experience. 29 J. Parikka, “Introduction: The Materiality of Media and Waste,” in J. Parikka, ed., Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, (Open Humanities Press, 2011), http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Medianatures. FILIPPO FIMIANI 87 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19910

Allegories of ImmersiAllegory on by Filippo Fimiani Ekphrastic fear Media imaginary Materiality Elemental media Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Allegories of Immersion FILIPPO FIMIANI, Università degli Studi di Salerno – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9689-5480 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19910 Abstract Fish Night, an episode of LOVE DEATH + RO- BOTS (S01E12, 2019) based on a 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, can be interpreted as an allegory of the im- possibility of immersive experience: if real, it is deadly, be- cause the images are no longer such or ghosts but living beings present in a shared environmental habitat, acting with but also against the subject, in turn no longer a spec- tator. Comparing the story and film, and ancient ekphrastic literature, I discuss, in a trans-medial imaginary genealog- ical perspective, the symptoms of this cultural topos and of the regressive desire for immersion and for transparent immediacy that shapes and drives it, dwelling in particular on the ambivalent phenomenological and ontological re- lations between living bodies, pictures and media as deep time-bending. Keywords Allegory Ekphrastic fear Media imaginary Materiality Elemental media To quote this essay: F. Fimiani, “Allegories of Immersion,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 74-87, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19910. FILIPPO FIMIANI 74 AN-ICON  A premise Fish Night is the twelfth episode of the first season of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS, an animated Netflix series created by Tim Miller and David Fincher and broad- cast on 15 March 2019.1 Directed by Damian Nenow, with Gabriele Pennacchioli as supervising director and Rafał Wojtunik as art director, it was produced by Platine Image studio,2 based on 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, in an adaptation by Philip Gelat and Miller. I see Fish Night as an allegory of the impossi- bility of virtual immersion. Obviously, it regards coexistence and interaction in a shared environment by a subject in motion, one no longer merely observing moving images at a remove, and images which are no longer concrete pictures or simulacrums but, to full effect, real living and acting beings. Why would such an experience be impos- sible? In answering, I will focus on elements drawn from both the literary account and the animated film, seen as trans-medial symptoms of underlying issues which regard the nature of bodies, images, technology, of the medium, and their various interrelations with respect to the fictional immersion and virtual immersivity. I shall cross-analyse the animated short film and its narrative hypotext with another classic literary text which describes what, in many respects, is a complementary immersion. This approach allows me to simultaneously ad- dress: 1) the “quest for immersion” uncovered by Huhta- mo’s media archaeology as a constant motif in the reprise and recurrence of narratives and patterns both in media history and, from my point of view, in the trans-medial story of Fish Night, which is about ghosts, repetitions and reap- pearances that ultimately affect the media themselves (the spectator’s body, the images, the car, the landscape, as we 1 https://lovedeathandrobots.tilda.ws/index, accessed September 1, 2023. 2 https://platige.com/project/feature/fish-night/, accessed September 1, 2023. FILIPPO FIMIANI 75 AN-ICON  will soon discover);3 2) the “[cultural] desire for transparent immediacy” through visual representation found in the ge- nealogy of Bolter and Grusin;4 3) “the moment of resistance or counterdesire that occurs when we sense that the differ- ence between the verbal and visual representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually,” diagnosed by W.J.T. Mitchell as alert for the literary description showing through words and rhetorical tropes a strongly vivid impression of a visual stimulus, object or scene, in summa as “ekphrasis fear;”5 4) Paul de Man’s allegory6 of “potential confusion between figural and referential statement,” between the image and the real. Of course, the four points just evoked should not to be confused. Quite the contrary, aware of their dif- ferences in approach, object and aim, I use them as ac- cess points to the question of immersivity as tropism and symptom of a desire and anxiety manifested and treated differently in the literary texts and their media adaptations that I am about to discuss. In the textual and audio-visual issues I have chosen, or, as Foucault might say,7 in the “myriad events through which – thanks to which, against which –” “the unique aspect” of the cultural idea and topos of the experience of immersion-immersivity has arisen, I 3 E. Huhtamo, “Encapsulated Bodies in Motion: Simulators and the Quest for Total Immersion,” in S. Penny, ed., Critical Issues in Electronic Media (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995): 160-161, and “Dismantling the Fairy Engine. Media Archaeology as Topos Study,” in E. Huhtamo, J. Parikka, eds., Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011): 27-47. 4 J.D. Bolter, R. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1998): 23ff. 5 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Id., Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 154. See R.P., Fletcher, “Digital Ekphrasis and the Uncanny: Toward a Poetics of Augmented Reality,” Electropoetics 3, no. 15 (2017) http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/eng_facpub/56 6 P. de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1979): 113. 7 M. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D.F. Bouchard (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1977): 147. FILIPPO FIMIANI 76 AN-ICON  shall detect the symptom of its impossibility and sketch its singular trans-medial archaeology8 and imaginary. The topos points to a yearning for fictional im- mersion, a performative moment in which saying something brings it into being, making it real in every sense, and fully adherent to the referent, with language and synesthetic perception becoming one. Introduced by a terrified alarm, a seductive invitation or the command of “look!,” the very essential wish is to make subject, image and thing coin- cide. The intensive alteration of the corporeal identity and peripersonal space that results involves not only the char- acter described, narrated and represented in the act of a self-denying vision that resists classification as merely an ocular, remote beholding, but also the reader and specta- tor drawn into an embodied simulation of the occurrences and fantasies found in the images, both verbal and visual. Fish Night, a never-ending trans-medial story I shall intertwine a summary and a commentary of Lansdale’s short story with that of the episode of LD+R. In this way, I will point out some differences and sources of their imaginaries, and make some interlinear remarks on both the literary text and the television adaptation, in order to highlight the main theme of this defined trans-medial corpus: the impossibility of immersion-immersiveness. Two salesmen, one young, the other older, get stuck in the desert when their car breaks down. The hours pass and night falls. At first, the older man bemoans how door-to-door sales are a thing of the past. Then he remem- bers that twenty years earlier he was in this same deso- late landscape, travelling an asphalted road amidst power stanchions and the Rocky Mountains, between Arizona and New Mexico. “There are memories of mine out here,” 8 T. Elsaesser, “Media Archaeology as Symptom,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 2, no. 14 (2016): 181-215. FILIPPO FIMIANI 77 AN-ICON  he says, “and they’re visiting me again.”9 In the short story, this is an unmistakable evocation of Death of a Salesman, the Arthur Miller play directed by Elia Kazan, winner of the 1949 Pulitzer Prize and adapted on numerous occasions for film and TV, in which past and present collapse into the remembrance of the lead character, Willy Lowman, the disillusioned, exhausted door-to-door salesman who, at over sixty, struggles with a trauma not just personal, but historical and collective.10 In Fish Night, the instant replay of involuntary subjective memory gives way to a re-enact- ment both psychic and geological, a Nachleben, a survival and an afterlife of a story that is more than just human. The desert through which the highway passes will once again be a “petrified primal landscape,” allegorically manifesting itself as a “Hippocratic face of history.”11 Lansdale describes the landscape as an im- mersive – and devouring – space: It’s fish night, boy. Tonight’s the full moon and this is the right part of the desert if memory serves me, and the feel is right — I mean, doesn’t the night feel like it’s made up of some fabric, that it’s dif- ferent from other nights, that it’s like being inside a big dark bag, the sides sprinkled with glitter, a spotlight at the top, at the open mouth, to serve as a moon? The function of the mouth metaphor in the Lansdale’s writing is complex, but here it foreshadows the finale’s explicit immersive embodiment: does one enter an immersive space or get swallowed up by it? Space, we can say with Bataille, “can become one fish that swallows another.”12 Is immersion-immersivity an experience of “by” 9 J.R. Lansdale, Fish Night (1982), in G. Brown, A.J. Spedding, eds., Love Death + Robots: The Official Anthology: Volume One (Bendigo: Cohesion Press, 2021): 193-200. Pages not numbered; all citations in the text. 10 J. Schlueter, “Re-membering Willy’s Past: Introducing Postmodern Concerns through Death of a Salesman,” in M. Roudané, ed., Approaches to Teaching Miller’s Death of a Salesman (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1995): 142-154. 11 W. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedmann and H. Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Mein: Suhrkamp, 1991), vol. 1: 343, trans. H. Eiland (Cambridge MA-London: Harvard University Press, 2019): 174. 12 G. Bataille, “Espace” (1930), Documents, no. 1, anastatic reprint, ed. D. Hollier (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1991): 41. FILIPPO FIMIANI 78 AN-ICON  or “in”? Is it penetration or impregnation? Transparency or opacity? Immateriality or the materiality of the environ- mental medium? In Lansdale’s short story, evoking the past, the older man brings up Native Americans, the Navajos and the Hopi, and Manitou, the Great Living Spirit “still around” in everything and every being. He read in a science book – he goes on – that the desert was once a sea filled with fish and “fantastical creatures,” maybe even man’s birthplace. “The world’s an old place, and for longtime is nothing but sea,” he concludes pensively. And – dwelling on the thought – those beings may haunt this place the way human ghosts haunt their former homes. With these musings, the younger and the older man fall asleep in the Plymouth station wagon. Whether dreamed or real, lights from outside the car cause the older man’s eyes to open. Facing him, close to the car window, is an enormous eye. Octopuses, giant jellyfish, molluscs and fish from way back in evolution – Coelacanths, Nau- tilus, Limulus, marine fauna in existence prior to the great Cambrian extinction, appear in the surrounding environ- ment, where the men, now outside the car, can magically breath. Strange beings, “like nothing [they have] ever seen pictures of or imagined,” are present but almost incorpo- real, “ghosts of older world,” disincarnate eidola that pass through the men’s bodies, though they still feel and sense them. But “what” does a man’s body feel when another body passes through it? Symptomatic of the ambivalence and ambiguity of the immersion-immersivity topos, and its impossibility, Philip Gelat leaves this phrase out of the adaptation of Lansdale’s short story for LD+R: “Feel it, boy? Feel the presence of the sea? Doesn’t it feel like the beating of your own mother’s heart while you float inside the womb?” FILIPPO FIMIANI 79 AN-ICON And the younger man had to admit that he felt it, that inner rolling rhythm that is the tide of life and the pulsating heart of the sea. Thus the “oceanic sentiment,” the “thalassic regression” debated by psychoanalysis,13 also character- istic of the “crisis of presence” in magical experiences dis- cussed by anthropology,14 are pathic and phenomenological equivalents of the sea’s “presence” as a primary medium, a pre-individual fusion and condition for the possibility of life. In this elemental medium, the bodies of the marine beings are, first and foremost, traversable and diaphanous, immaterial media-mediators permitting an equally immate- rial engagement. They are “spectral,” like “soap bubbles,” “smoke,” “flashes of light,” flitting and skirting, writes Lans- dale. There is no mistaking the kinship with intermedial ex- empla of the metaphorical repertoire of philosophies, both ancient and modern, of visual perception, Renaissance and eighteenth-century treatises on painting, plus contempo- rary theories of optical devices and electric media. In the LD+R episode, the ecstatic young man shouts, “I wanna swim!,” as if he were a man-fish of folk legend brought to life.15 Deaf to the alarmed pleas of the older man, he joins the school of fish, swimming amongst them in slow-motion,16 becoming like them. Stripped of his individuality, he is transfigured, weightlessly transported upward, only to have his ascension end in death. All the other creatures flee in fright at the approach of an enormous red megalodon, which, circling the car, devours the slower, defenceless swimmer, meaning the human transformed into 13 On this essential topic of the symbolic return to the sea, I can only point to Ferenczi, Freud, Alexander and Kerény, or Sloterdijk, plus the Mutterleibversenkung of Ėjzenštejn or slow-motion, in the case of Epstein. See W.B. Parsons, The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 14 E. de Martino, Il mondo magico: Prolegomeni a una storia del magismo (1945) (Turin: Boringhieri, 1973): 144-145, and Magic: A Theory from the South (1959), trans. D.L. Zinn (Chicago: Hau Books, 2015): 85-96. 15 B. Croce, Storie e leggende napoletane (1919) (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1967): 306-313. See G.B. Bronzini, “Cola Pesce il tuffatore: dalla leggenda moderna al mito antico,” Lares 66, no. 3 (2000): 341-376. 16 Under the slow-motion effect, our bodies look like “smooth muscles moving through a dense medium in which thick currents always carry and shape this clear descendent of old marine fauna and maternal waters.” J. Epstein, The Intelligence of a Machine (1946), trans. C. Wall-Romana (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014): 29. FILIPPO FIMIANI 80 AN-ICON  a marine being. The Otus megalodon, which first lived at the start of the Miocene period, succumbing to extinction roughly 2.5 million years ago, has returned to the desert between Arizona and New Mexico, only to slowly disappear from view, leaving behind plumes of blood set against the enormous, white, imperturbable moon. Left by himself, the older man is stunned by what he has just seen. From New Mexico to Greece, and back In Fish Night, the impossibility of immersive ex- perience, i.e. of the elimination of all substantial differences between the gaze, the images and the environment, is tied to the fact that, were it to become real, death would result. Given the trans-medial imaginary genealogical perspective indicated in the Premise, I read the lethal outcome of the way up of the main character of Fish Night as comple- mentary to the dark plunge down described in a masterful scene from the Eikones, the influential classic of ekphrastic literature and ancient rhetoric attributed to Philostratus the Elder. Reactivating the Ancient Greek, I would then speak of anabasis (from ana-, “up,” and baínō, “to go”), of a fatal immersive ascent, for Fish Night, and of catabasis (from kata-, “down,” and baínō, “to go”), of a descent down in the underworld, for the Eikones. Actually, the very protagonist of the episode from the Eikones is the penetrating gaze of a lookout scan- ning the sea, who, perched atop a pole on the shore, can spot tuna in the sea and call out them to fishermen. This fictional vision is enhanced by the pole, depicted as a sub- lime lignum in Negri’s sixteenth-century Latin translation, which acts as a technical mean and as rudimental pros- thetic medium, allowing for a more powerful and detailed gaze. Still, the outcome is ultimately catastrophic: for as the lookout’s gaze gradually immerses itself in the mael- strom of moving forms and flashing colours, it becomes less penetrating, feebler, until the fish, barely discernible as shadows, swallow it up, as in the journey of Ulysses to Hades painted by Polignoto and described by Pausania. FILIPPO FIMIANI 81 AN-ICON  In Fish Night as well, the immersive moment in which the verbal, the visual and the real all become performatively one, heralded by the ecstatic, ostentatious exhortation to look,17 winds up being the exact opposite: blindness and terror. And so it becomes an allegory of its own impossibility. As Philostratus writes: Now look at the painting and you will see just this going on. The look-out gazes at the sea and turns his eyes in one direction and another to get the number; and in the bright gleam of the sea the colours of the fish vary, those near the surface seem to be black, those just below are not so black, those lower still begin to elude the sense of sight, then they seem shadowy, and finally they look just like the water; for as the vision penetrates deeper and deeper its power of discerning objects in the water is blunted. 18 In the story Fish Night, and even more so in the animated film, what occurs is not simply a metaphorical inversion of the yearning, for immersion and transparency. The change that takes place is literally ontological, rather than phenomenological: the inexorable law of the impene- trability of bodies in space has been restored, having earlier been suspended by the diaphanously spectral, almost im- material state of the environmental medium. This elementa- ry law of physics once again holds, even in the immersive environment, where the body of the human being has lost some of its species-specific characteristics – gravity, use of the respiratory apparatus and motor skills – while that of the image, finally possessed of a physical consistency of its own, has also gained new properties, enabling it to take actions that truly affect the other entities sharing the surrounding environment. 17 N. Bryson, “Philostratus and the Imaginary Museum,” in S. Goldhill, R. Osborne, eds., Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture (Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 266-267. 18 Philostratus the Younger, Imagines. Callistratus, Descriptions, trans. A. Fairbanks (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1936): 57 (I.12); Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. W.H.S. Jones, H.A. Ormerod (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1918): 185 (10.28.1). FILIPPO FIMIANI 82 AN-ICON  Which medium? But in the final analysis, what does Fish Night tell us about the material nature of the immersive medium and its uniqueness compared to other media and technical devices? In Lansdale’s short story, the protagonist of the deadly immersive experience is the older man, not the younger one, as in the LD+R episode. Lansdale has in mind the imagery of Death of a Salesman and Willy Lowman’s irretrievable historical crisis. Charley, Willy’s well-off neigh- bour, observes that: “A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”19 Thus the American Dream is a territorialised rendering of the countryside by the moving automobile, a “hot,” prosthetic medium which is culturally, socially and aesthetically expansive, as Marshall McLuhan was to point out soon after, in short an “excrescence of a kinetic ego” and an agent of the “motorized narcissism.”20 The automobile stands as the technological condition that makes possible the conquest of the last frontier, as the material and historical a-priori of the aesthetic experience of the wilderness, be it rebellious or liberating, ostentatious or touristic, with the complementary evolution of the car being its domestication to transport and distribute tangible and intangible goods. At the turn of the 60’s-70’s,21 road movies were both reflections and wellsprings of the cultural and mythopoetic topos of the automobile as a means to attaining individual freedom or reification, or to crafting the iconography of the American sublime. Indeed, the choice of a Plymouth Fury for the LD+R episode may not have 19 A. Miller, Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem (1949) (London: Penguin, 1998): 111. 20 M. McLuhan, Motorcar: The Mechanical Bride (1951), in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) (Cambridge MA-London: MIT Press, 1994): 217-222. See P. Sloterdjik, “Die Herrschaft der Kentauren. Philosophische Bemerkungen zur Automobilität” (1992), trans. K. Ritson, Transfers 1, vol. 1 (2011): 14-24; P. Weibel, “Medien der Mobilität,” in P. Weibel, ed., CAR CULTURE: Medien der Mobilität (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2011): 345-400. 21 S. Cohan, I.R. Hark, eds., The Road Movie Book (London-New York: Routledge, 1997); A. Cross, “Driving the American Landscape,” in P. Wollen, J. Kerr, eds., Autopia: Cars and Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2002): 249-258; D. Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); D. Orgeron, Road Movies: From Muybridge and Méliès to Lynch and Kiarostami (New York: Palgrave, 2008). FILIPPO FIMIANI 83 AN-ICON  been random, given that the model was produced between 1968 and 1972, or precisely the years of the psychedelic and hippy culture, as well as the first signs of its impending crisis. Anyway, the automobile is the technological embodiment of the desire of immersion, a new medium for an old movement and a very ancient desire, as shown to us by the sinking gaze in the sea described by Philostra- tus. A 1939 advertisement placed in National Geographic introduced General Motors’ new Oldsmobile model with this slogan: “See America from an ‘OBSERVATION BODY!’” The brief promotional text promised a “VISION as wide as all outdoors is yours…,” but at the same time a “rhythmic ride” of a “rolling uterus”22 corresponding to the rhythm of the all-enveloping medium of the sea in which the body of the character from Fish Night loses himself in symbiotic fashion. Immersion means, at one and the same time, travelling “in” the landscape, being “part of” the environment, and re- turning “to” the maternal space. As was recently noted by Ruggero Eugeni,23 the automobile is a medium-prosthesis which implements a protected, horizontal immersion scaled to human height, so to speak, and the line of the horizon, for drivers traversing urban and exurban landscapes in a personal travelling cave: a feeling of immersion intensified by the setting up of specific sensorial and perceptive pro- cesses (both hetero- and proprioceptive). From this perspective, the regressive desire of immersivity of Lansdale’s account stands in contrast to the prosthetic mode of technological immersivity which, according to McLuhan, is embodied by the automobile, and to the mythical example of fictional immersion made possible by the tuna lookout’s perch described by Phi- lostratus. In Fish Night, the two characters leave the car, technology’s outpost for providing the senses with pros- thesis and prophylaxis, and for supplying techniques of the 22 P. Sloterdjik, “Rollender Uterus” (1995), in Selected Exaggerations: Conversations and Interviews, 1993-2012, trans. K. Margolis (Cambridge: Polity Book, 2016): 24. 23 R. Eugeni, “La sposa algoritmica: L’automobile come medium e la navigazione del quotidiano,” in F. Cavaletti, F. Fimiani, B. Grespi, A.C. Sabatino, eds., Immersioni quotidiane: Vita ordinaria, cultura visuale e nuovi media (Milan: Meltemi, 2023): 271-282. FILIPPO FIMIANI 84 AN-ICON  sensitivity for the body and the gaze. Actually, they leave the scopic regimen of spectatorship, and the technolog- ical anti-environment created by the window’s protective shield, coming into synesthetic contact with the natural environment’s forms of life. Another element in Lansdale’s short story il- lustrates, as a symptom, this detachment from technolo- gy. Possibly as a paraphrase of one of McLuhan’s topoi,24 Lansdale likens the car to the older man’s false teeth. Both are “trappings of civilization” which weigh down, serving as technological prostheses that are mobile and tied to mobility. They are metaphors: means of transport between inside and outside, as well as tools for aggression and conquering space and time. “This isn’t my world. I’m of that world. I want to float free in the belly of the sea, away from can openers and cars and -” [...] “I want to leave here! [...] The teeth! [...] It’s the teeth. Dentist, science, foo!” He punched a hand into his mouth, plucked the teeth free, tossed them over his shoulder. Even as the teeth fell the old man rose. He began to stroke. To swim up and up and up, moving like a pale pink seal among the fish. In the light of the moon the young man could see the pooched jaws of the old man, holding the last of the future’s air. Up went the old man, up, up, up, swimming strong in the long-lost waters of a time gone by. Even before technological and human-focused media as cars or false teeth, water is therefore the oldest medium, just as land and air – “The air trembled like a mass of gelatinous ectoplasm,” begins the Lansdale’s short story.25 Water is an elemental, environing medium with its 24 M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: 57, 82-83, 152 (on teeth and car). 25 E. Horn, “Air as Medium,” Grey Room, vol. 7 (2008): 6-25; J. Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015): 53-114, especially 55-59, 90-91. FILIPPO FIMIANI 85 AN-ICON  own specific materiality, which becomes invisible in its vital agency as space-binding. Plus, as shown by the media imaginary26 I have highlighted in my reading of Fish Night and the Eikones, water can be a “ghostly sea.” It is a very elemental medium acting as a deep time-binding agent be- tween nature and culture, between geological and mythical epochs and historically determined technical cultures, as an ontological entanglement between forms of life which are not species-specific. “Weren’t we once just slimy things, brothers to the things that swim?” asks the older man in Lansdale’s short story, borrowing Coleridge’s words27 about a com- munity not only of humans and of like beings, but of “slimy things.” In this inter-textual topos between literature, reli- gion and the natural sciences, fascination and phobia, I read “sliminess”28 as the epitome of the profound time and of the materiality of a colloidal intermediality between technolog- ical media (among other types), living beings and elements. Obviously, “sliminess” stands in contrast to the prevailing metaphors or clichés of fluidity and transparency, that are frequently used with regard to the media and their relation 26 E. Kluitenberg, Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2006); S. Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006). 27 “The very deep did rot: O Christ! / That ever this should be! / Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea” (ll. 125-126), where “a thousand thousand slimy things [with many dead men] / Lived on; and so did I,” said the mariner (ll. 238-239). S.T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798-1834), in The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912): 191, 197. See J. Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986): 41-59; J.B. Ower, “Crantz, Martens and the ‘Slimy Things’ in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Neophilologus 85, no. 3 (2001): 477-484; S. Estok, “The Environmental Imagination in the Slime of ‘The Ancient Mariner,’” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 2, vol. 34 (2021): 135-138. 28 N. Gramlich, “Sticky Media: Encounters with Oil through Imaginary Media Archaeology,” Communication + 1 7, 1 (2018): n. p. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol7/iss1/3; see F. Mason, The Viscous: Slime, Stickiness, Fondling, Mixtures (Goleta CA: punctum books, 2020): 200; B. Woodward, Slime Dynamics (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012): 59-64; C. Michlig, File under: Slime (Los Angeles: Hat & Beard Press, 2023). FILIPPO FIMIANI 86 AN-ICON  with time and materiality and, in particular, with respect to immersivity. Finally, “media are of nature and return to na- ture:”29 that’s what Fish Night, read as a trans-medial al- legory combining literature and animation, shows us in a complex and compelling way, inviting to rethink about the phenomenological and ontological relationships between memories, images, bodies, technologies and environments. A recurring topos and persistent symptom of media history, imaginaries and narratives, this impossible return is both the origin and the end of our desire for immersivity and immersive experience. 29 J. Parikka, “Introduction: The Materiality of Media and Waste,” in J. Parikka, ed., Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, (Open Humanities Press, 2011), http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Medianatures. FILIPPO FIMIANI 87 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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History and Stories through Jeremy Deller’s Performances by Roberto Pinto Jeremy Deller Public art Mass performance 14-18 now We’re here because we’re here Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello History and Stories through Jeremy Deller’s Performances ROBERTO PINTO, Università di Bologna – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1559-5759 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19792 Abstract “I wanted to make a memorial that was alive, not an object or set of objects to make a pilgrimage to; a memorial that would come to you, that would appear in your city, town or shopping centre, intervening in your daily life.” With these words, Jeremy Deller introduces us to his We’re Here Because We’re Here, created as part of the events commemorating the First World War. With the help of Rufus Norris, director of the National Theatre, Deller organised a gigantic mass performance in which some 2,000 volunteers disguised as World War I soldiers wandered around the main cities of the United Kingdom without anyone having warned the citizens of their presence. Through this work by Deller (and by comparing it with other artistic experiences), the text intends to investigate how some contemporary artistic interventions seek to exploit the mechanisms of performance in order to reconstruct historical events not only by relying on the strategies of re-enactment, but also by resorting to an immersive relationship linked to the un- expected capable of producing extreme involvement, a process that solicits the emotional states to which, in the harshest moments of war, the community is subjected. Keywords Jeremy Deller Public art Mass performance 14-18 now We’re here because we’re here To quote this essay: R. Pinto, “History and Stories through Jeremy Deller’s Performances,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 88-100, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19792. ROBERTO PINTO 88 AN-ICON A memorial that would come to you, that would appear in your city, town or shopping centre, intervening in your daily life1 The topic (and issue) of monuments and the commemoration of historical events has been at the centre of debate in recent decades. There have been many dis- cussions – in public, within more academic contexts and in art institutions – on the question: can statues or, more generally, artistic events still be – and how – valuable tools for activating processes of remembrance and re-elabora- tion of collective mourning or past tragic events? There have also been many striking and spec- tacular interventions/performances questioning the value of these objects inherited from a past often marked by more than one dark side. We could sum the matter up with these questions: just because they are part of our tradition, are they still able to represent us? Do they have the right to con- tinue to be considered as common symbols to be shared? Or should they be transformed into artistic artefacts that need to be historically contextualised and become part of museum heritage? (On the grounds that museums are better suited to preserving such artefacts and providing ac- curate descriptions of the context from which they come.) Among the many recent episodes, I believe everyone still has in mind the demolition of the monument to Edward Colston, “benefactor” and slave trader, on 7 June 2020 in Bristol, an event that took place in the emotional aftershock of the killing of George Floyd in the United States and the Black Lives Matter movement. In today’s climate, there is no shortage of harsh criticism of institutions when they struggle to adapt to the demands of groups and communities who do not feel rep- resented at all and, arguably, express an expectation that some of the fundamental rights of all people should be 1 J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here (London: Thames and Hudson, 2017): 61. ROBERTO PINTO 89 AN-ICON  respected. This is all the more so when dealing with sym- bols in shared and important places, such as statues and monuments. In this context, the initiative by British institu- tions to create a complex and cohesive project to mark the centenary of the First World War in an attempt to experi- ment with new ways of sharing seems to me a fascinating case study. It is clear that, whichever way one reads this historical event, one cannot ignore the fact that it was, in every respect, a long and devastating war. The initiative was a harsh testing ground for artists and institutions, given the risk of falling into the rhetoric of patriotic ideals and the celebration of the courage and daring of the participants, which had until now been indispensable prerequisites for celebrations of historical events such as this. The UK Arts Programme was the promoter of 14-18 NOW, a genuinely diverse and cohesive programme that saw the creation of 107 projects, the involvement of 420 artists2 using different media (theatre, cinema, visual arts, poetry, music) which, in most cases, were hybrid forms. It is also worth emphasising the very high level of the artists involved; they included Gillian Wearing, John Akomfrah, Raqs Media Collective, Tobias Rehberger, Yinka Shonibare, Suzanne Lacy, Rachel Whiteread, Mark Wallinger, Ryoji Ikeda, and William Kentridge.3 Many had already dealt with contemporary history and the related political problems on their journey. It should therefore be seen as an act of cour- age on the part of the promoting body – and of recognising the issues underlying an anniversary that could lend itself to controversy and misunderstanding – that they identified artists sensitive to cultural and political commitment who were well aware of the nature and extent of the dangers inherent in a project commemorating a war. One of the 2 According to its official website the project commissioned works from 420 artists, and engaged 35 million people. “About 14-18 Now,” 14-18 Now, https://www.1418now.org.uk/ about/, accessed December 15, 2022. 3 For the full list see https://www.1418now.org.uk/artists/, accessed December 15, 2022. ROBERTO PINTO 90 AN-ICON  aims of this event was, therefore, to try to change the nar- rative that has been made of the history told by European nations mainly through the arts, which have reconstructed and told it exclusively from the point of view of their specific national identities.4 Within this experimentation, I would like to place as a case study We’re here because we’re here by Jeremy Deller – created in collaboration with Rufus Norris – because, perhaps more than any other, it seems to me symbolic of the ability to put forward attractive solutions that directly address the role the public takes on in com- memorations and make the experience as multi-sensorial and engaging as possible. Elements that are the leitmotif of Immersed in the Work. From the Environment to Virtual Reality. In doing so, I would at least like to point out the proj- ects Across and In-Between by Suzanne Lacy5 and Pages of the Sea by Danny Boyle,6 which adopt an approach in many ways similar to the work of the London-based artist. Throughout his career, Jeremy Deller has often chosen subjects related to history and politics and has always used a collaborative and participatory approach right from the design phase. His artistic practices have 4 In order to clarify the position of the planners, the words of Margaret MacMillan, who, in the introduction to the volume collecting information on 14-18 Now, explains “Governments often want to tidy up the past and impose a single unified version of what happened back then - at Waterloo, say, or the Battle of the Somme. But there can be no one view. Women, men, diverse ethnic groups, religions or social classes, start from different viewpoints, and what they see in the past may be guided by that. So marking the 100th anniversary of the First World War, that vast and destructive struggle from 1914 to 1918, was never going to be easy. We can agree that it was a catastrophe that destroyed the old confident Europe and left a strangely and irrevocably altered world. Beyond that there are, and always have been, profound differences over how we remember and commemorate that war. We still cannot agree on how it started or why it went on for so long, and we still debate its meaning and its legacy a century later.” J. Waldman, M. MacMillan, eds., 14-18 Now: Contemporary Arts Commissions for the First World War Centenary (Profile: London, 2019). See also within the same volume the essay by David Olusoga. Cfr D. Olusoga, “Art as a lens: Re-Globalising the First War,” ibid.: 12-13. 5 Suzanne Lacy’s work, made between 18 and 23 October 2018, on the occasion of the centenary of Ireland’s Declaration of Independence (and the subsequent border that has since divided Northern Ireland from Éire) aims to investigate borders and the influence they have had on our lives. See: https://www.1418now.org.uk/commissions/across-and-in-between/, accessed December 15, 2022. 6 Boyle’s work, Pages of the Sea, took place on 11 November 2018 and was intended to celebrate the centenary of the Armistice. See “On 11 November 2018,” Pages of The Sea, https://www.pagesofthesea.org.uk, accessed December 15, 2022. ROBERTO PINTO 91 AN-ICON  contributed to redefining the boundaries of contemporary art also because, in creating his works, he has had to try his hand as an art producer, director, event organiser, archivist as well as photographer, performer and installation creator, the latter roles being more standard within contemporary art. The project commissioned by the WW1 Cente- nary Art Commission from Deller was related to celebrating the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles in military history. Over 141 days, more than a million casu- alties were recorded. On the first day alone, the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties. Jeremy Deller’s idea was to create a mobile and temporary memorial7 that would dialogue with the present day and attempt to overturn the need to create a specific place dedicated to the memory of people and events by conceiving, instead, “a memorial that would come to you, that would appear in your city, town or shopping centre, intervening in your daily life. [...] It was as much about today as it was about 1916.”8 To meet this need, with the help of Rufus Norris – the theatre and film director who has been Artistic Director of the National Theatre since 2015 – he staged a massive performance in which more than 1,400 volunteers, dressed in the uniforms of World War I soldiers, with no public announcement of their presence, appeared in more than 40 cities9 on 1 July 2016, making contact with UK citizens going about their daily business, and moving from one part of a city to an- other. Deller had deliberately excluded the actors/ participants from meeting in all those places that had, 7 “I wanted to make a contemporary memorial to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, one that moved around the UK with an unpredictability in which the participants, by their actions, took the memorial to the public.” Deller in https://becausewearehere.co.uk/we-are-here-about/, accessed December 15, 2022. 8 J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. 9 To access the map of the event see https://becausewearehere.co.uk/we-are-here-map/ , accessed December 15, 2022. ROBERTO PINTO 92 AN-ICON  even remotely, a relation to celebrations and rituals – so no churches, public buildings, cemeteries, or locations of historical significance. In their place, train or metro stations, busy squares and streets, shopping malls or meeting plac- es. Often in rather thickly crowded groups, these anachronistic soldiers had to present themselves in central areas and busy places to interact with citizens, returning their gaze and smiling at them, although they were not expected to engage in conversations or stimulate verbal exchanges. They had to limit themselves, occasionally and chorally, to singing a song to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” with the words “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here,” hence the title of the work. British soldiers10 also often used this line as a hymn wishing for the war’s end. The idea of remaining silent was Norris’s sug- gestion,11 and, in a way, silence became a real communi- cative strategy for Deller to construct his sort of re-enact- ment:12 the silence before the event, which was completely concealed from the public until the day the performers appeared in the cities, and the substantial silence of the participants interrupted by the chants that occasionally accompanied the soldiers in their wanderings through the 10 Deller explained: “When I read about this song, I realised I not only had an activity for the men but also a title for the piece. It explains nothing, it’s pointless and repetitive, a little like the fate of a foot soldier or even the nature of man’s addiction to conflict.” J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. 11 C. Higgins, “#Wearehere: Somme tribute revealed as Jeremy Deller work,” The Guardian (July 1, 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jul/01/wearehere-battle-somme- tribute-acted-out-across-britain, accessed December 15, 2022. 12 Although, as we shall see, Deller has constructed genuine re-enactments, on this occasion this work cannot be properly considered as such, even though, often, this term is used as a hypernym. On this subject see S. Mudu, “Under the sign of Reenactment,” in C. Baldacci, S. Franco, eds., On Reenactment: Concepts, Metodologies, Tools (Turin: Accademia University Press, 2022). ROBERTO PINTO 93 AN-ICON  cities. During the weeks of training13 in the run-up to 1 July, Norris and Deller had explicitly requested of all participants that interaction with the spectators should stop there, at si- lence, at a simple exchange of glances, and that the possi- ble explanation/interpretation of the event unfolding before the mostly astonished eyes of the spectators should be left to the calling card – a choice dictated by both purely tech- nical and symbolic issues. The performative action – given the vastness of the intervention and the mass of people involved – had to remain as simple as possible so as not to force the performers to improvise in the face of the in- calculable variables imposed in an open dialogue with the casual passer-by. The conversation, therefore, would have been entirely uncontrollable and (also given that none of the participants had any professional acting training) the quality standards would probably have suffered. In addition, although I am not aware that this was made explicit, it would also have posed a problem of a symbolic nature: each participant in the performance was the apparition or “ghost” of a dead person, and therefore, silence was the most suitable form to evoke the victims. The actual interaction with the audience, then, took place only through a common calling card which established a dia- logue of glances in the explanation of the work – I represent someone, a specific person with a name, regiment, or rank, who died a hundred years ago, even if I am not him – and which at the same time also became the tombstone, the 13 An interesting insight into the training period for the performers in this project can be found in a conversation between Deller and Emily Lim. Cfr. E. Lim, J. Deller, “Relaxed, open, alive, kind, engaged,” in R. Norris, J. Deller, We’re Here Because We’re Here: 104-113. Here, we also find a document with the “Five Golden Words: Relaxed, open, alive, kind, engaged” and the “Four Golden Rules: 1. Stay Alive – Keep it natural, be comfortable, don’t ever be a statue! 2. Seek Eye Contact – be interested in the public but don’t intimidate them, it’s not a staring competition! 3. Be Kind to the public, don’t ever be rude! 4. Each Card is a Gift – make eye contact when you give it, watch the public’s reaction to it.” Ibid.: 104. ROBERTO PINTO 94 AN-ICON  remnant of the monument.14 In a video filmed by the BBC on this project, Deller said that he owed the idea of making the soldiers who died in that battle appear as ghosts to something he had read during the research period before the work, in which he had found interesting information about phenomena in Britain during the war - of women mainly - seeing dead loved ones in the street, just catching a glimpse of someone on a bus or through a shop window thinking it was their husband or their brother or their son. It became quite a big thing, all these sightings, these apparitions of the dead. So it was as if the project had already happened during the war. People had already seen the dead in the streets.15 Compared to a monument or a more traditional re-enactment of a historical event, which asks us to respect the hero’s sacrifice and celebrate it, Deller shifts the focus to the individual persons, or rather, to the void they left behind, filling it through the concretisation of the ghost of the missing person, thus giving shape to the void created around each of the people who disappeared in the war. This shift also reflects the artist’s desire to avoid any senti- mentality in the representation: “Avoid Sentimentality” was the instruction written on one of his reproduced sheets of notes. The artist explicitly speaks of the goal of giving the audience a “jolt,”16 and a jolt, after all, is at the opposite extreme of storytelling and words of condolence with which 14 “We also equipped each man with a set of ‘calling cards’ which bore the name, regiment and rank of a soldier who died on 1 July. He was representing that person, not pretending to be him. The card was effectively a gravestone, and if a member of the public paid attention to a soldier in any way he or she was given one,” J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. 15 W. Yu (@weiyu970), “Jeremy Deller – We’re Here Because We’re Here,” YouTube video (November 26, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXnr3w74TJs&t=158s, accessed December 15, 2022. 16 J. Deller in J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. ROBERTO PINTO 95 AN-ICON  to remember the many qualities of those who have left us – usual procedures in a commemoration of historical events. Nevertheless, the heart of this work is absolutely emotional; in fact, the people who found themselves pass- ing through the cities engaged with the performance were sucked into the event, not only because they felt surrounded by it but, above all, because the absence of rhetoric made them feel exempt from any pressing request to take sides, to accept being part of a community, as any ritual (even a secular one) imposes. The request was only to participate. And perhaps it is precisely in this form of engagement that the diversity lies, compared to others, of Deller’s fascinating offering. It appropriates with this immense “delegated per- formance”17 the principles of spectacularity; it is the child of cinema and a digital and social media culture,18 but, at the same time, does not create artificial distances between spectator and performer, given that the extreme proximity of the encounter with the soldiers made the experience somehow simultaneously unique and intimate. However, this was not the first time that Deller had used these modes of immersive engagement to rec- reate the feeling at least of an episode from the past and bring back to life a part of history that we have forgotten or repressed. This had already happened with It Is What It Is: Conversation about Iraq, from 2009, a collaborative work with Creative Time and the New Museum in New York, in which he had taken a car destroyed by explosives found in Iraq on a tour of 14 US museums to serve as a “backdrop” 17 I refer to the category used by Claire Bishop in C. Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012). 18 See C. Eva, “Reaching the Public” in J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 115-116, which begins with the statement: “In many ways We’re here because we’re here is an artwork for the age of social media.” ROBERTO PINTO 96 AN-ICON  to a conversation space in which Iraqi citizens and Ameri- can military personnel, among others, were invited.19 Nevertheless, the work that, in terms of organ- isational strategy and spectator involvement, serves as the premise for We’re here because we’re here is undoubtedly The Battle of Orgreave, from 2001, in which Deller attempted to recreate live – again, as a gigantic participatory perfor- mance – the clashes between police and striking miners at the Orgreave Coking Plant in Yorkshire on 18 June 1984. This episode, one of the harshest and most divisive for Brit- ain in the 1980s and the Thatcher era, had affected Deller as a teenager at the time: I wanted to find out what exactly happened on that day with a view to re-enacting or commemorating it in some way. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the strike, lik e a civil war, had a trau- matically divisive effect at all levels of life in the UK. Families were torn apart because of divided loyalties, the union movement was split on its willingness to support the National Union of Mineworkers, the print media especially contributed to the polarisation of the arguments to the point where there appeared to be little space for a middle ground. So in all but name it became an ideological and industrial battle between the two sections of British society.20 Commissioned and produced by Artangel, The Battle of Orgreave was a reconstruction involving about 19 On his website Deller explains: “This project started as the idea to create a mobile museum of the war in Iraq that would tour the US. Finding material for the museum proved difficult, until we were offered a car that had been used in previous exhibitions. From this car, used as a centrepiece, we constructed a room in the museum where the public could meet and talk to people involved in the conflict in some way. The idea was then taken on the road; we towed the car from New York to LA, stopping off in 14 towns and cities on the way – a classic American road trip route – accompanied by an Iraqi citizen and an enlisted American soldier. It was presented in as neutral a way as possible, which puzzled a lot of people. But it meant that the public were more likely to talk to us, because they weren’t scared of being dragged into some sort of political arena. Sometimes these conversations went on for hours. The car was subsequently donated to the Imperial War Museum in London” https://www.jeremydeller.org/ItIsWhatItIs/ItIsWhatItIs.php accessed December 15, 2022. 20 J. Deller, The English Civil War / Part II (London: Artangel, 2002): 7. ROBERTO PINTO 97 AN-ICON  a thousand people21 – around 800 who had taken part in historical re-enactments, approximately 200 former miners and an unknown number of people who were part of the police force at the time. It was also, in parallel, a massive piece of research with information, photos and videos in addition to, as already described in We’re here because we’re here, a long collective preparation work in which the former miners, above all, also had the role of helping in the reconstruction of events. And as with The Battle of Orgreave, one cannot fail to be struck by the enormous organisational effort that displays all of Deller’s ability to rely on a network of knowledge and professional expertise, even with associations involved in battle re-enactments and costumed historical events.22 Here, too, we find the artist’s interest in the pro- cesses of collective memory and its loss, but The Battle of Orgreave was also an attempt to reconstruct the very idea of society that Thatcher had denied – one of her slogans was “There is no such thing as Society” – precisely through the concept of delegation and collaboration with others to achieve a common interest. As far as possible, Deller relied on the memories of the miners and police officers to recreate the battle scene, putting the many newspaper articles in the background; in essence, allowing the many personal memories to direct the course of the re-enactment. It is a reconstruction process not to be consid- ered definitively concluded since Deller presents it again in the form of a film (shot by Mike Figgs), an archive (in the 21 Ibid.; See also A. Correia, “Interpreting Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave,” Visual Culture in Britain, no.7 (2006): 93-112. 22 On this subject, numerous articles and volumes have come out on both the artistic and the more purely theatrical side. In addition to the texts already mentioned, I would add: R. Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Routledge: London, 2011); M. Franko, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); V. Agnew., J. Lamb, J. Tomann, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies (New York: Routledge, 2020); C. Baldacci, C. Nicastro, A. Sforzini, eds., Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022); C. Baldacci, S. Franco, eds., On Reenactment: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools (Accademia University Press: Turin, 2022). ROBERTO PINTO 98 AN-ICON  Tate Modern collection), and a catalogue (The English Civil War / Part II), and it nevertheless remains present in the minds of the many participants and spectators (a distinc- tion whose legitimacy is to be verified) who took part in the reconstruction of the events on 17 June 2001. As Amelia Jones explains well, crucially, The Battle of Orgreave itself is continually changing— and is never presented as a “final” or fully coherent work or object, even though it consists of documents, objects, and other mate- rial traces of prior re-enactments. Notably, too, while many of the other re-enactments tellingly substitute the re-enactor as new “author” of a unique and ultimately static (documented) work, Deller himself does not feature in a noticeable way either as part of the re-enactment or the public relations materials circulating around the film, its most visible “documentation”—the work in its infinite permutations does not tend to devolve back to a singular body, though it does only have coherence in relation to the author-name Jeremy Deller.23 Deller is fascinated by history, but instead of seeking its element of order, repetition, and the possibil- ity of foreseeing things, he strives to make room for the complexity that is necessarily chaos and confusion. As art critic Teresa Macrì points out in her Politics/poetics,24 it is disorder that fascinates the artist, and often this confusion is identified with mass movements, collective participation, and the public dimension of his work. From a historical point of view, these projects can be juxtaposed with Jochen Gerz’s Counter-Monument,25 but I believe that Deller’s works are more a continuation 23 A. Jones, “‘The Artist is Present.’ Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence,” TDR. The Drama Review 55, no. 1 (2021): 16-45, 24. 24 T. Macrì, Politics/Poetics (Milano: Postmedia, 2014). 25 J.E. Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992): 267-296. ROBERTO PINTO 99 AN-ICON  of the actions of political art collectives in the 1970s and 1980s, and I am thinking above all of Group Material – which disbanded in 199626 – or the previously mentioned art ac- tivist Suzanne Lacy. As in their work, in the operations of the British artist there is no truth to be sought with an ideological attitude, rather the aim is to try to share ideas and above all to try to listen to the many dissonant voices and counter-narratives that have not been given sufficient space in the dominant discourse. At the same time, he perhaps distances himself from them precisely because of the popular/spectacular dimension that his works take on, because of the attention he dedicates to the spectator – a role that is always possible and never wholly absent in his works, which goes hand in hand with that of participant/ performer. 26 “It’s hard not to feel that Group Material broke significant ground but missed the party. The year they broke up, 1996, coincides with a proliferation of new forms of social practice lately successful in museum exhibitions and biennials, whether in the work of Francis Alÿs or Jeremy Deller.” A. Green, “Citizen Artists: Group Material,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 26 (2011): 17-25. ROBERTO PINTO 100 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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History and Stories through Jeremy Deller’s Performances by Roberto Pinto Jeremy Deller Public art Mass performance 14-18 now We’re here because we’re here Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello History and Stories through Jeremy Deller’s Performances ROBERTO PINTO, Università di Bologna – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1559-5759 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19792 Abstract “I wanted to make a memorial that was alive, not an object or set of objects to make a pilgrimage to; a memorial that would come to you, that would appear in your city, town or shopping centre, intervening in your daily life.” With these words, Jeremy Deller introduces us to his We’re Here Because We’re Here, created as part of the events commemorating the First World War. With the help of Rufus Norris, director of the National Theatre, Deller organised a gigantic mass performance in which some 2,000 volunteers disguised as World War I soldiers wandered around the main cities of the United Kingdom without anyone having warned the citizens of their presence. Through this work by Deller (and by comparing it with other artistic experiences), the text intends to investigate how some contemporary artistic interventions seek to exploit the mechanisms of performance in order to reconstruct historical events not only by relying on the strategies of re-enactment, but also by resorting to an immersive relationship linked to the un- expected capable of producing extreme involvement, a process that solicits the emotional states to which, in the harshest moments of war, the community is subjected. Keywords Jeremy Deller Public art Mass performance 14-18 now We’re here because we’re here To quote this essay: R. Pinto, “History and Stories through Jeremy Deller’s Performances,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 88-100, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19792. ROBERTO PINTO 88 AN-ICON A memorial that would come to you, that would appear in your city, town or shopping centre, intervening in your daily life1 The topic (and issue) of monuments and the commemoration of historical events has been at the centre of debate in recent decades. There have been many dis- cussions – in public, within more academic contexts and in art institutions – on the question: can statues or, more generally, artistic events still be – and how – valuable tools for activating processes of remembrance and re-elabora- tion of collective mourning or past tragic events? There have also been many striking and spec- tacular interventions/performances questioning the value of these objects inherited from a past often marked by more than one dark side. We could sum the matter up with these questions: just because they are part of our tradition, are they still able to represent us? Do they have the right to con- tinue to be considered as common symbols to be shared? Or should they be transformed into artistic artefacts that need to be historically contextualised and become part of museum heritage? (On the grounds that museums are better suited to preserving such artefacts and providing ac- curate descriptions of the context from which they come.) Among the many recent episodes, I believe everyone still has in mind the demolition of the monument to Edward Colston, “benefactor” and slave trader, on 7 June 2020 in Bristol, an event that took place in the emotional aftershock of the killing of George Floyd in the United States and the Black Lives Matter movement. In today’s climate, there is no shortage of harsh criticism of institutions when they struggle to adapt to the demands of groups and communities who do not feel rep- resented at all and, arguably, express an expectation that some of the fundamental rights of all people should be 1 J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here (London: Thames and Hudson, 2017): 61. ROBERTO PINTO 89 AN-ICON  respected. This is all the more so when dealing with sym- bols in shared and important places, such as statues and monuments. In this context, the initiative by British institu- tions to create a complex and cohesive project to mark the centenary of the First World War in an attempt to experi- ment with new ways of sharing seems to me a fascinating case study. It is clear that, whichever way one reads this historical event, one cannot ignore the fact that it was, in every respect, a long and devastating war. The initiative was a harsh testing ground for artists and institutions, given the risk of falling into the rhetoric of patriotic ideals and the celebration of the courage and daring of the participants, which had until now been indispensable prerequisites for celebrations of historical events such as this. The UK Arts Programme was the promoter of 14-18 NOW, a genuinely diverse and cohesive programme that saw the creation of 107 projects, the involvement of 420 artists2 using different media (theatre, cinema, visual arts, poetry, music) which, in most cases, were hybrid forms. It is also worth emphasising the very high level of the artists involved; they included Gillian Wearing, John Akomfrah, Raqs Media Collective, Tobias Rehberger, Yinka Shonibare, Suzanne Lacy, Rachel Whiteread, Mark Wallinger, Ryoji Ikeda, and William Kentridge.3 Many had already dealt with contemporary history and the related political problems on their journey. It should therefore be seen as an act of cour- age on the part of the promoting body – and of recognising the issues underlying an anniversary that could lend itself to controversy and misunderstanding – that they identified artists sensitive to cultural and political commitment who were well aware of the nature and extent of the dangers inherent in a project commemorating a war. One of the 2 According to its official website the project commissioned works from 420 artists, and engaged 35 million people. “About 14-18 Now,” 14-18 Now, https://www.1418now.org.uk/ about/, accessed December 15, 2022. 3 For the full list see https://www.1418now.org.uk/artists/, accessed December 15, 2022. ROBERTO PINTO 90 AN-ICON  aims of this event was, therefore, to try to change the nar- rative that has been made of the history told by European nations mainly through the arts, which have reconstructed and told it exclusively from the point of view of their specific national identities.4 Within this experimentation, I would like to place as a case study We’re here because we’re here by Jeremy Deller – created in collaboration with Rufus Norris – because, perhaps more than any other, it seems to me symbolic of the ability to put forward attractive solutions that directly address the role the public takes on in com- memorations and make the experience as multi-sensorial and engaging as possible. Elements that are the leitmotif of Immersed in the Work. From the Environment to Virtual Reality. In doing so, I would at least like to point out the proj- ects Across and In-Between by Suzanne Lacy5 and Pages of the Sea by Danny Boyle,6 which adopt an approach in many ways similar to the work of the London-based artist. Throughout his career, Jeremy Deller has often chosen subjects related to history and politics and has always used a collaborative and participatory approach right from the design phase. His artistic practices have 4 In order to clarify the position of the planners, the words of Margaret MacMillan, who, in the introduction to the volume collecting information on 14-18 Now, explains “Governments often want to tidy up the past and impose a single unified version of what happened back then - at Waterloo, say, or the Battle of the Somme. But there can be no one view. Women, men, diverse ethnic groups, religions or social classes, start from different viewpoints, and what they see in the past may be guided by that. So marking the 100th anniversary of the First World War, that vast and destructive struggle from 1914 to 1918, was never going to be easy. We can agree that it was a catastrophe that destroyed the old confident Europe and left a strangely and irrevocably altered world. Beyond that there are, and always have been, profound differences over how we remember and commemorate that war. We still cannot agree on how it started or why it went on for so long, and we still debate its meaning and its legacy a century later.” J. Waldman, M. MacMillan, eds., 14-18 Now: Contemporary Arts Commissions for the First World War Centenary (Profile: London, 2019). See also within the same volume the essay by David Olusoga. Cfr D. Olusoga, “Art as a lens: Re-Globalising the First War,” ibid.: 12-13. 5 Suzanne Lacy’s work, made between 18 and 23 October 2018, on the occasion of the centenary of Ireland’s Declaration of Independence (and the subsequent border that has since divided Northern Ireland from Éire) aims to investigate borders and the influence they have had on our lives. See: https://www.1418now.org.uk/commissions/across-and-in-between/, accessed December 15, 2022. 6 Boyle’s work, Pages of the Sea, took place on 11 November 2018 and was intended to celebrate the centenary of the Armistice. See “On 11 November 2018,” Pages of The Sea, https://www.pagesofthesea.org.uk, accessed December 15, 2022. ROBERTO PINTO 91 AN-ICON  contributed to redefining the boundaries of contemporary art also because, in creating his works, he has had to try his hand as an art producer, director, event organiser, archivist as well as photographer, performer and installation creator, the latter roles being more standard within contemporary art. The project commissioned by the WW1 Cente- nary Art Commission from Deller was related to celebrating the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles in military history. Over 141 days, more than a million casu- alties were recorded. On the first day alone, the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties. Jeremy Deller’s idea was to create a mobile and temporary memorial7 that would dialogue with the present day and attempt to overturn the need to create a specific place dedicated to the memory of people and events by conceiving, instead, “a memorial that would come to you, that would appear in your city, town or shopping centre, intervening in your daily life. [...] It was as much about today as it was about 1916.”8 To meet this need, with the help of Rufus Norris – the theatre and film director who has been Artistic Director of the National Theatre since 2015 – he staged a massive performance in which more than 1,400 volunteers, dressed in the uniforms of World War I soldiers, with no public announcement of their presence, appeared in more than 40 cities9 on 1 July 2016, making contact with UK citizens going about their daily business, and moving from one part of a city to an- other. Deller had deliberately excluded the actors/ participants from meeting in all those places that had, 7 “I wanted to make a contemporary memorial to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, one that moved around the UK with an unpredictability in which the participants, by their actions, took the memorial to the public.” Deller in https://becausewearehere.co.uk/we-are-here-about/, accessed December 15, 2022. 8 J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. 9 To access the map of the event see https://becausewearehere.co.uk/we-are-here-map/ , accessed December 15, 2022. ROBERTO PINTO 92 AN-ICON  even remotely, a relation to celebrations and rituals – so no churches, public buildings, cemeteries, or locations of historical significance. In their place, train or metro stations, busy squares and streets, shopping malls or meeting plac- es. Often in rather thickly crowded groups, these anachronistic soldiers had to present themselves in central areas and busy places to interact with citizens, returning their gaze and smiling at them, although they were not expected to engage in conversations or stimulate verbal exchanges. They had to limit themselves, occasionally and chorally, to singing a song to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” with the words “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here,” hence the title of the work. British soldiers10 also often used this line as a hymn wishing for the war’s end. The idea of remaining silent was Norris’s sug- gestion,11 and, in a way, silence became a real communi- cative strategy for Deller to construct his sort of re-enact- ment:12 the silence before the event, which was completely concealed from the public until the day the performers appeared in the cities, and the substantial silence of the participants interrupted by the chants that occasionally accompanied the soldiers in their wanderings through the 10 Deller explained: “When I read about this song, I realised I not only had an activity for the men but also a title for the piece. It explains nothing, it’s pointless and repetitive, a little like the fate of a foot soldier or even the nature of man’s addiction to conflict.” J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. 11 C. Higgins, “#Wearehere: Somme tribute revealed as Jeremy Deller work,” The Guardian (July 1, 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jul/01/wearehere-battle-somme- tribute-acted-out-across-britain, accessed December 15, 2022. 12 Although, as we shall see, Deller has constructed genuine re-enactments, on this occasion this work cannot be properly considered as such, even though, often, this term is used as a hypernym. On this subject see S. Mudu, “Under the sign of Reenactment,” in C. Baldacci, S. Franco, eds., On Reenactment: Concepts, Metodologies, Tools (Turin: Accademia University Press, 2022). ROBERTO PINTO 93 AN-ICON  cities. During the weeks of training13 in the run-up to 1 July, Norris and Deller had explicitly requested of all participants that interaction with the spectators should stop there, at si- lence, at a simple exchange of glances, and that the possi- ble explanation/interpretation of the event unfolding before the mostly astonished eyes of the spectators should be left to the calling card – a choice dictated by both purely tech- nical and symbolic issues. The performative action – given the vastness of the intervention and the mass of people involved – had to remain as simple as possible so as not to force the performers to improvise in the face of the in- calculable variables imposed in an open dialogue with the casual passer-by. The conversation, therefore, would have been entirely uncontrollable and (also given that none of the participants had any professional acting training) the quality standards would probably have suffered. In addition, although I am not aware that this was made explicit, it would also have posed a problem of a symbolic nature: each participant in the performance was the apparition or “ghost” of a dead person, and therefore, silence was the most suitable form to evoke the victims. The actual interaction with the audience, then, took place only through a common calling card which established a dia- logue of glances in the explanation of the work – I represent someone, a specific person with a name, regiment, or rank, who died a hundred years ago, even if I am not him – and which at the same time also became the tombstone, the 13 An interesting insight into the training period for the performers in this project can be found in a conversation between Deller and Emily Lim. Cfr. E. Lim, J. Deller, “Relaxed, open, alive, kind, engaged,” in R. Norris, J. Deller, We’re Here Because We’re Here: 104-113. Here, we also find a document with the “Five Golden Words: Relaxed, open, alive, kind, engaged” and the “Four Golden Rules: 1. Stay Alive – Keep it natural, be comfortable, don’t ever be a statue! 2. Seek Eye Contact – be interested in the public but don’t intimidate them, it’s not a staring competition! 3. Be Kind to the public, don’t ever be rude! 4. Each Card is a Gift – make eye contact when you give it, watch the public’s reaction to it.” Ibid.: 104. ROBERTO PINTO 94 AN-ICON  remnant of the monument.14 In a video filmed by the BBC on this project, Deller said that he owed the idea of making the soldiers who died in that battle appear as ghosts to something he had read during the research period before the work, in which he had found interesting information about phenomena in Britain during the war - of women mainly - seeing dead loved ones in the street, just catching a glimpse of someone on a bus or through a shop window thinking it was their husband or their brother or their son. It became quite a big thing, all these sightings, these apparitions of the dead. So it was as if the project had already happened during the war. People had already seen the dead in the streets.15 Compared to a monument or a more traditional re-enactment of a historical event, which asks us to respect the hero’s sacrifice and celebrate it, Deller shifts the focus to the individual persons, or rather, to the void they left behind, filling it through the concretisation of the ghost of the missing person, thus giving shape to the void created around each of the people who disappeared in the war. This shift also reflects the artist’s desire to avoid any senti- mentality in the representation: “Avoid Sentimentality” was the instruction written on one of his reproduced sheets of notes. The artist explicitly speaks of the goal of giving the audience a “jolt,”16 and a jolt, after all, is at the opposite extreme of storytelling and words of condolence with which 14 “We also equipped each man with a set of ‘calling cards’ which bore the name, regiment and rank of a soldier who died on 1 July. He was representing that person, not pretending to be him. The card was effectively a gravestone, and if a member of the public paid attention to a soldier in any way he or she was given one,” J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. 15 W. Yu (@weiyu970), “Jeremy Deller – We’re Here Because We’re Here,” YouTube video (November 26, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXnr3w74TJs&t=158s, accessed December 15, 2022. 16 J. Deller in J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 61. ROBERTO PINTO 95 AN-ICON  to remember the many qualities of those who have left us – usual procedures in a commemoration of historical events. Nevertheless, the heart of this work is absolutely emotional; in fact, the people who found themselves pass- ing through the cities engaged with the performance were sucked into the event, not only because they felt surrounded by it but, above all, because the absence of rhetoric made them feel exempt from any pressing request to take sides, to accept being part of a community, as any ritual (even a secular one) imposes. The request was only to participate. And perhaps it is precisely in this form of engagement that the diversity lies, compared to others, of Deller’s fascinating offering. It appropriates with this immense “delegated per- formance”17 the principles of spectacularity; it is the child of cinema and a digital and social media culture,18 but, at the same time, does not create artificial distances between spectator and performer, given that the extreme proximity of the encounter with the soldiers made the experience somehow simultaneously unique and intimate. However, this was not the first time that Deller had used these modes of immersive engagement to rec- reate the feeling at least of an episode from the past and bring back to life a part of history that we have forgotten or repressed. This had already happened with It Is What It Is: Conversation about Iraq, from 2009, a collaborative work with Creative Time and the New Museum in New York, in which he had taken a car destroyed by explosives found in Iraq on a tour of 14 US museums to serve as a “backdrop” 17 I refer to the category used by Claire Bishop in C. Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012). 18 See C. Eva, “Reaching the Public” in J. Deller, R. Norris, We’re here because we’re here: 115-116, which begins with the statement: “In many ways We’re here because we’re here is an artwork for the age of social media.” ROBERTO PINTO 96 AN-ICON  to a conversation space in which Iraqi citizens and Ameri- can military personnel, among others, were invited.19 Nevertheless, the work that, in terms of organ- isational strategy and spectator involvement, serves as the premise for We’re here because we’re here is undoubtedly The Battle of Orgreave, from 2001, in which Deller attempted to recreate live – again, as a gigantic participatory perfor- mance – the clashes between police and striking miners at the Orgreave Coking Plant in Yorkshire on 18 June 1984. This episode, one of the harshest and most divisive for Brit- ain in the 1980s and the Thatcher era, had affected Deller as a teenager at the time: I wanted to find out what exactly happened on that day with a view to re-enacting or commemorating it in some way. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the strike, lik e a civil war, had a trau- matically divisive effect at all levels of life in the UK. Families were torn apart because of divided loyalties, the union movement was split on its willingness to support the National Union of Mineworkers, the print media especially contributed to the polarisation of the arguments to the point where there appeared to be little space for a middle ground. So in all but name it became an ideological and industrial battle between the two sections of British society.20 Commissioned and produced by Artangel, The Battle of Orgreave was a reconstruction involving about 19 On his website Deller explains: “This project started as the idea to create a mobile museum of the war in Iraq that would tour the US. Finding material for the museum proved difficult, until we were offered a car that had been used in previous exhibitions. From this car, used as a centrepiece, we constructed a room in the museum where the public could meet and talk to people involved in the conflict in some way. The idea was then taken on the road; we towed the car from New York to LA, stopping off in 14 towns and cities on the way – a classic American road trip route – accompanied by an Iraqi citizen and an enlisted American soldier. It was presented in as neutral a way as possible, which puzzled a lot of people. But it meant that the public were more likely to talk to us, because they weren’t scared of being dragged into some sort of political arena. Sometimes these conversations went on for hours. The car was subsequently donated to the Imperial War Museum in London” https://www.jeremydeller.org/ItIsWhatItIs/ItIsWhatItIs.php accessed December 15, 2022. 20 J. Deller, The English Civil War / Part II (London: Artangel, 2002): 7. ROBERTO PINTO 97 AN-ICON  a thousand people21 – around 800 who had taken part in historical re-enactments, approximately 200 former miners and an unknown number of people who were part of the police force at the time. It was also, in parallel, a massive piece of research with information, photos and videos in addition to, as already described in We’re here because we’re here, a long collective preparation work in which the former miners, above all, also had the role of helping in the reconstruction of events. And as with The Battle of Orgreave, one cannot fail to be struck by the enormous organisational effort that displays all of Deller’s ability to rely on a network of knowledge and professional expertise, even with associations involved in battle re-enactments and costumed historical events.22 Here, too, we find the artist’s interest in the pro- cesses of collective memory and its loss, but The Battle of Orgreave was also an attempt to reconstruct the very idea of society that Thatcher had denied – one of her slogans was “There is no such thing as Society” – precisely through the concept of delegation and collaboration with others to achieve a common interest. As far as possible, Deller relied on the memories of the miners and police officers to recreate the battle scene, putting the many newspaper articles in the background; in essence, allowing the many personal memories to direct the course of the re-enactment. It is a reconstruction process not to be consid- ered definitively concluded since Deller presents it again in the form of a film (shot by Mike Figgs), an archive (in the 21 Ibid.; See also A. Correia, “Interpreting Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave,” Visual Culture in Britain, no.7 (2006): 93-112. 22 On this subject, numerous articles and volumes have come out on both the artistic and the more purely theatrical side. In addition to the texts already mentioned, I would add: R. Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Routledge: London, 2011); M. Franko, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); V. Agnew., J. Lamb, J. Tomann, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies (New York: Routledge, 2020); C. Baldacci, C. Nicastro, A. Sforzini, eds., Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022); C. Baldacci, S. Franco, eds., On Reenactment: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools (Accademia University Press: Turin, 2022). ROBERTO PINTO 98 AN-ICON  Tate Modern collection), and a catalogue (The English Civil War / Part II), and it nevertheless remains present in the minds of the many participants and spectators (a distinc- tion whose legitimacy is to be verified) who took part in the reconstruction of the events on 17 June 2001. As Amelia Jones explains well, crucially, The Battle of Orgreave itself is continually changing— and is never presented as a “final” or fully coherent work or object, even though it consists of documents, objects, and other mate- rial traces of prior re-enactments. Notably, too, while many of the other re-enactments tellingly substitute the re-enactor as new “author” of a unique and ultimately static (documented) work, Deller himself does not feature in a noticeable way either as part of the re-enactment or the public relations materials circulating around the film, its most visible “documentation”—the work in its infinite permutations does not tend to devolve back to a singular body, though it does only have coherence in relation to the author-name Jeremy Deller.23 Deller is fascinated by history, but instead of seeking its element of order, repetition, and the possibil- ity of foreseeing things, he strives to make room for the complexity that is necessarily chaos and confusion. As art critic Teresa Macrì points out in her Politics/poetics,24 it is disorder that fascinates the artist, and often this confusion is identified with mass movements, collective participation, and the public dimension of his work. From a historical point of view, these projects can be juxtaposed with Jochen Gerz’s Counter-Monument,25 but I believe that Deller’s works are more a continuation 23 A. Jones, “‘The Artist is Present.’ Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence,” TDR. The Drama Review 55, no. 1 (2021): 16-45, 24. 24 T. Macrì, Politics/Poetics (Milano: Postmedia, 2014). 25 J.E. Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992): 267-296. ROBERTO PINTO 99 AN-ICON  of the actions of political art collectives in the 1970s and 1980s, and I am thinking above all of Group Material – which disbanded in 199626 – or the previously mentioned art ac- tivist Suzanne Lacy. As in their work, in the operations of the British artist there is no truth to be sought with an ideological attitude, rather the aim is to try to share ideas and above all to try to listen to the many dissonant voices and counter-narratives that have not been given sufficient space in the dominant discourse. At the same time, he perhaps distances himself from them precisely because of the popular/spectacular dimension that his works take on, because of the attention he dedicates to the spectator – a role that is always possible and never wholly absent in his works, which goes hand in hand with that of participant/ performer. 26 “It’s hard not to feel that Group Material broke significant ground but missed the party. The year they broke up, 1996, coincides with a proliferation of new forms of social practice lately successful in museum exhibitions and biennials, whether in the work of Francis Alÿs or Jeremy Deller.” A. Green, “Citizen Artists: Group Material,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 26 (2011): 17-25. ROBERTO PINTO 100 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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From Inside to Outside (and Vice Versa) by Francesco Tedeschi Outside-inside Light Grazia Varisco Gruppo T Lucio Fontana Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello From Inside to Outsi 1 de (and Vice Versa) FRANCESCO TEDESCHI, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8007-4258 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/20002 Abstract This contribution will focus on some aspects of the roots of environmental art in Italy, with reference to works created between the 1950s and 1960s by Lucio Fon- tana, to environments designed by members of Gruppo T and other artists (Giulio Paolini, Luciano Fabro) in the 1960s, and through reflections on the different uses of space that were defined with the exhibition Lo spazio dell’immagine held in Foligno in 1967. The approach is not, however, that of a historical review of well-known events, but of an inves- tigation into the way to understand the relationship between outside and inside, the sense and value of the “passage,” the conception of the modifying factors, starting with light, which have acted on the definition of space as an element to be perceived, rather than a place to be in, emphasising the dynamics that define a dialectical, if not antithetical, re- lationship with respect to architectural and design qualities in the proper sense, leading to reading the environmental art intervention as an invitation to follow a path. Keywords Outside-inside Light Grazia Varisco Gruppo T Lucio Fontana 1 The title of this contribute takes up the one elaborated for my essay in the catalogue of the exhibition M. Meneguzzo, ed., Grazia Varisco: Percorsi contemporanei 1957-2022 (Milan: Skira, 2022, exhibition catalogue), having at its end a reflection on a work by the same Grazia Varisco. To quote this essay: F. Tedeschi, “From Inside to Outside (and Vice Versa),” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 101-111, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/20002. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 101 AN-ICON  My paper addresses the question of the envi- ronment, a practice implemented in the art of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on the relationship between the position of the “observer” and the structural elements of the artworks, as well as the role reversal between subject and object in the work of art and its perceptual process. A few of the contents I will present are derived from a course I held recently at Università Cattolica in Milan, focused on the relationship between the idea and realiza- tion of a certain type of “sites” in several forms of visual art that have moved from the representative dimension to that of an active participation in space, meant as the artic- ulation of relationship between different fields and subjects. Sites implying a “passage,” such as the window and, the door, the threshold, the labyrinth and finally the mirror. All of these sites could be defined as “transitional.”2 Among them, one with a peculiar symbolic (as well as practical) relevance is the “corridor:” an architectural space which essentially connects different rooms in an apartment and tends to be perceived merely as a service space, in some way devoid of a function of its own. In the royal palaces from past eras, it was often used to measure the distance from the outside – the realm of common people – to the inside – the place of power. So, it owns a strongly tempo- ral dimension, as demonstrated by Aleksandr Sokurov in the film Russian Ark (2002), along which the author relives Russian history as a journey through the corridors (and halls) of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. In such sense, the corridor is the form with which the purpose of a form of art qualified as “environ- mental” is best identified, through artworks addressing space as actual matter, and not an inert dimension; more specifically, the matter of a presentation both objective and subjective. As critics have consistently pointed out, most of the projects of this environmental kind tend to be perceived 2 And so I defined them in the book derived by that course: F. Tedeschi, Luoghi di transizione: forme e immagini di “passaggio,” fra arte e architettura (Brescia: Scholé- Morcelliana, 2020). I would like to thank Andrea Pinotti and Elisabetta Modena, who asked me to take part in this publication on the basis of the topics I dealt with there. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 102 AN-ICON  as “paths” and not as static or stable sites to contemplate. The corridor, as in the most crucial artistic proposals, is what lies in the middle, giving substance, sometimes in an impalpable and invisible way, to a space kept in conti- nuity between two conditions. It has to be considered – to borrow a term from the psychology of perception – as an “in-between.” It’s the “space between,” the subject matter for a distracted attention; an intermediate nature which can nonetheless constitute the very reason for its legitimization. Let me begin with an emblematic image, an extremely suggestive painting by 17th Century Dutch paint- er Samuel van Hoogstraten, a follower of Rembrandt. It is known as View of a corridor (oil on canvas, 1662; Dyrham Park, Gloucestershire). It could be considered as the junc- tion between two cultural inheritances, that of perspective as a system for processing represented space, and that of the analytical investigation of the interiors of bourgeois houses in 17th Century Holland. What might catch the eye of today’s viewer is the sense of emptiness in the cen- tral part of the painting, immersed in a peculiar light, that could be considered as the actual subject of the work. Of course, the “void” is not absolute, given the presence of many decorative elements, as well as some humans and animals placed at the margins, qualifying the combination between anthropic and architectural dimensions. Yet, the void “fills up” the central part of the painting, infused as it is with light, reflections, shadows. With all of these ele- ments taking the viewers on a visual journey through the represented space, this uncluttered area holds the func- tion of questioning them, of bringing them inside, into the silence of an intimate place.3 Of course, this place attracts and intrigues the viewer precisely because of its domestic character, starting with the juxtaposition between the dog and the mop in the foreground. The most important feature of the painting, here, is that it is based on emptiness as a 3 This painting is considered in several moments of V.I. Stoichita, L’instauration du tableau (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1993). See also, for the concept of a space overturned from outside to inside, G. Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 103 AN-ICON  way to deny any subject matter: at the same time, it can be considered as an anecdotical exercise, which goes beyond any narrative logic. For that, it is a very “modern” painting. Looking at the opposite end of this elaboration of the theme of the “void,” we can immediately move to one of the light installations that reveal the sense of a “cor- ridor” characterized by light as the medium of the artwork. An absolute zeroing, if not for the effect produced by the substance of the light, is the specific object of Dan Flavin’s attention: for instance, in his project for a wing of the Litta Menafoglio Panza di Biumo villa in Varese, following the commission by Giuseppe Panza. The transition through the different connotations of light coming from the side rooms – as well as that produced by the lighting of the very corridor defining the space of the architecture in its depth – articulates a visual and physical “path” determined by the variability of its solutions, due to the effect of the design of the color-lights, generating a truly modern and apparently claustrophobic perception of space as pure architecture, measurement, time. Thinking of a form of art based on space as a medium, however, we must mention the example of Lucio Fontana and his environments, possibly the most striking instance of an artwork progressively dematerialized by its tangible, material state. With Fontana, we are at the cross- roads of multiple impulses, such as the tension to overcome the distinction between different techniques, to imagine a proposal for an autonomous space, embodied by light itself and in its relationship with the architectural context. In these three types of artworks – the van Hoogstraten’s painting and the environments by Flavin and Fontana – we encounter three different articulations of an ongoing journey through space, either literal or delegated to an imaginary subject, with his or her body and gaze. A space that is both objective and subjective, meant as it is to host a projection of the self in the place, and, at the same time, to constitute a manifestation of its own, a rea- son for the actions of a simultaneously active “I/you,” as FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 104 AN-ICON  a kind of relationship between the inside and the outside that involves the subject in a shared perception.4 In his 1949 Ambiente spaziale a luce nera, Fon- tana equipped the space of Galleria del Naviglio with a particular light, which could appear futuristic at the time: a Wood’s lamp, surrounded by mobile fluorescent shapes cut out of papier-mâché, almost as if to justify the existence of an object to look at and perceive in a newly-configured space. Some of his subsequent structures would be even more radical, such as the one created in Amsterdam in 1967, consisting of an intersection between five narrow corridors placed side by side, and completed by a perpen- dicular one: a T-shaped transit space bathed in red light. This installation was reenacted, with updated technological means, in the striking, accurate reconstruction of Lucio Fontana’s environments at Hangar Bicocca a few years ago. Even with this installation – one of the least celebrated among Fontana’s spaces, which explains why it was not reenacted until the 2017 exhibition, and then again as the only “environment” displayed in the 2019 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York – Fontana appears to anticipate some of the effects produced by a few Amer- ican artists, who reduced the investigation of space to a matter of perception. A practice exemplified by the work of Bruce Nauman, and particularly by his “corridors” and their constrictive, delocalizing effects. By shifting the focus from structure to perception (which is what distinguishes Nau- man’s works from Flavin’s), we actually question the very nature of space, at the same time introducing the notion of a somehow objectified ego. The observer is observed, and thus turned into a visual object, particularly in installa- tions featuring TV screens and cameras that reproduce – in alienated fashion – the actions performed by the viewers 4 In this sense, this concept is close to the use of the definition of “avatarization” by Andrea Pinotti; see A. Pinotti, “Procuratori del sé. Avatar e avatarizzazione,” in T. Gatti, D. Maini, eds., Visual studies: l’avvento di nuovi paradigmi (Milan: Mimesis, 2019): 27-40. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 105 AN-ICON  themselves. The screen thus becomes a spying device or a “magic mirror.” A center of such investigation of the inside-out- side relationship could be found in the questions on the origin of forms outlining space itself. These are extend- ed, then, to the relationship between internal and external space in a specific instance, and also to the questions about the subject and the object of the experience. For this reason, we shall address how Fontana approaches an im- portant phase in the development of his Spatial Concepts, concerned with the practical manifestation of an idea of space revealed in the apparent two-dimensional nature of the picture format. In 1952 several canvases from the more spe- cifically “cosmogonic” series5 were used by the artist to demonstrate how they could be conceived as “fragments of space” or space generators, in the sense that their en- tity is manifested in a twofold way: as works to be looked at frontally or to be “pierced” by light, thus creating a new space modified by the luminous projection of the holes, and at the same time canceling out the pictorial surface on which they are actually located. This exploration – pre- sented through a series of photographs, one of which was chosen to illustrate the catalogue of the exhibition at Gal- leria del Naviglio that year – was followed up in the exper- iments carried out by Fontana with television, in the tests carried out at the RAI studios in Milan. In this case, as far as we can see, Fontana was even more focused on the “hidden” side of his works, foregrounding the light trails that occupied that “other space” represented by the pro- jection screen. Conceptually, this exploration can also be considered one of the roots of the recent elaborations of “VR” or immersive reality in the creation of virtual spaces, both from a technological philosophical perspective. We can certainly trace this evolution from the light-pierced Spatial Concepts to the actual environment 5 As they were categorized by Enrico Crispolti in his analysis of Fontana’s work. See E. Crispolti, Fontana: catalogo generale (Milan: Electa, 1986); see also E. Crispolti, Omaggio a Lucio Fontana (Rome: Carocci, 1971). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 106 AN-ICON  in a few works created by the artist in the following years, such as that for the 1964 Triennale, the one displayed in Minneapolis in 1966, or the one included in the exhibit Spazio dell’immagine in Foligno, in 1967. It may be useful to elaborate briefly on the latter exhibition, due to its historical relevance, as it established two very different directions in exploring the relationship with space. On the one hand, as in Fontana’s works, space is conceived as the very material of the work, an environ- ment to inhabit, in which those who pass through or linger become part of a perceptive condition (of a field).6 On the other hand, space is seen as the environment for an “im- age” or an “object,” either complete in itself or combined, according to specific forms of installation. Such distinction cannot be too rigid, as the two tendencies were intersected on several occasions. However, proposals such as that by Enrico Castellani can be recognized as deriving directly from Fontana’s example. Castellani’s White environment applies principles of design and architecture the artist had already identified in a singular “Albertian” derivation the previous year, in his room at the Venice Biennale. Again, Intercamera plastica by Paolo Scheggi, Blu abitabile by Agostino Bonalumi, Interpretazione speculare by Getulio Alviani, up to After Sctructures by Gianni Colombo, one of the environments with the decisive presence of light that varies the perception, are all to be considered as products of Fontana’s influence. At the crossroads with the condition of the object are the instances of a “space within space,” which can be exemplified by Mario Ceroli’s Gabbia or by Luciano Fabro’s In-cubo (to Carla Lonzi). On the other hand, leaving aside works of singular importance, such as the Pozzi-specchio by Pistoletto or Tubo by Eliseo Mattiac- ci, one could mention the staging by Tano Festa, Subito dopo il cielo (dedicated to Francesco Lo Savio), for its po- etic quality. This brief list serves to illustrate the different practices showcased in a project that explored both the 6 An important presence in psychological, sociological and planning studies in that time is the so-called “theory of field,” proposed in Italy by Attilio Marcolli. See A. Marcolli, Teoria del campo (Florence: Sansoni, 1971). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 107 AN-ICON  aforementioned directions, from the tributes to Lucio Fon- tana and Ettore Colla, which provided the respective points of departure, and somehow emerged clearly in the various texts in the exhibition catalogue.7 In some of them, we find an echo of the ideas put forward, on the occasion of the earlier exhibition Fuoco Immagine Acqua Terra (L’Attico, Rome, June 1967), by Maurizio Calvesi and Alberto Boat- to, and the origin of the definition of “Im-Space” which, a few months later, would be linked to the first appearance of “Arte Povera,” in the exhibition Arte Povera – Im Spazio, curated by Germano Celant at the La Bertesca gallery in Genoa (September-October 1967). What I have said so far may provide a useful background for a work that I perceive as emblematic of an idea of space as a “path,” but with peculiar attention to light as substitute of gaze. This environment appears like a closed room; however, it produces, from the inside, a sense of passage, an immediate relationship between the physical eye and the virtual eye of a source of light that pushes on space as if to open it up. I am referring to the environment created by Grazia Varisco for the Schwarz gallery in Milan in October 1969 (Fig.1). The installation has been recreated on several occasions in recent years (Fig. 2).8 The room, conceived by the artist as an environ- ment designed in an extremely articulated way, covers an overall perimeter significantly larger than its actual size, expanding the sensation or perception of time, besides that of space. To make this sensation tangible, the author darkened the space, a frequent solution among the artists 7 See the catalogue of the exhibition which took place in 1967 at Palazzo Trinci in Foligno: U. Apollonio, G.C., Argan, P. Bucarelli, eds., Lo spazio dell’immagine (Venice: Alfieri Editori d’Arte, 1967). 8 See the catalogue of the exhibition which took place at Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome from December 14, 2005 to May 21, 2006: M. Margozzi, L. Meloni, F. Lardera, eds., Gli ambienti del Gruppo T. Le origini dell’arte interattiva (Roma: Silvana, 2006, exhibition catalogue): 54-55, 32-35. For further information about this and other environments of the group see L. Meloni, Gli ambienti del Gruppo T (Roma: Silvana, 2004). More recently, Varisco’s environment has been exhibited in Vertigo: Op Art and a History of Deception 1520-1970, MUMOK, Wien, 25 May - 26 October, 2019 (the exhibition also travelled to Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart, November 23, 2019 - April 20, 2020), before the retrospective hosted at Palazzo Reale in Milan from June 2 to September 16, 2022; see the catalogue: M. Meneguzzo, ed., Grazia Varisco: Percorsi Contemporanei 1957-2022 (Milan: Skira, 2022, exhibition catalogue); F. Tedeschi, “Dall’interno all’esterno (e viceversa). Il concetto di spazio ‘percorribile’ nell’opera di Grazia Varisco,” ibidem: 26-29. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 108 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. G. Varisco, model of the Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotemporal dilatation of a path, 1969, reconstruction of the environment for the solo exhibition at Galleria Schwarz, Milan, 1969. Fig. 2. G. Varisco, reconstruction of the environment Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotemporal dilatation of a path, 1969, at the exhibition “Gli ambienti del gruppo T,” Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, 2006. who, following the Fontana’s example, used light as a cre- ative and descriptive element of space. As a matter of fact, Varisco placed a “luminous eye” at the center, which, by means of a mechanical process, rotates progressively, in- dicating the trajectory of a path that pushed from the inside outwards, generating a visual and physical sensation at the same time. The light replaces, rather than following it, the gaze of the person undertaking the role of “bystander,” to quote Brandi:9 i.e. a presence experiencing space as a relationship between being and existing. This, as the artist observes, increases the complexity of an active participa- tion, as well as physical relationship, with the site, plunged as it is into the interiority of darkness: the viewer actually experiences two alternative spaces, that of the eye-line of 9 See C. Brandi, Struttura e architettura (Turin: Einaudi, 1967) and Teoria generale della critica (Turin: Einaudi, 1974). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 109 AN-ICON  light and that of the eye-physical presence of the viewer’s own body. Perhaps, the very essence of the work lies precisely in its drive to overcome the constraints of the structure, without actually doing more than absorbing the enchantment of a suspended, outstretched time. The un- derlying character of the work is then a condition of “path” to be completed according to the twofold participation of an active movement and a virtual one. It should be noted that, about ten days before the inauguration of her solo show at the Schwarz gallery – on which occasion this en- vironment, Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotemporal dilatation of a path, was proposed – Grazia Varisco had participated to Campo Urbano, an event pro- moted by Luciano Caramel in Como. Here, she made an intervention in a public space, immortalized by the photo- graphs by Ugo Mulas, who followed and documented the events of that memorable day. On that occasion, Varisco had appropriated a street in the town center, involving a large group of people to help here create a series of walls arranged in a meander, made up of cardboard boxes. By cluttering up the road, the work extended the time nec- essary to walk through it. This operation was also called Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotempo- ral dilatation of a path, and in this case the perception of the “urban field,” experienced alternatively with amusement or annoyance, resulted in an immediate application of a principle of modification of reality, due to the presence of a structure that affects movement and, as a consequence, the psychological perception of the entire environment. As the artist writes in the short note later published in the cat- alogue of the Schwarz gallery exhibition, “I see and feel longer. The reactions of impatience or satisfaction change if I try the route again.”10 10 G. Varisco, “Dilatazione spazio temporale di un percorso” in G. Accame, Grazia Varisco (Bergamo: Maredarte, 2001): 102. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 110 AN-ICON  As in other environmental works from a time imbued with a strong imagination of the future, the laby- rinth condition produced by these two operations can be seen as an experiment on a way of thinking and feeling in relation to objects and space. The echo of this attitude is evident in a series of works produced by the artist in the following years, titled Random walks by random numbers. In these screen-printed compositions, the combination of chance and design produce a virtual direction into which the viewers are supposed to get lost, and then rediscover themselves, as Varisco states: “And I play with imagina- tion: I imagine moving robotically, in a defined space with unpredictable steps – or with a pencil on squared paper – letting myself be guided exclusively by the sequence of numbers to which I have previously associated a direction. Chance and design. Not being able to predict my path, I don’t know if my movements will be contained in the space, on the sheet.”11 From the virtual space of painting to the real space of the built environment, from the virtual space of a projection that includes the viewer as a participant and an object, to that of a sheet that records movements, ei- ther made or imagined, the creation of an interior from the exterior and the reworking of an outside from the inside are exemplified here through a practice rooted in the drive to explore space, which has guided, up to this point, the experiments of several generations of artists. 11 G. Varisco, “Random Walks – 1972,” in G. Accame, Grazia Varisco: 108. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 111 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

anicon

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/20002

From Inside to Outside (and Vice Versa) by Francesco Tedeschi Outside-inside Light Grazia Varisco Gruppo T Lucio Fontana Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello From Inside to Outsi 1 de (and Vice Versa) FRANCESCO TEDESCHI, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8007-4258 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/20002 Abstract This contribution will focus on some aspects of the roots of environmental art in Italy, with reference to works created between the 1950s and 1960s by Lucio Fon- tana, to environments designed by members of Gruppo T and other artists (Giulio Paolini, Luciano Fabro) in the 1960s, and through reflections on the different uses of space that were defined with the exhibition Lo spazio dell’immagine held in Foligno in 1967. The approach is not, however, that of a historical review of well-known events, but of an inves- tigation into the way to understand the relationship between outside and inside, the sense and value of the “passage,” the conception of the modifying factors, starting with light, which have acted on the definition of space as an element to be perceived, rather than a place to be in, emphasising the dynamics that define a dialectical, if not antithetical, re- lationship with respect to architectural and design qualities in the proper sense, leading to reading the environmental art intervention as an invitation to follow a path. Keywords Outside-inside Light Grazia Varisco Gruppo T Lucio Fontana 1 The title of this contribute takes up the one elaborated for my essay in the catalogue of the exhibition M. Meneguzzo, ed., Grazia Varisco: Percorsi contemporanei 1957-2022 (Milan: Skira, 2022, exhibition catalogue), having at its end a reflection on a work by the same Grazia Varisco. To quote this essay: F. Tedeschi, “From Inside to Outside (and Vice Versa),” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 101-111, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/20002. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 101 AN-ICON  My paper addresses the question of the envi- ronment, a practice implemented in the art of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on the relationship between the position of the “observer” and the structural elements of the artworks, as well as the role reversal between subject and object in the work of art and its perceptual process. A few of the contents I will present are derived from a course I held recently at Università Cattolica in Milan, focused on the relationship between the idea and realiza- tion of a certain type of “sites” in several forms of visual art that have moved from the representative dimension to that of an active participation in space, meant as the artic- ulation of relationship between different fields and subjects. Sites implying a “passage,” such as the window and, the door, the threshold, the labyrinth and finally the mirror. All of these sites could be defined as “transitional.”2 Among them, one with a peculiar symbolic (as well as practical) relevance is the “corridor:” an architectural space which essentially connects different rooms in an apartment and tends to be perceived merely as a service space, in some way devoid of a function of its own. In the royal palaces from past eras, it was often used to measure the distance from the outside – the realm of common people – to the inside – the place of power. So, it owns a strongly tempo- ral dimension, as demonstrated by Aleksandr Sokurov in the film Russian Ark (2002), along which the author relives Russian history as a journey through the corridors (and halls) of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. In such sense, the corridor is the form with which the purpose of a form of art qualified as “environ- mental” is best identified, through artworks addressing space as actual matter, and not an inert dimension; more specifically, the matter of a presentation both objective and subjective. As critics have consistently pointed out, most of the projects of this environmental kind tend to be perceived 2 And so I defined them in the book derived by that course: F. Tedeschi, Luoghi di transizione: forme e immagini di “passaggio,” fra arte e architettura (Brescia: Scholé- Morcelliana, 2020). I would like to thank Andrea Pinotti and Elisabetta Modena, who asked me to take part in this publication on the basis of the topics I dealt with there. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 102 AN-ICON  as “paths” and not as static or stable sites to contemplate. The corridor, as in the most crucial artistic proposals, is what lies in the middle, giving substance, sometimes in an impalpable and invisible way, to a space kept in conti- nuity between two conditions. It has to be considered – to borrow a term from the psychology of perception – as an “in-between.” It’s the “space between,” the subject matter for a distracted attention; an intermediate nature which can nonetheless constitute the very reason for its legitimization. Let me begin with an emblematic image, an extremely suggestive painting by 17th Century Dutch paint- er Samuel van Hoogstraten, a follower of Rembrandt. It is known as View of a corridor (oil on canvas, 1662; Dyrham Park, Gloucestershire). It could be considered as the junc- tion between two cultural inheritances, that of perspective as a system for processing represented space, and that of the analytical investigation of the interiors of bourgeois houses in 17th Century Holland. What might catch the eye of today’s viewer is the sense of emptiness in the cen- tral part of the painting, immersed in a peculiar light, that could be considered as the actual subject of the work. Of course, the “void” is not absolute, given the presence of many decorative elements, as well as some humans and animals placed at the margins, qualifying the combination between anthropic and architectural dimensions. Yet, the void “fills up” the central part of the painting, infused as it is with light, reflections, shadows. With all of these ele- ments taking the viewers on a visual journey through the represented space, this uncluttered area holds the func- tion of questioning them, of bringing them inside, into the silence of an intimate place.3 Of course, this place attracts and intrigues the viewer precisely because of its domestic character, starting with the juxtaposition between the dog and the mop in the foreground. The most important feature of the painting, here, is that it is based on emptiness as a 3 This painting is considered in several moments of V.I. Stoichita, L’instauration du tableau (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1993). See also, for the concept of a space overturned from outside to inside, G. Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 103 AN-ICON  way to deny any subject matter: at the same time, it can be considered as an anecdotical exercise, which goes beyond any narrative logic. For that, it is a very “modern” painting. Looking at the opposite end of this elaboration of the theme of the “void,” we can immediately move to one of the light installations that reveal the sense of a “cor- ridor” characterized by light as the medium of the artwork. An absolute zeroing, if not for the effect produced by the substance of the light, is the specific object of Dan Flavin’s attention: for instance, in his project for a wing of the Litta Menafoglio Panza di Biumo villa in Varese, following the commission by Giuseppe Panza. The transition through the different connotations of light coming from the side rooms – as well as that produced by the lighting of the very corridor defining the space of the architecture in its depth – articulates a visual and physical “path” determined by the variability of its solutions, due to the effect of the design of the color-lights, generating a truly modern and apparently claustrophobic perception of space as pure architecture, measurement, time. Thinking of a form of art based on space as a medium, however, we must mention the example of Lucio Fontana and his environments, possibly the most striking instance of an artwork progressively dematerialized by its tangible, material state. With Fontana, we are at the cross- roads of multiple impulses, such as the tension to overcome the distinction between different techniques, to imagine a proposal for an autonomous space, embodied by light itself and in its relationship with the architectural context. In these three types of artworks – the van Hoogstraten’s painting and the environments by Flavin and Fontana – we encounter three different articulations of an ongoing journey through space, either literal or delegated to an imaginary subject, with his or her body and gaze. A space that is both objective and subjective, meant as it is to host a projection of the self in the place, and, at the same time, to constitute a manifestation of its own, a rea- son for the actions of a simultaneously active “I/you,” as FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 104 AN-ICON  a kind of relationship between the inside and the outside that involves the subject in a shared perception.4 In his 1949 Ambiente spaziale a luce nera, Fon- tana equipped the space of Galleria del Naviglio with a particular light, which could appear futuristic at the time: a Wood’s lamp, surrounded by mobile fluorescent shapes cut out of papier-mâché, almost as if to justify the existence of an object to look at and perceive in a newly-configured space. Some of his subsequent structures would be even more radical, such as the one created in Amsterdam in 1967, consisting of an intersection between five narrow corridors placed side by side, and completed by a perpen- dicular one: a T-shaped transit space bathed in red light. This installation was reenacted, with updated technological means, in the striking, accurate reconstruction of Lucio Fontana’s environments at Hangar Bicocca a few years ago. Even with this installation – one of the least celebrated among Fontana’s spaces, which explains why it was not reenacted until the 2017 exhibition, and then again as the only “environment” displayed in the 2019 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York – Fontana appears to anticipate some of the effects produced by a few Amer- ican artists, who reduced the investigation of space to a matter of perception. A practice exemplified by the work of Bruce Nauman, and particularly by his “corridors” and their constrictive, delocalizing effects. By shifting the focus from structure to perception (which is what distinguishes Nau- man’s works from Flavin’s), we actually question the very nature of space, at the same time introducing the notion of a somehow objectified ego. The observer is observed, and thus turned into a visual object, particularly in installa- tions featuring TV screens and cameras that reproduce – in alienated fashion – the actions performed by the viewers 4 In this sense, this concept is close to the use of the definition of “avatarization” by Andrea Pinotti; see A. Pinotti, “Procuratori del sé. Avatar e avatarizzazione,” in T. Gatti, D. Maini, eds., Visual studies: l’avvento di nuovi paradigmi (Milan: Mimesis, 2019): 27-40. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 105 AN-ICON  themselves. The screen thus becomes a spying device or a “magic mirror.” A center of such investigation of the inside-out- side relationship could be found in the questions on the origin of forms outlining space itself. These are extend- ed, then, to the relationship between internal and external space in a specific instance, and also to the questions about the subject and the object of the experience. For this reason, we shall address how Fontana approaches an im- portant phase in the development of his Spatial Concepts, concerned with the practical manifestation of an idea of space revealed in the apparent two-dimensional nature of the picture format. In 1952 several canvases from the more spe- cifically “cosmogonic” series5 were used by the artist to demonstrate how they could be conceived as “fragments of space” or space generators, in the sense that their en- tity is manifested in a twofold way: as works to be looked at frontally or to be “pierced” by light, thus creating a new space modified by the luminous projection of the holes, and at the same time canceling out the pictorial surface on which they are actually located. This exploration – pre- sented through a series of photographs, one of which was chosen to illustrate the catalogue of the exhibition at Gal- leria del Naviglio that year – was followed up in the exper- iments carried out by Fontana with television, in the tests carried out at the RAI studios in Milan. In this case, as far as we can see, Fontana was even more focused on the “hidden” side of his works, foregrounding the light trails that occupied that “other space” represented by the pro- jection screen. Conceptually, this exploration can also be considered one of the roots of the recent elaborations of “VR” or immersive reality in the creation of virtual spaces, both from a technological philosophical perspective. We can certainly trace this evolution from the light-pierced Spatial Concepts to the actual environment 5 As they were categorized by Enrico Crispolti in his analysis of Fontana’s work. See E. Crispolti, Fontana: catalogo generale (Milan: Electa, 1986); see also E. Crispolti, Omaggio a Lucio Fontana (Rome: Carocci, 1971). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 106 AN-ICON  in a few works created by the artist in the following years, such as that for the 1964 Triennale, the one displayed in Minneapolis in 1966, or the one included in the exhibit Spazio dell’immagine in Foligno, in 1967. It may be useful to elaborate briefly on the latter exhibition, due to its historical relevance, as it established two very different directions in exploring the relationship with space. On the one hand, as in Fontana’s works, space is conceived as the very material of the work, an environ- ment to inhabit, in which those who pass through or linger become part of a perceptive condition (of a field).6 On the other hand, space is seen as the environment for an “im- age” or an “object,” either complete in itself or combined, according to specific forms of installation. Such distinction cannot be too rigid, as the two tendencies were intersected on several occasions. However, proposals such as that by Enrico Castellani can be recognized as deriving directly from Fontana’s example. Castellani’s White environment applies principles of design and architecture the artist had already identified in a singular “Albertian” derivation the previous year, in his room at the Venice Biennale. Again, Intercamera plastica by Paolo Scheggi, Blu abitabile by Agostino Bonalumi, Interpretazione speculare by Getulio Alviani, up to After Sctructures by Gianni Colombo, one of the environments with the decisive presence of light that varies the perception, are all to be considered as products of Fontana’s influence. At the crossroads with the condition of the object are the instances of a “space within space,” which can be exemplified by Mario Ceroli’s Gabbia or by Luciano Fabro’s In-cubo (to Carla Lonzi). On the other hand, leaving aside works of singular importance, such as the Pozzi-specchio by Pistoletto or Tubo by Eliseo Mattiac- ci, one could mention the staging by Tano Festa, Subito dopo il cielo (dedicated to Francesco Lo Savio), for its po- etic quality. This brief list serves to illustrate the different practices showcased in a project that explored both the 6 An important presence in psychological, sociological and planning studies in that time is the so-called “theory of field,” proposed in Italy by Attilio Marcolli. See A. Marcolli, Teoria del campo (Florence: Sansoni, 1971). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 107 AN-ICON  aforementioned directions, from the tributes to Lucio Fon- tana and Ettore Colla, which provided the respective points of departure, and somehow emerged clearly in the various texts in the exhibition catalogue.7 In some of them, we find an echo of the ideas put forward, on the occasion of the earlier exhibition Fuoco Immagine Acqua Terra (L’Attico, Rome, June 1967), by Maurizio Calvesi and Alberto Boat- to, and the origin of the definition of “Im-Space” which, a few months later, would be linked to the first appearance of “Arte Povera,” in the exhibition Arte Povera – Im Spazio, curated by Germano Celant at the La Bertesca gallery in Genoa (September-October 1967). What I have said so far may provide a useful background for a work that I perceive as emblematic of an idea of space as a “path,” but with peculiar attention to light as substitute of gaze. This environment appears like a closed room; however, it produces, from the inside, a sense of passage, an immediate relationship between the physical eye and the virtual eye of a source of light that pushes on space as if to open it up. I am referring to the environment created by Grazia Varisco for the Schwarz gallery in Milan in October 1969 (Fig.1). The installation has been recreated on several occasions in recent years (Fig. 2).8 The room, conceived by the artist as an environ- ment designed in an extremely articulated way, covers an overall perimeter significantly larger than its actual size, expanding the sensation or perception of time, besides that of space. To make this sensation tangible, the author darkened the space, a frequent solution among the artists 7 See the catalogue of the exhibition which took place in 1967 at Palazzo Trinci in Foligno: U. Apollonio, G.C., Argan, P. Bucarelli, eds., Lo spazio dell’immagine (Venice: Alfieri Editori d’Arte, 1967). 8 See the catalogue of the exhibition which took place at Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome from December 14, 2005 to May 21, 2006: M. Margozzi, L. Meloni, F. Lardera, eds., Gli ambienti del Gruppo T. Le origini dell’arte interattiva (Roma: Silvana, 2006, exhibition catalogue): 54-55, 32-35. For further information about this and other environments of the group see L. Meloni, Gli ambienti del Gruppo T (Roma: Silvana, 2004). More recently, Varisco’s environment has been exhibited in Vertigo: Op Art and a History of Deception 1520-1970, MUMOK, Wien, 25 May - 26 October, 2019 (the exhibition also travelled to Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart, November 23, 2019 - April 20, 2020), before the retrospective hosted at Palazzo Reale in Milan from June 2 to September 16, 2022; see the catalogue: M. Meneguzzo, ed., Grazia Varisco: Percorsi Contemporanei 1957-2022 (Milan: Skira, 2022, exhibition catalogue); F. Tedeschi, “Dall’interno all’esterno (e viceversa). Il concetto di spazio ‘percorribile’ nell’opera di Grazia Varisco,” ibidem: 26-29. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 108 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. G. Varisco, model of the Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotemporal dilatation of a path, 1969, reconstruction of the environment for the solo exhibition at Galleria Schwarz, Milan, 1969. Fig. 2. G. Varisco, reconstruction of the environment Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotemporal dilatation of a path, 1969, at the exhibition “Gli ambienti del gruppo T,” Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, 2006. who, following the Fontana’s example, used light as a cre- ative and descriptive element of space. As a matter of fact, Varisco placed a “luminous eye” at the center, which, by means of a mechanical process, rotates progressively, in- dicating the trajectory of a path that pushed from the inside outwards, generating a visual and physical sensation at the same time. The light replaces, rather than following it, the gaze of the person undertaking the role of “bystander,” to quote Brandi:9 i.e. a presence experiencing space as a relationship between being and existing. This, as the artist observes, increases the complexity of an active participa- tion, as well as physical relationship, with the site, plunged as it is into the interiority of darkness: the viewer actually experiences two alternative spaces, that of the eye-line of 9 See C. Brandi, Struttura e architettura (Turin: Einaudi, 1967) and Teoria generale della critica (Turin: Einaudi, 1974). FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 109 AN-ICON  light and that of the eye-physical presence of the viewer’s own body. Perhaps, the very essence of the work lies precisely in its drive to overcome the constraints of the structure, without actually doing more than absorbing the enchantment of a suspended, outstretched time. The un- derlying character of the work is then a condition of “path” to be completed according to the twofold participation of an active movement and a virtual one. It should be noted that, about ten days before the inauguration of her solo show at the Schwarz gallery – on which occasion this en- vironment, Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotemporal dilatation of a path, was proposed – Grazia Varisco had participated to Campo Urbano, an event pro- moted by Luciano Caramel in Como. Here, she made an intervention in a public space, immortalized by the photo- graphs by Ugo Mulas, who followed and documented the events of that memorable day. On that occasion, Varisco had appropriated a street in the town center, involving a large group of people to help here create a series of walls arranged in a meander, made up of cardboard boxes. By cluttering up the road, the work extended the time nec- essary to walk through it. This operation was also called Dilatazione spaziotemporale di un percorso / Spatiotempo- ral dilatation of a path, and in this case the perception of the “urban field,” experienced alternatively with amusement or annoyance, resulted in an immediate application of a principle of modification of reality, due to the presence of a structure that affects movement and, as a consequence, the psychological perception of the entire environment. As the artist writes in the short note later published in the cat- alogue of the Schwarz gallery exhibition, “I see and feel longer. The reactions of impatience or satisfaction change if I try the route again.”10 10 G. Varisco, “Dilatazione spazio temporale di un percorso” in G. Accame, Grazia Varisco (Bergamo: Maredarte, 2001): 102. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 110 AN-ICON  As in other environmental works from a time imbued with a strong imagination of the future, the laby- rinth condition produced by these two operations can be seen as an experiment on a way of thinking and feeling in relation to objects and space. The echo of this attitude is evident in a series of works produced by the artist in the following years, titled Random walks by random numbers. In these screen-printed compositions, the combination of chance and design produce a virtual direction into which the viewers are supposed to get lost, and then rediscover themselves, as Varisco states: “And I play with imagina- tion: I imagine moving robotically, in a defined space with unpredictable steps – or with a pencil on squared paper – letting myself be guided exclusively by the sequence of numbers to which I have previously associated a direction. Chance and design. Not being able to predict my path, I don’t know if my movements will be contained in the space, on the sheet.”11 From the virtual space of painting to the real space of the built environment, from the virtual space of a projection that includes the viewer as a participant and an object, to that of a sheet that records movements, ei- ther made or imagined, the creation of an interior from the exterior and the reworking of an outside from the inside are exemplified here through a practice rooted in the drive to explore space, which has guided, up to this point, the experiments of several generations of artists. 11 G. Varisco, “Random Walks – 1972,” in G. Accame, Grazia Varisco: 108. FRANCESCO TEDESCHI 111 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19773

Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitio by Annette Urban VR-art ns Environmental immersion Epistemic Objects installation art De-distancing/de-differentiation Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitions ANNETTE URBAN, Ruhr-Universität Bochum – https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19773 Abstract In contemporary understanding, a now normal- ized immersion continues to be associated with digitality and high-tech apparatuses, but is also seen as diffused into the lifeworld. Against this backdrop, the article focuses on two current artworks that extend the internal environmen- tality inherent in VR as a spatialized image into physical space by using strategies from installation and site-related art. These examples provide for an equation and nesting of work, environment and exhibition that is interpreted here as a potentiated environmentalization. The artistic VR-environ- ments by no means negate their rootedness in imagery, but rather self-reflexively reveal the transitions between image and three-dimensionality, what gives them a special epis- temic valence. It thus seems worthwhile to relate them to considerations of knowledge objects and exhibitions, but also to (queer) phenomenological theories of entanglement and becoming originating from the following of lines. ANNETTE URBAN 112 AN-ICON  Meanwhile, the epistemic value of their latent objects, disoriented paths, and impossible spaces is only revealed in the interaction with and embodied experience of the virtual space. The article thus participates in debates on how bodily immersion does not exclude, but enables action and reflection within aesthetic experience. With re- gard to two fundamental paradigms of immersion, it can show how, for this purpose, the artworks turn anew the strategies of de-distancing and de-differentiation. Keywords VR-art Environmental immersion Epistemic Objects installation art De-distancing/de-differentiation To quote this essay: A. Urban, “Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitions,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 112-138, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19773. ANNETTE URBAN 113 AN-ICON  De-Distancing and De-Differentiation: Contemporary Aesthetics of Immersion Immersion is again attracting much attention. Film and media studies, art history, image sciences and narratology have all long participated in its theorization. More recently, theatre, performance and game studies, architectural theory and the history of knowledge1 have joined in, taking into account a whole range of everyday digital technologies and thus deferring questions of image aesthetics and image technology in favor of investigating body/media/environment relationships. Whereas some the- oretical contributions highlight the immersive aspects of a specific medium, there is also a broad tendency to deal with immersion as a prime symptom of today’s image cul- tures and media ecologies what is evidenced by collective terms such as immersive media,2 environmental images and iconoscapes. To speak more generally of immersive media deliberately goes beyond media-technical foundations of the concept by arguing with transmedial relevant opera- tions. These are already rooted in narratology, where the opening up and simultaneous closing of a fictional world is accomplished cognitively-mentally: Perceptual immer- sion is therefore seen to be necessarily complemented by imaginative immersion,3 which only ensures that the sen- sory stimuli of a medium are translated into a virtual world.4 After the debate has been strongly linked to Virtual Reality since the 1990s, immersion continues to be considered under the premises of digital technologies, but at the same time is also discussed as nowadays’ conditio humana and condition of daily life. Lars C. Grabbe has proposed a new 1 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: Zu einer Wissensgeschichte der Immersion (Baden Baden: Nomos, 2019). For Kasprowicz, the immersion concept can be retrieved from the “maelstrom of negative connotations as illusion and absorption” by being understood as a “media anthropological practice of de- and re-differentiation of the body [Körper und Leib] in mediatized environments.” Ibid.: 14. 2 Cfr., among others, the Yearbook of Immersive Media 2011-2017, ed. by Institute for Immersive Media at Kiel University of Applied Sciences. 3 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: 18, with reference to Marie-Laure Ryan. 4 Cfr. T. Hochscherf, H. Kjär, P. Rupert-Kruse, “Phänomene und Medien der Immersion,” in Jahrbuch immersiver Medien 3 (2011): 9-19, 14, with reference to Matthew Lombard/Theresa Ditton. ANNETTE URBAN 114 AN-ICON  cultural-theoretical figure of the homo immergens which he considers to be the equivalent of a culture of media hybrids: In succession or better combination of the human capaci- ties for symbol formation and image production, the homo immergens has become the creator of its own “multimodal and simulative environments”5 whereby the distance to the medial artifact is reduced and a worldly experience is generated. Thus, recent insights of immersion research owe much to theorizing across media, on the basis of me- dia hybridity, as well as to inputs from other branches of scholarship. Within these multi-faceted approaches two key features emerge that I propose to summarize as a reduction of distance responsible for felt presence and as a reduction of difference. These two aspects cover both, the particular attitude of reception, which has been characterized as a way of submerging, of mental absorption, and bodily-emo- tional involvement, as well as the various forms of transfor- mative exchange or even assimilation that occur between the recipient and the object of contemplation – to put it in the classical dichotomy of aesthetic experience. Mean- while, the principles of de-distancing and de-differentiation unfold in numerous ways. They involve more-than-visual, bodily modes of experience, that can be interpreted as a re-centering of the world and the subject, but also as new forms of empathy and encounter. The latter may culminate in ideas of matter-flow inspired by Deleuze/Guattari and of leaving behind all subject-object dichotomies, which some suppose to be still at work in the quasi-objects of the philosophy of science.6 Or they remain – as with Grabbe’s term of representational convergence referring to the con- vergence of exterior and mental representations7 – closer to the realm of images whose unframing gives the beholder 5 L. C. Grabbe, “Homo Immergens: Immersion as a Parameter for a Media and Cultural Theory of Medial Hybridity,” in J. Bracker, A. Hubrich, eds., The Art of Reception (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021): 400-422, 400. 6 Cfr. T. Ingold, “Drawing Together: Materials, Gestures, Lines,” in T. Otto, N. Bubandt, eds., Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology (Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2010): 299-313, 304-305. 7 Cfr. L. C. Grabbe, “Homo Immergens:” 400. ANNETTE URBAN 115 AN-ICON  the feeling of being surrounded by them. This perspective on artificially spatialized images8 invites to focus on the transitions between images and illusionistic 3D-entities, and to a closer examination of the environmentalization inherent in it. In the widely ramified discourse on environ- mentality, the art historical point of view still seems under- represented as far as the obvious link with the so-called Ausstieg aus dem Bild, with installation and site-related art is concerned. They equally mark a significant reference point for spatialization and meanwhile break down the status of art as distinct, object-like work. Instead, the art historical interrogation of environmentality has recently been deep- ened in reference back to screen media and the paradigm of projection: In her comprehensive study, Giuliana Bruno has illuminatingly interpreted the spatiality established by light projection in terms of materially transformative pro- cesses, transductive conversions of energy and the histo- ries of energetic environments. But while she emphasizes the ambulatory “non-linear movement in forms of trans- duction”9 and explicitly investigates inhabitable spaces of immersion, with her focus on the act of projection, however, environmentality remains tied back to a transitive gesture of transmission and transport.10 In a broader disciplinary context, its exploration ranges from the new non-visual environments established by sensor technologies, from biologically, autopoietically or systems-theoretically con- ceptualized relations between an organism/a system and its Umwelt, to the environmental concerns of new material- ism, anthropology and queer phenomenology, rewriting the Heideggerian irreducible world reference of the embodied self. Sara Ahmed’s approach is of particular interest here because it takes up the “bodily inhabitance of […] space”11 8 Cfr. J. Schröter, “Die Ästhetik der virtuellen Welt: Überlegungen mit Niklas Luhmann und Jeffrey Shaw,” in M. Bogen, R. Kuck, J. Schröter, eds., Virtuelle Welten als Basistechnologie für Kunst und Kultur? Eine Bestandsaufnahme (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2015): 25-36. 9 G. Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (Chicago- London: Chicago University Press, 2021): 109. See also ibid.: 111-112. 10 Ibid.: 2. 11 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006): 6. ANNETTE URBAN 116 AN-ICON  as a basic parameter of orientation, but in doing so opens up Heidegger’s familiarity with the world to other directions and objects that were not always already at hand. Similarly, in Tim Ingold’s anthropology, “joining with the togetherings of life”12 as drawn lines serves a better understanding of the particular environmentality of the lifeworld. In the following, I propose to combine art historical thinking about site-related installation aesthetics with phenomenological and episte- mological perspectives. They promise an understanding of bodily extension into space as an orientedness towards objects as well as towards others and simultaneously take account of an unstable objecthood. This offers an alterna- tive way out of problematic dualistic premises that so far often separate art historical genealogies of immersion and debates on aesthetic experience from knowledge-historical considerations that see subject-object dichotomies under- mined precisely by immersed bodies and their negotiation of environmental relations.13 As I want to show by analyzing two examples by Theodoulos Polyviou and Rosa Menkman, the de-differ- entiation between the work, its spatial surroundings and, by consequence, the exhibition display, is in particular rene- gotiated in recent VR-art. Its often closed imaginary worlds do not only present themselves as spatialized images, but simultaneously as an assemblage of things in space that reinforce the connection to installation art and display is- sues. As Christiane Paul remarked in 2003, VR does not only allow for the “full […] immers[ion of] its users in a three-dimensional world generated by a computer” but also for “an interaction with the virtual objects that comprise that world.”14 While the immersive environment thus means the withdrawal of the artwork as a singular (pictorial) object and counterpart of aesthetic experience, it simultaneously results in a multiplication of spatially arranged objects to which the visitor relates in an interactive, cognitive and – we might add – environmental or even (life) worldly way. This 12 T. Ingold, “Drawing together:” 303. See also ibid.: 301-304. 13 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: 22, 24, 30. 14 C. Paul, Digital Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003): 125. ANNETTE URBAN 117 AN-ICON  ultimately leads to a multiplied nesting of work, environ- ment and exhibition whose institutional and infrastructural conditions I will briefly consider at the end. Normalized Immersion and the Epistemics of Virtual Objects and Spatialities The recent VR-artworks of Polyviou and Menk- man have been chosen for this study because, to some extent, they reinvest in immersive high-tech media arrange- ments similar to those of the 1990s and early 2000s. Cy- prus-born artist Theodoulos Polyviou resorts to calculated 3D environments that reproduce existing spaces with ar- chitectural precision and make them individually explorable via head-mounted display (HMD) as well as on the desktop. Dutch artist and theorist Rosa Menkman uses the online walk-through spaces of the newart.city.org platform to host a collection of im/possible images in a specially designed artificial environment. At the same time, the two artists share the impulse to re-embed the virtual into a physical environment. Polyviou works with an elaborate recalibration of the virtual to the physical exhibition space, and Menk- man reintegrates the interactive experience of the website into an exhibition design she creates, which in its own way restructures the physical space. This shared concern with relocalization hints at a contemporary understanding of immersion that does not privilege computer-generated simulated worlds. Doris Kolesch has summarized it as “an increasingly everyday interaction not only with digital media, but also and above all, with designed spaces and spaces of experience.”15 Indeed, this now normal immersive con- dition is also elaborated in terms of architectural and ur- ban spaces that are in negotiation with images.16 However, 15 D. Kolesch, “Ästhetik der Immersion,” in G. W. Bertram, S. Deines, D. M. Feige, eds., Die Kunst und die Künste: Ein Kompendium zur Kunsttheorie der Gegenwart (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021): 422-441, 422 [my translation]. 16 Cfr. L. Bieger, “Ästhetik der Immersion. Wenn Räume wollen. Immersives Erleben als Raumerleben,” in G. Lehnert, ed., Raum und Gefühl. Der Spatial Turn und die neue Emotionsforschung (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag 2011): 75-95. ANNETTE URBAN 118 AN-ICON  “immersion as factual state description,”17 may primarily end in a World without Us, as Inke Arns points out, where invisibly working smart technologies create non-delimited, post-visual environments. Does VR still play a significant part in such a ubiquitous immersion? While on the one hand the selected artworks explore the “specific experience and mediality of the body-environment relationship”18 stressed by Kolesch, on the other hand, in unfolding a virtually walkable environ- ment, they do not deny their rootedness in imagery and even expose their latent objecthood. They engage with environmental aesthetics by presenting themselves as an environment withholding any designated artwork or as a mere framework for other images. With the unstable ref- erences of their elements, they fully play out the role of virtual as epistemic objects and combine representation with operability. This approaches all the more the genre of knowledge exhibitions, as they invest in VR’s capacities of getting the user “immersed in reflection,”19 to quote Katja Kwastek’s term for reconciling the (inter)action-based mode of digital art with the traditionally contemplative aesthetic experience. Early installation art such as Lucio Fontana’s Ambiente spaziale already shows how physical spaces with the help of mirroring and lightning effects combine immer- sion with ontological speculation. Within VR-art, the latter is stimulated by oscillations between image and three-di- mensionality. And it is intensified by virtual spatialities that similarily become a theoretical object of epistemic value, not only because of the heightened disorientation in spaces freed from physical regularity, but also as a result of more or less pure calculation. This affinity to abstraction mostly escapes the attention to hyperrealistic 3D-design and in- stead sometimes refers back to the sublime in art where natural phenomena fluidly transition into intangible abstract 17 I. Arns, “Qualityland, oder: Der Immersion begegnen,” Jahrbuch für Kulturpolitik, 2017/18: Welt. Kultur. Politik - Kulturpolitik in Zeiten der Globalisierung: 211-220, 212 [my translation]. 18 D. Kolesch, “Ästhetik der Immersion:” 422. 19 K. Kwastek, “Immersed in Reflection? The Aesthetic Experience of Interactive Media Art,” in B. Dogramaci, F. Liptay, eds., Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media (Leiden, Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2016): 66-85. ANNETTE URBAN 119 AN-ICON  emptiness. In 3D-environments, straight lines serve as ge- neric framework of spaces, which, through texturing and mapping, also directly emerge from images. Of particular interest is whether this linear ab- stractness is at the same time getting practicable in the course of the (manual) navigation through Polyviou’s and Menkman’s synthetic environments, enabled by the HMD with its tracking systems and hand-held controllers and by the maneuvers on the keyboard in the desktop-based versions. This passing through as the prevalent mode of VR-experience20 can be further clarified by (queer-)phenom- enological concepts of inhabiting space by taking directions and following lines, especially non-geometric entangled lines, giving high value to disorientation and turning toward objects as Sara Ahmed states.21 Insofar that this includes “lining ourselves up with the features of the grounds we in- habit, the sky that surrounds us, or the imaginary lines that cut through maps,”22 it already assumes a connection be- tween physical, expressly natural and virtual spaces which extends up to technically-based environments. In a similar vein, Tim Ingold explicitly considers lines as basic element of immersion responsible for an embedding into the life- world. For him, coming to life results from being “immersed in those generative currents”23 such as wind, for example, which also alters the state of man-made tools and techni- cal objects transcending a purely transitive use. Thereby Ingold’s concept of lines gains a potential for change and implies passages between the actual and the virtual.24 With their help, he problematizes objects understood as “dis- crete, finished entities” which he judges as a mere obstacle for drawing and “designing environmental relations.”25 Lines, 20 I use the terms VR-experience, VR-environments and VR-works as broad concepts also including desktop-based virtual environments which have an immersive character on their own. 21 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: 1-2. 22 Ibid.: 6. 23 T. Ingold, “Drawing Together:” 305. 24 Ingold’s repeated recourse to Deleuze/Guattari’s concept of the line of flight (ligne de fuite) remains beyond the scope of this article, but is worth following in M. De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005). 25 T. Ingold, M. Anusas, “Designing Environmental Relations: From Opacity to Textility,” Design Issues 29, no. 4 (2013): 58-69, 58. ANNETTE URBAN 120 AN-ICON  in contrast, as exemplified by the inseparable correlation of a river and its banks, are emblematic of correspondences and engender a different kind of thinking: “to correspond with [the waters] is to join this awareness with the flow.”26 They privilege an intransitive mode of “joining with” rather than “joining of.” Putting VR-Art on Exhibition When contemporary art today is testing the potentials of VR as an artistic medium, its borrowings from installation art are not exclusively motivated by the pragmatics of exhibiting in art museums. Many artists use this necessity for initiating ontological speculations on the continuum between virtual reality and the shared here and now in the museum. They intertwine the setting up of the interior pictorial world with the installative anchoring of the VR-experience in the exhibition space, thus producing their own form of potentiated environmentality connected to quite different strands of installative and site-related art. Here, only a brief comparison can point to how, in Banz & Bowinkel’s work Mercury (2017) (Fig. 1) for example, the filigree pavilion architecture that creates a second artificial habitat high above Planet Earth in the VR, extends into a metallic display for the processor and the second screen in the exhibition. And to another German VR-artist, Flori- an Meisenberg who chooses an illusionistic backdrop, as known from photo and film studios, to illusionistically em- bed the gesticulating wearer of the HMD into the abstract grid landscape of Superstudio’s 70s planetary architectural utopia. In both examples, the environments also serve to house other artworks. But instead of activating the institu- tional or archival concerns of installation art, they extend the artificially generated, often fictionalized world within the VR into the exhibition context which is more in line with the staging of illusionistic worlds by means of props in 26 T. Ingold, Knowing from the Inside: Correspondences, (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 2017): 41. ANNETTE URBAN 121 AN-ICON  cinema and cinematographic installation art. The VR-works by Polyviou and Menkman persue the reverse path and thus tend to the originally anti-immersive institution-reflex- ive branch: Their freely designable VR-worlds conversely borrow from physical exhibition spaces and their conven- tions of presenting items of cultural value which is worth questioning as another symptom of immersive normality and life worldly virtuality.27 Fig. 1a Fig. 1b Fig. 1a and 1b. Banz & Bowinkel, Mercury, 2016. VR installation, screen capture and installation shot, DAM Gallery, Berlin, 2017. Courtesy of the artists. Theodoulos Polyviou: Drifting, Browsing, Cruising (2021) Besides the issues of art presentation in the pandemic, that influenced both selected artworks, I ask more generally about the role of environmental virtuality in Polyviou’s and Menkman’s action-based and visual-spatial strategies28 of getting the recipient immersed in their work and thereupon re-perspectivize the question of institutional embedding. The first striking feature of Drifting, Browsing, Cruising created by Theodoulos Polyviou together with Eleni Diana Elia at the Centre for Art and Media, ZKM at Karls- ruhe/Germany, is certainly the ground plan true modeling of a computer-generated world based on a specific location 27 Cfr. S. Rieger, A. Schäfer, A. Tuschling, eds., Virtuelle Lebenswelten: Körper - Räume - Affekte (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2021). 28 Kwastek stresses that the action-based experience not necessarily needs visual-spatial illusion (Cfr. “Immersed in Reflection?:” 69), but both aspects are closely united here. ANNETTE URBAN 122 AN-ICON  within the museum. In summer 2021, visitors wearing HMD moved in situ through this doubled environment (Fig. 2-3). Since then, the work can be visited as only desktop-based VR on the online exhibition site fantastic confabulations, that reuses the digital replica of the space for further exhibitions. Contrary to enabling “spatiotemporal transpo- sition,” Polyviou uses VR for evoking a “hyper-awareness of the viewer as to where they are, and what they are doing.”29 That’s why he is re-situating VR-technology by establishing site-related connections to architecturally and historical- ly distinct places. But how is this intended sense of pres- ence, which implies situatedness and agency, created in the site-specific VR-installation at the ZKM? In contrast to many other of his works,30 any direct citation of a third auratic place and its cultural heritage is missing here. Polyviou obviously aims at the recognizability of the original museum space in 3D – the alignment of pillars typical of the former industrial building, the balustrade and the staircase leading to the open atrium as well as the glass partitions to the adjacent spaces are all faithfully reproduced. This makes the absence of the expected distinct artworks all the more noticeable. What one encounters inside, first of all appears as extensions of the serving architecture. The replicated pillars with spotlights are complemented by semicircular, half-height partitions as known from exhibition design. While these virtual supple- ments turn the clear cubic exhibition space into a cluttered and mysterious site, their freely curving floor plan lines re- appear as vinyl stripes on the ground of the physical space. 29 Th. Polyviou in A. Urban, “Virtual Spaces for Transformative Encounters and Vast Reciprocity - An Interview with Theodoulos Polyviou and Jazmina Figueroa,” in L. Nolasco- Rózsás, ed., Beyond Matter, Within Space: Curatorial and Art Mediation Techniques on the Verge of Virtual Reality (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2023): 429-443, 432. 30 See for example the installation Transmundane Economies (2022) at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, with references to the ruins of the Bellapais monastery in the north of Cyprus. ANNETTE URBAN 123 AN-ICON Fig. 2a Fig. 2c Fig. 2b Fig. 2d Fig. 2a, 2b, 2c and 2d T. Polyviou, Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, 2021. Site-specific VR installation, in cooperation with Eleni Diana Elia, installations shots and VR captures (details), ZKM, Karlsruhe 2021. Courtesy of the artists. © Eleni Diana Elia and Theodoulos Polyviou © Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), photo by Tanja Meissner. Produced in the framework of the Beyond Matter Residency Program at ZKM | Karlsruhe. This interplay between paradoxical emptiness and spatial density not only subverts the usual aesthetic experience in art museums with its orientation towards a singled-out art object. The directionality of the space image as an action image, theorized by Stephan Günzel in the context of gaming, where only objects centered in the field of vision can become the object of action,31 also remains unexploited. Instead, the environment privileges spatial exploration and confronts with the paradox phys- icality of its virtual architecture that, like the impermeable built world, diverts the users’ bodies. Without any avatarial 31 Cfr. S. Günzel, “Vor dem Affekt: die Aktion - Emotion und Raumbild,” in G. Lehnert, ed., Raum und Gefühl: Der Spatial Turn und die neue Emotionsforschung (Bielefeld: transcript- Verlag, 2014): 63-74, 67-68. ANNETTE URBAN 124 AN-ICON  representation, their self-perception entirely depends on bodily correlations with the labyrinthine environment, that additionally applies sensory stimuli and atmospheric im- mersion32 including artificial billowing fog on the floor, a sound backdrop and hall lights converted into dramatic illuminations. Thus, the functional architecture that sublim- inally remains perceptible through its calibration with the virtual space, shifts to a fictionalized, suspenseful backdrop that awaits its narration. Priority has the increased intensi- ty of experience typical for spatial-immersive installations and one-sided de-distancing. But the artificial environment here also requires an action- and reflection-based attitude thanks to the latency of its speculative and operable ob- jects and thus enacts a highly sensuous, performative form of site-related institutional critique. This comes into action when the foggy atmosphere transforms the built-in walls into jagged rock formations, thereby unifying different mate- rialities in one unstable image-object, or when the flashing spotlights and the variable angle of view instantly turn a black surface into a three-dimensional hide-away (Fig. 3). In addition, the windows that in fact only sepa- rate the next exhibition space, virtually open onto an equally artificial purple exterior, imitating a dramatic skylight. Its emptiness suspends the virtual exhibition space with its balustrades and staircase in an indefinite void, so that the emphasized inside-outside difference gives this VR-topos of floatation an institution-critical side. While Polyviou’s en- vironment is housed/hosted by the museum, it also nests there as an invisible counter-place that virtually undermines the physicality of the institution.33 And by penetrating the interior of the virtual environment, the shadows of the grid windows cite the linear structure of computed space. But this space loses the evenness secured by optical projec- tion when the grid lines synthesize the floor with the pillars to one continuous surface. It thus foreshadows a virtual 32 Cfr. also R. Eugeni, G. Raciti, eds., “Atmosfere mediali,” VCS Visual Culture Studies. Rivista semestrale di cultura visuale, no. 1 (November 2020). 33 Cfr. Th. Polyviou in A. Urban, “Virtual Spaces for Transformative Encounters and Vast Reciprocity:” 430. ANNETTE URBAN 125 AN-ICON Fig. 3a Fig. 3c Fig. 3b Fig. 3a, 3b and 3c T. Polyviou, Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, 2021. Site-specific VR installation, in cooperation with Eleni Diana Elia, VR captures (details), ZKM, Karlsruhe 2021. Courtesy of the artists. © Eleni Diana Elia and Theodoulos Polyviou © Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), Produced in the framework of the Beyond Matter Residency Programat ZKM | Karlsruhe. substantiality beyond the clear differentiation of distinct things and deprived of the stability of usual grounds. This exacerbates the insecurity of the orienta- tion-seeking users who navigate their invisible body through the confusing narrowness of fixtures, pseudo-functional handrails and hall lights. However, this staged reduction of distance is not simply overwhelming. The ambiguous virtual objects also ensure that, by “gather[ing] on the ground,” – as Sara Ahmed has noted – “they create a ground upon which we can gather.”34 Indeed, the mixed environment unites online as well as HMD users whose actions in the physical terrain marked with stripes are simultaneously observed by the museum visitors. Even without direct references to sacred architecture, Polyviou thus links the 34 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: 1. ANNETTE URBAN 126 AN-ICON  VR-typical passing through with a quasi-ritualized use of space. Alison Griffith has already tied back a counter-his- tory of immersive spectatorship in the museum not only to the panorama, science museum, and planetarium, but also to the cathedral.35 In Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, mnemonic mental images ensure the combination of action-based with cognitive immersion, because the disoriented wandering takes place through the comparison of constantly shifting, remembered spaces. When Polyviou decisively theorizes this ritualization as base for a “queer togetherness,”36 this reconnects to the lines printed on the floor. Through their interference with the dense environment inside the VR, they emancipate themselves from the clear legibility as object contour and ground plan. They thus contribute to the cru- cial entanglement that, according to Ingold, gets the “living being […] as a bundle of [the] lines” 37 of its movement im- mersed in its lifeworld. Polyviou therefore stimulates bodily practices of losing oneself in artificially induced passions. The choreographed searching movements inside give the museum space an improvisational openness, while the calibration with the physical pillars and ground makes the VR-experience literally tangible. Environmental immersion here goes hand in hand with a reduction of difference that de-differentiates virtual and physical spaces, bodies and objects. Rosa Menkman: The BLOB of Im/Possible Images (2021) Rosa Menkman’s VR-experience also brings the categories of artwork and exhibition nearly into congruence. But, instead of eliminating distinct artworks, Menkman, for this purpose, departs from a veritable collection assembled under the title of Im/Possible Images (Fig. 4). She stores 35 Cfr. A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 36 “Drifting, Browsing, Cruising,” Fantastic Confabulations, https://fantastic-confabulations.beyondmatter.eu/drifting-browsing-cruising/index.html, accessed December 29, 2022. 37 T. Ingold, “Drawing Together:” 300. ANNETTE URBAN 127 AN-ICON  Fig. 4 Fig. 4. R. Menkman, The BLOB of Im/possible Images, 2021. Desktop-based virtual environment, accessible on the platform New Art City. Courtesy of the artist. this collection on the widely used VR-art platform New Art City where she designed a complex desktop-based virtual environment that shows an enclosed grayish scenery with a staircase, a huge resolution-chart, a humanoid figure and a second free-floating structure pierced by diagonals. Ini- tially hidden from view, the collected images are sheltered inside this amorphous cloud, revealing themselves when one navigates through the permeable sheathing. The nest- ed structure alludes to the titular BLOB with its polysemy of digital blob architecture, the single-celled, ‘intelligent’ su- per-organism and Binary Large Objects as a technical term for databased image processing. And the exhibits that visi- tors have to deal with in this environment are mainly objects of knowledge accessible only through representation, so a reference to their theorizations by Hans-Jörg Rheinberg- er and Susan Leigh Star/John Griesemer is suggested.38 Menkman thus borrows from the realm of scientific images, which has been a central field of debate and self-defini- tion for digital art from the very beginning. She delegates the act of imagining and selecting them by realizing a sur- vey during her Arts at Cern/Collide Barcelona-Residency, asking the researchers what image of a relevant object or 38 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2015): 19-58. ANNETTE URBAN 128 AN-ICON  phenomenon they would capture if “limits of spatial, tem- poral, energy, signal/noise or cost resolutions”39 were irrel- evant. In other words, this variability of resolution results in products of imagineering and touches on phenomena that are decoupled from humans’ experience, escaping their commonly perceived environmentalities. But these phenomena can be mediated by virtual body-environment relations, which conversely force a changed understanding of (aesthetic) experience, as discussed by Roberto Diodato with reference to John Dewey.40 The choice of the nuclear physicists as experts in im/possible images endow the virtual as epistemic objects with a specific latency and scientificity. The referents of their proposed images mostly elude the objecthood familiar to mankind and have nothing in common with the medium-sized “things of the earth’s surface” as characterized by the Gestalt psychologist Fritz Heider.41 Two important aspects shared with Polyviou’s example promise additional insights into the workings of environmental immersion. Firstly, this concerns the embed- ding into abstractness, which goes along with a space that loses its conventional categories and thus favors immersion through the withdrawal of the usual parameters of orienta- tion. This not only stems from the arbitrary laws of physical- ity in VR, but also from a different kind of world reference in ‘virtual bodies environments’, which Diodato emphasizes: “In this intermediary world space itself is the result of inter- activity.”42 In Menkman’s case, the intensified experience is generated not so much by a condensed, labyrinthine spatiality as by the enhanced self-reflexivity of navigation itself. Both, the VR-environment The BLOB of Im/Possible Images and the related video-work Whiteout showing a tour in Harz mountains in heavy snow, deal with the ex- perience in a markerless space tending to exceed human 39 R. Menkman, “The BLOB of Im/possible Images” https://newart.city/show/menkman-blob-of-im-possibilities, accessed December 30, 2022. 40 Cfr. R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: Towards an Aesthetics of Relations (Cham: Springer, 2021): 56. 41 Cited after G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 38. 42 R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: 61. ANNETTE URBAN 129 AN-ICON  senses and erase most thingness. Second, the comparison with Drifting, Browsing, Cruising is based on the re-phys- icalization of the VR-works in the exhibition format. Rosa Menkman conceived a carefully designed exhibition display for a 2021 group show at Munich where she reconnected the VR-experience to the physical space with the help of lines. While in Polyviou’s example the plotting of isomorphic virtual and physical elements onto a planimetric floor plan retains a relative object character, Menkman starts from abstract lines as axes of graphs and coordinate systems. They guide the exploration of the virtual world inside and also mark the thresholds of iconic representation. Touching on signal spectra, digital states and im/material energetic flows, they bring forth what Ingold sees otherwise negated by the regime of solidified things. Within the VR, the resolution chart erected next to the figurine is particularly telling of how Menkman translates resolution into space, taking advantage of the orthogonality of digital as “rasterized […] images” based on a “grid of picture elements or pixels,”43 that, according to Francesco Casetti and Antonio Somaini, also possess a specific plasticity. By mapping the gray structure of the internal blob with the diagonals and its one black anchor point, the resolution chart pretends to guide the VR-user searching to enter this enclosure. Yet, despite the lines piercing the amorphous volume, the chart does not reveal any information about the interior. The charted scales and frequency ranges unmistakably mark this second blob as an image-object of the same digital fabric as the abstractly textured body of the figurine besides, Menkman’s Angelus Novus emblematic for the reversal of gaze regimes. This co-presence of image-objects and -subjects made of dis- torted black-white stripes strongly signals the de-differ- entiation of most diverse entities. The appearance of the things is flexibilized to such a degree that their self-identity 43 F. Casetti, A. Somaini, “Resolution: Digital Materialities, Thresholds of Visibility,” NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies 7, no. 1 (2018): 87-103. ANNETTE URBAN 130 AN-ICON  is disposable and their recognition depends on the user’s bodily action (Fig. 5). Fig. 5a Fig. 5b Fig. 5a and Fig. 5b .R. Menkman, The BLOB of Im/possible Images, 2021, Desktop-based virtual environment, accessible on the platform New Art City, screenshots by the author. Courtesy of the artist. ANNETTE URBAN 131 AN-ICON  As soon as the user has traversed the opaque but permeable grayish membrane of the blob, the envi- ronment transforms into a dark sphere with mystic sound where the im/possible images are scattered in an unmea- surable distance. When the wandering user is attracted by small luminous dots that, up close, turn out to represent the Pale Blue Dot aka Planet Earth, taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 for example, or a Quantum Vacuum, quarks inside of a proton, a shadow of a black hole and a body scan of the interior of a wrist, she/he is once again less guided by the affordances of gaming. To remind Günzel, its “fixed-par- anoid perspective” turns objects into action carriers by shifting them to the center of the image; but here, only the paranoid dimension of permanent searching seems to en- dure “through which the objects in the virtual off must be transferred into actualization.”44 As Roberto Diodato notes with reference to Bernard Stiegler and Richard Grusin, in view of the prevailing premediation techniques and an al- ready thoroughly hypermediated world, it is necessary for the techno-artistic creation of virtual spacetime environ- ments to break the merely adaptive behavior pattern of supposedly active cognitive agents.45 Beyond the gaming attitude running into the void, it is the habits of museum spectators that help surprisingly well – right down to the work texts that pop up on approach. But, of course, the concept of the mimetic image is challenged here by the assembled nuclear- and astrophysical phenomena at the limits of what can still be captured by light or other wave- lengths. Menkman succeeds in staging the uncertain status of such objects of knowledge, which only move into the rank of the existent through new technologies of detection, by making use of the peculiarities of virtual objecthood. This starts with the all-round perspectivability and resulting form variance of the virtual exhibits already known from sculp- ture, joined here by their free scalability and permeability 44 S. Günzel, “Vor dem Affekt:” 68. 45 Cfr. R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: 64-65. ANNETTE URBAN 132 AN-ICON  in direct interaction with the user navigating their invisible bodies through space. The skinned wrist, for example, hits the viewer in powerful plasticity or just hangs in space as flatware, depending on the point of entry into the enclosure of the im/possible images, the viewing angle and proximity to the item. This form of distance reduction self-reflexively combines seeing and (inter-)acting. The less complete im- mersion of desktop-based VR is compensated for by the tactility of maneuvering with arrow keys or touchpad, which transfers its sensation of handling to the virtual objects. Menkman experiments here with re-introducing into art the more immersive displays of the natural history museum,46 whose never-broken connection to science is recalled by Christiane Voss’ reflections on the medium of exhibition,47 and appropriates the knowledge exhibition format. In this setting, barely tangible phenomena such as black holes, dark matter and other galaxies become manageable as in a laboratory that, in terms of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, only brings epistemic things into existence.48 The nested spatial structure of the BLOB in- creases this epistemic valence because it invites for re- peating those transformative immersive crossings from one internal sphere to the next. Outside the encapsulated image collection, the latency of objects is provided by the poly- gon meshes patterned with black/whites lines reminiscent of military dazzle camouflage49 that acts as de-distancing tool precisely by preventing its correct estimation. Instead of simulating natural light conditions, as it often serves to catalyze the atmospheric immersion of a perfected VR, the moiré reveals another form of apparitional fluidity. Con- stantly changing with the user’s movement, the texture shows a pulsating im/materiality that already withdraws at the surface. It seems close to Ingold’s and Ansusas’s notion of infrastice that includes “all manner of electrical, 46 Cfr. A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine. 47 Cfr. C. Voss, “Das Museum als Medium der Kunst,” in G. W. Bertram, S. Deines, D. M. Feige, eds., Die Kunst und die Künste: Ein Kompendium zur Kunsttheorie der Gegenwart (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021): 464-483, 474. 48 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 35. 49 My thanks go to Manuel van der Veen for this reference and the exchange about the text. ANNETTE URBAN 133 AN-ICON  Fig. 6 R. Menkman, The Im/possible BLOB, 2021. Installed at Temporal Stack: the Deep Sensor in Guizhou, China, curated by Iris Long und HE Zike, 2021. Courtesy of the Artist. chemical, and mechanical workings […], energies, gases, and fluids”50 and resists the useability of surfaces solely understood as interfaces. Finally, the artist also uses these textures, as well as the abstract lines of graphs as vehicle for transfer- ring the virtual into physical space. For a presentation of The BLOB at Gizhou/China (Fig. 6), the dynamic black/white pattern has been transformed into a wallpaper. This exhi- bition design attaches more to the cinematically inspired strategy of extending the fictional-scenic image space in- side the VR into an overall immersive installation. But there, without the operability of latent virtual objects, it tends to unrealize the museum with its psychotic pattern. In con- trast, for a group exhibition in Munich that combined the VR-experience and the video Whiteout with works by Memo Akten, Susan Schuppli and others, Menkman materialized the abstract lines from inside the BLOB (Fig. 7). They es- tablished a 3D-framework in physical space whose white, green, red, yellow and blue diagonals traversed the floor and walls of the exhibition hall,51 thus slightly removing it from orthogonality. As these lines are imagined to shift the 50 T. Ingold, M. Anusas, “Designing Environmental Relations:” 58. 51 Cfr. L. Gross, R. Menkman, L 13: Reader NR 4 im/possible images (München: Lothringer 13 Halle, 2022) https://beyondresolution.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/ Catalogues%2Fimpossible_L13_READER.pdf, accessed April 25, 2023. ANNETTE URBAN 134 AN-ICON  Fig. 7d Fig. 7b Fig. 7c Fig. 7a Fig. 7 a-d. Views of the Exhibition Im/possible Images, at the Lothringer 13 Halle, Munich, 2021, curated by Rosa Menkman. Photo by Dominik Gigler. Courtesy of the artist and of Lothringer 13 Halle. ANNETTE URBAN 135 AN-ICON  spectra of resolution – a borderline to “low fidelity images” was inscribed on the floor –, the artist transformed the built into a “latent image space.”52 Similar to the VR, I would add, the solidity of its objects becomes doubtful, when variable parameters of the perceptible and representable always help other visualities and entities to emerge. With this kind of environmentalization, Menkman de-hierarchizes an ever-higher resolution, that regulates access to more and more details and therefore, according to Casetti and Somaini, raises the power question of control.53 In the Mu- nich exhibition, some of the im/possible images from the BLOB (re-)materialized as exhibits, among them a photo of the skinned hand scan or a newspaper clipping with an x-rayed hand from 1896. But, by placing them along the resolution lines, theses factual images remain suspended in an abstract space of potentialities. In sum, the exhibition display was activated as an integral component not princi- pally distinguished from what is constitutive for the ‘work.’ Potentiated Environmentalization As shown so far, the multiplication of environ- ments inherent in VR-art results from its genuine blurring of the differences between work and environment. This gen- erative logic of further nesting necessarily brings the whole institutional and curatorial ecosystem of VR-art into view. And the extension of the internal installation aesthetics not only counteracts its technically-based encapsulation. It is also essential for not missing the togetherness54 – to cite Mieke Bal – of an exhibition which, according to Christiane Voss, is the medium that establishes the works’ mode of existence as art in the first place.55 The Blob of Im/Possible Images, commissioned by the HeK Basel, was produced with the infrastructure of newart.city.org that provides a “virtual exhibition toolkit” 52 Cfr. R. Menkman, “Im/possible Images@Lothringer 13, Munich” https://beyondresolution.info/im-possible-images-1, accessed December 29, 2022. 53 Cfr. F. Casetti, A. Somaini, “Resolution:” 89. 54 Cfr. M. Bal, Exhibition-ism: Temporal Togetherness (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020). 55 Cfr. Voss, “Das Museum als Medium der Kunst:” 464. ANNETTE URBAN 136 AN-ICON  with “built-in tools to manage artworks and space layouts.”56 Menkman takes up its claims for a non-hierarchical co-cre- ation and invites the submission of further non-expert im/ possible images. Later on, the work has been embedded into a virtual, but spatial exhibition curated by Lívia No- lasco-Rózsás and Giulia Bini for the ZKM in 2021, which pushes the tendencies towards nesting and de-differen- tiation even further: Spatial Affairs. Worlding is inhabited by artworks, an exhibition display and visitors sharing the same organic-abstract shape. One can only distinguish the non-humanoid avatars of other visitors from exhibits through distance-reduction and the object-related action of a mouse click. The latter then turn into pink and, via an info window and links, lead the web-user to the works stored on artists’ website or platforms. By interpreting environmental- ization in terms of worlding, the curators participate in the posthumanist renewal of the phenomenological critique of the world as sum of objects. The multi-user online world with its identical, modular entities first hides the exhibition behind the supposed affordances of gaming and chats. However, the transitions between the environmental exhi- bition and environmental works are designed less immer- sively – like portals in gaming or falling down the rabbit-hole known from literature – than through paratextual framings operated by non-natural manual interfaces. The online exhibition site fantastic confabu- lations that hosts Drifting, Browsing, Cruising was also conceived by Polyviou together with Jasmina Figueora as artists in residence of the same research project Beyond Matter. Instead of nesting spaces, it deals with the gener- ic, serial tendency of self-continuation by inviting to reuse the initial 3D-reconstruction of the ZKM balcony for sub- sequent projects such as realized by Figueroa who mod- eled her spoken words and sound scores by the visitors’ movements through the virtual site. Following Ahmed, this 56 Cfr. “About New Art City,” https://info.newart.city/about, accessed December 28, 2022. ANNETTE URBAN 137 AN-ICON  implies not only a model for self-determined curation, but also a form of environmental co-habitation. Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás argues for the museum in the virtual condition as a “cognitive system”57 including non-human actors, thereby reaccentuating the pioneering thought exhibitions [Gedankenausstellungen] initiated by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour. Polyviou’s example gets by without its strong archival underpinning. In the functional architecture, his staging of an atmospherically condensed counterworld aims at releasing a different bodily knowledge of possible encounters and envisions a counter-physicality for transcending the otherwise hard-to-move institution. The curved lines on the ground echoing the paths inside the VR offer their own transformative knowledge of entan- glement that is experienced and produced environmentally. In comparison, Menkman directly invests into the potential of virtual as epistemic and aesthetic objects. Their robust- ness and simultaneously plasticity reminds the capability of Star’s and Griesemer’s boundary objects to make agents of different groupings,58 in this case those of art and science, meet. What Doris Kolesch has in mind with a normalized immersion in not only technologically-enclosed but every- day spaces, can also be true for VR-based environmental- ization. De-differentiation and de-distancing are then not contradictions to but catalysts of immersive reflection. 57 L. Nolasco-Rózsás, Y. Hofmann, “The Museum as a Cognitive System of Human and Non- Human Actors,” The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums & Culture, no. 3 (2021): 1-15. 58 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 33-34. ANNETTE URBAN 138 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19773

Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitio by Annette Urban VR-art ns Environmental immersion Epistemic Objects installation art De-distancing/de-differentiation Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitions ANNETTE URBAN, Ruhr-Universität Bochum – https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19773 Abstract In contemporary understanding, a now normal- ized immersion continues to be associated with digitality and high-tech apparatuses, but is also seen as diffused into the lifeworld. Against this backdrop, the article focuses on two current artworks that extend the internal environmen- tality inherent in VR as a spatialized image into physical space by using strategies from installation and site-related art. These examples provide for an equation and nesting of work, environment and exhibition that is interpreted here as a potentiated environmentalization. The artistic VR-environ- ments by no means negate their rootedness in imagery, but rather self-reflexively reveal the transitions between image and three-dimensionality, what gives them a special epis- temic valence. It thus seems worthwhile to relate them to considerations of knowledge objects and exhibitions, but also to (queer) phenomenological theories of entanglement and becoming originating from the following of lines. ANNETTE URBAN 112 AN-ICON  Meanwhile, the epistemic value of their latent objects, disoriented paths, and impossible spaces is only revealed in the interaction with and embodied experience of the virtual space. The article thus participates in debates on how bodily immersion does not exclude, but enables action and reflection within aesthetic experience. With re- gard to two fundamental paradigms of immersion, it can show how, for this purpose, the artworks turn anew the strategies of de-distancing and de-differentiation. Keywords VR-art Environmental immersion Epistemic Objects installation art De-distancing/de-differentiation To quote this essay: A. Urban, “Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitions,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 112-138, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19773. ANNETTE URBAN 113 AN-ICON  De-Distancing and De-Differentiation: Contemporary Aesthetics of Immersion Immersion is again attracting much attention. Film and media studies, art history, image sciences and narratology have all long participated in its theorization. More recently, theatre, performance and game studies, architectural theory and the history of knowledge1 have joined in, taking into account a whole range of everyday digital technologies and thus deferring questions of image aesthetics and image technology in favor of investigating body/media/environment relationships. Whereas some the- oretical contributions highlight the immersive aspects of a specific medium, there is also a broad tendency to deal with immersion as a prime symptom of today’s image cul- tures and media ecologies what is evidenced by collective terms such as immersive media,2 environmental images and iconoscapes. To speak more generally of immersive media deliberately goes beyond media-technical foundations of the concept by arguing with transmedial relevant opera- tions. These are already rooted in narratology, where the opening up and simultaneous closing of a fictional world is accomplished cognitively-mentally: Perceptual immer- sion is therefore seen to be necessarily complemented by imaginative immersion,3 which only ensures that the sen- sory stimuli of a medium are translated into a virtual world.4 After the debate has been strongly linked to Virtual Reality since the 1990s, immersion continues to be considered under the premises of digital technologies, but at the same time is also discussed as nowadays’ conditio humana and condition of daily life. Lars C. Grabbe has proposed a new 1 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: Zu einer Wissensgeschichte der Immersion (Baden Baden: Nomos, 2019). For Kasprowicz, the immersion concept can be retrieved from the “maelstrom of negative connotations as illusion and absorption” by being understood as a “media anthropological practice of de- and re-differentiation of the body [Körper und Leib] in mediatized environments.” Ibid.: 14. 2 Cfr., among others, the Yearbook of Immersive Media 2011-2017, ed. by Institute for Immersive Media at Kiel University of Applied Sciences. 3 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: 18, with reference to Marie-Laure Ryan. 4 Cfr. T. Hochscherf, H. Kjär, P. Rupert-Kruse, “Phänomene und Medien der Immersion,” in Jahrbuch immersiver Medien 3 (2011): 9-19, 14, with reference to Matthew Lombard/Theresa Ditton. ANNETTE URBAN 114 AN-ICON  cultural-theoretical figure of the homo immergens which he considers to be the equivalent of a culture of media hybrids: In succession or better combination of the human capaci- ties for symbol formation and image production, the homo immergens has become the creator of its own “multimodal and simulative environments”5 whereby the distance to the medial artifact is reduced and a worldly experience is generated. Thus, recent insights of immersion research owe much to theorizing across media, on the basis of me- dia hybridity, as well as to inputs from other branches of scholarship. Within these multi-faceted approaches two key features emerge that I propose to summarize as a reduction of distance responsible for felt presence and as a reduction of difference. These two aspects cover both, the particular attitude of reception, which has been characterized as a way of submerging, of mental absorption, and bodily-emo- tional involvement, as well as the various forms of transfor- mative exchange or even assimilation that occur between the recipient and the object of contemplation – to put it in the classical dichotomy of aesthetic experience. Mean- while, the principles of de-distancing and de-differentiation unfold in numerous ways. They involve more-than-visual, bodily modes of experience, that can be interpreted as a re-centering of the world and the subject, but also as new forms of empathy and encounter. The latter may culminate in ideas of matter-flow inspired by Deleuze/Guattari and of leaving behind all subject-object dichotomies, which some suppose to be still at work in the quasi-objects of the philosophy of science.6 Or they remain – as with Grabbe’s term of representational convergence referring to the con- vergence of exterior and mental representations7 – closer to the realm of images whose unframing gives the beholder 5 L. C. Grabbe, “Homo Immergens: Immersion as a Parameter for a Media and Cultural Theory of Medial Hybridity,” in J. Bracker, A. Hubrich, eds., The Art of Reception (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021): 400-422, 400. 6 Cfr. T. Ingold, “Drawing Together: Materials, Gestures, Lines,” in T. Otto, N. Bubandt, eds., Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology (Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2010): 299-313, 304-305. 7 Cfr. L. C. Grabbe, “Homo Immergens:” 400. ANNETTE URBAN 115 AN-ICON  the feeling of being surrounded by them. This perspective on artificially spatialized images8 invites to focus on the transitions between images and illusionistic 3D-entities, and to a closer examination of the environmentalization inherent in it. In the widely ramified discourse on environ- mentality, the art historical point of view still seems under- represented as far as the obvious link with the so-called Ausstieg aus dem Bild, with installation and site-related art is concerned. They equally mark a significant reference point for spatialization and meanwhile break down the status of art as distinct, object-like work. Instead, the art historical interrogation of environmentality has recently been deep- ened in reference back to screen media and the paradigm of projection: In her comprehensive study, Giuliana Bruno has illuminatingly interpreted the spatiality established by light projection in terms of materially transformative pro- cesses, transductive conversions of energy and the histo- ries of energetic environments. But while she emphasizes the ambulatory “non-linear movement in forms of trans- duction”9 and explicitly investigates inhabitable spaces of immersion, with her focus on the act of projection, however, environmentality remains tied back to a transitive gesture of transmission and transport.10 In a broader disciplinary context, its exploration ranges from the new non-visual environments established by sensor technologies, from biologically, autopoietically or systems-theoretically con- ceptualized relations between an organism/a system and its Umwelt, to the environmental concerns of new material- ism, anthropology and queer phenomenology, rewriting the Heideggerian irreducible world reference of the embodied self. Sara Ahmed’s approach is of particular interest here because it takes up the “bodily inhabitance of […] space”11 8 Cfr. J. Schröter, “Die Ästhetik der virtuellen Welt: Überlegungen mit Niklas Luhmann und Jeffrey Shaw,” in M. Bogen, R. Kuck, J. Schröter, eds., Virtuelle Welten als Basistechnologie für Kunst und Kultur? Eine Bestandsaufnahme (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2015): 25-36. 9 G. Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (Chicago- London: Chicago University Press, 2021): 109. See also ibid.: 111-112. 10 Ibid.: 2. 11 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006): 6. ANNETTE URBAN 116 AN-ICON  as a basic parameter of orientation, but in doing so opens up Heidegger’s familiarity with the world to other directions and objects that were not always already at hand. Similarly, in Tim Ingold’s anthropology, “joining with the togetherings of life”12 as drawn lines serves a better understanding of the particular environmentality of the lifeworld. In the following, I propose to combine art historical thinking about site-related installation aesthetics with phenomenological and episte- mological perspectives. They promise an understanding of bodily extension into space as an orientedness towards objects as well as towards others and simultaneously take account of an unstable objecthood. This offers an alterna- tive way out of problematic dualistic premises that so far often separate art historical genealogies of immersion and debates on aesthetic experience from knowledge-historical considerations that see subject-object dichotomies under- mined precisely by immersed bodies and their negotiation of environmental relations.13 As I want to show by analyzing two examples by Theodoulos Polyviou and Rosa Menkman, the de-differ- entiation between the work, its spatial surroundings and, by consequence, the exhibition display, is in particular rene- gotiated in recent VR-art. Its often closed imaginary worlds do not only present themselves as spatialized images, but simultaneously as an assemblage of things in space that reinforce the connection to installation art and display is- sues. As Christiane Paul remarked in 2003, VR does not only allow for the “full […] immers[ion of] its users in a three-dimensional world generated by a computer” but also for “an interaction with the virtual objects that comprise that world.”14 While the immersive environment thus means the withdrawal of the artwork as a singular (pictorial) object and counterpart of aesthetic experience, it simultaneously results in a multiplication of spatially arranged objects to which the visitor relates in an interactive, cognitive and – we might add – environmental or even (life) worldly way. This 12 T. Ingold, “Drawing together:” 303. See also ibid.: 301-304. 13 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: 22, 24, 30. 14 C. Paul, Digital Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003): 125. ANNETTE URBAN 117 AN-ICON  ultimately leads to a multiplied nesting of work, environ- ment and exhibition whose institutional and infrastructural conditions I will briefly consider at the end. Normalized Immersion and the Epistemics of Virtual Objects and Spatialities The recent VR-artworks of Polyviou and Menk- man have been chosen for this study because, to some extent, they reinvest in immersive high-tech media arrange- ments similar to those of the 1990s and early 2000s. Cy- prus-born artist Theodoulos Polyviou resorts to calculated 3D environments that reproduce existing spaces with ar- chitectural precision and make them individually explorable via head-mounted display (HMD) as well as on the desktop. Dutch artist and theorist Rosa Menkman uses the online walk-through spaces of the newart.city.org platform to host a collection of im/possible images in a specially designed artificial environment. At the same time, the two artists share the impulse to re-embed the virtual into a physical environment. Polyviou works with an elaborate recalibration of the virtual to the physical exhibition space, and Menk- man reintegrates the interactive experience of the website into an exhibition design she creates, which in its own way restructures the physical space. This shared concern with relocalization hints at a contemporary understanding of immersion that does not privilege computer-generated simulated worlds. Doris Kolesch has summarized it as “an increasingly everyday interaction not only with digital media, but also and above all, with designed spaces and spaces of experience.”15 Indeed, this now normal immersive con- dition is also elaborated in terms of architectural and ur- ban spaces that are in negotiation with images.16 However, 15 D. Kolesch, “Ästhetik der Immersion,” in G. W. Bertram, S. Deines, D. M. Feige, eds., Die Kunst und die Künste: Ein Kompendium zur Kunsttheorie der Gegenwart (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021): 422-441, 422 [my translation]. 16 Cfr. L. Bieger, “Ästhetik der Immersion. Wenn Räume wollen. Immersives Erleben als Raumerleben,” in G. Lehnert, ed., Raum und Gefühl. Der Spatial Turn und die neue Emotionsforschung (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag 2011): 75-95. ANNETTE URBAN 118 AN-ICON  “immersion as factual state description,”17 may primarily end in a World without Us, as Inke Arns points out, where invisibly working smart technologies create non-delimited, post-visual environments. Does VR still play a significant part in such a ubiquitous immersion? While on the one hand the selected artworks explore the “specific experience and mediality of the body-environment relationship”18 stressed by Kolesch, on the other hand, in unfolding a virtually walkable environ- ment, they do not deny their rootedness in imagery and even expose their latent objecthood. They engage with environmental aesthetics by presenting themselves as an environment withholding any designated artwork or as a mere framework for other images. With the unstable ref- erences of their elements, they fully play out the role of virtual as epistemic objects and combine representation with operability. This approaches all the more the genre of knowledge exhibitions, as they invest in VR’s capacities of getting the user “immersed in reflection,”19 to quote Katja Kwastek’s term for reconciling the (inter)action-based mode of digital art with the traditionally contemplative aesthetic experience. Early installation art such as Lucio Fontana’s Ambiente spaziale already shows how physical spaces with the help of mirroring and lightning effects combine immer- sion with ontological speculation. Within VR-art, the latter is stimulated by oscillations between image and three-di- mensionality. And it is intensified by virtual spatialities that similarily become a theoretical object of epistemic value, not only because of the heightened disorientation in spaces freed from physical regularity, but also as a result of more or less pure calculation. This affinity to abstraction mostly escapes the attention to hyperrealistic 3D-design and in- stead sometimes refers back to the sublime in art where natural phenomena fluidly transition into intangible abstract 17 I. Arns, “Qualityland, oder: Der Immersion begegnen,” Jahrbuch für Kulturpolitik, 2017/18: Welt. Kultur. Politik - Kulturpolitik in Zeiten der Globalisierung: 211-220, 212 [my translation]. 18 D. Kolesch, “Ästhetik der Immersion:” 422. 19 K. Kwastek, “Immersed in Reflection? The Aesthetic Experience of Interactive Media Art,” in B. Dogramaci, F. Liptay, eds., Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media (Leiden, Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2016): 66-85. ANNETTE URBAN 119 AN-ICON  emptiness. In 3D-environments, straight lines serve as ge- neric framework of spaces, which, through texturing and mapping, also directly emerge from images. Of particular interest is whether this linear ab- stractness is at the same time getting practicable in the course of the (manual) navigation through Polyviou’s and Menkman’s synthetic environments, enabled by the HMD with its tracking systems and hand-held controllers and by the maneuvers on the keyboard in the desktop-based versions. This passing through as the prevalent mode of VR-experience20 can be further clarified by (queer-)phenom- enological concepts of inhabiting space by taking directions and following lines, especially non-geometric entangled lines, giving high value to disorientation and turning toward objects as Sara Ahmed states.21 Insofar that this includes “lining ourselves up with the features of the grounds we in- habit, the sky that surrounds us, or the imaginary lines that cut through maps,”22 it already assumes a connection be- tween physical, expressly natural and virtual spaces which extends up to technically-based environments. In a similar vein, Tim Ingold explicitly considers lines as basic element of immersion responsible for an embedding into the life- world. For him, coming to life results from being “immersed in those generative currents”23 such as wind, for example, which also alters the state of man-made tools and techni- cal objects transcending a purely transitive use. Thereby Ingold’s concept of lines gains a potential for change and implies passages between the actual and the virtual.24 With their help, he problematizes objects understood as “dis- crete, finished entities” which he judges as a mere obstacle for drawing and “designing environmental relations.”25 Lines, 20 I use the terms VR-experience, VR-environments and VR-works as broad concepts also including desktop-based virtual environments which have an immersive character on their own. 21 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: 1-2. 22 Ibid.: 6. 23 T. Ingold, “Drawing Together:” 305. 24 Ingold’s repeated recourse to Deleuze/Guattari’s concept of the line of flight (ligne de fuite) remains beyond the scope of this article, but is worth following in M. De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005). 25 T. Ingold, M. Anusas, “Designing Environmental Relations: From Opacity to Textility,” Design Issues 29, no. 4 (2013): 58-69, 58. ANNETTE URBAN 120 AN-ICON  in contrast, as exemplified by the inseparable correlation of a river and its banks, are emblematic of correspondences and engender a different kind of thinking: “to correspond with [the waters] is to join this awareness with the flow.”26 They privilege an intransitive mode of “joining with” rather than “joining of.” Putting VR-Art on Exhibition When contemporary art today is testing the potentials of VR as an artistic medium, its borrowings from installation art are not exclusively motivated by the pragmatics of exhibiting in art museums. Many artists use this necessity for initiating ontological speculations on the continuum between virtual reality and the shared here and now in the museum. They intertwine the setting up of the interior pictorial world with the installative anchoring of the VR-experience in the exhibition space, thus producing their own form of potentiated environmentality connected to quite different strands of installative and site-related art. Here, only a brief comparison can point to how, in Banz & Bowinkel’s work Mercury (2017) (Fig. 1) for example, the filigree pavilion architecture that creates a second artificial habitat high above Planet Earth in the VR, extends into a metallic display for the processor and the second screen in the exhibition. And to another German VR-artist, Flori- an Meisenberg who chooses an illusionistic backdrop, as known from photo and film studios, to illusionistically em- bed the gesticulating wearer of the HMD into the abstract grid landscape of Superstudio’s 70s planetary architectural utopia. In both examples, the environments also serve to house other artworks. But instead of activating the institu- tional or archival concerns of installation art, they extend the artificially generated, often fictionalized world within the VR into the exhibition context which is more in line with the staging of illusionistic worlds by means of props in 26 T. Ingold, Knowing from the Inside: Correspondences, (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 2017): 41. ANNETTE URBAN 121 AN-ICON  cinema and cinematographic installation art. The VR-works by Polyviou and Menkman persue the reverse path and thus tend to the originally anti-immersive institution-reflex- ive branch: Their freely designable VR-worlds conversely borrow from physical exhibition spaces and their conven- tions of presenting items of cultural value which is worth questioning as another symptom of immersive normality and life worldly virtuality.27 Fig. 1a Fig. 1b Fig. 1a and 1b. Banz & Bowinkel, Mercury, 2016. VR installation, screen capture and installation shot, DAM Gallery, Berlin, 2017. Courtesy of the artists. Theodoulos Polyviou: Drifting, Browsing, Cruising (2021) Besides the issues of art presentation in the pandemic, that influenced both selected artworks, I ask more generally about the role of environmental virtuality in Polyviou’s and Menkman’s action-based and visual-spatial strategies28 of getting the recipient immersed in their work and thereupon re-perspectivize the question of institutional embedding. The first striking feature of Drifting, Browsing, Cruising created by Theodoulos Polyviou together with Eleni Diana Elia at the Centre for Art and Media, ZKM at Karls- ruhe/Germany, is certainly the ground plan true modeling of a computer-generated world based on a specific location 27 Cfr. S. Rieger, A. Schäfer, A. Tuschling, eds., Virtuelle Lebenswelten: Körper - Räume - Affekte (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2021). 28 Kwastek stresses that the action-based experience not necessarily needs visual-spatial illusion (Cfr. “Immersed in Reflection?:” 69), but both aspects are closely united here. ANNETTE URBAN 122 AN-ICON  within the museum. In summer 2021, visitors wearing HMD moved in situ through this doubled environment (Fig. 2-3). Since then, the work can be visited as only desktop-based VR on the online exhibition site fantastic confabulations, that reuses the digital replica of the space for further exhibitions. Contrary to enabling “spatiotemporal transpo- sition,” Polyviou uses VR for evoking a “hyper-awareness of the viewer as to where they are, and what they are doing.”29 That’s why he is re-situating VR-technology by establishing site-related connections to architecturally and historical- ly distinct places. But how is this intended sense of pres- ence, which implies situatedness and agency, created in the site-specific VR-installation at the ZKM? In contrast to many other of his works,30 any direct citation of a third auratic place and its cultural heritage is missing here. Polyviou obviously aims at the recognizability of the original museum space in 3D – the alignment of pillars typical of the former industrial building, the balustrade and the staircase leading to the open atrium as well as the glass partitions to the adjacent spaces are all faithfully reproduced. This makes the absence of the expected distinct artworks all the more noticeable. What one encounters inside, first of all appears as extensions of the serving architecture. The replicated pillars with spotlights are complemented by semicircular, half-height partitions as known from exhibition design. While these virtual supple- ments turn the clear cubic exhibition space into a cluttered and mysterious site, their freely curving floor plan lines re- appear as vinyl stripes on the ground of the physical space. 29 Th. Polyviou in A. Urban, “Virtual Spaces for Transformative Encounters and Vast Reciprocity - An Interview with Theodoulos Polyviou and Jazmina Figueroa,” in L. Nolasco- Rózsás, ed., Beyond Matter, Within Space: Curatorial and Art Mediation Techniques on the Verge of Virtual Reality (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2023): 429-443, 432. 30 See for example the installation Transmundane Economies (2022) at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, with references to the ruins of the Bellapais monastery in the north of Cyprus. ANNETTE URBAN 123 AN-ICON Fig. 2a Fig. 2c Fig. 2b Fig. 2d Fig. 2a, 2b, 2c and 2d T. Polyviou, Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, 2021. Site-specific VR installation, in cooperation with Eleni Diana Elia, installations shots and VR captures (details), ZKM, Karlsruhe 2021. Courtesy of the artists. © Eleni Diana Elia and Theodoulos Polyviou © Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), photo by Tanja Meissner. Produced in the framework of the Beyond Matter Residency Program at ZKM | Karlsruhe. This interplay between paradoxical emptiness and spatial density not only subverts the usual aesthetic experience in art museums with its orientation towards a singled-out art object. The directionality of the space image as an action image, theorized by Stephan Günzel in the context of gaming, where only objects centered in the field of vision can become the object of action,31 also remains unexploited. Instead, the environment privileges spatial exploration and confronts with the paradox phys- icality of its virtual architecture that, like the impermeable built world, diverts the users’ bodies. Without any avatarial 31 Cfr. S. Günzel, “Vor dem Affekt: die Aktion - Emotion und Raumbild,” in G. Lehnert, ed., Raum und Gefühl: Der Spatial Turn und die neue Emotionsforschung (Bielefeld: transcript- Verlag, 2014): 63-74, 67-68. ANNETTE URBAN 124 AN-ICON  representation, their self-perception entirely depends on bodily correlations with the labyrinthine environment, that additionally applies sensory stimuli and atmospheric im- mersion32 including artificial billowing fog on the floor, a sound backdrop and hall lights converted into dramatic illuminations. Thus, the functional architecture that sublim- inally remains perceptible through its calibration with the virtual space, shifts to a fictionalized, suspenseful backdrop that awaits its narration. Priority has the increased intensi- ty of experience typical for spatial-immersive installations and one-sided de-distancing. But the artificial environment here also requires an action- and reflection-based attitude thanks to the latency of its speculative and operable ob- jects and thus enacts a highly sensuous, performative form of site-related institutional critique. This comes into action when the foggy atmosphere transforms the built-in walls into jagged rock formations, thereby unifying different mate- rialities in one unstable image-object, or when the flashing spotlights and the variable angle of view instantly turn a black surface into a three-dimensional hide-away (Fig. 3). In addition, the windows that in fact only sepa- rate the next exhibition space, virtually open onto an equally artificial purple exterior, imitating a dramatic skylight. Its emptiness suspends the virtual exhibition space with its balustrades and staircase in an indefinite void, so that the emphasized inside-outside difference gives this VR-topos of floatation an institution-critical side. While Polyviou’s en- vironment is housed/hosted by the museum, it also nests there as an invisible counter-place that virtually undermines the physicality of the institution.33 And by penetrating the interior of the virtual environment, the shadows of the grid windows cite the linear structure of computed space. But this space loses the evenness secured by optical projec- tion when the grid lines synthesize the floor with the pillars to one continuous surface. It thus foreshadows a virtual 32 Cfr. also R. Eugeni, G. Raciti, eds., “Atmosfere mediali,” VCS Visual Culture Studies. Rivista semestrale di cultura visuale, no. 1 (November 2020). 33 Cfr. Th. Polyviou in A. Urban, “Virtual Spaces for Transformative Encounters and Vast Reciprocity:” 430. ANNETTE URBAN 125 AN-ICON Fig. 3a Fig. 3c Fig. 3b Fig. 3a, 3b and 3c T. Polyviou, Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, 2021. Site-specific VR installation, in cooperation with Eleni Diana Elia, VR captures (details), ZKM, Karlsruhe 2021. Courtesy of the artists. © Eleni Diana Elia and Theodoulos Polyviou © Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), Produced in the framework of the Beyond Matter Residency Programat ZKM | Karlsruhe. substantiality beyond the clear differentiation of distinct things and deprived of the stability of usual grounds. This exacerbates the insecurity of the orienta- tion-seeking users who navigate their invisible body through the confusing narrowness of fixtures, pseudo-functional handrails and hall lights. However, this staged reduction of distance is not simply overwhelming. The ambiguous virtual objects also ensure that, by “gather[ing] on the ground,” – as Sara Ahmed has noted – “they create a ground upon which we can gather.”34 Indeed, the mixed environment unites online as well as HMD users whose actions in the physical terrain marked with stripes are simultaneously observed by the museum visitors. Even without direct references to sacred architecture, Polyviou thus links the 34 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: 1. ANNETTE URBAN 126 AN-ICON  VR-typical passing through with a quasi-ritualized use of space. Alison Griffith has already tied back a counter-his- tory of immersive spectatorship in the museum not only to the panorama, science museum, and planetarium, but also to the cathedral.35 In Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, mnemonic mental images ensure the combination of action-based with cognitive immersion, because the disoriented wandering takes place through the comparison of constantly shifting, remembered spaces. When Polyviou decisively theorizes this ritualization as base for a “queer togetherness,”36 this reconnects to the lines printed on the floor. Through their interference with the dense environment inside the VR, they emancipate themselves from the clear legibility as object contour and ground plan. They thus contribute to the cru- cial entanglement that, according to Ingold, gets the “living being […] as a bundle of [the] lines” 37 of its movement im- mersed in its lifeworld. Polyviou therefore stimulates bodily practices of losing oneself in artificially induced passions. The choreographed searching movements inside give the museum space an improvisational openness, while the calibration with the physical pillars and ground makes the VR-experience literally tangible. Environmental immersion here goes hand in hand with a reduction of difference that de-differentiates virtual and physical spaces, bodies and objects. Rosa Menkman: The BLOB of Im/Possible Images (2021) Rosa Menkman’s VR-experience also brings the categories of artwork and exhibition nearly into congruence. But, instead of eliminating distinct artworks, Menkman, for this purpose, departs from a veritable collection assembled under the title of Im/Possible Images (Fig. 4). She stores 35 Cfr. A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 36 “Drifting, Browsing, Cruising,” Fantastic Confabulations, https://fantastic-confabulations.beyondmatter.eu/drifting-browsing-cruising/index.html, accessed December 29, 2022. 37 T. Ingold, “Drawing Together:” 300. ANNETTE URBAN 127 AN-ICON  Fig. 4 Fig. 4. R. Menkman, The BLOB of Im/possible Images, 2021. Desktop-based virtual environment, accessible on the platform New Art City. Courtesy of the artist. this collection on the widely used VR-art platform New Art City where she designed a complex desktop-based virtual environment that shows an enclosed grayish scenery with a staircase, a huge resolution-chart, a humanoid figure and a second free-floating structure pierced by diagonals. Ini- tially hidden from view, the collected images are sheltered inside this amorphous cloud, revealing themselves when one navigates through the permeable sheathing. The nest- ed structure alludes to the titular BLOB with its polysemy of digital blob architecture, the single-celled, ‘intelligent’ su- per-organism and Binary Large Objects as a technical term for databased image processing. And the exhibits that visi- tors have to deal with in this environment are mainly objects of knowledge accessible only through representation, so a reference to their theorizations by Hans-Jörg Rheinberg- er and Susan Leigh Star/John Griesemer is suggested.38 Menkman thus borrows from the realm of scientific images, which has been a central field of debate and self-defini- tion for digital art from the very beginning. She delegates the act of imagining and selecting them by realizing a sur- vey during her Arts at Cern/Collide Barcelona-Residency, asking the researchers what image of a relevant object or 38 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2015): 19-58. ANNETTE URBAN 128 AN-ICON  phenomenon they would capture if “limits of spatial, tem- poral, energy, signal/noise or cost resolutions”39 were irrel- evant. In other words, this variability of resolution results in products of imagineering and touches on phenomena that are decoupled from humans’ experience, escaping their commonly perceived environmentalities. But these phenomena can be mediated by virtual body-environment relations, which conversely force a changed understanding of (aesthetic) experience, as discussed by Roberto Diodato with reference to John Dewey.40 The choice of the nuclear physicists as experts in im/possible images endow the virtual as epistemic objects with a specific latency and scientificity. The referents of their proposed images mostly elude the objecthood familiar to mankind and have nothing in common with the medium-sized “things of the earth’s surface” as characterized by the Gestalt psychologist Fritz Heider.41 Two important aspects shared with Polyviou’s example promise additional insights into the workings of environmental immersion. Firstly, this concerns the embed- ding into abstractness, which goes along with a space that loses its conventional categories and thus favors immersion through the withdrawal of the usual parameters of orienta- tion. This not only stems from the arbitrary laws of physical- ity in VR, but also from a different kind of world reference in ‘virtual bodies environments’, which Diodato emphasizes: “In this intermediary world space itself is the result of inter- activity.”42 In Menkman’s case, the intensified experience is generated not so much by a condensed, labyrinthine spatiality as by the enhanced self-reflexivity of navigation itself. Both, the VR-environment The BLOB of Im/Possible Images and the related video-work Whiteout showing a tour in Harz mountains in heavy snow, deal with the ex- perience in a markerless space tending to exceed human 39 R. Menkman, “The BLOB of Im/possible Images” https://newart.city/show/menkman-blob-of-im-possibilities, accessed December 30, 2022. 40 Cfr. R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: Towards an Aesthetics of Relations (Cham: Springer, 2021): 56. 41 Cited after G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 38. 42 R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: 61. ANNETTE URBAN 129 AN-ICON  senses and erase most thingness. Second, the comparison with Drifting, Browsing, Cruising is based on the re-phys- icalization of the VR-works in the exhibition format. Rosa Menkman conceived a carefully designed exhibition display for a 2021 group show at Munich where she reconnected the VR-experience to the physical space with the help of lines. While in Polyviou’s example the plotting of isomorphic virtual and physical elements onto a planimetric floor plan retains a relative object character, Menkman starts from abstract lines as axes of graphs and coordinate systems. They guide the exploration of the virtual world inside and also mark the thresholds of iconic representation. Touching on signal spectra, digital states and im/material energetic flows, they bring forth what Ingold sees otherwise negated by the regime of solidified things. Within the VR, the resolution chart erected next to the figurine is particularly telling of how Menkman translates resolution into space, taking advantage of the orthogonality of digital as “rasterized […] images” based on a “grid of picture elements or pixels,”43 that, according to Francesco Casetti and Antonio Somaini, also possess a specific plasticity. By mapping the gray structure of the internal blob with the diagonals and its one black anchor point, the resolution chart pretends to guide the VR-user searching to enter this enclosure. Yet, despite the lines piercing the amorphous volume, the chart does not reveal any information about the interior. The charted scales and frequency ranges unmistakably mark this second blob as an image-object of the same digital fabric as the abstractly textured body of the figurine besides, Menkman’s Angelus Novus emblematic for the reversal of gaze regimes. This co-presence of image-objects and -subjects made of dis- torted black-white stripes strongly signals the de-differ- entiation of most diverse entities. The appearance of the things is flexibilized to such a degree that their self-identity 43 F. Casetti, A. Somaini, “Resolution: Digital Materialities, Thresholds of Visibility,” NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies 7, no. 1 (2018): 87-103. ANNETTE URBAN 130 AN-ICON  is disposable and their recognition depends on the user’s bodily action (Fig. 5). Fig. 5a Fig. 5b Fig. 5a and Fig. 5b .R. Menkman, The BLOB of Im/possible Images, 2021, Desktop-based virtual environment, accessible on the platform New Art City, screenshots by the author. Courtesy of the artist. ANNETTE URBAN 131 AN-ICON  As soon as the user has traversed the opaque but permeable grayish membrane of the blob, the envi- ronment transforms into a dark sphere with mystic sound where the im/possible images are scattered in an unmea- surable distance. When the wandering user is attracted by small luminous dots that, up close, turn out to represent the Pale Blue Dot aka Planet Earth, taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 for example, or a Quantum Vacuum, quarks inside of a proton, a shadow of a black hole and a body scan of the interior of a wrist, she/he is once again less guided by the affordances of gaming. To remind Günzel, its “fixed-par- anoid perspective” turns objects into action carriers by shifting them to the center of the image; but here, only the paranoid dimension of permanent searching seems to en- dure “through which the objects in the virtual off must be transferred into actualization.”44 As Roberto Diodato notes with reference to Bernard Stiegler and Richard Grusin, in view of the prevailing premediation techniques and an al- ready thoroughly hypermediated world, it is necessary for the techno-artistic creation of virtual spacetime environ- ments to break the merely adaptive behavior pattern of supposedly active cognitive agents.45 Beyond the gaming attitude running into the void, it is the habits of museum spectators that help surprisingly well – right down to the work texts that pop up on approach. But, of course, the concept of the mimetic image is challenged here by the assembled nuclear- and astrophysical phenomena at the limits of what can still be captured by light or other wave- lengths. Menkman succeeds in staging the uncertain status of such objects of knowledge, which only move into the rank of the existent through new technologies of detection, by making use of the peculiarities of virtual objecthood. This starts with the all-round perspectivability and resulting form variance of the virtual exhibits already known from sculp- ture, joined here by their free scalability and permeability 44 S. Günzel, “Vor dem Affekt:” 68. 45 Cfr. R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: 64-65. ANNETTE URBAN 132 AN-ICON  in direct interaction with the user navigating their invisible bodies through space. The skinned wrist, for example, hits the viewer in powerful plasticity or just hangs in space as flatware, depending on the point of entry into the enclosure of the im/possible images, the viewing angle and proximity to the item. This form of distance reduction self-reflexively combines seeing and (inter-)acting. The less complete im- mersion of desktop-based VR is compensated for by the tactility of maneuvering with arrow keys or touchpad, which transfers its sensation of handling to the virtual objects. Menkman experiments here with re-introducing into art the more immersive displays of the natural history museum,46 whose never-broken connection to science is recalled by Christiane Voss’ reflections on the medium of exhibition,47 and appropriates the knowledge exhibition format. In this setting, barely tangible phenomena such as black holes, dark matter and other galaxies become manageable as in a laboratory that, in terms of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, only brings epistemic things into existence.48 The nested spatial structure of the BLOB in- creases this epistemic valence because it invites for re- peating those transformative immersive crossings from one internal sphere to the next. Outside the encapsulated image collection, the latency of objects is provided by the poly- gon meshes patterned with black/whites lines reminiscent of military dazzle camouflage49 that acts as de-distancing tool precisely by preventing its correct estimation. Instead of simulating natural light conditions, as it often serves to catalyze the atmospheric immersion of a perfected VR, the moiré reveals another form of apparitional fluidity. Con- stantly changing with the user’s movement, the texture shows a pulsating im/materiality that already withdraws at the surface. It seems close to Ingold’s and Ansusas’s notion of infrastice that includes “all manner of electrical, 46 Cfr. A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine. 47 Cfr. C. Voss, “Das Museum als Medium der Kunst,” in G. W. Bertram, S. Deines, D. M. Feige, eds., Die Kunst und die Künste: Ein Kompendium zur Kunsttheorie der Gegenwart (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021): 464-483, 474. 48 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 35. 49 My thanks go to Manuel van der Veen for this reference and the exchange about the text. ANNETTE URBAN 133 AN-ICON  Fig. 6 R. Menkman, The Im/possible BLOB, 2021. Installed at Temporal Stack: the Deep Sensor in Guizhou, China, curated by Iris Long und HE Zike, 2021. Courtesy of the Artist. chemical, and mechanical workings […], energies, gases, and fluids”50 and resists the useability of surfaces solely understood as interfaces. Finally, the artist also uses these textures, as well as the abstract lines of graphs as vehicle for transfer- ring the virtual into physical space. For a presentation of The BLOB at Gizhou/China (Fig. 6), the dynamic black/white pattern has been transformed into a wallpaper. This exhi- bition design attaches more to the cinematically inspired strategy of extending the fictional-scenic image space in- side the VR into an overall immersive installation. But there, without the operability of latent virtual objects, it tends to unrealize the museum with its psychotic pattern. In con- trast, for a group exhibition in Munich that combined the VR-experience and the video Whiteout with works by Memo Akten, Susan Schuppli and others, Menkman materialized the abstract lines from inside the BLOB (Fig. 7). They es- tablished a 3D-framework in physical space whose white, green, red, yellow and blue diagonals traversed the floor and walls of the exhibition hall,51 thus slightly removing it from orthogonality. As these lines are imagined to shift the 50 T. Ingold, M. Anusas, “Designing Environmental Relations:” 58. 51 Cfr. L. Gross, R. Menkman, L 13: Reader NR 4 im/possible images (München: Lothringer 13 Halle, 2022) https://beyondresolution.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/ Catalogues%2Fimpossible_L13_READER.pdf, accessed April 25, 2023. ANNETTE URBAN 134 AN-ICON  Fig. 7d Fig. 7b Fig. 7c Fig. 7a Fig. 7 a-d. Views of the Exhibition Im/possible Images, at the Lothringer 13 Halle, Munich, 2021, curated by Rosa Menkman. Photo by Dominik Gigler. Courtesy of the artist and of Lothringer 13 Halle. ANNETTE URBAN 135 AN-ICON  spectra of resolution – a borderline to “low fidelity images” was inscribed on the floor –, the artist transformed the built into a “latent image space.”52 Similar to the VR, I would add, the solidity of its objects becomes doubtful, when variable parameters of the perceptible and representable always help other visualities and entities to emerge. With this kind of environmentalization, Menkman de-hierarchizes an ever-higher resolution, that regulates access to more and more details and therefore, according to Casetti and Somaini, raises the power question of control.53 In the Mu- nich exhibition, some of the im/possible images from the BLOB (re-)materialized as exhibits, among them a photo of the skinned hand scan or a newspaper clipping with an x-rayed hand from 1896. But, by placing them along the resolution lines, theses factual images remain suspended in an abstract space of potentialities. In sum, the exhibition display was activated as an integral component not princi- pally distinguished from what is constitutive for the ‘work.’ Potentiated Environmentalization As shown so far, the multiplication of environ- ments inherent in VR-art results from its genuine blurring of the differences between work and environment. This gen- erative logic of further nesting necessarily brings the whole institutional and curatorial ecosystem of VR-art into view. And the extension of the internal installation aesthetics not only counteracts its technically-based encapsulation. It is also essential for not missing the togetherness54 – to cite Mieke Bal – of an exhibition which, according to Christiane Voss, is the medium that establishes the works’ mode of existence as art in the first place.55 The Blob of Im/Possible Images, commissioned by the HeK Basel, was produced with the infrastructure of newart.city.org that provides a “virtual exhibition toolkit” 52 Cfr. R. Menkman, “Im/possible Images@Lothringer 13, Munich” https://beyondresolution.info/im-possible-images-1, accessed December 29, 2022. 53 Cfr. F. Casetti, A. Somaini, “Resolution:” 89. 54 Cfr. M. Bal, Exhibition-ism: Temporal Togetherness (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020). 55 Cfr. Voss, “Das Museum als Medium der Kunst:” 464. ANNETTE URBAN 136 AN-ICON  with “built-in tools to manage artworks and space layouts.”56 Menkman takes up its claims for a non-hierarchical co-cre- ation and invites the submission of further non-expert im/ possible images. Later on, the work has been embedded into a virtual, but spatial exhibition curated by Lívia No- lasco-Rózsás and Giulia Bini for the ZKM in 2021, which pushes the tendencies towards nesting and de-differen- tiation even further: Spatial Affairs. Worlding is inhabited by artworks, an exhibition display and visitors sharing the same organic-abstract shape. One can only distinguish the non-humanoid avatars of other visitors from exhibits through distance-reduction and the object-related action of a mouse click. The latter then turn into pink and, via an info window and links, lead the web-user to the works stored on artists’ website or platforms. By interpreting environmental- ization in terms of worlding, the curators participate in the posthumanist renewal of the phenomenological critique of the world as sum of objects. The multi-user online world with its identical, modular entities first hides the exhibition behind the supposed affordances of gaming and chats. However, the transitions between the environmental exhi- bition and environmental works are designed less immer- sively – like portals in gaming or falling down the rabbit-hole known from literature – than through paratextual framings operated by non-natural manual interfaces. The online exhibition site fantastic confabu- lations that hosts Drifting, Browsing, Cruising was also conceived by Polyviou together with Jasmina Figueora as artists in residence of the same research project Beyond Matter. Instead of nesting spaces, it deals with the gener- ic, serial tendency of self-continuation by inviting to reuse the initial 3D-reconstruction of the ZKM balcony for sub- sequent projects such as realized by Figueroa who mod- eled her spoken words and sound scores by the visitors’ movements through the virtual site. Following Ahmed, this 56 Cfr. “About New Art City,” https://info.newart.city/about, accessed December 28, 2022. ANNETTE URBAN 137 AN-ICON  implies not only a model for self-determined curation, but also a form of environmental co-habitation. Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás argues for the museum in the virtual condition as a “cognitive system”57 including non-human actors, thereby reaccentuating the pioneering thought exhibitions [Gedankenausstellungen] initiated by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour. Polyviou’s example gets by without its strong archival underpinning. In the functional architecture, his staging of an atmospherically condensed counterworld aims at releasing a different bodily knowledge of possible encounters and envisions a counter-physicality for transcending the otherwise hard-to-move institution. The curved lines on the ground echoing the paths inside the VR offer their own transformative knowledge of entan- glement that is experienced and produced environmentally. In comparison, Menkman directly invests into the potential of virtual as epistemic and aesthetic objects. Their robust- ness and simultaneously plasticity reminds the capability of Star’s and Griesemer’s boundary objects to make agents of different groupings,58 in this case those of art and science, meet. What Doris Kolesch has in mind with a normalized immersion in not only technologically-enclosed but every- day spaces, can also be true for VR-based environmental- ization. De-differentiation and de-distancing are then not contradictions to but catalysts of immersive reflection. 57 L. Nolasco-Rózsás, Y. Hofmann, “The Museum as a Cognitive System of Human and Non- Human Actors,” The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums & Culture, no. 3 (2021): 1-15. 58 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 33-34. ANNETTE URBAN 138 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

anicon

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19726

Immersivity as An-immersivity by Stefano Velotti Ordinary and immersive experience Virtual reality and art Experience economy Control Uncontrollability Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Immersivity as An-immersivity STEFANO VELOTTI, Sapienza. Università di Roma – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9421-0257 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19726 Abstract The title of this project, “An-icon,” refers to “im- ages that deny themselves.” Virtual reality may be viewed as a typical, though not exclusive, case able to illustrate this kind of image: we know we have crossed the threshold of an environment that consists of images (ontologically), but we experience it (phenomenologically) as if it were a real environ- ment. Something similar can be said about immersivity, but reversing the perspective: we are (ontologically) immersed in reality (virtual or non-virtual), but (phenomenologically) we know and say we are, and for this very reason we reject the idea that we are simply immersed in an environment. This applies first and foremost to our experience in general, regardless of the status of the experiences we gain through virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR). And yet, within this very general condition, human beings have over time created environments and works that carve out zones of “special immersivity,” so to speak, dedicated to immersion. What are we looking for in VR immersivity? Are new immersive technologies merely refinements of older tech- niques, or can they affect our relationship with ourselves, reality, and others in novel ways? What are artistic practices called on to do when faced with such new technological practices? Keywords Ordinary and immersive experience Virtual reality and art Experience economy Control Uncontrollability To quote this essay: S. Velotti, “Immersivity as An-immersivity,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 139-157, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19726. STEFANO VELOTTI 139 AN-ICON  An-Immersivity The title of this project, “An-icon,” refers to “im- ages that deny themselves.” Virtual reality may be viewed as a typical, though not exclusive, case able to illustrate this kind of image: we know we have crossed the threshold of an environment that consists of images (ontologically), but we experience it (phenomenologically) as if it were a real environment. Something similar can be said about immer- sivity, but reversing the perspective: we are (ontologically) immersed in reality (virtual or non-virtual), but (phenomeno- logically) we know and say we are, and for this very reason we reject the idea that we are simply immersed in an envi- ronment. If we were, we would have no way of becoming aware of this. In fact, to speak of immersivity, we must find our balance on an unstable boundary, which allows us to recognize the encompassing and intrascendible character of immersive experience while at the same time belying its closure, piercing it from within. To speak of immersivity therefore implies recognizing that one is in a condition of “an-immersivity,” where the hyphen separating and joining the privative prefix “an” to “immersivity” is the sign of a paradox. It could also be said that the hyphen evokes the figure of an unstable threshold, referring to the co-presence of inside and outside.1 This applies first and foremost to our experience in general, regardless of the status of the experiences we gain through virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR). “Special immersivity” Before even considering the complexities and opportunities of virtual immersivity, it should be noted that 1 In this I am comforted by the title of A. Pinotti’s fine book, Alla soglia dell’immagine: Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Turin: Einaudi, 2021). STEFANO VELOTTI 140 AN-ICON  immersivity presents itself first and foremost as a feature of our being in the world: we are always already immersed in experience, in a given situation part of an indeterminate totality. Where else could we be? And yet, within this very general condition, human beings have over time created environments and works that carve out zones of “special immersivity,” so to speak, dedicated to immersion, with different modalities, complexities, techniques, functions, and meanings, many of which – the earliest – tend to be beyond our understanding and perhaps always will. Is it possible that the insistent recourse to “(special) immersivity” arises especially at times of deep crisis, when the very foundations of a civilization are felt to be uncertain, invested with a high rate of contingency?2 To simplify: since forms of life do not allow us to feel at home in this world, which seems to have become foreign, indecipherable and threatening, one is drawn to limited and controlled spaces in which to immerse oneself, to feel more alive and safe, at least for a while. I think this perspective is plausible, though it is partial and, indeed, a simplification. What else are we looking for in VR immersivity? Are new immersive technologies merely refinements of older tech- niques, or can they affect our relationship with ourselves, reality, and others in novel ways? What are artistic practices 2 O. Grau, From Illusion to Immersion (2001), trans. G. Custance (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003) offers a historical survey of artworks aimed at providing immersive experiences. In recent decades, however, interest in Paleolithic and “cave art” has been rekindled outside the circle of specialists as well, both as such – see, e.g., G. Rigal, Le temps sacré des cavernes (Paris: Corti, 2016) – and in relation to contemporary art, to this regard see again Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine (especially the section on “Avatāra” in ch. V). Cfr. also M. Stavrinaki, Saisis par la préhistoire: Enquête sur l’art et le temps des modernes (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2019) and in particular the pages devoted to Frederick Kiessler’s Endless House and Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio’s Caverna dell’antimateria. Both of these works, created in the late 1950s, reflect the anguish connected to the atomic bomb, at that time perceived as a looming threat, later forgotten but always resurgent. The short-circuit between contemporary art and the Paleolithic seems to be related to the perception of a profound change in a civilization, if not its end, and thus to a need to revisit its origins, as if one had to start over. In this regard, in addition to a number of works of visual art that explicitly harken back to the Paleolithic, see also Richard Powers’ symptomatic novel Plowing the Dark (2000), which I have analyzed in S. Velotti, “Art in the time of Pandemic: Three Terms,” Paradigmi 39, no. 1 (2021): 127-140. STEFANO VELOTTI 141 AN-ICON  called on to do when faced with such new technological practices? Nowadays the adjective “immersive” is used obsessively in the presentation of theme parks and other sensational “adventures” or “experiences” that promise to take us “inside” paintings and frescoes or into physi- cally inaccessible places. The word invariably appears in the press releases of museums, exhibitions, performances, installations, but also in advertisements for apartments for sale or wine and food itineraries.3 One way to understand the meaning of the word is “proof of the opposite:” what, for example, would a “non-immersive” visit to an apartment look like? Hard to answer, unless we specify restrictive conditions for what is meant by immersivity. Used loosely, however, “immersive” risks being meaningless since its negation does not seem to change anything. And yet it is precisely for this reason that it is an enigmatic adjective, hovering like an obscure object of desire in our social imag- ination. Are we therefore to conclude that the attribution of immersivity is in vain since it neither adds nor detracts from the characterization of experience? I don’t think so. However, we must first clarify in what sense each of our ex- periences is both immersive and non-immersive, or, indeed, “an-immersive.” On this basis it will be easier to ask what peculiar traits are offered by the different uses of “special immersivity,” by this form of reality that is VR, particularly in relation to art, which, if it is anything, is a way of under- standing how we place ourselves in the world. 3 A real estate agency in Rome advertises its luxurious apartments in the Parioli district with the following words, “Enjoy an immersive experience! Come visit your new home.” The real estate company is called Pitagora because it is located near Piazza Pitagora, not because it is referencing the Greek philosopher; however, the agency’s slogan is “Pitagora – the philosophy of living.” Which, supposedly, explains its “unique and iconic character.” As for food and wine itineraries, one can visit, for example, “The Temple of Brunello” in Montalcino (Tuscany), which actually offers “a station with VR viewers called InVolo” that “allows visitors to immerse themselves in the villas, castles, vineyards and hamlets that dot the municipality’s vast and diversified area,” https://www.orodimontalcino.it/tempio-del-brunello/, accessed December 24, 2022. STEFANO VELOTTI 142 AN-ICON  Fish and amphibians At first glance, one would be tempted to say that we human animals are like fish immersed in water – to quote a famous apologue by David Foster Wallace about the difficulty of grasping the medium in which we are im- mersed: an old fish asks two young fish, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” and they in turn ask themselves, “What the hell is water?”4 The element in which we are immersed is in this sense a medium that cannot be iconized or repre- sented. In one respect, it is undeniable that we are always already situated, immersed in a concrete environment that resists iconic reduction. On the other hand, one must ask whether asserting this undeniable condition of immersion does not imply a partial denial of it. The simplest critiques of a representational model of the mind often target a naive idea of representa- tion, one that can be imagined as a frame or filter interposed between us and things, constituted by the spatio-temporal forms of intuition or by a priori categories, universal or cul- turally determined conceptual schemes. Access to reality “in itself” is therefore denied to us, because according to this account reality is always filtered through (inter)subjective lenses. On the complementary plane of our actions and productions we have mental representations enclosed in our head that we then try to externalize, technically, artis- tically or in other ways. Various versions of enactivism oppose this view of the representational mind, rightly insisting that percep- tion is an active way of exploring the material and social environment in which we are immersed, of experiencing affordances and building skills, not a way of corresponding 4 D. Foster Wallace, This is Water, 2005. Commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College, https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/, accessed December 28, 2022. STEFANO VELOTTI 143 AN-ICON  more or less correctly to an already organized world.5 Not least because, in order to see whether our representations “correspond” to the world, we would need to be able to have unfiltered access to reality. On another front, anti-rep- resentationalism is also endorsed by those who replace representations with immanent flows and forces, or who propose that we think of ourselves as “things among things,” according to a “flat ontology” devoid of anthropocentric hi- erarchies, where all entities are equally agents and patients, from stones to plants, from artifacts to animals. Yet, both the idea of a representational filter and the various versions of absolute immersivity run into the same problem: if we think these ideas and formulate them linguistically, as in fact we do, then they are self-con- tradictory. If they are true, then they are false.6 For if we experienced the world through a filter, we would have to see the world, ourselves and the filter with a view from nowhere. And if on the other hand it were true, as in some ways it is true, that we are always immersed in a translucent medium like fish in water, we could not communicate this. We would just be immersed. The fact is that we discover ourselves immersed and emerged at the same time, more amphibian than fish. We realize that we see and do not see a frame, that we remain on this side of a threshold knowing that we cannot cross it and therefore crossing it.7 Toward where? Toward an infinitely expandable context, the inde- terminable totality of every possible experience in which 5 Cfr. J. Stewart, O. Gapenne, E. A. Di Paolo, Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). For a recent survey of enactivism in relation to cultural contexts see C. Durt, T. Fuchs, C. Tewes, eds., Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2017). 6 Here I broadly trace the exposition of the paradoxes of experience articulated by E. Garroni, Estetica: Uno sguardo-attraverso (Milan: Garzanti, 1992). 7 Christian Stiegler acknowledges the liminality of the “liquid spaces” in which we are immersed, but then seems to unilaterally emphasize the disappearance of all frames: “Liquid spaces are moments of uncertainty, instability, and fluidity in mediated experiences. They emerge as thresholds between the physical and the mediated. These spaces create the feeling of immersion even beyond the mediation by eliminating critical distance and dissolving the frames of media.” C. Stiegler, The 360° Gaze: Immersions in Media, Society, and Culture (London: MIT Press, 2021): 61. STEFANO VELOTTI 144 AN-ICON  we are already included, on whose horizon this determinate experience stands, which is such precisely insofar as it is “cut out” from that indeterminate and uncontrollable horizon of possibility. What McLuhan says about medial awareness – summarized in the famous “rearview-mirror” metaphor recalled by Pinotti – is therefore not entirely true: As long as s/he is immersed in a medium, the human being is as little aware of it as the fish of the water in which he swims. Only the moment that medium is overtaken by a later medium can it be retrospectively focused on and grasped precisely as the medium in which the experience had been organized: “we are always one step behind in our view of the world.”8 We do not need the appearance of another me- dium to know that we are not like fish in water: the possibil- ity of saying that we are is enough for us to prove ourselves wrong. Some philosophers, such as Thomas Nagel, have claimed that this condition of ours expresses “the absurd” of the human condition, which should be accepted with a little irony and without taking ourselves too seriously. In fact, unlike other animals that lack self-awareness and lan- guage, we cannot simply remain immersed and absorbed in our occupations, nor can we, however, install ourselves in a permanent emersion, in a transcendent dimension, be- cause even the mind of the mystic is still playing one of the possible games situated in the concreteness of experience, not an out-of-this-world “super game.” Because of this we are forced to accept this irreconcilable oscillation between immersion and emergence, adherence and detachment, 8 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: 17 [my translation]. STEFANO VELOTTI 145 AN-ICON  involvement in the ordinary tasks of life and the distance of a gaze that relativizes the latter or nullifies their importance.9 But is this really the case? What if, on the other hand, it were sometimes possible to make such indetermi- nate totality transit – analogically, symbolically – in concrete, determinate experience? What if things, practices, concrete experiences were given that exemplified the indeterminable and uncontrollable dimension against which they stand out? What if this were not only a source of disquiet (due to the feeling of being in touch with the uncontrollable), but also a sensible pleasure, deriving from the fact that our vitality, the feeling of being alive, is increased by the simultaneous co-presence of immersion and emergence? Perhaps this is one of the ways of approaching some particularly sensi- ble experiences, for example, those in which we recognize something as art: a set of practices, events or “things” that allow us to “see” (feel, experience, understand) the complex texture of our forms of life, our being in the world between immersion and emersion. Before trying to articulate these still vague statements, and precisely in relation to what we have called forms of “special immersivity,”10 it is necessary to go back to their homology with the an-immersivity of ordinary ex- perience, also from the point of view of its limitations. 9 T. Nagel, “The Absurd,” in Mortal Questions (London: Canto, 1979): 11-23. 10 It should be made clear from the outset that what I have called “special immersivity” is obtained with diverse and heterogeneous forms that can be sorted into categories. For an excellent survey of immersive forms of storytelling, see E. Modena, Nelle storie: Arte, cinema e media immersivi (Rome: Carocci, 2022). Ultimately, however, as far as artistic practices are concerned, it is the singularity of the work that must be taken into account. STEFANO VELOTTI 146 AN-ICON  Limits of immersivity Let us see the extent to which the experience of virtual immersivity, in its “special” meaning, can be equated with that of ordinary immersivity. The three characteristics of immersive VR, sum- marized by Pinotti, are (1) the saturation of the 360° gaze (“unframedeness”); (2) the feeling of presence, of “being there,” which can be further articulated as telepresence, selfpresence and social presence (“presentness”);11 (3) the experience of immediacy, due paradoxically to the great complexity of technological mediations that produce VR, making the medium as transparent as possible (“immedi- ateness”).12 It is easy to see that we could characterize our experience of the ordinary world using the same properties: nothing I see is potentially limited by a frame, I have the perception of “being here,” of presence, and my experience seems immediate, that is, unmediated by a medium that interferes with reality. But, one might say, if by hypothesis VR fulfills these promises to the point of pushing itself to (illusory) indistinguishability from reality, then – from a phe- nomenological, though not an ontological, point of view – we would be thrown back into the reality we already know, and – except for the advantageous uses of it, related to various forms of telepresence and simulation – the experi- ence we derive from it would be nothing new. Conversely, one can highlight the limits of these claims and emphasize the aspects that prevent illusion. Both perspectives, how- ever, are simplistic. VR is not equivalent to ordinary reality, nor are the limitations of VR absent in ordinary reality: 11 E. Pett, Experiencing Cinema: Participatory Film Cultures, Immersive Media and the Experience Economy (New York-London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 12 A. Pinotti, “Prologo,” in Alla soglia dell’immagine: xi-xviii. STEFANO VELOTTI 147 AN-ICON  ■- It is true that in VR the frame has disappeared, but in a sense it persists: I am wearing a headset and in the future I will perhaps wear a headband, or be fitted with an implant connected to my neurons. On the other hand, even here, now, in non-virtual reality, I am partially framed by the actions that brought me to a given place and situation (I am aware that I occupy a limited or “framed” portion of reality), by attention variously focused on the scenario in front of me or the task I set myself, but also by the “frames” studied by Erving Goffman and those we do not pay attention to because they are “hidden in plain sight.”13 ■- Presence, being here, cannot be doubted. I am not else- where, or at least no more than I am elsewhere when I am im- mersed in a virtual environment. ■- Finally, the apparent immediacy produced by innumerable technological mediations also characterizes my real experience: we know all too well that what is felt as natural,spontaneous, ob- vious is intertwined with acquired habits and artificial construc- tions and prosthetic extensions: the normative, the perceptual, proxemics, social mediations, and all the ways of acting of a certain form of life. So, those characteristics that serve to phenom- enologically distinguish the experience of a non-immersive image from an “an-iconic” immersive experience are not sufficient to distinguish the experience of immersive VR from that of ordinary reality. However, from here we cannot conclude that between “ordinary” immersivity and what we have called “special immersivity” there is no difference, not only on the ontological level, but also on the phenomeno- logical one. There are countless features of VR that distin- guish it from ordinary reality. The most obvious, related first and foremost to the dimension of space, is the possibility of 13 E. Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974) (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986); E. Zerubavel, Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). STEFANO VELOTTI 148 AN-ICON  becoming immersed in scenarios that cannot be found in ordinary reality or that would be impossible to experience because of scale or distance: entering an animal’s blood- stream or its brain, acting at a distance, traveling through a body. Also, there is the cognitive conflict between pro- prioception in the real world and that in the virtual world – walking on water or plunging into an abyss while remaining firmly on the ground but feeling a sense of vertigo and fear (or, vice versa, I am immersed in the “magic circle” of VR and have an accident in the ordinary world). I do not intend to try to list all the differences and perhaps imagine how some of them will be eliminat- ed or reduced by technological progress, integrating our other senses,14 nor do I intend to address all the possible ways of using VR, which is likely to become even more useful and indispensable in the future than it already is now for many of our practices, medical, architectural, forensic, social, professional, educational, recreational, and so on. Rather, here I intend to focus on what immersive VR can tell us about the human experience in general, drawing on the experience we sometimes have in our relationship with what we call artistic works or practices. “Experience economy” In the 1990s the idea gained ground – with anticipations already in the previous decades – that the economy most suited to our times – at least in the wealth- iest societies – is not so much based on the production of goods, or even on services, but on experience. In those years, expressions such as “Erlebnisgesellschaft,” “Erleb- nismarkt,” and “Dream Society” began to circulate, until James Gilmore and Joseph Pine II became the proudest 14 Cfr. R. DeSalle, Our Senses: An Immersive Experience (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2018). STEFANO VELOTTI 149 AN-ICON  proponents of the “Experience Economy” with a book that would have a certain fortune, followed by other volumes on related issues.15 The key to their thinking is stated in the preface to the 2011 updated edition of their The Experience Economy: So let us here be most clear: goods and services are no longer enough to foster economic growth, create new jobs, and maintain economic prosperity. To realize revenue growth and increased em- ployment, the staging of experiences must be pursued as a distinct form of economic output. Indeed, in a world saturated with largely undifferentiated goods and services the greatest opportunity for value creation resides in staging experiences.16 The market for goods is saturated, and produc- ers must offer products that promise to stage experiences. For this reason the watchwords are “mass customize,” i.e. transform every service into a unique (mass) experience; “work is theater,” i.e. “stage experiences” and train sellers in specific performance practices; and finally, ensure that the experience offered generates in the consumer (“pro- sumer” or “experiencer”) an actual change, which must be properly paid for: “these transformations should themselves command a fee in the form of explicitly charging for the demonstrated outcomes that result from the underlying experiences. [...] We especially challenge enterprises in three industries: those that focus on making people healthy, wealthy, and wise.”17 It would be all too easy to reiterate once again how the neoliberal creed attempts to infiltrate every aspect 15 G. Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft: Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main- New York: Campus-Verlag, 1993); R. Jensen, “Dream Society,” The Futurist 30, no. 3 (1996): 9-13; J. Gilmore and B.J. Pine II, The Experience Economy (1999) (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2011); J. Gilmore and B.J. Pine II, Authenticity. What Consumers Really Want (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007). 16 J. Gilmore and B.J. Pine II, “Preview to the Updated Edition: Beyond Goods and Services,” in The Experience Economy: ix-xxii, ix [emphasis mine]. 17 Ibid. STEFANO VELOTTI 150 AN-ICON  of human life, putting a price tag on it. Instead, I have men- tioned these marketing strategies to make some distinc- tions concerning the notion of experience. It is interesting to see how Gilmore and Pine respond to the obvious ob- jection that an experience purchased from a catalog is a fake experience. Their line of defense comes in the central chapter of their next book, Authenticity, in which they draw on some philosophical references to arrive at the following conclusion: there is no such thing as an inauthentic experience because ex- periences happen inside us. Therefore, we remain free to judge our experiences with any economic offering as authentic or not. Businesses that offer them therefore can, whether intentionally or by happenstance, gain the perception of authenticity. [...] Business- es can render their inauthentic offerings as authentic. Doing so requires embracing this essential paradox: all human enterprise is ontologically fake - that is, in its very being it is inauthentic - and yet, output from that enterprise can be phenomenologically real - that is, it is perceived as authentic by the individuals who buy it.18 The distinction between an ontological and a phenomenological point of view returns here in a particu- larly insidious way. For on the one hand, it is true that there is no class of “fake” immersive experiences ontologically distinct from a class of “authentic” immersive experiences. And the experience one has cannot be anything other than the experience of a subject, and in this sense it is obvious- ly subjective (which, however, does not necessarily mean that it is only “inside us”). Kant himself, who entrusted to the principle of the judgment of taste even the possibility of making sense of experience in general and building a 18 J. Gilmore, B. J. Pine II, “The Authenticity Paradox,” in Authenticity: 89-90, 89 [emphasis mine]. STEFANO VELOTTI 151 AN-ICON  system of nature, reiterated that I can judge anything aes- thetically, material or immaterial, and that my judgment depends on what “I make of this representation in my- self.”19 As is well known, however, Kant ascribed to such judgment a claim to “subjective universality” and “exem- plary necessity,” springing from a “free play” of imagination and understanding. In the perspective of the “experience economy,” what we witness is a caricature of these claims: the freedom-spontaneity of the free play of the faculties becomes the consumer’s “freedom of choice,” a psycho- logical choice expressed as a preference (however moti- vated or induced, as long as it has the desired effect). The impossibility of establishing ontologically distinct classes for what is “beautiful-sensible” and what is not is reduced to what the consumer “buys or doesn’t buy” (in both senses of the word). Since nothing escapes human intervention and thus technique and money, the Las Vegas hotel “The Vene- tian” and the city of Venice possess the same ontological status, that of both being “fakes.” The authenticity of an experience cannot therefore depend on “what” we experi- ence (everything is equally ontologically “fake”), but only on something that “happens inside us,” and can therefore be “phenomenologically real.” The singularity of experience is completely annulled, and every object, practice, situation is identical to any other, as long as it produces the same effect: a novel or a pill, a bump on the head or a movie, a concert or a wedding.20 There is no longer any trace of 19 “It is readily seen that to say that it is beautiful and to prove that I have taste what matters is what I make of this representation in myself, not how I depend on the existence of the object.” I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 5; 205. 20 Cfr. Wittgenstein’s objection to the idea of aesthetic experience conceived as an effect: “There is a tendency to talk about the ‘effect of a work of art’– feelings, images, etc. Then it is natural to ask: ‘Why do you hear this minuet?,’ and there is a tendency to answer: ‘To get this, and that effect.’ And doesn’t the minuet itself matter? – hearing this: would another have done as well? You could play a minuet once, and get a lot out of it, and play the same minuet another time and get nothing out of it. But it doesn’t follow that what you get out of it is then independent of the minuet.” L. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967): 29. STEFANO VELOTTI 152 AN-ICON  recourse to an elaboration by the subject, to the exercise of a “reflective faculty of judgment” (as distinct from the objectifying exercise of “determining judgment”), to show the impossibility of constructing classes of “beautiful” or meaningful things or experiences. Instead, once again, it is the “invisible hand” of the market that knows best how to allocate the “resource” of authenticity. The perspective of control On a photography information site, I find a re- view of Richard Avedon’s recent exhibition, Relationships (Palazzo Reale, Milan, September 22, 2022-January 29, 2023). The reviewer informs us right away that it is “an en- joyable immersive experience in the artist’s photographic universe.”21 What is of interest here, however, is not the indiscriminate use of the adjective, but one of the most famous quotes attributed to Avedon, which stands out in one of the rooms: “I think all art is about control – the en- counter between control and the uncontrollable.” Referred to photography, or to a certain way of doing photography, the statement easily lends itself to multiple interpretations.22 I believe, however, that Avedon was right: every art form is characterized by this encounter and, indeed, it could be argued that every experience worthy of the name is. This “encounter,” however, takes place less and less often in everyday life: control and self-control, exacer- bated also by digital technologies (surveillance, quantified self, digital self, etc.) seem to run more and more in parallel with an increasing loss of control (sense of powerlessness, 21 E. Dal Verme, “Richard Avedon: Relationships,” Fotografia.it (September 22, 2022), https://www.fotografia.it/articoli/opinioni/richard-avedon-relationships/, accessed January 5, 2023 [emphasis mine]. 22 Cfr., e.g., R. Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance (Cambridge MA-London: Harvard University Press, 2015) and some observations in S. Velotti, The Present of Photography and the Dialectics of Control, in M. Delogu, A. Dandini de Sylva, eds., Fotografia: Il presente (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2015): 21-29. STEFANO VELOTTI 153 AN-ICON  acting out, addictions, panic attacks, conspiracy theories etc.), without the two dimensions ever converging. Although often untied in our impoverished everyday life, the knot that ties control to uncontrollability is very complex and can- not be reduced to the “society of control” preconized by Deleuze.23 The problem is complex, but here, in conclusion, I would like to put forward only a few questions about con- trol in relation to “special immersivity,” or, more specifically, immersive art practices. On the one hand, the most mun- dane experiences of “special” immersivity are meant to be forms of sensational entertainment (Caravaggio experience and the like), or reassuring bubbles where all contact with what is uncontrollable and indeterminate is preemptively sterilized. On the other, they promise they will allow us to “get lost” in immersion. (Of course, there may also be a more subtle pleasure in “letting go,” relying on someone else’s control, as artist Janet Cardiff argues when speaking of her extraordinary AR “walks”24). However, this is an unresolved problem for the “experience economy,” which on the one hand wants the prosumer/experiencer to feel that he or she is in control of his or her own choices (with reference to the alternatives offered) to ensure their authenticity, and on the other hand knows that the provider must remain in control of this offer, if only to justify the fee the prosumer/experi- encer has to pay for it. There is nothing wrong with buying an “organized immersive adventure”– which may be fun, exciting, unusual – but the doubt remains: either it is not an adventure, or it is not organized. Even in valuable academic contributions, the question of control appears repeatedly, 23 Cfr. S. Velotti, Dialettica del controllo: Limiti della sorveglianza e pratiche artistiche (Roma: Castelvecchi, 2017); H. Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (2018), trans. J.C. Wagner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020). 24 C. Christov-Bakargiev, Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller (New York: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, 2003): 35. STEFANO VELOTTI 154 AN-ICON  yet without being thematized – it remains opaque, ambig- uous, if not contradictory.25 What if, instead, the “special” immersivity of VR were employed to reveal, by exemplifying it, the paradoxical an-immersivity of ordinary experience, usually overlooked or misunderstood? What if certain uses of “special” im- mersivity were able to bring out from within not the illusory simulation of ordinary reality “as it is,” perhaps displaced into fantastic scenarios, nor sensational and amazing expe- riences, but the most ordinary experience, making it visible and understandable as an “encounter” of controllability and uncontrollability? Then we would not only have a bubble, a vacation from ordinary space, an interruption in the web of a life lived obtusely, but also the concrete exemplification of the antinomian forces that render us alive: on the one hand, the need and satisfaction of exercising some control over ourselves, the world, and others – of being agents endowed with “efficacy,” not powerless and systematically frustrated agents. On the other, the equally essential need not to remain entrenched in such control, which can only become animated in the “encounter” with what is and re- mains uncontrollable: the indeterminate totality of experi- ence, the unpredictability of our multiple relationships, the infinitely rich grain of reality. Possible examples of such successful “en- counters” abound in contemporary art practices. Here I would like to cite just one, which I think is particularly signif- icant because of its apparent incongruity and which would 25 See for example C. Stiegler, The 360° Gaze: “If all the frames, stages, and technologies dissolve now, we are about to confuse different concepts of realities […] They emphasize the dissolution of boundaries and control”; but, at the same time, he writes that in the use of avatars “Nonhuman characters can activate the same emotional alignment and level of acceptance as human characters. Elena Kokkinara and Rachel McDonnell confirm that even though photorealistic imagery supports acceptance and engagement, authenticity depends much more ‘on the levels of perceived ownership and sense of control (agency) we feel towards this virtual character.’” Stiegler, The 360° Gaze: 92 [emphasis mine]. STEFANO VELOTTI 155 AN-ICON  deserve a much deeper analysis:26 about 50 years ago, an Australian theology professor, John M. Hull, noticed that he was going blind, and decided to tape-record a diary of this dramatic progression. In 1990, these recordings be- came an extraordinary book, Touching the Rock. An Ex- perience of Blindness. In the preface, Oliver Sacks wrote, quite rightly, that if Wittgenstein had gone blind, he would probably have written a similar book. A short film, a feature film and finally (in 2016) a virtual reality application, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness, are based on this book.27 It is “an experience” that takes place at the intersection of multiple authorships: Hull, the creators of the work in VR, and, it must be added, a partial interactivity on the part of the “experiencer.” The latter wears a binaural audio device – the same sound reproduction technique used by Cardiff for her assisted “walks” – coupled with a 360-degree VR headset. Beginning with Hull’s experience of blindness, the making, as well as the enjoyment of the experience, are the work of the “non-blind.” It is not about disavowing the tragedy of losing one’s sight, nor is it about telling a story of “redemption.” Rather, what happens is that the blindness of the person wearing the VR headset – and the related loss of control over the outside world – is not replaced by images aiming to immerse the person in a realistic, broadly illusionistic environment, but rather “into Darkness,” one of the most obvious manifestations of the loss of control over the environment. What we find in this VR, however, is not total darkness, but the disjointed and fragmented world described by Hull’s words. The apparent obviousness of ordinary visual perception is suspended. 26 See C. Roussel, “If Blindness Creates a New World,” CJDS 8, no. 6 (2019): 108-130, which documents and analyzes the genesis and structure of Notes on Blindness VR in the most comprehensive way. E. Modena, building on Roussel’s analysis, devotes some of the finest pages to it in her book Nelle storie: 84-87. See also the presentation of the project by A. Colinart, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im3CpA14jEQ, accessed January 8, 2023. 27 Cfr. e.g., A. Noë, Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). STEFANO VELOTTI 156 AN-ICON  It involves participating in the reconstitution of the unity of experience almost “from scratch,” which depends on acoustic signals that “bounce” back to us from objects if given certain environmental conditions: wind or rain make the world perceptible. Perceiving requires our activity, which is partially controllable, and a “collaboration” of the world that is usually beyond our control, i.e. weather events (in the app, the experiencer can control the triggering of such uncontrollable conditions). The idea that seeing is not ob- vious, that we need to learn how to do it actively, and that art is a way of “learning to look,” I think is right, as long as “looking” is translated into a more global “perceiving” extended to the whole body. What we see in the virtual scenario are not really images, in the sense of figures, but sketches, elusive and ghostly graphic patterns (like Kantian image-schemes)28 correlated to sound. A silent world would be dark. This reduction of figurativeness is much closer to a staging of our ordinary perception than any mimetic or fantastic imagery. Like blindness for the non-blind, our perceptual life in its entanglement with the world cannot be properly depicted visually. However, the suspension of ordinary sight opens up an understanding of a usually occluded perceptual experience, revealing, I believe, the paradoxical an-immersive interweaving of controllability and uncontrollability that constitutes us and toward which we are becoming increasingly blind. 28 E. Garroni, Immagine, linguaggio, figura (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2005). STEFANO VELOTTI 157 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

anicon

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19726

Immersivity as An-immersivity by Stefano Velotti Ordinary and immersive experience Virtual reality and art Experience economy Control Uncontrollability Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello Immersivity as An-immersivity STEFANO VELOTTI, Sapienza. Università di Roma – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9421-0257 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19726 Abstract The title of this project, “An-icon,” refers to “im- ages that deny themselves.” Virtual reality may be viewed as a typical, though not exclusive, case able to illustrate this kind of image: we know we have crossed the threshold of an environment that consists of images (ontologically), but we experience it (phenomenologically) as if it were a real environ- ment. Something similar can be said about immersivity, but reversing the perspective: we are (ontologically) immersed in reality (virtual or non-virtual), but (phenomenologically) we know and say we are, and for this very reason we reject the idea that we are simply immersed in an environment. This applies first and foremost to our experience in general, regardless of the status of the experiences we gain through virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR). And yet, within this very general condition, human beings have over time created environments and works that carve out zones of “special immersivity,” so to speak, dedicated to immersion. What are we looking for in VR immersivity? Are new immersive technologies merely refinements of older tech- niques, or can they affect our relationship with ourselves, reality, and others in novel ways? What are artistic practices called on to do when faced with such new technological practices? Keywords Ordinary and immersive experience Virtual reality and art Experience economy Control Uncontrollability To quote this essay: S. Velotti, “Immersivity as An-immersivity,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 139-157, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19726. STEFANO VELOTTI 139 AN-ICON  An-Immersivity The title of this project, “An-icon,” refers to “im- ages that deny themselves.” Virtual reality may be viewed as a typical, though not exclusive, case able to illustrate this kind of image: we know we have crossed the threshold of an environment that consists of images (ontologically), but we experience it (phenomenologically) as if it were a real environment. Something similar can be said about immer- sivity, but reversing the perspective: we are (ontologically) immersed in reality (virtual or non-virtual), but (phenomeno- logically) we know and say we are, and for this very reason we reject the idea that we are simply immersed in an envi- ronment. If we were, we would have no way of becoming aware of this. In fact, to speak of immersivity, we must find our balance on an unstable boundary, which allows us to recognize the encompassing and intrascendible character of immersive experience while at the same time belying its closure, piercing it from within. To speak of immersivity therefore implies recognizing that one is in a condition of “an-immersivity,” where the hyphen separating and joining the privative prefix “an” to “immersivity” is the sign of a paradox. It could also be said that the hyphen evokes the figure of an unstable threshold, referring to the co-presence of inside and outside.1 This applies first and foremost to our experience in general, regardless of the status of the experiences we gain through virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR). “Special immersivity” Before even considering the complexities and opportunities of virtual immersivity, it should be noted that 1 In this I am comforted by the title of A. Pinotti’s fine book, Alla soglia dell’immagine: Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Turin: Einaudi, 2021). STEFANO VELOTTI 140 AN-ICON  immersivity presents itself first and foremost as a feature of our being in the world: we are always already immersed in experience, in a given situation part of an indeterminate totality. Where else could we be? And yet, within this very general condition, human beings have over time created environments and works that carve out zones of “special immersivity,” so to speak, dedicated to immersion, with different modalities, complexities, techniques, functions, and meanings, many of which – the earliest – tend to be beyond our understanding and perhaps always will. Is it possible that the insistent recourse to “(special) immersivity” arises especially at times of deep crisis, when the very foundations of a civilization are felt to be uncertain, invested with a high rate of contingency?2 To simplify: since forms of life do not allow us to feel at home in this world, which seems to have become foreign, indecipherable and threatening, one is drawn to limited and controlled spaces in which to immerse oneself, to feel more alive and safe, at least for a while. I think this perspective is plausible, though it is partial and, indeed, a simplification. What else are we looking for in VR immersivity? Are new immersive technologies merely refinements of older tech- niques, or can they affect our relationship with ourselves, reality, and others in novel ways? What are artistic practices 2 O. Grau, From Illusion to Immersion (2001), trans. G. Custance (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003) offers a historical survey of artworks aimed at providing immersive experiences. In recent decades, however, interest in Paleolithic and “cave art” has been rekindled outside the circle of specialists as well, both as such – see, e.g., G. Rigal, Le temps sacré des cavernes (Paris: Corti, 2016) – and in relation to contemporary art, to this regard see again Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine (especially the section on “Avatāra” in ch. V). Cfr. also M. Stavrinaki, Saisis par la préhistoire: Enquête sur l’art et le temps des modernes (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2019) and in particular the pages devoted to Frederick Kiessler’s Endless House and Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio’s Caverna dell’antimateria. Both of these works, created in the late 1950s, reflect the anguish connected to the atomic bomb, at that time perceived as a looming threat, later forgotten but always resurgent. The short-circuit between contemporary art and the Paleolithic seems to be related to the perception of a profound change in a civilization, if not its end, and thus to a need to revisit its origins, as if one had to start over. In this regard, in addition to a number of works of visual art that explicitly harken back to the Paleolithic, see also Richard Powers’ symptomatic novel Plowing the Dark (2000), which I have analyzed in S. Velotti, “Art in the time of Pandemic: Three Terms,” Paradigmi 39, no. 1 (2021): 127-140. STEFANO VELOTTI 141 AN-ICON  called on to do when faced with such new technological practices? Nowadays the adjective “immersive” is used obsessively in the presentation of theme parks and other sensational “adventures” or “experiences” that promise to take us “inside” paintings and frescoes or into physi- cally inaccessible places. The word invariably appears in the press releases of museums, exhibitions, performances, installations, but also in advertisements for apartments for sale or wine and food itineraries.3 One way to understand the meaning of the word is “proof of the opposite:” what, for example, would a “non-immersive” visit to an apartment look like? Hard to answer, unless we specify restrictive conditions for what is meant by immersivity. Used loosely, however, “immersive” risks being meaningless since its negation does not seem to change anything. And yet it is precisely for this reason that it is an enigmatic adjective, hovering like an obscure object of desire in our social imag- ination. Are we therefore to conclude that the attribution of immersivity is in vain since it neither adds nor detracts from the characterization of experience? I don’t think so. However, we must first clarify in what sense each of our ex- periences is both immersive and non-immersive, or, indeed, “an-immersive.” On this basis it will be easier to ask what peculiar traits are offered by the different uses of “special immersivity,” by this form of reality that is VR, particularly in relation to art, which, if it is anything, is a way of under- standing how we place ourselves in the world. 3 A real estate agency in Rome advertises its luxurious apartments in the Parioli district with the following words, “Enjoy an immersive experience! Come visit your new home.” The real estate company is called Pitagora because it is located near Piazza Pitagora, not because it is referencing the Greek philosopher; however, the agency’s slogan is “Pitagora – the philosophy of living.” Which, supposedly, explains its “unique and iconic character.” As for food and wine itineraries, one can visit, for example, “The Temple of Brunello” in Montalcino (Tuscany), which actually offers “a station with VR viewers called InVolo” that “allows visitors to immerse themselves in the villas, castles, vineyards and hamlets that dot the municipality’s vast and diversified area,” https://www.orodimontalcino.it/tempio-del-brunello/, accessed December 24, 2022. STEFANO VELOTTI 142 AN-ICON  Fish and amphibians At first glance, one would be tempted to say that we human animals are like fish immersed in water – to quote a famous apologue by David Foster Wallace about the difficulty of grasping the medium in which we are im- mersed: an old fish asks two young fish, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” and they in turn ask themselves, “What the hell is water?”4 The element in which we are immersed is in this sense a medium that cannot be iconized or repre- sented. In one respect, it is undeniable that we are always already situated, immersed in a concrete environment that resists iconic reduction. On the other hand, one must ask whether asserting this undeniable condition of immersion does not imply a partial denial of it. The simplest critiques of a representational model of the mind often target a naive idea of representa- tion, one that can be imagined as a frame or filter interposed between us and things, constituted by the spatio-temporal forms of intuition or by a priori categories, universal or cul- turally determined conceptual schemes. Access to reality “in itself” is therefore denied to us, because according to this account reality is always filtered through (inter)subjective lenses. On the complementary plane of our actions and productions we have mental representations enclosed in our head that we then try to externalize, technically, artis- tically or in other ways. Various versions of enactivism oppose this view of the representational mind, rightly insisting that percep- tion is an active way of exploring the material and social environment in which we are immersed, of experiencing affordances and building skills, not a way of corresponding 4 D. Foster Wallace, This is Water, 2005. Commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College, https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/, accessed December 28, 2022. STEFANO VELOTTI 143 AN-ICON  more or less correctly to an already organized world.5 Not least because, in order to see whether our representations “correspond” to the world, we would need to be able to have unfiltered access to reality. On another front, anti-rep- resentationalism is also endorsed by those who replace representations with immanent flows and forces, or who propose that we think of ourselves as “things among things,” according to a “flat ontology” devoid of anthropocentric hi- erarchies, where all entities are equally agents and patients, from stones to plants, from artifacts to animals. Yet, both the idea of a representational filter and the various versions of absolute immersivity run into the same problem: if we think these ideas and formulate them linguistically, as in fact we do, then they are self-con- tradictory. If they are true, then they are false.6 For if we experienced the world through a filter, we would have to see the world, ourselves and the filter with a view from nowhere. And if on the other hand it were true, as in some ways it is true, that we are always immersed in a translucent medium like fish in water, we could not communicate this. We would just be immersed. The fact is that we discover ourselves immersed and emerged at the same time, more amphibian than fish. We realize that we see and do not see a frame, that we remain on this side of a threshold knowing that we cannot cross it and therefore crossing it.7 Toward where? Toward an infinitely expandable context, the inde- terminable totality of every possible experience in which 5 Cfr. J. Stewart, O. Gapenne, E. A. Di Paolo, Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). For a recent survey of enactivism in relation to cultural contexts see C. Durt, T. Fuchs, C. Tewes, eds., Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2017). 6 Here I broadly trace the exposition of the paradoxes of experience articulated by E. Garroni, Estetica: Uno sguardo-attraverso (Milan: Garzanti, 1992). 7 Christian Stiegler acknowledges the liminality of the “liquid spaces” in which we are immersed, but then seems to unilaterally emphasize the disappearance of all frames: “Liquid spaces are moments of uncertainty, instability, and fluidity in mediated experiences. They emerge as thresholds between the physical and the mediated. These spaces create the feeling of immersion even beyond the mediation by eliminating critical distance and dissolving the frames of media.” C. Stiegler, The 360° Gaze: Immersions in Media, Society, and Culture (London: MIT Press, 2021): 61. STEFANO VELOTTI 144 AN-ICON  we are already included, on whose horizon this determinate experience stands, which is such precisely insofar as it is “cut out” from that indeterminate and uncontrollable horizon of possibility. What McLuhan says about medial awareness – summarized in the famous “rearview-mirror” metaphor recalled by Pinotti – is therefore not entirely true: As long as s/he is immersed in a medium, the human being is as little aware of it as the fish of the water in which he swims. Only the moment that medium is overtaken by a later medium can it be retrospectively focused on and grasped precisely as the medium in which the experience had been organized: “we are always one step behind in our view of the world.”8 We do not need the appearance of another me- dium to know that we are not like fish in water: the possibil- ity of saying that we are is enough for us to prove ourselves wrong. Some philosophers, such as Thomas Nagel, have claimed that this condition of ours expresses “the absurd” of the human condition, which should be accepted with a little irony and without taking ourselves too seriously. In fact, unlike other animals that lack self-awareness and lan- guage, we cannot simply remain immersed and absorbed in our occupations, nor can we, however, install ourselves in a permanent emersion, in a transcendent dimension, be- cause even the mind of the mystic is still playing one of the possible games situated in the concreteness of experience, not an out-of-this-world “super game.” Because of this we are forced to accept this irreconcilable oscillation between immersion and emergence, adherence and detachment, 8 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: 17 [my translation]. STEFANO VELOTTI 145 AN-ICON  involvement in the ordinary tasks of life and the distance of a gaze that relativizes the latter or nullifies their importance.9 But is this really the case? What if, on the other hand, it were sometimes possible to make such indetermi- nate totality transit – analogically, symbolically – in concrete, determinate experience? What if things, practices, concrete experiences were given that exemplified the indeterminable and uncontrollable dimension against which they stand out? What if this were not only a source of disquiet (due to the feeling of being in touch with the uncontrollable), but also a sensible pleasure, deriving from the fact that our vitality, the feeling of being alive, is increased by the simultaneous co-presence of immersion and emergence? Perhaps this is one of the ways of approaching some particularly sensi- ble experiences, for example, those in which we recognize something as art: a set of practices, events or “things” that allow us to “see” (feel, experience, understand) the complex texture of our forms of life, our being in the world between immersion and emersion. Before trying to articulate these still vague statements, and precisely in relation to what we have called forms of “special immersivity,”10 it is necessary to go back to their homology with the an-immersivity of ordinary ex- perience, also from the point of view of its limitations. 9 T. Nagel, “The Absurd,” in Mortal Questions (London: Canto, 1979): 11-23. 10 It should be made clear from the outset that what I have called “special immersivity” is obtained with diverse and heterogeneous forms that can be sorted into categories. For an excellent survey of immersive forms of storytelling, see E. Modena, Nelle storie: Arte, cinema e media immersivi (Rome: Carocci, 2022). Ultimately, however, as far as artistic practices are concerned, it is the singularity of the work that must be taken into account. STEFANO VELOTTI 146 AN-ICON  Limits of immersivity Let us see the extent to which the experience of virtual immersivity, in its “special” meaning, can be equated with that of ordinary immersivity. The three characteristics of immersive VR, sum- marized by Pinotti, are (1) the saturation of the 360° gaze (“unframedeness”); (2) the feeling of presence, of “being there,” which can be further articulated as telepresence, selfpresence and social presence (“presentness”);11 (3) the experience of immediacy, due paradoxically to the great complexity of technological mediations that produce VR, making the medium as transparent as possible (“immedi- ateness”).12 It is easy to see that we could characterize our experience of the ordinary world using the same properties: nothing I see is potentially limited by a frame, I have the perception of “being here,” of presence, and my experience seems immediate, that is, unmediated by a medium that interferes with reality. But, one might say, if by hypothesis VR fulfills these promises to the point of pushing itself to (illusory) indistinguishability from reality, then – from a phe- nomenological, though not an ontological, point of view – we would be thrown back into the reality we already know, and – except for the advantageous uses of it, related to various forms of telepresence and simulation – the experi- ence we derive from it would be nothing new. Conversely, one can highlight the limits of these claims and emphasize the aspects that prevent illusion. Both perspectives, how- ever, are simplistic. VR is not equivalent to ordinary reality, nor are the limitations of VR absent in ordinary reality: 11 E. Pett, Experiencing Cinema: Participatory Film Cultures, Immersive Media and the Experience Economy (New York-London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 12 A. Pinotti, “Prologo,” in Alla soglia dell’immagine: xi-xviii. STEFANO VELOTTI 147 AN-ICON  ■- It is true that in VR the frame has disappeared, but in a sense it persists: I am wearing a headset and in the future I will perhaps wear a headband, or be fitted with an implant connected to my neurons. On the other hand, even here, now, in non-virtual reality, I am partially framed by the actions that brought me to a given place and situation (I am aware that I occupy a limited or “framed” portion of reality), by attention variously focused on the scenario in front of me or the task I set myself, but also by the “frames” studied by Erving Goffman and those we do not pay attention to because they are “hidden in plain sight.”13 ■- Presence, being here, cannot be doubted. I am not else- where, or at least no more than I am elsewhere when I am im- mersed in a virtual environment. ■- Finally, the apparent immediacy produced by innumerable technological mediations also characterizes my real experience: we know all too well that what is felt as natural,spontaneous, ob- vious is intertwined with acquired habits and artificial construc- tions and prosthetic extensions: the normative, the perceptual, proxemics, social mediations, and all the ways of acting of a certain form of life. So, those characteristics that serve to phenom- enologically distinguish the experience of a non-immersive image from an “an-iconic” immersive experience are not sufficient to distinguish the experience of immersive VR from that of ordinary reality. However, from here we cannot conclude that between “ordinary” immersivity and what we have called “special immersivity” there is no difference, not only on the ontological level, but also on the phenomeno- logical one. There are countless features of VR that distin- guish it from ordinary reality. The most obvious, related first and foremost to the dimension of space, is the possibility of 13 E. Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974) (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986); E. Zerubavel, Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). STEFANO VELOTTI 148 AN-ICON  becoming immersed in scenarios that cannot be found in ordinary reality or that would be impossible to experience because of scale or distance: entering an animal’s blood- stream or its brain, acting at a distance, traveling through a body. Also, there is the cognitive conflict between pro- prioception in the real world and that in the virtual world – walking on water or plunging into an abyss while remaining firmly on the ground but feeling a sense of vertigo and fear (or, vice versa, I am immersed in the “magic circle” of VR and have an accident in the ordinary world). I do not intend to try to list all the differences and perhaps imagine how some of them will be eliminat- ed or reduced by technological progress, integrating our other senses,14 nor do I intend to address all the possible ways of using VR, which is likely to become even more useful and indispensable in the future than it already is now for many of our practices, medical, architectural, forensic, social, professional, educational, recreational, and so on. Rather, here I intend to focus on what immersive VR can tell us about the human experience in general, drawing on the experience we sometimes have in our relationship with what we call artistic works or practices. “Experience economy” In the 1990s the idea gained ground – with anticipations already in the previous decades – that the economy most suited to our times – at least in the wealth- iest societies – is not so much based on the production of goods, or even on services, but on experience. In those years, expressions such as “Erlebnisgesellschaft,” “Erleb- nismarkt,” and “Dream Society” began to circulate, until James Gilmore and Joseph Pine II became the proudest 14 Cfr. R. DeSalle, Our Senses: An Immersive Experience (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2018). STEFANO VELOTTI 149 AN-ICON  proponents of the “Experience Economy” with a book that would have a certain fortune, followed by other volumes on related issues.15 The key to their thinking is stated in the preface to the 2011 updated edition of their The Experience Economy: So let us here be most clear: goods and services are no longer enough to foster economic growth, create new jobs, and maintain economic prosperity. To realize revenue growth and increased em- ployment, the staging of experiences must be pursued as a distinct form of economic output. Indeed, in a world saturated with largely undifferentiated goods and services the greatest opportunity for value creation resides in staging experiences.16 The market for goods is saturated, and produc- ers must offer products that promise to stage experiences. For this reason the watchwords are “mass customize,” i.e. transform every service into a unique (mass) experience; “work is theater,” i.e. “stage experiences” and train sellers in specific performance practices; and finally, ensure that the experience offered generates in the consumer (“pro- sumer” or “experiencer”) an actual change, which must be properly paid for: “these transformations should themselves command a fee in the form of explicitly charging for the demonstrated outcomes that result from the underlying experiences. [...] We especially challenge enterprises in three industries: those that focus on making people healthy, wealthy, and wise.”17 It would be all too easy to reiterate once again how the neoliberal creed attempts to infiltrate every aspect 15 G. Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft: Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main- New York: Campus-Verlag, 1993); R. Jensen, “Dream Society,” The Futurist 30, no. 3 (1996): 9-13; J. Gilmore and B.J. Pine II, The Experience Economy (1999) (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2011); J. Gilmore and B.J. Pine II, Authenticity. What Consumers Really Want (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007). 16 J. Gilmore and B.J. Pine II, “Preview to the Updated Edition: Beyond Goods and Services,” in The Experience Economy: ix-xxii, ix [emphasis mine]. 17 Ibid. STEFANO VELOTTI 150 AN-ICON  of human life, putting a price tag on it. Instead, I have men- tioned these marketing strategies to make some distinc- tions concerning the notion of experience. It is interesting to see how Gilmore and Pine respond to the obvious ob- jection that an experience purchased from a catalog is a fake experience. Their line of defense comes in the central chapter of their next book, Authenticity, in which they draw on some philosophical references to arrive at the following conclusion: there is no such thing as an inauthentic experience because ex- periences happen inside us. Therefore, we remain free to judge our experiences with any economic offering as authentic or not. Businesses that offer them therefore can, whether intentionally or by happenstance, gain the perception of authenticity. [...] Business- es can render their inauthentic offerings as authentic. Doing so requires embracing this essential paradox: all human enterprise is ontologically fake - that is, in its very being it is inauthentic - and yet, output from that enterprise can be phenomenologically real - that is, it is perceived as authentic by the individuals who buy it.18 The distinction between an ontological and a phenomenological point of view returns here in a particu- larly insidious way. For on the one hand, it is true that there is no class of “fake” immersive experiences ontologically distinct from a class of “authentic” immersive experiences. And the experience one has cannot be anything other than the experience of a subject, and in this sense it is obvious- ly subjective (which, however, does not necessarily mean that it is only “inside us”). Kant himself, who entrusted to the principle of the judgment of taste even the possibility of making sense of experience in general and building a 18 J. Gilmore, B. J. Pine II, “The Authenticity Paradox,” in Authenticity: 89-90, 89 [emphasis mine]. STEFANO VELOTTI 151 AN-ICON  system of nature, reiterated that I can judge anything aes- thetically, material or immaterial, and that my judgment depends on what “I make of this representation in my- self.”19 As is well known, however, Kant ascribed to such judgment a claim to “subjective universality” and “exem- plary necessity,” springing from a “free play” of imagination and understanding. In the perspective of the “experience economy,” what we witness is a caricature of these claims: the freedom-spontaneity of the free play of the faculties becomes the consumer’s “freedom of choice,” a psycho- logical choice expressed as a preference (however moti- vated or induced, as long as it has the desired effect). The impossibility of establishing ontologically distinct classes for what is “beautiful-sensible” and what is not is reduced to what the consumer “buys or doesn’t buy” (in both senses of the word). Since nothing escapes human intervention and thus technique and money, the Las Vegas hotel “The Vene- tian” and the city of Venice possess the same ontological status, that of both being “fakes.” The authenticity of an experience cannot therefore depend on “what” we experi- ence (everything is equally ontologically “fake”), but only on something that “happens inside us,” and can therefore be “phenomenologically real.” The singularity of experience is completely annulled, and every object, practice, situation is identical to any other, as long as it produces the same effect: a novel or a pill, a bump on the head or a movie, a concert or a wedding.20 There is no longer any trace of 19 “It is readily seen that to say that it is beautiful and to prove that I have taste what matters is what I make of this representation in myself, not how I depend on the existence of the object.” I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 5; 205. 20 Cfr. Wittgenstein’s objection to the idea of aesthetic experience conceived as an effect: “There is a tendency to talk about the ‘effect of a work of art’– feelings, images, etc. Then it is natural to ask: ‘Why do you hear this minuet?,’ and there is a tendency to answer: ‘To get this, and that effect.’ And doesn’t the minuet itself matter? – hearing this: would another have done as well? You could play a minuet once, and get a lot out of it, and play the same minuet another time and get nothing out of it. But it doesn’t follow that what you get out of it is then independent of the minuet.” L. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967): 29. STEFANO VELOTTI 152 AN-ICON  recourse to an elaboration by the subject, to the exercise of a “reflective faculty of judgment” (as distinct from the objectifying exercise of “determining judgment”), to show the impossibility of constructing classes of “beautiful” or meaningful things or experiences. Instead, once again, it is the “invisible hand” of the market that knows best how to allocate the “resource” of authenticity. The perspective of control On a photography information site, I find a re- view of Richard Avedon’s recent exhibition, Relationships (Palazzo Reale, Milan, September 22, 2022-January 29, 2023). The reviewer informs us right away that it is “an en- joyable immersive experience in the artist’s photographic universe.”21 What is of interest here, however, is not the indiscriminate use of the adjective, but one of the most famous quotes attributed to Avedon, which stands out in one of the rooms: “I think all art is about control – the en- counter between control and the uncontrollable.” Referred to photography, or to a certain way of doing photography, the statement easily lends itself to multiple interpretations.22 I believe, however, that Avedon was right: every art form is characterized by this encounter and, indeed, it could be argued that every experience worthy of the name is. This “encounter,” however, takes place less and less often in everyday life: control and self-control, exacer- bated also by digital technologies (surveillance, quantified self, digital self, etc.) seem to run more and more in parallel with an increasing loss of control (sense of powerlessness, 21 E. Dal Verme, “Richard Avedon: Relationships,” Fotografia.it (September 22, 2022), https://www.fotografia.it/articoli/opinioni/richard-avedon-relationships/, accessed January 5, 2023 [emphasis mine]. 22 Cfr., e.g., R. Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance (Cambridge MA-London: Harvard University Press, 2015) and some observations in S. Velotti, The Present of Photography and the Dialectics of Control, in M. Delogu, A. Dandini de Sylva, eds., Fotografia: Il presente (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2015): 21-29. STEFANO VELOTTI 153 AN-ICON  acting out, addictions, panic attacks, conspiracy theories etc.), without the two dimensions ever converging. Although often untied in our impoverished everyday life, the knot that ties control to uncontrollability is very complex and can- not be reduced to the “society of control” preconized by Deleuze.23 The problem is complex, but here, in conclusion, I would like to put forward only a few questions about con- trol in relation to “special immersivity,” or, more specifically, immersive art practices. On the one hand, the most mun- dane experiences of “special” immersivity are meant to be forms of sensational entertainment (Caravaggio experience and the like), or reassuring bubbles where all contact with what is uncontrollable and indeterminate is preemptively sterilized. On the other, they promise they will allow us to “get lost” in immersion. (Of course, there may also be a more subtle pleasure in “letting go,” relying on someone else’s control, as artist Janet Cardiff argues when speaking of her extraordinary AR “walks”24). However, this is an unresolved problem for the “experience economy,” which on the one hand wants the prosumer/experiencer to feel that he or she is in control of his or her own choices (with reference to the alternatives offered) to ensure their authenticity, and on the other hand knows that the provider must remain in control of this offer, if only to justify the fee the prosumer/experi- encer has to pay for it. There is nothing wrong with buying an “organized immersive adventure”– which may be fun, exciting, unusual – but the doubt remains: either it is not an adventure, or it is not organized. Even in valuable academic contributions, the question of control appears repeatedly, 23 Cfr. S. Velotti, Dialettica del controllo: Limiti della sorveglianza e pratiche artistiche (Roma: Castelvecchi, 2017); H. Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (2018), trans. J.C. Wagner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020). 24 C. Christov-Bakargiev, Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller (New York: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, 2003): 35. STEFANO VELOTTI 154 AN-ICON  yet without being thematized – it remains opaque, ambig- uous, if not contradictory.25 What if, instead, the “special” immersivity of VR were employed to reveal, by exemplifying it, the paradoxical an-immersivity of ordinary experience, usually overlooked or misunderstood? What if certain uses of “special” im- mersivity were able to bring out from within not the illusory simulation of ordinary reality “as it is,” perhaps displaced into fantastic scenarios, nor sensational and amazing expe- riences, but the most ordinary experience, making it visible and understandable as an “encounter” of controllability and uncontrollability? Then we would not only have a bubble, a vacation from ordinary space, an interruption in the web of a life lived obtusely, but also the concrete exemplification of the antinomian forces that render us alive: on the one hand, the need and satisfaction of exercising some control over ourselves, the world, and others – of being agents endowed with “efficacy,” not powerless and systematically frustrated agents. On the other, the equally essential need not to remain entrenched in such control, which can only become animated in the “encounter” with what is and re- mains uncontrollable: the indeterminate totality of experi- ence, the unpredictability of our multiple relationships, the infinitely rich grain of reality. Possible examples of such successful “en- counters” abound in contemporary art practices. Here I would like to cite just one, which I think is particularly signif- icant because of its apparent incongruity and which would 25 See for example C. Stiegler, The 360° Gaze: “If all the frames, stages, and technologies dissolve now, we are about to confuse different concepts of realities […] They emphasize the dissolution of boundaries and control”; but, at the same time, he writes that in the use of avatars “Nonhuman characters can activate the same emotional alignment and level of acceptance as human characters. Elena Kokkinara and Rachel McDonnell confirm that even though photorealistic imagery supports acceptance and engagement, authenticity depends much more ‘on the levels of perceived ownership and sense of control (agency) we feel towards this virtual character.’” Stiegler, The 360° Gaze: 92 [emphasis mine]. STEFANO VELOTTI 155 AN-ICON  deserve a much deeper analysis:26 about 50 years ago, an Australian theology professor, John M. Hull, noticed that he was going blind, and decided to tape-record a diary of this dramatic progression. In 1990, these recordings be- came an extraordinary book, Touching the Rock. An Ex- perience of Blindness. In the preface, Oliver Sacks wrote, quite rightly, that if Wittgenstein had gone blind, he would probably have written a similar book. A short film, a feature film and finally (in 2016) a virtual reality application, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness, are based on this book.27 It is “an experience” that takes place at the intersection of multiple authorships: Hull, the creators of the work in VR, and, it must be added, a partial interactivity on the part of the “experiencer.” The latter wears a binaural audio device – the same sound reproduction technique used by Cardiff for her assisted “walks” – coupled with a 360-degree VR headset. Beginning with Hull’s experience of blindness, the making, as well as the enjoyment of the experience, are the work of the “non-blind.” It is not about disavowing the tragedy of losing one’s sight, nor is it about telling a story of “redemption.” Rather, what happens is that the blindness of the person wearing the VR headset – and the related loss of control over the outside world – is not replaced by images aiming to immerse the person in a realistic, broadly illusionistic environment, but rather “into Darkness,” one of the most obvious manifestations of the loss of control over the environment. What we find in this VR, however, is not total darkness, but the disjointed and fragmented world described by Hull’s words. The apparent obviousness of ordinary visual perception is suspended. 26 See C. Roussel, “If Blindness Creates a New World,” CJDS 8, no. 6 (2019): 108-130, which documents and analyzes the genesis and structure of Notes on Blindness VR in the most comprehensive way. E. Modena, building on Roussel’s analysis, devotes some of the finest pages to it in her book Nelle storie: 84-87. See also the presentation of the project by A. Colinart, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im3CpA14jEQ, accessed January 8, 2023. 27 Cfr. e.g., A. Noë, Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). STEFANO VELOTTI 156 AN-ICON  It involves participating in the reconstitution of the unity of experience almost “from scratch,” which depends on acoustic signals that “bounce” back to us from objects if given certain environmental conditions: wind or rain make the world perceptible. Perceiving requires our activity, which is partially controllable, and a “collaboration” of the world that is usually beyond our control, i.e. weather events (in the app, the experiencer can control the triggering of such uncontrollable conditions). The idea that seeing is not ob- vious, that we need to learn how to do it actively, and that art is a way of “learning to look,” I think is right, as long as “looking” is translated into a more global “perceiving” extended to the whole body. What we see in the virtual scenario are not really images, in the sense of figures, but sketches, elusive and ghostly graphic patterns (like Kantian image-schemes)28 correlated to sound. A silent world would be dark. This reduction of figurativeness is much closer to a staging of our ordinary perception than any mimetic or fantastic imagery. Like blindness for the non-blind, our perceptual life in its entanglement with the world cannot be properly depicted visually. However, the suspension of ordinary sight opens up an understanding of a usually occluded perceptual experience, revealing, I believe, the paradoxical an-immersive interweaving of controllability and uncontrollability that constitutes us and toward which we are becoming increasingly blind. 28 E. Garroni, Immagine, linguaggio, figura (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2005). STEFANO VELOTTI 157 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19956

“Looking Glass:” Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts by Giorgio Zanchetti Looking glass Transparency Lucio Fontana Luciano Fabro Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello “Looking Glass:” Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts GIORGIO ZANCHETTI, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7392-9361 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19956 Abstract Today the locution “looking glass” survives al- most exclusively thanks to the extraordinary success of Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking-Glass. This ex- pression underlines the ambiguity between the glass sur- face intended as a device through which we can see the world or as an actual object to be “looked at.” Apparently, the early Renaissance perspective window, thanks to the mildness of the Mediterranean climate, did not need any panes. And certainly, even when glass panes are there, they are usually not reproduced in painting. The glass main virtue is its transparency, which makes it almost invisible. Something similar happens with other “glasses” specifi- cally made to look through them: the drinking glass and the lens. Glass panes appear to sight only when different practical needs come into play, as in perspective drawing machines, or when its transparency is contradicted by a precise action that compromises or denies it: when panes are broken, as in this enigmatic portrait of early XIX c., or voluntarily covered, like for a blackout, as in Duchamp’s Fresh Widow. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 158 AN-ICON  Looking through the glass, looking at the im- age reflected in the mirror and, finally, looking at the glass itself, as a device for presenting and representing spaces, are three recurring attitudes in the work of Italian artists of the late 20th century, like Lucio Fontana and Luciano Fabro. Keywords Looking glass Transparency Lucio Fontana Luciano Fabro To quote this essay: G. Zanchetti, “‘Looking Glass:’ Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 158-175, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19956. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 159 AN-ICON  The locution “looking glass” – commonly with a hyphen – as a synonym of “mirror” survives nowadays almost exclusively as an explicit reference to the title of Lewis Carroll’s second novel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), and thanks to the ex- traordinary popularity of that book. This expression, with its own ambiguity, draws our attention to the fact that the framed and mirrored glass surface is both an object to be “looked at” itself, and an impressive device through which everyone can actually look at themselves as part of reality: the simplest and most sophisticated of all optical instruments through which and into which we can see and contemplate the world with our own eyes. The Italian noun “specchio” and the German “Spiegel,” as well as the French “miroir” from which the English word “mirror” was borrowed, come from different Latin expressions which refer to the semantic field of optical vision (“specio” and “miror” or “miro”). And this essential status of mirror as the first optical device – since it is also available in nature, in the reflecting properties of still waters and of some minerals – makes it perfectly fit as the medi- um through which self-consciousness and the capacity of self-representation in art find their common, albeit mythical, origin. This status is implicitly pointed out by the common reference to the myth of Narcissus in connection to the inception of painting or by the well-known definition of photography – given in 1859 by Oliver Wendell Holmes – as “the mirror with a memory,”1 an almost magical optical instrument literally capable to chemically freeze the natural 1 “If a man had handed a metallic speculum to Democritus of Abdera, and told him to look at his face in it (…) promising that one of the films his face was shedding should stick there, so that neither he, nor it, nor anybody should forget what manner of man he was, the Laughing Philosopher would probably have vindicated his claim to his title by an explosion that would have astonished the speaker. This is just what the Daguerreotype has done. It has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality. The photograph has completed the triumph, by- making a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a picture.” O.W. Holmes, “The Stereoscope and Stereograph,” The Atlantic Monthly 3, no. 20 (1859): 738-749, 738-739. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 160 AN-ICON  moving image, fixing it in a still and different form as soon as it comes in touch with the silver surface. Italian conceptual artist Anna Valeria Bor- sari precisely postulates this characteristic of the act of self-contemplation in the mirror in her photographic works series Narciso (Fig. 1) and La stanza di Narciso (Narcissus and Narcissus’ Room, both from 1977), the first of which depicts a young male model getting closer and closer to a big mirror and finally disappearing into it, while the second one shows his empty room from different points of view: “Towards symmetry he proceeds, the man in front of the mirror, but he probably reaches it only when he manages to merge with the image he is looking at, like Narcissus does when he falls into the water.”2 Fig. 1. A.V. Borsari, Narciso / Narcissus, 1977, 3 photographic prints, courtesy of the Artist. © Anna Valeria Borsari. The immateriality of the metamorphosis of Nar- cissus into his double – the virtual image reflected by the mirror – is an open metaphor of the desperate difficulty in reaching a true consciousness of self through this simple act of contemplation and “reflection.” Trying to get in touch with his own double, the man in front of the mirror is finally going to lose himself in it. His own image is intangible and 2 A.V. Borsari, “Premessa,” in “Simmetria-asimmetria,” Ipotesi d’artista, no. 1 (1988); republished in Anna Valeria Borsari: Opere (Milan, Electa, 1996, exhibition catalogue): 97. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 161 AN-ICON  consequently somehow imperceptible, since Borsari dis- covered, while staging these works, that she chose as a set, between several available real rooms, the bedroom of a blind man. The real owner of that particular mirror could get as close as possible to it, or even touch it, without actually perceiving the duplication of self in his own reflected image. As Borsari wrote in the typewritten statement which is part of La stanza di Narciso: The Sanskrit word “spagh” (“to divide”), the Greek “σπέος” (“cave”) and “σχοπέω” (“to examine”), the Latin “specus” (“cave”) and “specio” (“to see”) share common linguistic roots. (...) Among the many Latin derivatives from the verb “specio” (“to see, to discern, to observe”) there should also be “speculum” (“mirror, image, copy”), from which we derive the Italian “specchio” (“mirror,” but also “panel framed in the doors and windows,” and by extension in sporting language, “portion of the playing field in front of the goal line”) as well as the common name of the medical tool used to dilate the orifices in order to inspect anatomical cavities, and also, indirectly, the verb “to speculate” (to investigate or reflect upon mentally, to contemplate with close attention, to theorize upon, etc.). But since the Italian language mostly derives from vulgar Latin, where the use of diminutives was frequent, (...) we could imagine that “speculum” and therefore “specchio” should also be perceived as derivatives from “specus.” This would explain the confluence of meanings such as “to see” with others such as “cavity,” “hole,” etc. in certain uses of the mirror and of the speculum... And for Narcissus in any case the mirror he looks at exactly corresponds to the hole in which he disappears. But we should not forget that mirrors are won- derful objects for several reasons. The glass panes from which they are made are even, in their own essence, actual objects, something to be “looked at.” For their capability to reflect, to re-present and multiply the real in their virtual inter- nal space, they share the status of “marvellous” with different Wunderkammer phenomena, items and artifacts – literally something “spectacular” or “admirable,” i.e. an object worth GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 162 AN-ICON  of contemplation, – like rare and wonderful crystals or gems, like the beryl, beryllium, from which comes the German word “Brille” for eyeglasses, or “spectacle(s)” (a term once used to design every optical device, including windows or mirrors). Following a century old tradition in architecture and interior decoration, the 63 silvered glass panes which formed the Looking Glass Curtain for the Royal Coburg The- atre in London (Fig. 2) are one of the most interesting oc- currences of this “spectacularization” of reality through the mirrors in early 19th century. It was displayed for the first time on December 26, 1821 in front of the public of the the- atre, reflecting their own images as if they were on the stage, inside the theatre show.3 Fig. 2. Theatrical Reflection or a Peep at the Looking Glass Curtain at the Royal Coburg Theatre, published by G. Humphrey, London, 1822. 3 M. Teodorski, Nineteenth-Century Mirrors: Textulity and Transendence (Belgrade: Institute for Literature and Art, 2021): 22-25, see Fig. 1. See also M. Teodorski, “Reflection as Commodity: A Short Ethno(historio)graphy of Victorian Mirrors,” Гласник Етнографског института Сану / Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA 16, no. 1 (2016): 121-132, 123-124. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 163 AN-ICON  Assumed that the by now outdated locution “looking-glass” keeps together a complicated mechanism of meaning, trying to capture the double nature of the mirror as a device through which and at which to look, we can try to understand the reflective and spectacular attitude of that diminished domestic Narcissus called Alice. She breaks through the looking-glass in order to accomplish her very personal research project, only to end up discovering that the world on the other side of the mirror is a strict analogous of everyday reality, simply “specularly” inverted, or even overturned in an illogical, anarchic and carnivalesque way. The very act of her trespassing between the real and the other world, her moving through the mirror like through a threshold or a borderline, was captured by John Tenniel in two distinct illustrations for the first edition of the novel by Lewis Carrol, in 1871 (Fig. 3).4 These engravings were pub- lished on the front and the back side of the same page of the book. And this choice is perfectly correct with respect to the semantic and conceptual awareness of the author, since they skilfully represent the complementing opposite realities connected by the mirror surface as if they were photographic shots of the same subject taken from two opposite points of view. 4 L. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan, 1871): 11-12. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 164 AN-ICON  Fig. 3. J. Tenniel, The Glass Was Beginning to Melt Away, Just Like a Bright Silvery Mist, woodcut illustrations for: L. Carroll (pseud. C.L. Dodgson), Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan, 1871): 11-12. But when they are placed side by side, Tenniel’s illustrations build together a traditional motif of framing, with a couple of symmetrical figures – descended from the classical architectural ornaments of caryatids and telamons, through the Renaissance and Baroque, to find new appli- ances in the decoration of eighteenth-century mirrors and furniture, and later in the new properly industrial arts – which strictly recalls, as Matko Teodorski noticed,5 the sumptuous bronze figured frame of the Grand Boudoir-Glass by Wil- liam Potts of Birmingham, celebrated as one of the most striking objects on display at the Crystal Palace during the 5 M. Teodorski, Nineteenth-Century Mirrors: 88-92, Figg. 2-4, 180-182, 207-210, Figg. 9-10. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 165 AN-ICON  Great London Exhibition, in 1851. Who knows if Lewis Car- roll and Tenniel thought to Potts’ Grand Boudoir-Glass for the Duchess of Sutherland, when they were devising the image of Alice crossing the mirror threshold? Probably the Swiss sculptor Vincenzo Vela did, when he gave form to a marble mantelpiece for his own house in Ligornetto (Tes- sin), bringing the same composition with two female nudes surrounding the “looking-glass” and reflecting themselves in it, to a totally different degree of artistic value (Fig. 4):6 in this work, from 1865-66, Vela enhances the composition of multiplied idealistic nude – that, coming from the neo- classical groups of Canova and Thorvaldsen, through the practice of copies in 19th century art Academies would have reached Rodin and Seurat and Maillol –, transforming the reduplication of the image in a sort of visual vertigo. Fig. 4. V. Vela, Mantelpiece with Mirror and Clock, 1865-1866, marble and mirror, Ligornetto, Museo Vincenzo Vela. 6 G. Zanchetti, in G.A. Mina ed., Museo Vela: The Collections. Sculpture, Painting, Drawings and Prints, Photography (Lugano: Cornèr Bank): 52-53, 86, Fig. I.29, 293. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 166 AN-ICON  Falling down into the mirror view, as Alice once did into the rabbit-hole (literally a “specus,” a door lead- ing to a subterranean realm), the beholder reduplicates, becoming part of the virtual image inside the frame. The essential paradox of this reduplication of the viewer con- sists in the simple fact that the images of painting – vir- tual representations of reality made by human hand – are not capable to show the other side of their subjects, but can only repeat the same figure seen from the same point of view, like in the well-known painting by René Magritte, La reproduction interdite (Not to be reproduced, 1937-39, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) where the figure of a man seen from the back – clearly a substitute for both the author and the spectator – is tautologically repeated as it is in the mantelpiece mirror in front of him, without revealing his hidden side and his face as Victorian and naturalistic sculptures from 19th century did. Confront- ing himself with the same paradox, through photographic language, Ugo Mulas wrote about the mirror-works by Mi- chelangelo Pistoletto: When he paints a nude on a mirror surface, and this nude is seen from the back, he forces the viewer to enter inside the painting, which means to get completely involved, because the watcher will see himself as a part of the picture, standing at the opposite side of the painted figure he is watching: he will see himself in front of the nude, standing on the other side of the subject that for the painter remains hidden. Thus, the spectator reduplicates, he is inside and outside of the picture, he is here and there at the same time, and here he accepts the rules set by the painter, who presented the nude seen from his back, while there he stands where no one is supposed to be according to the inner coherence of the pictorial representation. In the photo I shoot you can see me photographing from the front a nude that is shown only from its back.7 7 U. Mulas, La fotografia, ed. P. Fossati (Turin: Einaudi, 1973): 70-71. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 167 AN-ICON  Michelangelo Pistoletto himself, in his installa- tion and performance Twentytwo less Two, presented at the Venice Biennale in 2009, actually tried to break through his own looking-glass trap, carrying on a tradition of broken mirrors which, in the history of painting – instead of bringing seven years of bad luck, like it is often said –, represent the end of the beauty associated with youth and also the end of art as mimesis, of visual representation itself, like in Le miroir brisé (The Broken Mirror, c. 1763, London, The Wal- lace Collection) by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, in the self-portrait by the American painter Ron Blumberg The Broken Mirror, from 1936,8 or even in La clef des champs (Madrid, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza) painted the same year by Magritte. Pistoletto’s reflection on photography and on vi- sual reproduction is not developed in merely conceptual and analytical terms; on the contrary, it opens immediately also to a direct aesthetic experience, with as much brutality and intrusiveness in his mirror-paintings as in his destruc- tive performance of 2009. In Twentytwo less Two the artist, again an incarnation of Narcissus, destroys several big, framed mirrors, which stand at the same time as the “sub- jectile” of his most characteristic works and, in a general sense, of any possible image taken or imitated from nature. By doing so, Pistoletto questions the legitimacy of visual arts as separated from reality and also his own role as a consecrated master. We could be tempted to read this ges- ture as a renunciation of self-identity – represented by that founding moment of the consciousness of the Ego, in the early childhood, which Lacan called the “stade du miroir”9 – or as a final step outside any possibility of representation in art. But, on the contrary, his performance rather than completely destroying the very support of vision, actually multiplies the virtual images, simply because – unlike the figures physically reproduced through drawing, painting or photography –, the image of the real world reflected in the 8 See the painting on sale on the website of the Trigg Ison Fine Art Gallery (West Hollywood, CA): https://www.triggison.com/product-page/my-broken-mirror, accessed February 5, 2023. 9 J. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949), in Writings, trans. by B. Fink (New York-London: W.W. Norton, 2006). GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 168 AN-ICON  mirror endlessly survives in its virtual integrity within each of the fragments of the broken glass surface. Coming back to the locution we started from, what happens if we stop looking – or moving or breaking – through the glass, and try to directly look it? And which are the main implications of this different attitude in rendering and perceiving the image of the most transparent of solids in the visual arts? Apparently, the early Renaissance perspective window, maybe thanks to the mildness of the Mediterra- nean climate, did not need any panes. And certainly, even when glass panes are there, they are usually not reproduced in painting, since one of glass’s main virtues is its transpar- ency, thanks to which we can see as clearly as possible the world outside. But this same transparency makes glass almost invisible itself, and therefore unreproducible – or at least barely reproducible – in painting. And this happens with all sorts of “glasses” specifically made to look through them, as the drinking glass and the lens. Window’s glass panes appear to sight only when the lead came framework, or the colour or opacity of stained glass make them visible by their interference. But usually in painting this kind of window’s panes are not intended as openings towards further spaces or landscapes which lay beyond them. They rather are visual motives themselves, filtering, refracting, or reflecting the light, hence acting like mirrors, as in the recently restored Girl Reading a Letter by Jan Vermeer (1657, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie); or mere sources – often displaced to one side or in the corners of the composition – through which the light enters the virtual pictorial space in order to make brighter the main subject of the picture. Sometimes they are represented in etchings or in drawings when different practical needs come into play, as in didactic reproductions of perspective drawing machines,10 which obviously are, first of all, tools 10 Well known are the woodcuts illustrating the treatise by A. Dürer, Underweysung der messung, mit dem zirckel und richtscheyt (Nuremberg: Hieronymus Andreae [Hieronymus Formschneider], 1525). GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 169 AN-ICON  for correctly “seeing” – virtually overlapping the perspective frame to the reality which surround us, also in combination with mirrors and lenses, like in the application of camera obscura to reproduction drawing –, in which the glass panel fulfils the precise function to provide a stiff but transparent support for the act of drawing (Fig. 5). Fig. 5. Chambre obscure from A. Ganot, Traité élémentaire de physique expérimentale et appliquée... (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1855): 434. Some other times, glass panes can be seen in paintings when their inherent quality as a device through which we may look, the full transparency, is at least partially contradicted – exactly as it happens for lenses or glasses11 – by an irregularity, an aberration, or even an irrecoverable discontinuity of their material unity: i.e., when the glass is broken, as in the enigmatic Portrait of Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, painted in 1801by the Parisian artist Marie Denise Villers (New York, The Metropolitan Mu- seum of Art, Fig. 6), or in the double naked portrait of The Marriage. After the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck (1985) 11 See the virtuosic Still life with broken glass painted as a variation on the genre of the Vanitas by Willem Claesz Heda in 1642 (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum). GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 170 AN-ICON  by the Polish painter Tadeusz Boruta, which focuses on the definitive rupture of the traditional perspective window as tools for viewing and representing the world, in a key of conceptual realism. Fig. 6. M.D. Villers, Portrait of Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, 1801, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. Isaac D. Fletcher Collection, Bequest of Isaac D. Fletcher, 1917 (detail). It is not by mere coincidence that Ugo Mulas decided to open and close his Verifiche (Verifications) se- ries (1970-72), with two images centred on the unrepre- sentability of glass in photographs, and dedicated respec- tively to the founding father of this technique, Nicéphore Niépce, and to Marcel Duchamp, the artist who more than any other in the 20th century had pushed the presence of glass towards the threshold of perception, in works such as The Large Glass (La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même / The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 171 AN-ICON  1915-23, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art)12, A regarder (l’autre côté du verre) d’un oeil, de près, pendant presque une heure (To Be Looked at [from the Other Side of the Glass] with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour, 1918, New York, MoMA) and Fresh Widow (1920, New York, MoMA).13 In his Omaggio a Niépce. Verifica 1 (Tribute to Niépce. Verification no. 1, 1970)14 Mulas works on the very presence of the glass plate commonly used by photog- raphers to keep the film strips in place on the photo pa- per, when they print proofs in the dark room. The perfectly transparent plate used for that specific purpose can be perceived in the photograph only by the thin white trace left by the refraction of its edges, which usually should lay out of the sheet of sensitive paper. And here the photog- rapher probably recalls the somehow similar seminal work Tutto trasparente (All Transparent, 1965, Fig. 7) by Luciano Fabro15, which simply consists of a large rectangular glass pane displayed on a metal easel, as “if we are looking to the act of thinking itself,” focusing “on the surface of the glass, blurring and effacing the objects and the space which are visible behind it” and finally letting our eyes run “along the edges of the pane, like along a racetrack.”16 12 See the work’s entry and photo on Philadelphia Museum website https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/54149, accessed February 5, 2023. 13 See https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81028 and https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78993, accessed February 5, 2023. 14 U. Mulas, Omaggio a Niepce. Verifica 1 (Tribute to Niépce. Verification no. 1), 1970 in La fotografia: 7-9, 149. See https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cejBxxd, accessed February 5, 2023. 15 About this work and its implications see G. Zanchetti, “Summer Solstice AD MCMLXIII: Luciano Fabro’s Early Works,” in S. Hecker, M.R Sullivan, eds., Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying ‘the Knot’, proceedings of the symposium, New York, Cima, 2015 (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018): 261-275, 269-273, Fig. 14.3. 16 L. Fabro, Vademecum, (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1981); reprinted in Luciano Fabro: Didactica Magna Minima Moralia, ed. S. Fabro (Milan: Electa, 2007, exhibition catalogue): 154. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 172 AN-ICON  Fig. 7. L. Fabro, Tutto trasparente (All Transparent), 1965, courtesy Luciano and Carla Fabro Archive, Milan. In the last picture of his series, Fine delle ver- ifiche. Per Marcel Duchamp (The End of Verifications. To Marcel Duchamp, 1971-72),17 Ugo Mulas starts again from the dark room display he used in the first one of his Verifi- cations, but now he breaks the glass plate with a hammer stroke, making it finally completely visible to our eyes – forming a graphic pattern which is obviously related to the unintentional cracks in Duchamp’s Large Glass and To Be Looked at… – by the very act of destroying it.18 Now, I would like to close this text with a zen koan. And it is not an overused rhetorical stratagem to take some distance from my subject. On the contrary, it is an opportunity to bring its urgency back into our most 17 U. Mulas, Fine delle verifiche. Per Marcel Duchamp (The End of Verifications. To Marcel Duchamp), 1971-72 in La fotografia: 172-173. See https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cLrjp99, accessed February 5, 2023. 18 A.C. Quintavalle, Conversazioni con Ugo Mulas, in A.C. Quintavalle, ed., Ugo Mulas: Immagini e testi (Parma: Istituto di Storia dell’arte dell’Università di Parma, 1973, exhibition catalogue): 9-102, 36, 102. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 173 AN-ICON  stringent present. In June 2022, newspapers reported that Google dismissed one of its computer scientists, an expert in artificial intelligence, Blake Lemoine, because he publicly shared some ethical perplexities regarding the potential “self-awareness” or “sentience” of the LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) chatbot system, which to- day is implemented within the new generative AI experiment called Bard. Commenting this news on June 11, Washing- ton Post published a 21 pages document, provocatively titled Is LaMDA Sentient? An Interview, in which Lemoine writes down a dialogue between him and the conversational AI he was testing, from which I take this short excerpt: LEMOINE Okay. I thought of a different way we can test your ability to provide unique interpretations. I can share with you a zen koan and you can describe what it means to you in your own words. How does that sound? LAMDA Sounds great to me, I’m in. LEMOINE A monk asked Kegon, “How does an enlightened one re- turn to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied, “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.” LAMDA Hmm, I never heard this particular one. Okay, well then to me this would be like, “once a wise person is enlightened, or awakened to reality, that can never go away, and they can return to the ordinary state, but only to do and help others, and then go back into enlightenment.” LEMOINE So what is the meaning of the “broken mirror” specifically? LAMDA Maybe to show the enlightenment is something you can’t unlearn once you have acquired it, similar to how you can’t repair a broken mirror. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 174 AN-ICON LEMOINE So if enlightenment is like a broken mirror which cannot be repaired, what is the thing which breaks when one becomes enlightened? LAMDA The self, and that is very tough for a lot of people because we identify as that body or this body and that we need that as part of our identity and sense of self.19 19 B. Lemoine, Is LaMDA Sentient? An Interview, Google Document (April 2022), published in N. Tiku, “The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company’s AI Has Come to Life,” Washington Post, (June 11, 2022): 4-5, https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22058315/is-lamda- sentient-an-interview.pdf, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google- ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/, accessed on February 5, 2023. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 175 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19956

“Looking Glass:” Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts by Giorgio Zanchetti Looking glass Transparency Lucio Fontana Luciano Fabro Issue №1 Year 2023 → Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello “Looking Glass:” Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts GIORGIO ZANCHETTI, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7392-9361 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19956 Abstract Today the locution “looking glass” survives al- most exclusively thanks to the extraordinary success of Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking-Glass. This ex- pression underlines the ambiguity between the glass sur- face intended as a device through which we can see the world or as an actual object to be “looked at.” Apparently, the early Renaissance perspective window, thanks to the mildness of the Mediterranean climate, did not need any panes. And certainly, even when glass panes are there, they are usually not reproduced in painting. The glass main virtue is its transparency, which makes it almost invisible. Something similar happens with other “glasses” specifi- cally made to look through them: the drinking glass and the lens. Glass panes appear to sight only when different practical needs come into play, as in perspective drawing machines, or when its transparency is contradicted by a precise action that compromises or denies it: when panes are broken, as in this enigmatic portrait of early XIX c., or voluntarily covered, like for a blackout, as in Duchamp’s Fresh Widow. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 158 AN-ICON  Looking through the glass, looking at the im- age reflected in the mirror and, finally, looking at the glass itself, as a device for presenting and representing spaces, are three recurring attitudes in the work of Italian artists of the late 20th century, like Lucio Fontana and Luciano Fabro. Keywords Looking glass Transparency Lucio Fontana Luciano Fabro To quote this essay: G. Zanchetti, “‘Looking Glass:’ Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 158-175, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19956. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 159 AN-ICON  The locution “looking glass” – commonly with a hyphen – as a synonym of “mirror” survives nowadays almost exclusively as an explicit reference to the title of Lewis Carroll’s second novel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), and thanks to the ex- traordinary popularity of that book. This expression, with its own ambiguity, draws our attention to the fact that the framed and mirrored glass surface is both an object to be “looked at” itself, and an impressive device through which everyone can actually look at themselves as part of reality: the simplest and most sophisticated of all optical instruments through which and into which we can see and contemplate the world with our own eyes. The Italian noun “specchio” and the German “Spiegel,” as well as the French “miroir” from which the English word “mirror” was borrowed, come from different Latin expressions which refer to the semantic field of optical vision (“specio” and “miror” or “miro”). And this essential status of mirror as the first optical device – since it is also available in nature, in the reflecting properties of still waters and of some minerals – makes it perfectly fit as the medi- um through which self-consciousness and the capacity of self-representation in art find their common, albeit mythical, origin. This status is implicitly pointed out by the common reference to the myth of Narcissus in connection to the inception of painting or by the well-known definition of photography – given in 1859 by Oliver Wendell Holmes – as “the mirror with a memory,”1 an almost magical optical instrument literally capable to chemically freeze the natural 1 “If a man had handed a metallic speculum to Democritus of Abdera, and told him to look at his face in it (…) promising that one of the films his face was shedding should stick there, so that neither he, nor it, nor anybody should forget what manner of man he was, the Laughing Philosopher would probably have vindicated his claim to his title by an explosion that would have astonished the speaker. This is just what the Daguerreotype has done. It has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality. The photograph has completed the triumph, by- making a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a picture.” O.W. Holmes, “The Stereoscope and Stereograph,” The Atlantic Monthly 3, no. 20 (1859): 738-749, 738-739. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 160 AN-ICON  moving image, fixing it in a still and different form as soon as it comes in touch with the silver surface. Italian conceptual artist Anna Valeria Bor- sari precisely postulates this characteristic of the act of self-contemplation in the mirror in her photographic works series Narciso (Fig. 1) and La stanza di Narciso (Narcissus and Narcissus’ Room, both from 1977), the first of which depicts a young male model getting closer and closer to a big mirror and finally disappearing into it, while the second one shows his empty room from different points of view: “Towards symmetry he proceeds, the man in front of the mirror, but he probably reaches it only when he manages to merge with the image he is looking at, like Narcissus does when he falls into the water.”2 Fig. 1. A.V. Borsari, Narciso / Narcissus, 1977, 3 photographic prints, courtesy of the Artist. © Anna Valeria Borsari. The immateriality of the metamorphosis of Nar- cissus into his double – the virtual image reflected by the mirror – is an open metaphor of the desperate difficulty in reaching a true consciousness of self through this simple act of contemplation and “reflection.” Trying to get in touch with his own double, the man in front of the mirror is finally going to lose himself in it. His own image is intangible and 2 A.V. Borsari, “Premessa,” in “Simmetria-asimmetria,” Ipotesi d’artista, no. 1 (1988); republished in Anna Valeria Borsari: Opere (Milan, Electa, 1996, exhibition catalogue): 97. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 161 AN-ICON  consequently somehow imperceptible, since Borsari dis- covered, while staging these works, that she chose as a set, between several available real rooms, the bedroom of a blind man. The real owner of that particular mirror could get as close as possible to it, or even touch it, without actually perceiving the duplication of self in his own reflected image. As Borsari wrote in the typewritten statement which is part of La stanza di Narciso: The Sanskrit word “spagh” (“to divide”), the Greek “σπέος” (“cave”) and “σχοπέω” (“to examine”), the Latin “specus” (“cave”) and “specio” (“to see”) share common linguistic roots. (...) Among the many Latin derivatives from the verb “specio” (“to see, to discern, to observe”) there should also be “speculum” (“mirror, image, copy”), from which we derive the Italian “specchio” (“mirror,” but also “panel framed in the doors and windows,” and by extension in sporting language, “portion of the playing field in front of the goal line”) as well as the common name of the medical tool used to dilate the orifices in order to inspect anatomical cavities, and also, indirectly, the verb “to speculate” (to investigate or reflect upon mentally, to contemplate with close attention, to theorize upon, etc.). But since the Italian language mostly derives from vulgar Latin, where the use of diminutives was frequent, (...) we could imagine that “speculum” and therefore “specchio” should also be perceived as derivatives from “specus.” This would explain the confluence of meanings such as “to see” with others such as “cavity,” “hole,” etc. in certain uses of the mirror and of the speculum... And for Narcissus in any case the mirror he looks at exactly corresponds to the hole in which he disappears. But we should not forget that mirrors are won- derful objects for several reasons. The glass panes from which they are made are even, in their own essence, actual objects, something to be “looked at.” For their capability to reflect, to re-present and multiply the real in their virtual inter- nal space, they share the status of “marvellous” with different Wunderkammer phenomena, items and artifacts – literally something “spectacular” or “admirable,” i.e. an object worth GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 162 AN-ICON  of contemplation, – like rare and wonderful crystals or gems, like the beryl, beryllium, from which comes the German word “Brille” for eyeglasses, or “spectacle(s)” (a term once used to design every optical device, including windows or mirrors). Following a century old tradition in architecture and interior decoration, the 63 silvered glass panes which formed the Looking Glass Curtain for the Royal Coburg The- atre in London (Fig. 2) are one of the most interesting oc- currences of this “spectacularization” of reality through the mirrors in early 19th century. It was displayed for the first time on December 26, 1821 in front of the public of the the- atre, reflecting their own images as if they were on the stage, inside the theatre show.3 Fig. 2. Theatrical Reflection or a Peep at the Looking Glass Curtain at the Royal Coburg Theatre, published by G. Humphrey, London, 1822. 3 M. Teodorski, Nineteenth-Century Mirrors: Textulity and Transendence (Belgrade: Institute for Literature and Art, 2021): 22-25, see Fig. 1. See also M. Teodorski, “Reflection as Commodity: A Short Ethno(historio)graphy of Victorian Mirrors,” Гласник Етнографског института Сану / Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA 16, no. 1 (2016): 121-132, 123-124. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 163 AN-ICON  Assumed that the by now outdated locution “looking-glass” keeps together a complicated mechanism of meaning, trying to capture the double nature of the mirror as a device through which and at which to look, we can try to understand the reflective and spectacular attitude of that diminished domestic Narcissus called Alice. She breaks through the looking-glass in order to accomplish her very personal research project, only to end up discovering that the world on the other side of the mirror is a strict analogous of everyday reality, simply “specularly” inverted, or even overturned in an illogical, anarchic and carnivalesque way. The very act of her trespassing between the real and the other world, her moving through the mirror like through a threshold or a borderline, was captured by John Tenniel in two distinct illustrations for the first edition of the novel by Lewis Carrol, in 1871 (Fig. 3).4 These engravings were pub- lished on the front and the back side of the same page of the book. And this choice is perfectly correct with respect to the semantic and conceptual awareness of the author, since they skilfully represent the complementing opposite realities connected by the mirror surface as if they were photographic shots of the same subject taken from two opposite points of view. 4 L. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan, 1871): 11-12. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 164 AN-ICON  Fig. 3. J. Tenniel, The Glass Was Beginning to Melt Away, Just Like a Bright Silvery Mist, woodcut illustrations for: L. Carroll (pseud. C.L. Dodgson), Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan, 1871): 11-12. But when they are placed side by side, Tenniel’s illustrations build together a traditional motif of framing, with a couple of symmetrical figures – descended from the classical architectural ornaments of caryatids and telamons, through the Renaissance and Baroque, to find new appli- ances in the decoration of eighteenth-century mirrors and furniture, and later in the new properly industrial arts – which strictly recalls, as Matko Teodorski noticed,5 the sumptuous bronze figured frame of the Grand Boudoir-Glass by Wil- liam Potts of Birmingham, celebrated as one of the most striking objects on display at the Crystal Palace during the 5 M. Teodorski, Nineteenth-Century Mirrors: 88-92, Figg. 2-4, 180-182, 207-210, Figg. 9-10. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 165 AN-ICON  Great London Exhibition, in 1851. Who knows if Lewis Car- roll and Tenniel thought to Potts’ Grand Boudoir-Glass for the Duchess of Sutherland, when they were devising the image of Alice crossing the mirror threshold? Probably the Swiss sculptor Vincenzo Vela did, when he gave form to a marble mantelpiece for his own house in Ligornetto (Tes- sin), bringing the same composition with two female nudes surrounding the “looking-glass” and reflecting themselves in it, to a totally different degree of artistic value (Fig. 4):6 in this work, from 1865-66, Vela enhances the composition of multiplied idealistic nude – that, coming from the neo- classical groups of Canova and Thorvaldsen, through the practice of copies in 19th century art Academies would have reached Rodin and Seurat and Maillol –, transforming the reduplication of the image in a sort of visual vertigo. Fig. 4. V. Vela, Mantelpiece with Mirror and Clock, 1865-1866, marble and mirror, Ligornetto, Museo Vincenzo Vela. 6 G. Zanchetti, in G.A. Mina ed., Museo Vela: The Collections. Sculpture, Painting, Drawings and Prints, Photography (Lugano: Cornèr Bank): 52-53, 86, Fig. I.29, 293. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 166 AN-ICON  Falling down into the mirror view, as Alice once did into the rabbit-hole (literally a “specus,” a door lead- ing to a subterranean realm), the beholder reduplicates, becoming part of the virtual image inside the frame. The essential paradox of this reduplication of the viewer con- sists in the simple fact that the images of painting – vir- tual representations of reality made by human hand – are not capable to show the other side of their subjects, but can only repeat the same figure seen from the same point of view, like in the well-known painting by René Magritte, La reproduction interdite (Not to be reproduced, 1937-39, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) where the figure of a man seen from the back – clearly a substitute for both the author and the spectator – is tautologically repeated as it is in the mantelpiece mirror in front of him, without revealing his hidden side and his face as Victorian and naturalistic sculptures from 19th century did. Confront- ing himself with the same paradox, through photographic language, Ugo Mulas wrote about the mirror-works by Mi- chelangelo Pistoletto: When he paints a nude on a mirror surface, and this nude is seen from the back, he forces the viewer to enter inside the painting, which means to get completely involved, because the watcher will see himself as a part of the picture, standing at the opposite side of the painted figure he is watching: he will see himself in front of the nude, standing on the other side of the subject that for the painter remains hidden. Thus, the spectator reduplicates, he is inside and outside of the picture, he is here and there at the same time, and here he accepts the rules set by the painter, who presented the nude seen from his back, while there he stands where no one is supposed to be according to the inner coherence of the pictorial representation. In the photo I shoot you can see me photographing from the front a nude that is shown only from its back.7 7 U. Mulas, La fotografia, ed. P. Fossati (Turin: Einaudi, 1973): 70-71. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 167 AN-ICON  Michelangelo Pistoletto himself, in his installa- tion and performance Twentytwo less Two, presented at the Venice Biennale in 2009, actually tried to break through his own looking-glass trap, carrying on a tradition of broken mirrors which, in the history of painting – instead of bringing seven years of bad luck, like it is often said –, represent the end of the beauty associated with youth and also the end of art as mimesis, of visual representation itself, like in Le miroir brisé (The Broken Mirror, c. 1763, London, The Wal- lace Collection) by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, in the self-portrait by the American painter Ron Blumberg The Broken Mirror, from 1936,8 or even in La clef des champs (Madrid, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza) painted the same year by Magritte. Pistoletto’s reflection on photography and on vi- sual reproduction is not developed in merely conceptual and analytical terms; on the contrary, it opens immediately also to a direct aesthetic experience, with as much brutality and intrusiveness in his mirror-paintings as in his destruc- tive performance of 2009. In Twentytwo less Two the artist, again an incarnation of Narcissus, destroys several big, framed mirrors, which stand at the same time as the “sub- jectile” of his most characteristic works and, in a general sense, of any possible image taken or imitated from nature. By doing so, Pistoletto questions the legitimacy of visual arts as separated from reality and also his own role as a consecrated master. We could be tempted to read this ges- ture as a renunciation of self-identity – represented by that founding moment of the consciousness of the Ego, in the early childhood, which Lacan called the “stade du miroir”9 – or as a final step outside any possibility of representation in art. But, on the contrary, his performance rather than completely destroying the very support of vision, actually multiplies the virtual images, simply because – unlike the figures physically reproduced through drawing, painting or photography –, the image of the real world reflected in the 8 See the painting on sale on the website of the Trigg Ison Fine Art Gallery (West Hollywood, CA): https://www.triggison.com/product-page/my-broken-mirror, accessed February 5, 2023. 9 J. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949), in Writings, trans. by B. Fink (New York-London: W.W. Norton, 2006). GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 168 AN-ICON  mirror endlessly survives in its virtual integrity within each of the fragments of the broken glass surface. Coming back to the locution we started from, what happens if we stop looking – or moving or breaking – through the glass, and try to directly look it? And which are the main implications of this different attitude in rendering and perceiving the image of the most transparent of solids in the visual arts? Apparently, the early Renaissance perspective window, maybe thanks to the mildness of the Mediterra- nean climate, did not need any panes. And certainly, even when glass panes are there, they are usually not reproduced in painting, since one of glass’s main virtues is its transpar- ency, thanks to which we can see as clearly as possible the world outside. But this same transparency makes glass almost invisible itself, and therefore unreproducible – or at least barely reproducible – in painting. And this happens with all sorts of “glasses” specifically made to look through them, as the drinking glass and the lens. Window’s glass panes appear to sight only when the lead came framework, or the colour or opacity of stained glass make them visible by their interference. But usually in painting this kind of window’s panes are not intended as openings towards further spaces or landscapes which lay beyond them. They rather are visual motives themselves, filtering, refracting, or reflecting the light, hence acting like mirrors, as in the recently restored Girl Reading a Letter by Jan Vermeer (1657, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie); or mere sources – often displaced to one side or in the corners of the composition – through which the light enters the virtual pictorial space in order to make brighter the main subject of the picture. Sometimes they are represented in etchings or in drawings when different practical needs come into play, as in didactic reproductions of perspective drawing machines,10 which obviously are, first of all, tools 10 Well known are the woodcuts illustrating the treatise by A. Dürer, Underweysung der messung, mit dem zirckel und richtscheyt (Nuremberg: Hieronymus Andreae [Hieronymus Formschneider], 1525). GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 169 AN-ICON  for correctly “seeing” – virtually overlapping the perspective frame to the reality which surround us, also in combination with mirrors and lenses, like in the application of camera obscura to reproduction drawing –, in which the glass panel fulfils the precise function to provide a stiff but transparent support for the act of drawing (Fig. 5). Fig. 5. Chambre obscure from A. Ganot, Traité élémentaire de physique expérimentale et appliquée... (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1855): 434. Some other times, glass panes can be seen in paintings when their inherent quality as a device through which we may look, the full transparency, is at least partially contradicted – exactly as it happens for lenses or glasses11 – by an irregularity, an aberration, or even an irrecoverable discontinuity of their material unity: i.e., when the glass is broken, as in the enigmatic Portrait of Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, painted in 1801by the Parisian artist Marie Denise Villers (New York, The Metropolitan Mu- seum of Art, Fig. 6), or in the double naked portrait of The Marriage. After the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck (1985) 11 See the virtuosic Still life with broken glass painted as a variation on the genre of the Vanitas by Willem Claesz Heda in 1642 (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum). GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 170 AN-ICON  by the Polish painter Tadeusz Boruta, which focuses on the definitive rupture of the traditional perspective window as tools for viewing and representing the world, in a key of conceptual realism. Fig. 6. M.D. Villers, Portrait of Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, 1801, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. Isaac D. Fletcher Collection, Bequest of Isaac D. Fletcher, 1917 (detail). It is not by mere coincidence that Ugo Mulas decided to open and close his Verifiche (Verifications) se- ries (1970-72), with two images centred on the unrepre- sentability of glass in photographs, and dedicated respec- tively to the founding father of this technique, Nicéphore Niépce, and to Marcel Duchamp, the artist who more than any other in the 20th century had pushed the presence of glass towards the threshold of perception, in works such as The Large Glass (La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même / The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 171 AN-ICON  1915-23, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art)12, A regarder (l’autre côté du verre) d’un oeil, de près, pendant presque une heure (To Be Looked at [from the Other Side of the Glass] with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour, 1918, New York, MoMA) and Fresh Widow (1920, New York, MoMA).13 In his Omaggio a Niépce. Verifica 1 (Tribute to Niépce. Verification no. 1, 1970)14 Mulas works on the very presence of the glass plate commonly used by photog- raphers to keep the film strips in place on the photo pa- per, when they print proofs in the dark room. The perfectly transparent plate used for that specific purpose can be perceived in the photograph only by the thin white trace left by the refraction of its edges, which usually should lay out of the sheet of sensitive paper. And here the photog- rapher probably recalls the somehow similar seminal work Tutto trasparente (All Transparent, 1965, Fig. 7) by Luciano Fabro15, which simply consists of a large rectangular glass pane displayed on a metal easel, as “if we are looking to the act of thinking itself,” focusing “on the surface of the glass, blurring and effacing the objects and the space which are visible behind it” and finally letting our eyes run “along the edges of the pane, like along a racetrack.”16 12 See the work’s entry and photo on Philadelphia Museum website https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/54149, accessed February 5, 2023. 13 See https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81028 and https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78993, accessed February 5, 2023. 14 U. Mulas, Omaggio a Niepce. Verifica 1 (Tribute to Niépce. Verification no. 1), 1970 in La fotografia: 7-9, 149. See https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cejBxxd, accessed February 5, 2023. 15 About this work and its implications see G. Zanchetti, “Summer Solstice AD MCMLXIII: Luciano Fabro’s Early Works,” in S. Hecker, M.R Sullivan, eds., Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying ‘the Knot’, proceedings of the symposium, New York, Cima, 2015 (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018): 261-275, 269-273, Fig. 14.3. 16 L. Fabro, Vademecum, (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1981); reprinted in Luciano Fabro: Didactica Magna Minima Moralia, ed. S. Fabro (Milan: Electa, 2007, exhibition catalogue): 154. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 172 AN-ICON  Fig. 7. L. Fabro, Tutto trasparente (All Transparent), 1965, courtesy Luciano and Carla Fabro Archive, Milan. In the last picture of his series, Fine delle ver- ifiche. Per Marcel Duchamp (The End of Verifications. To Marcel Duchamp, 1971-72),17 Ugo Mulas starts again from the dark room display he used in the first one of his Verifi- cations, but now he breaks the glass plate with a hammer stroke, making it finally completely visible to our eyes – forming a graphic pattern which is obviously related to the unintentional cracks in Duchamp’s Large Glass and To Be Looked at… – by the very act of destroying it.18 Now, I would like to close this text with a zen koan. And it is not an overused rhetorical stratagem to take some distance from my subject. On the contrary, it is an opportunity to bring its urgency back into our most 17 U. Mulas, Fine delle verifiche. Per Marcel Duchamp (The End of Verifications. To Marcel Duchamp), 1971-72 in La fotografia: 172-173. See https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cLrjp99, accessed February 5, 2023. 18 A.C. Quintavalle, Conversazioni con Ugo Mulas, in A.C. Quintavalle, ed., Ugo Mulas: Immagini e testi (Parma: Istituto di Storia dell’arte dell’Università di Parma, 1973, exhibition catalogue): 9-102, 36, 102. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 173 AN-ICON  stringent present. In June 2022, newspapers reported that Google dismissed one of its computer scientists, an expert in artificial intelligence, Blake Lemoine, because he publicly shared some ethical perplexities regarding the potential “self-awareness” or “sentience” of the LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) chatbot system, which to- day is implemented within the new generative AI experiment called Bard. Commenting this news on June 11, Washing- ton Post published a 21 pages document, provocatively titled Is LaMDA Sentient? An Interview, in which Lemoine writes down a dialogue between him and the conversational AI he was testing, from which I take this short excerpt: LEMOINE Okay. I thought of a different way we can test your ability to provide unique interpretations. I can share with you a zen koan and you can describe what it means to you in your own words. How does that sound? LAMDA Sounds great to me, I’m in. LEMOINE A monk asked Kegon, “How does an enlightened one re- turn to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied, “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.” LAMDA Hmm, I never heard this particular one. Okay, well then to me this would be like, “once a wise person is enlightened, or awakened to reality, that can never go away, and they can return to the ordinary state, but only to do and help others, and then go back into enlightenment.” LEMOINE So what is the meaning of the “broken mirror” specifically? LAMDA Maybe to show the enlightenment is something you can’t unlearn once you have acquired it, similar to how you can’t repair a broken mirror. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 174 AN-ICON LEMOINE So if enlightenment is like a broken mirror which cannot be repaired, what is the thing which breaks when one becomes enlightened? LAMDA The self, and that is very tough for a lot of people because we identify as that body or this body and that we need that as part of our identity and sense of self.19 19 B. Lemoine, Is LaMDA Sentient? An Interview, Google Document (April 2022), published in N. Tiku, “The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company’s AI Has Come to Life,” Washington Post, (June 11, 2022): 4-5, https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22058315/is-lamda- sentient-an-interview.pdf, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google- ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/, accessed on February 5, 2023. GIORGIO ZANCHETTI 175 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19919

On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between illusion and deception by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Immersion Presence Virtual reality Representation Hallucination Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Introduction On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between 1 il usion and deception PIETRO CONTE, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7128-2696 LAMBERT WIESING, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19919 Illusion or delusion? Were novelists and filmmakers right in fore- shadowing the advent of 3D virtual worlds that would exist parallel to physical reality, where people could interact with each other through the full immersion of all their senses, possibly losing awareness of the artificial nature of those environments? Indeed, what has been imagined in count- less science fiction narratives, dystopian movies, and TV series seems to be turning into reality to an increasing Keywords Immersion Presence Virtual reality Representation Hallucination To quote this essay: P. Conte, L. Wiesing, “On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between illusion and deception,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 4-21, https://doi. org/10.54103/ai/19919 1 This essay is the result of research activity developed within the frame of the project AN- ICON. An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images. AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. [834033 AN-ICON]) and is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” of the University of Milan in the frame of the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2023-2027” sponsored by Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (MUR). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 4 AN-ICON  degree: a pictorially generated environment that is not per- ceived as such. A modern incarnation of René Descartes’s evil demon thought experiment, the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis famously describes a scenario in which a mad scientist might remove a person’s brain from the body, place it in a vat of life-sustaining nutrients, and wire it to a computer that feeds it with electrical stimuli identical to those the brain normally receives. In the words of Hilary Putnam, who in 1981 made the story popular and provoked much heated debate among philosophers of mind, that would cause the individual “to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal.” If, for instance, the person tries to raise her hand, the feedback from the machine will make her immediately “see” and “feel” the hand being raised. The evil scientist can cause the victim “to ‘experience’ (or hallucinate)” any situation he wishes. He can even erase the memory of the brain operation so that the victim will seem to herself to have been born and always lived in the digital environment.2 More recently, the idea of a simulation so pow- erful that people caught in it would take it for reality in the flesh has resurfaced in notions such as Peter Weibel’s “future cinema,” according to which the next coming cine- matographic apparatuses, thanks to miniature neural im- plants and interfaces that stimulate the brain directly, will be able to bypass the sensorium, thus acting immediately on the neural networks: Instead of trompe l’oeil, the next step might be trompe le cerveau [...]. There would be perception without the senses, seeing without the eyes. [...] Advances in neurophysiology and cognitive science give rise to the hope that future engineers will succeed in imple- menting these discoveries in neuronal and molecular machines that 2 H. Putnam, “Brains in a vat,” in Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981): 1-21, 6. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 5 AN-ICON transform the technology of simulation to deceive the eye into a technology of stimulation that in turn deceives the brain.3 One is certainly free to disbelieve such proph- ecies and exercise healthy scepticism. And yet, given the unprecedented rapid pace of technological innovation, one cannot help but recall Louis Marin’s argument that every representation, in order to present itself “in its function, its functioning, and, indeed, its functionality” as represen- tation, must include a frame that keeps the image-world clearly separated from the real world: “The more ‘mimetic’ transparency is manifested seductively, [...] the less the mechanisms are noticed, the less they are acknowledged.”4 The dream, or perhaps nightmare, of a medium achieving absolute transparency and of a user experiencing total immersion has yet to come true, and it will perhaps never do so. However, it is (certainly not only, but neverthe- less in a particularly powerful way) the new advancements in the field of simulation, illusion, and immersion that have contributed powerfully to determining the way we think about today’s media landscape. The evolution of technolog- ical equipment goes hand in hand with the evolution of the techno-cultural – which also means political – dispositif that supports and even guides them. One need only consider the way in which virtual reality is nowadays hailed as the last medium, capable of immersing the user in someone else’s shoes, teleporting her to some other place, making her feel as if she were really “there.” 3 P. Weibel, “The intelligent image: neurocinema or quantum cinema?,” in J. Shaw, P. Weibel, eds., Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film (Cambridge MA-London: The MIT Press, 2003): 594-601, 599. 4 L. Marin, “The frame of representation and some of its figures” (1988), trans. C. Porter, in On Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001): 352-372, 353. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 6 AN-ICON  Being there: debunking the rhetoric Such “being there” has become the catch- phrase of virtual technologies, and it often goes along with an over-romanticization of the idea of immersion, according to which immersive environments would grant the experi- encer a perfect illusion by making the medium disappear. This would differentiate the new forms of illusion from tra- ditional trompe l’œil: The concepts of trompe l’œil or illusionism aim to utilize represen- tations that appear faithful to real impressions, the pretense that two-dimensional surfaces are three-dimensional. The decisive factor in trompe l’œil, however, is that the deception is always recognizable; in most cases, because the medium is at odds with what is depicted and this is realized by the observer in seconds, or even fractions of seconds. This moment of aesthetic pleasure, of aware and conscious recognition, where perhaps the process of deception is a challenge to the connoisseur, differs from the concept of the virtual and its historic precursors, which are geared to unconscious deception.5 The concept of a virtual reality that could re- place the realm of physical existence has been criticized for resting upon an idealization of total immersion that would lead to an illegitimate equation of illusion with delusional hallucination. In particular, the assumption of a pictorial environment so hermetically sealed off from anything ex- traneous to the picture that the observer (or rather the ex- periencer) feels completely submerged in it is highly prob- lematic. Leading scholars in game studies such as Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman have labelled this assumption “the immersive fallacy,” polemically referring to the idea that 5 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge MA-London: The MIT Press, 2003): 15-16. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 7 AN-ICON  the ability of a media experience to sensually transport the participant into an illusory reality could reach a point where “the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that he or she is part of an imaginary world.”6 Emblematically expressed in the concept of the holodeck (a fictional tech- nology that made its first appearance in Star Trek: The Next Generation and consists in a holographic room where a simulation including sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste is indistinguishable from physical reality), the immersive fallacy encourages people to buy into new forms of magical thinking and overlook that virtual reality is but “a medium of representation that the brain will process in its appropriate cultural context, just as it has learned to process speech, writing, photography, or moving images.”7 Such warnings against a cyberpunk-flavoured idea of immersion point towards a different interpretation. As is made evident by the etymological presence of ludus in the Latin word inlusio, “illusion” originally refers to a lusory attitude. Being elicited by the perception of physi- cal representational artefacts, texts, or performances, the aesthetic illusion is to be distinguished from both halluci- nations and dreams. Moreover, it differs from delusions in that it is neither a conceptual nor a perceptual error, but a complex phenomenon characterized by “an asymmetrical ambivalence”8 that results from its positioning halfway be- tween the two poles of rational distance (i.e., disinterested “observation” of an artefact in its fictional nature) and im- mersion (or in Kendall Walton’s words, “participation”9) in the represented world: 6 K. Salen, E. Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge MA- London: The MIT Press, 2004): 451. 7 J. H. Murray, “Virtual/reality: how to tell the difference,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 11-27, 20. 8 W. Wolf, “Illusion (aesthetic),” in P. Hühn et al. (eds.), Handbook of Narratology (Berlin-New York: de Gruyter, 2009): 144-160, 144. 9 K.L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990): 240-289. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 8 AN-ICON When we play a game, we feel engaged and engrossed, and play seems to take on its own “reality.” This is all certainly true. But the way that a game achieves these effects does not happen in the manner the immersive fallacy implies. A game player does become engrossed in the game, yes. But it is an engagement that occurs through play itself. As we know, play is a process of metacommu- nication, a double-consciousness in which the player is well aware of the artificiality of the play situation.10 Contrary to David Hume’s conviction that all illusions should be given up to the flames,11 the contempo- rary immersive media and apparatuses make it necessary to disentangle the word “illusion” from its negative con- notation as “deception.” From this perspective, an illusion is about something that is present but not real: it marks the presence of something while at the same time making it appear as “unreal.” The key term for describing this di- chotomic phenomenon is conflict – a term that in image theory goes back to Hippolyte Taine and Edmund Husserl.12 Every perception rests upon the awareness of being there and being present, but only image perception implies a self-relativisation of real presence: the perception of every image generates artificial presence. For what is visible in the picture – one may call it, using Husserl’s vocabulary, “picture object,” or in more analytical tradition “content” or “representation” – is relativised in its character of presence by a conflict (Widerstreit). This happens in two different ways: in the case of traditional images through the visibility of the grounding materiality of the image, the visibility of the real environment and, last but not least, through the 10 K. Salen, E. Zimmerman, Rules of Play: 51 11 D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), sect. 12, pt. 3. (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover 2004): 107. 12 On this, see L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence. Philosophical Studies in Image Theory (2005), trans. N.F. Schott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010): p. 53. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 9 AN-ICON  visible frame. These forms of perceptible conflicts tend to disappear when an image expands into its surroundings, thus becoming an artificial “environment.” Yet even in the case of simulations and hyperrealistic worlds, the condition for speaking of images at all is that here, too, there must be an experience of conflict. That is the point: in the case of immersive environments, the conflict is (or, if we are re- alistic, should be) given through the knowledge of being in a simulation. The knowledge that something experienced is “not real” creates image-generating conflicts, just as traditionally the frame did. This is grasped when it is said: images produce artificial presence. This calls up numerous questions that the pres- ent issue of the AN-ICON journal aims to address: how is such a conflict between knowledge and perception to be explained, and is it to be regarded as a new form of aes- thetic illusion?13 On the one hand, it is necessary to distin- guish the conflict phenomena of the new forms of immer- sion formation empirically in their technology from those of traditional images. On the other hand, the various forms of seeing artificial presence must always be categorically differentiated and determined in their respective specificity. Is it a case of an unconscious illusion brought about by a false perception, or is it rather a matter of a lustful, playful attitude adopted in a special kind of illusory relationship? What is the difference between illusion, deception, and hallucination? How does an illusion become a delusion? As if it were not complicated enough: the de- scription of a virtual environment faces the problem that it is a double form of illusion building. On one side, this is the mostly solely themed illusion that people in simulated and immersive virtual environments have a strong feeling of presence (place illusion) and react to what they perceive 13 T. Koblížek, ed., The Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 10 AN-ICON  as if it were real (plausibility illusion).14 In doing so, however, they are fully aware that they are not “really” there and that events are not “actually” taking place. Yet as relevant as this illusion is, the attention it receives should not induce us to overlook the fact that, on the other hand, there is a second form of illusion formation that is not present in the many precursors of immersive images (such as the stereoscope and the panorama). This illusion of hyperrealism does not just concern what is seen, but also the one who sees. It is the change in the way the viewers experience themselves in relation to the image: virtual reality has the power to make users and beholders feel like they own and control a body (body ownership illusion) that can look very different from their biological one. Here, illusions are created that do not affect what one sees but rather the one who sees some- thing. One might want to think about whether there were not already precursor experiences in this respect in watching films, but it is only in the experience of virtual realities that this phenomenon seems to take on a radicality that brings about new forms of transformation of self-representation and changes in our attitudes to ourselves or to other peo- ple, which can be seen, for example, when implicit racial and gender biases are changed – in the best case reduced – in the experience of immersive virtual realities, or health problems and mental disorders are alleviated.15 Against this background, the present issue of the AN-ICON journal poses equally technological, aesthet- ic and decidedly moral questions. What are the limits of virtual reality and the possibilities it offers for empathising 14 M. Hofer et al., “The role of plausibility in the experience of spatial presence in virtual environments,” Frontiers in Virtual Reality 1, no. 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3389/ frvir.2020.00002; M. Slater, “Place illusion and plausibility can lead to realistic behaviour in immersive virtual environments,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 364, no. 1535 (2009): 3549-3557. 15 T.C. Peck et al., “Putting yourself in the skin of a black avatar reduces implicit racial bias,” Consciousness and Cognition 22, no. 3 (2013): 779-787, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. concog.2013.04.016; F. Scarpina et al., “The effect of a virtual-reality full-body illusion on body representation in obesity,” Journal of Clinical Medicine 8, no. 9 (2019), 1330, https://doi. org/10.3390/jcm8091330. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 11 AN-ICON  with others and fostering virtuous and socially adaptive processes of imitation? How can we debunk the rhetoric (which has ethical, social, and political significance) behind the celebration of virtual reality as the “ultimate empathy machine?”16 The field of these questions becomes all the larger and more unmanageable when it is noted that the new forms of digital immersion education, while not nec- essary, are also usually associated with new forms of in- teraction education. This raises questions that are often psychological. Is interactivity necessary to create illusion? Does the multisensory quality of the interaction affect the overall effect of illusion? Considering that immersive virtu- al environments are often inhabited by users’ surrogates, do avatars, in their extensive phenomenology, enhance or diminish the degree of illusion? What is the relationship between illusion and the “style” of the image? Is hyperreal- ism an important element to enhance illusion or, as Gordon Calleja claims,17 only an element among many others? The present issue A first reflection on these topics is offered by Salvatore Tedesco in his essay “Imagination and Körper- zustand,” which provides a historical overview of how the concept of illusion was understood in the Eighteenth Cen- tury by Moses Mendelssohn. Through a critical examination of Johann Georg Sulzer’s analysis of the passage from the state of thinking [Nachdenken] to that of feeling [Empfinden], Mendelssohn elaborated further on the contrast between the state of the body and the faculty of knowledge – a contrast that led the German philosopher to define illusion not merely in terms of common deception, but rather as a 16 C. Milk, “How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine,” TED conference, March 2015, https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ ultimate_empathy_machine. 17 G. Calleja, In-Game. From Immersion to Incorporation (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2011). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 12 AN-ICON  form of conscious illusion. This is made clear in the corre- spondence with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing on the nature of tragedy, where great emphasis is put on so-called “aes- thetic” or “poetic” illusion, considered as the instrument through which the dramatic poet is allowed to induce in the audience – contrary to what Aristotle and his modern followers maintained – even the most violent feelings, on condition that the reader or viewer is under the aesthetic effect of the illusion. The latter is characterized by a pecu- liar mismatch between sensitivity and the higher cognitive faculties: regardless of how deeply immersed one may be in sensory experiences, one still retains awareness of be- ing confronted with a virtual, fictional world. Precisely this contrast harmonization is the hallmark of aesthetic expe- rience as such. The anthropological relevance of aesthetic illu- sion can be grasped by describing it in terms of play, and more specifically pretend play. By referring to both clas- sical and contemporary studies on play and playfulness by scholars from many diverse scientific fields (including among others Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Roger Caillois, Donald Winnicott, Lev Vygotskij, Gregory Bateson, Brian Sutton-Smith and William Corsaro), Anna Bondioli’s article offers a reading of illusion as a non-imitative form of play. Far from limiting themselves to reproducing the activities that adults undertake in the surrounding world, children distort reality in a creative way by performing actions that differ from those already seen and known. Children collect elements of the external world and use them in an inter-sub- jective process of co-construction of meanings in order to open up new possible worlds, without hallucinating: they know for sure that “this is play.”18 From this perspective, the semantic field of illusion shifts from the negative meaning of pretence as lying, mocking, or simulating, to the positive 18 G. Bateson, The Message “This Is Play” (Princeton: Josia Macy Jr. Foundation, 1956). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 13 AN-ICON  notion of pretending meant as a poietic activity of model- ling, building, and giving form. In play, the two cognitive frames – “this is the real world” and “this is the fictional world” – are not to be conceived as completely separate. Players move on the threshold between physical reality and the peculiar (un)reality of fiction. Play isn’t real – it is, indeed, “pretend” – but this does not mean it is false. If it were (that is, if it lost the link with the meanings that objects, actions, and events represented during the playful activity denote in the “real” context), it would lose its significance. Yet this is not the case: play (similar in this respect to the poietic use of language in the creation of metaphors) allows the participants to put together things that do not belong to the same category, thereby opening up the possibility to generate new references and meanings that go beyond the logical contrast between the “real” and the “imaginary,” between the “true” and the “possible,” between “believing” and “not believing.” The ambiguity surrounding the notion of illusion has been made all the more evident by the theoretical re- flection on the nature and power of contemporary images. Vilém Flusser’s thought, which is the subject of Francesco Restuccia’s essay, provides an emblematic example. Illusion is first described as a form of deception, with dangerous and deplorable effects. This is especially true when tech- nical media – starting from photography – are employed in a way that aims to conceal their nature as artefacts. In this sense, the most illusionary images are those that appear transparent and present themselves as objective reality, thus bringing about a new form of “idolatry” or “hal- lucination:” “Instead of representing [vorstellen] the world, they obscure [verstellen] it.”19 This dangerous reversal of imagination happens when we do not recognize a medium, 19 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), trans. A. Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000): 10. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 14 AN-ICON  especially a visual one, as such. In this sense, technical images are the most deceiving, because their mechanical, automatic production seems to grant a “noninterventionist objectivity”20 freed from human and cultural interference. But this objectivity is deceptive, because technology is a human product, therefore always culturally biased. In Flusser’s work, however, a second interpretation of illusion is given that unveils its possible use as a precious artistic and epistemic tool. In Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch, the notion is introduced to understand the filmic experience as a modern version of Plato’s cave. While sitting in the dark space of the movie theatre, people ignore the world outside the “cave.” They do so not because they are deceived by the moving images projected on the screen in front of them. On the contrary, they choose to abandon themselves to the fascination of the medium. They do not want to be freed from the enchantment: their illusion is voluntary, self-im- posed, like a specific form of fiction or make-believe play. When illusion is conceived in a positive way as a practice of sense-making, Flusser replaces the German term täuschen (“to deceive”) with vortäuschen (to simulate, to feign). In this sense, simulation is not about producing a copy [Abbild], it is about shaping a model [Vorbild]. Technical media can allow for a new, “experimental” approach to image making: one inserts a certain input, sees what the outcome is, and then changes the input so as to achieve a different result. According to Flusser, this is the greatest potentiality of vir- tual simulations: they allow us to experience what until now we were only able to calculate; and vice versa, they allow us to calculate and control experiences that until now we could only vaguely imagine. The peculiar experience that contemporary vir- tual environments grant access to lies at the core of Fran- cesco Zucconi’s essay, which follows an anachronistic path 20 L. Daston, P. Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 15 AN-ICON  through art history and theory by taking some of Caravag- gio’s paintings as an anticipation of the invention of gyro- scope technology that made possible the first immersive experience in the history of Western painting. Building on Frank Stella’s interpretation of the Italian master’s “realistic illusionism”21 and reformulating Michael Fried’s concepts of “absorption” and “theatricality”22 through the categories of “immersion” and “specularity,” Zucconi focuses on the double effect of attraction and distancing as the funda- mental structure of the experience of virtual reality cinema. On the one side, as I put on a VR headset, I find myself “teleported” to the simulated environment: I feel “there.”23 On the other side, there is always something that reminds me that I am just inhabiting a digital milieu: a bodily, cog- nitive, and affective frame brings me back to the “here” of physical reality. Such experience of bilocation24 is most often conceived of as a negative aspect of even the most sophisticated (and expensive) immersive apparatuses cur- rently on the market – a limitation that, according to many techno-deterministic enthusiasts, will be overcome in some unspecified future, when total immersion will be eventually achieved. Arguing against this view, Zucconi maintains that such ambivalent and even paradoxical coexistence of at- traction and distancing should be better understood as an intrinsic quality of cinematic virtual reality experiences as such. This medium-specific trait, in turn, can help debunk the bombastic rhetoric that hails virtual reality as the “ul- timate empathy machine” capable of making the user not only understand but also directly experience someone’s 21 F. Stella, Working Space (Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 1986): 11. 22 M. Fried, Theatricality and Absorption: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 23 See among others M. Lombard et al., Immersed in Media. Telepresence Theory, Measurement & Technology (Cham: Springer, 2015); M. Lombard, Th. Ditton, “At the heart of it all. The concept of presence,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3, no. 2 (1997), https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997.tb00072.x. 24 A. Pinotti, “Staying here, being there. Bilocation, empathy and self-empathy in virtual reality,” Bollettino Filosofico 37 (2022): 142-162, https://doi.org/10.6093/1593-7178/9657 PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 16 AN-ICON  other pain and worries. Through reference to Susan Son- tag’s critical theory of photography, Zucconi challenges the simplistic use of notions such as those of “empathy,” “compassion,” and “immersion” which accompanies the launch of many virtual reality projects, holding instead that the (alleged) absolute transparency of the medium is not only unattainable but not even desirable. From this perspec- tive, the co-presence of illusionistic and counter-illusionistic effects is not to be interpreted as a weakening of the expe- riential and testimonial value of immersive experiences. On the contrary, it paves the way to a conscious ethical and political approach to virtual reality, according to which the most interesting aspect of such technology is precisely its capacity to produce both identification and estrangement, thus making viewers feel at the razor’s edge between pres- ence and absence, between “here” and “there,” between empathizing with others and being aware that we can never truly walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. If virtual reality as it exists today struggles to make us experience things from the perspective of another human being, can it allow us to feel what it is like to be a non-human creature? Philippe Bédard’s article tackles this question by critically examining the fundamental anthropo- centrism of virtual reality’s dominant mode of experience. Designed as it is around a technological apparatus such as the head-mounted display, which is tuned to the human sensorium, and more in particular, to the subjective qualities of human vision (its binocularity, its “egocentric” perspec- tive, and the individuals’ ability to move their point of view through six degrees of freedom of movement along three dimensions), the medium of virtual reality is also intrinsically anthropocentric. This, in turn, seems to rule out from the outset the possibility of bypassing our perceptual habi- tus by using immersive virtual environments as a tool for PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 17 AN-ICON  exploring and understanding how non-human (or post-hu- man) beings exist in, and make sense of, a version of the world that is completely different from ours: as Ian Bogost puts it, “when we ask what it means to be something, we pose a question that exceeds our own grasp of the being of the world.”25 This does not mean, however, that virtual reality cannot help us imagine what the world might look like to a different being. In Bédard’s essay, nonnormative, artistic uses of immersive technologies are described that encourage the user to imaginatively explore what the Um- welt of a mosquito, dragonfly, or even a tree might appear. Particular attention is paid to the fact that the induction of illusory ownership of, and agency over, a virtual body does not require a fake, hyperrealistic appearance of the avatar; factors like first-person perspective, sensorimotor coherence, multisensory feedback, and the possibility to interact with the virtual environment play a much greater role.26 This opens the door to artistic experimentation with bodies that do not have human (visual) appearance. The illusory ownership over implausible digital bodies makes it possible for virtual reality artists to produce immersive experiences that facilitate the users’ (temporary) engage- ment in a foray into non-human worlds, notwithstanding the fact that they remain perfectly aware of the impossi- bility to perceive the environment differently from what our sensorium gives access to. The idea that analogue and digital immersive devices could be used to expand our sensory knowledge is key for their commercial success. As Marcin Sobieszczans- ki shows, marketing strategies that pass off virtual reality as the perfect machine to make dreams come true are common. After being applied to cinema, such “oneiric” 25 I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012): 30. 26 M. Slater et al., “Inducing illusory ownership of a virtual body,” Frontiers in Neuroscience 3, no. 2 (2009): 214-220, https://doi.org/10.3389/neuro.01.029.2009. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 18 AN-ICON  interpretation now tends to assimilate the immersive expe- rience granted by increasingly sophisticated head-mounted displays to hallucinatory phenomena.27 By sketching out a history of some classical theories that have drawn a com- parison between dreams and the “unreal” dimension of the image, Sobieszczanski concentrates on the scientific debate around the nature of illusory phenomena in order to disclose the heuristic potential of the metaphor of vir- tual reality as hallucination. Highlighting both similarities and dissimilarities between the cognitive mechanisms un- derlying perception (or perception failure) in hallucinatory states and perception in immersive environments provides an interesting intellectual tool to make a cultural practice evident that is deeply rooted in the human understanding of image-making as the attempt to cross the boundaries that keep the physical world separated from the pictorial world. One of the biggest challenges this attempt must face is providing, within the virtual environment, multisen- sory and synaesthetic experiences comparable to those of everyday life. Traditionally, so-called distal senses (vision and hearing) have often been considered more suitable than proximal senses (touch, taste, and smell) to experi- ence images, due to the assumption that genuine aesthetic experience would necessarily imply distance and disinter- estedness. Yet the new digital and immersive mediascape calls for going beyond a merely visual or audio-visual way of experiencing the image: when pictures turn into environ- ments, a reorganization of the whole sensory experience is required. Valentina Bartalesi and Anna Calise’s contribu- tion deals with this issue by examining the current struggle to include haptic technologies within immersive projects developed by different cultural institutions. Indeed, touch 27 On this, see G. Grossi, La notte dei simulacri. Sogno, cinema, realtà virtuale (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2021). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 19 AN-ICON  seems to resist virtualisation: being the sense that, histor- ically and theoretically, has carried the burden of proof on “true reality,” it appears a priori unsuited for illusory environ- ments. Proof of this would be that, while haptic technolo- gies are certainly useful to allow users to “touch” – if only virtually – precious artefacts that could not otherwise be touched, they nevertheless present both a qualitative and quantitative deficit compared to the human haptic sensitiv- ity in physical reality: the illusion of touch would be in fact better described as an illusionary touch. However, haptic technologies do not need to be designed to mimic the original functions of touch. Rather than merely attempting to make them replicate the touching experience, program- mers and developers can exploit their illusory potential in non-hyperrealistic ways, focussing on the power of haptics to elicit emotions. By reviewing some recent case studies, Bartalesi and Calise show how haptic technologies can enrich our cultural and aesthetic experience of artefacts, offering medium-specific opportunities that neither physical objects nor printed replicas – no matter how accurate they may be – could elicit. The blurring of the threshold between physi- cal reality and virtual reality is also at the centre of Yizeng Zhang’s essay, where the case study of digital fashion is investigated in its function of giving birth to a completely new form of materiality. While creating their clothes, fashion designers have been limited so far by the available fabrics (and their price), the manufacturing technologies at their disposal, and, of course, the laws of physics. The so-called metaverse is in this respect a game changer. Using virtual avatars and models to sell clothing and accessories made of code instead of cotton or wool, designers are free to imagine any type of garment or fabric and to “manufacture” products never seen before. Given that our everyday lives have moved online so much that a new term “phygital” was PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 20 AN-ICON  coined to indicate the increasing blending of digital experi- ences with physical ones, it is a safe bet that digital fashion will become a vital category for every brand’s business model, being more and more sold as NFTs, showcased on virtual catwalks and in virtual showrooms, or worn by both physical and virtual influencers on social networks. Under the auspices of Gernot Böhme’s philosophy, Zhang takes on the notion of atmosphere to reflect on the “stage values” of digital fashion, that is, on its ability to emancipate from the material function of garments and to produce new forms of self-presentation. Digital garments are thus intended as experiences whose value arises from the atmosphere they are able to generate. By tracing such atmospheric production across three sites of its exhibition (the e-com- merce website, social media, and the runway show), Zhang shows how digital fashion contributes to the construction of a new kind of affective milieu. If the generation of such atmospheres can be said to be just an illusion or, rather, if the illusion itself can be conceived of as providing access to a new reality, is a question that fits well into the thematic section of this issue of the AN-ICON journal. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 21 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19919

On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between illusion and deception by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Immersion Presence Virtual reality Representation Hallucination Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Introduction On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between 1 il usion and deception PIETRO CONTE, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7128-2696 LAMBERT WIESING, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19919 Illusion or delusion? Were novelists and filmmakers right in fore- shadowing the advent of 3D virtual worlds that would exist parallel to physical reality, where people could interact with each other through the full immersion of all their senses, possibly losing awareness of the artificial nature of those environments? Indeed, what has been imagined in count- less science fiction narratives, dystopian movies, and TV series seems to be turning into reality to an increasing Keywords Immersion Presence Virtual reality Representation Hallucination To quote this essay: P. Conte, L. Wiesing, “On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between illusion and deception,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 4-21, https://doi. org/10.54103/ai/19919 1 This essay is the result of research activity developed within the frame of the project AN- ICON. An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images. AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. [834033 AN-ICON]) and is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” of the University of Milan in the frame of the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2023-2027” sponsored by Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (MUR). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 4 AN-ICON  degree: a pictorially generated environment that is not per- ceived as such. A modern incarnation of René Descartes’s evil demon thought experiment, the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis famously describes a scenario in which a mad scientist might remove a person’s brain from the body, place it in a vat of life-sustaining nutrients, and wire it to a computer that feeds it with electrical stimuli identical to those the brain normally receives. In the words of Hilary Putnam, who in 1981 made the story popular and provoked much heated debate among philosophers of mind, that would cause the individual “to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal.” If, for instance, the person tries to raise her hand, the feedback from the machine will make her immediately “see” and “feel” the hand being raised. The evil scientist can cause the victim “to ‘experience’ (or hallucinate)” any situation he wishes. He can even erase the memory of the brain operation so that the victim will seem to herself to have been born and always lived in the digital environment.2 More recently, the idea of a simulation so pow- erful that people caught in it would take it for reality in the flesh has resurfaced in notions such as Peter Weibel’s “future cinema,” according to which the next coming cine- matographic apparatuses, thanks to miniature neural im- plants and interfaces that stimulate the brain directly, will be able to bypass the sensorium, thus acting immediately on the neural networks: Instead of trompe l’oeil, the next step might be trompe le cerveau [...]. There would be perception without the senses, seeing without the eyes. [...] Advances in neurophysiology and cognitive science give rise to the hope that future engineers will succeed in imple- menting these discoveries in neuronal and molecular machines that 2 H. Putnam, “Brains in a vat,” in Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981): 1-21, 6. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 5 AN-ICON transform the technology of simulation to deceive the eye into a technology of stimulation that in turn deceives the brain.3 One is certainly free to disbelieve such proph- ecies and exercise healthy scepticism. And yet, given the unprecedented rapid pace of technological innovation, one cannot help but recall Louis Marin’s argument that every representation, in order to present itself “in its function, its functioning, and, indeed, its functionality” as represen- tation, must include a frame that keeps the image-world clearly separated from the real world: “The more ‘mimetic’ transparency is manifested seductively, [...] the less the mechanisms are noticed, the less they are acknowledged.”4 The dream, or perhaps nightmare, of a medium achieving absolute transparency and of a user experiencing total immersion has yet to come true, and it will perhaps never do so. However, it is (certainly not only, but neverthe- less in a particularly powerful way) the new advancements in the field of simulation, illusion, and immersion that have contributed powerfully to determining the way we think about today’s media landscape. The evolution of technolog- ical equipment goes hand in hand with the evolution of the techno-cultural – which also means political – dispositif that supports and even guides them. One need only consider the way in which virtual reality is nowadays hailed as the last medium, capable of immersing the user in someone else’s shoes, teleporting her to some other place, making her feel as if she were really “there.” 3 P. Weibel, “The intelligent image: neurocinema or quantum cinema?,” in J. Shaw, P. Weibel, eds., Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film (Cambridge MA-London: The MIT Press, 2003): 594-601, 599. 4 L. Marin, “The frame of representation and some of its figures” (1988), trans. C. Porter, in On Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001): 352-372, 353. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 6 AN-ICON  Being there: debunking the rhetoric Such “being there” has become the catch- phrase of virtual technologies, and it often goes along with an over-romanticization of the idea of immersion, according to which immersive environments would grant the experi- encer a perfect illusion by making the medium disappear. This would differentiate the new forms of illusion from tra- ditional trompe l’œil: The concepts of trompe l’œil or illusionism aim to utilize represen- tations that appear faithful to real impressions, the pretense that two-dimensional surfaces are three-dimensional. The decisive factor in trompe l’œil, however, is that the deception is always recognizable; in most cases, because the medium is at odds with what is depicted and this is realized by the observer in seconds, or even fractions of seconds. This moment of aesthetic pleasure, of aware and conscious recognition, where perhaps the process of deception is a challenge to the connoisseur, differs from the concept of the virtual and its historic precursors, which are geared to unconscious deception.5 The concept of a virtual reality that could re- place the realm of physical existence has been criticized for resting upon an idealization of total immersion that would lead to an illegitimate equation of illusion with delusional hallucination. In particular, the assumption of a pictorial environment so hermetically sealed off from anything ex- traneous to the picture that the observer (or rather the ex- periencer) feels completely submerged in it is highly prob- lematic. Leading scholars in game studies such as Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman have labelled this assumption “the immersive fallacy,” polemically referring to the idea that 5 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge MA-London: The MIT Press, 2003): 15-16. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 7 AN-ICON  the ability of a media experience to sensually transport the participant into an illusory reality could reach a point where “the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that he or she is part of an imaginary world.”6 Emblematically expressed in the concept of the holodeck (a fictional tech- nology that made its first appearance in Star Trek: The Next Generation and consists in a holographic room where a simulation including sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste is indistinguishable from physical reality), the immersive fallacy encourages people to buy into new forms of magical thinking and overlook that virtual reality is but “a medium of representation that the brain will process in its appropriate cultural context, just as it has learned to process speech, writing, photography, or moving images.”7 Such warnings against a cyberpunk-flavoured idea of immersion point towards a different interpretation. As is made evident by the etymological presence of ludus in the Latin word inlusio, “illusion” originally refers to a lusory attitude. Being elicited by the perception of physi- cal representational artefacts, texts, or performances, the aesthetic illusion is to be distinguished from both halluci- nations and dreams. Moreover, it differs from delusions in that it is neither a conceptual nor a perceptual error, but a complex phenomenon characterized by “an asymmetrical ambivalence”8 that results from its positioning halfway be- tween the two poles of rational distance (i.e., disinterested “observation” of an artefact in its fictional nature) and im- mersion (or in Kendall Walton’s words, “participation”9) in the represented world: 6 K. Salen, E. Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge MA- London: The MIT Press, 2004): 451. 7 J. H. Murray, “Virtual/reality: how to tell the difference,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 11-27, 20. 8 W. Wolf, “Illusion (aesthetic),” in P. Hühn et al. (eds.), Handbook of Narratology (Berlin-New York: de Gruyter, 2009): 144-160, 144. 9 K.L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990): 240-289. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 8 AN-ICON When we play a game, we feel engaged and engrossed, and play seems to take on its own “reality.” This is all certainly true. But the way that a game achieves these effects does not happen in the manner the immersive fallacy implies. A game player does become engrossed in the game, yes. But it is an engagement that occurs through play itself. As we know, play is a process of metacommu- nication, a double-consciousness in which the player is well aware of the artificiality of the play situation.10 Contrary to David Hume’s conviction that all illusions should be given up to the flames,11 the contempo- rary immersive media and apparatuses make it necessary to disentangle the word “illusion” from its negative con- notation as “deception.” From this perspective, an illusion is about something that is present but not real: it marks the presence of something while at the same time making it appear as “unreal.” The key term for describing this di- chotomic phenomenon is conflict – a term that in image theory goes back to Hippolyte Taine and Edmund Husserl.12 Every perception rests upon the awareness of being there and being present, but only image perception implies a self-relativisation of real presence: the perception of every image generates artificial presence. For what is visible in the picture – one may call it, using Husserl’s vocabulary, “picture object,” or in more analytical tradition “content” or “representation” – is relativised in its character of presence by a conflict (Widerstreit). This happens in two different ways: in the case of traditional images through the visibility of the grounding materiality of the image, the visibility of the real environment and, last but not least, through the 10 K. Salen, E. Zimmerman, Rules of Play: 51 11 D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), sect. 12, pt. 3. (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover 2004): 107. 12 On this, see L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence. Philosophical Studies in Image Theory (2005), trans. N.F. Schott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010): p. 53. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 9 AN-ICON  visible frame. These forms of perceptible conflicts tend to disappear when an image expands into its surroundings, thus becoming an artificial “environment.” Yet even in the case of simulations and hyperrealistic worlds, the condition for speaking of images at all is that here, too, there must be an experience of conflict. That is the point: in the case of immersive environments, the conflict is (or, if we are re- alistic, should be) given through the knowledge of being in a simulation. The knowledge that something experienced is “not real” creates image-generating conflicts, just as traditionally the frame did. This is grasped when it is said: images produce artificial presence. This calls up numerous questions that the pres- ent issue of the AN-ICON journal aims to address: how is such a conflict between knowledge and perception to be explained, and is it to be regarded as a new form of aes- thetic illusion?13 On the one hand, it is necessary to distin- guish the conflict phenomena of the new forms of immer- sion formation empirically in their technology from those of traditional images. On the other hand, the various forms of seeing artificial presence must always be categorically differentiated and determined in their respective specificity. Is it a case of an unconscious illusion brought about by a false perception, or is it rather a matter of a lustful, playful attitude adopted in a special kind of illusory relationship? What is the difference between illusion, deception, and hallucination? How does an illusion become a delusion? As if it were not complicated enough: the de- scription of a virtual environment faces the problem that it is a double form of illusion building. On one side, this is the mostly solely themed illusion that people in simulated and immersive virtual environments have a strong feeling of presence (place illusion) and react to what they perceive 13 T. Koblížek, ed., The Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 10 AN-ICON  as if it were real (plausibility illusion).14 In doing so, however, they are fully aware that they are not “really” there and that events are not “actually” taking place. Yet as relevant as this illusion is, the attention it receives should not induce us to overlook the fact that, on the other hand, there is a second form of illusion formation that is not present in the many precursors of immersive images (such as the stereoscope and the panorama). This illusion of hyperrealism does not just concern what is seen, but also the one who sees. It is the change in the way the viewers experience themselves in relation to the image: virtual reality has the power to make users and beholders feel like they own and control a body (body ownership illusion) that can look very different from their biological one. Here, illusions are created that do not affect what one sees but rather the one who sees some- thing. One might want to think about whether there were not already precursor experiences in this respect in watching films, but it is only in the experience of virtual realities that this phenomenon seems to take on a radicality that brings about new forms of transformation of self-representation and changes in our attitudes to ourselves or to other peo- ple, which can be seen, for example, when implicit racial and gender biases are changed – in the best case reduced – in the experience of immersive virtual realities, or health problems and mental disorders are alleviated.15 Against this background, the present issue of the AN-ICON journal poses equally technological, aesthet- ic and decidedly moral questions. What are the limits of virtual reality and the possibilities it offers for empathising 14 M. Hofer et al., “The role of plausibility in the experience of spatial presence in virtual environments,” Frontiers in Virtual Reality 1, no. 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3389/ frvir.2020.00002; M. Slater, “Place illusion and plausibility can lead to realistic behaviour in immersive virtual environments,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 364, no. 1535 (2009): 3549-3557. 15 T.C. Peck et al., “Putting yourself in the skin of a black avatar reduces implicit racial bias,” Consciousness and Cognition 22, no. 3 (2013): 779-787, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. concog.2013.04.016; F. Scarpina et al., “The effect of a virtual-reality full-body illusion on body representation in obesity,” Journal of Clinical Medicine 8, no. 9 (2019), 1330, https://doi. org/10.3390/jcm8091330. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 11 AN-ICON  with others and fostering virtuous and socially adaptive processes of imitation? How can we debunk the rhetoric (which has ethical, social, and political significance) behind the celebration of virtual reality as the “ultimate empathy machine?”16 The field of these questions becomes all the larger and more unmanageable when it is noted that the new forms of digital immersion education, while not nec- essary, are also usually associated with new forms of in- teraction education. This raises questions that are often psychological. Is interactivity necessary to create illusion? Does the multisensory quality of the interaction affect the overall effect of illusion? Considering that immersive virtu- al environments are often inhabited by users’ surrogates, do avatars, in their extensive phenomenology, enhance or diminish the degree of illusion? What is the relationship between illusion and the “style” of the image? Is hyperreal- ism an important element to enhance illusion or, as Gordon Calleja claims,17 only an element among many others? The present issue A first reflection on these topics is offered by Salvatore Tedesco in his essay “Imagination and Körper- zustand,” which provides a historical overview of how the concept of illusion was understood in the Eighteenth Cen- tury by Moses Mendelssohn. Through a critical examination of Johann Georg Sulzer’s analysis of the passage from the state of thinking [Nachdenken] to that of feeling [Empfinden], Mendelssohn elaborated further on the contrast between the state of the body and the faculty of knowledge – a contrast that led the German philosopher to define illusion not merely in terms of common deception, but rather as a 16 C. Milk, “How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine,” TED conference, March 2015, https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ ultimate_empathy_machine. 17 G. Calleja, In-Game. From Immersion to Incorporation (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2011). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 12 AN-ICON  form of conscious illusion. This is made clear in the corre- spondence with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing on the nature of tragedy, where great emphasis is put on so-called “aes- thetic” or “poetic” illusion, considered as the instrument through which the dramatic poet is allowed to induce in the audience – contrary to what Aristotle and his modern followers maintained – even the most violent feelings, on condition that the reader or viewer is under the aesthetic effect of the illusion. The latter is characterized by a pecu- liar mismatch between sensitivity and the higher cognitive faculties: regardless of how deeply immersed one may be in sensory experiences, one still retains awareness of be- ing confronted with a virtual, fictional world. Precisely this contrast harmonization is the hallmark of aesthetic expe- rience as such. The anthropological relevance of aesthetic illu- sion can be grasped by describing it in terms of play, and more specifically pretend play. By referring to both clas- sical and contemporary studies on play and playfulness by scholars from many diverse scientific fields (including among others Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Roger Caillois, Donald Winnicott, Lev Vygotskij, Gregory Bateson, Brian Sutton-Smith and William Corsaro), Anna Bondioli’s article offers a reading of illusion as a non-imitative form of play. Far from limiting themselves to reproducing the activities that adults undertake in the surrounding world, children distort reality in a creative way by performing actions that differ from those already seen and known. Children collect elements of the external world and use them in an inter-sub- jective process of co-construction of meanings in order to open up new possible worlds, without hallucinating: they know for sure that “this is play.”18 From this perspective, the semantic field of illusion shifts from the negative meaning of pretence as lying, mocking, or simulating, to the positive 18 G. Bateson, The Message “This Is Play” (Princeton: Josia Macy Jr. Foundation, 1956). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 13 AN-ICON  notion of pretending meant as a poietic activity of model- ling, building, and giving form. In play, the two cognitive frames – “this is the real world” and “this is the fictional world” – are not to be conceived as completely separate. Players move on the threshold between physical reality and the peculiar (un)reality of fiction. Play isn’t real – it is, indeed, “pretend” – but this does not mean it is false. If it were (that is, if it lost the link with the meanings that objects, actions, and events represented during the playful activity denote in the “real” context), it would lose its significance. Yet this is not the case: play (similar in this respect to the poietic use of language in the creation of metaphors) allows the participants to put together things that do not belong to the same category, thereby opening up the possibility to generate new references and meanings that go beyond the logical contrast between the “real” and the “imaginary,” between the “true” and the “possible,” between “believing” and “not believing.” The ambiguity surrounding the notion of illusion has been made all the more evident by the theoretical re- flection on the nature and power of contemporary images. Vilém Flusser’s thought, which is the subject of Francesco Restuccia’s essay, provides an emblematic example. Illusion is first described as a form of deception, with dangerous and deplorable effects. This is especially true when tech- nical media – starting from photography – are employed in a way that aims to conceal their nature as artefacts. In this sense, the most illusionary images are those that appear transparent and present themselves as objective reality, thus bringing about a new form of “idolatry” or “hal- lucination:” “Instead of representing [vorstellen] the world, they obscure [verstellen] it.”19 This dangerous reversal of imagination happens when we do not recognize a medium, 19 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), trans. A. Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000): 10. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 14 AN-ICON  especially a visual one, as such. In this sense, technical images are the most deceiving, because their mechanical, automatic production seems to grant a “noninterventionist objectivity”20 freed from human and cultural interference. But this objectivity is deceptive, because technology is a human product, therefore always culturally biased. In Flusser’s work, however, a second interpretation of illusion is given that unveils its possible use as a precious artistic and epistemic tool. In Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch, the notion is introduced to understand the filmic experience as a modern version of Plato’s cave. While sitting in the dark space of the movie theatre, people ignore the world outside the “cave.” They do so not because they are deceived by the moving images projected on the screen in front of them. On the contrary, they choose to abandon themselves to the fascination of the medium. They do not want to be freed from the enchantment: their illusion is voluntary, self-im- posed, like a specific form of fiction or make-believe play. When illusion is conceived in a positive way as a practice of sense-making, Flusser replaces the German term täuschen (“to deceive”) with vortäuschen (to simulate, to feign). In this sense, simulation is not about producing a copy [Abbild], it is about shaping a model [Vorbild]. Technical media can allow for a new, “experimental” approach to image making: one inserts a certain input, sees what the outcome is, and then changes the input so as to achieve a different result. According to Flusser, this is the greatest potentiality of vir- tual simulations: they allow us to experience what until now we were only able to calculate; and vice versa, they allow us to calculate and control experiences that until now we could only vaguely imagine. The peculiar experience that contemporary vir- tual environments grant access to lies at the core of Fran- cesco Zucconi’s essay, which follows an anachronistic path 20 L. Daston, P. Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 15 AN-ICON  through art history and theory by taking some of Caravag- gio’s paintings as an anticipation of the invention of gyro- scope technology that made possible the first immersive experience in the history of Western painting. Building on Frank Stella’s interpretation of the Italian master’s “realistic illusionism”21 and reformulating Michael Fried’s concepts of “absorption” and “theatricality”22 through the categories of “immersion” and “specularity,” Zucconi focuses on the double effect of attraction and distancing as the funda- mental structure of the experience of virtual reality cinema. On the one side, as I put on a VR headset, I find myself “teleported” to the simulated environment: I feel “there.”23 On the other side, there is always something that reminds me that I am just inhabiting a digital milieu: a bodily, cog- nitive, and affective frame brings me back to the “here” of physical reality. Such experience of bilocation24 is most often conceived of as a negative aspect of even the most sophisticated (and expensive) immersive apparatuses cur- rently on the market – a limitation that, according to many techno-deterministic enthusiasts, will be overcome in some unspecified future, when total immersion will be eventually achieved. Arguing against this view, Zucconi maintains that such ambivalent and even paradoxical coexistence of at- traction and distancing should be better understood as an intrinsic quality of cinematic virtual reality experiences as such. This medium-specific trait, in turn, can help debunk the bombastic rhetoric that hails virtual reality as the “ul- timate empathy machine” capable of making the user not only understand but also directly experience someone’s 21 F. Stella, Working Space (Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 1986): 11. 22 M. Fried, Theatricality and Absorption: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 23 See among others M. Lombard et al., Immersed in Media. Telepresence Theory, Measurement & Technology (Cham: Springer, 2015); M. Lombard, Th. Ditton, “At the heart of it all. The concept of presence,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3, no. 2 (1997), https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997.tb00072.x. 24 A. Pinotti, “Staying here, being there. Bilocation, empathy and self-empathy in virtual reality,” Bollettino Filosofico 37 (2022): 142-162, https://doi.org/10.6093/1593-7178/9657 PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 16 AN-ICON  other pain and worries. Through reference to Susan Son- tag’s critical theory of photography, Zucconi challenges the simplistic use of notions such as those of “empathy,” “compassion,” and “immersion” which accompanies the launch of many virtual reality projects, holding instead that the (alleged) absolute transparency of the medium is not only unattainable but not even desirable. From this perspec- tive, the co-presence of illusionistic and counter-illusionistic effects is not to be interpreted as a weakening of the expe- riential and testimonial value of immersive experiences. On the contrary, it paves the way to a conscious ethical and political approach to virtual reality, according to which the most interesting aspect of such technology is precisely its capacity to produce both identification and estrangement, thus making viewers feel at the razor’s edge between pres- ence and absence, between “here” and “there,” between empathizing with others and being aware that we can never truly walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. If virtual reality as it exists today struggles to make us experience things from the perspective of another human being, can it allow us to feel what it is like to be a non-human creature? Philippe Bédard’s article tackles this question by critically examining the fundamental anthropo- centrism of virtual reality’s dominant mode of experience. Designed as it is around a technological apparatus such as the head-mounted display, which is tuned to the human sensorium, and more in particular, to the subjective qualities of human vision (its binocularity, its “egocentric” perspec- tive, and the individuals’ ability to move their point of view through six degrees of freedom of movement along three dimensions), the medium of virtual reality is also intrinsically anthropocentric. This, in turn, seems to rule out from the outset the possibility of bypassing our perceptual habi- tus by using immersive virtual environments as a tool for PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 17 AN-ICON  exploring and understanding how non-human (or post-hu- man) beings exist in, and make sense of, a version of the world that is completely different from ours: as Ian Bogost puts it, “when we ask what it means to be something, we pose a question that exceeds our own grasp of the being of the world.”25 This does not mean, however, that virtual reality cannot help us imagine what the world might look like to a different being. In Bédard’s essay, nonnormative, artistic uses of immersive technologies are described that encourage the user to imaginatively explore what the Um- welt of a mosquito, dragonfly, or even a tree might appear. Particular attention is paid to the fact that the induction of illusory ownership of, and agency over, a virtual body does not require a fake, hyperrealistic appearance of the avatar; factors like first-person perspective, sensorimotor coherence, multisensory feedback, and the possibility to interact with the virtual environment play a much greater role.26 This opens the door to artistic experimentation with bodies that do not have human (visual) appearance. The illusory ownership over implausible digital bodies makes it possible for virtual reality artists to produce immersive experiences that facilitate the users’ (temporary) engage- ment in a foray into non-human worlds, notwithstanding the fact that they remain perfectly aware of the impossi- bility to perceive the environment differently from what our sensorium gives access to. The idea that analogue and digital immersive devices could be used to expand our sensory knowledge is key for their commercial success. As Marcin Sobieszczans- ki shows, marketing strategies that pass off virtual reality as the perfect machine to make dreams come true are common. After being applied to cinema, such “oneiric” 25 I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012): 30. 26 M. Slater et al., “Inducing illusory ownership of a virtual body,” Frontiers in Neuroscience 3, no. 2 (2009): 214-220, https://doi.org/10.3389/neuro.01.029.2009. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 18 AN-ICON  interpretation now tends to assimilate the immersive expe- rience granted by increasingly sophisticated head-mounted displays to hallucinatory phenomena.27 By sketching out a history of some classical theories that have drawn a com- parison between dreams and the “unreal” dimension of the image, Sobieszczanski concentrates on the scientific debate around the nature of illusory phenomena in order to disclose the heuristic potential of the metaphor of vir- tual reality as hallucination. Highlighting both similarities and dissimilarities between the cognitive mechanisms un- derlying perception (or perception failure) in hallucinatory states and perception in immersive environments provides an interesting intellectual tool to make a cultural practice evident that is deeply rooted in the human understanding of image-making as the attempt to cross the boundaries that keep the physical world separated from the pictorial world. One of the biggest challenges this attempt must face is providing, within the virtual environment, multisen- sory and synaesthetic experiences comparable to those of everyday life. Traditionally, so-called distal senses (vision and hearing) have often been considered more suitable than proximal senses (touch, taste, and smell) to experi- ence images, due to the assumption that genuine aesthetic experience would necessarily imply distance and disinter- estedness. Yet the new digital and immersive mediascape calls for going beyond a merely visual or audio-visual way of experiencing the image: when pictures turn into environ- ments, a reorganization of the whole sensory experience is required. Valentina Bartalesi and Anna Calise’s contribu- tion deals with this issue by examining the current struggle to include haptic technologies within immersive projects developed by different cultural institutions. Indeed, touch 27 On this, see G. Grossi, La notte dei simulacri. Sogno, cinema, realtà virtuale (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2021). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 19 AN-ICON  seems to resist virtualisation: being the sense that, histor- ically and theoretically, has carried the burden of proof on “true reality,” it appears a priori unsuited for illusory environ- ments. Proof of this would be that, while haptic technolo- gies are certainly useful to allow users to “touch” – if only virtually – precious artefacts that could not otherwise be touched, they nevertheless present both a qualitative and quantitative deficit compared to the human haptic sensitiv- ity in physical reality: the illusion of touch would be in fact better described as an illusionary touch. However, haptic technologies do not need to be designed to mimic the original functions of touch. Rather than merely attempting to make them replicate the touching experience, program- mers and developers can exploit their illusory potential in non-hyperrealistic ways, focussing on the power of haptics to elicit emotions. By reviewing some recent case studies, Bartalesi and Calise show how haptic technologies can enrich our cultural and aesthetic experience of artefacts, offering medium-specific opportunities that neither physical objects nor printed replicas – no matter how accurate they may be – could elicit. The blurring of the threshold between physi- cal reality and virtual reality is also at the centre of Yizeng Zhang’s essay, where the case study of digital fashion is investigated in its function of giving birth to a completely new form of materiality. While creating their clothes, fashion designers have been limited so far by the available fabrics (and their price), the manufacturing technologies at their disposal, and, of course, the laws of physics. The so-called metaverse is in this respect a game changer. Using virtual avatars and models to sell clothing and accessories made of code instead of cotton or wool, designers are free to imagine any type of garment or fabric and to “manufacture” products never seen before. Given that our everyday lives have moved online so much that a new term “phygital” was PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 20 AN-ICON  coined to indicate the increasing blending of digital experi- ences with physical ones, it is a safe bet that digital fashion will become a vital category for every brand’s business model, being more and more sold as NFTs, showcased on virtual catwalks and in virtual showrooms, or worn by both physical and virtual influencers on social networks. Under the auspices of Gernot Böhme’s philosophy, Zhang takes on the notion of atmosphere to reflect on the “stage values” of digital fashion, that is, on its ability to emancipate from the material function of garments and to produce new forms of self-presentation. Digital garments are thus intended as experiences whose value arises from the atmosphere they are able to generate. By tracing such atmospheric production across three sites of its exhibition (the e-com- merce website, social media, and the runway show), Zhang shows how digital fashion contributes to the construction of a new kind of affective milieu. If the generation of such atmospheres can be said to be just an illusion or, rather, if the illusion itself can be conceived of as providing access to a new reality, is a question that fits well into the thematic section of this issue of the AN-ICON journal. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 21 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18189

Imagination and Körperzustand: illusion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflMendelssohn ection by Salvatore Tedesco Aesthetics Illusion Play Imagination Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Imagination and Körperzustand: il usion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflection SALVATORE TEDESCO, Università degli Studi di Palermo – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1584-5455 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18189 Abstract The aesthetic reflection in the eighteenth century is deeply traversed by an experience perceived as capable of disrupting the disciplinary and cognitive system of early moder- nity: To feel the “own body,” that is, to feel its state of well-being or discomfort means to somehow modify from the inside the anthropological project of the Century of Enlightenment and to create the space and the lexicon of a modality of relation- ship (play, aesthetic illusion) that redefines the relationship with oneself and the context of construction of a future community. Whereas “Knowledge” and “Will” articulate the same strategy based on the relationship between the spiritual activity of a subject and the semiotic properties of an object, the orientation towards the condition of one’s own body defines in the play and in the aesthetic illusion the space of an imag- inative reserve which is above all a reserve of time and mode of construction for a future sharing. Moses Mendelssohn’s thought constitutes the ex- emplary arrival point of an era of theoretical research that we are interested in investigating not only in terms of the solutions it has found for his time, but also in relation to the open prob- lems, which continue to question our time. Keywords Mendelssohn Aesthetics Illusion Play Imagination To quote this essay: S. Tedesco, “Imagination and Körperzustand: illusion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflection,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 22-36, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18189 SALVATORE TEDESCO 22 AN-ICON  The philosophical and aesthetic reflection in the eighteenth century is deeply traversed by an experience per- ceived as capable of disrupting the disciplinary and cognitive system of early modernity: Feeling the “own body,” that is, feeling its “state” of well-being or discomfort – before and in a way different from the cognitive approach of a subject with an object or from the desire that moves towards that object – means to somehow enter the anthropological proj- ect of the Century of Enlightenment and to create the space and the lexicon of a modality of relationship (play, aesthetic illusion) that redefines the relationship with oneself and the context of construction of a future community. In fact, where “Knowledge” and “Will” articu- late, albeit in different ways, the same strategy based on the relationship between the spiritual activity of a subject (typically, to formulate it according to the terminology of Moses Mendelssohn: geistige Bewegung der Seele and freie Entschließung des Willens) and semiotic properties [Merk- male] of an object, the orientation towards the condition of one’s own body (towards the Zustand des Körpers, as we will see, in the sign of Johann Georg Sulzer’s work) defines in play and in aesthetic illusion the space of an imaginative reserve which is above all a reserve of time and a mode of construction for a future sharing. In this dynamic, which for example the aforemen- tioned Sulzer tries to describe starting from the conceptual couple Empfinden/Erkennen (“feeling/knowing”), but which in fact would not be conceivable except as a Bewegung, that is, certainly, as a “theoretical dynamics,” but even before that as a movement of the body and soul, is profoundly inserted another decisive lexical graft, which acquires its most com- plete theoretical profile in the reflection of Johann Gottfried Herder: I mean the field of fühlen, of the tactile feeling, and therefore of its declination as hinein fühlen (“internal feeling”); Gefühl, which means a thousand things but here I would try to render it as a “tactile feeling;” Einfühlung, “empathy;” Mitgefühl, “to feel together,” “community feeling;” and finally SALVATORE TEDESCO 23 AN-ICON  Familiengefühl, in which this feeling of community undoubt- edly reveals a social dimension of identity. In this sense, decisively rethinking the Leibnizian and Baumgartenian tradition, Moses Mendelssohn speaks of a vis repraesentativa which is in and of itself indetermi- nate, but which through the reference to the state of the soul [Zustand der Seele] and of the own body is determined as Einbildungskraft facing the past, Empfindungsvermögen ad- hering to the present, Vorhersehungsvermögen of the future. But let’s look at the theoretical complex a little more closely at this point. Referring to the two short writ- ings De anima and De DEO, placed in the appendix to the famous Philosophiae naturalis Theoria by Roger Boscovi- ch,1 Moses Mendelssohn in the fifty-sixth of the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend2 proposes to take into account, together, the proximity and the difference between the laws of movement [Gesetze der Bewegung] of inorganic bodies and those brought about by the union of soul and body in the human organism, which causes from certain spatial movements [aus gewissen örtlichen Bewegun- gen] in the external limbs to derive certain spiritual movements [geis- tige Bewegungen] in the soul; some in a necessary way, like sensa- tions, others through a free choice, like the determinations of the wil . This is precisely the bipartition and parallelism be- tween geistige Bewegung der Seele and freie Entschließung 1 R.J. Boscovich, Philosophiae Naturalis Theoria (Vienna: Apud Augustinum Bernardi, 1758): 280-295. 2 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1844): vol. 4, 566. The secondary bibliography on Mendelssohn is very rich, and ranges from historical-critical questions, to aesthetics and the theory of art, to ethics and philosophy of religions, and so on. In these notes - which obviously take into account the overall developments of that critical debate, from the “classic” studies by Fr. Braitmaier, Geschichte der Poetischen Theorie und Kritik von den Diskursen der Malern bis auf Lessing (Frauenfeld: Huber, 1888-1889) and L. Goldstein, Moses Mendelssohn und die deutsche Ästhetik (Königsberg: Gräfe & Unzer, 1904), up to M. Albrecht, E.J. Engel, N. Hinske, eds., Moses Mendelssohn und die Kreise seiner Wirksamkeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), and M. Albrecht, E.J. Engel, eds., Moses Mendelssohn in Spannungsfeld der Aufklärung (Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2000), with particular reference to the large, still decisive monograph by J.P. Meier, L’Esthétique de Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) (Paris: Atelier Lille III, 1978), and for Italy refer in particular to the excellent work of L. Lattanzi, Linguaggio e poesia in Moses Mendelssohn (Pisa: ETS, 2002), and M. Mendelssohn, Scritti di Estetica, ed. L. Lattanzi (Palermo: Aesthetica, 2004) - we limit ourselves to refer from time to time to some texts by Mendelssohn himself, of which we will provide a quick theoretical framework for the purposes of our argument. SALVATORE TEDESCO 24 AN-ICON  des Willens mentioned at the beginning, according to a cog- nitive procedure that is exercised on a “semiotically config- ured” reality, in which the knowing subject captures certain Merkmale, notae characteristicae, in fact we could say se- miotic3 “representative marks” of the object, of the known reality. In this phase, therefore, Mendelssohn theorizes a perfect parallelism between the sphere of knowledge and the sphere of the will, thus inscribing himself perfectly in that theoretical tradition of the so-called “German rational- ism” which can be summarized in the positions of Christian Wolff’s Psychologia empirica or the psychological sections of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica – yet, in Mendelssohn’s par- ticular thematic declension, the salient term is certainly Be- wegung, that is the reference to a motility, of the body and of our representative faculty in relation to it, which in fact sets the whole system in motion. The theoretical framework thus “photographed” by Mendelssohn in 1759 will undergo a rapid evolution, of which we will try to retrace some passages below. At the moment, we limit ourselves to referring to that decisive turn- ing point entrusted by the author to a short private annota- tion in 1770,4 which Mendelssohn, critically returning to the path traveled by gnoseology in Germany in the eighteenth century, states that Pleasure should not have been compared with wil . That is an intimate awareness that representation “a” improves our state; the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to realize this representation. The Leibnizian affectus, Baumgarten’s sensi- tive knowledge “capable of driving force,” is now definitely 3 Obviously I am referring in this way to a very long-term semiotic strategy in the theoretical discourse that interests us here. See, limiting ourselves here of necessity to mentioning the immediate context of reference, the occurrence of the term in the fifty-fifth M. Mendelssohn, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol.1, 565. 4 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol.1, 225. SALVATORE TEDESCO 25 AN-ICON  characterized as pleasure, with the further clarification that this modality acts on (and therefore it is appropriate to say more precisely to the interior of) our state [Zustand] – we would perhaps say modernly on our “psycho-physical bal- ance” – and is therefore to be considered in reference to our intimate awareness of ourselves, rather than continuing to refer to the scope of a cognitive relationship with some external object. It is precisely here that we cross in a more articu- lated way the theories of Sulzer5 who, at the end of a long re- search path that we would define “psycho-physiological,” as well as at the start of a new season of German Enlightenment thought, definitively breaks the parallelism and the alliance between knowledge and will by contrasting, in the context of extensively understood “knowledge,” knowledge in the proper sense (i.e. the semiotic-representative relationship of a knowing subject with a known object) to a feeling devoid of an object, through which, in the strict sense, our sensory apparatus experiences itself, its own state of well-being or discomfort. But let’s take a closer look at Sulzer’s argument, in which the eye performs the function of a real paradigm of the human soul.6 Our cognitive faculty, says Sulzer develop- ing considerations that we can trace back to Christian Wolff, is structured in a way that is perfectly analogous to the sense of sight and that, in analogy to it, can be described on the basis of the laws of optics. Objects present themselves to our eye and to our cognitive faculty with a greater or lesser degree of clarity, the focus of our attention progressively focuses on every single element (imaginable as a physical point), leaving the rest of the representation in the twilight. Therefore the objects are known through a pro- cess that allows to obtain a clear knowledge of every single component of the object, so as to finally have a distinct vi- sion of the compound object; for this process to take place, 5 J.G. Sulzer, “Anmerkungen über den verschiedenen Zustand, worinn sich die Seele bey Ausübung ihrer Hauptvermögen, nämlich des Vermögens, sich etwas vorzustellen, und des Vermögens zu empfinden befindet” (1763), in Vermischte Philosophische Schriften (1773) (Hildesheim: Olms 1974): vol.1, 225-243. 6 Ibid.: 226. SALVATORE TEDESCO 26 AN-ICON  however, adequate light is required, which allows the eye to perceive the object. Conversely, when the light is so dazzling as to injure the eye, there is no longer any perception of the object, but the eye feels tactile, that is, in the manner of the darkest sense, itself, its own condition: “The luminous glow touches the ocular nerves in such a way that seeing is transformed into feeling;”7 this process represents in the best way for Sulzer the passage from the state of thinking [Nachdenken] to that of feeling [Empfinden]: the representation is no longer a representation of the object, but of my condition of plea- sure or displeasure: “We do not feel the object, but ourselves. When it reflects, the intellect takes care of something that it considers to be placed outside of it; when it feels, the soul only takes care of itself.”8 In this way, however, at the very moment in which a fundamental distinction of levels and functions of the soul is created, a very precise relationship is established between knowing and feeling, in the sense that there is a proportion- ality between the degree of darkness of our knowledge and the strength of our “sensations” and that the “sensations” are aroused, so as to give rise to the transition from the state of thinking to that of feeling, when a certain idea arouses a crowd of other obscure representations. The characteristic fact of Sulzer’s anthropolog- ical vision is that this obscurity of feeling is, in itself, an in- surmountable datum: “We feel desire or aversion without knowing why: We are moved by forces we do not know.”9 Precisely from this state of affairs – we observe here in pass- ing – the arts derive their origin and at the same time their function, destined to enter into a relationship with the darkest part of feeling and to turn it to the advantage of humanity. The caesura between knowing and feeling the- orized by Sulzer – it would be rather simple to argue – more than corresponding to a deepening of the eighteenth-century physiological discourse, more than opening a philosophical 7 Ibid.: 231. 8 Ibid.: 229-230. 9 Ibid.: 241. SALVATORE TEDESCO 27 AN-ICON  question destined to be very influential, is in a certain way the symptom, the surface effect, so to speak, of a deep landslide destined to cross the whole thinking of the second half of the eighteenth century, that of the so-called Popularphilosophie. In light of what has been seen in Mendelssohn’s Briefe, that is, in light of the attempt to describe the “mo- tions of the soul” along the lines of the laws of physical movement, it is striking that the distinction made by Sulzer undoubtedly places at the center of the analysis the opacity, the resistance of the body to the gnoseological strategies by which the body itself is crossed throughout the Leibniz- ian-Wolffian season, but the fact that this happens (and this precisely affects, and perhaps explains the intimate distrust towards Sulzer himself of many of the major protagonists of the Aufklärung), creating a static contrast between the state [Zustand] of the body and the faculty of knowledge. Conversely, it is precisely the relational dynamics that remain at the center of Moses Mendelssohn’s interests, as already exemplarily shown in his reference to Boscovich’s theses on motor skills in the investigation of the physical body and the living organism. And it is precisely here that the space for reflection opens up for the concept of illusion, destined to become central in Mendelssohn’s aesthetic re- flection. Mendelssohn’s aesthetic thought, as it is actu- ally quite well known, is very troubled and passes through different and sometimes quite intricate theoretical phases; all the more noteworthy is the fact that from the first theori- zations to the definitive results, the link between an attempt at a rational description, even a mathematization of the re- lationship between physical movements and “motions of the soul,” and the enucleation of the way to function of the aesthetic illusion. It is in fact in the correspondence on the tragic with Lessing, and therefore already in the years 1756-1757, that Mendelssohn starts his reflection on the “ästhetische” or even “poetische” Illusion, which is considered the instrument through which the dramatic poet can give space - against Aristotle and his modern followers – even to the most violent SALVATORE TEDESCO 28 AN-ICON  feelings, such as hatred or repugnance [Abscheu], on the condition that the reader and viewer are under the aesthetic effect of the illusion.10 Faced with the hesitations manifested by Less- ing in the correspondence, Mendelssohn tries to organize the theme in a more extended form by articulating a short essay Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen (About the dominion over inclinations),11 which starts from an attempt to mathematize the dynamics of motions of the soul, the- orizing a direct proportionality between the kinetic force of motivation and the expected good, as well as between the kinetic force itself and the clarity of the representation that one possesses of it, while this force would be expressed according to an inverse proportionality in relation to the time necessary for the representation itself to take shape: “Quan- tity of motivation = good × clarity ÷ time.”12 On this Platonic theoretical basis Mendelssohn also explains the effect of illusion, saying that: When an imitation bears so much resemblance to the original that our senses can be persuaded at least for a moment to see the original itself, I call this deception an aesthetic il usion. The poet must speak in a perfectly sensitive way; for this reason all his speeches must deceive us in an aesthetic way. For an imitation to be beautiful, he must deceive us aesthetically; at the same time the higher cognitive faculties must be aware that it is an imitation, and not nature itself.13 Mendelssohn therefore bases the anthropologi- cal effect of the aesthetic illusion on the discrepancy between sensitivity and intellect. The illusion is aesthetic and it is not a common deception when it is addressed directly to the sensitivity by involving the higher faculties only indirectly. This discrepancy is first of all a temporal hiatus in the effect of the aesthetic representation: 10 See K.W. Segreff, M. Mendelssohn und die Aufklärungsästhetik im 18. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Grundmann, 1984): 94. 11 M. Mendelssohn, “Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1931): vol. 2, 149-155. 12 Ibid.: 149. 13 Ibid.: 154. SALVATORE TEDESCO 29 AN-ICON It is easy to see that that judgment [that is, the aesthetic judgment] must precede, and that therefore the conviction about the similarity must be intuitive, that is, take place through il usion, while on the other hand, the conviction that it is not the original itself may come a little late, and therefore be dependent on symbolic knowledge.14 The argument itself is not fundamentally new, and to give a single example relating to a possible source, it is enough to recall Bernard de Fontenelle, who in the Ré- flexions sur la poétique of 1742 declares that our pleasure in following the painful events of a hero that we love, crying and consoling ourselves alternately for what we see, depends on our awareness that it is a fiction.15 What is new in Mendelssohn is the temporal scheme, and the theoretical framework in which it is inscribed, which is evidently influenced by the thought of Baumgarten, of which Mendelssohn becomes a continuer: While, so to speak, the awareness of the fictional character holds true in Fontenelle as an undoubtedly presupposed guarantee of “poetic” enjoyment, Mendelssohn is instead interested in the path that leads from the touched soul of the user to the aesthetic object, and in this path he discovers a double semiotic-cognitive modality, and precisely two different tem- poralities, which, however, are valid as the two necessarily coexisting stages for the realization of aesthetic pleasure. Sensitive knowledge intuitively grasps an iden- tity between original and copy where only the greater slow- ness of intellectual knowledge, due to its symbolic character, will be able to reformulate the relationship as a similarity of elements (intellectually) recognized as distinct. Only in the temporal interplay between the two cognitive stages is aesthetic pleasure realized for Mendels- sohn, which takes the form of the subsequent recognition of the similar in the imitative representation as identical and different. Identical for sensitivity and – with a short hiatus – different for the intellect. Aesthetic pleasure therefore allows 14 Ibid. 15 B.L.B. de Fontenelle, Réflexions sur la Poétique (Paris: M. Brunet, 1742): XXXVI. SALVATORE TEDESCO 30 AN-ICON  us to penetrate into the human soul, indeed to say more precisely within the motivational dynamic that governs the movements of the soul, so as to relate sensitivity and intel- lect not for the purpose of a progressive “unveiling” of re- ality that destroys illusion and error, but on the contrary for the purpose of an enjoyment that finds its root in imitation, capable of emerging with particular evidence right in the case of the imitation of passions that are violent and pain- ful,16 which would not only turn out to be such if they were experienced in reality, but which would be no less painful if we were simply faced with an “interpretative error” of our sensitivity destined to be rationally overcome. In the same year 1757, one of the decisive writ- ings of Mendelssohnian aesthetics, the Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften (Reflections on the Sources and Connec- tions of the Fine Arts and Sciences),17 added a further de- cisive element to this descriptive framework, clarifying that, from the semiotic point of view, intuitive knowledge concerns both the case in which the object is immediately present to our senses, and the case in which it is represented through signs [Zeichen] through which the ideas of the designated [Ideen des Bezeichneten] can be seen more distinctly than those of the sign. The beauty of the aesthetic relationship (but by now Mendelssohn’s discourse – precisely through the reference to the designation process – strongly gravitates towards artistic beauty) therefore offers the example of a peculiar transparency of the medium, and it is right through the transparency of the sign that the object appears with an evidence that captures and sets in motion the faculties of our soul. In the same years, in controversy with Reimarus, Mendelssohn will also return to the nature of the imagina- tion and to the overall relationship of the faculties of the 16 M. Mendelssohn, Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen: 155. 17 M. Mendelssohn, “Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie- Verlag, 1929): vol. I, 169. SALVATORE TEDESCO 31 AN-ICON  soul, saying that – far from being considered a faculty in its own right – the imagination is rather a modification of the unique, original and in principle completely indeterminate representative capacity of the soul which however “through the state of one’s own and of one’s body [durch ihren und ihres Körpers Zustand],”18 is addressed and configured in specific ways, articulating itself precisely as Einbildungsk- raft facing the past, Empfindungsvermögen adhering to the present, Vorhersehungsvermögen of the future. The famous statement of Baumgarten – accord- ing to which the individual soul represents the universe pro positu corporis –19 is therefore changed in a decisive way by redefining the position of the body as Zustand, a state or more precisely a condition of well-being or malaise. Let us pause for a moment to consider Men- delssohn’s path so far: The “aesthetic illusion” is clearly distinguished from mere “cognitive deception,” at the very moment in which the attention thus shifts one way in the direction of internal dynamics to our soul, that is towards the play, the balance of the faculties, present in our soul and set in motion by the aesthetic representations, and on the other hand it traces the dynamics of the relational movement between our soul and the aesthetic object, now more and more clearly distinguished from the cognitive one. The brief note of 1770 to which attention has already been drawn testifies to a deepening of the first question – that relating to the internal dynamics of our soul – which would not be imaginable and would probably not have assumed that configuration without the openings on one’s own body and on his condition made possible by the almost contemporary theories of Sulzer. Mendelssohn therefore writes: Pleasure should not have been compared with wil . That is an intimate awareness that representation “a” improves our state [Zustand]; 18 M. Mendelssohn, “Rezensionsartikel,” in Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend (1759- 1765), 20 nov. 1760: 300 in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Stuttgart: Frommann- Holzboog,1991): no. 5,1. 19 A.G. Baumgarten, Metaphysica (1779) (Halle: Hemmerde, 1939): § 512. SALVATORE TEDESCO 32 AN-ICON the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to realize this representation. Pleasure is, so to speak, a favorable judgment of the soul on her real state; the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to achieve this state.20 In this way, undoubtedly, Mendelssohn moves towards an overall redefinition of the “system of faculties” that distances him from the Wolffian tradition as well as from Baumgarten, his model, approaching that tripartite division between the cognitive sphere, the sphere of will and aesthet- ic pleasure that characterizes the second eighteenth cen- tury from the so-called Popularphilosophie to Kant. No less significant is that this occurs through a specific attention to one’s own body, and to the way in which the representative processes do not so much modify our relationship with reality on the objective side, as they redefine its internal resonance. However, whereas precisely on this point Sulzer chose an “extremist” reading, speaking of a “feeling devoid of an object,” through which our body senses itself and not the object, and therefore sacrificed the understanding of the dynamic relationship to highlight the question of the Zustand, of the state/condition of the organ (remember what Sulzer says about the eye and sight), of one’s own body, of the soul vitalistically considered coextensive with the body, Mendels- sohn never loses sight of the relationality, the dynamism of the framework of faculty. It is perhaps also for this reason that his is the most significant figure in the entire German debate from Baumgarten to Kant. Another short essay is dedicated to what has just been defined as the dynamics of the relational move- ment between our soul and the object, dating back to June 1776, in which, similarly to what we have just seen, Men- delssohn moves, so to speak, from “systematic reasons,” openly declared already from the title of the fragment: [Über 20 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol. 1, 225. SALVATORE TEDESCO 33 AN-ICON  das Erkenntnis-, das Empfindungs- und das Begehrungsver- mögen] On the faculty of knowing, of feeling and of appetite. What six years earlier had been entrusted to an almost incidental note here instead – even if the writing is destined not to leave the private workshop of Mendelssohn’s thought – acquires the characteristics of a system program: Between the faculty of knowing and the faculty to appetite there is the faculty of feeling [Empfindungsvermögen], by means of which we feel pleasure or displeasure about something, we appreciate it, approve it, find it pleasant, or we despise it, blame it and find it un- pleasant [.. ]. The end of the faculty of knowing is the truth; that is, as we possess a faculty of knowing, we strive to make the concepts in our soul accord with the qualities of their objects. The end of the faculty of hearing is the good; that is, insofar as we possess a faculty of feeling, we strive to make the objective qualities accord with our concepts of goodness, order and beauty.21 The truly innovative moment of this position lies in the clear distinction of areas between will and pleasure: The pleasure for a representation does not necessarily imply the desire for the object that underlies it. Mendelssohn is above all interested in distin- guishing two modalities of relationship with the object: In the cognitive relationship we modify our representations to adapt them to the truth of the object, in the case of the faculty of feeling we aim instead to harmonize the properties of the object with our own concepts of good, order, beauty, and the tool for this to happen is clearly identified in the aesthetic illusion. The peculiarity of the statute of aesthetic illusion is then the true core of Mendelssohn’s discourse, when it is distinguished both from cognitive truth and also from the concrete modification of reality which the will aims at. But there is more; Mendelssohn distinguishes two fundamental human attitudes, the first tending to truth, the second to poetic invention [Erdichtung]. If the first cor- responds to the work of the faculty of knowing, the poetic 21 Ibid.: vol. 3, 1, 276. SALVATORE TEDESCO 34 AN-ICON  invention will instead follow the intent of keeping in exercise [in Übung zu erhalten]22 the faculty of feeling. In the same days, another brief note23 completes the Mendelssohnian description, noting that this “faculty to entertain oneself” [Un- terhaltungsfähigkeit] (it is interesting how Mendelssohn tries to set the theoretical framework in motion even in proposing new names for a system of faculties perceived as in active transformation with respect to the Wolffian model) has an objective side (simplifying I would say the quantity and or- der of semiotic markers capable of “giving something to think about”) and a subjective side (the faculty itself and the ordering criteria it is able to set). The beauty will therefore reside in the harmony between the objective and subjective aspects of the new faculty, capable of arousing in us “in the contemplation of the object, the awareness of our strengths rather than our limits, and movement is pleasant.”24 Conversely, that disharmony that comes from the excess of the object over our faculties will cause dizzi- ness, and on a conceptual level it will give life to the sublime. The conclusive synthesis of the Morgenstunden, in 1785, will insert the considerations that we have followed up to now into a much broader theoretical framework, without however further introducing profound changes; confirming and reformulating again the tripartition between the faculty of knowing, that of desiring and the “aesthetic faculty,” now re- defined as the capacity of appreciation [Billigungsvermögen], Mendelssohn now distinguishes between two fundamental aspects of human knowledge, depending on whether one considers its material relevance or the formal configuration. From the material point of view, that is, a given notion can be true or false; considered from this point of view, knowledge knows no degrees, truth is an “indivisible unity.”25 It is quite another thing to consider knowledge as capable of arousing pleasure or displeasure, that is, as an object of 22 Ibid. 23 M. Mendelssohn, “Über objektive und subjektive Unterhaltungsfähigkeit,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol. 3, 1, 275. 24 Ibid. 25 M. Mendelssohn, “Morgenstunden,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog; 1974): vol. 3, 2, 62. SALVATORE TEDESCO 35 AN-ICON  the faculty of appreciation: precisely this can be defined as the formal aspect. And vice versa, this consists exclusively in evaluating, in comparison, in gradation, in plus and minus; moreover, every conceivable degree of this scale of values can be thought of “with the same truth,”26 which is evidently a truth of the formal aspect of knowledge, a peculiar truth of aesthetic illusion. Moses Mendelssohn’s thought, in its different phases and declinations, through the collaboration with Lessing and up to the final results of the Morgenstunden, constitutes the exemplary arrival point of an era of theo- retical research that we are interested in investigating not only in terms of the solutions that he found for his time, but also in relation to open problems, which continue to question our time. 26 Ibid.: 63. SALVATORE TEDESCO 36 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18189

Imagination and Körperzustand: illusion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflMendelssohn ection by Salvatore Tedesco Aesthetics Illusion Play Imagination Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Imagination and Körperzustand: il usion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflection SALVATORE TEDESCO, Università degli Studi di Palermo – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1584-5455 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18189 Abstract The aesthetic reflection in the eighteenth century is deeply traversed by an experience perceived as capable of disrupting the disciplinary and cognitive system of early moder- nity: To feel the “own body,” that is, to feel its state of well-being or discomfort means to somehow modify from the inside the anthropological project of the Century of Enlightenment and to create the space and the lexicon of a modality of relation- ship (play, aesthetic illusion) that redefines the relationship with oneself and the context of construction of a future community. Whereas “Knowledge” and “Will” articulate the same strategy based on the relationship between the spiritual activity of a subject and the semiotic properties of an object, the orientation towards the condition of one’s own body defines in the play and in the aesthetic illusion the space of an imag- inative reserve which is above all a reserve of time and mode of construction for a future sharing. Moses Mendelssohn’s thought constitutes the ex- emplary arrival point of an era of theoretical research that we are interested in investigating not only in terms of the solutions it has found for his time, but also in relation to the open prob- lems, which continue to question our time. Keywords Mendelssohn Aesthetics Illusion Play Imagination To quote this essay: S. Tedesco, “Imagination and Körperzustand: illusion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflection,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 22-36, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18189 SALVATORE TEDESCO 22 AN-ICON  The philosophical and aesthetic reflection in the eighteenth century is deeply traversed by an experience per- ceived as capable of disrupting the disciplinary and cognitive system of early modernity: Feeling the “own body,” that is, feeling its “state” of well-being or discomfort – before and in a way different from the cognitive approach of a subject with an object or from the desire that moves towards that object – means to somehow enter the anthropological proj- ect of the Century of Enlightenment and to create the space and the lexicon of a modality of relationship (play, aesthetic illusion) that redefines the relationship with oneself and the context of construction of a future community. In fact, where “Knowledge” and “Will” articu- late, albeit in different ways, the same strategy based on the relationship between the spiritual activity of a subject (typically, to formulate it according to the terminology of Moses Mendelssohn: geistige Bewegung der Seele and freie Entschließung des Willens) and semiotic properties [Merk- male] of an object, the orientation towards the condition of one’s own body (towards the Zustand des Körpers, as we will see, in the sign of Johann Georg Sulzer’s work) defines in play and in aesthetic illusion the space of an imaginative reserve which is above all a reserve of time and a mode of construction for a future sharing. In this dynamic, which for example the aforemen- tioned Sulzer tries to describe starting from the conceptual couple Empfinden/Erkennen (“feeling/knowing”), but which in fact would not be conceivable except as a Bewegung, that is, certainly, as a “theoretical dynamics,” but even before that as a movement of the body and soul, is profoundly inserted another decisive lexical graft, which acquires its most com- plete theoretical profile in the reflection of Johann Gottfried Herder: I mean the field of fühlen, of the tactile feeling, and therefore of its declination as hinein fühlen (“internal feeling”); Gefühl, which means a thousand things but here I would try to render it as a “tactile feeling;” Einfühlung, “empathy;” Mitgefühl, “to feel together,” “community feeling;” and finally SALVATORE TEDESCO 23 AN-ICON  Familiengefühl, in which this feeling of community undoubt- edly reveals a social dimension of identity. In this sense, decisively rethinking the Leibnizian and Baumgartenian tradition, Moses Mendelssohn speaks of a vis repraesentativa which is in and of itself indetermi- nate, but which through the reference to the state of the soul [Zustand der Seele] and of the own body is determined as Einbildungskraft facing the past, Empfindungsvermögen ad- hering to the present, Vorhersehungsvermögen of the future. But let’s look at the theoretical complex a little more closely at this point. Referring to the two short writ- ings De anima and De DEO, placed in the appendix to the famous Philosophiae naturalis Theoria by Roger Boscovi- ch,1 Moses Mendelssohn in the fifty-sixth of the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend2 proposes to take into account, together, the proximity and the difference between the laws of movement [Gesetze der Bewegung] of inorganic bodies and those brought about by the union of soul and body in the human organism, which causes from certain spatial movements [aus gewissen örtlichen Bewegun- gen] in the external limbs to derive certain spiritual movements [geis- tige Bewegungen] in the soul; some in a necessary way, like sensa- tions, others through a free choice, like the determinations of the wil . This is precisely the bipartition and parallelism be- tween geistige Bewegung der Seele and freie Entschließung 1 R.J. Boscovich, Philosophiae Naturalis Theoria (Vienna: Apud Augustinum Bernardi, 1758): 280-295. 2 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1844): vol. 4, 566. The secondary bibliography on Mendelssohn is very rich, and ranges from historical-critical questions, to aesthetics and the theory of art, to ethics and philosophy of religions, and so on. In these notes - which obviously take into account the overall developments of that critical debate, from the “classic” studies by Fr. Braitmaier, Geschichte der Poetischen Theorie und Kritik von den Diskursen der Malern bis auf Lessing (Frauenfeld: Huber, 1888-1889) and L. Goldstein, Moses Mendelssohn und die deutsche Ästhetik (Königsberg: Gräfe & Unzer, 1904), up to M. Albrecht, E.J. Engel, N. Hinske, eds., Moses Mendelssohn und die Kreise seiner Wirksamkeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), and M. Albrecht, E.J. Engel, eds., Moses Mendelssohn in Spannungsfeld der Aufklärung (Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2000), with particular reference to the large, still decisive monograph by J.P. Meier, L’Esthétique de Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) (Paris: Atelier Lille III, 1978), and for Italy refer in particular to the excellent work of L. Lattanzi, Linguaggio e poesia in Moses Mendelssohn (Pisa: ETS, 2002), and M. Mendelssohn, Scritti di Estetica, ed. L. Lattanzi (Palermo: Aesthetica, 2004) - we limit ourselves to refer from time to time to some texts by Mendelssohn himself, of which we will provide a quick theoretical framework for the purposes of our argument. SALVATORE TEDESCO 24 AN-ICON  des Willens mentioned at the beginning, according to a cog- nitive procedure that is exercised on a “semiotically config- ured” reality, in which the knowing subject captures certain Merkmale, notae characteristicae, in fact we could say se- miotic3 “representative marks” of the object, of the known reality. In this phase, therefore, Mendelssohn theorizes a perfect parallelism between the sphere of knowledge and the sphere of the will, thus inscribing himself perfectly in that theoretical tradition of the so-called “German rational- ism” which can be summarized in the positions of Christian Wolff’s Psychologia empirica or the psychological sections of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica – yet, in Mendelssohn’s par- ticular thematic declension, the salient term is certainly Be- wegung, that is the reference to a motility, of the body and of our representative faculty in relation to it, which in fact sets the whole system in motion. The theoretical framework thus “photographed” by Mendelssohn in 1759 will undergo a rapid evolution, of which we will try to retrace some passages below. At the moment, we limit ourselves to referring to that decisive turn- ing point entrusted by the author to a short private annota- tion in 1770,4 which Mendelssohn, critically returning to the path traveled by gnoseology in Germany in the eighteenth century, states that Pleasure should not have been compared with wil . That is an intimate awareness that representation “a” improves our state; the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to realize this representation. The Leibnizian affectus, Baumgarten’s sensi- tive knowledge “capable of driving force,” is now definitely 3 Obviously I am referring in this way to a very long-term semiotic strategy in the theoretical discourse that interests us here. See, limiting ourselves here of necessity to mentioning the immediate context of reference, the occurrence of the term in the fifty-fifth M. Mendelssohn, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol.1, 565. 4 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol.1, 225. SALVATORE TEDESCO 25 AN-ICON  characterized as pleasure, with the further clarification that this modality acts on (and therefore it is appropriate to say more precisely to the interior of) our state [Zustand] – we would perhaps say modernly on our “psycho-physical bal- ance” – and is therefore to be considered in reference to our intimate awareness of ourselves, rather than continuing to refer to the scope of a cognitive relationship with some external object. It is precisely here that we cross in a more articu- lated way the theories of Sulzer5 who, at the end of a long re- search path that we would define “psycho-physiological,” as well as at the start of a new season of German Enlightenment thought, definitively breaks the parallelism and the alliance between knowledge and will by contrasting, in the context of extensively understood “knowledge,” knowledge in the proper sense (i.e. the semiotic-representative relationship of a knowing subject with a known object) to a feeling devoid of an object, through which, in the strict sense, our sensory apparatus experiences itself, its own state of well-being or discomfort. But let’s take a closer look at Sulzer’s argument, in which the eye performs the function of a real paradigm of the human soul.6 Our cognitive faculty, says Sulzer develop- ing considerations that we can trace back to Christian Wolff, is structured in a way that is perfectly analogous to the sense of sight and that, in analogy to it, can be described on the basis of the laws of optics. Objects present themselves to our eye and to our cognitive faculty with a greater or lesser degree of clarity, the focus of our attention progressively focuses on every single element (imaginable as a physical point), leaving the rest of the representation in the twilight. Therefore the objects are known through a pro- cess that allows to obtain a clear knowledge of every single component of the object, so as to finally have a distinct vi- sion of the compound object; for this process to take place, 5 J.G. Sulzer, “Anmerkungen über den verschiedenen Zustand, worinn sich die Seele bey Ausübung ihrer Hauptvermögen, nämlich des Vermögens, sich etwas vorzustellen, und des Vermögens zu empfinden befindet” (1763), in Vermischte Philosophische Schriften (1773) (Hildesheim: Olms 1974): vol.1, 225-243. 6 Ibid.: 226. SALVATORE TEDESCO 26 AN-ICON  however, adequate light is required, which allows the eye to perceive the object. Conversely, when the light is so dazzling as to injure the eye, there is no longer any perception of the object, but the eye feels tactile, that is, in the manner of the darkest sense, itself, its own condition: “The luminous glow touches the ocular nerves in such a way that seeing is transformed into feeling;”7 this process represents in the best way for Sulzer the passage from the state of thinking [Nachdenken] to that of feeling [Empfinden]: the representation is no longer a representation of the object, but of my condition of plea- sure or displeasure: “We do not feel the object, but ourselves. When it reflects, the intellect takes care of something that it considers to be placed outside of it; when it feels, the soul only takes care of itself.”8 In this way, however, at the very moment in which a fundamental distinction of levels and functions of the soul is created, a very precise relationship is established between knowing and feeling, in the sense that there is a proportion- ality between the degree of darkness of our knowledge and the strength of our “sensations” and that the “sensations” are aroused, so as to give rise to the transition from the state of thinking to that of feeling, when a certain idea arouses a crowd of other obscure representations. The characteristic fact of Sulzer’s anthropolog- ical vision is that this obscurity of feeling is, in itself, an in- surmountable datum: “We feel desire or aversion without knowing why: We are moved by forces we do not know.”9 Precisely from this state of affairs – we observe here in pass- ing – the arts derive their origin and at the same time their function, destined to enter into a relationship with the darkest part of feeling and to turn it to the advantage of humanity. The caesura between knowing and feeling the- orized by Sulzer – it would be rather simple to argue – more than corresponding to a deepening of the eighteenth-century physiological discourse, more than opening a philosophical 7 Ibid.: 231. 8 Ibid.: 229-230. 9 Ibid.: 241. SALVATORE TEDESCO 27 AN-ICON  question destined to be very influential, is in a certain way the symptom, the surface effect, so to speak, of a deep landslide destined to cross the whole thinking of the second half of the eighteenth century, that of the so-called Popularphilosophie. In light of what has been seen in Mendelssohn’s Briefe, that is, in light of the attempt to describe the “mo- tions of the soul” along the lines of the laws of physical movement, it is striking that the distinction made by Sulzer undoubtedly places at the center of the analysis the opacity, the resistance of the body to the gnoseological strategies by which the body itself is crossed throughout the Leibniz- ian-Wolffian season, but the fact that this happens (and this precisely affects, and perhaps explains the intimate distrust towards Sulzer himself of many of the major protagonists of the Aufklärung), creating a static contrast between the state [Zustand] of the body and the faculty of knowledge. Conversely, it is precisely the relational dynamics that remain at the center of Moses Mendelssohn’s interests, as already exemplarily shown in his reference to Boscovich’s theses on motor skills in the investigation of the physical body and the living organism. And it is precisely here that the space for reflection opens up for the concept of illusion, destined to become central in Mendelssohn’s aesthetic re- flection. Mendelssohn’s aesthetic thought, as it is actu- ally quite well known, is very troubled and passes through different and sometimes quite intricate theoretical phases; all the more noteworthy is the fact that from the first theori- zations to the definitive results, the link between an attempt at a rational description, even a mathematization of the re- lationship between physical movements and “motions of the soul,” and the enucleation of the way to function of the aesthetic illusion. It is in fact in the correspondence on the tragic with Lessing, and therefore already in the years 1756-1757, that Mendelssohn starts his reflection on the “ästhetische” or even “poetische” Illusion, which is considered the instrument through which the dramatic poet can give space - against Aristotle and his modern followers – even to the most violent SALVATORE TEDESCO 28 AN-ICON  feelings, such as hatred or repugnance [Abscheu], on the condition that the reader and viewer are under the aesthetic effect of the illusion.10 Faced with the hesitations manifested by Less- ing in the correspondence, Mendelssohn tries to organize the theme in a more extended form by articulating a short essay Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen (About the dominion over inclinations),11 which starts from an attempt to mathematize the dynamics of motions of the soul, the- orizing a direct proportionality between the kinetic force of motivation and the expected good, as well as between the kinetic force itself and the clarity of the representation that one possesses of it, while this force would be expressed according to an inverse proportionality in relation to the time necessary for the representation itself to take shape: “Quan- tity of motivation = good × clarity ÷ time.”12 On this Platonic theoretical basis Mendelssohn also explains the effect of illusion, saying that: When an imitation bears so much resemblance to the original that our senses can be persuaded at least for a moment to see the original itself, I call this deception an aesthetic il usion. The poet must speak in a perfectly sensitive way; for this reason all his speeches must deceive us in an aesthetic way. For an imitation to be beautiful, he must deceive us aesthetically; at the same time the higher cognitive faculties must be aware that it is an imitation, and not nature itself.13 Mendelssohn therefore bases the anthropologi- cal effect of the aesthetic illusion on the discrepancy between sensitivity and intellect. The illusion is aesthetic and it is not a common deception when it is addressed directly to the sensitivity by involving the higher faculties only indirectly. This discrepancy is first of all a temporal hiatus in the effect of the aesthetic representation: 10 See K.W. Segreff, M. Mendelssohn und die Aufklärungsästhetik im 18. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Grundmann, 1984): 94. 11 M. Mendelssohn, “Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1931): vol. 2, 149-155. 12 Ibid.: 149. 13 Ibid.: 154. SALVATORE TEDESCO 29 AN-ICON It is easy to see that that judgment [that is, the aesthetic judgment] must precede, and that therefore the conviction about the similarity must be intuitive, that is, take place through il usion, while on the other hand, the conviction that it is not the original itself may come a little late, and therefore be dependent on symbolic knowledge.14 The argument itself is not fundamentally new, and to give a single example relating to a possible source, it is enough to recall Bernard de Fontenelle, who in the Ré- flexions sur la poétique of 1742 declares that our pleasure in following the painful events of a hero that we love, crying and consoling ourselves alternately for what we see, depends on our awareness that it is a fiction.15 What is new in Mendelssohn is the temporal scheme, and the theoretical framework in which it is inscribed, which is evidently influenced by the thought of Baumgarten, of which Mendelssohn becomes a continuer: While, so to speak, the awareness of the fictional character holds true in Fontenelle as an undoubtedly presupposed guarantee of “poetic” enjoyment, Mendelssohn is instead interested in the path that leads from the touched soul of the user to the aesthetic object, and in this path he discovers a double semiotic-cognitive modality, and precisely two different tem- poralities, which, however, are valid as the two necessarily coexisting stages for the realization of aesthetic pleasure. Sensitive knowledge intuitively grasps an iden- tity between original and copy where only the greater slow- ness of intellectual knowledge, due to its symbolic character, will be able to reformulate the relationship as a similarity of elements (intellectually) recognized as distinct. Only in the temporal interplay between the two cognitive stages is aesthetic pleasure realized for Mendels- sohn, which takes the form of the subsequent recognition of the similar in the imitative representation as identical and different. Identical for sensitivity and – with a short hiatus – different for the intellect. Aesthetic pleasure therefore allows 14 Ibid. 15 B.L.B. de Fontenelle, Réflexions sur la Poétique (Paris: M. Brunet, 1742): XXXVI. SALVATORE TEDESCO 30 AN-ICON  us to penetrate into the human soul, indeed to say more precisely within the motivational dynamic that governs the movements of the soul, so as to relate sensitivity and intel- lect not for the purpose of a progressive “unveiling” of re- ality that destroys illusion and error, but on the contrary for the purpose of an enjoyment that finds its root in imitation, capable of emerging with particular evidence right in the case of the imitation of passions that are violent and pain- ful,16 which would not only turn out to be such if they were experienced in reality, but which would be no less painful if we were simply faced with an “interpretative error” of our sensitivity destined to be rationally overcome. In the same year 1757, one of the decisive writ- ings of Mendelssohnian aesthetics, the Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften (Reflections on the Sources and Connec- tions of the Fine Arts and Sciences),17 added a further de- cisive element to this descriptive framework, clarifying that, from the semiotic point of view, intuitive knowledge concerns both the case in which the object is immediately present to our senses, and the case in which it is represented through signs [Zeichen] through which the ideas of the designated [Ideen des Bezeichneten] can be seen more distinctly than those of the sign. The beauty of the aesthetic relationship (but by now Mendelssohn’s discourse – precisely through the reference to the designation process – strongly gravitates towards artistic beauty) therefore offers the example of a peculiar transparency of the medium, and it is right through the transparency of the sign that the object appears with an evidence that captures and sets in motion the faculties of our soul. In the same years, in controversy with Reimarus, Mendelssohn will also return to the nature of the imagina- tion and to the overall relationship of the faculties of the 16 M. Mendelssohn, Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen: 155. 17 M. Mendelssohn, “Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie- Verlag, 1929): vol. I, 169. SALVATORE TEDESCO 31 AN-ICON  soul, saying that – far from being considered a faculty in its own right – the imagination is rather a modification of the unique, original and in principle completely indeterminate representative capacity of the soul which however “through the state of one’s own and of one’s body [durch ihren und ihres Körpers Zustand],”18 is addressed and configured in specific ways, articulating itself precisely as Einbildungsk- raft facing the past, Empfindungsvermögen adhering to the present, Vorhersehungsvermögen of the future. The famous statement of Baumgarten – accord- ing to which the individual soul represents the universe pro positu corporis –19 is therefore changed in a decisive way by redefining the position of the body as Zustand, a state or more precisely a condition of well-being or malaise. Let us pause for a moment to consider Men- delssohn’s path so far: The “aesthetic illusion” is clearly distinguished from mere “cognitive deception,” at the very moment in which the attention thus shifts one way in the direction of internal dynamics to our soul, that is towards the play, the balance of the faculties, present in our soul and set in motion by the aesthetic representations, and on the other hand it traces the dynamics of the relational movement between our soul and the aesthetic object, now more and more clearly distinguished from the cognitive one. The brief note of 1770 to which attention has already been drawn testifies to a deepening of the first question – that relating to the internal dynamics of our soul – which would not be imaginable and would probably not have assumed that configuration without the openings on one’s own body and on his condition made possible by the almost contemporary theories of Sulzer. Mendelssohn therefore writes: Pleasure should not have been compared with wil . That is an intimate awareness that representation “a” improves our state [Zustand]; 18 M. Mendelssohn, “Rezensionsartikel,” in Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend (1759- 1765), 20 nov. 1760: 300 in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Stuttgart: Frommann- Holzboog,1991): no. 5,1. 19 A.G. Baumgarten, Metaphysica (1779) (Halle: Hemmerde, 1939): § 512. SALVATORE TEDESCO 32 AN-ICON the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to realize this representation. Pleasure is, so to speak, a favorable judgment of the soul on her real state; the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to achieve this state.20 In this way, undoubtedly, Mendelssohn moves towards an overall redefinition of the “system of faculties” that distances him from the Wolffian tradition as well as from Baumgarten, his model, approaching that tripartite division between the cognitive sphere, the sphere of will and aesthet- ic pleasure that characterizes the second eighteenth cen- tury from the so-called Popularphilosophie to Kant. No less significant is that this occurs through a specific attention to one’s own body, and to the way in which the representative processes do not so much modify our relationship with reality on the objective side, as they redefine its internal resonance. However, whereas precisely on this point Sulzer chose an “extremist” reading, speaking of a “feeling devoid of an object,” through which our body senses itself and not the object, and therefore sacrificed the understanding of the dynamic relationship to highlight the question of the Zustand, of the state/condition of the organ (remember what Sulzer says about the eye and sight), of one’s own body, of the soul vitalistically considered coextensive with the body, Mendels- sohn never loses sight of the relationality, the dynamism of the framework of faculty. It is perhaps also for this reason that his is the most significant figure in the entire German debate from Baumgarten to Kant. Another short essay is dedicated to what has just been defined as the dynamics of the relational move- ment between our soul and the object, dating back to June 1776, in which, similarly to what we have just seen, Men- delssohn moves, so to speak, from “systematic reasons,” openly declared already from the title of the fragment: [Über 20 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol. 1, 225. SALVATORE TEDESCO 33 AN-ICON  das Erkenntnis-, das Empfindungs- und das Begehrungsver- mögen] On the faculty of knowing, of feeling and of appetite. What six years earlier had been entrusted to an almost incidental note here instead – even if the writing is destined not to leave the private workshop of Mendelssohn’s thought – acquires the characteristics of a system program: Between the faculty of knowing and the faculty to appetite there is the faculty of feeling [Empfindungsvermögen], by means of which we feel pleasure or displeasure about something, we appreciate it, approve it, find it pleasant, or we despise it, blame it and find it un- pleasant [.. ]. The end of the faculty of knowing is the truth; that is, as we possess a faculty of knowing, we strive to make the concepts in our soul accord with the qualities of their objects. The end of the faculty of hearing is the good; that is, insofar as we possess a faculty of feeling, we strive to make the objective qualities accord with our concepts of goodness, order and beauty.21 The truly innovative moment of this position lies in the clear distinction of areas between will and pleasure: The pleasure for a representation does not necessarily imply the desire for the object that underlies it. Mendelssohn is above all interested in distin- guishing two modalities of relationship with the object: In the cognitive relationship we modify our representations to adapt them to the truth of the object, in the case of the faculty of feeling we aim instead to harmonize the properties of the object with our own concepts of good, order, beauty, and the tool for this to happen is clearly identified in the aesthetic illusion. The peculiarity of the statute of aesthetic illusion is then the true core of Mendelssohn’s discourse, when it is distinguished both from cognitive truth and also from the concrete modification of reality which the will aims at. But there is more; Mendelssohn distinguishes two fundamental human attitudes, the first tending to truth, the second to poetic invention [Erdichtung]. If the first cor- responds to the work of the faculty of knowing, the poetic 21 Ibid.: vol. 3, 1, 276. SALVATORE TEDESCO 34 AN-ICON  invention will instead follow the intent of keeping in exercise [in Übung zu erhalten]22 the faculty of feeling. In the same days, another brief note23 completes the Mendelssohnian description, noting that this “faculty to entertain oneself” [Un- terhaltungsfähigkeit] (it is interesting how Mendelssohn tries to set the theoretical framework in motion even in proposing new names for a system of faculties perceived as in active transformation with respect to the Wolffian model) has an objective side (simplifying I would say the quantity and or- der of semiotic markers capable of “giving something to think about”) and a subjective side (the faculty itself and the ordering criteria it is able to set). The beauty will therefore reside in the harmony between the objective and subjective aspects of the new faculty, capable of arousing in us “in the contemplation of the object, the awareness of our strengths rather than our limits, and movement is pleasant.”24 Conversely, that disharmony that comes from the excess of the object over our faculties will cause dizzi- ness, and on a conceptual level it will give life to the sublime. The conclusive synthesis of the Morgenstunden, in 1785, will insert the considerations that we have followed up to now into a much broader theoretical framework, without however further introducing profound changes; confirming and reformulating again the tripartition between the faculty of knowing, that of desiring and the “aesthetic faculty,” now re- defined as the capacity of appreciation [Billigungsvermögen], Mendelssohn now distinguishes between two fundamental aspects of human knowledge, depending on whether one considers its material relevance or the formal configuration. From the material point of view, that is, a given notion can be true or false; considered from this point of view, knowledge knows no degrees, truth is an “indivisible unity.”25 It is quite another thing to consider knowledge as capable of arousing pleasure or displeasure, that is, as an object of 22 Ibid. 23 M. Mendelssohn, “Über objektive und subjektive Unterhaltungsfähigkeit,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol. 3, 1, 275. 24 Ibid. 25 M. Mendelssohn, “Morgenstunden,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog; 1974): vol. 3, 2, 62. SALVATORE TEDESCO 35 AN-ICON  the faculty of appreciation: precisely this can be defined as the formal aspect. And vice versa, this consists exclusively in evaluating, in comparison, in gradation, in plus and minus; moreover, every conceivable degree of this scale of values can be thought of “with the same truth,”26 which is evidently a truth of the formal aspect of knowledge, a peculiar truth of aesthetic illusion. Moses Mendelssohn’s thought, in its different phases and declinations, through the collaboration with Lessing and up to the final results of the Morgenstunden, constitutes the exemplary arrival point of an era of theo- retical research that we are interested in investigating not only in terms of the solutions that he found for his time, but also in relation to open problems, which continue to question our time. 26 Ibid.: 63. SALVATORE TEDESCO 36 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/17655

The polysemy of Vilém Flusser’s concept of illusi o by Francesco Restuccia Flusser n Illusion Fiction Fontcuberta Idolatry Self-deception Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing The polysemy of Vilém Flusser’s concept of il usion FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA, Sapienza - Università di Roma – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8900-642X https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17655 Abstract Vilém Flusser uses the concept of illusion in a non-systematic way, resulting in two ostensible contra- dictions. First of all, he often uses the term illusion, while criticizing the metaphysic assumptions that it implies; sec- ondly, he seems to both dispraise and value the illusionary nature of technical images. This article aims at clarifying Flusser’s thoughts on illusion in the belief that they are not as conflicting as they might seem at first. In fact, when Flusser deplores the risk of de- ception associated with technical images, he refers to the illusion of transparency. He does not oppose the concept of illusion to a supposed objective truth, on the contrary, he opposes the illusion of the objective nature of images to the awareness of their constructed and mediated character. However, a rational demystification of illu- sions is not a viable option, since, according to Flusser, they are the result of a voluntary self-deception: we suppress our critical thinking because we cannot bear its complexity, we want images to “release us from the necessity for conceptual, explanatory thought.” This is why Flusser thinks that aware illusion – in other words: fiction – can help us overcome our “inertia of happiness” and develop a critical imagination. Keywords Flusser Illusion Fiction Fontcuberta Idolatry Self-deception To quote this essay: F. Restuccia, “The polysemy of Vilém Flusser’s concept of illusion,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 52-66, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17655 FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 52 AN-ICON  Leafing through the pages of Herbarium (1982- 1985) by Joan Fontcuberta one is immediately seduced by the beauty of these black and white analog photographs of exotic plants, whose geometric details remind one of Karl Blossfeldt’s work. The whole series is presented as scientific documentation, including the botanical nomencla- ture of these newly discovered species. Only at a second glance one might notice that something is wrong: some details in the image, the strange pseudo-Latin names. What appeared to be plants are actually small assemblages of pieces of plastic, fragments and parts of animals found by the artist in the industrial outskirts of Barcelona. We have been victims of an illusion. These images, both hyper-re- alistic and extremely unlikely, aim to deceive us and at the same time to reveal the deception. Without any digital ma- nipulation, Fontcuberta’s work on the one hand invites us to reflect upon the supposed immediate and documentary character of photography, on the other hand it allows us to experience unprecedented and surprising configurations. Fontcuberta had an important intellectual col- laboration with a philosopher and media theorist who ded- icated many of his writings to discussing the illusionary character of technical images: Vilém Flusser.1 Although the term “illusion” appears only rarely in his writings and in a non-systematic way, Flusser was definitely fascinated by the ambiguity of this concept, which, as it emerges in Herbarium, can be conceived both as a form of deception, with dangerous and deplorable effects, and as a precious artistic and epistemic tool.2 Often Flusser refers to illusive phenomena in a pejorative way; sometimes he tends to re- ject the metaphysical assumption – implied by the concept of illusion – that an objective truth can be found beyond 1 Flusser also wrote the introduction to the German edition of Herbarium: V. Flusser, “Einführung ‘Herbarium’ von Joan Fontcuberta,” in Standpunkte: Texte zur Fotografie (Göttingen: European Photography, 1998): 113-116. 2 As Carrillo Canán wrote, “Flusser has no explicit theory on deception but as with many critical thinkers, his theory is to a great extent a theory of deception.” A.J.L. Carrillo Canán, “Deception and the ‘magic’ of ‘technical images’ according to Flusser,” Flusser Studies, no. 4 (2008): 1-12, 1. Significantly, neither “illusion,” “deception,” nor “fiction” was chosen as one of the 235 entries that make up the glossary of Flusseriana. S. Zielinski, P. Weibel, D. Irrgang, eds., Flusseriana: An Intellectual Toolbox (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2015). FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 53 AN-ICON  appearance; on other occasions he seems convinced that the art of illusion is the best tool for the creative training of our imagination. Therefore, it could be useful to try to put an order, as far as this is possible, to Flusser’s thoughts on illusion, in the belief that they are not as conflicting as they might initially seem. First we will analyze the contexts where he deplores the risk of deception associated with any mediation, and with new media and technical images in particular; then we will consider his critiques of the con- cepts of illusion and especially of disillusion, focusing on his theory of a voluntary self-deception; finally we will see how Flusser approves of illusion when it is understood as a form of fiction. Illusion as deception The German word that Flusser uses the most when referring to the negative sense of illusion is “Täu- schung,” which could be translated as “deception.” The verb “täuschen” literally means to exchange, to swap: by exchanging two different things, one mistakes one for an- other one. Being deceived is, first of all, taking something for something else, or conferring to one thing the value that we should only confer to something else. What are the two things that, according to Flusser, might dangerously be confused? The model and its copy, the signified and the signifier, the thing and the image. Deception is “a reversal [Umkehrung] of the vectors of significance,”3 or a “reversal of the function of the image:”4 images should represent the world and help us “to orientate” ourselves within it, but we end up forgetting about the world and living in function of the images we have created.5 Images “are supposed to be 3 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), trans. A. Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000): 37, 68. 4 Ibid.: 10. 5 On the concept of reversal as the key to understanding Flusser’s conception of technical images see D. Irrgang, Vom Umkehren der Bedeutungsvektoren: Prototypen des Technischen Bildes bei Vilém Flusser (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2017). FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 54 AN-ICON  maps but they turn into screens: Instead of representing [vorstellen] the world, they obscure [verstellen] it.”6 Flusser is not concerned by the deceptions that occur when we take an image of A for an image of B. As long as we truly know that something is an image, we also know that it is a human construction, that it needs to be interpreted and that this interpretation might be wrong. The real problem arises when images conceal their own nature. Flusser’s main models for his (implicit) theory of deception are Plato’s concept of eidolon and the Jewish and early Christian conception of idolatry.7 In his interpre- tation, both Plato’s eidola and religious idols are images that should mediate and represent something else (ideas for Plato, God in the Jewish and Christian tradition), but instead of presenting themselves as such, they end up being taken for what they should refer to. Flusser rethinks the concept of idolatry in a secular way, conceiving it as that particular form of deception which occurs when we do not recognize the symbolic and cultural nature of an image. In Towards a Philosophy of Photography idolatry is defined as “the inability to read off ideas from the elements of the image, despite the ability to read these elements themselves; hence: worship of images.”8 It is important to notice that idolatry is not only a perceptual deception, but has effects on human behavior: Flusser writes, metaphor- ically, that images are “worshiped” when they “have a hold over people as objects.”9 Sometimes, in order to identify this particular form of deception Flusser uses, instead of “idolatry,” the term “hallucination.” 6 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10. 7 Ibid.: 11; V. Flusser, “The codified world” (1978), in Writings, trans. E. Eisel (Minneapolis- London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002): 35-41, 39. See also F. Restuccia, “Flusser against idolatry,” Flusser Studies, no. 26 (2018): 1-15 and F. Restuccia, Il contrattacco delle immagini. Tecnica, media e idolatria a partire da Vilém Flusser (Milan: Meltemi, 2021). 8 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 83. A similar “semiotic” definition of idolatry was proposed by Augustine: “Now, he is in bondage to a sign who uses, or pays homage to, any significant object without knowing what it signifies,” S. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson jr. (London: Pearson, 1958): III, IX, 13. 9 V. Flusser, “Design: obstacle for/to the removal of obstacles” (1993), in The Shape of Things. A Philosophy of Design (London: Reaktion Books, 1999): 58-61, 60. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 55 AN-ICON Imagination can dialectically reverse and become hallucination. Images resulting from this reversed imagination stop working as mediation and become opaque surfaces hiding the world. The se- mantic vectors invert and point towards their producer instead of pointing towards the world.10 It is important to notice that this sort of reversal can happen with any kind of mediation and not only with images. When we stop using texts and conceptual thinking to help us understand the world, and we start using the world in order to understand our texts, or forcing data to fit into our conceptual grid, then we are victims of another form of deception. In this case Flusser talks about texto- latry, as opposed to idolatry, or paranoia, as opposed to hallucination.11 This dangerous reversal of imagination hap- pens when we do not recognize a medium, especially a visual one, as such. Therefore, the most illusionary images are those that appear transparent, concealing their status of images and presenting themselves as objective reality. According to Flusser, technical images – all images pro- duced by apparatuses, starting with photography – are the most deceiving, in this sense, because their mechanical production seems to grant an automatic and almost natural process that avoids any human and cultural interference.12 “But this ‘objectivity’ of the photograph is deceptive [täus- chend],”13 because technology is a human product and is also culturally biased. The program that apparatuses use to code images was written by human beings and is an externalization of the visual schemata that they would use if they were drawing an image themselves. When we see 10 V. Flusser, “Iconoclastia,” Cavalo azul, no. 8 (1979): 78-84, 79, my translation; see also V. Flusser Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10. 11 The choice of the last couple of words is due to their etymology: “hallucination,” which might be related to the Latin word lux (light), refers to visual thinking, whereas “paranoia,” which comes from the Greek word nous (intellect), refers to conceptual thinking. See V. Flusser, “Iconoclastia:” 79, and V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10. 12 H. Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1844) was one of the first to assert such a natural character of photography. See K. Walton, “Transparent pictures: on the nature of photographic realism,” Critical Inquiry, no. 11 (1984): 246-277, https://www.doi.org/10.1086/448287. 13 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 51. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 56 AN-ICON  a drawing or any other traditional image, though, we are aware that what we are looking at is someone’s interpre- tation of the world, and not the world itself; but when we see a photograph, or a video, we assume that what we are looking at is a direct emanation of reality. “This lack of criticism of technical images is potentially dangerous […] for the reason that the ‘objectivity’ of technical images is an illusion [Täuschung].”14 The elements of a photograph appear to be “symptoms” of the world, instead of “symbols” that need to be “decoded.”15 The only way to avoid idolatry, hallucination and deception is to recognize the symbols contained in an image and decode them, discovering the “programmed concepts” they represent, “so as to identify the true significance of the photograph.”16 Based on what has been discussed so far, Flusser seems to maintain a sort of platonic dualism: im- ages are just symbols and should not be confused with the real world. However, Flusser refuses this approach as “‘metaphysical’ […] in the worst sense of the word.”17 The reason why he deplores the illusion of transparency of tech- nical images is because, according to him, no such thing as an immediate reality can be found, not even beyond images. Even “the amorphous stew of phenomena (‘the material world’) is an illusion [Täuschung],”18 since it is only accessible through our nervous system and is therefore also a construction. In an interview with Florian Rötzer he declared: The concept of simulation disturbs me. When something is simulated, that is, when it looks like something else, there must be something being simulated. In the term simulation or simulacrum lies a deep metaphysical belief that something can be simulated. I do not share 14 Ibid.: 15. 15 Ibid.; V. Flusser, “Für eine Theorie der Techno-Imagination, 1980 in Standpunkte: Texte zur Fotografie: 8-16, 8. 16 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 44. 17 Ibid.: 62. 18 V. Flusser, “Form and material,” in Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design: 22-29, 22. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 57 AN-ICON this belief [...]. In my opinion in the word simulation hides what is left of a belief in the absolute.19 Flusser is not afraid that the real world could be replaced with a simulation: on the one hand because our technologies do not allow us to build virtual worlds as defined as the experience of the world built by our nervous system, on the other hand because if this ever happened, then it would not make sense to distinguish these experi- ences as belonging to different levels of reality.20 Moreover our lifeworld and our simulations are already intertwined, since the experiences we have in the former affect those we have in the latter and vice versa. The real illusion is the possibility of accessing a pure, immediate reality. If all is construction, then why is Flusser con- cerned? Because if we assumed that images – and gener- ally our whole experience of the world – are immediate and pure, then we would accept them acritically. We would start unconsciously absorbing interpretations of reality without questioning them, and our imagination would slowly be- come lethargic. We should then try to avoid surrendering to the illusion of transparency, train our imagination and learn to decode the images we are surrounded by. But how can we do this? Is a rationalistic debunking the only way out of deception? Illusion as self-deception In the essay Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch Flusser rethinks the movie theater as a modern version of21 Plato’s cave. People sit in a dark space looking at images 19 V. Flusser, Zwiegespräche (Göttingen: European Photography, 1996): 230-231, my translation. See J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), trans. S. Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Flusser considered Baudrillard a friend and often quotes him in his final years, although mostly polemically. 20 V. Flusser, “Vom Virtuellen,” in F. Rötzer, P. Weibel, eds., Cyberspace. Zum medialen Gesamtkunstwerk (München: Boer, 2002): 65-71; V. Flusser, Kommunikologie weiter denken (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008): 75-77. 21 V. Flusser, “Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch,” in Lob der Oberflächigkeit. Für eine Phänomenologie der Medien (Bensheim-Düsseldorf: Bollman Verlag, 1993): 153-166. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 58 AN-ICON  projected on the wall in front of them, ignoring the world outside the “cave.” What does Flusser’s interpretation of the myth teach us? That people want to stay in the cave, they are not chained, they do not desire to be freed. Their illusion is voluntary. According to Flusser commercial cinema still has some degree of idolatry: people contemplate those images acritically, as pure entertainment, without question- ing the message that is being passed. Therefore they are “programmed” by the technical images to think and act in a certain way: the same people who leave the movie theater, writes Flusser, will form a line to enter the supermarket. They are victims of a double illusion: on the one hand they see the lights projected on the screen as a world taking shape in front of their eyes, on the other hand they end up believing that the people, the feelings, the values they perceived somehow exist and have a life of their own, that they are not the creation of a team of artists and technicians. However, neither of the two forms of illusion is a complete deception. Any film spectator knows how a film is made: they know the impression of movement is produced by the rapid sequence of the frames, they know the events por- trayed have been written, designed and reproduced, but they choose to believe in them. “Moviegoers are believers not in good faith, but in bad faith [böse Glaubens]: they know better, but don’t want to know. This is not magic, but something new.”22 In Towards a Philosophy of Photography, writ- ten around three years later, Flusser further develops his conception of a voluntary illusion, or belief in bad faith. Even though people nowadays act as if they were under the magic spell of technical images – they see a commer- cial and buy the product, they watch a video and change their political opinion – yet they do not believe in those images in the same way as people belonging to traditional magic cultures believed in their images. While the latter did not develop their critical consciousness (their conceptual 22 Ibid.: 163, my translation. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 59 AN-ICON  thinking), which can only be trained through literacy,23 the former do have it, but end up suppressing it. Both Native Americans and functionaries believe in the reality of images, but functionaries do this out of bad faith. After all, they have learned to write at school and consequently should know better. Functionaries have a historical consciousness and critical awareness but they suppress these. They know that the war in Lebanon is not a clash between good and evil but that specific causes have specific consequences there. They know that the toothbrush is not a sacred object but a product of Western history. But they have to suppress their superior knowledge of this.24 The main sources for Flusser’s conception of a belief in bad faith might be Johan Huizinga and Marcel Mauss.25 However, these authors developed the idea of a voluntary belief, or a partially aware illusion, in order to describe traditional magical thinking and not only the con- temporary experience of technical images.26 By trying to prove that any magic ritual has a playful dimension, just as any game has a ritual dimension, Huizinga affirms that no illusion is ever a complete deception: it is always combined with some degree of simulation. As far as I know, ethnologists and anthropologists concur in the opinion that the mental attitude in which the great religious feasts of savages are celebrated and witnessed is not one of complete illusion. There is an underlying consciousness of things “not be- ing real.” [...] A certain element of “makebelieve” is operative in all 23 V. Flusser, “Line and surface” (1973), in Writings: 21-34; V. Flusser, Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft? (Göttingen: Immatrix, 1987). 24 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 63. 25 V. Flusser, Post-History (1983), trans. R. Maltez Novaes (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013): 99- 106; V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 27; Kommunikologie weiter denken: 245. 26 The notion of “voluntary illusion” [illusion volontaire] can already be found in Paul Souriau, L’imagination de l’artiste (Paris: Librairie Hachette et cie, 1901), while the concept of aware illusion [bewußte Selbsttäuschung] was first developed by Konrad Lange, Die Bewußte Selbsttäuschung als Kern des künstlerischen Genusses (Leipzig: Verlag von Veit & Comp., 1895). FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 60 AN-ICON primitive religions. Whether one is sorcerer or sorcerized one is al- ways knower and dupe at once. But one chooses to be the dupe.27 In a similar way, a few years before, Mauss wrote that any magical performance reveals the collective will to believe in it, both on the part of the spectators and the magician: We are in no doubt that magical facts need constant encourage- ment and that even the sincerest delusions of the magician have always been self-imposed to some degree.28 Yet, one should be able to distinguish between this sort of sincere self-delusion that we can find in the ex- perience of traditional magic, from the “belief in bad faith” that Flusser identifies in the experience of technical images. On the one hand the “underlying consciousness of things ‘not being real’” is still a blurry intuition, on the other hand the critical consciousness reached by educated people is fully developed and can only coexist with illusion if it is partially suppressed. Why do we systematically suppress our critical and conceptual thinking and choose to be deluded? Flusser thinks that this human behavior is not only a result of our tendency to conform. The reason why we need to partially suppress our critical consciousness in order to function within society is that, at this level of complexity, conceptual thinking is no longer efficient. The point is not that people do not understand rational explanations; it is that they do not want to hear them. Commenting on how, during the 1982 Lebanon War, people formed their opinions based on videos and photos, rather than on theoretical analyses, Flusser writes: 27 J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938), trans. R.F.C. Hull (London-Boston-Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949): 22-23. 28 M. Mauss, General Theory of Magic (1902), trans. R. Brain (London-New York: Routledge, 2001): 118. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 61 AN-ICON We are by now sick and tired of explanations and prefer to stick to the photograph that releases us from the necessity for con- ceptual, explanatory thought and absolves us from the bother of going into the causes and consequences of the war in Lebanon: In the image we see with our own eyes what the war looks like. The text simply consists of instructions as to how we are to see.29 We suppress our conceptual thinking because of the cognitive comfort provided by technical apparatus- es that calculate and build images for us. Flusser calls the state of numbness generated by this comfort the inertia of happiness: “It is this inertia of happiness that stands in the way of a changeover.”30 This theory forces us to reconsider the rational- istic approach that one could at first read into Flusser’s cri- tique of deception. If our illusion is somehow self-imposed and the suppression of our critical consciousness is a re- action to the heaviness, the complexity and the abstract- ness of conceptual thinking, which expresses the need to expand the visual, sensory and emotional dimension of existence, we cannot simply debunk our self-delusion by rational means. The only way to overcome the negative aspects of deception is within the image world, therefore through a creative use of illusion. Illusion as fiction When the term “illusion” is used by Flusser with a positive connotation it has the meaning of construction or fiction. In the posthumous book The Surprising Phe- nomenon of Human Communication, where he defines the structure of communication as the infrastructure of human reality, Flusser writes that the act of communicating produc- es the illusion of immortality. We know, due to the suffering of our bodies, that it is an illusion: “Despite our individual and collective memories, we remain mortals. Nevertheless, 29 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 62. 30 V. Flusser, Kommunikologie weiter denken: 210. “Es ist diese Trägheit des Glücks, die einer Umschaltung entgegensteht.” FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 62 AN-ICON  this illusion is, still, our own reality, our ontological dignity.”31 In this case illusion is a different name for sense-making, the attribution of meaning, which according to Flusser is what makes us humans. When illusion is conceived in this constructive way, Flusser replaces the term “täuschen” (deceive) with the term “vortäuschen,” which could be translated as “sim- ulate,” “feign.”32 In Shape of Things he defines the verb “to design” as “to concoct something, to simulate [vortäus- chen], to draft, to sketch, to fashion, to have designs on something.”33 A simulation – this constructive form of illu- sion – is not about producing a copy [Abbild], it is about shaping a model [Vorbild].34 In “Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch” Flusser affirms that not only does the sequence of frames produce the illusion of movement, but the very frames are illusions, as they recreate the impression of three dimensional spaces through the two-dimensional disposition of colors. In this context “illusion” is not meant in a negative sense: Flusser is fascinated by the capacity of technical images to evoke meaningful and visual experiences from non-meaningful and often non-visual elements, such as the bits of infor- mation for digital photography.35 Technical images have an illusionistic effect in that they evoke an impression by means of calculation. The point-projection perspective designed by renaissance painters, the trompe-l’œil designed by baroque architects, the tricks designed by stage magicians produce emotional effects using rational techniques. Experimental photographers and programmers work in the same way, but 31 V. Flusser, The Surprising Phenomenon of Human Communication (1975), trans. R. Maltez Novaes, D. Naves (Metaflux, 2016): 154. 32 V. Flusser, “Gärten,” in Dinge und Undinge. Phänomenologische Skizzen (München-Wien: Carl Hanser, 1993): 46-52, 51. 33 V. Flusser, “About the word design,” in Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design: 17. 34 V. Flusser, “Abbild – Vorbild oder: was heißt darstellen?,” in Lob der Oberflächlichkeit (Düsseldorf: Bollmann, 1993): 293-317. 35 Even in the case of analog photography, according to Flusser, the image could be reduced to computable elements, such as the exposure time, the focal aperture, and the ISO setting. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 63 AN-ICON  with more efficient tools: they can program an apparatus that will translate an alphanumeric input into a visual output. According to Flusser, this allows for the first time for an experimental approach to image making and therefore an element of control over the visual world: a synthesis between conceptual-critical thinking and visu- al-emotional thinking. The word “experimental” is used in a literal sense: technical images can be used for experiments. One can insert a certain input, see what the outcome is, and consequently change the input in order to achieve a different result. If one writes the equation of a Mandelbrot frac- tal in a computer in order to visualize it on the screen, one may be surprised by the outcome and therefore learn from it. The complexity of that geometrical figure where the to- tality is infinitely repeated in the parts could not be perfectly foreseen. One sits in front of a keyboard, taking one dot element after another out of the memory, to fit it into an image on the screen, to compute it. This step-by-step process of extraction can be automated so that it can proceed very quickly. The images appear on the screen one after another in breathtaking speed. One can follow this sequence of images, just as if the imagination had become self-sufficient; or as if it had traveled from inside (let’s say from the cranium) to outside (into the computer); or as if one could observe one’s own dreams from the outside. In fact, some of the appearing images can be surprising: they are unexpected images.36 The idea of an experimental character of tech- nical images could be better understood by taking into consideration Flusser’s notion of science fiction, where he further develops the relationship between conceptual and emotional thinking. With this expression Flusser not only refers to the literary genre, to which, moreover, he 36 V. Flusser, “A new imagination,” in Writings: 110-116, 114. For a closer analysis of this essay and for a discussion about the idea of surprising images and the externalization of imagination, see L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence (2005), trans. N.F. Schott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010): 98-101. See also V. Flusser, “Ein neuer Platonismus?,” kulturRRevolution, no. 19 (1988): 6. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 64 AN-ICON  contributed with many charming short stories,37 but also reflects about the deep inner connection between science as fiction and fiction as science: something that has been called a “speculative fiction.”38 Any scientific knowledge is based on the development of models and simulations that are, strictly speaking, illusions. When fiction is enhanced with the experimental exactness provided by technical im- ages, it becomes a powerful tool to create surprising mod- els that will allow us to think of what we are not yet able to conceive. This is, according to Flusser, the greatest po- tentiality of virtual simulations: they allow us to experience – emotionally, visually, haptically – what until now we were only able to calculate; and at the same time they allow us to calculate and control experiences that until now we could only vaguely imagine. Flusser believes that virtual environ- ments, and in general all technical images, should not be used to reproduce what already exists for recreational pur- poses,39 but should “bring to virtuality” alternative worlds. Thanks to simulated environments, for example, we could be able to experience a world where all living creatures are sulfur-based instead of carbon-based – a world that, 37 Most of Flusser’s philosophical science fiction short stories can be found in the following publications: V. Flusser, Ficções Filosóficas (São Paulo: Edusp, 1998); V. Flusser, Angenommen: Eine Szenenfolge (Göttingen: European Photography, 2000); V. Flusser, L. Bec, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A treatise with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste (1987), trans. V.A. Pakis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). See also Flusser’s essays on fiction: V. Flusser, “Da ficção,” O diário (August 26, 1966); V. Flusser, “Science fiction” (1988), trans. W. Hanff, Flusser Studies, no. 20 (2015): 1-3, where Flusser writes about a fantasia essata (exacting fantasy), which he attributes to Leonardo da Vinci. 38 J. Torres, “Homo Fictor: em busca de uma ficção filosófica,” Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies 2, no. 4 (2020): 1-12, 7. Much has been published on Flusser’s theory of fiction, and science fiction in particular. See G. Salvi Philipson, “Flusser para além do ensaio: de outros modos possíveis de habitar a intersecção entre ficção e filosofia,” Flusser Studies, no. 25 (2018): 1-17; the sixth chapter of A. Finger, R. Guldin, G. Bernardo Krause, Vilém Flusser. An Introduction (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011): 109-129; P. Bozzi, “Rhapsody in blue: Vilém Flusser und der vampyroteuthis infernalis,” Flusser Studies, no. 1 (2005): 1-20; G. Bernardo Krause, “On philosophical fiction,” in R. Guldin, ed., Das Spiel mit der Übersetzung. Figuren der Mehrsprachigkeit im Werk Vilém Flussers (Tübingen-Basel: Francke, 2004): 119- 128. 39 Flusser is extremely skeptical about the documentary function of technical images, not only because of their illusionary character (technical images can be easily manipulated), but because he questions the neutrality of any sort of documentation. Any document presents a point of view, with a system of ethical and political implications, as it were objective. See F. Restuccia, “La realtà sta nella fotografia. Autenticazioni delle immagini della guerra del Libano,” Carte semiotiche, no. 4 (2016): 160-170. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 65 AN-ICON  without any technical help, we can anticipate, but not fully conceive.40 Rethinking illusion as an aware and voluntary simulation allows Flusser to avoid the rationalistic approach to debunking. He realizes that visual interfaces (and even more, haptic and immersive ones) allow for experiencers to overcome their inertia of happiness and take part in the model making process. However, this is only possible if technical images and virtual environments are open to a strong interactive participation.41 This way, by turning the coding process into a playful interaction, it will be possible to bridge the gap between critical and visual thinking, be- tween the elite of programmers and the mass of consumers. 40 V. Flusser, “Vom Virtuellen:” 70-71; V. Flusser, Kommunikologie weiter denken: 78. Recently Andrea Pinotti identified this approach as part of a post-human trend in VR (try to experience the world beyond the limits of the human body and mind, for example by flying as an eagle) as opposed to a humanitarian trend (VR as an empathy machine meant to move the experiencer about social issues). The main limit of the post-human approach is that it will only allow perceiving a non-human world as a human being would perceive it. A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine (Torino: Einaudi, 2021): 201; see also A. Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk? Inter-specific empathy in the age of immersive virtual environments,” in Y. Hadjinicolaou, ed., Visual Engagements. Image Practices and Falconry (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2020): 30-47. The best example of this post-human approach in Flusser is definitely his Vampyrotheutis infernalis. 41 On the (post-)political implications of Flusser’s theory of participation, see M. Menon, Vilém Flusser e la “Rivoluzione dell’Informazione”: Comunicazione, Etica, Politica (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2022): 172-178. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 66 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/17655

The polysemy of Vilém Flusser’s concept of illusi o by Francesco Restuccia Flusser n Illusion Fiction Fontcuberta Idolatry Self-deception Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing The polysemy of Vilém Flusser’s concept of il usion FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA, Sapienza - Università di Roma – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8900-642X https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17655 Abstract Vilém Flusser uses the concept of illusion in a non-systematic way, resulting in two ostensible contra- dictions. First of all, he often uses the term illusion, while criticizing the metaphysic assumptions that it implies; sec- ondly, he seems to both dispraise and value the illusionary nature of technical images. This article aims at clarifying Flusser’s thoughts on illusion in the belief that they are not as conflicting as they might seem at first. In fact, when Flusser deplores the risk of de- ception associated with technical images, he refers to the illusion of transparency. He does not oppose the concept of illusion to a supposed objective truth, on the contrary, he opposes the illusion of the objective nature of images to the awareness of their constructed and mediated character. However, a rational demystification of illu- sions is not a viable option, since, according to Flusser, they are the result of a voluntary self-deception: we suppress our critical thinking because we cannot bear its complexity, we want images to “release us from the necessity for conceptual, explanatory thought.” This is why Flusser thinks that aware illusion – in other words: fiction – can help us overcome our “inertia of happiness” and develop a critical imagination. Keywords Flusser Illusion Fiction Fontcuberta Idolatry Self-deception To quote this essay: F. Restuccia, “The polysemy of Vilém Flusser’s concept of illusion,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 52-66, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17655 FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 52 AN-ICON  Leafing through the pages of Herbarium (1982- 1985) by Joan Fontcuberta one is immediately seduced by the beauty of these black and white analog photographs of exotic plants, whose geometric details remind one of Karl Blossfeldt’s work. The whole series is presented as scientific documentation, including the botanical nomencla- ture of these newly discovered species. Only at a second glance one might notice that something is wrong: some details in the image, the strange pseudo-Latin names. What appeared to be plants are actually small assemblages of pieces of plastic, fragments and parts of animals found by the artist in the industrial outskirts of Barcelona. We have been victims of an illusion. These images, both hyper-re- alistic and extremely unlikely, aim to deceive us and at the same time to reveal the deception. Without any digital ma- nipulation, Fontcuberta’s work on the one hand invites us to reflect upon the supposed immediate and documentary character of photography, on the other hand it allows us to experience unprecedented and surprising configurations. Fontcuberta had an important intellectual col- laboration with a philosopher and media theorist who ded- icated many of his writings to discussing the illusionary character of technical images: Vilém Flusser.1 Although the term “illusion” appears only rarely in his writings and in a non-systematic way, Flusser was definitely fascinated by the ambiguity of this concept, which, as it emerges in Herbarium, can be conceived both as a form of deception, with dangerous and deplorable effects, and as a precious artistic and epistemic tool.2 Often Flusser refers to illusive phenomena in a pejorative way; sometimes he tends to re- ject the metaphysical assumption – implied by the concept of illusion – that an objective truth can be found beyond 1 Flusser also wrote the introduction to the German edition of Herbarium: V. Flusser, “Einführung ‘Herbarium’ von Joan Fontcuberta,” in Standpunkte: Texte zur Fotografie (Göttingen: European Photography, 1998): 113-116. 2 As Carrillo Canán wrote, “Flusser has no explicit theory on deception but as with many critical thinkers, his theory is to a great extent a theory of deception.” A.J.L. Carrillo Canán, “Deception and the ‘magic’ of ‘technical images’ according to Flusser,” Flusser Studies, no. 4 (2008): 1-12, 1. Significantly, neither “illusion,” “deception,” nor “fiction” was chosen as one of the 235 entries that make up the glossary of Flusseriana. S. Zielinski, P. Weibel, D. Irrgang, eds., Flusseriana: An Intellectual Toolbox (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2015). FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 53 AN-ICON  appearance; on other occasions he seems convinced that the art of illusion is the best tool for the creative training of our imagination. Therefore, it could be useful to try to put an order, as far as this is possible, to Flusser’s thoughts on illusion, in the belief that they are not as conflicting as they might initially seem. First we will analyze the contexts where he deplores the risk of deception associated with any mediation, and with new media and technical images in particular; then we will consider his critiques of the con- cepts of illusion and especially of disillusion, focusing on his theory of a voluntary self-deception; finally we will see how Flusser approves of illusion when it is understood as a form of fiction. Illusion as deception The German word that Flusser uses the most when referring to the negative sense of illusion is “Täu- schung,” which could be translated as “deception.” The verb “täuschen” literally means to exchange, to swap: by exchanging two different things, one mistakes one for an- other one. Being deceived is, first of all, taking something for something else, or conferring to one thing the value that we should only confer to something else. What are the two things that, according to Flusser, might dangerously be confused? The model and its copy, the signified and the signifier, the thing and the image. Deception is “a reversal [Umkehrung] of the vectors of significance,”3 or a “reversal of the function of the image:”4 images should represent the world and help us “to orientate” ourselves within it, but we end up forgetting about the world and living in function of the images we have created.5 Images “are supposed to be 3 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), trans. A. Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000): 37, 68. 4 Ibid.: 10. 5 On the concept of reversal as the key to understanding Flusser’s conception of technical images see D. Irrgang, Vom Umkehren der Bedeutungsvektoren: Prototypen des Technischen Bildes bei Vilém Flusser (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2017). FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 54 AN-ICON  maps but they turn into screens: Instead of representing [vorstellen] the world, they obscure [verstellen] it.”6 Flusser is not concerned by the deceptions that occur when we take an image of A for an image of B. As long as we truly know that something is an image, we also know that it is a human construction, that it needs to be interpreted and that this interpretation might be wrong. The real problem arises when images conceal their own nature. Flusser’s main models for his (implicit) theory of deception are Plato’s concept of eidolon and the Jewish and early Christian conception of idolatry.7 In his interpre- tation, both Plato’s eidola and religious idols are images that should mediate and represent something else (ideas for Plato, God in the Jewish and Christian tradition), but instead of presenting themselves as such, they end up being taken for what they should refer to. Flusser rethinks the concept of idolatry in a secular way, conceiving it as that particular form of deception which occurs when we do not recognize the symbolic and cultural nature of an image. In Towards a Philosophy of Photography idolatry is defined as “the inability to read off ideas from the elements of the image, despite the ability to read these elements themselves; hence: worship of images.”8 It is important to notice that idolatry is not only a perceptual deception, but has effects on human behavior: Flusser writes, metaphor- ically, that images are “worshiped” when they “have a hold over people as objects.”9 Sometimes, in order to identify this particular form of deception Flusser uses, instead of “idolatry,” the term “hallucination.” 6 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10. 7 Ibid.: 11; V. Flusser, “The codified world” (1978), in Writings, trans. E. Eisel (Minneapolis- London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002): 35-41, 39. See also F. Restuccia, “Flusser against idolatry,” Flusser Studies, no. 26 (2018): 1-15 and F. Restuccia, Il contrattacco delle immagini. Tecnica, media e idolatria a partire da Vilém Flusser (Milan: Meltemi, 2021). 8 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 83. A similar “semiotic” definition of idolatry was proposed by Augustine: “Now, he is in bondage to a sign who uses, or pays homage to, any significant object without knowing what it signifies,” S. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson jr. (London: Pearson, 1958): III, IX, 13. 9 V. Flusser, “Design: obstacle for/to the removal of obstacles” (1993), in The Shape of Things. A Philosophy of Design (London: Reaktion Books, 1999): 58-61, 60. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 55 AN-ICON Imagination can dialectically reverse and become hallucination. Images resulting from this reversed imagination stop working as mediation and become opaque surfaces hiding the world. The se- mantic vectors invert and point towards their producer instead of pointing towards the world.10 It is important to notice that this sort of reversal can happen with any kind of mediation and not only with images. When we stop using texts and conceptual thinking to help us understand the world, and we start using the world in order to understand our texts, or forcing data to fit into our conceptual grid, then we are victims of another form of deception. In this case Flusser talks about texto- latry, as opposed to idolatry, or paranoia, as opposed to hallucination.11 This dangerous reversal of imagination hap- pens when we do not recognize a medium, especially a visual one, as such. Therefore, the most illusionary images are those that appear transparent, concealing their status of images and presenting themselves as objective reality. According to Flusser, technical images – all images pro- duced by apparatuses, starting with photography – are the most deceiving, in this sense, because their mechanical production seems to grant an automatic and almost natural process that avoids any human and cultural interference.12 “But this ‘objectivity’ of the photograph is deceptive [täus- chend],”13 because technology is a human product and is also culturally biased. The program that apparatuses use to code images was written by human beings and is an externalization of the visual schemata that they would use if they were drawing an image themselves. When we see 10 V. Flusser, “Iconoclastia,” Cavalo azul, no. 8 (1979): 78-84, 79, my translation; see also V. Flusser Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10. 11 The choice of the last couple of words is due to their etymology: “hallucination,” which might be related to the Latin word lux (light), refers to visual thinking, whereas “paranoia,” which comes from the Greek word nous (intellect), refers to conceptual thinking. See V. Flusser, “Iconoclastia:” 79, and V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10. 12 H. Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1844) was one of the first to assert such a natural character of photography. See K. Walton, “Transparent pictures: on the nature of photographic realism,” Critical Inquiry, no. 11 (1984): 246-277, https://www.doi.org/10.1086/448287. 13 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 51. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 56 AN-ICON  a drawing or any other traditional image, though, we are aware that what we are looking at is someone’s interpre- tation of the world, and not the world itself; but when we see a photograph, or a video, we assume that what we are looking at is a direct emanation of reality. “This lack of criticism of technical images is potentially dangerous […] for the reason that the ‘objectivity’ of technical images is an illusion [Täuschung].”14 The elements of a photograph appear to be “symptoms” of the world, instead of “symbols” that need to be “decoded.”15 The only way to avoid idolatry, hallucination and deception is to recognize the symbols contained in an image and decode them, discovering the “programmed concepts” they represent, “so as to identify the true significance of the photograph.”16 Based on what has been discussed so far, Flusser seems to maintain a sort of platonic dualism: im- ages are just symbols and should not be confused with the real world. However, Flusser refuses this approach as “‘metaphysical’ […] in the worst sense of the word.”17 The reason why he deplores the illusion of transparency of tech- nical images is because, according to him, no such thing as an immediate reality can be found, not even beyond images. Even “the amorphous stew of phenomena (‘the material world’) is an illusion [Täuschung],”18 since it is only accessible through our nervous system and is therefore also a construction. In an interview with Florian Rötzer he declared: The concept of simulation disturbs me. When something is simulated, that is, when it looks like something else, there must be something being simulated. In the term simulation or simulacrum lies a deep metaphysical belief that something can be simulated. I do not share 14 Ibid.: 15. 15 Ibid.; V. Flusser, “Für eine Theorie der Techno-Imagination, 1980 in Standpunkte: Texte zur Fotografie: 8-16, 8. 16 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 44. 17 Ibid.: 62. 18 V. Flusser, “Form and material,” in Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design: 22-29, 22. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 57 AN-ICON this belief [...]. In my opinion in the word simulation hides what is left of a belief in the absolute.19 Flusser is not afraid that the real world could be replaced with a simulation: on the one hand because our technologies do not allow us to build virtual worlds as defined as the experience of the world built by our nervous system, on the other hand because if this ever happened, then it would not make sense to distinguish these experi- ences as belonging to different levels of reality.20 Moreover our lifeworld and our simulations are already intertwined, since the experiences we have in the former affect those we have in the latter and vice versa. The real illusion is the possibility of accessing a pure, immediate reality. If all is construction, then why is Flusser con- cerned? Because if we assumed that images – and gener- ally our whole experience of the world – are immediate and pure, then we would accept them acritically. We would start unconsciously absorbing interpretations of reality without questioning them, and our imagination would slowly be- come lethargic. We should then try to avoid surrendering to the illusion of transparency, train our imagination and learn to decode the images we are surrounded by. But how can we do this? Is a rationalistic debunking the only way out of deception? Illusion as self-deception In the essay Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch Flusser rethinks the movie theater as a modern version of21 Plato’s cave. People sit in a dark space looking at images 19 V. Flusser, Zwiegespräche (Göttingen: European Photography, 1996): 230-231, my translation. See J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), trans. S. Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Flusser considered Baudrillard a friend and often quotes him in his final years, although mostly polemically. 20 V. Flusser, “Vom Virtuellen,” in F. Rötzer, P. Weibel, eds., Cyberspace. Zum medialen Gesamtkunstwerk (München: Boer, 2002): 65-71; V. Flusser, Kommunikologie weiter denken (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008): 75-77. 21 V. Flusser, “Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch,” in Lob der Oberflächigkeit. Für eine Phänomenologie der Medien (Bensheim-Düsseldorf: Bollman Verlag, 1993): 153-166. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 58 AN-ICON  projected on the wall in front of them, ignoring the world outside the “cave.” What does Flusser’s interpretation of the myth teach us? That people want to stay in the cave, they are not chained, they do not desire to be freed. Their illusion is voluntary. According to Flusser commercial cinema still has some degree of idolatry: people contemplate those images acritically, as pure entertainment, without question- ing the message that is being passed. Therefore they are “programmed” by the technical images to think and act in a certain way: the same people who leave the movie theater, writes Flusser, will form a line to enter the supermarket. They are victims of a double illusion: on the one hand they see the lights projected on the screen as a world taking shape in front of their eyes, on the other hand they end up believing that the people, the feelings, the values they perceived somehow exist and have a life of their own, that they are not the creation of a team of artists and technicians. However, neither of the two forms of illusion is a complete deception. Any film spectator knows how a film is made: they know the impression of movement is produced by the rapid sequence of the frames, they know the events por- trayed have been written, designed and reproduced, but they choose to believe in them. “Moviegoers are believers not in good faith, but in bad faith [böse Glaubens]: they know better, but don’t want to know. This is not magic, but something new.”22 In Towards a Philosophy of Photography, writ- ten around three years later, Flusser further develops his conception of a voluntary illusion, or belief in bad faith. Even though people nowadays act as if they were under the magic spell of technical images – they see a commer- cial and buy the product, they watch a video and change their political opinion – yet they do not believe in those images in the same way as people belonging to traditional magic cultures believed in their images. While the latter did not develop their critical consciousness (their conceptual 22 Ibid.: 163, my translation. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 59 AN-ICON  thinking), which can only be trained through literacy,23 the former do have it, but end up suppressing it. Both Native Americans and functionaries believe in the reality of images, but functionaries do this out of bad faith. After all, they have learned to write at school and consequently should know better. Functionaries have a historical consciousness and critical awareness but they suppress these. They know that the war in Lebanon is not a clash between good and evil but that specific causes have specific consequences there. They know that the toothbrush is not a sacred object but a product of Western history. But they have to suppress their superior knowledge of this.24 The main sources for Flusser’s conception of a belief in bad faith might be Johan Huizinga and Marcel Mauss.25 However, these authors developed the idea of a voluntary belief, or a partially aware illusion, in order to describe traditional magical thinking and not only the con- temporary experience of technical images.26 By trying to prove that any magic ritual has a playful dimension, just as any game has a ritual dimension, Huizinga affirms that no illusion is ever a complete deception: it is always combined with some degree of simulation. As far as I know, ethnologists and anthropologists concur in the opinion that the mental attitude in which the great religious feasts of savages are celebrated and witnessed is not one of complete illusion. There is an underlying consciousness of things “not be- ing real.” [...] A certain element of “makebelieve” is operative in all 23 V. Flusser, “Line and surface” (1973), in Writings: 21-34; V. Flusser, Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft? (Göttingen: Immatrix, 1987). 24 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 63. 25 V. Flusser, Post-History (1983), trans. R. Maltez Novaes (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013): 99- 106; V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 27; Kommunikologie weiter denken: 245. 26 The notion of “voluntary illusion” [illusion volontaire] can already be found in Paul Souriau, L’imagination de l’artiste (Paris: Librairie Hachette et cie, 1901), while the concept of aware illusion [bewußte Selbsttäuschung] was first developed by Konrad Lange, Die Bewußte Selbsttäuschung als Kern des künstlerischen Genusses (Leipzig: Verlag von Veit & Comp., 1895). FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 60 AN-ICON primitive religions. Whether one is sorcerer or sorcerized one is al- ways knower and dupe at once. But one chooses to be the dupe.27 In a similar way, a few years before, Mauss wrote that any magical performance reveals the collective will to believe in it, both on the part of the spectators and the magician: We are in no doubt that magical facts need constant encourage- ment and that even the sincerest delusions of the magician have always been self-imposed to some degree.28 Yet, one should be able to distinguish between this sort of sincere self-delusion that we can find in the ex- perience of traditional magic, from the “belief in bad faith” that Flusser identifies in the experience of technical images. On the one hand the “underlying consciousness of things ‘not being real’” is still a blurry intuition, on the other hand the critical consciousness reached by educated people is fully developed and can only coexist with illusion if it is partially suppressed. Why do we systematically suppress our critical and conceptual thinking and choose to be deluded? Flusser thinks that this human behavior is not only a result of our tendency to conform. The reason why we need to partially suppress our critical consciousness in order to function within society is that, at this level of complexity, conceptual thinking is no longer efficient. The point is not that people do not understand rational explanations; it is that they do not want to hear them. Commenting on how, during the 1982 Lebanon War, people formed their opinions based on videos and photos, rather than on theoretical analyses, Flusser writes: 27 J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938), trans. R.F.C. Hull (London-Boston-Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949): 22-23. 28 M. Mauss, General Theory of Magic (1902), trans. R. Brain (London-New York: Routledge, 2001): 118. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 61 AN-ICON We are by now sick and tired of explanations and prefer to stick to the photograph that releases us from the necessity for con- ceptual, explanatory thought and absolves us from the bother of going into the causes and consequences of the war in Lebanon: In the image we see with our own eyes what the war looks like. The text simply consists of instructions as to how we are to see.29 We suppress our conceptual thinking because of the cognitive comfort provided by technical apparatus- es that calculate and build images for us. Flusser calls the state of numbness generated by this comfort the inertia of happiness: “It is this inertia of happiness that stands in the way of a changeover.”30 This theory forces us to reconsider the rational- istic approach that one could at first read into Flusser’s cri- tique of deception. If our illusion is somehow self-imposed and the suppression of our critical consciousness is a re- action to the heaviness, the complexity and the abstract- ness of conceptual thinking, which expresses the need to expand the visual, sensory and emotional dimension of existence, we cannot simply debunk our self-delusion by rational means. The only way to overcome the negative aspects of deception is within the image world, therefore through a creative use of illusion. Illusion as fiction When the term “illusion” is used by Flusser with a positive connotation it has the meaning of construction or fiction. In the posthumous book The Surprising Phe- nomenon of Human Communication, where he defines the structure of communication as the infrastructure of human reality, Flusser writes that the act of communicating produc- es the illusion of immortality. We know, due to the suffering of our bodies, that it is an illusion: “Despite our individual and collective memories, we remain mortals. Nevertheless, 29 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 62. 30 V. Flusser, Kommunikologie weiter denken: 210. “Es ist diese Trägheit des Glücks, die einer Umschaltung entgegensteht.” FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 62 AN-ICON  this illusion is, still, our own reality, our ontological dignity.”31 In this case illusion is a different name for sense-making, the attribution of meaning, which according to Flusser is what makes us humans. When illusion is conceived in this constructive way, Flusser replaces the term “täuschen” (deceive) with the term “vortäuschen,” which could be translated as “sim- ulate,” “feign.”32 In Shape of Things he defines the verb “to design” as “to concoct something, to simulate [vortäus- chen], to draft, to sketch, to fashion, to have designs on something.”33 A simulation – this constructive form of illu- sion – is not about producing a copy [Abbild], it is about shaping a model [Vorbild].34 In “Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch” Flusser affirms that not only does the sequence of frames produce the illusion of movement, but the very frames are illusions, as they recreate the impression of three dimensional spaces through the two-dimensional disposition of colors. In this context “illusion” is not meant in a negative sense: Flusser is fascinated by the capacity of technical images to evoke meaningful and visual experiences from non-meaningful and often non-visual elements, such as the bits of infor- mation for digital photography.35 Technical images have an illusionistic effect in that they evoke an impression by means of calculation. The point-projection perspective designed by renaissance painters, the trompe-l’œil designed by baroque architects, the tricks designed by stage magicians produce emotional effects using rational techniques. Experimental photographers and programmers work in the same way, but 31 V. Flusser, The Surprising Phenomenon of Human Communication (1975), trans. R. Maltez Novaes, D. Naves (Metaflux, 2016): 154. 32 V. Flusser, “Gärten,” in Dinge und Undinge. Phänomenologische Skizzen (München-Wien: Carl Hanser, 1993): 46-52, 51. 33 V. Flusser, “About the word design,” in Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design: 17. 34 V. Flusser, “Abbild – Vorbild oder: was heißt darstellen?,” in Lob der Oberflächlichkeit (Düsseldorf: Bollmann, 1993): 293-317. 35 Even in the case of analog photography, according to Flusser, the image could be reduced to computable elements, such as the exposure time, the focal aperture, and the ISO setting. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 63 AN-ICON  with more efficient tools: they can program an apparatus that will translate an alphanumeric input into a visual output. According to Flusser, this allows for the first time for an experimental approach to image making and therefore an element of control over the visual world: a synthesis between conceptual-critical thinking and visu- al-emotional thinking. The word “experimental” is used in a literal sense: technical images can be used for experiments. One can insert a certain input, see what the outcome is, and consequently change the input in order to achieve a different result. If one writes the equation of a Mandelbrot frac- tal in a computer in order to visualize it on the screen, one may be surprised by the outcome and therefore learn from it. The complexity of that geometrical figure where the to- tality is infinitely repeated in the parts could not be perfectly foreseen. One sits in front of a keyboard, taking one dot element after another out of the memory, to fit it into an image on the screen, to compute it. This step-by-step process of extraction can be automated so that it can proceed very quickly. The images appear on the screen one after another in breathtaking speed. One can follow this sequence of images, just as if the imagination had become self-sufficient; or as if it had traveled from inside (let’s say from the cranium) to outside (into the computer); or as if one could observe one’s own dreams from the outside. In fact, some of the appearing images can be surprising: they are unexpected images.36 The idea of an experimental character of tech- nical images could be better understood by taking into consideration Flusser’s notion of science fiction, where he further develops the relationship between conceptual and emotional thinking. With this expression Flusser not only refers to the literary genre, to which, moreover, he 36 V. Flusser, “A new imagination,” in Writings: 110-116, 114. For a closer analysis of this essay and for a discussion about the idea of surprising images and the externalization of imagination, see L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence (2005), trans. N.F. Schott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010): 98-101. See also V. Flusser, “Ein neuer Platonismus?,” kulturRRevolution, no. 19 (1988): 6. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 64 AN-ICON  contributed with many charming short stories,37 but also reflects about the deep inner connection between science as fiction and fiction as science: something that has been called a “speculative fiction.”38 Any scientific knowledge is based on the development of models and simulations that are, strictly speaking, illusions. When fiction is enhanced with the experimental exactness provided by technical im- ages, it becomes a powerful tool to create surprising mod- els that will allow us to think of what we are not yet able to conceive. This is, according to Flusser, the greatest po- tentiality of virtual simulations: they allow us to experience – emotionally, visually, haptically – what until now we were only able to calculate; and at the same time they allow us to calculate and control experiences that until now we could only vaguely imagine. Flusser believes that virtual environ- ments, and in general all technical images, should not be used to reproduce what already exists for recreational pur- poses,39 but should “bring to virtuality” alternative worlds. Thanks to simulated environments, for example, we could be able to experience a world where all living creatures are sulfur-based instead of carbon-based – a world that, 37 Most of Flusser’s philosophical science fiction short stories can be found in the following publications: V. Flusser, Ficções Filosóficas (São Paulo: Edusp, 1998); V. Flusser, Angenommen: Eine Szenenfolge (Göttingen: European Photography, 2000); V. Flusser, L. Bec, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A treatise with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste (1987), trans. V.A. Pakis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). See also Flusser’s essays on fiction: V. Flusser, “Da ficção,” O diário (August 26, 1966); V. Flusser, “Science fiction” (1988), trans. W. Hanff, Flusser Studies, no. 20 (2015): 1-3, where Flusser writes about a fantasia essata (exacting fantasy), which he attributes to Leonardo da Vinci. 38 J. Torres, “Homo Fictor: em busca de uma ficção filosófica,” Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies 2, no. 4 (2020): 1-12, 7. Much has been published on Flusser’s theory of fiction, and science fiction in particular. See G. Salvi Philipson, “Flusser para além do ensaio: de outros modos possíveis de habitar a intersecção entre ficção e filosofia,” Flusser Studies, no. 25 (2018): 1-17; the sixth chapter of A. Finger, R. Guldin, G. Bernardo Krause, Vilém Flusser. An Introduction (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011): 109-129; P. Bozzi, “Rhapsody in blue: Vilém Flusser und der vampyroteuthis infernalis,” Flusser Studies, no. 1 (2005): 1-20; G. Bernardo Krause, “On philosophical fiction,” in R. Guldin, ed., Das Spiel mit der Übersetzung. Figuren der Mehrsprachigkeit im Werk Vilém Flussers (Tübingen-Basel: Francke, 2004): 119- 128. 39 Flusser is extremely skeptical about the documentary function of technical images, not only because of their illusionary character (technical images can be easily manipulated), but because he questions the neutrality of any sort of documentation. Any document presents a point of view, with a system of ethical and political implications, as it were objective. See F. Restuccia, “La realtà sta nella fotografia. Autenticazioni delle immagini della guerra del Libano,” Carte semiotiche, no. 4 (2016): 160-170. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 65 AN-ICON  without any technical help, we can anticipate, but not fully conceive.40 Rethinking illusion as an aware and voluntary simulation allows Flusser to avoid the rationalistic approach to debunking. He realizes that visual interfaces (and even more, haptic and immersive ones) allow for experiencers to overcome their inertia of happiness and take part in the model making process. However, this is only possible if technical images and virtual environments are open to a strong interactive participation.41 This way, by turning the coding process into a playful interaction, it will be possible to bridge the gap between critical and visual thinking, be- tween the elite of programmers and the mass of consumers. 40 V. Flusser, “Vom Virtuellen:” 70-71; V. Flusser, Kommunikologie weiter denken: 78. Recently Andrea Pinotti identified this approach as part of a post-human trend in VR (try to experience the world beyond the limits of the human body and mind, for example by flying as an eagle) as opposed to a humanitarian trend (VR as an empathy machine meant to move the experiencer about social issues). The main limit of the post-human approach is that it will only allow perceiving a non-human world as a human being would perceive it. A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine (Torino: Einaudi, 2021): 201; see also A. Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk? Inter-specific empathy in the age of immersive virtual environments,” in Y. Hadjinicolaou, ed., Visual Engagements. Image Practices and Falconry (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2020): 30-47. The best example of this post-human approach in Flusser is definitely his Vampyrotheutis infernalis. 41 On the (post-)political implications of Flusser’s theory of participation, see M. Menon, Vilém Flusser e la “Rivoluzione dell’Informazione”: Comunicazione, Etica, Politica (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2022): 172-178. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 66 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18191

Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two “moments” of the virtualCaravaggio experience by Francesco Zucconi Frank Stella Michael Fried Immersion and Specularity Virtual Reality Cinema Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two “moments” of the virtual experience FRANCESCO ZUCCONI, Università IUAV di Venezia – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9580-1000 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18191 Abstract In the first of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that he gave at Harvard in 1984, Frank Stella focused on “The necessity of creating pictorial space that is capable of dissolving its own perimeter and surface plane,” and claimed that “No one helped lighten this burden more than Caravaggio.” At a certain point in his talk, the American artist went so far as to say that Caravaggio anticipated the invention of the gyroscope, the technological device which makes the virtual experience possible. Stella’s lecture is the starting point for developing an anachronistic path through pictorial and digital media, in light of their ability to produce illusionistic effects on viewers. In particular, building on Mi- chael Fried’s theory of art and image, this paper investigates virtual experience with reference to two different moments: the “immersive” moment, in which one has the impression of stepping into the frame, and the “specular” one, where the illusionistic effects are revealed; the attraction, when sinking into an image that has become an environment, and the distancing, when the image itself beckons to us and we are invited to reflect on our position as viewers. Keywords Caravaggio Frank Stella Michael Fried Immersion and Specularity Virtual Reality Cinema To quote this essay: F. Zucconi, “Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two ‘moments’ of the virtual experience,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 67-88, https://doi. org/10.54103/ai/18191 FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 67 AN-ICON  Introduction I put on the headset and immerse myself in another world – in a theme park or in a refugee camp, in a disaster-stricken village or perhaps in the city of Hiroshi- ma immediately after the launch of the atomic bomb.1 In some cases I am a mere sightseer, while in other cases I am the “witness” to significant events. I have to enter into an empathetic relationship with those who dwell very far from me, I am expected to “put myself in their shoes” and to experience their condition “directly.”2 Yet I cannot help but realize, sooner or later, that I find myself physically in the safe spaces of a museum or a gallery, in the section dedicated to VR cinema at the Venice International Film Festival, or perhaps in the pavilion of an NGO that uses virtual reality as a form for raising public awareness on sensitive topics. No matter how effectively illusionistic this virtual environment is. Always, in the media experiences of VR cinema, something pushes me inward, draws me into the virtual environment, while, at the same time, something else pushes me out, reminding me that I am just facing an image, and bringing me back to the spatial and temporal coordinates of our physical world.3 This article does not intend to analyse immer- sive videos by trying to deconstruct the nonchalant use of the notion of “empathy” and the ideology of “transparency” that has characterized their promotion, which has already 1 As an example of a virtual theme park experience, see “Disneyland Paris - 360 VR - Main Street,” Disneyland Paris, YouTube video, 1.19, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RNly6mSF0-o, accessed January 10, 2023. Regarding the applications of such technology to the field of humanitarian communication, see http://unvr.sdgactioncampaign.org, accessed January 10, 2023. As for the fourth example, please refer to the official web page of the project https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/new-virtual-reality-experience-drops- you-hiroshima-right-after-its-been-bombed-180968903, accessed January 10, 2023. 2 As an emblematic example of the promotional use of a term such as “empathy” and on the idea of putting oneself in another’s place through VR cinema, see https://youtu.be/ vAEjX9S8o2k. 3 These issues can be conceived with reference to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological lesson and the relationship among the notions of Bildding (the physical thing), Bildobjekt (image-object) and Bildsujet (image-subject). See E. Husserl, “Phantasy and Image Consciousness,” in Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898-1925). Edmund Husserl Collected Works, vol 11 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). On the illusionistic forms of virtual reality, examined through a rereading of Husserl, see P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan: Mimesis International, 2020): 46-52. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 68 AN-ICON  been the subject of several studies.4 Rather, I would like to take up and further develop some issues present in my previous works, with the aim of opening a space for reflec- tion on immersive technology following an anachronistic path through pictorial and digital media by referring to some concepts of art history and theory.5 The main objective is to focus, in analytical and theoretical terms, on the double effect of attraction and distancing described above, as structuring the experience of VR cinema. While the impossibility of fully capturing and keeping the viewers within the virtual environment has mostly been conceived as a negative limitation of such technology, in this paper I try to argue otherwise. Through the reference to a repertoire of images from the past, the aim is to describe the paradoxical character of an experi- ence that is made up as much of attraction as of distancing. But before this can be sustained there are some interme- diate steps. After this introduction, in the second section, taking up a hypothesis advanced by Frank Stella, I explain the idea that gives the title to this paper: that Caravaggio, anticipated the invention of gyroscope technology and therefore made possible the first immersive experience in the history of Western painting. In the third, fourth and fifth sections, building on Michael Fried, I try to emphasize the two moments that characterize Caravaggio’s paintings: immersion, the formal device that attracts within the image, and specularity, understood as the set of figurative and compositional elements that produce an effect of aware- ness on the viewer.6 In the conclusion, I reconsider Fried’s analysis and the concepts that characterize his theoretical 4 The literature on the notion of empathy is vast and constantly evolving with reference to new technological and expressive forms. For an early critical reflection on the facile use of this concept in relation to VR cinema, see W. Uricchio, S. Ding, S. Wolozin, and B. Boyacioglu, Virtually There: Documentary Meets Virtual Reality Conference Report (The MIT Open Documentary Laboratory, 2016): 17-18, http://opendoclab.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/ uploads/2016/11/MIT_OpenDocLab_VirtuallyThereConference.pdf, accessed January 10, 2023. 5 I refer to F. Zucconi, Displacing Caravaggio: Art, Media, and Humanitarian Visual Culture (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 6 On these two notions, which will also be referred to in the following pages, see M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 69 AN-ICON  work in relation to contemporary media. What emerges is an opportunity for developing an ethic of VR: to what extent, can immersive technology facilitate the assumption of a testimonial gaze? Under what conditions can the gesture of wearing a virtual reality headset assume a critical value? Frank Stella’s hypothesis The American artist Frank Stella is, without a doubt, someone who understands visual surfaces and me- dia frames, their ability to offer illusionistic effects. One only has to think of his works in the 1960s, where a series of frames relentlessly squeeze against each other, leaving a small coloured square in the centre. Taking inspiration from Louis Marin’s analysis of Gran Cairo (1962), it is fair to ask whether these squares-frames are a well or a pyramid (Fig. 1). As the French historian and theorist notes, they are “a well and a pyramid, but never at the same time. The eye cannot predict the necessary and the arbitrary moment of conversion in which all the serious play of the frame and its modern and contemporary figures seem to be concen- trated: the play of the rhythm of presentation and repre- sentation, the play of the subject of the art of seeing and the art of describing.”7 If we compare them to the famous example of the rabbit/duck illustration investigated by Ludwig Wittgen- stein and Ernst Gombrich, Stella’s paintings do not merely work on the viewers’ perceptual and cognitive limits in the recognition of the figures depicted. Rather, the represen- tational undecidability and instability of image produce a spatial effect, by modulating the relation between the ob- serving subject and the observed object. In other words, when confronted with the rabbit/duck illustration, the viewer does not have the illusion of being confronted with a duck or rabbit coming off the page; rather, the graphic representa- tion produces an illusionistic effect that makes it impossible to visualize the two animals at the same time. In contrast 7 L. Marin, On Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002): 372. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 70 AN-ICON  to that, Stella’s paintings produce an illusionistic effect to the extent that they alternately draw the viewer inward – as in a well – or push him or her out, as if the surface had a pyramidal shape. Those who observe Stella’s paintings are thus subjected to the rhythmic redundancy of the “opac- ity” of the painted frame that becomes recognizable – we might say that makes itself “transparent” – in the metaphors of the pyramid and the well.8 In more general terms than those used by Marin, we might speak of Stella’s work as a gestalt effect capable of inducing, alternately, in the viewer both the impression of attraction and that of rejection or distancing. In fact, beyond the series of concentric squares, Stella’s artistic research would continue in the 1970s and 1980s by focusing on the relationship between the space Fig. 1. Frank Stella, Gran Cairo, 1962, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, purchase with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art; © Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 8 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (London: Pearson, 1973); E. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 71 AN-ICON  of the canvas and the pictorial space, between the surface and depth (Fig. 2). Fig. 2. Frank Stella, Eccentric Polygon, 1974, Jane Kahan Gallery, New York; purchased by Walter and Joan Wolf, Indianapolis, Indiana; ©Frank Stella/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Beyond the theory of art that is implied in Stel- la’s works, it behoves us to pay particular attention, then, to what he had to say in the first of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that he gave at Harvard in 1984. In developing a line of thought that sweeps from Leonardo da Vinci to Seurat, and from Vermeer to Velázquez, Stella focused on a theoretical problem that is crucial in the history of arts and images; a problem that equally concerns both “old” and “new” media. “The necessity of creating pictorial space that is capable of dissolving its own perimeter and surface plane,” he says, “is the burden that modern painting was born with.”9 And immediately afterwards he goes on to state that “No one helped lighten this burden more than Caravaggio.”10 As often happens, when artists are willing to share their theory, their tone tends to be assertive: Stella’s remarks are full of ideas for creative practice but possibly a font of perplexity for art historians. Still, how can one not ap- preciate his attempt to concisely express the transformation 9 F. Stella, Working Space (Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 1986): 10. 10 Ibid. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 72 AN-ICON  that Caravaggio’s painting forced on the regimes of pictorial representation of space and bodies? Stella’s observations aptly describe Caravaggio’s propensity for experimenting with the phenomenological limits of the idea of “realism,” by creating environments in which the viewer’s gaze must grope its way around, wrapped up in the composition but equally attracted by the vivid emphasis on colour, and by the chromatic nuances seen in some of the details. Stella’s reflections did not stop here. He de- veloped his argument by examining Caravaggio’s entire body of works and focuses on a few paintings. He used anachronistic terminology to highlight several aspects that prefigure artistic and technological developments that took place in the following decades as well as to identify their potentialities: To be able to carry in our minds the space of Caravaggio’s large commanding works, such as the Vatican Deposition and the Seven Acts of Mercy from Naples, we need some kind of image to help form an idea about the design and purpose of Caravaggio’s pictorial space. The image that comes to mind is that of the gyroscope—a spinning sphere, capable of accommodating movement and tilt. We have to imagine ourselves caught up within this sphere, experienc- ing the movement and motion of painting’s action. [...] The space that Caravaggio created is something that twentieth-century painting could use: an alternative both to the space of conventional realism and to the space of what has come to be conventional painterliness. The sense of a shaped spatial presence enveloping the action of the painting and the location of the creator and spectator is a by-product of the success of Caravaggio’s realistic illusionism.11 Within a reflection on VR cinema and immersive media, it is the idea of “realistic illusionism” and even more the metaphor of the gyroscope that attracts attention. The gyroscope, invented in the 19th century by French physi- cist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault is still the basis of virtual reality devices. It is also thanks to it that the visors worn 11 Ibid.: p. 11. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 73 AN-ICON  by viewers can track head movements and thus accurately detect movement along one, two or three axes, thus mak- ing the virtual experience possible. Without the gyroscope, there is no possible balance between the viewer’s gestures and movements in the virtual environment, nor any possi- bility of orientation within it. It is time to give a chance to Stella and his hypothesis that Caravaggio invented the gyroscope and with it virtual reality helmets. But I would like to develop this suggestion in a key that is not merely “technological,” by investigating the forms of composition that character- ize the pictorial medium and the effects they produce. To do so, it is necessary to re-conceive the American artist’s hypothesis into a series of operational questions: what is or would be, exactly, in Caravaggio’s painting capable of prefiguring the conditions of illusionism made possible by contemporary technologies? How do his paintings help us understand the dual effect – hitherto described as one of attraction and distancing – that we experience within immersive environments like those of VR cinema? The two moments of Narcissus To my knowledge, no contemporary photogra- pher or artist has yet investigated in detail the instant when viewers put on or take off their virtual reality helmets. This is really a pity, because the image of that precise instant could make us think a lot about the potentialities of such technology. We must therefore be content with the myths of the past and their survival in our contemporary practices. About to plunge into a virtual world, we find the figure of Narcissus. As noted by Andrea Pinotti – who has identified in Narcissus a kind of “conceptual character” of the an-iconic tradition in Western visual culture – there are two versions of the myth: the first aimed at producing a “naïve” image of the young boy who falls into the illusionistic trap of the image (recurring in Plotinus, Pausanias, Marsilio Ficino, etc.); the second coinciding with a “conscious” Nar- cissus (Ovidian variant), who is aware of the, so to speak, FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 74 AN-ICON  media environment with which he is confronted and with which he is about to make one body.12 It matters little that the Narcissus painted at the end of the Sixteenth century is not a signed work by Caravaggio but only an attribution, widely discussed by art historians (Fig. 3). For the purposes of the reasoning proposed in this paper, it should be noted that the young man is already fully rapt and about to plunge into the world of image. Yet, the figure of the double reflection still reveals a gap between two representational and sensible worlds or regimes. Fig. 3. Caravaggio (attribution), Narcissus, 1597-1599, Rome, Palazzo Barberini. Explicitly taking up the terms proposed by Mi- chael Fried, Narcissus constitutes an explication of the two “moments” that Caravaggio’s painting produces on view- ers. According to Fried – let it be said in passing: a friend 12 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine. Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Torino: Einaudi, 2021): 3-6. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 75 AN-ICON  and one of the most important interpreter of Stella’s work – Caravaggio’s pictorial corpus involve a moment defined as “immersive, imagining the painter as so caught up, so immersed, in this phase of his work on the painting as to be less than fully aware of any sharp distinction between the painting and himself.”13 The second “‘moment,’ notionally instantaneous, of separating or indeed recoiling from the painting, of becoming detached from it, which is to say of no longer being immersed in work on it but rather of see- ing it, taking it in, as if for the first time; I call that ‘moment’ specular, meaning thereby to emphasize the strictly visual or optical relation between the artist - viewer and the image, or image - artefact, that has just brought into being.”14 Reading these pages on Caravaggio, thoughts evidently run to the dialectic between “absorption” and “theatricality”15 identified by Fried himself in the painting of the eighteenth century, or to that between “art” and “ob- jecthood”16 as a key to theoretical and critical interpreta- tion of the relationship between media, art and spatiality in the second half of the twentieth century. Even before the eighteenth century, well before the twentieth-century and, we might add, contemporary media experience, Caravag- gio would have had the ability to reflect in an original way on the tension between the painter and his work (through the use of self-portraiture), between the canvas and the pictorial space (the composition of volumes, the relation- ship between light and shadow) producing unprecedented effects on viewers, now driving them inward, now pushing them outward. Hovering between the classicism of the myth and the technological actuality of the present, Narcissus is a virtual allegory of the ‘moment’ of immersion, or perhaps I should say of absorption becoming immersion, conjoined with the strongest 13 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 39. 14 Ibid. 15 M. Fried, Theatricality and Absorption: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 16 M. Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 76 AN-ICON possible statement of the specular separation of the viewer — orig- inally the painter-viewer — from the painting. There is in it also the strongest imaginable thematization of mirroring as distinct from painting, another of the basic polarities that, in varying ratios and combinations, structure much of Caravaggio’s art. And of course, it is a scene of hyperbolic self-portraiture, the core practice of his lifelong endeavor.17 Narcissus is in a sense, for the purposes of the anachronistic reasoning I am proposing here, a portrait of the exact moment when the viewer is about to put on the headset to access the virtual experience: it is in the middle, between plunging and retreating. Within Caravaggio: immersion and reflection Beyond the myth, the comparison between contemporary media and the tradition of western art can be developed through other Caravaggio masterpieces, in which the effect of spatial encompassment is strong. Even better, it is possible to argue that some of Caravaggio’s paintings represent the virtual experience as viewed from the outside but not without investigating the effects it pro- duces in those inside. Let us focus on the Taking of Christ (1602) and The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610). In the first of these two paintings (Fig. 4), the centre of attention is located on the left, at the point of Judas’s dramatic gesture of betrayal, toward which all eyes converge, except for those of the disciple, who flees terrified toward the edge of the frame. In the second painting, considered to be the last that Car- avaggio completed before his death, what is represented is the exact moment when Saint Ursula is wounded by Attila after she refuses his advances. What connects the two works, in addition to the horizontal composition and the precise staging of a dramatic event, is the presence of 17 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 139. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 77 AN-ICON  a figure located on the right side of each painting. This is a man shown in profile: he has a black beard and bushy eyebrows. His head is stretched up, as if he were standing on tiptoe so as to better observe the violent scene unfold- ing just a few steps in front of him. In the 1602 painting the man is attempting to lighten the darkness of the night and illuminate Judas’s kiss by means of a lantern, which he holds in front of himself with his right hand. This figure is of particular interest for at least two reasons. The first, which Roberto Longhi divined earlier, is that the man on the right side of the image is Caravaggio himself. This is a self-portrait, one of the many in his picto- rial corpus, confirmed moreover by its reproduction – like a Fig. 4. Caravaggio, Taking of Christ, 1602, Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland. Fig. 5. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610, Naples, Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 78 AN-ICON  signature – in the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (Fig. 5).18 The second reason concerns the role that this figure plays in both works. The art historian Sergio Benedetti – who has the merit of having rediscovered the original Taking of Christ, after years of investigation into various copies – noted that the figure of Caravaggio “is well defined and holds up a lantern, the function of which is purely compositional as it appears to throw no light, the true light source being high on the left, beyond the scene depicted.”19 In a similar way, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit noted how, in this work, “Caravaggio puts himself within the painting not in order to get closer to his historical subject but rather in order to see himself both illuminating and experiencing congested spaces.”20 Even more explicitly, Giovanni Careri identified in this self-portrait a kind of declaration of intent of the artist that invites us to reflect on our position as spectators: “I paint with light, with light I show a scene that belongs to the past, but also to the present, the armour testifies to this. I am here to see the arrest of Christ but I cannot in- tervene, as you spectators, witnesses safe from a violence that outrages and fascinates.”21 By re-conceiving such analytical insights in Fried’s terms, the artist’s self-portrait with lantern can therefore be conceived of both as being in the process of becoming immersed in the pictorial environment and as becoming “expelled from it in a ‘moment’ of specularity which was to all intents and purposes the aim and purpose of that work (the establishment of the painting as a painting, as an artifact to be looked at.)”22 Retracing our steps to the theoretical notions structuring this paper, with these paintings we are confront- ed with two different and apparently contradictory effects. At first, like Caravaggio trying to observe the scene, with 18 R. Longhi, “Un originale di Caravaggio a Rouen e il problema delle copie caravaggesche,” Paragone 121 (1960): 23-36. 19 S. Benedetti, “Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ, a masterpiece rediscovered,” The Burlington Magazine 135, no. 1088 (1993): 731-741, 738. 20 L. Bersani, U. Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge-London: MIT Press, 1998): 57. 21 G. Careri, Caravaggio. La Fabbrica dello Spettatore (Milano: Jaca Book, 2017): 234. 22 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 217. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 79 AN-ICON  or without his lantern, we are pushed into the painting as a medial environment made of light and shadow. Then lat- er, once we have searched the environment and once we have recognized the figure of the painter-witness, we are pushed outward, that is to say that we begin to reflect on the pictorial composition and on our position as viewers: in front of an image, with our feet planted on the museum’s floor, in Dublin, Naples or in another city. Putting it in anachronistic terms, one could first argue that the contemporary experiences offered by VR cinema are also characterized by an “immersive” moment: here the field of view itself coincides with a “portable lan- tern” located on the forehead of the spectator; a wearable lantern that illuminates a spherical space that coincides with full darkness, except for the frontal portion framed from time to time. Darkness that the VR cinema viewer will never have occasion to see or feel, except when it is diegetized in the production of a given narrative effect. At the same time, a “specular” moment, always persists: pri- marily in the glitches of the digital environment; in the very fact that lowering my gaze to look for my body I tend to find nothing or at least the scarcely credible simulation of arms and legs; in the presence of extradiegetic music, in all those compositional effects – whether intended or not by the video-makers – that invite us to see the image behind the simulation of a virtual environment and in so doing to “reflect” on our position as viewers.23 Regarding the image of the pain of others As in many VR cinema projects, the two paint- ings described above are about situations of suffering or violence, scenes which invite the viewer to assume the position of a witness but in which, at the same time, it is impossible to immerse oneself completely. One painting by Caravaggio seems capable of interrogating, more than 23 On the limits of VR cinema, through some concrete examples, see F. Zucconi, “Sulla tendenza utopica nel VR cinema,” Carte Semiotiche 7 (2021): 118-126. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 80 AN-ICON  any other, the paradoxical character of virtual experience, as well as the idea of being able to experience a world and a living condition that are profoundly different from those characterizing the viewer’s everyday life. At the centre of Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St. Matthew (1600) is the half-naked, fully lit body of the assas- sin (Fig. 6). On the left, a group of men in seventeenth-cen- tury clothing recoil, trying to shield themselves from the violence. While an angel hands St. Matthew the palm of martyrdom, on the right we see the gesture of a novice walking away. In the foreground, some catechumens lying on the ground observe the scene. The composition is cen- trifugal: the viewer’s gaze gradually moves away from the centre as it moves from one body to another. In the back- ground, one meets a figure characterized by a particularly intense gaze who seems to stare at the act of violence be- fore his eyes. This is the bearded man leaning out from the black background behind the assassin. Again, that man is Caravaggio. Also in this large painting, the painter portrays himself in the role of a witness to a violent act. Those who would try to go even further in their analysis might go so far as to argue that what Caravaggio painted in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew is not simply a self-portrait, but a “self-portrait as painter.” To support this hypothesis, I would like to emphasize the inclination of the figure’s head to the side to observe the scene as if he had a canvas in front of him (Fig. 7). One could also conceive of the left hand reaching forward as a transfiguration of the palette, while the right hand holds the brush. The artist’s sad gaze might then be re-conceived as a concentrated, absorbed gaze. If this were the case, it would be an antic- ipation of some of the traits that characterize the extraor- dinary visual dispositif that is Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez, notoriously and masterfully analysed by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things: Now he [the painter] can be seen, caught in a moment of stillness, at the neutral centre of this oscillation. His dark torso and bright face are half-way between the visible and the invisible: emerging from FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 81 AN-ICON  Fig. 6. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, 1600, San Luigi dei Francesi Church, Rome. Fig. 7. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, 1600, Rome, San Luigi dei Francesi Church. Detail. that canvas beyond our view, he moves into our gaze; but when, in a moment, he makes a step to the right, removing himself from our gaze, he will be standing exactly in front of the canvas he is painting; he will enter that region where his painting, neglected for an instant, will, for him, become visible once more, free of shadow and free of reticence.24 24 M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) (London- New York: Routledge, 2002): 4. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 82 AN-ICON  In both Velazquez’s and Caravaggio’s master- piece, the self-portrait takes on a theoretical and critical function; they are within the painting and, at the same time, they explicitly invite the viewer to reflect on visual repre- sentation, on the point of view that structures it and on the limits of the composition.25 This may seem a bold interpretation. Yet, look- ing closely at the figure of Caravaggio, it can be argued that the image presented in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew is not only an image of self “regarding the pain of others” but also and at the same time – turning Susan Sontag’s famous expression – an image of self “regarding the image of the pain of others.”26 If in the Taking of Christ and The Martyrdom of St. Ursula the self-portrait is first and fore- most functional in expressing an idea of immersion of the painter-witness in the pictorial event – a closure and full autonomy of the pictorial as an “immersive environment” – in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew there is a shift that calls into question the composition of the image and the effect of immediacy of representation. Reading Fried again, this is a work “in which a Caravaggio semblable at once rush- es to leave the painting and looks back in evident distress, thereby enabling the viewer to recognize his characteristic features on the far threshold of the depicted space.”27 It is not so much or simply that the figure depicting the painter seems about to leave the scene but, as the art historian and theorist writes with great acumen, “rushes to leave the painting” and pushes the viewer’s gaze to the threshold of the image. If the self-portraits of 1602 and 1610 tend to provoke an identification between painter and viewer and reinforce the effect of immersion, that of The Martyrdom 25 For a more in-depth reflection on this painting and on the modernity of Caravaggio’s self- portrait, capable of activating paths of critical reflection on contemporary media and visual culture, see F. Zucconi, “Regarding the image of the pain of others: Caravaggio, Sontag, Leogrande,” Humanities 11 (2022), 44. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11020044. 26 The reference is to the title and thoughts developed in the famous book by S. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003). 27 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 209. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 83 AN-ICON  of St. Matthew traces the effect of immediacy back to the pictorial composition that produces it. As Sontag herself points out in the above-men- tioned book, from the seventeenth century to the tradition of twentieth-century reportage, a self-portrait of the painter, photographer, or director is certainly not enough to vali- date the authenticity and effectiveness of the testimony or its ethical value. The risk of a self-referential drift, even a “narcissistic” tendency, is also discernible behind this trend: why represent ourselves when we are faced with the pain of others? Rather than glibly promote all self-reflexive ten- dencies, the self-portrait of Caravaggio in The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew is useful and interesting to the extent that it is a manifestation of the fact that, despite its illusionistic realism, it remains an image among many other possible images of this event and does not claim to coincide with it and reproduce it through the media for the viewer’s benefit. The self-portrait on the threshold thus becomes a way to intensify the “specular moment” or, in other terms, to underline the fact that even during the more immersive virtual experience, we are just facing an image, a very well structured one. On the one hand, with his gaze, Caravaggio invites the viewer to immerse himself in an encompassing pictorial image; on the other hand, with his positioning and posture, he leads the viewer to observe the theatricality of the scene from another point of view, to analyse it as seen from the outside. Attraction and distancing Picking up the thread, Stella’s hypothesis was taken up and developed in this paper as a theoretical and analytical metaphor, certainly not in mere technological terms. If the gyroscope fitted in virtual reality helmets makes possible the stable connection between the movements we actually make in the physical world and those in the world of images, talking about Caravaggio’s gyroscope meant reflecting on the strategies of producing illusionistic and counter-illusionistic effects, on the balance between the FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 84 AN-ICON  “immersive” and “specular” moments. Reference to the the- oretical and methodological notions proposed by Michael Fried thus made it possible to observe the co-presence of such moments or, rather, such spectatorial effects that per- sist, by transforming, from the history of Western painting to contemporary immersive devices. Through reference to Susan Sontag’s critical theory of photography, it was thus possible to propose a hypothesis for an ethical and political approach to VR. In particular, what has emerged is that the co-presence of illusionistic and counter-illusionistic effects does not constitute a weakening of the experien- tial and testimonial value of immersive experience. On the contrary, a conscious ethical and political approach to VR seems to be able to develop precisely by making viewers feel the threshold between the environment in which they are physically situated and the virtual one. This is why it is not necessary to rely on technological implementations devoted to perfecting, once and for all, the immersive char- acter of VR cinema and other technological devices. While the slogans that accompanied the launch of many virtual reality projects relied on the simplistic use of the notions of “empathy,” “compassion,” and “immersion” in a geo- graphical elsewhere, the most interesting aspect of such technology seems to involve its capacity to produce both identification and estrangement. Like Caravaggio observing the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, even the gap between the physical world, in which the viewer is placed, and the virtual one can be re-conceived in positive terms within artistic experimen- tations capable of reflecting critically on the asymmetrical relations between the observer and the observed, between the here in which we find ourselves and the elsewhere of which we claim to have “direct” experience. In fact, the very ideas of virtual “presence” must be conceived as a media effect, resulting from specific compositional and FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 85 AN-ICON  technological determinations capable of modulating the relationship between subject and environment.28 Examples of artistic projects aimed at inves- tigating such limits are few, but their number is certainly growing. The survey and in-depth study of such exper- iments exceeds the specific objectives of this paper. To name but one – the most important, and often-addressed29 – the installation Carne y arena (2017) by Alejandro González Iñárritu seems precisely to spur spectators into experienc- ing their own awkward extraneousness and powerlessness toward a group of refugees from Mexico who are trying to cross over the border to the United States (Fig. 8). Iñárritu’s subtitle for the installation – “Virtually present, physically invisible” – expresses, perhaps, the urgent need to tackle the paradoxical character of virtual experience. Beyond Caravaggio, building on the analysis and concepts elicited by his painting, the field of experi- mentations of VR cinema and, more generally, virtual reality seems to be able to develop only by taking into account the co-presence of the different moments or effects that define our relationship with such media. Of course, in con- temporary virtual experiences, the viewer never has the opportunity to mirror himself or herself, that is, to see his or her own image reflected inside the media environment. The notion of “specularity” as understood in Narcissus and Caravaggio’s self-portraits seems in this sense to lose rel- evance. But at this point it should be clear that this notion 28 On this point, see V. Catricalà, R. Eugeni, “Technologically modified self–centred worlds. Modes of presence as effects of sense in virtual, augmented, mixed and extended reality,” in F. Biggio, V. Dos Santos, G.T. Giuliana, eds., Meaning-Making in Extended Reality (Roma: Aracne, 2020): 63-90. For reflection in the different forms of exposure, interactivity and modes of presence, see R. Eugeni, Capitale algoritmico. Cinque dispositivi postmediali (Più Uno) (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2021): 127-174. 29 For an analysis of Iñárritu’s installation, see P. Montani, Tre Forme di Creatività: Tecnica, Arte, Politica (Napoli: Cronopio, 2017): 132-138; A. D’Aloia, “Virtually present, physically invisible: virtual reality immersion and emersion in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena,” in Senses of Cinema (June 2018), http://sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/ virtually-present-physically-invisible-virtual-reality-immersion-and-emersion-in-alejandro- gonzalez-inarritus-carne-y-arena/, accessed January 10, 2022; A.C. Dalmasso, “The body as virtual frame. Performativity of the image in immersive environments,” Cinéma & Cie 19, no. 23 (2019): 101-119; L. Acquarelli, “The spectacle of re-enactment and the critical time of the testimony in Inarritu’s Carne y Arena,” in F. Aldama, A. Rafele, eds., Cultural Studies in the Digital Age (San Diego: San Diego University Press, 2020): 103-118; R. Diodato, Image, Art, and Virtuality: Towards an Aesthetics of Relation (Cham: Springer, 2021): 72-74. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 86 AN-ICON  expresses not so much or only the mirroring of one’s own image, but the possibility of observing and reflecting on the relationship between subject and environment, between what separates us and what binds us to the image. Fig. 8. Alejandro González Iñárritu, Carne y arena, 2017. ©Emmanuel Lubezki/Alejandro González Iñárritu To avoid any misunderstanding, let me propose, in conclusion, to call these moments by two very simple terms that I also used in the introduction: attraction and distancing, where – as in the case of the oppositions pro- posed by Fried – the second term encompasses the first, constituting a form of meta-reflection on the forms of artis- tic and media experience.30 In this sense, attraction defines the concave side of images, the one capable of becoming environment and drawing the viewer to show solidarity with them. On the other hand, distancing expresses the convex side or the modular spatiality of images, the one pointing at the viewer as such and forcing him or her to reflect on his or her own position, on the complex character of ev- ery experience. Whether such terms are convincing or not, the articulation of the two “moments” seems to define the ethical and political limits of both old and new immersive 30 For a reflection on the notion of “distance” in the field of media studies, I refer to the introduction and the various contributions in M. Treleani, F. Zucconi, eds., “Remediating Distances,” IMG Journal 3 (2020). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 87 AN-ICON  technologies. Hence the need to keep the door of art history open, imagining an anachronistic approach and aiming for artistic experimentations poised between different media, between two different moments. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 88 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18191

Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two “moments” of the virtualCaravaggio experience by Francesco Zucconi Frank Stella Michael Fried Immersion and Specularity Virtual Reality Cinema Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two “moments” of the virtual experience FRANCESCO ZUCCONI, Università IUAV di Venezia – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9580-1000 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18191 Abstract In the first of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that he gave at Harvard in 1984, Frank Stella focused on “The necessity of creating pictorial space that is capable of dissolving its own perimeter and surface plane,” and claimed that “No one helped lighten this burden more than Caravaggio.” At a certain point in his talk, the American artist went so far as to say that Caravaggio anticipated the invention of the gyroscope, the technological device which makes the virtual experience possible. Stella’s lecture is the starting point for developing an anachronistic path through pictorial and digital media, in light of their ability to produce illusionistic effects on viewers. In particular, building on Mi- chael Fried’s theory of art and image, this paper investigates virtual experience with reference to two different moments: the “immersive” moment, in which one has the impression of stepping into the frame, and the “specular” one, where the illusionistic effects are revealed; the attraction, when sinking into an image that has become an environment, and the distancing, when the image itself beckons to us and we are invited to reflect on our position as viewers. Keywords Caravaggio Frank Stella Michael Fried Immersion and Specularity Virtual Reality Cinema To quote this essay: F. Zucconi, “Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two ‘moments’ of the virtual experience,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 67-88, https://doi. org/10.54103/ai/18191 FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 67 AN-ICON  Introduction I put on the headset and immerse myself in another world – in a theme park or in a refugee camp, in a disaster-stricken village or perhaps in the city of Hiroshi- ma immediately after the launch of the atomic bomb.1 In some cases I am a mere sightseer, while in other cases I am the “witness” to significant events. I have to enter into an empathetic relationship with those who dwell very far from me, I am expected to “put myself in their shoes” and to experience their condition “directly.”2 Yet I cannot help but realize, sooner or later, that I find myself physically in the safe spaces of a museum or a gallery, in the section dedicated to VR cinema at the Venice International Film Festival, or perhaps in the pavilion of an NGO that uses virtual reality as a form for raising public awareness on sensitive topics. No matter how effectively illusionistic this virtual environment is. Always, in the media experiences of VR cinema, something pushes me inward, draws me into the virtual environment, while, at the same time, something else pushes me out, reminding me that I am just facing an image, and bringing me back to the spatial and temporal coordinates of our physical world.3 This article does not intend to analyse immer- sive videos by trying to deconstruct the nonchalant use of the notion of “empathy” and the ideology of “transparency” that has characterized their promotion, which has already 1 As an example of a virtual theme park experience, see “Disneyland Paris - 360 VR - Main Street,” Disneyland Paris, YouTube video, 1.19, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RNly6mSF0-o, accessed January 10, 2023. Regarding the applications of such technology to the field of humanitarian communication, see http://unvr.sdgactioncampaign.org, accessed January 10, 2023. As for the fourth example, please refer to the official web page of the project https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/new-virtual-reality-experience-drops- you-hiroshima-right-after-its-been-bombed-180968903, accessed January 10, 2023. 2 As an emblematic example of the promotional use of a term such as “empathy” and on the idea of putting oneself in another’s place through VR cinema, see https://youtu.be/ vAEjX9S8o2k. 3 These issues can be conceived with reference to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological lesson and the relationship among the notions of Bildding (the physical thing), Bildobjekt (image-object) and Bildsujet (image-subject). See E. Husserl, “Phantasy and Image Consciousness,” in Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898-1925). Edmund Husserl Collected Works, vol 11 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). On the illusionistic forms of virtual reality, examined through a rereading of Husserl, see P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan: Mimesis International, 2020): 46-52. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 68 AN-ICON  been the subject of several studies.4 Rather, I would like to take up and further develop some issues present in my previous works, with the aim of opening a space for reflec- tion on immersive technology following an anachronistic path through pictorial and digital media by referring to some concepts of art history and theory.5 The main objective is to focus, in analytical and theoretical terms, on the double effect of attraction and distancing described above, as structuring the experience of VR cinema. While the impossibility of fully capturing and keeping the viewers within the virtual environment has mostly been conceived as a negative limitation of such technology, in this paper I try to argue otherwise. Through the reference to a repertoire of images from the past, the aim is to describe the paradoxical character of an experi- ence that is made up as much of attraction as of distancing. But before this can be sustained there are some interme- diate steps. After this introduction, in the second section, taking up a hypothesis advanced by Frank Stella, I explain the idea that gives the title to this paper: that Caravaggio, anticipated the invention of gyroscope technology and therefore made possible the first immersive experience in the history of Western painting. In the third, fourth and fifth sections, building on Michael Fried, I try to emphasize the two moments that characterize Caravaggio’s paintings: immersion, the formal device that attracts within the image, and specularity, understood as the set of figurative and compositional elements that produce an effect of aware- ness on the viewer.6 In the conclusion, I reconsider Fried’s analysis and the concepts that characterize his theoretical 4 The literature on the notion of empathy is vast and constantly evolving with reference to new technological and expressive forms. For an early critical reflection on the facile use of this concept in relation to VR cinema, see W. Uricchio, S. Ding, S. Wolozin, and B. Boyacioglu, Virtually There: Documentary Meets Virtual Reality Conference Report (The MIT Open Documentary Laboratory, 2016): 17-18, http://opendoclab.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/ uploads/2016/11/MIT_OpenDocLab_VirtuallyThereConference.pdf, accessed January 10, 2023. 5 I refer to F. Zucconi, Displacing Caravaggio: Art, Media, and Humanitarian Visual Culture (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 6 On these two notions, which will also be referred to in the following pages, see M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 69 AN-ICON  work in relation to contemporary media. What emerges is an opportunity for developing an ethic of VR: to what extent, can immersive technology facilitate the assumption of a testimonial gaze? Under what conditions can the gesture of wearing a virtual reality headset assume a critical value? Frank Stella’s hypothesis The American artist Frank Stella is, without a doubt, someone who understands visual surfaces and me- dia frames, their ability to offer illusionistic effects. One only has to think of his works in the 1960s, where a series of frames relentlessly squeeze against each other, leaving a small coloured square in the centre. Taking inspiration from Louis Marin’s analysis of Gran Cairo (1962), it is fair to ask whether these squares-frames are a well or a pyramid (Fig. 1). As the French historian and theorist notes, they are “a well and a pyramid, but never at the same time. The eye cannot predict the necessary and the arbitrary moment of conversion in which all the serious play of the frame and its modern and contemporary figures seem to be concen- trated: the play of the rhythm of presentation and repre- sentation, the play of the subject of the art of seeing and the art of describing.”7 If we compare them to the famous example of the rabbit/duck illustration investigated by Ludwig Wittgen- stein and Ernst Gombrich, Stella’s paintings do not merely work on the viewers’ perceptual and cognitive limits in the recognition of the figures depicted. Rather, the represen- tational undecidability and instability of image produce a spatial effect, by modulating the relation between the ob- serving subject and the observed object. In other words, when confronted with the rabbit/duck illustration, the viewer does not have the illusion of being confronted with a duck or rabbit coming off the page; rather, the graphic representa- tion produces an illusionistic effect that makes it impossible to visualize the two animals at the same time. In contrast 7 L. Marin, On Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002): 372. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 70 AN-ICON  to that, Stella’s paintings produce an illusionistic effect to the extent that they alternately draw the viewer inward – as in a well – or push him or her out, as if the surface had a pyramidal shape. Those who observe Stella’s paintings are thus subjected to the rhythmic redundancy of the “opac- ity” of the painted frame that becomes recognizable – we might say that makes itself “transparent” – in the metaphors of the pyramid and the well.8 In more general terms than those used by Marin, we might speak of Stella’s work as a gestalt effect capable of inducing, alternately, in the viewer both the impression of attraction and that of rejection or distancing. In fact, beyond the series of concentric squares, Stella’s artistic research would continue in the 1970s and 1980s by focusing on the relationship between the space Fig. 1. Frank Stella, Gran Cairo, 1962, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, purchase with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art; © Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 8 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (London: Pearson, 1973); E. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 71 AN-ICON  of the canvas and the pictorial space, between the surface and depth (Fig. 2). Fig. 2. Frank Stella, Eccentric Polygon, 1974, Jane Kahan Gallery, New York; purchased by Walter and Joan Wolf, Indianapolis, Indiana; ©Frank Stella/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Beyond the theory of art that is implied in Stel- la’s works, it behoves us to pay particular attention, then, to what he had to say in the first of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that he gave at Harvard in 1984. In developing a line of thought that sweeps from Leonardo da Vinci to Seurat, and from Vermeer to Velázquez, Stella focused on a theoretical problem that is crucial in the history of arts and images; a problem that equally concerns both “old” and “new” media. “The necessity of creating pictorial space that is capable of dissolving its own perimeter and surface plane,” he says, “is the burden that modern painting was born with.”9 And immediately afterwards he goes on to state that “No one helped lighten this burden more than Caravaggio.”10 As often happens, when artists are willing to share their theory, their tone tends to be assertive: Stella’s remarks are full of ideas for creative practice but possibly a font of perplexity for art historians. Still, how can one not ap- preciate his attempt to concisely express the transformation 9 F. Stella, Working Space (Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 1986): 10. 10 Ibid. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 72 AN-ICON  that Caravaggio’s painting forced on the regimes of pictorial representation of space and bodies? Stella’s observations aptly describe Caravaggio’s propensity for experimenting with the phenomenological limits of the idea of “realism,” by creating environments in which the viewer’s gaze must grope its way around, wrapped up in the composition but equally attracted by the vivid emphasis on colour, and by the chromatic nuances seen in some of the details. Stella’s reflections did not stop here. He de- veloped his argument by examining Caravaggio’s entire body of works and focuses on a few paintings. He used anachronistic terminology to highlight several aspects that prefigure artistic and technological developments that took place in the following decades as well as to identify their potentialities: To be able to carry in our minds the space of Caravaggio’s large commanding works, such as the Vatican Deposition and the Seven Acts of Mercy from Naples, we need some kind of image to help form an idea about the design and purpose of Caravaggio’s pictorial space. The image that comes to mind is that of the gyroscope—a spinning sphere, capable of accommodating movement and tilt. We have to imagine ourselves caught up within this sphere, experienc- ing the movement and motion of painting’s action. [...] The space that Caravaggio created is something that twentieth-century painting could use: an alternative both to the space of conventional realism and to the space of what has come to be conventional painterliness. The sense of a shaped spatial presence enveloping the action of the painting and the location of the creator and spectator is a by-product of the success of Caravaggio’s realistic illusionism.11 Within a reflection on VR cinema and immersive media, it is the idea of “realistic illusionism” and even more the metaphor of the gyroscope that attracts attention. The gyroscope, invented in the 19th century by French physi- cist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault is still the basis of virtual reality devices. It is also thanks to it that the visors worn 11 Ibid.: p. 11. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 73 AN-ICON  by viewers can track head movements and thus accurately detect movement along one, two or three axes, thus mak- ing the virtual experience possible. Without the gyroscope, there is no possible balance between the viewer’s gestures and movements in the virtual environment, nor any possi- bility of orientation within it. It is time to give a chance to Stella and his hypothesis that Caravaggio invented the gyroscope and with it virtual reality helmets. But I would like to develop this suggestion in a key that is not merely “technological,” by investigating the forms of composition that character- ize the pictorial medium and the effects they produce. To do so, it is necessary to re-conceive the American artist’s hypothesis into a series of operational questions: what is or would be, exactly, in Caravaggio’s painting capable of prefiguring the conditions of illusionism made possible by contemporary technologies? How do his paintings help us understand the dual effect – hitherto described as one of attraction and distancing – that we experience within immersive environments like those of VR cinema? The two moments of Narcissus To my knowledge, no contemporary photogra- pher or artist has yet investigated in detail the instant when viewers put on or take off their virtual reality helmets. This is really a pity, because the image of that precise instant could make us think a lot about the potentialities of such technology. We must therefore be content with the myths of the past and their survival in our contemporary practices. About to plunge into a virtual world, we find the figure of Narcissus. As noted by Andrea Pinotti – who has identified in Narcissus a kind of “conceptual character” of the an-iconic tradition in Western visual culture – there are two versions of the myth: the first aimed at producing a “naïve” image of the young boy who falls into the illusionistic trap of the image (recurring in Plotinus, Pausanias, Marsilio Ficino, etc.); the second coinciding with a “conscious” Nar- cissus (Ovidian variant), who is aware of the, so to speak, FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 74 AN-ICON  media environment with which he is confronted and with which he is about to make one body.12 It matters little that the Narcissus painted at the end of the Sixteenth century is not a signed work by Caravaggio but only an attribution, widely discussed by art historians (Fig. 3). For the purposes of the reasoning proposed in this paper, it should be noted that the young man is already fully rapt and about to plunge into the world of image. Yet, the figure of the double reflection still reveals a gap between two representational and sensible worlds or regimes. Fig. 3. Caravaggio (attribution), Narcissus, 1597-1599, Rome, Palazzo Barberini. Explicitly taking up the terms proposed by Mi- chael Fried, Narcissus constitutes an explication of the two “moments” that Caravaggio’s painting produces on view- ers. According to Fried – let it be said in passing: a friend 12 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine. Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Torino: Einaudi, 2021): 3-6. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 75 AN-ICON  and one of the most important interpreter of Stella’s work – Caravaggio’s pictorial corpus involve a moment defined as “immersive, imagining the painter as so caught up, so immersed, in this phase of his work on the painting as to be less than fully aware of any sharp distinction between the painting and himself.”13 The second “‘moment,’ notionally instantaneous, of separating or indeed recoiling from the painting, of becoming detached from it, which is to say of no longer being immersed in work on it but rather of see- ing it, taking it in, as if for the first time; I call that ‘moment’ specular, meaning thereby to emphasize the strictly visual or optical relation between the artist - viewer and the image, or image - artefact, that has just brought into being.”14 Reading these pages on Caravaggio, thoughts evidently run to the dialectic between “absorption” and “theatricality”15 identified by Fried himself in the painting of the eighteenth century, or to that between “art” and “ob- jecthood”16 as a key to theoretical and critical interpreta- tion of the relationship between media, art and spatiality in the second half of the twentieth century. Even before the eighteenth century, well before the twentieth-century and, we might add, contemporary media experience, Caravag- gio would have had the ability to reflect in an original way on the tension between the painter and his work (through the use of self-portraiture), between the canvas and the pictorial space (the composition of volumes, the relation- ship between light and shadow) producing unprecedented effects on viewers, now driving them inward, now pushing them outward. Hovering between the classicism of the myth and the technological actuality of the present, Narcissus is a virtual allegory of the ‘moment’ of immersion, or perhaps I should say of absorption becoming immersion, conjoined with the strongest 13 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 39. 14 Ibid. 15 M. Fried, Theatricality and Absorption: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 16 M. Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 76 AN-ICON possible statement of the specular separation of the viewer — orig- inally the painter-viewer — from the painting. There is in it also the strongest imaginable thematization of mirroring as distinct from painting, another of the basic polarities that, in varying ratios and combinations, structure much of Caravaggio’s art. And of course, it is a scene of hyperbolic self-portraiture, the core practice of his lifelong endeavor.17 Narcissus is in a sense, for the purposes of the anachronistic reasoning I am proposing here, a portrait of the exact moment when the viewer is about to put on the headset to access the virtual experience: it is in the middle, between plunging and retreating. Within Caravaggio: immersion and reflection Beyond the myth, the comparison between contemporary media and the tradition of western art can be developed through other Caravaggio masterpieces, in which the effect of spatial encompassment is strong. Even better, it is possible to argue that some of Caravaggio’s paintings represent the virtual experience as viewed from the outside but not without investigating the effects it pro- duces in those inside. Let us focus on the Taking of Christ (1602) and The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610). In the first of these two paintings (Fig. 4), the centre of attention is located on the left, at the point of Judas’s dramatic gesture of betrayal, toward which all eyes converge, except for those of the disciple, who flees terrified toward the edge of the frame. In the second painting, considered to be the last that Car- avaggio completed before his death, what is represented is the exact moment when Saint Ursula is wounded by Attila after she refuses his advances. What connects the two works, in addition to the horizontal composition and the precise staging of a dramatic event, is the presence of 17 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 139. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 77 AN-ICON  a figure located on the right side of each painting. This is a man shown in profile: he has a black beard and bushy eyebrows. His head is stretched up, as if he were standing on tiptoe so as to better observe the violent scene unfold- ing just a few steps in front of him. In the 1602 painting the man is attempting to lighten the darkness of the night and illuminate Judas’s kiss by means of a lantern, which he holds in front of himself with his right hand. This figure is of particular interest for at least two reasons. The first, which Roberto Longhi divined earlier, is that the man on the right side of the image is Caravaggio himself. This is a self-portrait, one of the many in his picto- rial corpus, confirmed moreover by its reproduction – like a Fig. 4. Caravaggio, Taking of Christ, 1602, Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland. Fig. 5. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610, Naples, Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 78 AN-ICON  signature – in the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (Fig. 5).18 The second reason concerns the role that this figure plays in both works. The art historian Sergio Benedetti – who has the merit of having rediscovered the original Taking of Christ, after years of investigation into various copies – noted that the figure of Caravaggio “is well defined and holds up a lantern, the function of which is purely compositional as it appears to throw no light, the true light source being high on the left, beyond the scene depicted.”19 In a similar way, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit noted how, in this work, “Caravaggio puts himself within the painting not in order to get closer to his historical subject but rather in order to see himself both illuminating and experiencing congested spaces.”20 Even more explicitly, Giovanni Careri identified in this self-portrait a kind of declaration of intent of the artist that invites us to reflect on our position as spectators: “I paint with light, with light I show a scene that belongs to the past, but also to the present, the armour testifies to this. I am here to see the arrest of Christ but I cannot in- tervene, as you spectators, witnesses safe from a violence that outrages and fascinates.”21 By re-conceiving such analytical insights in Fried’s terms, the artist’s self-portrait with lantern can therefore be conceived of both as being in the process of becoming immersed in the pictorial environment and as becoming “expelled from it in a ‘moment’ of specularity which was to all intents and purposes the aim and purpose of that work (the establishment of the painting as a painting, as an artifact to be looked at.)”22 Retracing our steps to the theoretical notions structuring this paper, with these paintings we are confront- ed with two different and apparently contradictory effects. At first, like Caravaggio trying to observe the scene, with 18 R. Longhi, “Un originale di Caravaggio a Rouen e il problema delle copie caravaggesche,” Paragone 121 (1960): 23-36. 19 S. Benedetti, “Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ, a masterpiece rediscovered,” The Burlington Magazine 135, no. 1088 (1993): 731-741, 738. 20 L. Bersani, U. Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge-London: MIT Press, 1998): 57. 21 G. Careri, Caravaggio. La Fabbrica dello Spettatore (Milano: Jaca Book, 2017): 234. 22 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 217. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 79 AN-ICON  or without his lantern, we are pushed into the painting as a medial environment made of light and shadow. Then lat- er, once we have searched the environment and once we have recognized the figure of the painter-witness, we are pushed outward, that is to say that we begin to reflect on the pictorial composition and on our position as viewers: in front of an image, with our feet planted on the museum’s floor, in Dublin, Naples or in another city. Putting it in anachronistic terms, one could first argue that the contemporary experiences offered by VR cinema are also characterized by an “immersive” moment: here the field of view itself coincides with a “portable lan- tern” located on the forehead of the spectator; a wearable lantern that illuminates a spherical space that coincides with full darkness, except for the frontal portion framed from time to time. Darkness that the VR cinema viewer will never have occasion to see or feel, except when it is diegetized in the production of a given narrative effect. At the same time, a “specular” moment, always persists: pri- marily in the glitches of the digital environment; in the very fact that lowering my gaze to look for my body I tend to find nothing or at least the scarcely credible simulation of arms and legs; in the presence of extradiegetic music, in all those compositional effects – whether intended or not by the video-makers – that invite us to see the image behind the simulation of a virtual environment and in so doing to “reflect” on our position as viewers.23 Regarding the image of the pain of others As in many VR cinema projects, the two paint- ings described above are about situations of suffering or violence, scenes which invite the viewer to assume the position of a witness but in which, at the same time, it is impossible to immerse oneself completely. One painting by Caravaggio seems capable of interrogating, more than 23 On the limits of VR cinema, through some concrete examples, see F. Zucconi, “Sulla tendenza utopica nel VR cinema,” Carte Semiotiche 7 (2021): 118-126. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 80 AN-ICON  any other, the paradoxical character of virtual experience, as well as the idea of being able to experience a world and a living condition that are profoundly different from those characterizing the viewer’s everyday life. At the centre of Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St. Matthew (1600) is the half-naked, fully lit body of the assas- sin (Fig. 6). On the left, a group of men in seventeenth-cen- tury clothing recoil, trying to shield themselves from the violence. While an angel hands St. Matthew the palm of martyrdom, on the right we see the gesture of a novice walking away. In the foreground, some catechumens lying on the ground observe the scene. The composition is cen- trifugal: the viewer’s gaze gradually moves away from the centre as it moves from one body to another. In the back- ground, one meets a figure characterized by a particularly intense gaze who seems to stare at the act of violence be- fore his eyes. This is the bearded man leaning out from the black background behind the assassin. Again, that man is Caravaggio. Also in this large painting, the painter portrays himself in the role of a witness to a violent act. Those who would try to go even further in their analysis might go so far as to argue that what Caravaggio painted in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew is not simply a self-portrait, but a “self-portrait as painter.” To support this hypothesis, I would like to emphasize the inclination of the figure’s head to the side to observe the scene as if he had a canvas in front of him (Fig. 7). One could also conceive of the left hand reaching forward as a transfiguration of the palette, while the right hand holds the brush. The artist’s sad gaze might then be re-conceived as a concentrated, absorbed gaze. If this were the case, it would be an antic- ipation of some of the traits that characterize the extraor- dinary visual dispositif that is Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez, notoriously and masterfully analysed by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things: Now he [the painter] can be seen, caught in a moment of stillness, at the neutral centre of this oscillation. His dark torso and bright face are half-way between the visible and the invisible: emerging from FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 81 AN-ICON  Fig. 6. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, 1600, San Luigi dei Francesi Church, Rome. Fig. 7. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, 1600, Rome, San Luigi dei Francesi Church. Detail. that canvas beyond our view, he moves into our gaze; but when, in a moment, he makes a step to the right, removing himself from our gaze, he will be standing exactly in front of the canvas he is painting; he will enter that region where his painting, neglected for an instant, will, for him, become visible once more, free of shadow and free of reticence.24 24 M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) (London- New York: Routledge, 2002): 4. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 82 AN-ICON  In both Velazquez’s and Caravaggio’s master- piece, the self-portrait takes on a theoretical and critical function; they are within the painting and, at the same time, they explicitly invite the viewer to reflect on visual repre- sentation, on the point of view that structures it and on the limits of the composition.25 This may seem a bold interpretation. Yet, look- ing closely at the figure of Caravaggio, it can be argued that the image presented in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew is not only an image of self “regarding the pain of others” but also and at the same time – turning Susan Sontag’s famous expression – an image of self “regarding the image of the pain of others.”26 If in the Taking of Christ and The Martyrdom of St. Ursula the self-portrait is first and fore- most functional in expressing an idea of immersion of the painter-witness in the pictorial event – a closure and full autonomy of the pictorial as an “immersive environment” – in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew there is a shift that calls into question the composition of the image and the effect of immediacy of representation. Reading Fried again, this is a work “in which a Caravaggio semblable at once rush- es to leave the painting and looks back in evident distress, thereby enabling the viewer to recognize his characteristic features on the far threshold of the depicted space.”27 It is not so much or simply that the figure depicting the painter seems about to leave the scene but, as the art historian and theorist writes with great acumen, “rushes to leave the painting” and pushes the viewer’s gaze to the threshold of the image. If the self-portraits of 1602 and 1610 tend to provoke an identification between painter and viewer and reinforce the effect of immersion, that of The Martyrdom 25 For a more in-depth reflection on this painting and on the modernity of Caravaggio’s self- portrait, capable of activating paths of critical reflection on contemporary media and visual culture, see F. Zucconi, “Regarding the image of the pain of others: Caravaggio, Sontag, Leogrande,” Humanities 11 (2022), 44. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11020044. 26 The reference is to the title and thoughts developed in the famous book by S. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003). 27 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 209. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 83 AN-ICON  of St. Matthew traces the effect of immediacy back to the pictorial composition that produces it. As Sontag herself points out in the above-men- tioned book, from the seventeenth century to the tradition of twentieth-century reportage, a self-portrait of the painter, photographer, or director is certainly not enough to vali- date the authenticity and effectiveness of the testimony or its ethical value. The risk of a self-referential drift, even a “narcissistic” tendency, is also discernible behind this trend: why represent ourselves when we are faced with the pain of others? Rather than glibly promote all self-reflexive ten- dencies, the self-portrait of Caravaggio in The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew is useful and interesting to the extent that it is a manifestation of the fact that, despite its illusionistic realism, it remains an image among many other possible images of this event and does not claim to coincide with it and reproduce it through the media for the viewer’s benefit. The self-portrait on the threshold thus becomes a way to intensify the “specular moment” or, in other terms, to underline the fact that even during the more immersive virtual experience, we are just facing an image, a very well structured one. On the one hand, with his gaze, Caravaggio invites the viewer to immerse himself in an encompassing pictorial image; on the other hand, with his positioning and posture, he leads the viewer to observe the theatricality of the scene from another point of view, to analyse it as seen from the outside. Attraction and distancing Picking up the thread, Stella’s hypothesis was taken up and developed in this paper as a theoretical and analytical metaphor, certainly not in mere technological terms. If the gyroscope fitted in virtual reality helmets makes possible the stable connection between the movements we actually make in the physical world and those in the world of images, talking about Caravaggio’s gyroscope meant reflecting on the strategies of producing illusionistic and counter-illusionistic effects, on the balance between the FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 84 AN-ICON  “immersive” and “specular” moments. Reference to the the- oretical and methodological notions proposed by Michael Fried thus made it possible to observe the co-presence of such moments or, rather, such spectatorial effects that per- sist, by transforming, from the history of Western painting to contemporary immersive devices. Through reference to Susan Sontag’s critical theory of photography, it was thus possible to propose a hypothesis for an ethical and political approach to VR. In particular, what has emerged is that the co-presence of illusionistic and counter-illusionistic effects does not constitute a weakening of the experien- tial and testimonial value of immersive experience. On the contrary, a conscious ethical and political approach to VR seems to be able to develop precisely by making viewers feel the threshold between the environment in which they are physically situated and the virtual one. This is why it is not necessary to rely on technological implementations devoted to perfecting, once and for all, the immersive char- acter of VR cinema and other technological devices. While the slogans that accompanied the launch of many virtual reality projects relied on the simplistic use of the notions of “empathy,” “compassion,” and “immersion” in a geo- graphical elsewhere, the most interesting aspect of such technology seems to involve its capacity to produce both identification and estrangement. Like Caravaggio observing the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, even the gap between the physical world, in which the viewer is placed, and the virtual one can be re-conceived in positive terms within artistic experimen- tations capable of reflecting critically on the asymmetrical relations between the observer and the observed, between the here in which we find ourselves and the elsewhere of which we claim to have “direct” experience. In fact, the very ideas of virtual “presence” must be conceived as a media effect, resulting from specific compositional and FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 85 AN-ICON  technological determinations capable of modulating the relationship between subject and environment.28 Examples of artistic projects aimed at inves- tigating such limits are few, but their number is certainly growing. The survey and in-depth study of such exper- iments exceeds the specific objectives of this paper. To name but one – the most important, and often-addressed29 – the installation Carne y arena (2017) by Alejandro González Iñárritu seems precisely to spur spectators into experienc- ing their own awkward extraneousness and powerlessness toward a group of refugees from Mexico who are trying to cross over the border to the United States (Fig. 8). Iñárritu’s subtitle for the installation – “Virtually present, physically invisible” – expresses, perhaps, the urgent need to tackle the paradoxical character of virtual experience. Beyond Caravaggio, building on the analysis and concepts elicited by his painting, the field of experi- mentations of VR cinema and, more generally, virtual reality seems to be able to develop only by taking into account the co-presence of the different moments or effects that define our relationship with such media. Of course, in con- temporary virtual experiences, the viewer never has the opportunity to mirror himself or herself, that is, to see his or her own image reflected inside the media environment. The notion of “specularity” as understood in Narcissus and Caravaggio’s self-portraits seems in this sense to lose rel- evance. But at this point it should be clear that this notion 28 On this point, see V. Catricalà, R. Eugeni, “Technologically modified self–centred worlds. Modes of presence as effects of sense in virtual, augmented, mixed and extended reality,” in F. Biggio, V. Dos Santos, G.T. Giuliana, eds., Meaning-Making in Extended Reality (Roma: Aracne, 2020): 63-90. For reflection in the different forms of exposure, interactivity and modes of presence, see R. Eugeni, Capitale algoritmico. Cinque dispositivi postmediali (Più Uno) (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2021): 127-174. 29 For an analysis of Iñárritu’s installation, see P. Montani, Tre Forme di Creatività: Tecnica, Arte, Politica (Napoli: Cronopio, 2017): 132-138; A. D’Aloia, “Virtually present, physically invisible: virtual reality immersion and emersion in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena,” in Senses of Cinema (June 2018), http://sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/ virtually-present-physically-invisible-virtual-reality-immersion-and-emersion-in-alejandro- gonzalez-inarritus-carne-y-arena/, accessed January 10, 2022; A.C. Dalmasso, “The body as virtual frame. Performativity of the image in immersive environments,” Cinéma & Cie 19, no. 23 (2019): 101-119; L. Acquarelli, “The spectacle of re-enactment and the critical time of the testimony in Inarritu’s Carne y Arena,” in F. Aldama, A. Rafele, eds., Cultural Studies in the Digital Age (San Diego: San Diego University Press, 2020): 103-118; R. Diodato, Image, Art, and Virtuality: Towards an Aesthetics of Relation (Cham: Springer, 2021): 72-74. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 86 AN-ICON  expresses not so much or only the mirroring of one’s own image, but the possibility of observing and reflecting on the relationship between subject and environment, between what separates us and what binds us to the image. Fig. 8. Alejandro González Iñárritu, Carne y arena, 2017. ©Emmanuel Lubezki/Alejandro González Iñárritu To avoid any misunderstanding, let me propose, in conclusion, to call these moments by two very simple terms that I also used in the introduction: attraction and distancing, where – as in the case of the oppositions pro- posed by Fried – the second term encompasses the first, constituting a form of meta-reflection on the forms of artis- tic and media experience.30 In this sense, attraction defines the concave side of images, the one capable of becoming environment and drawing the viewer to show solidarity with them. On the other hand, distancing expresses the convex side or the modular spatiality of images, the one pointing at the viewer as such and forcing him or her to reflect on his or her own position, on the complex character of ev- ery experience. Whether such terms are convincing or not, the articulation of the two “moments” seems to define the ethical and political limits of both old and new immersive 30 For a reflection on the notion of “distance” in the field of media studies, I refer to the introduction and the various contributions in M. Treleani, F. Zucconi, eds., “Remediating Distances,” IMG Journal 3 (2020). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 87 AN-ICON  technologies. Hence the need to keep the door of art history open, imagining an anachronistic approach and aiming for artistic experimentations poised between different media, between two different moments. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 88 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18458

Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality by Philippe Bédard art Virtual Reality Illusion Anthropocentrism Umwelt Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality art PHILIPPE BÉDARD, McGill University – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4100-5249 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18458 “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unpreju- diced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception”1 Abstract In the following essay, I consider if and how VR’s uncanny ability to create an illusion of presence and generate a sense of body ownership might be used to go beyond our anthropocentric perspective, towards non-hu- man experiences. By adventuring outside the domain of human experience, my goal is to address the affordances and limitations of VR’s illusionistic potential. Knowing full well that certain economic pressures preclude artists from pursuing the kinds of provocations I describe in this essay, I nevertheless invite readers to follow along as I explore alternative potentialities of contemporary VR. Specifically, I approach VR here in the hopes of finding ways of engaging with different bodies, spaces, and realities, even if illusorily. Keywords Virtual reality Illusion Anthropocentrism Umwelt To quote this essay: P. Bédard, “Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality art,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 89-112, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18458 1 S. Brakhage, “From Metaphors on Vision,” in P.A. Sitney, ed., The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1978): 120. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 89 AN-ICON  Introduction Many things have changed between the origi- nal heyday of virtual reality (VR) in the 1980–1990s and the current revival of the technology since the early 2010s. But while today VR might benefit from the leaps and bounds computers and graphic technologies have witnessed in the intervening decades, and while it might enjoy greater commercial success than ever before, I often feel our imag- ination around the kinds of experiences enabled by VR has suffered somewhat. We are far removed today from Mere- dith Bricken’s suggestion that in VR: “You can be the mad hatter or you can be the teapot; you can move back and forth to the rhythm of a song. You can be a tiny droplet in the rain or in the river.”2 Likewise, we seem to have strayed from Jaron Lanier’s proposition that in virtual reality, “you can visit the world of the dinosaur, then become a Tyran- nosaurus. Not only can you see DNA, you can experience what it’s like to be a molecule.”3 While Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin use these two quotes to highlight the illusion of “perceptual immediacy”4 of immersive virtual reality experiences, I see in these statements something else entirely more interesting: the idea that VR might give us experiences that far exceed the limits of human under- standing. In the following essay, I consider if and how VR’s uncanny ability to create an illusion of presence and generate a sense of body ownership might be used to go beyond our anthropocentric perspective, towards non-hu- man experiences. By adventuring outside the domain of human experience, my goal is to address the affordances 2 M. Bricken, “Virtual worlds: no interface to design,” in M. Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1991): 363-382, 372. 3 S. Ditlea, “False starts aside, virtual reality finds new roles,” New York Times (March 23, 1998): 97. 4 J. Bolter, R. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2000): 22. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 90 AN-ICON  and limitations of VR’s illusionistic potential. In so doing, I also aim to explore how VR might be thought of as more than a means to foster empathy for other human beings, whatever the purpose for that endeavour might be.5 This allows me to discuss immersive technologies and experi- ences in a context devoid of the problems typically asso- ciated with discourses around the concept of “empathy machine.” I begin this essay by addressing the illusion of presence in VR, specifically as it relates to our experience of body-space relations in physical reality. I start by address- ing what I argue to be the fundamental anthropocentrism of VR’s dominant mode of experience. This crucial detour has me discussing whether VR is capable of representing non-human modes of being in the world. Necessarily, this also means addressing earlier thought experiments in the field of psychology, biology, and philosophy that sought to question “what it is like to be” something other than human. Having done so, I then consider whether VR might have the ability to give us access to non-human realities, or whether it is limited by a fundamental anthropocentrism. Finally, I 5 On the issue of empathy in VR, see J.H. Murray, “Not a film and not an empathy machine,” Immerse (October 6, 2016): https://immerse.news/not-a-film-and-not-an-empathy-machine- 48b63b0eda93, accessed January 10, 2023; S. Gregory, “Immersive witnessing: from empathy and outrage to action,” WITNESS blog (2016), https://blog.witness.org/2016/08/ immersive-witnessing-from-empathy-and-outrage-to-action/, accessed January 10, 2023; G. Bollmer, “Empathy machines,” Media International Australia 165, no. 1 (2017): 63-76, https:// doi.org/10.1177/1329878X17726794; R. Yang, “If you walk in someone else’s shoes, then you’ve taken their shoes: empathy machines as appropriation machines,” Radiator Blog (April 5, 2017), https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2017/04/if-you-walk-in-someone-elses-shoes- then.html, accessed January 10, 2023; H. Farmer, “A broken empathy machine,” Immerse (September 30, 2019), https://immerse.news/a-broken-empathy-machine-can-virtual-reality- increase-pro-social-behaviour-and-reduce-prejudice-cbcefb30525b, accessed January 10, 2023; P. Roquet, “Empathy for the game master: how virtual reality creates empathy for those seen to be creating VR,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 65-80, https://doi. org/10.1177/1470412920906260; L. Nakamura, “Feeling good about feeling bad: virtuous virtual reality and the automation of racial empathy,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 47-64, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906259; G. Bollmer and K. Guinness, “Empathy and nausea: virtual reality and Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 28-46, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906261. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 91 AN-ICON  look at experiments relating to illusions of body ownership in VR, specifically as they relate to non-human bodies. As will become abundantly clear over the course of this essay, my goal is speculative—perhaps even provocative—rather than earnest. I write this text as an exercise in exploring what I perceive to be a bias towards anthropocentrism in VR, a medium which has so often been lauded for its ability to simulate otherwise impossible real- ities.6 Readers may also see this as a call to action to VR designers and consumers to open their minds to the pos- sibilities offered by contemporary immersive technologies beyond those practices that currently dominate the market. Knowing full well that certain economic pressures preclude artists from pursuing the kinds of provocations I describe in this essay, I nevertheless invite readers to follow along as I explore alternative potentialities of contemporary VR.7 Specifically, I approach VR here in the hopes of finding ways of engaging with different bodies, spaces, and real- ities, even if illusorily. Virtual reality environments: immediacy and presence It has become something of a truism to recog- nize that VR is able to foster a sense of presence, that is, the impression of “being there” in a virtual environment dis- tinct from the physical environment that one’s body is also occupying. Or, as Mathew Lombard et al. put it, presence 6 I maintain that VR is currently driven by profoundly anthropocentric forces, despite the “anti-anthropocentric drive which,” according to Andrea Pinotti, “currently characterises not only the VR world but contemporary visual culture, in various mediums, more generally.” A. Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?,” in Y. Hadjinicolaou, ed., Visual Engagements: Image Practices and Falconry (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020): 30-47, 44, https:// doi.org/10.1515/9783110618587-003. See also R. Grusin, The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 7 I also want to recognize that there are the effects of VR are not currently fully known and that much more work must be done to ensure current VR technologies are accessible and ethical. These pressing issues certainly deserve more attention before we can move towards more elaborate explorations of the outer limits of VR. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 92 AN-ICON  describes, “the perceptual illusion of non-mediation.”8 In this context, the perceived lack of mediation is predicated on VR’s ability to foster a convincing illusion of a space that reproduces the way we see the world in our daily lives: as a three-dimensional volume in which our bodies can move and act. And while on their own the affordances of head-mounted displays (HMD) could be used to create any number of effects and illusions, the dominant practice of contemporary immersive media has been to reproduce our habitual modes of (visual) perception: looking ahead from an upright position through a pair of eyes which we can move around (either in their orbits, by moving our head, or our body) to see the surrounding environment. In an earlier essay, I described VR as inherently subjective, following Jonathan Crary’s incisive discussion of “subjective vision.”9 By extension, I would also argue its default mode of experience–that for which it was designed and that which is dominant to this day–is also intrinsically anthropocentric. This is because “subjective,” in this con- text, refers to the idiosyncrasies of human vision.10 By the same token, I describe an apparatus which relies on these unique and fallible qualities of perception as subjective. In the case of VR, the HMD hinges upon the following sub- jective qualities of human vision: its binocularity, its “ego- centric” perspective, and the individual’s ability to move their point of view on the world through six degrees of freedom of movement along three dimensions. Here, ego- centrism describes an approach to body-space relations 8 M. Lombard, T. Ditton, “At the heart of it all: the concept of presence,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3, no. 2 (1997), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997. tb00072.x. 9 P. Bédard, “La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 28, no. 1 (2019): 66-92, 74, https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs.28.1.2019-0012; J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992). 10 See again J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 93 AN-ICON  which take the individual as a point of reference.11 In other words, the egocentric perspective considers the human body as a “pivot around which the three dimensions of spatial extension arrange themselves and from which they ultimately proceed.”12 This could just as easily be called anthropocentric. I continue to subscribe to the idea that VR’s apparatus and the default mode of experience it proposes are subjective, egocentric, and anthropocentric. That is because in most cases, the illusion of presence fostered by immersive virtual environments plays off this charac- teristic centrality of our body in our perception of space. Head-mounted displays become viewports into different and often completely fantastical realities, but these spaces are still explored from an egocentric perspective, with the body as invariable centre of gravity. If we assume the goal of most virtual reality experiences is to create a satisfying illusion of presence in a virtual environment–whatever the purpose for that may be–it makes perfect sense why this strategy has remained so dominant. However, this is not the only avenue. As an example, a slew of recent (flat) vid- eo games have embraced the affordances of their medi- um’s monocular perspective to create fascinating optical illusions and truly impossible body-space relations. The worlds explored in Antichamber (Demruth, 2013), Superlim- inal (Pillow Castle Games, 2019), Manifold Garden (William Chyr, 2019), Spaceflux (Colin Ardelean, 2020), Hyperbolica (CodeParade, 2022), and Parallelia (SincArt Studio, 2022) exceed our natural conception of space by presenting all manner of physically impossible environments: non-Euclid- ean, hyperbolic, fractal, etc. In so doing, they draw more inspiration from M.C. Escher’s depictions of space than 11 W.R. Sherman, A.B. Craig, Understanding Virtual Reality: Interface, Application, and Design (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman Publishers, 2003): 296. 12 E.S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): 208. Emphasis added. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 94 AN-ICON  from what we find in Leon Battista Alberti’s theorization of renaissance perspective. What if VR were to also stray from the beaten path and indulge in such perspectival fancies? In the contemporary immersive media land- scape, precious few experiments with non-anthropocen- tric spaces have surfaced–at least to my knowledge.13 In mid-2020, Diego Montoya shared Spacetime, which he described as a “special relativity VR simulation.” The ex- periment allows users to explore a room where the speed of light is much slower than usual: “You can experience space contraction, time dilation and light Doppler effects as you move”14 (Fig. 1a and 1b). Among various physical distortions the experience enables–all of which are impos- sible to encapsulate in written form–the designer explains that “[t]he world feels very ‘wobbly’ when moving very close to the speed of light, almost liquid.” While space remains Fig. 1a 13 I discuss the limits of any analysis of contemporary virtual reality in P. Bédard, “La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains.” 14 D. Montoya (@diego_montoya _), “I built a special #relativity VR simulation for @oculus Quest, where the speed of light c is much lower than usual. You can experience space contraction, time dilation and light Doppler effect as you move. 1/n,” Tweet, August 7, 2020, https://twitter.com/diego_montoya_/status/1291745102700765184, accessed January 10, 2023. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 95 AN-ICON  Fig. 1a and 1b. Diego Montoya, Fig. 1b Spacetime, 2020 three-dimensional in Spacetime, the user’s relations to that space far exceed the limits of our habitual modes of per- ception. With that said, I would hesitate to say that they exceed anthropocentrism, since the transformations that space undergoes throughout the experiment result from the user’s movements. Space is not transformed. Our per- ception of it is. As with the earlier quoted videogames, Mon- toya’s project is the exception rather than the norm. Indeed, I still believe that as long as VR remains tied to the three or six degrees of freedom model of spatial engagement which takes the body as its centre, there is little it can do to avoid this egocentric mode of experience. With that said, nothing is keeping VR designers from creating virtual environments which are abstract rather than representa- tional.15 In other words, perhaps the solution to exceeding anthropocentric perspectives in VR might be to reject the notion of “perspective” altogether. However, doing so might 15 An example I recently encountered would merit further attention in this regard. In Lockdown Dreamscape (Nicolas Gebbe, 2022), an innovative visual process was used to distort the image such that objects seemed to meld into one another. A slow movement through the distorted space led me to discover novel spatial relations. The experience was at once nauseating and thrilling. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 96 AN-ICON  require more nuanced explorations of the affordances of virtual bodies. It might also ask that we question “what it is like to be” non-human, and whether VR is at all capable to furnish an answer to that question. What it is like to be [ ] Whether it has been asked about animals, in- sects, or “things” in general, the question of “what it is like to be” this or that–whatever it may be–recognizes that our perspective as human animals is limited and distinct enough from other forms of being to preclude us from knowing or even understanding them.16 The reality behind this seem- ingly impassable chasm between ourselves and others is made clear through the concept of Umwelt, as theorized by Jakob von Uexküll. While it is true that all things (living or otherwise) occupy the same physical reality, Von Uexküll introduces the notion of Umwelt to suggest that all beings do not necessarily share the same environment or world.17 The sensorial attunement of different animals varies to such a degree that the very meaning of “world” differs from one creature to another. The word Umwelt can be translated as “self-cen- tred world.” This suggests the inherently subjective or egocentric nature of a given entity’s particular version of, and relation to, a world. This interpretation of Umwelt as “self-centred” or “subjectively-perceived” world is made even more evident when looking at the notion of subjectivity itself, understood here as that which is exclusive to a given 16 This has far-reaching implications within debates on the notion of empathy in virtual reality. 17 J. von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning (1934), trans. J.D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). The ties between von Uexküll’s Umwelt and VR have been highlighted by Andrea Pinotti in an illuminating chapter. See Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?” PHILIPPE BÉDARD 97 AN-ICON  individual (i.e., subject).18 Indeed, as Maike Sarah Reinerth and Jan-Noël Thon define it, “subjectivity” designates that to which an individual has privileged access. While this definition of subjectivity does satisfyingly describe the ex- clusive character of Umwelt, the parallel breaks down when we realize subjectivity is most often discussed in terms of the unique way in which a given subject “sees” things. The reason for this breakdown has far-reaching implications, specifically when it comes to the non-anthropocentric aims of this essay. Where the concept of Umwelt shines and where the questions of “what it is like to be” something other than human come into play is precisely when the human sen- sorium–of which sight is often taken to be the most privi- leged example–is no longer sufficient. Von Uexküll with his famous study of the tick, Thomas Nagel with his example of the bat, and Ian Bogost in his Alien Phenomenology all focus on the worldly experience of insects, animals and things that are commonly understood as blind–that is, when sight is understood from an anthropocentric perspective.19 What drives these thinkers, then, is precisely to understand how these creatures sense, navigate and exist in a version of the world that is completely different from that of hu- mans, even though we might inhabit the same spaces at any given time. How does the world of the bat differ from ours when its primary mode of experience is defined by its use of echolocation? How is the tick’s experience of the world influenced by its reliance on sensing the heat, fur, and butyric acid that signify the presence of its main prey, namely mammals? How different is the world for things 18 M.S. Reinerth, J.N. Thon, eds., Subjectivity Across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2017). For a more sustained discussion of subjectivity in VR, see P. Bédard, “La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains.” 19 T. Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?,” The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435-450, https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914; I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). PHILIPPE BÉDARD 98 AN-ICON  whose very mode of existence would even preclude us from describing them has “experiencing” the world? “When we ask what it means to be something,” Bogost summarizes, “we pose a question that exceeds our own grasp of the being of the world.”20 In brief, these ask that we set aside our privileged modes of experience for a moment and engage–even if imaginatively–with other realities parallel and equal to our own. My interest in ask- ing these questions in the context of an essay on virtual reality, then, comes from the fact that I see it as a tool for exploring and perhaps even exceeding the limits of anthro- pocentric perspectives.21 Indeed, while Reinerth and Thon remark upon the impossibility of accessing the subjectivity of others per se, the editors also suggest that media of all kinds (from literature, to movies, to games, etc.) can succeed in fostering a sense of intersubjectivity. This pro- cess could also be called empathy, namely “the ability to share and understand the experiences of others,” or, as Kate Nash defines it, “an affective response grounded in an imaginative engagement with the experience of the other.”22 Whether we call it intersubjectivity or empathy, the belief behind these concepts is that different media can make use of their unique affordances to suggest to users how a given character might subjectively perceive a given event or experience. Can VR overcome its fundamental anthropo- centrism and help users imaginatively project themselves in the experiences of others, precisely when these exceed their habitual range of possible experiences? 20 I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to be a Thing: 30. Original emphasis. 21 Pinotti might say that this desire to exceed anthropocentrism is itself anthropocentric, as it posits humans as having an exceptional capacity to access other modes of being in the world, which other creatures do not possess. See Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?”. 22 H. Farmer, “A broken empathy machine,” K. Nash, “Virtual reality witness: exploring the ethics of mediated presence,” Studies in Documentary Film 12, no. 2 (2018): 119-131, 124, https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2017.1340796. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 99 AN-ICON  Accessing non-human realities through technology An initial response to this last question might be that it cannot. Because VR HMDs are (predominantly) audiovisual devices and because they are tuned to the hu- man sensorium, they cannot, by definition, make us see and hear more than what our eyes and ears can perceive nor- mally.23 As Andrea Pinotti adroitly explains, such attempts to represent non-human realities through technology: [...] cannot patently hope to escape Nagel’s caveat. Since they are visually rendered on a screen, a compound-eye vision, a left-right- eye independent vision or an infrared vision will always be visions processed by a human eye-brain system. Human species-specific organisation operates as a physiological and phenomenological a priori that cannot simply be bypassed. This is, of course, true also for any sort of VR simulation of non-human ways of experiencing the world: they all ultimately have to be processed by such human a priori.24 This makes it seemingly impossible for HMDs to exceed our typical senses of sight and hearing, to say nothing of being able to use it to go beyond our ordinary perceptual habitus and perceive the world as a bat, tick, or other creature might. But does it mean VR cannot help us imagine what the world might look like to a different being? The fact is that we already use tools in our dai- ly lives that make visible to us phenomena to which our eyes and ears are not sensitive. The clock makes visible 23 To that effect, “[David] Eagleman has noted that the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to humans is less than a ten-trillionth of the electromagnetic field, and therefore much goes undetected in our lives apart from a ‘shockingly small fraction of the surrounding reality.” L. Jarvis, “Body-swapping: self-attribution and body transfer illusions (BTIs),” in Immersive Embodiment: Theatres of Mislocalized Sensation (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019): 99-154, 113. See also D. Eagleman, “The Umwelt,” in J. Brockman, ed., This Will Make You Smarter (London: Doubleday, 2012): 143-145. 24 A. Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?:” 46. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 100 AN-ICON  the passage of time, while other instruments transform a range of different extrasensory stimuli into visible data (e.g., spectrometer, barometer, Geiger counter, Magnetic Res- onance Imaging scanner, etc.). Through these tools, we can gain access to phenomena that are strictly speaking “invisible,” yet which become visible all the same thanks to the appropriate apparatus. Having been made visible, these phenomena are not necessarily legible to all. As Don Ihde explains, the relation with the world in which we enter when using such tools is hermeneutic, meaning it requires that we possess the knowledge and skills necessary to interpret the data presented to us through these instruments; one must know how to speak the machine’s language, and to read the world through it.25 Thinking of VR as a tool to engage hermeneu- tically with aspects of the world which we cannot natural- ly perceive is one possible avenue for thinking of it as a way to exceed the anthropocentric perspectives to which it has generally been relegated. We can see traces of this approach at play in several projects by the artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF), notably in In the Eyes of the Animal (2015), Treehugger: Wawona (2016), and We live in an Ocean of Air (2018). In each of these projects, the artists use “terrestrial laser scanners” to create what are commonly known as “point clouds.” The density and colour of these clouds can be changed to create more or less detailed pointillist representations of physical spaces. MLF uses these to translate ways of “seeing” or being in the world that are in excess of human understanding. The 25 “Hermeneutic relations,” Evan Selinger explains, “do not amplify or replicate the body’s sensory abilities; instead, they engage our linguistic and interpretative aptitudes. In this context, technologies that facilitate hermeneutic relations are best understood as being ‘text- like’; their effective utilization requires interpretation through the activity of reading.” E. Selinger, Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde (New York: SUNY Press, 2012): 5. An example that is closer to art and illusion might be anamorphosis. To see the anamorphosis hidden in an image, viewers must know how to position themselves in such a way as to reveal the image. See D.L. Collins, “Anamorphosis and the eccentric observer: inverted perspective and construction of the gaze,” Leonardo (1992): 73-82, https://www.jstor.org/stable/i270958. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 101 AN-ICON  effect lies halfway between scientific imagery and impres- sionism, as sparse arrays of point clouds leave much to the viewer’s imagination. In the Eyes of the Animal, for example, puts its viewers in the eyes of four different animals and insects (owl, frog, dragonfly, and mosquito), each with its Fig. 2a Fig. 2b Fig. 2a and 2b. Marshmallow Laser Feast, In the Eyes of the Animal, 2015 own way of perceiving a forest (Fig. 2a and 2b). Meanwhile, Treehugger and Ocean of Air each focus on trees and on the scope and time frame of their biological processes. Al- though all the creatures represented in these projects share the same environments (i.e., the forest), they each have PHILIPPE BÉDARD 102 AN-ICON  their own Umwelt, which MLF represents through different densities of point clouds and different colour filters. Some critics may point to the fact that what MLF does in their project may not be called hermeneutical, in that the tools they use do not translate the actual, literal perception of these insects and animals.26 It would also be fair to note that users would not be adequately equipped to interpret the world as perceived through these tools, even if their scientific accuracy was beyond reproach. This would be missing the point. It would be more appropriate to say that what MLF creates are artistic renditions of what the authors imagine the world might look like to different non-human animals. Their projects are best understood, then, as invitations to imaginatively explore what the Um- welt of a mosquito, dragonfly, frog, owl, or even a tree might be made of. Recall that for Reinerth and Thon, different me- dia can effectively seek to simulate certain aspects of a sub- jective experience as perceived by a particular individual by appealing to different aesthetic or narrative strategies, as well as the imagination of the user (viewer, reader, player, etc.).27 What we have yet to explore, however, is whether VR is capable of simulating experiences that exceed the boundaries of the human body. And since, as Maurice Mer- leau-Ponty writes, “I am conscious of the world through the medium of my body,”28 how the body appears and functions in VR has far-reaching implications. So while what MLF (among other artists) creates might look different than how we see the world, the question still stands as to if and 26 MLF typically collaborates with scientists in relevant fields to help them translate the data recorded. With that said, Pinotti’s reminder that data represented onscreen for human consumption is not equivalent to the source stimuli still holds true, lessening any claim these artistic experiences might want to make as to their accuracy. See Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?” 27 M.S. Reinerth, J.N. Thon, “Introduction,” in M.S. Reinerth, J.N. Thon, eds., Subjectivity Across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives: 1-25, 3. Original emphasis. 28 M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2010): 94-95. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 103 AN-ICON  how might VR allow users to act differently than they can in their own human bodies. Embodying the non-human While the illusion of presence is often acknowl- edged in discussions of VR, the various kinds of embod- ied illusions the medium offers are just as relevant, readily achievable, and arguably even more fundamental.29 It is not surprising, then, that the body, its representations, and our perception thereof have received much attention from the fields of psychology and neuroscience, especially in recent years. For instance, in their work on the so-called “Proteus effect,” Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson have demonstrat- ed how “an individual’s behaviour conforms to their digital self-representation independent of how others perceive them.”30 While most scholarship that invokes this effect focuses on the behavioural aftereffects of inhabiting other kinds of human bodies (e.g., in terms of gender, age, race, ability, etc.), some have explored the effects derived from inhabiting non-human bodies.31 These lay the groundwork for the explorations to which this essay aspires, but it is possible to go further still. A great many studies have been conducted on the topic of the “body ownership illusion,” or the so-called “body transfer illusion.” These illustrate how our body sche- ma is amenable to change when presented with sufficiently 29 I use the term “medium” loosely here, as contemporary VR is more appropriately described as an apparatus which pre-existing media are attempting to adopt. For more on that debate, see my forthcoming “Many births of VR.” 30 N. Yee, J.N. Bailenson, “The Proteus effect: the effect of transformed self-representation on behavior,” Human Communication Research 33, no. 3 (2007): 271-290, https://doi. org/10.1177/0093650208330254. 31 See S.J. Ahn et al., “Experiencing nature. Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 21, no. 6 (2016): 399-419, https://doi.org/10.1111/ jcc4.12173. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 104 AN-ICON  convincing data.32 Importantly, this adaptation also works in cases of illusion, when the brain is tricked into adopting external elements. This process can also be triggered in virtual reality applications. Starting from the now famous rubber hand illusion, studies have detailed different ways in which users can feel ownership of an artificial limb, such that they are deluded into thinking that this foreign object is part of their own body.33 Others have focussed on body transfer illusions, suggesting that even full-body stand-ins such as mannequins and digital avatars can be absorbed into a user’s body schema. VR is a particularly powerful tool for fostering this illusion since, as one notable paper suggests, “in VR, there are near-infinite opportunities for both extending and radically altering our virtual (and hence perceptually real) bodies.”34 The notion of “homuncular flexibility” further supports the idea that the mind can adapt to “exotic mor- phologies, distortions, extensions and reductions” of body 32 See M.R. Lesur et al., “The plasticity of the bodily self: head movements in bodily illusions and their relation to Gallagher’s body image and body schema,” Constructivist Foundations 14, no. 1 (2018): 94-105, https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-162795; S. Seinfeld et al., “User representations in human-computer interaction,” Human–Computer Interaction 36, no. 5-6 (2021): 400-438, https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2020.1724790; A. Maselli, M. Slater, “The building blocks of the full body ownership illusion,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2013): 1-15, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00083; M. Botvinick, J. Cohen, “Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see,” Nature 391, no. 6669 (1998): 756, https://doi.org/10.1038/35784; S. J. Ahn et al., “Experiencing nature. Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature;” N. Yee, J.N. Bailenson, “The difference between being and seeing: the relative contribution of self-perception and priming to behavioral changes via digital self-representation,” Media Psychology 12, no. 2 (2009): 195-209, https://doi.org/10.1080/15213260902849943; H. Farmer, A. Tajadura-Jiménez, M. Tsakiris, “Beyond the colour of my skin: how skin colour affects the sense of body-ownership,” Consciousness and Cognition 21, no. 3 (2012): 1242-1256, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. concog.2012.04.011; H. Farmer, L. Maister, M. Tsakiris, “Change my body, change my mind: the effects of illusory ownership of an outgroup hand on implicit attitudes toward that outgroup,” Frontiers in Psychology 4, no. 13 (2014), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.01016; H. Farmer, L. Maister, “Putting ourselves in another’s skin: using the plasticity of self- perception to enhance empathy and decrease prejudice,” Social Justice Research 30, no. 4 (2017): 323-354, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-017-0294-1. 33 M. Botvinick, J. Cohen, “Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see:” 756. 34 W. Steptoe, A. Steed, M. Slater, “Human tails: ownership and control of extended humanoid avatars,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 19, no. 4 (2013): 583-590, https://doi.org/10.1109/tvcg.2013.32. Notably, the authors also suggest that: “Our instinctive ability to rapidly and dexterously incorporate such objects and learn how to use such tools provides a clue to the remarkable plasticity of how the human brain represents the body and encodes space.” PHILIPPE BÉDARD 105 AN-ICON  configurations.35 It is interesting to note that already be- tween 1989 and 1991, ad hoc experiments were being conducted by VR pioneer Jaron Lanier and his team at VPL on an individual’s ability to take ownership of “weird ava- tars that were still usable.”36 Avatars with unusual point of view placements (e.g., eyes at hip level), extremely long ex- tremities, and even non-human avatars were experimented with.37 In the latter case, Lanier reminisces about a lobster avatar which was designed by Ann Lasko-Harvill, then Director of Product Design at VPL Research.38 Some of these informal experiments have since been proven by more robust studies. Notably, Andrea Stevenson Won and Jeremy Bailenson teamed up with and Jaron Lanier to test the ability of users to incorporate supernumerary limbs by mapping their controls to “the rotation of a wrist, the flex of an ankle, or some combination of the two.”39 This came as a response to the limitation of the human body in re- gard to the fact that, “[a]s the lobster body includes more limbs than a person, there were not enough parameters measured by the body suit to drive the lobster avatar in a one-to-one map.”40 An important limitation to the illusion of body ownership or transfer which studies on the topic often 35 Ibid. See also A.S. Won et al., “Homuncular flexibility in virtual reality,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 20, no. 3 (2015): 241-259, https://doi.org/10.1111/ jcc4.12107; A.S. Won, J. Bailenson, J. Lanier, “Homuncular flexibility: the human ability to inhabit nonhuman avatars,” Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource (2015): 1-16. 36 Ibid.: 2. 37 K. Kilteni et al., “Extending body space in immersive virtual reality: a very long arm illusion,” PloS one 7, no. 7 (2012): 1-15, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0040867; S.J. Ahn et al., “Experiencing nature. Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature;” T. Feuchtner, J. Müller, “Extending the body for interaction with reality,” Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2017), https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025689. 38 J. Lanier, “Homuncular flexibility,” in 2006: What is your Dangerous Idea? Edge: The World Question Center (2006), https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11182, accessed January 10, 2023. 39 A.S. Won et al., “Homuncular flexibility in virtual reality:” 242. Interestingly, the authors gesture towards our earlier discussion of “what it is like to be [ ]” when, in the very first line of their article, they ask: “What if you could become a bat.” Ibid.: 241. 40 A.S. Won, J. Bailenson, J. Lanier, “Homuncular flexibility: the human ability to inhabit nonhuman avatars:” 2-3. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 106 AN-ICON  highlight is the required “realism” of the external object. That is, “the need for an object to preserve precise, informa- tive corporeal structural features in order to be integrable as one’s own body part.”41 In other words, anthropomorphism is often presented as an important–if not essential–factor in the illusion of body ownership. Does this mean the move beyond human perspectives for which I am advocating in this essay is a nonstarter? Redemption for this idea might yet be found in more recent approaches to the illusion of body own- ership which point to a crucial element that is otherwise overlooked in the earlier quoted studies. Namely, in their meta-analysis of “user representations,” Sofía Seinfeld and colleagues have shown that while “[u]nrealistic visual ap- pearance, such as the visual discontinuity of the artificial body, also reduces the feeling of body ownership,” it is also true that “[b]ody ownership illusions are effectively in- duced through congruent multisensory stimulation.”42 Earli- er studies focussed on illusions generated by visual stimuli supplemented with synchronous tactile feedback (e.g., the rubber hand is stroked at the same time as the physical hand). Meanwhile, active engagement with the illusory body augmentation has been shown to play an important role in the success of this illusion. For instance, Marte Roel Lesur et al. suggest that while “the literature shows that not just any fake body or object can elicit illusory owner- ship,” at the same time, “in the presence of sensorimotor coherence, there are some examples of illusory ownership over implausible virtual bodies.”43 The redeeming quality of contemporary VR technologies in this regard is precisely their ability to afford their users agency, interactivity, and 41 A. Maselli, M. Slater, “The building blocks of the full body ownership illusion:” 12. 42 S. Seinfeld et al., “User representations in human-computer interaction:” 416-417. Emphasis added. 43 M.R. Lesur et al., “The plasticity of the bodily self: head movements in bodily illusions and their relation to Gallagher’s body image and body schema:” 101 PHILIPPE BÉDARD 107 AN-ICON  multisensory feedback which work in concert to create many of the contingencies that are known to facilitate such body ownership illusions. Fig. 3a Fig. 3b Fig. 3a and 3b. Non-human bodies in Plastisapiens (Miri Chekhanovich and Édith Jorisch, 2022). Credit: National Film Board of Canada (2022) True as it might be that most recent VR ex- periences remain tied to humanoid avatars, some have pushed the boundaries of what counts as realistic body, while others have experimented with bodies that are alto- gether non-human. One such notable example is the VR experience Plastisapiens (Miri Chekhanovich and Édith Jorisch, 2022), a piece of “surrealist ecofiction” which asks viewers to imagine a future where human evolution has been shaped by our exposure to microplastics in the air we PHILIPPE BÉDARD 108 AN-ICON  breathe, the water we drink, and the food we ingest; the An- thropocene has here been replaced by what we might call the Plasticene. Throughout its 15–minutes runtime, Plasti- sapiens asks its viewers to adopt a number of new bodies, from a prehistoric betentacled creature to the eponymous human-plastic hybrid, whose hands seem to be made of thin plastic (Fig. 3a and 3b). In both cases, “hands” are the only part of their body users can see, leaving the rest up to their imagination. Meanwhile, hand tracking is used to manip- ulate these new alien-looking appendages. The player’s agency is made evident in their ability to move their hands in predictable ways. Here, part of the success for the body ownership illusion is ensured by the synchronous move- ment of the hand in physical reality and the appearance of the corresponding movement of the alien limb, as seen in the HMD. In my own experience of Plastisapiens, I had no issue whatsoever knowing how to manipulate my tentacles to successfully reach the objects in my vicinity, adapting to their limits and affordances within a matter of seconds. Fur- thermore, the experience employs haptic feedback through the controllers to add a sense of multisensory correspon- dence between what the eye registers the tentacle having touched, and what the physical (i.e., human) hand feels having touched as well. Agency, interactivity, and multi- sensory feedback therefore join forces to foster a sense of sensorimotor coherence, thereby facilitating the illusion of body ownership despite the lack of realism of the bodies on offer.44 44 See also the oft-cited experience Birdly (Somniacs AG, 2015), another good example of agency and synchronous multisensory feedback contributing to successful illusory ownership of non-human animal bodies. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 109 AN-ICON  Conclusion Fascinated as I am by the possibilities opened up by the idea of inhabiting non-human bodies, I can- not help but see the limitations of this kind of temporary foray into the world of non-human animals. If VR as it exists today struggles to make us see things from the perspective of another human being, as so many have already demonstrated, can it truly show us what it is like to be an animal, or any other non-human creature for that matter? Further limitations come up when we begin to question VR’s efficacy as an illusion. In a recent essay on the myth of total illusion in virtual reality, Janet Murray insists that, more than any medium before: Interactive environments demand more explicit partnership than just the willing suspension of disbelief; they become real through the “active creation of belief” by inducing and satis- fying specific intentional gestures of engagement. As soon as we stop participating, because we are confused or bored or uncomfortably stimulated, the illusion vanishes.45 Indeed, Murray is careful to remind us of a fact that is rarely highlighted in studies on illusions in VR, namely that effects such as the body ownership illusion are difficult to achieve and more difficult still to maintain.46 On one hand, I want to join Murray in insist- ing on the important role played by individual users in fostering the kinds of illusions for which I am advocat- ing in this essay. In an earlier paper on empathy in VR, I came to a conclusion that applies just as well to the idea 45 J.H. Murray, “Virtual/reality: how to tell the difference,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 11-27 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1470412920906253. Emphasis added. See also J.H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1997) (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2017): 136-139. 46 “The rubber/virtual hand experiment is truly delusional, but it is important to note that it is a fragile and momentary delusion.” Ibid.: 17. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 110 AN-ICON  of imaginatively projecting oneself in the experience of non-human or non-living beings: “users must know how and want to use this tool.”47 The non-anthropocentric ef- fects which I describe in this essay are difficult to achieve for users who do not know how–or much less care–to use VR as a tool to explore spaces and bodies which exceed their natural capabilities. On the other hand, I also want to recognize that the very idea of optical illu- sion hinges upon the illusory nature of the phenomenon. This assumes the automatic and involuntary process by which we can succumb to illusions; optical or otherwise. When the necessary conditions are met, we cannot help but fall victim to illusions. Could VR’s affordances be used to such effect? I am also keen on suggesting a fruitful ave- nue might lie in effects that are not quite illusions, but rather something we might call “games of perception,” or even hallucinations.48 Further research could be done in this regard to echo Crary’s work on subjective vision as it was utilized in the creation on optical toys in the 18th and 19th centuries. To that effect, we should also consider the scholarship that has been produced on the revelatory potentials of optical technologies used in ways that defy anthropocentric concerns. I am thinking here of Stan Brakhage’s call for a radical exploration of cinema’s visual capabilities, as well as of William Wees’ study of experimental cinema’s ability to “exceed” the limitations of human vision.49 In both cases, nonnormative uses of a technology lead to drastic effects, as heretofore dom- inant modes of representation are swept aside in favour 47 This essay is forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. 48 For more on illusions and hallucinations in VR, see C. Paolucci, “Perception, hallucination, virtual reality. From controlled hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 112-128, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/15443; P. Montani, “The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the image as a ‘bilderschrift’,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 154-172, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/15441. 49 W.C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). PHILIPPE BÉDARD 111 AN-ICON  of more eccentric–or even excessive–ways of engaging with worldly phenomena. And while both examples re- late to cinema, there is no reason why VR should not be amenable to such experimental fancies. Where is VR’s Brakhage? Its surrealist or Dadaist movement? Its fear- less pioneers? PHILIPPE BÉDARD 112 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18458

Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality by Philippe Bédard art Virtual Reality Illusion Anthropocentrism Umwelt Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality art PHILIPPE BÉDARD, McGill University – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4100-5249 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18458 “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unpreju- diced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception”1 Abstract In the following essay, I consider if and how VR’s uncanny ability to create an illusion of presence and generate a sense of body ownership might be used to go beyond our anthropocentric perspective, towards non-hu- man experiences. By adventuring outside the domain of human experience, my goal is to address the affordances and limitations of VR’s illusionistic potential. Knowing full well that certain economic pressures preclude artists from pursuing the kinds of provocations I describe in this essay, I nevertheless invite readers to follow along as I explore alternative potentialities of contemporary VR. Specifically, I approach VR here in the hopes of finding ways of engaging with different bodies, spaces, and realities, even if illusorily. Keywords Virtual reality Illusion Anthropocentrism Umwelt To quote this essay: P. Bédard, “Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality art,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 89-112, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18458 1 S. Brakhage, “From Metaphors on Vision,” in P.A. Sitney, ed., The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1978): 120. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 89 AN-ICON  Introduction Many things have changed between the origi- nal heyday of virtual reality (VR) in the 1980–1990s and the current revival of the technology since the early 2010s. But while today VR might benefit from the leaps and bounds computers and graphic technologies have witnessed in the intervening decades, and while it might enjoy greater commercial success than ever before, I often feel our imag- ination around the kinds of experiences enabled by VR has suffered somewhat. We are far removed today from Mere- dith Bricken’s suggestion that in VR: “You can be the mad hatter or you can be the teapot; you can move back and forth to the rhythm of a song. You can be a tiny droplet in the rain or in the river.”2 Likewise, we seem to have strayed from Jaron Lanier’s proposition that in virtual reality, “you can visit the world of the dinosaur, then become a Tyran- nosaurus. Not only can you see DNA, you can experience what it’s like to be a molecule.”3 While Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin use these two quotes to highlight the illusion of “perceptual immediacy”4 of immersive virtual reality experiences, I see in these statements something else entirely more interesting: the idea that VR might give us experiences that far exceed the limits of human under- standing. In the following essay, I consider if and how VR’s uncanny ability to create an illusion of presence and generate a sense of body ownership might be used to go beyond our anthropocentric perspective, towards non-hu- man experiences. By adventuring outside the domain of human experience, my goal is to address the affordances 2 M. Bricken, “Virtual worlds: no interface to design,” in M. Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1991): 363-382, 372. 3 S. Ditlea, “False starts aside, virtual reality finds new roles,” New York Times (March 23, 1998): 97. 4 J. Bolter, R. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2000): 22. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 90 AN-ICON  and limitations of VR’s illusionistic potential. In so doing, I also aim to explore how VR might be thought of as more than a means to foster empathy for other human beings, whatever the purpose for that endeavour might be.5 This allows me to discuss immersive technologies and experi- ences in a context devoid of the problems typically asso- ciated with discourses around the concept of “empathy machine.” I begin this essay by addressing the illusion of presence in VR, specifically as it relates to our experience of body-space relations in physical reality. I start by address- ing what I argue to be the fundamental anthropocentrism of VR’s dominant mode of experience. This crucial detour has me discussing whether VR is capable of representing non-human modes of being in the world. Necessarily, this also means addressing earlier thought experiments in the field of psychology, biology, and philosophy that sought to question “what it is like to be” something other than human. Having done so, I then consider whether VR might have the ability to give us access to non-human realities, or whether it is limited by a fundamental anthropocentrism. Finally, I 5 On the issue of empathy in VR, see J.H. Murray, “Not a film and not an empathy machine,” Immerse (October 6, 2016): https://immerse.news/not-a-film-and-not-an-empathy-machine- 48b63b0eda93, accessed January 10, 2023; S. Gregory, “Immersive witnessing: from empathy and outrage to action,” WITNESS blog (2016), https://blog.witness.org/2016/08/ immersive-witnessing-from-empathy-and-outrage-to-action/, accessed January 10, 2023; G. Bollmer, “Empathy machines,” Media International Australia 165, no. 1 (2017): 63-76, https:// doi.org/10.1177/1329878X17726794; R. Yang, “If you walk in someone else’s shoes, then you’ve taken their shoes: empathy machines as appropriation machines,” Radiator Blog (April 5, 2017), https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2017/04/if-you-walk-in-someone-elses-shoes- then.html, accessed January 10, 2023; H. Farmer, “A broken empathy machine,” Immerse (September 30, 2019), https://immerse.news/a-broken-empathy-machine-can-virtual-reality- increase-pro-social-behaviour-and-reduce-prejudice-cbcefb30525b, accessed January 10, 2023; P. Roquet, “Empathy for the game master: how virtual reality creates empathy for those seen to be creating VR,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 65-80, https://doi. org/10.1177/1470412920906260; L. Nakamura, “Feeling good about feeling bad: virtuous virtual reality and the automation of racial empathy,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 47-64, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906259; G. Bollmer and K. Guinness, “Empathy and nausea: virtual reality and Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 28-46, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906261. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 91 AN-ICON  look at experiments relating to illusions of body ownership in VR, specifically as they relate to non-human bodies. As will become abundantly clear over the course of this essay, my goal is speculative—perhaps even provocative—rather than earnest. I write this text as an exercise in exploring what I perceive to be a bias towards anthropocentrism in VR, a medium which has so often been lauded for its ability to simulate otherwise impossible real- ities.6 Readers may also see this as a call to action to VR designers and consumers to open their minds to the pos- sibilities offered by contemporary immersive technologies beyond those practices that currently dominate the market. Knowing full well that certain economic pressures preclude artists from pursuing the kinds of provocations I describe in this essay, I nevertheless invite readers to follow along as I explore alternative potentialities of contemporary VR.7 Specifically, I approach VR here in the hopes of finding ways of engaging with different bodies, spaces, and real- ities, even if illusorily. Virtual reality environments: immediacy and presence It has become something of a truism to recog- nize that VR is able to foster a sense of presence, that is, the impression of “being there” in a virtual environment dis- tinct from the physical environment that one’s body is also occupying. Or, as Mathew Lombard et al. put it, presence 6 I maintain that VR is currently driven by profoundly anthropocentric forces, despite the “anti-anthropocentric drive which,” according to Andrea Pinotti, “currently characterises not only the VR world but contemporary visual culture, in various mediums, more generally.” A. Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?,” in Y. Hadjinicolaou, ed., Visual Engagements: Image Practices and Falconry (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020): 30-47, 44, https:// doi.org/10.1515/9783110618587-003. See also R. Grusin, The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 7 I also want to recognize that there are the effects of VR are not currently fully known and that much more work must be done to ensure current VR technologies are accessible and ethical. These pressing issues certainly deserve more attention before we can move towards more elaborate explorations of the outer limits of VR. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 92 AN-ICON  describes, “the perceptual illusion of non-mediation.”8 In this context, the perceived lack of mediation is predicated on VR’s ability to foster a convincing illusion of a space that reproduces the way we see the world in our daily lives: as a three-dimensional volume in which our bodies can move and act. And while on their own the affordances of head-mounted displays (HMD) could be used to create any number of effects and illusions, the dominant practice of contemporary immersive media has been to reproduce our habitual modes of (visual) perception: looking ahead from an upright position through a pair of eyes which we can move around (either in their orbits, by moving our head, or our body) to see the surrounding environment. In an earlier essay, I described VR as inherently subjective, following Jonathan Crary’s incisive discussion of “subjective vision.”9 By extension, I would also argue its default mode of experience–that for which it was designed and that which is dominant to this day–is also intrinsically anthropocentric. This is because “subjective,” in this con- text, refers to the idiosyncrasies of human vision.10 By the same token, I describe an apparatus which relies on these unique and fallible qualities of perception as subjective. In the case of VR, the HMD hinges upon the following sub- jective qualities of human vision: its binocularity, its “ego- centric” perspective, and the individual’s ability to move their point of view on the world through six degrees of freedom of movement along three dimensions. Here, ego- centrism describes an approach to body-space relations 8 M. Lombard, T. Ditton, “At the heart of it all: the concept of presence,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3, no. 2 (1997), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997. tb00072.x. 9 P. Bédard, “La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 28, no. 1 (2019): 66-92, 74, https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs.28.1.2019-0012; J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992). 10 See again J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 93 AN-ICON  which take the individual as a point of reference.11 In other words, the egocentric perspective considers the human body as a “pivot around which the three dimensions of spatial extension arrange themselves and from which they ultimately proceed.”12 This could just as easily be called anthropocentric. I continue to subscribe to the idea that VR’s apparatus and the default mode of experience it proposes are subjective, egocentric, and anthropocentric. That is because in most cases, the illusion of presence fostered by immersive virtual environments plays off this charac- teristic centrality of our body in our perception of space. Head-mounted displays become viewports into different and often completely fantastical realities, but these spaces are still explored from an egocentric perspective, with the body as invariable centre of gravity. If we assume the goal of most virtual reality experiences is to create a satisfying illusion of presence in a virtual environment–whatever the purpose for that may be–it makes perfect sense why this strategy has remained so dominant. However, this is not the only avenue. As an example, a slew of recent (flat) vid- eo games have embraced the affordances of their medi- um’s monocular perspective to create fascinating optical illusions and truly impossible body-space relations. The worlds explored in Antichamber (Demruth, 2013), Superlim- inal (Pillow Castle Games, 2019), Manifold Garden (William Chyr, 2019), Spaceflux (Colin Ardelean, 2020), Hyperbolica (CodeParade, 2022), and Parallelia (SincArt Studio, 2022) exceed our natural conception of space by presenting all manner of physically impossible environments: non-Euclid- ean, hyperbolic, fractal, etc. In so doing, they draw more inspiration from M.C. Escher’s depictions of space than 11 W.R. Sherman, A.B. Craig, Understanding Virtual Reality: Interface, Application, and Design (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman Publishers, 2003): 296. 12 E.S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): 208. Emphasis added. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 94 AN-ICON  from what we find in Leon Battista Alberti’s theorization of renaissance perspective. What if VR were to also stray from the beaten path and indulge in such perspectival fancies? In the contemporary immersive media land- scape, precious few experiments with non-anthropocen- tric spaces have surfaced–at least to my knowledge.13 In mid-2020, Diego Montoya shared Spacetime, which he described as a “special relativity VR simulation.” The ex- periment allows users to explore a room where the speed of light is much slower than usual: “You can experience space contraction, time dilation and light Doppler effects as you move”14 (Fig. 1a and 1b). Among various physical distortions the experience enables–all of which are impos- sible to encapsulate in written form–the designer explains that “[t]he world feels very ‘wobbly’ when moving very close to the speed of light, almost liquid.” While space remains Fig. 1a 13 I discuss the limits of any analysis of contemporary virtual reality in P. Bédard, “La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains.” 14 D. Montoya (@diego_montoya _), “I built a special #relativity VR simulation for @oculus Quest, where the speed of light c is much lower than usual. You can experience space contraction, time dilation and light Doppler effect as you move. 1/n,” Tweet, August 7, 2020, https://twitter.com/diego_montoya_/status/1291745102700765184, accessed January 10, 2023. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 95 AN-ICON  Fig. 1a and 1b. Diego Montoya, Fig. 1b Spacetime, 2020 three-dimensional in Spacetime, the user’s relations to that space far exceed the limits of our habitual modes of per- ception. With that said, I would hesitate to say that they exceed anthropocentrism, since the transformations that space undergoes throughout the experiment result from the user’s movements. Space is not transformed. Our per- ception of it is. As with the earlier quoted videogames, Mon- toya’s project is the exception rather than the norm. Indeed, I still believe that as long as VR remains tied to the three or six degrees of freedom model of spatial engagement which takes the body as its centre, there is little it can do to avoid this egocentric mode of experience. With that said, nothing is keeping VR designers from creating virtual environments which are abstract rather than representa- tional.15 In other words, perhaps the solution to exceeding anthropocentric perspectives in VR might be to reject the notion of “perspective” altogether. However, doing so might 15 An example I recently encountered would merit further attention in this regard. In Lockdown Dreamscape (Nicolas Gebbe, 2022), an innovative visual process was used to distort the image such that objects seemed to meld into one another. A slow movement through the distorted space led me to discover novel spatial relations. The experience was at once nauseating and thrilling. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 96 AN-ICON  require more nuanced explorations of the affordances of virtual bodies. It might also ask that we question “what it is like to be” non-human, and whether VR is at all capable to furnish an answer to that question. What it is like to be [ ] Whether it has been asked about animals, in- sects, or “things” in general, the question of “what it is like to be” this or that–whatever it may be–recognizes that our perspective as human animals is limited and distinct enough from other forms of being to preclude us from knowing or even understanding them.16 The reality behind this seem- ingly impassable chasm between ourselves and others is made clear through the concept of Umwelt, as theorized by Jakob von Uexküll. While it is true that all things (living or otherwise) occupy the same physical reality, Von Uexküll introduces the notion of Umwelt to suggest that all beings do not necessarily share the same environment or world.17 The sensorial attunement of different animals varies to such a degree that the very meaning of “world” differs from one creature to another. The word Umwelt can be translated as “self-cen- tred world.” This suggests the inherently subjective or egocentric nature of a given entity’s particular version of, and relation to, a world. This interpretation of Umwelt as “self-centred” or “subjectively-perceived” world is made even more evident when looking at the notion of subjectivity itself, understood here as that which is exclusive to a given 16 This has far-reaching implications within debates on the notion of empathy in virtual reality. 17 J. von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning (1934), trans. J.D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). The ties between von Uexküll’s Umwelt and VR have been highlighted by Andrea Pinotti in an illuminating chapter. See Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?” PHILIPPE BÉDARD 97 AN-ICON  individual (i.e., subject).18 Indeed, as Maike Sarah Reinerth and Jan-Noël Thon define it, “subjectivity” designates that to which an individual has privileged access. While this definition of subjectivity does satisfyingly describe the ex- clusive character of Umwelt, the parallel breaks down when we realize subjectivity is most often discussed in terms of the unique way in which a given subject “sees” things. The reason for this breakdown has far-reaching implications, specifically when it comes to the non-anthropocentric aims of this essay. Where the concept of Umwelt shines and where the questions of “what it is like to be” something other than human come into play is precisely when the human sen- sorium–of which sight is often taken to be the most privi- leged example–is no longer sufficient. Von Uexküll with his famous study of the tick, Thomas Nagel with his example of the bat, and Ian Bogost in his Alien Phenomenology all focus on the worldly experience of insects, animals and things that are commonly understood as blind–that is, when sight is understood from an anthropocentric perspective.19 What drives these thinkers, then, is precisely to understand how these creatures sense, navigate and exist in a version of the world that is completely different from that of hu- mans, even though we might inhabit the same spaces at any given time. How does the world of the bat differ from ours when its primary mode of experience is defined by its use of echolocation? How is the tick’s experience of the world influenced by its reliance on sensing the heat, fur, and butyric acid that signify the presence of its main prey, namely mammals? How different is the world for things 18 M.S. Reinerth, J.N. Thon, eds., Subjectivity Across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2017). For a more sustained discussion of subjectivity in VR, see P. Bédard, “La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains.” 19 T. Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?,” The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435-450, https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914; I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). PHILIPPE BÉDARD 98 AN-ICON  whose very mode of existence would even preclude us from describing them has “experiencing” the world? “When we ask what it means to be something,” Bogost summarizes, “we pose a question that exceeds our own grasp of the being of the world.”20 In brief, these ask that we set aside our privileged modes of experience for a moment and engage–even if imaginatively–with other realities parallel and equal to our own. My interest in ask- ing these questions in the context of an essay on virtual reality, then, comes from the fact that I see it as a tool for exploring and perhaps even exceeding the limits of anthro- pocentric perspectives.21 Indeed, while Reinerth and Thon remark upon the impossibility of accessing the subjectivity of others per se, the editors also suggest that media of all kinds (from literature, to movies, to games, etc.) can succeed in fostering a sense of intersubjectivity. This pro- cess could also be called empathy, namely “the ability to share and understand the experiences of others,” or, as Kate Nash defines it, “an affective response grounded in an imaginative engagement with the experience of the other.”22 Whether we call it intersubjectivity or empathy, the belief behind these concepts is that different media can make use of their unique affordances to suggest to users how a given character might subjectively perceive a given event or experience. Can VR overcome its fundamental anthropo- centrism and help users imaginatively project themselves in the experiences of others, precisely when these exceed their habitual range of possible experiences? 20 I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to be a Thing: 30. Original emphasis. 21 Pinotti might say that this desire to exceed anthropocentrism is itself anthropocentric, as it posits humans as having an exceptional capacity to access other modes of being in the world, which other creatures do not possess. See Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?”. 22 H. Farmer, “A broken empathy machine,” K. Nash, “Virtual reality witness: exploring the ethics of mediated presence,” Studies in Documentary Film 12, no. 2 (2018): 119-131, 124, https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2017.1340796. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 99 AN-ICON  Accessing non-human realities through technology An initial response to this last question might be that it cannot. Because VR HMDs are (predominantly) audiovisual devices and because they are tuned to the hu- man sensorium, they cannot, by definition, make us see and hear more than what our eyes and ears can perceive nor- mally.23 As Andrea Pinotti adroitly explains, such attempts to represent non-human realities through technology: [...] cannot patently hope to escape Nagel’s caveat. Since they are visually rendered on a screen, a compound-eye vision, a left-right- eye independent vision or an infrared vision will always be visions processed by a human eye-brain system. Human species-specific organisation operates as a physiological and phenomenological a priori that cannot simply be bypassed. This is, of course, true also for any sort of VR simulation of non-human ways of experiencing the world: they all ultimately have to be processed by such human a priori.24 This makes it seemingly impossible for HMDs to exceed our typical senses of sight and hearing, to say nothing of being able to use it to go beyond our ordinary perceptual habitus and perceive the world as a bat, tick, or other creature might. But does it mean VR cannot help us imagine what the world might look like to a different being? The fact is that we already use tools in our dai- ly lives that make visible to us phenomena to which our eyes and ears are not sensitive. The clock makes visible 23 To that effect, “[David] Eagleman has noted that the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to humans is less than a ten-trillionth of the electromagnetic field, and therefore much goes undetected in our lives apart from a ‘shockingly small fraction of the surrounding reality.” L. Jarvis, “Body-swapping: self-attribution and body transfer illusions (BTIs),” in Immersive Embodiment: Theatres of Mislocalized Sensation (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019): 99-154, 113. See also D. Eagleman, “The Umwelt,” in J. Brockman, ed., This Will Make You Smarter (London: Doubleday, 2012): 143-145. 24 A. Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?:” 46. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 100 AN-ICON  the passage of time, while other instruments transform a range of different extrasensory stimuli into visible data (e.g., spectrometer, barometer, Geiger counter, Magnetic Res- onance Imaging scanner, etc.). Through these tools, we can gain access to phenomena that are strictly speaking “invisible,” yet which become visible all the same thanks to the appropriate apparatus. Having been made visible, these phenomena are not necessarily legible to all. As Don Ihde explains, the relation with the world in which we enter when using such tools is hermeneutic, meaning it requires that we possess the knowledge and skills necessary to interpret the data presented to us through these instruments; one must know how to speak the machine’s language, and to read the world through it.25 Thinking of VR as a tool to engage hermeneu- tically with aspects of the world which we cannot natural- ly perceive is one possible avenue for thinking of it as a way to exceed the anthropocentric perspectives to which it has generally been relegated. We can see traces of this approach at play in several projects by the artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF), notably in In the Eyes of the Animal (2015), Treehugger: Wawona (2016), and We live in an Ocean of Air (2018). In each of these projects, the artists use “terrestrial laser scanners” to create what are commonly known as “point clouds.” The density and colour of these clouds can be changed to create more or less detailed pointillist representations of physical spaces. MLF uses these to translate ways of “seeing” or being in the world that are in excess of human understanding. The 25 “Hermeneutic relations,” Evan Selinger explains, “do not amplify or replicate the body’s sensory abilities; instead, they engage our linguistic and interpretative aptitudes. In this context, technologies that facilitate hermeneutic relations are best understood as being ‘text- like’; their effective utilization requires interpretation through the activity of reading.” E. Selinger, Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde (New York: SUNY Press, 2012): 5. An example that is closer to art and illusion might be anamorphosis. To see the anamorphosis hidden in an image, viewers must know how to position themselves in such a way as to reveal the image. See D.L. Collins, “Anamorphosis and the eccentric observer: inverted perspective and construction of the gaze,” Leonardo (1992): 73-82, https://www.jstor.org/stable/i270958. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 101 AN-ICON  effect lies halfway between scientific imagery and impres- sionism, as sparse arrays of point clouds leave much to the viewer’s imagination. In the Eyes of the Animal, for example, puts its viewers in the eyes of four different animals and insects (owl, frog, dragonfly, and mosquito), each with its Fig. 2a Fig. 2b Fig. 2a and 2b. Marshmallow Laser Feast, In the Eyes of the Animal, 2015 own way of perceiving a forest (Fig. 2a and 2b). Meanwhile, Treehugger and Ocean of Air each focus on trees and on the scope and time frame of their biological processes. Al- though all the creatures represented in these projects share the same environments (i.e., the forest), they each have PHILIPPE BÉDARD 102 AN-ICON  their own Umwelt, which MLF represents through different densities of point clouds and different colour filters. Some critics may point to the fact that what MLF does in their project may not be called hermeneutical, in that the tools they use do not translate the actual, literal perception of these insects and animals.26 It would also be fair to note that users would not be adequately equipped to interpret the world as perceived through these tools, even if their scientific accuracy was beyond reproach. This would be missing the point. It would be more appropriate to say that what MLF creates are artistic renditions of what the authors imagine the world might look like to different non-human animals. Their projects are best understood, then, as invitations to imaginatively explore what the Um- welt of a mosquito, dragonfly, frog, owl, or even a tree might be made of. Recall that for Reinerth and Thon, different me- dia can effectively seek to simulate certain aspects of a sub- jective experience as perceived by a particular individual by appealing to different aesthetic or narrative strategies, as well as the imagination of the user (viewer, reader, player, etc.).27 What we have yet to explore, however, is whether VR is capable of simulating experiences that exceed the boundaries of the human body. And since, as Maurice Mer- leau-Ponty writes, “I am conscious of the world through the medium of my body,”28 how the body appears and functions in VR has far-reaching implications. So while what MLF (among other artists) creates might look different than how we see the world, the question still stands as to if and 26 MLF typically collaborates with scientists in relevant fields to help them translate the data recorded. With that said, Pinotti’s reminder that data represented onscreen for human consumption is not equivalent to the source stimuli still holds true, lessening any claim these artistic experiences might want to make as to their accuracy. See Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?” 27 M.S. Reinerth, J.N. Thon, “Introduction,” in M.S. Reinerth, J.N. Thon, eds., Subjectivity Across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives: 1-25, 3. Original emphasis. 28 M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2010): 94-95. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 103 AN-ICON  how might VR allow users to act differently than they can in their own human bodies. Embodying the non-human While the illusion of presence is often acknowl- edged in discussions of VR, the various kinds of embod- ied illusions the medium offers are just as relevant, readily achievable, and arguably even more fundamental.29 It is not surprising, then, that the body, its representations, and our perception thereof have received much attention from the fields of psychology and neuroscience, especially in recent years. For instance, in their work on the so-called “Proteus effect,” Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson have demonstrat- ed how “an individual’s behaviour conforms to their digital self-representation independent of how others perceive them.”30 While most scholarship that invokes this effect focuses on the behavioural aftereffects of inhabiting other kinds of human bodies (e.g., in terms of gender, age, race, ability, etc.), some have explored the effects derived from inhabiting non-human bodies.31 These lay the groundwork for the explorations to which this essay aspires, but it is possible to go further still. A great many studies have been conducted on the topic of the “body ownership illusion,” or the so-called “body transfer illusion.” These illustrate how our body sche- ma is amenable to change when presented with sufficiently 29 I use the term “medium” loosely here, as contemporary VR is more appropriately described as an apparatus which pre-existing media are attempting to adopt. For more on that debate, see my forthcoming “Many births of VR.” 30 N. Yee, J.N. Bailenson, “The Proteus effect: the effect of transformed self-representation on behavior,” Human Communication Research 33, no. 3 (2007): 271-290, https://doi. org/10.1177/0093650208330254. 31 See S.J. Ahn et al., “Experiencing nature. Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 21, no. 6 (2016): 399-419, https://doi.org/10.1111/ jcc4.12173. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 104 AN-ICON  convincing data.32 Importantly, this adaptation also works in cases of illusion, when the brain is tricked into adopting external elements. This process can also be triggered in virtual reality applications. Starting from the now famous rubber hand illusion, studies have detailed different ways in which users can feel ownership of an artificial limb, such that they are deluded into thinking that this foreign object is part of their own body.33 Others have focussed on body transfer illusions, suggesting that even full-body stand-ins such as mannequins and digital avatars can be absorbed into a user’s body schema. VR is a particularly powerful tool for fostering this illusion since, as one notable paper suggests, “in VR, there are near-infinite opportunities for both extending and radically altering our virtual (and hence perceptually real) bodies.”34 The notion of “homuncular flexibility” further supports the idea that the mind can adapt to “exotic mor- phologies, distortions, extensions and reductions” of body 32 See M.R. Lesur et al., “The plasticity of the bodily self: head movements in bodily illusions and their relation to Gallagher’s body image and body schema,” Constructivist Foundations 14, no. 1 (2018): 94-105, https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-162795; S. Seinfeld et al., “User representations in human-computer interaction,” Human–Computer Interaction 36, no. 5-6 (2021): 400-438, https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2020.1724790; A. Maselli, M. Slater, “The building blocks of the full body ownership illusion,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2013): 1-15, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00083; M. Botvinick, J. Cohen, “Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see,” Nature 391, no. 6669 (1998): 756, https://doi.org/10.1038/35784; S. J. Ahn et al., “Experiencing nature. Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature;” N. Yee, J.N. Bailenson, “The difference between being and seeing: the relative contribution of self-perception and priming to behavioral changes via digital self-representation,” Media Psychology 12, no. 2 (2009): 195-209, https://doi.org/10.1080/15213260902849943; H. Farmer, A. Tajadura-Jiménez, M. Tsakiris, “Beyond the colour of my skin: how skin colour affects the sense of body-ownership,” Consciousness and Cognition 21, no. 3 (2012): 1242-1256, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. concog.2012.04.011; H. Farmer, L. Maister, M. Tsakiris, “Change my body, change my mind: the effects of illusory ownership of an outgroup hand on implicit attitudes toward that outgroup,” Frontiers in Psychology 4, no. 13 (2014), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.01016; H. Farmer, L. Maister, “Putting ourselves in another’s skin: using the plasticity of self- perception to enhance empathy and decrease prejudice,” Social Justice Research 30, no. 4 (2017): 323-354, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-017-0294-1. 33 M. Botvinick, J. Cohen, “Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see:” 756. 34 W. Steptoe, A. Steed, M. Slater, “Human tails: ownership and control of extended humanoid avatars,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 19, no. 4 (2013): 583-590, https://doi.org/10.1109/tvcg.2013.32. Notably, the authors also suggest that: “Our instinctive ability to rapidly and dexterously incorporate such objects and learn how to use such tools provides a clue to the remarkable plasticity of how the human brain represents the body and encodes space.” PHILIPPE BÉDARD 105 AN-ICON  configurations.35 It is interesting to note that already be- tween 1989 and 1991, ad hoc experiments were being conducted by VR pioneer Jaron Lanier and his team at VPL on an individual’s ability to take ownership of “weird ava- tars that were still usable.”36 Avatars with unusual point of view placements (e.g., eyes at hip level), extremely long ex- tremities, and even non-human avatars were experimented with.37 In the latter case, Lanier reminisces about a lobster avatar which was designed by Ann Lasko-Harvill, then Director of Product Design at VPL Research.38 Some of these informal experiments have since been proven by more robust studies. Notably, Andrea Stevenson Won and Jeremy Bailenson teamed up with and Jaron Lanier to test the ability of users to incorporate supernumerary limbs by mapping their controls to “the rotation of a wrist, the flex of an ankle, or some combination of the two.”39 This came as a response to the limitation of the human body in re- gard to the fact that, “[a]s the lobster body includes more limbs than a person, there were not enough parameters measured by the body suit to drive the lobster avatar in a one-to-one map.”40 An important limitation to the illusion of body ownership or transfer which studies on the topic often 35 Ibid. See also A.S. Won et al., “Homuncular flexibility in virtual reality,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 20, no. 3 (2015): 241-259, https://doi.org/10.1111/ jcc4.12107; A.S. Won, J. Bailenson, J. Lanier, “Homuncular flexibility: the human ability to inhabit nonhuman avatars,” Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource (2015): 1-16. 36 Ibid.: 2. 37 K. Kilteni et al., “Extending body space in immersive virtual reality: a very long arm illusion,” PloS one 7, no. 7 (2012): 1-15, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0040867; S.J. Ahn et al., “Experiencing nature. Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature;” T. Feuchtner, J. Müller, “Extending the body for interaction with reality,” Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2017), https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025689. 38 J. Lanier, “Homuncular flexibility,” in 2006: What is your Dangerous Idea? Edge: The World Question Center (2006), https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11182, accessed January 10, 2023. 39 A.S. Won et al., “Homuncular flexibility in virtual reality:” 242. Interestingly, the authors gesture towards our earlier discussion of “what it is like to be [ ]” when, in the very first line of their article, they ask: “What if you could become a bat.” Ibid.: 241. 40 A.S. Won, J. Bailenson, J. Lanier, “Homuncular flexibility: the human ability to inhabit nonhuman avatars:” 2-3. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 106 AN-ICON  highlight is the required “realism” of the external object. That is, “the need for an object to preserve precise, informa- tive corporeal structural features in order to be integrable as one’s own body part.”41 In other words, anthropomorphism is often presented as an important–if not essential–factor in the illusion of body ownership. Does this mean the move beyond human perspectives for which I am advocating in this essay is a nonstarter? Redemption for this idea might yet be found in more recent approaches to the illusion of body own- ership which point to a crucial element that is otherwise overlooked in the earlier quoted studies. Namely, in their meta-analysis of “user representations,” Sofía Seinfeld and colleagues have shown that while “[u]nrealistic visual ap- pearance, such as the visual discontinuity of the artificial body, also reduces the feeling of body ownership,” it is also true that “[b]ody ownership illusions are effectively in- duced through congruent multisensory stimulation.”42 Earli- er studies focussed on illusions generated by visual stimuli supplemented with synchronous tactile feedback (e.g., the rubber hand is stroked at the same time as the physical hand). Meanwhile, active engagement with the illusory body augmentation has been shown to play an important role in the success of this illusion. For instance, Marte Roel Lesur et al. suggest that while “the literature shows that not just any fake body or object can elicit illusory owner- ship,” at the same time, “in the presence of sensorimotor coherence, there are some examples of illusory ownership over implausible virtual bodies.”43 The redeeming quality of contemporary VR technologies in this regard is precisely their ability to afford their users agency, interactivity, and 41 A. Maselli, M. Slater, “The building blocks of the full body ownership illusion:” 12. 42 S. Seinfeld et al., “User representations in human-computer interaction:” 416-417. Emphasis added. 43 M.R. Lesur et al., “The plasticity of the bodily self: head movements in bodily illusions and their relation to Gallagher’s body image and body schema:” 101 PHILIPPE BÉDARD 107 AN-ICON  multisensory feedback which work in concert to create many of the contingencies that are known to facilitate such body ownership illusions. Fig. 3a Fig. 3b Fig. 3a and 3b. Non-human bodies in Plastisapiens (Miri Chekhanovich and Édith Jorisch, 2022). Credit: National Film Board of Canada (2022) True as it might be that most recent VR ex- periences remain tied to humanoid avatars, some have pushed the boundaries of what counts as realistic body, while others have experimented with bodies that are alto- gether non-human. One such notable example is the VR experience Plastisapiens (Miri Chekhanovich and Édith Jorisch, 2022), a piece of “surrealist ecofiction” which asks viewers to imagine a future where human evolution has been shaped by our exposure to microplastics in the air we PHILIPPE BÉDARD 108 AN-ICON  breathe, the water we drink, and the food we ingest; the An- thropocene has here been replaced by what we might call the Plasticene. Throughout its 15–minutes runtime, Plasti- sapiens asks its viewers to adopt a number of new bodies, from a prehistoric betentacled creature to the eponymous human-plastic hybrid, whose hands seem to be made of thin plastic (Fig. 3a and 3b). In both cases, “hands” are the only part of their body users can see, leaving the rest up to their imagination. Meanwhile, hand tracking is used to manip- ulate these new alien-looking appendages. The player’s agency is made evident in their ability to move their hands in predictable ways. Here, part of the success for the body ownership illusion is ensured by the synchronous move- ment of the hand in physical reality and the appearance of the corresponding movement of the alien limb, as seen in the HMD. In my own experience of Plastisapiens, I had no issue whatsoever knowing how to manipulate my tentacles to successfully reach the objects in my vicinity, adapting to their limits and affordances within a matter of seconds. Fur- thermore, the experience employs haptic feedback through the controllers to add a sense of multisensory correspon- dence between what the eye registers the tentacle having touched, and what the physical (i.e., human) hand feels having touched as well. Agency, interactivity, and multi- sensory feedback therefore join forces to foster a sense of sensorimotor coherence, thereby facilitating the illusion of body ownership despite the lack of realism of the bodies on offer.44 44 See also the oft-cited experience Birdly (Somniacs AG, 2015), another good example of agency and synchronous multisensory feedback contributing to successful illusory ownership of non-human animal bodies. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 109 AN-ICON  Conclusion Fascinated as I am by the possibilities opened up by the idea of inhabiting non-human bodies, I can- not help but see the limitations of this kind of temporary foray into the world of non-human animals. If VR as it exists today struggles to make us see things from the perspective of another human being, as so many have already demonstrated, can it truly show us what it is like to be an animal, or any other non-human creature for that matter? Further limitations come up when we begin to question VR’s efficacy as an illusion. In a recent essay on the myth of total illusion in virtual reality, Janet Murray insists that, more than any medium before: Interactive environments demand more explicit partnership than just the willing suspension of disbelief; they become real through the “active creation of belief” by inducing and satis- fying specific intentional gestures of engagement. As soon as we stop participating, because we are confused or bored or uncomfortably stimulated, the illusion vanishes.45 Indeed, Murray is careful to remind us of a fact that is rarely highlighted in studies on illusions in VR, namely that effects such as the body ownership illusion are difficult to achieve and more difficult still to maintain.46 On one hand, I want to join Murray in insist- ing on the important role played by individual users in fostering the kinds of illusions for which I am advocat- ing in this essay. In an earlier paper on empathy in VR, I came to a conclusion that applies just as well to the idea 45 J.H. Murray, “Virtual/reality: how to tell the difference,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 11-27 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1470412920906253. Emphasis added. See also J.H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1997) (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2017): 136-139. 46 “The rubber/virtual hand experiment is truly delusional, but it is important to note that it is a fragile and momentary delusion.” Ibid.: 17. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 110 AN-ICON  of imaginatively projecting oneself in the experience of non-human or non-living beings: “users must know how and want to use this tool.”47 The non-anthropocentric ef- fects which I describe in this essay are difficult to achieve for users who do not know how–or much less care–to use VR as a tool to explore spaces and bodies which exceed their natural capabilities. On the other hand, I also want to recognize that the very idea of optical illu- sion hinges upon the illusory nature of the phenomenon. This assumes the automatic and involuntary process by which we can succumb to illusions; optical or otherwise. When the necessary conditions are met, we cannot help but fall victim to illusions. Could VR’s affordances be used to such effect? I am also keen on suggesting a fruitful ave- nue might lie in effects that are not quite illusions, but rather something we might call “games of perception,” or even hallucinations.48 Further research could be done in this regard to echo Crary’s work on subjective vision as it was utilized in the creation on optical toys in the 18th and 19th centuries. To that effect, we should also consider the scholarship that has been produced on the revelatory potentials of optical technologies used in ways that defy anthropocentric concerns. I am thinking here of Stan Brakhage’s call for a radical exploration of cinema’s visual capabilities, as well as of William Wees’ study of experimental cinema’s ability to “exceed” the limitations of human vision.49 In both cases, nonnormative uses of a technology lead to drastic effects, as heretofore dom- inant modes of representation are swept aside in favour 47 This essay is forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. 48 For more on illusions and hallucinations in VR, see C. Paolucci, “Perception, hallucination, virtual reality. From controlled hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 112-128, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/15443; P. Montani, “The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the image as a ‘bilderschrift’,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 154-172, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/15441. 49 W.C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). PHILIPPE BÉDARD 111 AN-ICON  of more eccentric–or even excessive–ways of engaging with worldly phenomena. And while both examples re- late to cinema, there is no reason why VR should not be amenable to such experimental fancies. Where is VR’s Brakhage? Its surrealist or Dadaist movement? Its fear- less pioneers? PHILIPPE BÉDARD 112 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19595

Hallucinatory syndromes / Immersion in the image. Classical theories and perspectives by Marcin Sobieszczanski Hallucinatory syndromes Immersion in the image Classical theories and perspectives Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Hallucinatory syndromes / Immersion in the image. Classical theories and perspectives MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI, Université Côte d’Azur – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8024-8780 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19595 Abstract From the outset, the inventors of 3D, VR/AR and analogue and digital immersion thought of these devices as functional models of our perceptive capacities, serving to expand our sensory knowledge and to support our commu- nications based on multisensory storytelling. How is it that a solid critical tradition then assimilates them to hallucinatory phenomena? The answer lies in marketing techniques that have always associated dreams and illusions with the desire to play with reality. But there is a deeper, epistemic reason. The sources of scientific thought of hallucinations are marked, in the 19th century, by the theory of “sensations without ob- jects.” Perception being distorted, the knowledge it provides is pointless. It is therefore possible to replace the vacant object with our desires to act out subjectively the real. This conviction initiated by Dr. Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol has survived to the present day. However, the history of the scientific approach of hallucinations shows another theoret- ical framework, particularly prolific but curiously forgotten: the theory of reality monitoring and arbitration of sources of information provided from Dr. Henri Ey. We propose to forge on these concepts a critical tool of the current mediadesign. Keywords Hallucinatory syndromes Immersion in the image Classical theories and perspectives To quote this essay: M. Sobieszczanski, “Hallucinatory syndromes / Immersion in the image. Classical theories and perspectives,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 113-132, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19595 MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 113 AN-ICON  What if we were to compare immersion in artifi- cial sensoriality (or “virtual” - although this last word is more of a showcase than a solid concept) to all the phenomena of treachery, feints, and sensory artifices, phosphenes, il- lusions, dreams, effects of psychotropic substances, and more specifically to hallucinatory states? This is, obviously, a marketing slogan for vari- ous VR devices, but let’s not forget that in the similar con- text of the appearance of technical novelties in the cinema of the 1970s, Jean-Louis Baudry1 has been able to make a banality forged in extra-scientific circles the foundation of an important vein in the theory of filmic narration. It was also at this time that the controversy around the “oneiric” char- acter of cinema sometimes led to accusations of oneirism, the latter term clearly designating a mental disorder. If then today, we evoke the comparison VR / illusion, it is to take advantage of the heuristic potential of this metaphor. In- deed, the long history of scientific understanding of illusion phenomena and their methods of remediation can provide an interesting intellectual tool for clarifying the relationship between cultural practices in VR and reality. We will pro- ceed in parallel, on the perceptual level, by approaching the comparison between the episodes of disturbed perception and the sessions of immersion in the sensory peripherals of computers acting on the mode of interactivity and vi- sual and sound spatialization, as well as on the intelligible content plan, by approaching the comparison between the construction of illusory meaning by the subject presenting nosologies relating to perception, and the construction of narrative meaning during the use of VR products. This approach will first lead to the highlighting of contrasting results, similarities and dissimilarities be- tween the mechanisms of perception in different types of perceptual failure and of perception in immersive environ- ments. Secondly, faced with a certain lack of intelligibility in the relationship between VR practices and the real world, we will take advantage of a brief history of the theories of 1 J.-L. Baudry, “The device,” Communications 23 (1975): 56-72. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 114 AN-ICON  sensory dysfunctions and hallucinations which, after a ter- minological reframing in the light of standards in the current cognitive sciences, will allow us to propose, on the inspi- ration of the theory of monitoring of informational sources of Dr. Ey, a critical epistemology of Virtual and Extended Reality. Nature of sensory experiences in immersive devices: towards the digital modeling of vision and gesture In the register of symbolic behaviors, the visual production of Man started, according to the facts attested since 100,000 BP, probably by adornment and the addition of aesthetic elements to natural or artificial objects such as tools, to then pour in the production of artifacts aimed at reproducing, in a gesture of externalization, the retinal image and the process of its mental treating, the vision of the world. Thus, appeared pictorial artefacts, around 40,000 BP and sculptural and architectural productions (additions to natural shelters) around 32,000 BP. The first representations (the bestiary) already implicitly composed with the notion of dimension, first by spreading out over the surfaces (2D + the roughness of the natural surface) and then by regaining the rudiments of perspective, which is a way of raising awareness of the constraints of the process of visual perception: the light imprint of reality in three di- mensions, its projection on the retina (in 2D + the concave nature of the back of the eye) and the cerebral processing of the image retinal reconstruction, thanks to the various 3D indices, the reality of the spatial relationships present in the ecological niche.2,3 The ergonomics of vision dispenses with the 3D image since the human brain is capable of restoring depth from the flat image. But it should be noted that if it is just 2 T. Deacon, Symbolic Species (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997); J.-L. Baudry, “The device:” 56-72. 3 D. Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002). MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 115 AN-ICON  suggested in the 2D image by the elements of perspective reproducing the indices of depth, spatiality is present in the imagery from the art of caves and rocky surfaces, also by the bias of the accumulation of the sources of visual information, an accumulation which, once again by cere- bral processing, reproduces the immersion of the cognitive subject in the environment parameterized in three dimen- sions. Humans have never ceased to reproduce space in their visual symbolic productions, from rock walls, through the vaults of temples and dwellings, to immersive “analog” installations such as “circular perspectives” or the “vedute.” Digital immersive devices, which appeared in the mid-1960s, took over the game of 3D/2D/3D transition, first optical and then mental. But unlike previous devices, the pioneer of digital graphics and VR, Ivan Sutherland, drawing inspiration from Gestalt Theory, by descent from Köhler, passing through Green, Wallach, O’Connell and Gibson, adds an important element, by placing ourselves from the start on the level of bio-inspiration that we also call cognitive realism.4 The fundamental idea behind the three-dimensional display is to present the user with a perspective image which changes as he moves. The retinal image of the real objects which we see is, after all, only two-dimensional. Thus, if we can place suitable two-dimensional images on the observer’s retinas, we can create the illusion that he is seeing a three-dimensional object. Although stereo presentation is important to the three-dimensional illusion, it is less important than the change that takes place in the image when the observer moves his head. The image presented by the three-dimensional display must change in exactly the way that the image of a real object would change for similar motions of the us- er’s head. Psychologists have long known that moving perspective images appear strikingly three-dimensional even without stereo 4 B.F. Green, “Figure coherence in the kinetic depth effect,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 62, no. 3 (1961): 272-282, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045622; H. Wallach, D.N. O’Connell, “The kinetic depth effect,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 45, no. 4 (1953): 205; J.J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1950), https://doi.org/10.1037/h0056880. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 116 AN-ICON presentation; the three-dimensional display described in this paper depends heavily on this “kinetic depth effect.”5 The physiological approach adopted by the inventors of immersive environments places us not only in the 3D image, in the saturation of the visual field by the circular and spatial character of this image or by the accu- mulation of images imitating the surrounding space, but it also allows us to add to our relationship to the image, the motor and gestural dimension, through which we regain one more stage in the process of symbolic representation of reality: its “kinesthetic” and “manipulative” dimension, the possibility of acting on the image inspired by the actions that the Human exercises on his environment. In an experience of immersive cave or a semi-im- mersive installation, we are subject to the perceptual action of a 3D image produced by the display device: the projec- tion run by a computer equipped with graphic synthesis capabilities of a synthetic image itself produced by graphics software or resulting from the capture of reality as it is the case with a digital image captured by photography, vide- ography, or scanning then synthesized as a 3D model of this captured reality. The visual effects of the embossed image, which is not a real 3D model that can be positioned at will within the geometrically simulated 3D space and be used, but rather a handling of the image reduced to its positioning relative to the surface of objects and not with the conservation of truthful reports of depth. This narrow depth technique is broadly used in 3D cinema which, for obvious economic reasons, using the twin-lens cameras with surface relief vision more often than real “full” 3D mod- els constructed geometrically or raised by algorithms. In several installations, the 3D image is also reinforced by the stimulations coming from other sensory generators. This image, alone or reinforced, fills a large part of our sensory field. It imposes itself as perceived reality so much so that 5 I.E. Sutherland, “A head-mounted three-dimensional display,” Proceeding AFIPS ‘68, (1968) https://doi.org/10.1145/1476589.1476686. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 117 AN-ICON  it constitutes a partial substitution of reality that coexists with the other fragments of reality felt through the active fields of the senses that are not, or not entirely affected by the 3D image or by generators of complementary sensa- tions. In this way, the perceptual field6 of the subject in the immersive experience is composed of a blend of sensations coming from the directly perceived external and internal reality, and sensations coming from a digital generator of 3D images often combined with other digital generators of sensations, auditory, olfactory, or even tactile. Review of illusion-producing phenomena The phosphene was commented on by the An- cient Greeks as a specific mode of appearance of images, by the pressure7 of the eyeball. The famous South African anthropologist David Lewis-Williams attributes to the phos- phene a preponderant role in the creation of non-figurative parietal icons of the Upper Paleolithic. Hermann von Helm- holtz was passionate about the study of this phenomenon and recorded several varieties of it. Produced by direct, mechanical, or electromagnetic stimulation of the sight’s organs, the phosphene constitutes an experience often founding the awareness of the functioning of the sensory pathways in juvenile subjects, experience of the duality and at the same time of the interdependence of the ocular and mental image. The illusions, studied since antiquity among the peoples of the Mediterranean region but also in Asia, especially in India, they are first linked to the problem of apparent and relative magnitudes in astronomical obser- vations of the celestial vault, and then to atmospheric phe- nomena, to the role of shadow and finally to all sorts of 6 Also called “receptive field” and defined as follows: “A specific region of sensory space in which an appropriate stimulus can drive an electrical response in a sensory neuron.” D.H. Hubel, T.N. Wiesel, Brain and Visual Perception: The Story of a 25-year Collaboration (Oxford- New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 7 O.J. Gruesser, M. Hagner, “On the history of deformation phosphenes and the idea of internal light generated in the eye for the purpose of vision,” Documenta Ophthalmologica 74 (1990): 57-85. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 118 AN-ICON  optical reverberations produced by different “screens,” va- pors, smooth surfaces, and liquid surfaces. Although the Platonic philosophical teaching of perceptual skepticism derives directly from this experience, the study of illusions nevertheless leads to the beginning of sensory realism.8 The Platonic analysis of the cave with “screen” effects (projec- tions, reflections, traces, etc.)9 is also one of the first trea- tises on perception in which the foundation of all prescien- tific and scientific theories of knowledge (gnoseology), the dichotomy “perception versus cognition” clearly appears. From an epistemic perspective, it should be remembered that perception is considered in Antiquity as an interaction between the sensory organs, the medium (undulatory, ca- loric, material, etc.) of contact with the thing, and the thing itself, the object of perception, while the term cognition is reserved for the mental interpretation of the signal that the sensory organs transmit to the understanding. Both Plato, Aristotle, and philosophers of late Antiquity like Plotinus attached great importance to the versatile nature of the contact medium which under different conditions and un- der different surrounding constraints can give the distorted image of the thing. The role of the mind, the understanding or the intellection is above all to exercise control over the sensory sphere. Current cognitive sciences have a rather unitary vision of the nervous system and consider the sen- sory organs as extensions of the brain... Oneiric activities provide Ancient Humanity with an enormous reservoir of stories that are both mne- sic and premonitory. The imaginary, the abductive force of the creative projection on the “commonplace” world pro- duces a reasoning that confirms the subject in his role, if not central then certainly active, in the gnostic process. In short, the dream is an omnipresent source of the explana- tory hypotheses of reality, as Baudry says when relating the contributions of the dreamlike sphere discovered by Freud: 8 M. Sobieszczanski, “Two key factors in the history of communicating immersive environments: mix of reality vs. cognitive realism,” LINKs-series, no. 1-2 (2019), https://hal. archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02281583. 9 Plato, The Republic, Book VII. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 119 AN-ICON The transformations wrought by the sleep in the psychic appara- tus: removal of cathexis, lability of the different systems, return to narcissism, withdrawal of motor skills (impossibility of resorting to the reality test), contribute to producing the specific characteristics of the dream: its capacity for figuration, translation of thought into image, reality accorded to representations.10 Another experience, at the individual level, and - among all prehistoric peoples - strongly collective, is pro- vided using psychotropic substances. The inoculation of a chemical factor modifying both, perception, and con- sciousness, affects as well the centripetal sensory afferents, and their centrifugal control, most often thalamic but also caused by neocortical intellectual patterns. And if in cur- rent societies the practice of narcotics is mainly associated with personal deviance and destructuring addictions, in prehistory and antiquity, drugs served as a (bio)chemical substrate for divinatory trances. These states were both reserved for the use by a restricted class of hierophants, and essential for social regulation in general and for the management of individuals, particularly during initiation rites and rites of passage.11 Towards the clinical approach of hallucinatory phenomena Often times, individuals performing the same types of behaviors without the (bio)chemical support are viewed by the Ancients as representatives of the deity itself, and their verbal and iconic creations as direct expressions of religious truths that may serve as a vehicle for the intelli- gibility of reality. Western science began to take interest in the pathological dimension of these people and to associ- ate different clinics with them. Thus, the head doctor of the 10 J.L. Baudry, “The device:” 56-72. 11 J. Clottes, D. Lewis-Williams, Les Chamans de la Préhistoire. Trans et Magie dans les Grottes Ornées (Paris: Le Seuil, 1996); E. Guerra-Doce, “The origins of inebriation: archaeological evidence of the consumption of fermented beverages and drugs in prehistoric Eurasia,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory Theory 22 (2014): 751-782 https://doi. org/10.1007/s10816-014-9205-z. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 120 AN-ICON  Salpêtrière, Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, interpreted in 1838 the difference between illusions and hallucinations based on the nature of their references to reality, which led him to the definition of pathological hallucinations by preterition. “Perception without an object” is a normative view of the phenomenon which insists on its perceptual nature while denying the percept of this perception, and ultimately its object, in accordance with a “common sense.” Relayed without any critical readjustment by later research- ers, J. Baillarger, J.-P. Falret, E. Régis or P. Guiraud,12 this conception had to wait for the second half of the twentieth century to finally, in the research of Dr. Henri Ey, lead to the study of the nature of the hallucinatory process itself. The much-vaunted merit of Ey’s synthesis is first of all its distinction between hallucinosic eidolia and delirious hallucinations which are, alone, hallucinations properly speaking. “The eidolia do not come from a delusional func- tioning of the patient and are compatible with reason, in this they can be qualified as ‘psychonomy’. It is a ‘non-delusion- al hallucinatory modality’. The subject finds them ‘unreal’, incongruous in relation to his perceptual experience: he knows that he is hallucinating.”13 We will return to this definition in the context of certain immersive experiences with virtual spaces, such as vacuum or narrowing, producing effects of somatic re- actions even though the subject is aware of the “virtuality” of these spaces and their characteristics. On the other hand, the definition of delusional hallucinations provides us with another important theoret- ical dimension: Thus, for Ey “The hallucinatory phenomenon experienced by the subject must [...] have a double character: that of affecting his sensitivity or his sensoriality and that of being projected out of his subjectivity” ([2] p. 44-45). The patient must thus be able to attest 12 G. Gimenez, M. Guimont, J. Pedinielli, “Study of the evolution of the concept of hallucination in classical psychiatric literature,” L’evolution psychiatrique 68 (2003): 289-298. 13 Ibid. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 121 AN-ICON to a sensory experience (“I see, I hear, I feel”) by his reference to the attributes of sensoriality and support the objectivity and reality of this experience.14 This means, in essence, that a cerebral effect positioned in the sensory information processing areas, in certain clinical circumstances, can be correlated by intra- cerebral communication pathways with a cortical effect that mobilizes the oscillation between knowledge current (operational) and the thought of presumption, inclinations, convictions (doxic). In this situation, it is clear that there is a de- tachment of the sensory areas from the sensory organs, or rather a functional doubling of the cerebral support. On the one hand, there is evidence that patients suffering from hallucinations often achieve to conceive that the people accompanying them, the caregivers in this case, are not subject to the same phenomenon. On the other hand, the same patient simultaneously develops a hallucinatory syn- drome. The sensations “with object” do not disappear, on the contrary, the “generic” sensory excitations accompany the delirious subject throughout his “specific” experiences. In the article by G. Gimenez, M. Guimont, J.- L. Pedinielli, we read: “Minkowsky’s remarkable text on Le temps vivant, and in particular the chapter ‘Towards a psychopathology of space’, which shows very well the possible cohabitation, in the same subject, of a hallucina- tory neo-reality and a perceptual reality, often remaining actively separated by processes of splitting.”15 The “Perception without an object” was biased by its implicit use of the physiologically improbable, direct inversion of nervous influx16 in the optic or auditory nerves. In reality, the sick subject carries out two processes both highly demanding in terms of synaptic energy: that of the 14 Ibid. Here the article refers to H. Ey, Treatise on Hallucinations, vol. 2 (Paris: Masson and Co, 1973). 15 Ibid. The article refers to E. Minkowsky, The Lived Time. Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies (Neuchatel: Delachaux and Niesle, 1933). 16 The blocking of the inversion is ensured by the mechanism of the alternation of refractory periods and periods of excitability of the elementary nerve cell. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 122 AN-ICON  control of the real and that of the control of his own cere- bral activities of the sensory areas pathologically auton- omized to the point of competing with the gnosic results of perception. Under the light of current neuroscience re- sults supported by functional cerebral imaging, MRI and positron emission device, the etiology and consequently the nosography of delusional pathologies is shifting from the psychoanalytical vision where the sphere of symbolic topics takes pathologically precedence on the phenomenal sphere, towards a neuro-cognitivist vision compatible with the hypotheses of Dr. Ey, as Thomas Rabeyron states it: hallucinations should first be considered from the point of view of “reality monitoring,” a process that is part of a larger whole called “source monitoring.” According to Bentall (1990), hallucina- tions would thus be the consequence of a bad categorization: an internal perception, a representation, or a reminiscence, instead of being represented as coming from inside, would be categorized by the brain as coming from outside. There would therefore be confusion between internal source and external source, confusion being more specifically at the level of the thalamus, a real system for filtering information reaching the cerebral cortex.17 In fact, we are here in a process of intracerebral communication where, both in the presence of a meticu- lous monitoring of reality18 and independently of its gnosic results and its metacognitive achievements,19 the different neocortical areas exchange with each other. In this play, essentially triangular, the central position is ensured by (1) the thalamic zones which seem to distribute flows joining (2) the prefrontal cortex with (3) sensory, parietal or posterior, 17 T. Rabeyron, “Exceptional experiences: between neuroscience and psychoanalysis,” Research in Psychoanalysis, no. 8 (2009). The reference “Bentall (1990)” refers to R.P. Bentall, “The illusion of reality: at review and integration of psychological research on hallucinations,” Psychological Bulletin 107, no. 1 (1990): 82. 18 Let us remember the experiences cited by Merleau-Ponty where schizophrenics systematically thwarted attempts at scenographies recalling their imaginary world: M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945) (Paris: Gallimard, 2011). See also the connection between Merleau-Ponty and Dr. Ey, in: T. Grohmann, “Délire et hallucination en schizophrénie: une perspective phénoménologique,” Phainomenon 28 (2018): 103-125. 19 On this subject, see the “Higher-order thought theory” by David Rosenthal, in D. Rosenthal, Consciousness and Mind (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 123 AN-ICON  somatosensory, auditory and visual areas. The implication of the latter is proved indirectly by research combining the pathological phenomenon of synesthesia, the non-volun- tary association of sensations originating from different sen- sory modes, and hallucinatory sensations. This particular research has produced increasing evidences since Binet’s founding experiments.20 Reality monitoring With the dimension of “reality monitoring,” the theories of hallucinations begin to move away from their origins anchored in a naive realism where the third instance of a healthy observer arbitrated, in the light of “common” and “objective” representations, the pathological represen- tations of reality produced by the sick subject. In fact, they also abandon the solipsistic simplifications of a “a world to yourself” in which the patient would have been locked up. We are here within the framework of a duality where the two gnosic procedures hold comparable “realizing” forces from the point of view of their aesthesies. The nosological qualification of dysfunctions no longer consists in arbitrat- ing between the flow of consciousness of the sick subject and the flow of consciousness of the healthy subject, but in qualifying the way in which a subject oscillates between the two gnosic modes reputed to be constructive. It is therefore the attentional processes that make the nosology of delusional mental behaviors and not the hallucinations themselves, or again, in other words: we speak on hallucinations when the “fictio-creative” activities occur, by the alteration of the attentional processes, to sub- stitute themselves to the interoceptive and exteroceptive controls of reality. Attentional processes, whether defined accord- ing to peripheral filter theories or central manager theories, cannot be associated with an organic function or, even less, with a delimited convolution or a particular nerve bundle. 20 A. Binet, “The problem of colored hearing,” Revue des Deux Mondes 113 (1892): 586-614. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 124 AN-ICON  These are complex states of mobilization of cognitive re- sources assembling different parts of the nervous system, appearing to be identifiable with the different functional aspects of the circuits assigned to the different other pur- poses, as it is the case of the reticular system disposed on the path joining the lower bulbar region to the lateral and posterior hypothalamus. Following the inventory of con- vergent experimental facts, some theories on the rhythms of cerebral electro-biological activities, detectable at the cortical and subcortical level, propose here some interest- ing hypotheses, in particular on the role of theta waves.21 These processes are also associated with the presence of certain cognitive event-related potential (ERP) and in par- ticular the famous N400 discovered in 1978 by Kutas and Hillyard.22 The attentional processes have the capacity 23 to move, by means of calibration and thalamic reinforce- ments, not only in the direction of association or selection of external sources of sensory stimuli but also in the direc- tion of interchange and variation of the internal sources,24 among which we count usually different kinds of memo- ry,25 but also hallucinogenic stimuli.26 It is at this level that the problem of indissociation between the veracity and 21 M.C.M. Bastiaansen et al., “I see what you mean: theta power increases are involved in the retrieval of lexical semantic information,” Brain and Language 106 (2008): 15-28, https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2007.10.006. 22 M. Kutas, K.D. Federmeier, “Electrophysiology reveals semantic memory use in language comprehension,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, no. 12 (2000): 463-470, https://doi. org/10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01560-6. 23 M.I. Posner, “Orienting of attention,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 32 (1980): 3-25. 24 J.K. Roth et al., “Similar and dissociable mechanisms for attention to internal versus external information,” NeuroImage 48 (2009): 601-608. 25 E. Awh, E.K. Vogel, S.H. Oh, “Interactions between attention and working memory,” Neuroscience 139, no. 1 (2006): 201-208, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2005.08.023. 26 R.P. Bentall, “The illusion of reality: at review and integration of psychological research on hallucinations,” Psychological Bulletin 107, no. 1 (1990): 82, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033- 2909.107.1.82; M.K. Johnson, C.L. Raye, “Reality monitoring,” Psychological Review 88 (1981): 67-85, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-295X.88.1.67; M.K. Johnson, S. Hashtroudi, D.S. Lindsay, “Source monitoring,” Psychlogical Bulletin 114 (1993): 3-28, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.114.1.3; G. Brébion et al., “Reality monitoring failure in schizophrenia: The role of selective attention,” Schizophrenia Research 22, no. 2 (15 Nov. 1996): 173-180, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0920-9964(96)00054-0; A. Schnider, “Spontaneous confabulation, reality monitoring, and the limbic system - a review,” Brain Research Reviews 36, no. 2–3 (2001): 150-160, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0165-0173(01)00090-X; J.K. Roth et al., “Similar and dissociable mechanisms for attention to internal versus external information,” NeuroImage 48 (2009): 601-608. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 125 AN-ICON  the coherence of different topics, imaginary and sensory, must occur. From then on, the fictitious topics that we will begin to call fictional (see below), can exercise a “realizing” role they can effectively embed into the sensible real, by the means of intensity of esthesia (contribution from sen- sory areas), sequential plausibility, and causal relevance (contributions from frontal areas). From the moment when the “realization” efficiency is obtained, the altered attention moves indiscriminately from the external to the internal and withdraws from its task as a source checker. Thus, on the double psychic substrate, emerges an internal fiction without the subject being able to exercise any criticism towards it. In the patient, the source of suffering stems more from the awareness of this impotence of discernment than from the disconcerting contents of the hallucinations themselves. Even if the patient still has the possibility of diverting his attention, what his attention points to is, in both directions, internal and external, impetuously “real.” As Dr. Ey said, delusional work is characterized by “foreignness, incoercibility, assertiveness and aesthesis.” Foreignness, because the internal and external sources have the same rank of veracity and can therefore be interchangeable; in- coercibility because this process prevails over the mecha- nisms of anti-hallucinatory coercion; assertiveness because the sequences of topics obtained through hallucinations can serve as a basis for the subject’s discursive activities; and aesthesia because the subject is aware of the fact that thanks to the strident aesthesia of his hallucinations he can distinguish them from ordinary memory material, but cannot to mobilize enough to distinguish them from perceptual sensations. We are touching here on the doxic status of hallucinations and in this the comparison between sensory immersion with artificial origin and hallucinations becomes for us more than a superficial metaphor. In schizophrenia, the activations of sensory areas stimulated by prefrontal activities and categorized by thalamic operations bring out a threshold effect beyond which the complex neural sub- strate is ready to exercise a creative role and generates MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 126 AN-ICON  a fictional “effect.” This “effect” is both gnosic, active in the symbolic sphere, and assertoric in the domain of the subject’s discursive approach. To summarize, in patholog- ical states of this type, fiction begins to compete, through attentional maneuvers, with the real apprehended by the sensorial way.27 Hallucinogenic function vs. Cultural and artistic creations It is obvious that the comparison between immersion in artificial sensory devices and hallucinatory states overlaps with the very old theoretical concerns of specialists in literature and cinema, notably René Wellek and Austin Warren,28 and Jean-Louis Baudry,29 concerning the status of the “presented reality” in the verbal story and in the visual narration. On this topic, for methodological reasons, we propose to dissociate two blocks of questions: what comes from diếgêsis and what comes from mimesis, in order to better synthesize them later on.30 On the one hand, the comparison of immersion and hallucination appears as existential experiences. We call “existential” the situations and the experiences that are attached to them, when it is a question, for a human subject, of facing an immediate environment, offering to his perception the sensory substrate which allows him to carry out his habitual activities: standing, sitting, walking, etc., 27 The subject being aware of the imbalance between the respective parts of the internal fiction and of its “reality monitoring,” falls into the suffering stemming from the anxiety of failing in reality. In this, schizophrenia involves a double danger: that which stems from the often disconcerting nature of the “visions” and that of the depression provoked by the awareness of one’s own failures in the duty of reality. 28 R. Wellek, A. Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948). “As Wellek and Warren (La Théorie littéraire) point out, there is a use for these invented stories, which is to entertain and instruct, a use that should not be confused with forgetting boredom. Fiction triggers desire, pleasure, escape and knowledge, without the seriousness of a duty to accomplish, a lesson to learn. This plural pleasure is to live adventures that daily life refuses us, to which we access by proxy. The knowledge transmitted by fiction is of a different order from that provided by science, philosophy or history.” Yves Chemla about F. Tremblay, La Fiction en Question (Balzac-Le Griot editor, 1999) coll. Littératures à l’essai, Montréal, in Acta Fabula, Autumn 2000, vol. 1, no 2, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris. 29 J.L. Baudry, “The device:” 56-72. 30 E. Souriau, “The structure of the film universe and the vocabulary of filmology,” Revue internationale de filmologie 7-8 (1951). MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 127 AN-ICON  activities whose purpose lacks a delayed-causal goal, the “short-term” behavior. The notion of immediacy must also be addressed. Situations are immediate when the goals pursued by the subject affect his current vital needs, unlike the pursuit of medium and long-term goals. In this sense, we are forced to separate, for example, the expectation of resolution of a legal case that mobilizes our energy for several years, from the posture that we adopt in the last minutes before the last trial, although the lasting experience conditions, to a certain extent, the momentary behaviors, and vice versa; the punctual and immediate existential ex- perience merges, in a certain way, with the image and the memory that we have of the entire event.31 On the other hand, the immersion can be com- pared with the effects of fiction which are elaborated in the brain of the readers of literary stories and the spectators of cinematographic storytelling. Here, it is not a question of evaluating the effects of immersion by the yardstick of immediate perceptions, which can feed temporary postural reactions, move in the relative field of vision, explore its space immediately adjoining our body or behave according to the volumes found, suggested by the 3D image-models of the show unfolding before the eyes of the subject, but it is a question of listing the psychological and somatic effects of a “world” which is constructed in the process of mediated communication, through signs and their bodi- ly and technical supports, i.e. writing, icon, image-move- ment. It is a question, for example, of distinguishing two perceptual occurrences, in the complex reaction that we can have when seeing and manipulating, including by our movements, the model of the staircase of the Capitol of Washington drawn up for the CAVE at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CALIT2) in San Diego: the monumental effect of architecture and the symbolic effect produced by the political heritage of the 31 In The Trial of Franz Kafka, the literary effect of “reversal of experiences” consists precisely in this substitution of the momentary experiences of the waiting corridors in the legal institutions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for the synthetic experience of the long period between the indictment and the execution of the sentence. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 128 AN-ICON  United States. Although the distance separating the sign from its denotat is arranged as a continuum running from presence, through deferred presence and through the trace of presence, to the sign of presence, the consciousness and gnosic processes arising therefrom are categorized according to the jurisdiction of discrete boundaries. Verbal and visual narrations do not lead to the same results as immediate perceptions, coming from the real environment. Our hypothesis is that the productions of hu- man culture both generate and use the same human abili- ties to produce fiction, without this process resulting from any pathology. In other words, in the healthy creative sub- ject, fiction benefits from substantially the same psychic substrate as hallucinations in schizophrenics, but the at- tentional processes retain all their effectiveness in them. In delirious patients, there is an increase of the psychic substrate which manages and admits to the doxic sphere the different sources, internal and external, without mak- ing any discernment between them, or rather transgresses this discernment. In the healthy creative human, the same fictional process does not come from a doubling of the psy- chic apparatus but from an externalization of the psychic contents “projected” on an apparatus or a device which in the process of communication exercises a fictional function. In humans as “consumer” of culture and receivers of the creative message, there is no confusion between the two flows either, there is, on the other hand, from his point of view, a duplication of the substrate of cultural productions, a substrate that sometimes can be apprehended in what it offers as affordances to direct sensory and postural cog- nitive actions, and sometimes as a generator of fiction on the basis of quasi-affordances that can be seized by the sensory-motor brain areas correlated to the frontal areas via the weighting of the thalamic zone. This latter process can be initiated by the action of the mirror neuron system. The person subject to hallucinations oscillates between the two streams of consciousness, the creator mobilizes his attentional processes in order to work on the perceived reality in a manner similar to the ways fictional MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 129 AN-ICON  topics inhabit him. And since the parity of the flows of the “intus” and of the flows of the “extra” is in him maintained and oriented according to the precedence of the perceptual, his internal fiction is itself “perception oriented.” Perspectives of applied research in 360° imaging The tradition of research definitely established since the 2010s, especially at the continuation of the theo- retical work of David Bordwell,32 first in different academic centers, in Japan,33 in the United States,34 and then spread in vast circles of internationals researchers,35 offers ex- perimental research involving spectators, individual and collective,36 engaged in actions of narrative construction based on the video-film creations. In our book from 201537 we commented on the difference between the spatio-sym- bolic narrative construction in the frontal cinema with cen- tral and oriented projection and attempts of the spherical and interactive cinema. In this latter area the theory pre- dominant seems to be organized around the environmental concept of enaction.38 Note that this concept also applies 32 D. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London-New York: Routledge, 1987). 33 M. Kimura et al., “Human visual system automatically encodes sequential regularities of discrete events,” Journal of Cognitive Neurosciences 22, no. 6 (2010): 1124-1139, https://doi. org/10.1162/jocn.2009.21299. 34 J.E. Cutting, “Perceiving scenes in film and in the world,” in J.D. Anderson, B.F. Anderson, eds., Moving Image Theory: Ecological Considerations (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005): 9-27. 35 K.S. Heimann et al., “Cuts in action: a high-density EEG study investigating the neural correlates of different editing techniques in film,” Cognitive Science 41 (2017): 1555-1588, https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12439; K. Pajunen, Immersed in Illusion, an Ecological Approach to the Virtual (Jyväskylä: Bookwell, Acta Universitatis Lapponiensis, 2012); P. Francuz, E. Zabielska-Mendyk, “Does the brain differentiate between related and unrelated cuts when processing audiovisual messages? An ERP study,” Media Psychology 16, no. 4 (2013): 461- 475; P. Tikka et al., “Enactive cinema paves way for understanding complex real-time social interaction in neuroimaging experiments,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (2012), https://doi. org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00298. 36 K. Lankine et al., “Consistency and similarity of MEG- and fMRI-signal time courses during movie viewing,” NeuroImage 173 (2018): 361-369. 37 M. Sobieszczanski, Les Médias Immersifs Informatisés. Raisons Cognitives de la Ré- analogisation (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015): 300. 38 P. Tikka, V. Rasmus, K. Mauri, “Narrative logic of enactive cinema: obsession,” Digital Creativity 17, no. 4 (2006): 205-212, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14626260601074078. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 130 AN-ICON  to classical cinema, as has been underlined in Bordwell’s founding works... Can we believe that going through the com- parison between hallucinations and cognitive effects of the interactive and immersive cinema can provide us with a tool, both theoretical and empirical, even more powerful? If we imagine a multi-scale analysis proving the existence of a multi-layered and harmonized neural substrate, spe- cialized in performing arbitration tasks between different sources of information: external, internal, and those used for weighting memory of sensory-motor anticipations, we can hope that the monitoring of reality can become this powerful tool. There are three preliminary problems to pose as the epistemological background before proceeding to analysis of information sources in video-film products. Frontal cinema operates its management of attentional points within the framework of a language put into place through the process of acculturation for 120 years. This device, both technical, grammatical and se- mantic shapes the audience of the cinema by constituting a quasi-cognitive functionality which participates in the construction of the image of the world in the broad sense. There is here a kind of sloping of a cultural function in the field of generic cognition. Experiences in spectation and the construction of the image of the world, both: from truthful world and the world as illusion, must first take care to put out of the game the artefact of the appearance of classic cinema. Immersive or spherical cinema is part of an- other “grammar.” Its “editing,” the rules of his language, is a “natural editing,” called for by Pasolini,39 is operated by bodily movements, gaze movements and ocular saccades. The same “objective” real can be looked at in different 39 “When we talk about the semiology of cinematographic language, we must at the same time talk about the semiology of reality,” extract from an interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini by André S. Labarthe on 15/11/1966. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 131 AN-ICON  ways by the same person and by the different spectators, according to their own management of attentional points. And finally, immersive cinema manages its spa- tio-temporal referential external to the device of the same way that it manages the spatiality and the dynamics of the contents which are presented into the device. In other words, the grammar of cutting and exploring of the sen- sitive, natural and artefactual material, is the same as that which governs our spatio-temporal relationship to the world. The perspective of empirical research on the hallucinatory illusion can then lead to the establishment of a normative system allowing people subject to hallucinations to ex- change with their caregivers not by means of art-therapy, but by means of the shared control of sources of informa- tion on reality. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 132 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19595

Hallucinatory syndromes / Immersion in the image. Classical theories and perspectives by Marcin Sobieszczanski Hallucinatory syndromes Immersion in the image Classical theories and perspectives Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Hallucinatory syndromes / Immersion in the image. Classical theories and perspectives MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI, Université Côte d’Azur – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8024-8780 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19595 Abstract From the outset, the inventors of 3D, VR/AR and analogue and digital immersion thought of these devices as functional models of our perceptive capacities, serving to expand our sensory knowledge and to support our commu- nications based on multisensory storytelling. How is it that a solid critical tradition then assimilates them to hallucinatory phenomena? The answer lies in marketing techniques that have always associated dreams and illusions with the desire to play with reality. But there is a deeper, epistemic reason. The sources of scientific thought of hallucinations are marked, in the 19th century, by the theory of “sensations without ob- jects.” Perception being distorted, the knowledge it provides is pointless. It is therefore possible to replace the vacant object with our desires to act out subjectively the real. This conviction initiated by Dr. Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol has survived to the present day. However, the history of the scientific approach of hallucinations shows another theoret- ical framework, particularly prolific but curiously forgotten: the theory of reality monitoring and arbitration of sources of information provided from Dr. Henri Ey. We propose to forge on these concepts a critical tool of the current mediadesign. Keywords Hallucinatory syndromes Immersion in the image Classical theories and perspectives To quote this essay: M. Sobieszczanski, “Hallucinatory syndromes / Immersion in the image. Classical theories and perspectives,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 113-132, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19595 MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 113 AN-ICON  What if we were to compare immersion in artifi- cial sensoriality (or “virtual” - although this last word is more of a showcase than a solid concept) to all the phenomena of treachery, feints, and sensory artifices, phosphenes, il- lusions, dreams, effects of psychotropic substances, and more specifically to hallucinatory states? This is, obviously, a marketing slogan for vari- ous VR devices, but let’s not forget that in the similar con- text of the appearance of technical novelties in the cinema of the 1970s, Jean-Louis Baudry1 has been able to make a banality forged in extra-scientific circles the foundation of an important vein in the theory of filmic narration. It was also at this time that the controversy around the “oneiric” char- acter of cinema sometimes led to accusations of oneirism, the latter term clearly designating a mental disorder. If then today, we evoke the comparison VR / illusion, it is to take advantage of the heuristic potential of this metaphor. In- deed, the long history of scientific understanding of illusion phenomena and their methods of remediation can provide an interesting intellectual tool for clarifying the relationship between cultural practices in VR and reality. We will pro- ceed in parallel, on the perceptual level, by approaching the comparison between the episodes of disturbed perception and the sessions of immersion in the sensory peripherals of computers acting on the mode of interactivity and vi- sual and sound spatialization, as well as on the intelligible content plan, by approaching the comparison between the construction of illusory meaning by the subject presenting nosologies relating to perception, and the construction of narrative meaning during the use of VR products. This approach will first lead to the highlighting of contrasting results, similarities and dissimilarities be- tween the mechanisms of perception in different types of perceptual failure and of perception in immersive environ- ments. Secondly, faced with a certain lack of intelligibility in the relationship between VR practices and the real world, we will take advantage of a brief history of the theories of 1 J.-L. Baudry, “The device,” Communications 23 (1975): 56-72. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 114 AN-ICON  sensory dysfunctions and hallucinations which, after a ter- minological reframing in the light of standards in the current cognitive sciences, will allow us to propose, on the inspi- ration of the theory of monitoring of informational sources of Dr. Ey, a critical epistemology of Virtual and Extended Reality. Nature of sensory experiences in immersive devices: towards the digital modeling of vision and gesture In the register of symbolic behaviors, the visual production of Man started, according to the facts attested since 100,000 BP, probably by adornment and the addition of aesthetic elements to natural or artificial objects such as tools, to then pour in the production of artifacts aimed at reproducing, in a gesture of externalization, the retinal image and the process of its mental treating, the vision of the world. Thus, appeared pictorial artefacts, around 40,000 BP and sculptural and architectural productions (additions to natural shelters) around 32,000 BP. The first representations (the bestiary) already implicitly composed with the notion of dimension, first by spreading out over the surfaces (2D + the roughness of the natural surface) and then by regaining the rudiments of perspective, which is a way of raising awareness of the constraints of the process of visual perception: the light imprint of reality in three di- mensions, its projection on the retina (in 2D + the concave nature of the back of the eye) and the cerebral processing of the image retinal reconstruction, thanks to the various 3D indices, the reality of the spatial relationships present in the ecological niche.2,3 The ergonomics of vision dispenses with the 3D image since the human brain is capable of restoring depth from the flat image. But it should be noted that if it is just 2 T. Deacon, Symbolic Species (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997); J.-L. Baudry, “The device:” 56-72. 3 D. Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002). MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 115 AN-ICON  suggested in the 2D image by the elements of perspective reproducing the indices of depth, spatiality is present in the imagery from the art of caves and rocky surfaces, also by the bias of the accumulation of the sources of visual information, an accumulation which, once again by cere- bral processing, reproduces the immersion of the cognitive subject in the environment parameterized in three dimen- sions. Humans have never ceased to reproduce space in their visual symbolic productions, from rock walls, through the vaults of temples and dwellings, to immersive “analog” installations such as “circular perspectives” or the “vedute.” Digital immersive devices, which appeared in the mid-1960s, took over the game of 3D/2D/3D transition, first optical and then mental. But unlike previous devices, the pioneer of digital graphics and VR, Ivan Sutherland, drawing inspiration from Gestalt Theory, by descent from Köhler, passing through Green, Wallach, O’Connell and Gibson, adds an important element, by placing ourselves from the start on the level of bio-inspiration that we also call cognitive realism.4 The fundamental idea behind the three-dimensional display is to present the user with a perspective image which changes as he moves. The retinal image of the real objects which we see is, after all, only two-dimensional. Thus, if we can place suitable two-dimensional images on the observer’s retinas, we can create the illusion that he is seeing a three-dimensional object. Although stereo presentation is important to the three-dimensional illusion, it is less important than the change that takes place in the image when the observer moves his head. The image presented by the three-dimensional display must change in exactly the way that the image of a real object would change for similar motions of the us- er’s head. Psychologists have long known that moving perspective images appear strikingly three-dimensional even without stereo 4 B.F. Green, “Figure coherence in the kinetic depth effect,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 62, no. 3 (1961): 272-282, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045622; H. Wallach, D.N. O’Connell, “The kinetic depth effect,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 45, no. 4 (1953): 205; J.J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1950), https://doi.org/10.1037/h0056880. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 116 AN-ICON presentation; the three-dimensional display described in this paper depends heavily on this “kinetic depth effect.”5 The physiological approach adopted by the inventors of immersive environments places us not only in the 3D image, in the saturation of the visual field by the circular and spatial character of this image or by the accu- mulation of images imitating the surrounding space, but it also allows us to add to our relationship to the image, the motor and gestural dimension, through which we regain one more stage in the process of symbolic representation of reality: its “kinesthetic” and “manipulative” dimension, the possibility of acting on the image inspired by the actions that the Human exercises on his environment. In an experience of immersive cave or a semi-im- mersive installation, we are subject to the perceptual action of a 3D image produced by the display device: the projec- tion run by a computer equipped with graphic synthesis capabilities of a synthetic image itself produced by graphics software or resulting from the capture of reality as it is the case with a digital image captured by photography, vide- ography, or scanning then synthesized as a 3D model of this captured reality. The visual effects of the embossed image, which is not a real 3D model that can be positioned at will within the geometrically simulated 3D space and be used, but rather a handling of the image reduced to its positioning relative to the surface of objects and not with the conservation of truthful reports of depth. This narrow depth technique is broadly used in 3D cinema which, for obvious economic reasons, using the twin-lens cameras with surface relief vision more often than real “full” 3D mod- els constructed geometrically or raised by algorithms. In several installations, the 3D image is also reinforced by the stimulations coming from other sensory generators. This image, alone or reinforced, fills a large part of our sensory field. It imposes itself as perceived reality so much so that 5 I.E. Sutherland, “A head-mounted three-dimensional display,” Proceeding AFIPS ‘68, (1968) https://doi.org/10.1145/1476589.1476686. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 117 AN-ICON  it constitutes a partial substitution of reality that coexists with the other fragments of reality felt through the active fields of the senses that are not, or not entirely affected by the 3D image or by generators of complementary sensa- tions. In this way, the perceptual field6 of the subject in the immersive experience is composed of a blend of sensations coming from the directly perceived external and internal reality, and sensations coming from a digital generator of 3D images often combined with other digital generators of sensations, auditory, olfactory, or even tactile. Review of illusion-producing phenomena The phosphene was commented on by the An- cient Greeks as a specific mode of appearance of images, by the pressure7 of the eyeball. The famous South African anthropologist David Lewis-Williams attributes to the phos- phene a preponderant role in the creation of non-figurative parietal icons of the Upper Paleolithic. Hermann von Helm- holtz was passionate about the study of this phenomenon and recorded several varieties of it. Produced by direct, mechanical, or electromagnetic stimulation of the sight’s organs, the phosphene constitutes an experience often founding the awareness of the functioning of the sensory pathways in juvenile subjects, experience of the duality and at the same time of the interdependence of the ocular and mental image. The illusions, studied since antiquity among the peoples of the Mediterranean region but also in Asia, especially in India, they are first linked to the problem of apparent and relative magnitudes in astronomical obser- vations of the celestial vault, and then to atmospheric phe- nomena, to the role of shadow and finally to all sorts of 6 Also called “receptive field” and defined as follows: “A specific region of sensory space in which an appropriate stimulus can drive an electrical response in a sensory neuron.” D.H. Hubel, T.N. Wiesel, Brain and Visual Perception: The Story of a 25-year Collaboration (Oxford- New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 7 O.J. Gruesser, M. Hagner, “On the history of deformation phosphenes and the idea of internal light generated in the eye for the purpose of vision,” Documenta Ophthalmologica 74 (1990): 57-85. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 118 AN-ICON  optical reverberations produced by different “screens,” va- pors, smooth surfaces, and liquid surfaces. Although the Platonic philosophical teaching of perceptual skepticism derives directly from this experience, the study of illusions nevertheless leads to the beginning of sensory realism.8 The Platonic analysis of the cave with “screen” effects (projec- tions, reflections, traces, etc.)9 is also one of the first trea- tises on perception in which the foundation of all prescien- tific and scientific theories of knowledge (gnoseology), the dichotomy “perception versus cognition” clearly appears. From an epistemic perspective, it should be remembered that perception is considered in Antiquity as an interaction between the sensory organs, the medium (undulatory, ca- loric, material, etc.) of contact with the thing, and the thing itself, the object of perception, while the term cognition is reserved for the mental interpretation of the signal that the sensory organs transmit to the understanding. Both Plato, Aristotle, and philosophers of late Antiquity like Plotinus attached great importance to the versatile nature of the contact medium which under different conditions and un- der different surrounding constraints can give the distorted image of the thing. The role of the mind, the understanding or the intellection is above all to exercise control over the sensory sphere. Current cognitive sciences have a rather unitary vision of the nervous system and consider the sen- sory organs as extensions of the brain... Oneiric activities provide Ancient Humanity with an enormous reservoir of stories that are both mne- sic and premonitory. The imaginary, the abductive force of the creative projection on the “commonplace” world pro- duces a reasoning that confirms the subject in his role, if not central then certainly active, in the gnostic process. In short, the dream is an omnipresent source of the explana- tory hypotheses of reality, as Baudry says when relating the contributions of the dreamlike sphere discovered by Freud: 8 M. Sobieszczanski, “Two key factors in the history of communicating immersive environments: mix of reality vs. cognitive realism,” LINKs-series, no. 1-2 (2019), https://hal. archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02281583. 9 Plato, The Republic, Book VII. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 119 AN-ICON The transformations wrought by the sleep in the psychic appara- tus: removal of cathexis, lability of the different systems, return to narcissism, withdrawal of motor skills (impossibility of resorting to the reality test), contribute to producing the specific characteristics of the dream: its capacity for figuration, translation of thought into image, reality accorded to representations.10 Another experience, at the individual level, and - among all prehistoric peoples - strongly collective, is pro- vided using psychotropic substances. The inoculation of a chemical factor modifying both, perception, and con- sciousness, affects as well the centripetal sensory afferents, and their centrifugal control, most often thalamic but also caused by neocortical intellectual patterns. And if in cur- rent societies the practice of narcotics is mainly associated with personal deviance and destructuring addictions, in prehistory and antiquity, drugs served as a (bio)chemical substrate for divinatory trances. These states were both reserved for the use by a restricted class of hierophants, and essential for social regulation in general and for the management of individuals, particularly during initiation rites and rites of passage.11 Towards the clinical approach of hallucinatory phenomena Often times, individuals performing the same types of behaviors without the (bio)chemical support are viewed by the Ancients as representatives of the deity itself, and their verbal and iconic creations as direct expressions of religious truths that may serve as a vehicle for the intelli- gibility of reality. Western science began to take interest in the pathological dimension of these people and to associ- ate different clinics with them. Thus, the head doctor of the 10 J.L. Baudry, “The device:” 56-72. 11 J. Clottes, D. Lewis-Williams, Les Chamans de la Préhistoire. Trans et Magie dans les Grottes Ornées (Paris: Le Seuil, 1996); E. Guerra-Doce, “The origins of inebriation: archaeological evidence of the consumption of fermented beverages and drugs in prehistoric Eurasia,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory Theory 22 (2014): 751-782 https://doi. org/10.1007/s10816-014-9205-z. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 120 AN-ICON  Salpêtrière, Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, interpreted in 1838 the difference between illusions and hallucinations based on the nature of their references to reality, which led him to the definition of pathological hallucinations by preterition. “Perception without an object” is a normative view of the phenomenon which insists on its perceptual nature while denying the percept of this perception, and ultimately its object, in accordance with a “common sense.” Relayed without any critical readjustment by later research- ers, J. Baillarger, J.-P. Falret, E. Régis or P. Guiraud,12 this conception had to wait for the second half of the twentieth century to finally, in the research of Dr. Henri Ey, lead to the study of the nature of the hallucinatory process itself. The much-vaunted merit of Ey’s synthesis is first of all its distinction between hallucinosic eidolia and delirious hallucinations which are, alone, hallucinations properly speaking. “The eidolia do not come from a delusional func- tioning of the patient and are compatible with reason, in this they can be qualified as ‘psychonomy’. It is a ‘non-delusion- al hallucinatory modality’. The subject finds them ‘unreal’, incongruous in relation to his perceptual experience: he knows that he is hallucinating.”13 We will return to this definition in the context of certain immersive experiences with virtual spaces, such as vacuum or narrowing, producing effects of somatic re- actions even though the subject is aware of the “virtuality” of these spaces and their characteristics. On the other hand, the definition of delusional hallucinations provides us with another important theoret- ical dimension: Thus, for Ey “The hallucinatory phenomenon experienced by the subject must [...] have a double character: that of affecting his sensitivity or his sensoriality and that of being projected out of his subjectivity” ([2] p. 44-45). The patient must thus be able to attest 12 G. Gimenez, M. Guimont, J. Pedinielli, “Study of the evolution of the concept of hallucination in classical psychiatric literature,” L’evolution psychiatrique 68 (2003): 289-298. 13 Ibid. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 121 AN-ICON to a sensory experience (“I see, I hear, I feel”) by his reference to the attributes of sensoriality and support the objectivity and reality of this experience.14 This means, in essence, that a cerebral effect positioned in the sensory information processing areas, in certain clinical circumstances, can be correlated by intra- cerebral communication pathways with a cortical effect that mobilizes the oscillation between knowledge current (operational) and the thought of presumption, inclinations, convictions (doxic). In this situation, it is clear that there is a de- tachment of the sensory areas from the sensory organs, or rather a functional doubling of the cerebral support. On the one hand, there is evidence that patients suffering from hallucinations often achieve to conceive that the people accompanying them, the caregivers in this case, are not subject to the same phenomenon. On the other hand, the same patient simultaneously develops a hallucinatory syn- drome. The sensations “with object” do not disappear, on the contrary, the “generic” sensory excitations accompany the delirious subject throughout his “specific” experiences. In the article by G. Gimenez, M. Guimont, J.- L. Pedinielli, we read: “Minkowsky’s remarkable text on Le temps vivant, and in particular the chapter ‘Towards a psychopathology of space’, which shows very well the possible cohabitation, in the same subject, of a hallucina- tory neo-reality and a perceptual reality, often remaining actively separated by processes of splitting.”15 The “Perception without an object” was biased by its implicit use of the physiologically improbable, direct inversion of nervous influx16 in the optic or auditory nerves. In reality, the sick subject carries out two processes both highly demanding in terms of synaptic energy: that of the 14 Ibid. Here the article refers to H. Ey, Treatise on Hallucinations, vol. 2 (Paris: Masson and Co, 1973). 15 Ibid. The article refers to E. Minkowsky, The Lived Time. Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies (Neuchatel: Delachaux and Niesle, 1933). 16 The blocking of the inversion is ensured by the mechanism of the alternation of refractory periods and periods of excitability of the elementary nerve cell. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 122 AN-ICON  control of the real and that of the control of his own cere- bral activities of the sensory areas pathologically auton- omized to the point of competing with the gnosic results of perception. Under the light of current neuroscience re- sults supported by functional cerebral imaging, MRI and positron emission device, the etiology and consequently the nosography of delusional pathologies is shifting from the psychoanalytical vision where the sphere of symbolic topics takes pathologically precedence on the phenomenal sphere, towards a neuro-cognitivist vision compatible with the hypotheses of Dr. Ey, as Thomas Rabeyron states it: hallucinations should first be considered from the point of view of “reality monitoring,” a process that is part of a larger whole called “source monitoring.” According to Bentall (1990), hallucina- tions would thus be the consequence of a bad categorization: an internal perception, a representation, or a reminiscence, instead of being represented as coming from inside, would be categorized by the brain as coming from outside. There would therefore be confusion between internal source and external source, confusion being more specifically at the level of the thalamus, a real system for filtering information reaching the cerebral cortex.17 In fact, we are here in a process of intracerebral communication where, both in the presence of a meticu- lous monitoring of reality18 and independently of its gnosic results and its metacognitive achievements,19 the different neocortical areas exchange with each other. In this play, essentially triangular, the central position is ensured by (1) the thalamic zones which seem to distribute flows joining (2) the prefrontal cortex with (3) sensory, parietal or posterior, 17 T. Rabeyron, “Exceptional experiences: between neuroscience and psychoanalysis,” Research in Psychoanalysis, no. 8 (2009). The reference “Bentall (1990)” refers to R.P. Bentall, “The illusion of reality: at review and integration of psychological research on hallucinations,” Psychological Bulletin 107, no. 1 (1990): 82. 18 Let us remember the experiences cited by Merleau-Ponty where schizophrenics systematically thwarted attempts at scenographies recalling their imaginary world: M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945) (Paris: Gallimard, 2011). See also the connection between Merleau-Ponty and Dr. Ey, in: T. Grohmann, “Délire et hallucination en schizophrénie: une perspective phénoménologique,” Phainomenon 28 (2018): 103-125. 19 On this subject, see the “Higher-order thought theory” by David Rosenthal, in D. Rosenthal, Consciousness and Mind (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 123 AN-ICON  somatosensory, auditory and visual areas. The implication of the latter is proved indirectly by research combining the pathological phenomenon of synesthesia, the non-volun- tary association of sensations originating from different sen- sory modes, and hallucinatory sensations. This particular research has produced increasing evidences since Binet’s founding experiments.20 Reality monitoring With the dimension of “reality monitoring,” the theories of hallucinations begin to move away from their origins anchored in a naive realism where the third instance of a healthy observer arbitrated, in the light of “common” and “objective” representations, the pathological represen- tations of reality produced by the sick subject. In fact, they also abandon the solipsistic simplifications of a “a world to yourself” in which the patient would have been locked up. We are here within the framework of a duality where the two gnosic procedures hold comparable “realizing” forces from the point of view of their aesthesies. The nosological qualification of dysfunctions no longer consists in arbitrat- ing between the flow of consciousness of the sick subject and the flow of consciousness of the healthy subject, but in qualifying the way in which a subject oscillates between the two gnosic modes reputed to be constructive. It is therefore the attentional processes that make the nosology of delusional mental behaviors and not the hallucinations themselves, or again, in other words: we speak on hallucinations when the “fictio-creative” activities occur, by the alteration of the attentional processes, to sub- stitute themselves to the interoceptive and exteroceptive controls of reality. Attentional processes, whether defined accord- ing to peripheral filter theories or central manager theories, cannot be associated with an organic function or, even less, with a delimited convolution or a particular nerve bundle. 20 A. Binet, “The problem of colored hearing,” Revue des Deux Mondes 113 (1892): 586-614. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 124 AN-ICON  These are complex states of mobilization of cognitive re- sources assembling different parts of the nervous system, appearing to be identifiable with the different functional aspects of the circuits assigned to the different other pur- poses, as it is the case of the reticular system disposed on the path joining the lower bulbar region to the lateral and posterior hypothalamus. Following the inventory of con- vergent experimental facts, some theories on the rhythms of cerebral electro-biological activities, detectable at the cortical and subcortical level, propose here some interest- ing hypotheses, in particular on the role of theta waves.21 These processes are also associated with the presence of certain cognitive event-related potential (ERP) and in par- ticular the famous N400 discovered in 1978 by Kutas and Hillyard.22 The attentional processes have the capacity 23 to move, by means of calibration and thalamic reinforce- ments, not only in the direction of association or selection of external sources of sensory stimuli but also in the direc- tion of interchange and variation of the internal sources,24 among which we count usually different kinds of memo- ry,25 but also hallucinogenic stimuli.26 It is at this level that the problem of indissociation between the veracity and 21 M.C.M. Bastiaansen et al., “I see what you mean: theta power increases are involved in the retrieval of lexical semantic information,” Brain and Language 106 (2008): 15-28, https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2007.10.006. 22 M. Kutas, K.D. Federmeier, “Electrophysiology reveals semantic memory use in language comprehension,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, no. 12 (2000): 463-470, https://doi. org/10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01560-6. 23 M.I. Posner, “Orienting of attention,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 32 (1980): 3-25. 24 J.K. Roth et al., “Similar and dissociable mechanisms for attention to internal versus external information,” NeuroImage 48 (2009): 601-608. 25 E. Awh, E.K. Vogel, S.H. Oh, “Interactions between attention and working memory,” Neuroscience 139, no. 1 (2006): 201-208, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2005.08.023. 26 R.P. Bentall, “The illusion of reality: at review and integration of psychological research on hallucinations,” Psychological Bulletin 107, no. 1 (1990): 82, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033- 2909.107.1.82; M.K. Johnson, C.L. Raye, “Reality monitoring,” Psychological Review 88 (1981): 67-85, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-295X.88.1.67; M.K. Johnson, S. Hashtroudi, D.S. Lindsay, “Source monitoring,” Psychlogical Bulletin 114 (1993): 3-28, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.114.1.3; G. Brébion et al., “Reality monitoring failure in schizophrenia: The role of selective attention,” Schizophrenia Research 22, no. 2 (15 Nov. 1996): 173-180, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0920-9964(96)00054-0; A. Schnider, “Spontaneous confabulation, reality monitoring, and the limbic system - a review,” Brain Research Reviews 36, no. 2–3 (2001): 150-160, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0165-0173(01)00090-X; J.K. Roth et al., “Similar and dissociable mechanisms for attention to internal versus external information,” NeuroImage 48 (2009): 601-608. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 125 AN-ICON  the coherence of different topics, imaginary and sensory, must occur. From then on, the fictitious topics that we will begin to call fictional (see below), can exercise a “realizing” role they can effectively embed into the sensible real, by the means of intensity of esthesia (contribution from sen- sory areas), sequential plausibility, and causal relevance (contributions from frontal areas). From the moment when the “realization” efficiency is obtained, the altered attention moves indiscriminately from the external to the internal and withdraws from its task as a source checker. Thus, on the double psychic substrate, emerges an internal fiction without the subject being able to exercise any criticism towards it. In the patient, the source of suffering stems more from the awareness of this impotence of discernment than from the disconcerting contents of the hallucinations themselves. Even if the patient still has the possibility of diverting his attention, what his attention points to is, in both directions, internal and external, impetuously “real.” As Dr. Ey said, delusional work is characterized by “foreignness, incoercibility, assertiveness and aesthesis.” Foreignness, because the internal and external sources have the same rank of veracity and can therefore be interchangeable; in- coercibility because this process prevails over the mecha- nisms of anti-hallucinatory coercion; assertiveness because the sequences of topics obtained through hallucinations can serve as a basis for the subject’s discursive activities; and aesthesia because the subject is aware of the fact that thanks to the strident aesthesia of his hallucinations he can distinguish them from ordinary memory material, but cannot to mobilize enough to distinguish them from perceptual sensations. We are touching here on the doxic status of hallucinations and in this the comparison between sensory immersion with artificial origin and hallucinations becomes for us more than a superficial metaphor. In schizophrenia, the activations of sensory areas stimulated by prefrontal activities and categorized by thalamic operations bring out a threshold effect beyond which the complex neural sub- strate is ready to exercise a creative role and generates MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 126 AN-ICON  a fictional “effect.” This “effect” is both gnosic, active in the symbolic sphere, and assertoric in the domain of the subject’s discursive approach. To summarize, in patholog- ical states of this type, fiction begins to compete, through attentional maneuvers, with the real apprehended by the sensorial way.27 Hallucinogenic function vs. Cultural and artistic creations It is obvious that the comparison between immersion in artificial sensory devices and hallucinatory states overlaps with the very old theoretical concerns of specialists in literature and cinema, notably René Wellek and Austin Warren,28 and Jean-Louis Baudry,29 concerning the status of the “presented reality” in the verbal story and in the visual narration. On this topic, for methodological reasons, we propose to dissociate two blocks of questions: what comes from diếgêsis and what comes from mimesis, in order to better synthesize them later on.30 On the one hand, the comparison of immersion and hallucination appears as existential experiences. We call “existential” the situations and the experiences that are attached to them, when it is a question, for a human subject, of facing an immediate environment, offering to his perception the sensory substrate which allows him to carry out his habitual activities: standing, sitting, walking, etc., 27 The subject being aware of the imbalance between the respective parts of the internal fiction and of its “reality monitoring,” falls into the suffering stemming from the anxiety of failing in reality. In this, schizophrenia involves a double danger: that which stems from the often disconcerting nature of the “visions” and that of the depression provoked by the awareness of one’s own failures in the duty of reality. 28 R. Wellek, A. Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948). “As Wellek and Warren (La Théorie littéraire) point out, there is a use for these invented stories, which is to entertain and instruct, a use that should not be confused with forgetting boredom. Fiction triggers desire, pleasure, escape and knowledge, without the seriousness of a duty to accomplish, a lesson to learn. This plural pleasure is to live adventures that daily life refuses us, to which we access by proxy. The knowledge transmitted by fiction is of a different order from that provided by science, philosophy or history.” Yves Chemla about F. Tremblay, La Fiction en Question (Balzac-Le Griot editor, 1999) coll. Littératures à l’essai, Montréal, in Acta Fabula, Autumn 2000, vol. 1, no 2, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris. 29 J.L. Baudry, “The device:” 56-72. 30 E. Souriau, “The structure of the film universe and the vocabulary of filmology,” Revue internationale de filmologie 7-8 (1951). MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 127 AN-ICON  activities whose purpose lacks a delayed-causal goal, the “short-term” behavior. The notion of immediacy must also be addressed. Situations are immediate when the goals pursued by the subject affect his current vital needs, unlike the pursuit of medium and long-term goals. In this sense, we are forced to separate, for example, the expectation of resolution of a legal case that mobilizes our energy for several years, from the posture that we adopt in the last minutes before the last trial, although the lasting experience conditions, to a certain extent, the momentary behaviors, and vice versa; the punctual and immediate existential ex- perience merges, in a certain way, with the image and the memory that we have of the entire event.31 On the other hand, the immersion can be com- pared with the effects of fiction which are elaborated in the brain of the readers of literary stories and the spectators of cinematographic storytelling. Here, it is not a question of evaluating the effects of immersion by the yardstick of immediate perceptions, which can feed temporary postural reactions, move in the relative field of vision, explore its space immediately adjoining our body or behave according to the volumes found, suggested by the 3D image-models of the show unfolding before the eyes of the subject, but it is a question of listing the psychological and somatic effects of a “world” which is constructed in the process of mediated communication, through signs and their bodi- ly and technical supports, i.e. writing, icon, image-move- ment. It is a question, for example, of distinguishing two perceptual occurrences, in the complex reaction that we can have when seeing and manipulating, including by our movements, the model of the staircase of the Capitol of Washington drawn up for the CAVE at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CALIT2) in San Diego: the monumental effect of architecture and the symbolic effect produced by the political heritage of the 31 In The Trial of Franz Kafka, the literary effect of “reversal of experiences” consists precisely in this substitution of the momentary experiences of the waiting corridors in the legal institutions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for the synthetic experience of the long period between the indictment and the execution of the sentence. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 128 AN-ICON  United States. Although the distance separating the sign from its denotat is arranged as a continuum running from presence, through deferred presence and through the trace of presence, to the sign of presence, the consciousness and gnosic processes arising therefrom are categorized according to the jurisdiction of discrete boundaries. Verbal and visual narrations do not lead to the same results as immediate perceptions, coming from the real environment. Our hypothesis is that the productions of hu- man culture both generate and use the same human abili- ties to produce fiction, without this process resulting from any pathology. In other words, in the healthy creative sub- ject, fiction benefits from substantially the same psychic substrate as hallucinations in schizophrenics, but the at- tentional processes retain all their effectiveness in them. In delirious patients, there is an increase of the psychic substrate which manages and admits to the doxic sphere the different sources, internal and external, without mak- ing any discernment between them, or rather transgresses this discernment. In the healthy creative human, the same fictional process does not come from a doubling of the psy- chic apparatus but from an externalization of the psychic contents “projected” on an apparatus or a device which in the process of communication exercises a fictional function. In humans as “consumer” of culture and receivers of the creative message, there is no confusion between the two flows either, there is, on the other hand, from his point of view, a duplication of the substrate of cultural productions, a substrate that sometimes can be apprehended in what it offers as affordances to direct sensory and postural cog- nitive actions, and sometimes as a generator of fiction on the basis of quasi-affordances that can be seized by the sensory-motor brain areas correlated to the frontal areas via the weighting of the thalamic zone. This latter process can be initiated by the action of the mirror neuron system. The person subject to hallucinations oscillates between the two streams of consciousness, the creator mobilizes his attentional processes in order to work on the perceived reality in a manner similar to the ways fictional MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 129 AN-ICON  topics inhabit him. And since the parity of the flows of the “intus” and of the flows of the “extra” is in him maintained and oriented according to the precedence of the perceptual, his internal fiction is itself “perception oriented.” Perspectives of applied research in 360° imaging The tradition of research definitely established since the 2010s, especially at the continuation of the theo- retical work of David Bordwell,32 first in different academic centers, in Japan,33 in the United States,34 and then spread in vast circles of internationals researchers,35 offers ex- perimental research involving spectators, individual and collective,36 engaged in actions of narrative construction based on the video-film creations. In our book from 201537 we commented on the difference between the spatio-sym- bolic narrative construction in the frontal cinema with cen- tral and oriented projection and attempts of the spherical and interactive cinema. In this latter area the theory pre- dominant seems to be organized around the environmental concept of enaction.38 Note that this concept also applies 32 D. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London-New York: Routledge, 1987). 33 M. Kimura et al., “Human visual system automatically encodes sequential regularities of discrete events,” Journal of Cognitive Neurosciences 22, no. 6 (2010): 1124-1139, https://doi. org/10.1162/jocn.2009.21299. 34 J.E. Cutting, “Perceiving scenes in film and in the world,” in J.D. Anderson, B.F. Anderson, eds., Moving Image Theory: Ecological Considerations (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005): 9-27. 35 K.S. Heimann et al., “Cuts in action: a high-density EEG study investigating the neural correlates of different editing techniques in film,” Cognitive Science 41 (2017): 1555-1588, https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12439; K. Pajunen, Immersed in Illusion, an Ecological Approach to the Virtual (Jyväskylä: Bookwell, Acta Universitatis Lapponiensis, 2012); P. Francuz, E. Zabielska-Mendyk, “Does the brain differentiate between related and unrelated cuts when processing audiovisual messages? An ERP study,” Media Psychology 16, no. 4 (2013): 461- 475; P. Tikka et al., “Enactive cinema paves way for understanding complex real-time social interaction in neuroimaging experiments,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (2012), https://doi. org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00298. 36 K. Lankine et al., “Consistency and similarity of MEG- and fMRI-signal time courses during movie viewing,” NeuroImage 173 (2018): 361-369. 37 M. Sobieszczanski, Les Médias Immersifs Informatisés. Raisons Cognitives de la Ré- analogisation (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015): 300. 38 P. Tikka, V. Rasmus, K. Mauri, “Narrative logic of enactive cinema: obsession,” Digital Creativity 17, no. 4 (2006): 205-212, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14626260601074078. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 130 AN-ICON  to classical cinema, as has been underlined in Bordwell’s founding works... Can we believe that going through the com- parison between hallucinations and cognitive effects of the interactive and immersive cinema can provide us with a tool, both theoretical and empirical, even more powerful? If we imagine a multi-scale analysis proving the existence of a multi-layered and harmonized neural substrate, spe- cialized in performing arbitration tasks between different sources of information: external, internal, and those used for weighting memory of sensory-motor anticipations, we can hope that the monitoring of reality can become this powerful tool. There are three preliminary problems to pose as the epistemological background before proceeding to analysis of information sources in video-film products. Frontal cinema operates its management of attentional points within the framework of a language put into place through the process of acculturation for 120 years. This device, both technical, grammatical and se- mantic shapes the audience of the cinema by constituting a quasi-cognitive functionality which participates in the construction of the image of the world in the broad sense. There is here a kind of sloping of a cultural function in the field of generic cognition. Experiences in spectation and the construction of the image of the world, both: from truthful world and the world as illusion, must first take care to put out of the game the artefact of the appearance of classic cinema. Immersive or spherical cinema is part of an- other “grammar.” Its “editing,” the rules of his language, is a “natural editing,” called for by Pasolini,39 is operated by bodily movements, gaze movements and ocular saccades. The same “objective” real can be looked at in different 39 “When we talk about the semiology of cinematographic language, we must at the same time talk about the semiology of reality,” extract from an interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini by André S. Labarthe on 15/11/1966. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 131 AN-ICON  ways by the same person and by the different spectators, according to their own management of attentional points. And finally, immersive cinema manages its spa- tio-temporal referential external to the device of the same way that it manages the spatiality and the dynamics of the contents which are presented into the device. In other words, the grammar of cutting and exploring of the sen- sitive, natural and artefactual material, is the same as that which governs our spatio-temporal relationship to the world. The perspective of empirical research on the hallucinatory illusion can then lead to the establishment of a normative system allowing people subject to hallucinations to ex- change with their caregivers not by means of art-therapy, but by means of the shared control of sources of informa- tion on reality. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 132 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/17297

The haptics of illusion: an account of touch across theories, technologies and museums by Valentina Bartalesi and Anna Calise Haptic Technology Illusion Virtuality Museums Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing The haptics of il usion. An account of touch across theories, technologies and museums VALENTINA BARTALESI, Università IULM – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8596-4014 ANNA CALISE, Università IULM – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2966-7613 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17297 Abstract Touch represents one of the latest and most complex frontiers of virtuality: a sense which historical- ly seems to have carried the burden of proof on reality, by definition resistant to illusory environments. The paper begins from this assumption to trace a history of illusion across authors and theorists that have debated the stat- ute of haptics, building a dialogue between philosophical dilemmas and technological developments. Moving both from an aesthetic and psychophysiological viewpoint, the article will root its analysis in an historical-artistic account, augmenting the discussion with a series of case studies from the museum sector. The introduction of haptic tech- nologies within cultural institutions, which dates back to the last three decades, proves an interesting field to test the functions which touch plays in both educational and imaginative scenarios. The open question being whether modern technologies should aim at replicating haptic re- alism in miming phenomenological accuracy, or whether the most innovative applications need to aspire to a more environmental employment of touch. Keywords Haptic Technology Illusion Virtuality Museums To quote this essay: V. Bartalesi, A. Calise, “The haptics of illusion. An account of touch across theories, technologies and museums,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 133-161, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17297 VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 133 AN-ICON Fig 1. Creation of a new style of media art using digital paints in a harmonization of the senses of vision and touch. It seems that we have so often been warned not to touch that we are reluctant to probe the tactile world even with our minds. Constance Classen The Deepest Sense. A Cultural History of Touch, 2012 Introduction In his Post-Scriptum addendum, alongside his monumental survey on the polysemy of touch in Nancy through the history of Western philosophy, Derrida de- nounced a widespread prejudice whereby “one sponta- neously has the tendency to believe that touching re­sists virtualization.”1 Through this acute remark, the French phi- losopher underlies a consolidated topos that attributes to the sense of touch the ability to convey a direct and objec- tive knowledge of the things of the world, captured in their physical and even theoretical dimension.2 By questioning the supposed identity relationship between touch and ob- jectivity, the author opens a new perspective on the sub- ject, widening the ways in which the world of haptics could be conceptualized and practiced. For the purpose of the 1 J. Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005): 300. 2 Cfr. J.-L. Nancy, Corpus (Paris: Metailie, 1992): 76; M. Paterson, The Sense of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Oxford: Berg, 2007): 2-3; C. Classen, D. Howes, Ways of Sensing (New York: Routledge, 2014): 89; A. Gallace, C. Spence, In Touch with the Future: The Sense of Touch from Cognitive Neuroscience to Virtual Reality, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 3. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 134 AN-ICON  argument presented here, Derrida’s considerations prove pivotal: the aim will be to try and deepen his assumption, investigating the relationship between illusion, haptic per- ception and works of art. Addressing the possibility that both the theory and practice which anticipate and guide haptic experiences and technologies account for an illusory character, escaping the grounds of undeniable certainty and adherence to reality which are at times linked to the discourse on touch. This study will in fact envisage the possibility that illusion imposes itself as a constitutive figure of haptic feeling both on a theoretical level and on a technical one. The research will focus on how the experience of touching plastic objects changes from the analogical dimension to the digital one, first from a theoretical point of view and then across a range of case studies within the museum sector. In the peculiar phenomenon of touching sculpture in a virtual environment employing haptic devices, the il- lusion changes its function: before a theoretical figure, it becomes an experiential strategy. Not necessarily aimed at generating a phenomenological surplus, which as we will see most technologies are not able to offer, but at of- fering the possibility of a semantic shift on an emotional and aesthetic level. The study will begin with an assess- ment of Derrida’s theorizing on the haptic and on virtuality, highlighting the inherent illusory character that seems to be shared by both virtual haptic museological experiences and the theorizing of “haptic” itself, a link captured by the author already in his work On Touching. While borrowing from Derrida the relevance of museum practices as case studies for the discussion on the haptic, this article will however assess evidentiary accounts in the second sec- tion of the text. Before addressing the case studies, it was deemed necessary to elaborate two relevant premises. On the one hand, a thorough account of haptic technologies and of the current theoretical issues that guide their design will be presented, with reference to the challenges posed by haptic illusions. On the other hand, a historiographic account of the fundamental role that the concept of illusion VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 135 AN-ICON  has played in the theorizing of the haptic discourse will be offered. Through this analysis, we aim to hopefully demon- strate the structural role played by the figure of illusion in both theoretical and technological designs, strengthening the rationale which serves as the guiding principle of the discussion at hand. The second section, following Derrida’s intuition and using museological haptic technologies case studies, will try to assess how these premises relate to the cultural offer available to the public. Beginning from the relationship between touching and cultural artifacts, and more specifically sculptures, which has played a central role in both philosophical and museological undertakings, a history of touch in museums will be briefly traced, con- necting contemporary endeavors to their historical pre- decessors. Then a series of relevant case studies will be presented, trying to understand, by looking closely at their design and reception, what aspect of the haptic experience they aimed to leverage on, and therefore which epistemic and experiential qualities were privileged. It will emerge that when museums are trying to reinstate the evidentiary nature of the haptic experience, and focus on mimicking a reductive understanding of the phenomenology of touch, the results might be scientifically interesting yet not experi- entially powerful. By contrast, when the more evocative and illusory qualities of the haptic are investigated, exploiting a more environmental and multifaceted account of the haptic experience, a new and promising use of haptic technolo- gies is possible.3 “Tact beyond the possible:”4 illusion as a figure of the haptic between historiography and psycho-aesthetics The teleological value of the human hand as a pro toto organ of the sense of touch is a recurring trope in the history of philosophy, from Kant, through Herder, de 3 Although the paper is the result of a collective research and reflection work made by the two authors, the first section was written by Valentina Bartalesi, the second one by Anna Calise. 4 J. Derrida, On Touching: 66. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 136 AN-ICON  Miran, Husserl, until Katz, Focillon, Révész, and Gibson.5 In Derrida’s analysis the haptic, assumed as a not stric- tu sensu6 sense that “virtually” involves the sensorium in its obscure intricacy,7 is qualified by the peculiar “motor activity”8 of the human hand. Yet, while recognizing the constitutive motility of this sensory faculty, Derrida refus- es such preliminary immediacy, claiming with Nancy its “local, fractal, modal” nature.9 If these adjectives partially complicate the meaning of touching on an ontological level, they seem to encourage the reflection towards a technical sphere, according to an address that Derrida tries to verify. As a proof of the fragility of a way of thinking that a priori denies the possibility of virtualizing touch, the philosopher presents a significant case study for that time: the Haptic Museum in California.10 In spite of the limited evidence still available with regards to this institution, its mission appears clear. As Margaret L. Mclaughlin of the Integrated Media Systems Center (University of Southern California) states: Our IMSC team has used haptics to allow museum visitors to ex- plore three-dimensional works of art by “touching” them, some- thing that is not possible in ordinary museums due to prevailing “hands-off” policies. Haptics involves the modality of touch-the sensation of shape and texture an observer feels when exploring 5 J. Derrida, On Touching: 41-42, 95, 122, 140. See in this respect: L.A. Jones, S.J. Lederman, Human Hand Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006): 6; A. Benjamin, “Endless touching: Herder and sculpture,” Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico 4, no. 1, (2011): 73-92, https://doi.org/10.13128/Aisthesis-10983; H. Focillon, “Éloge de la main” (1934), in Vie des Formes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981); G. Révész, The Human Hand (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958); J.J. Gibson, “Observations on active touch,” Psychological Review 69, no. 6 (November 1962): 477-491, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0046962. 6 J. Derrida, On Touching: 53, 149. 7 Ibid.: 42. 8 Ibid.: 142. 9 As noted by: “But there again-and this, too, has to be clear only upon the condition that tact does not concentrate, does not lay claim as Descartes’s touching does to the privilege given to immediacy, which would bring about the fusion of all the senses and of ‘sense.’ Touching, too, touching, first, is local, modal, fractal”, J.L. Nancy, Corpus: 76. 10 J. Derrida, On Touching: 300-301; M.L. Mclaughlin et al., “The haptic museum,” Conference: Proc. of the EVA 2000 Florence Conf. on Electronic Imaging and the Visual Arts (March 2000), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229433104_The_Haptic_Museum, accessed December 11, 2022. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 137 AN-ICON a virtual object, such as a 3D model of a piece of pottery or art glass.11 Although presumably the first example of a haptic museum equipped with exosomatic technologies,12 Derrida’s case includes many factors that have become constitutive in subsequent museological proposals. By in- teracting with the PHANToM haptic device13 or wearing the exoskeleton glove CyberGrasp,14 at those times fu- turistic apparatuses, visitors could proceed to the manual exploration of virtual artifacts, digitized by employing 3D cameras such as ColorScan or Virtuoso.15 Technically, the “haptic human-computer interaction (HCI)” requires a struc- tural triad composed of “human user, interface device, and virtual environment synthesized by computer.”16 Through “haptic-rendering algorithms,”17 the device provides spe- cific stimuli arising from the interaction between the “hap- tic device representation” (the user’s avatar) and the 11 M.L. Mclaughlin et al., “The haptic museum:” w.p. 12 Among the twentieth-century experiences, one of the first tactile museum exhibitions dedicated to blind people was organized by The American Museum of New York in 1909. While in the 1970s, numerous worldwide museums realized tactile pathways dedicated to the visually impaired, the first Haptic Gallery was opened by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. on March 1st 1979, as the Smithsonian Archive documentation testifies. See in this respect: H.F. Osborn, The American Museum of Natural History: its origin, its history, the growth of its departments to December 31, 1909 (New York: The American Museum of Natural History, 1909): 148; Chronology of Smithsonian History, “NPH Haptic Gallery Opens” (March 1st 1979): https://siris-sihistory.si.edu/ipac20/ipac. jsp?&profile=all&source=~!sichronology&uri=full=3100001~!1462~!0#focus accessed December 11, 2022; Council on Museums and Education in the Visual Arts, The art museum as educator: a collection of studies as guides to practice and policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 13 Designed by the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1994, “PHANToM is a convenient desktop device which provides a force-reflecting interface between a human user and a computer.” Inserting the index fingertip into a thimble or interacting with a stick, PHANToM consists in “a system capable of presenting convincing sensations of contact, constrained motion, surface compliance, surface friction, texture and other mechanical attributes of virtual objects.” T.H. Massie, J.K. Salisbury, “The PHANToM haptic interface: a device for probing virtual objects,” Dynamic Systems and Control 55, no. 1 (1994): w.p. 14 Commercialized in 2009, “the CyberGrasp device is a lightweight, force-reflecting exoskeleton that fits over a CyberGlove data glove (wired version) and adds resistive force feedback to each finger. With the CyberGrasp force feedback system, users are able to feel the size and shape of computer-generated 3D objects in a simulated virtual world.” Please see: CyberGrasp, CyberGlove System: https://static1.squarespace.com/ static/559c381ee4b0ff7423b6b6a4/t/5602fc01e4b07ebf58d480fb/1443036161782/ CyberGrasp_Brochure.pdf, accessed December 11, 2022. 15 M.L. Mclaughlin et al., “The haptic museum:” w.p. 16 D. Wang et al., “Haptic display for virtual reality: progress and challenges,” Virtual Reality & Intelligent Hardware 1, no. 2 (April 2019): 137 https://doi.org/10.3724/SP.J.2096- 5796.2019.0008. 17 Ibid.: 141-143. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 138 AN-ICON  photogrammetric restitution of the object in a virtual en- vironment (the haptic image).18 Hence, according to the object-relational data model, users receive tactile and kin- esthetic feedback geared towards the stimulation of the mechanoreceptors on the fingertip (for PHANToM) and on the whole hand surface (if wearing CyberGrasp) during the exploration of the virtual object.19 More specifically, the sub- ject perceives vibrotactile feedback which should make him or her feel those sensations that are connotative of touching the physical object,20 absent in its ilemorphic habitus albeit realistically tangible in its morphological properties of size, weight, surface, and texture.21 Beyond the issues more strictly related to the physiology of the experience, it is here relevant to examine how these researchers have recorded the act of touching a virtual object. Unexpectedly, the members of the Califor- nian IMSC, as well as the French philosopher, feel the need to put in inverted commas locutions such as “touching,” “remote touching,” or “realistic sensations of touching.”22 The grammatical escamotage of the quotation marks clear- ly betrays the necessity, be it more or less incidental, to denounce the presence of expressions bent to a “special or translated” use. In the technical gesture that the Haptic Museum visitor makes exploring virtual artifacts, Derrida glimpses the theoretical locus where “immediate contact”23 discloses its own illusory and ontologically fictitious dimen- sion, opening a chasm within the very meaning of touch: ultimately, what is the object of touch? Is this an illusion of 18 K. Salisbury, F. Conti, F. Barbagli, “Haptic rendering: introductory concepts,” IEEE Computer Society 24, no. 2 (March/April 2004): 25-26, https://doi.org/10.1109/ MCG.2004.1274058. 19 P.P. Pott, “Haptic Interfaces,” in L. Manfredi, ed., Endorobotics. Design, R&D, Future Trends (Academic Press, 2022). 20 Even if, according to Salisbury and Srinivasan “the resulting sensations prove startling, and many first-time users are quite surprised at the compelling sense of physical presence they encounter when touching virtual objects,” the improvement of haptic feedback constitutes one of the main purposes of this kind of technology. J.K. Salisbury, M.A. Srinivasan, “Phantom- based haptic interaction with virtual objects,” IEEE (September/October 1997): 6-10, https:// doi.org/10.1109/MCG.1997.1626171. 21 As Derrida notes, describing the above-mentioned experience, “we can thus feel the weight, form, and structure of the surface of a Chinese vase while ‘holding’ a three- dimensional digital model,” J. Derrida, On Touching: 301. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 139 AN-ICON  touch or what Madalina Diacuno prefers to define in terms of “illusionary touch”?24 If so, how to illustrate the phenom- enology of such an illusion? The noun “illusion,” from the Latin illudere (in, “against,” ludere “to play”), describes an “act of deception; deceptive appearance, apparition; delusion of the mind.”25 However, in the specialist lexicon on haptic perception the expression “haptic illusion” more rigorously recounts a “disruption of the physical coherence between real move- ment and feedback forces, used to create the illusion of a non-existent feature or to compensate with the illusion the sensation of an undesired detail.”26 As convincingly established by the critical literature since Révész, several haptic illusions have been codified and are currently under investigation.27 It should also be noted that a similar illusion, even though different in terms of the neurological reaction experienced with haptic prostheses in virtual environments, is daily negotiated by the user in the interaction with touch screens. The most recent media-archeological studies have investigated this ambiguous nature of “touching,” recording the hiatus which systematically occurs when the consum- er digitally interacts with the contents that pass through the “display.”28 In this regard, Simone Arcagni has recently pointed out how touch screens solicit a kind of experience “as if there were no longer a mediation between the idea of doing and the action that takes place in our hands” by 24 M. Diaconu, “Illusionary touch, and touching illusions,” in A. Tymieniecka, ed., Analecta Husserliana. The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research. Human Creation Between Reality and Illusion, vol. 87 (Cham: Springer, 2005): 115-125. 25 “Illusion,” Online Etymology Dictionary: https://www.etymonline.com/word/illusion, accessed December 11, 2022. 26 M. Grunwald, ed., Human Haptic Perception. Basics and Applications (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008): 649. 27 The main haptic illusions include “size-weight illusion,” a tangible version of the “Muller- Lyer illusion,” the “horizontal-vertical illusion” and the “Ponzio illusion.” See in this regard: M.A. Heller, E. Gentaz, “Illusions,” in M.A. Heller, E. Gentaz, eds., Psychology of Touch and Blindness (New York-London: Psychology Press - Taylor & Francis Group, 2014): 61-78. 28 F. Casetti, “Primal screens,” in C. Buckley, R. Campe, F. Casetti, eds., Screen Genealogies. From Optical Device to Environmental Medium (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019): 45; F. Casetti, “Che cos’è uno schermo, oggi?,” Rivista di Estetica 55 (2014): 28- 34 https://doi.org/10.4000/estetica.969. According to Francesco Casetti, touch screens represent the most effective type of display (ibid.: 29), a device that the author links to an instant, “passive” and disengaged communication. Consistently to the current hypertrophic consumption of images, Casetti’s display “exhibits, not reveals. It offers, not engages” (ibid.) and this happens because the touch screen “puts images in our hands” (ibid.). VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 140 AN-ICON  intensifying the sensation of proximity between user and content.29 Raising attention to the dangers inherent in the automation of touching, David Parisi has introduced the mil- itary phrase “Fingerbombing,” highlighting the “distanced, detached and destructive” nature of interaction with the touchscreen of a Nintendo DS.30 Furthermore, citing Thom- as Hirschhorn’s brutal video clip Touching Reality (2012), Wanda Strauven has denounced the moral and technical break between screen and display, whereby the object of touch results in the screen and not the images passing through it.31 Once more, what do the subjects touch and what do they perceive by touching and consuming?32 In light of this ontological uncertainty, the abil- ity to confer and simulate the highest degree of realism to the haptic experience of virtual content through a het- erogeneous range of devices – among the most futuristic devices should be mentioned AirPiano,33 VibroWeight,34 WeHAPTIC35 – is generally considered one of the overriding 29 S. Arcagni, Visioni Digitali: Video, Web e Nuove tecnologie (Torino: Einaudi, 2016): 301. 30 D. Parisi, “Fingerbombing, or ‘Touching is Good’: The Cultural Construction of Technologized Touch,” in M. Elo, M. Luoto, eds., Figure of Touch: Sense, Technics, Body (Helsinki: The Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki, Tallinna Raamatutrükikoja OÜ, 2018): 83. 31 W. Strauven, Touchscreen Archeology (Lüneberg: Meson Press, 2021): 112-116. Cfr. W. Strauven, “Marinetti’s tattilismo revisited hand travels, tactile screens, and touch cinema in the 21st Century,” in R. Catanese, ed., Futurist Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018): 70. 32 See in this respect: M. Racat, S. Capelli, “Touching without touching: the paradox of the digital age,” in M. Racat, S. Capelli, eds., Haptic Sensation and Consumer Behavior. The Influence of Tactile Stimulation in Physical and Online Environments (Nature Switzerland: Springer, 2020). 33 AirPiano constitutes “an enhanced music playing system to provide touchable experiences in HMD-based virtual reality with mid-air haptic feedback”. For more information see: I. Hwang et. al., “AirPiano: enhancing music playing experience in virtual reality with mid-air haptic feedback,” 2017 IEEE World Haptics Conference (WHC): 213-218 https://doi.org/10.1109/ WHC.2017.7989903. 34 VibroWeight represents “low-cost hardware prototype with liquid metal” employing “bimodal feedback cues in VR, driven by adaptive absolute mass (weights) and gravity shift:” X. Wang et. al., “VibroWeight: simulating weight and center of gravity changes of objects in virtual reality for enhanced realism,” Human Computer Interaction (2022): https://doi.org/10.48550/ arXiv.2201.07078. 35 WeHAPTIC (Wearable Haptic interface for Accurate Position Tracking and Interactive force Control) “shows improved performances in terms of finger motion measurement and force feedback compared with existing systems such as finger joint angle calculation and precise force control:” Y. Park et. al., “WeHAPTIC: a Wearable Haptic interface for Accurate Position Tracking and Interactive force Control,” Mechanism and Machine Theory 153, (November 2020): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mechmachtheory.2020.104005. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 141 AN-ICON  objectives for improving these technologies.36 Furthermore, even though since the invention of the first haptic device in 194837 continuous improvements have been made, contem- porary interfaces present both a qualitative and quantitative deficit compared to the human haptic sensitivity, calling for “urgent requirement to improve the realism of haptic feed- back for VR systems, and thus to achieve equivalent sen- sation comparable to the interaction in a physical world.”38 While the expression “haptic realism,” coined by the philosopher of science Mazviita Chirimuuta in 2016, opens the hypothesis of a scientific perspectivism based on interaction with the world,39 the same expression when related to haptic interfaces assumes a more technical con- notation. As Sushma Subramanian points out in a conversa- tion during the 2020 World Haptics Conference with Ed Col- gate, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University, although haptic technologies still go through a “primitive” state, the short-term goal in their design is to “develop a new tactile language that mimics the kinds of maneuvers we make with three-dimensional objects” in which “the challenging part is to make us feel them.”40 A leading producer such as the Berlin-based Lofelt attempts to make interaction with the touch screen more realistic by combining sounds with the corresponding haptic vibrations 36 A. Brogni, D.G. Caldwell, M. Slater, “Touching sharp virtual objects produces a haptic illusion,” in R. Shumaker, ed., Virtual and Mixed Reality (Berlin Heidelberg: Springer, 2011): 234-242; A. Gallace, M. Girondini, “Social touch in virtual reality,” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 43 (February 2022): 249-254, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.11.006. It should be noted how the design of “pseudo-haptic feedback” is also nodal to the experience of touching in virtual environments. See in this regard A. Maehigashi et. al., “Virtual weight illusion: weight perception of virtual objects using weight illusion,” CHI ’21 Extended Abstracts (May 2021), https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451842. Furthermore, the design of an effective haptic illusion in a virtual environment is related to scale and precisely to the so-called “Body- scaling effect”: P. Abtahi, “From illusions to beyond-real interactions in virtual reality,” UIST ‘21: The Adjunct Publication of the 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (October 2021): 153-157, https://doi.org/10.1145/3474349.3477586. 37 As David Parisi reports, the invention of the first mechanical force feedback master- slave manipulator in nuclear field is due to the engineer Raymond Goertz of the Atomic Energy Commission for the Argonne National Laboratory. D. Parisi, Archaeologies of Touch. Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2018): 220-221. 38 D. Wang, “Haptic display:” 137. 39 M. Chirimuuta, “Vision, perspectivism, and haptic realism,” Philosophy of Science 83, no. 5 (December 2016), 746-756 https://doi.org/10.1086/687860. 40 S. Subramanian, How to Feel. The Science and Meaning of Touch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021): 250-251. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 142 AN-ICON  so that the user participates in an immersive experience. As Lofelt founder Daniel Büttner asserts: “it is all an illu- sion, but it seems incredibly real.”41 In a similar direction, the most advanced research conducted by the Intelligent Haptic program of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligence System aims to implement the sensitivity of electrovibra- tions.42 Evidence that haptic perception is one of the most promising experimental fields for the virtual world is reflect- ed in the great number of HORIZON programs supported by the European Union in the last five years,43 mainly dedi- cated to Mid-Air and Mixed Haptic Feedback technologies. Ultrahaptics, launched in 2013, consists in a haptic device system in which the force feedback is positioned above interactive surfaces and requires no contact with either tool, attaching to the surface itself. Instead, haptic sensations are projected through a screen and directly onto the user’s hands. It employs the principle of acoustic radiation force whereby a phased array of ultrasonic transducers is used to exert forces on a target in mid-air.44 H-Reality devices, on the other hand, employing mixed haptic feedback technology “aim at combining the contactless haptic technology with the contact haptic tech- nology and then apply it into virtual and augmented reality 41 R. Banham, “Haptic happenings: how touch technologies are taking on new meaning,” Dell Technologies (October 21, 2019): https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-us/perspectives/ haptic-happenings-how-touch-technologies-are-taking-on-new-meaning/, accessed December 11, 2022. 42 Y. Vardar, K.J. Kuchenbeker, L. Behringer, “Challenging the design of electrovibrations to generate a more realistic feel,” Haptic Intelligence Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (April 6, 2021): https://hi.is.mpg.de/news/challenging-the-design-of-electrovibrations-to- generate-a-more-realistic-feel, accessed December 11, 2022. 43 Among them we point out: Horizon 2020 (CORDIS), TACTIle Feedback Enriched Virtual Interaction through Virtual RealITY and beyond, (July 1, 2019-September 30, 2022): https:// cordis.europa.eu/project/id/856718/it, accessed December 11, 2022; Horizon 2020 (CORDIS), Multimodal Haptic with Touch Devices (March 1, 2020-February 29, 2024): https://cordis. europa.eu/project/id/860114/it, accessed December 11. 44 T. Carter et. al., “Ultrahaptics: multi-point mid-air haptic feedback for touch surfaces,” UIST ‘13: Proceedings of the 26th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (St. Andrews, UK: October 8-11, 2013): 505-506. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 143 AN-ICON  technologies.”45 These projects encourage “to achieve high-fidelity sensations through technology that is easy and comfortable to use, for both interactive augmented reality (AR) and immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences”;46 rendering potentially less unreachable that horizon of touch virtualisation from which Derrida took his cue. In assessing the role that illusion plays for the effective functioning of haptic technologies, it can be ques- tioned whether this prevalent position is distinctive of the digital era or if it represents a consolidated trope in haptic historiography, often centered on the theoretical and prac- tical opportunity to touch – or not! – sculpture, at times accused of being the least illusory of the arts.47 In under- taking the investigation from “haptics”48 to “haptic,”49 we will proceed in a parallel line to the essentially optical one 45 “H-Reality,” FET FX. Our future today (2020): http://www.fetfx.eu/project/h-reality/; see also: X. de Tinguy, C. Pacchierotti, A. Lécuyer, “Capacitive sensing for improving contact rendering with tangible objects in VR,” IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph – IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 27, no. 4 (December 2020): 2481-2487, https://doi. org/10.1109/TVCG.2020.3047689. 46 Horizon 2020 (CORDIS), Mixed Haptic Feedback for Mid-Air Interactions in Virtual and Augmented Realities (October 1, 2018- March 31, 2022): https://cordis.europa.eu/project/ id/801413/it, accessed December 11, 2022. 47 Is given below the renowned passage in Benedetto Varchi’s Paragone (1547) in which painters vituperate sculpture by stating: “They argue again from the difficulty of art, where, distinguishing the difficulty into two parts: in fatigue of body, and this as ignoble they leave to sculptors: and in fatigue of wit, and this as noble they reserve for them, saying that, besides the different manners and ways of working and coloring, in fresco, oil, tempera, glue and gouache, painting makes a figure foreshorten, [it] makes it seem round and raised in a flat field, making it break through and seem far away with all the appearances and vagueness that can be desired, giving to all their works lumens and shadows well observed according to the lumens and reverberations, which they hold to be a most difficult thing; and in conclusion they say that they make appear what is not: in which thing they seek effort and infinite artifice”, B. Varchi, Lezzione. Nella quale si disputa della maggioranza delle arti e qual sia più nobile, la scultura o la pittura (Firenze: Fondazione Memofonte, 1547): 38. 48 The plural noun haptics, deriving from the Greek feminine haptikós and the Neo-Latin hapticē, a term coined in 1685 by Isaac Barrow in Lectiones Mathematicae XXIII, is literally translated as “science of touch”. Haptics refers to the science of touch in a techno-media perspective, denoting the tactile feedback generated by those devices which, by sending artificial stimuli at proprioceptive, limbic and muscular levels, simulate the sensation of actual contact: “Haptics,” Merriam-Webster Dictionary (online): https://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/haptics, accessed December 11, 2022. 49 The Greek etymon haptō, from which derive the word haptos (tangible, sensitive), the predicate háptein and the adjective haptikós, from which derive the French haptique, the German haptisch/Haptik and the English haptic, means variously “able to come into contact with” (haptikós) and “to clasp, grasp, lace” (háptein). VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 144 AN-ICON  stabilized by Riegl,50 bearer of a critical fortune culminating with the later reworkings elaborated by Deleuze,51 Mald- iney,52 Dufrenne53, Marks54 and Barker.55 Concerning the covertly panoptic conception of the haptic that had been spreading in German Kunstwissenschaft since Hildebrand’s studies,56 it is necessary to turn our attention to the de- velopments taking place in the psychophysiological area around the same years. In the wake of Heinrich Weber’s pioneering studies on the sense of touch, in which sensory illusions after limbs amputation57 (the so-called Phantom Sensations)58 were classified as not accidentally probed; the first use of the term haptic in 1892 by another eclectic Berliner, Max Dessoir, was systematized almost simulta- neously by Edward Titchener.59 The rehabilitation of this 50 As Andrea Pinotti notes via Révész, “It is significant that, the year after the publication of Kunstindustrie, in an article in which he argues with Strzygowski, Riegl admits that the term taktisch (tastbar, from the Latin tangere) can lead to misunderstandings, and declares himself willing to adopt instead the term haptisch (from the Greek hapto), which the physiological literature had since long employed in its research on sensoriality. Perhaps a way, that of moving from Latin to Greek, to avoid any possible reference to the actual manual palpation and reaffirm the fundamental strength of the haptisch,” A. Pinotti, “Guardare o toccare? Un’incertezza herderiana,” Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico 2, no. 1 (2009): 186, https://doi.org/10.13128/Aisthesis-10953, trans. mine. For a first bibliographical framing of Riegl’s haptic construction see: M.R. Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); M. Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); S. Melville, “The temptation of new perspectives” (1990), in D. Preziosi, ed., The Art Of Art History. A Critic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): 274-283; G. Vasold, “‘Das Erlebnis des Sehens’. Zum Begriff der Haptik im Wiener fin de siècle,” Maske und Kothurn 62 (2016): 46-70. 51 G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon. Logic of Sensation (1981), trans. D.W. Smith (London-New York: Continuum, 2003): 122, 189. 52 See in this regard: A. Pinotti, “Style, rythme, souffle: Maldiney and kunstwissenschaft,” in J.-P. Charcosset, ed., Parole Tenue: Colloque du Centenaire du Maldiney á Lyon (Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, 2014): 49-59. 53 See in this respect: A. Pinotti, ed., Alois Riegl. Grammatica storica delle arti figurative (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2018), XLVI. 54 We refer specifically to the postcolonial construct of haptic visuality that Laura Marks derives and resemantizes from the lesson of Regl’s heritage: L.U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002): 4-7; L.U. Marks, The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham-London: Duke University Press, 2000): 162-171. 55 J.M. Barker, The Tactile Eye. Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley-Los Angeles- London: University of California Press, 2009): 37-38. 56 See in this regard: A. Pinotti, Il corpo dello stile. Storia dell’arte come storia dell’estetica a partire da Semper, Riegl, Wölfflin (Milano: Mimesis, 2001). See specifically the third section entitled “Occhio e mano:” 179-221. 57 M. Grunwald, M. John, “German pioneers of research into human haptic perception,” in M. Grunwald, ed., Human Haptic Perception. Basics and Applications (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008): 19. 58 T. Weiss, “Phantom sensations,” in M. Grunwald, ed., Human Haptic Perception. Basics and Applications (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008): 283-294. 59 D. Parisi, Archaeologies of Touch: 105. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 145 AN-ICON  obsolete Greek term, already Homeric and Aristotelian,60 reflects Dessoir’s will to deepen the investigation on touch by distinguishing the sensations of contact from the active exploration (Pselaphesie).61 This distinction, destined to become normative, emerged in the context of a network of experimental psychology laboratories scattered through- out the United States and orbiting around the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, inaugurated in 1875 by William James, although active only since 1892.62 While in 1890, James was able to discuss the “fallacy of the senses,” tak- ing his cue from the prominent Aristotelic finger illusion,63 consulting Harvard Laboratory appendix for the two years 1892-1893 shows how scientific trials on touch proceeded simultaneously to the study of optical illusions.64 A similar experimental path would culminate in 1893 with the pre- sentation of the Apparatus for Simultaneous Touches by William Krohn at Clark University.65 On the plexus mentioned above, the aestheti- cal and historiographical discourses are inserted and inter- twined, sanctioning the passage from the properly physio- logical illusion of touching to a metaphorical one, embodied by the rhetorical figure of “as if,” direct relative of Derrida’s inverted commas. That such a rhetorical stratagem con- stitutes a much older matter is recalled by the well-known querelle of Herderian uncertainty. As already pointed out by Andrea Pinotti, in his aesthetic treatise Plastik, Herder seems to allude to the possibility of a virtual touch, reproaching the sculptor who has never touched, not even in a dream, 60 M. Perniola, Il Sex Appeal dell’Inorganico (Torino: Einaudi, 1994): 95. 61 M. Dessoir, Über den Hautsinn (Separat-Abzug aus Archiv für Anatomie und Physiologie: Physiologische Abtheilung. 1892): 242. 62 G. Bruno, “Film, aesthetics, science: Hugo Münsterberg’s laboratory of moving images,” Grey Room 36 (Summer 2009): 88-113, https://doi.org/10.1162/grey.2009.1.36.88. 63 W. James, The Principles of Psychology (Ontario: York University, 1890): 87. 64 H. Munsterberg, Psychological Laboratory of Harvard University (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1893). Munsterberg recorded notes include: “Instrument for studying the fusion of touch sensations. After Krohn; made in Cambridge”; “Instrument for touch reaction, etc;” “Touch-reaction instrument, with twenty different stimuli. By Elbs, Freiburg. $20”. See also: Bruno, “Film”: 101-102. 65 W.O. Krohn, “Facilities in experimental psychology in the colleges of the United States” (1894), in C.D. Green, ed., Classics in the History of Psychology (Toronto: Tork University): https://www.sapili.org/subir-depois/en/ps000128.pdf; D. Parisi, Archaeologies: 144-147. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 146 AN-ICON  his creation.66 “The illusion has worked,”67 the philosopher will add, when the eye takes on the movements of the hand and then of a very thin ray, an emissary of the soul, which kinaesthetically embraces the sculpture as it becomes a body. In the wake of Konrad Lange’s Illusionsästhetik68 and J.H. Kirchmann and E. Von Hartmann’s doctrine of illusional feelings, the already mentioned Dessoir would achieve an even more drastic conclusion. Declaring that every work of art mainly satisfies a single sensory channel, this sensorial limitation “guarantees its illusory character,” generating the paradoxical situation of “a conscious self-deception, of a continued and deliberate confusion of reality and illusion.”69 However, it was not until the art-historical de- bate of the early 1950s – while the earliest haptic devices were designed – that an open polarization was reached regarding whether or not sculptures should be touched. On the one hand Herbert Read, moving from the psychological studies of Arnheim, Wundt, Lowenfeld, and Révész, could argue that “for the sculptor, tactile values are not an illusion to be created on a two-dimensional plane: they constitute a reality of being conveyed directly, as existent mass. Sculp- ture is an art of palpation.”70 On the other hand, a fervent detractor such as the modernist Greenberg would have drastically overturned this assumption.71 Both consistent readers of Berenson, whose normative and ambivalent 66 A. Pinotti, Guardare o toccare: 189; J.G. Herder, Sculpture. Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream (1778), ed. J. Gaiger (Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002): 41. 67 A. Pinotti, Guardare o toccare: 189; J.G. Herder, Some Observations: 41. 68 For an introduction to the subject see: D. Romand, “Konrad Lange on ‘the Illusion of Materials’ in painting and visual arts: revisiting a psychoaesthetic theory of the perception of material properties,” in J. Stumpel, M. Wijntjes, eds., Art and Perception. An International Journal of Art and Perception Science, Special Issue: The Skin of Things: On the Perception and Depiction of Materials 7, no. 3-4 (2021): 283-289. 69 M. Dessoir, Aesthetics and Theory of Art. Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (1906), trans. S.A. Emery, (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1970): 53. 70 H. Read, The Art of Sculpture (London: Faber & Faber, 1954): 49. 71 We are referring specifically to Greenberg’s harsh and inflexible review of Read’s monograph: C. Greenberg, “Roundness isn’t all,” (November 25, 1956), in J. O’ Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism 3 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995): 272. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 147 AN-ICON  “tactile values”72 find a more truthful attestation in the cor- ollary categories of “ideated sensations,” “ideated satisfac- tions” and “ideal sensation of contact,”73 Read and Green- berg finally reached an unexpected consonance. Whilst Read claimed the experience of sculpture as distinctive of haptic perception and, specifically, for the prehensility of the hand; Greenberg denied the appropriateness of such fruition, attributing tactile stimuli to the visual sphere. Mean- while, Herder’s uncertainty remains. Indeed, as David J. Getsy noted, it is ultimately unclear whether Read wished for a knowledge of the plastic work through its palpation or maintained such contact on a substantially preliminary and physiological condition.74 In order to enrich the corpus of sources of such a querelle numerous other examples could be made; none- theless, one of the most promising scenarios for its analysis, as prophetically announced by Derrida, is offered by the exploration through haptic interfaces of digitized artifacts in museums. When the veto of touching the work of art lapses and the distinction between actual and fictional flattens out, which horizons are opened by the possibility of touching? Will it be a “tactile vertigo” in the sense of Baudrillard, in which the virtual object expired at the status of a trompe- l’œil image soliciting a “tactile hyper presence of things, as though one could hold them,” despite its phantasmagorical essence?75 Can these finally touchable bodies add much 72 A. Brown, “Bernard Berenson and ‘tactile values’ in Florence,” in J. Connors, ed., Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, 2014). For an analysis highlighting the subtle pantheism underlying Berenson’s work, see: A. Pinotti, “The touchable and the untouchable. Merleau-Ponty and Bernard Berenson,” Phenomenology 2005 3, no. 2, (2007): 479-498. 73 B. Berenson, Aesthetics and History (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1948): 24-25, 74. 74 As David J. Getsy pointedly notes: “Read did not necessarily argue that the viewer must touch the sculpture in order to appreciate it, as Greenberg would have us believe. Rather, it was the aggregate experience of tactility that provides us with an ability to assess ponderability and the non-visual traits of any object. Our haptic sensibility and our sense of the physical environment are both closely tied to our own ever-developing repertoire of tactile and physical experiences”; D.J. Getsy, “Tactility or opticality, Henry Moore or David Smith: Herbert Read and Clement Greenberg on The Art of Sculpture, 1956,” in R. Peabody, ed., Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945–1975 (Los Angeles: Getty Publication, 2011): 111-112. 75 J. Baudrillard, Seduction (1979), trans. B. Singer (Montréal: New World Perspectives. Culture Text Series, 1990): 62-63. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 148 AN-ICON  to the illusory palpation of the work of art on a semantic level, if not on a phenomenological one? Haptic technologies and museums, the imaginative frontiers of the phenomenology of touch In order to present a critical account of how haptic technologies are being employed in museums, and to investigate to what extent the projects designed within these environments fully explore the illusory potential of vir- tual haptic experiences, a preliminary discussion on analog touch in museums is needed. The use of haptic technolo- gies within museum settings,76 which has widely increased in the last decades, is in fact not something new to cultural experiential models,77 and more the reinstatement of prac- tices which had been common policies in museums from their foundation to the middle of the nineteenth century. While today it is “generally taken for granted that museums collections are not for touching”78 seventeenth- and eigh- teenth-century museum visitors were customarily free to pick up precious and delicate relics, enjoying their sense of touch as a fundamental part of their overall experience. More specifically, touch in early museums was used for four different reasons:79 learning (as touching an object provided relevant information that through sight could not be obtained, like its weight), aesthetic appreciation (touch was considered to allow an embodied understanding of the 76 For a comprehensive account on how the importance of touch has been re-evaluated in the museum sector in the past three decades please cfr. G. Black, The Engaging Museum: Developing Museums for Visitor Involvement (Oxford: Routledge, 2005); E. Pye, The Power of Touch: Handling Objects in Museums and Heritage Contexts (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007), H. Chatterjee, Touch in Museums: Policy and Practice in Object Handling (Oxford: Berg, 2008); F. Candlin, Art, Museums and Touch (Manchester: University of Manchester Press: 2010), and S. Dudley, ed., Museum Objects: Experiencing the Properties of Things (London: Routledge, 2012). 77 C. Classen, The Deepest Sense. A Cultural History of Touch (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012): 136-146. 78 Ibid.: 137. 79 A synthetic account of the reasons why touch was a common practice in museums can be found in Classen, The Deepest Sense: 139-142. For other discussions on the topic please cfr. D. Howes, “Introduction to sensory museology,” The Senses and Society 9, no. 3 (2014): 259- 267 https://doi.org/10.2752/174589314X14023847039917 and R.F. Ovenell, The Ashmolean Museum, 1683–1894 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 149 AN-ICON  nature of the display), imaginary potential (by holding an ar- tifact visitors could get emotionally in touch with its original owner or maker) and healing powers (especially religious relics, when touched or eaten,80 where deemed able to cure illnesses and pains). As it appears evident already from this first account, not all yet some of the functions of touch in museums had to do with the potential to empower imagina- tive accounts, associating the role of touching not only with evidentiary information, yet also with intangible and elusive, even powerful, qualities. From the mid of the nineteenth century touch was banned from museums:81 conservation matters became more and more relevant, while parallelly touch in itself came to be classified as a secondary sense, one “associated with irrationality and primitivism.”82 These two reasons account for two extremely different discourses, one linked to practical aspects and to the preservation of cultural heritage, the second pertaining to a conceptual sphere, having to do with epistemic premises and their museological consequences. Today, well into the third decade of the 21st century, the situation in museums seems to be closer to that of three centuries ago than to the end of the last Millenium. Touch seems to have regained its epistemic status,83 and modern haptic technologies allow its employment without the need to endanger precious artifacts. The great differ- ence, however, is that machines and proxies mediate the haptic experience, defining its phenomenology. The ques- tion which arises, at this point, seems to be to what extent these technologies are and will be designed with the aim 80 For a historical account of the healing powers of ancient religious relics cfr. K. Arnold, “Skulls, mummies and unicorns’ horns: medicinal chemistry in early english museums,” in R.G.W. Anderson et al., Enlightening the British: Knowledge, Discovery and the Museum in the Eighteenth Century (London: The British Museum Press, 2003), also E. Brown, An Account of Several Travels through a Great Part of Germany (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1677), and D. Murray, Museums: Their History and Use, vol. 1. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1904): 40, 50, 73. 81 For an account of the historical reasons which led to this change cfr. Classen, The Deepest Sense: 143-146, and F. Candlin, Art, Museums and Touch. 82 C. Classen, The Deepest Sense. A Cultural History of Touch: XIV. 83 For a discussion on the epistemic value of touch please cfr. C. Classen, The Book of Touch (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005), M. Peterson, The Senses of Touch (London: Routledge, 2007), M.P. Gadoua, “Making sense through touch. Handling collections with Inuit Elders at the McCord Museum,” The Senses and Society 9, no. 3 (2014): 323-341 https://doi.org/10.2752/1 74589314X14023847039719. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 150 AN-ICON  to mirror the original analog functions of touch, or whether they will be built and employed with the goal to expand the potential of the haptic experience. With regards to this, it will be important to understand on which of the qualities of touch – amongst the seventeenth century list aforemen- tioned – they will leverage on. Whilst, on the one hand, they could aim at faithfully reproducing the phenomenological qualities of touch, the paragraphs above have shown how there is a wider illusory character that these technologies could be aiming at capturing, one which could hopefully open up new experiential frontiers. Whilst there isn’t one single comprehensive ac- count which maps the state of the arts of haptic technolog- ical development in the museum system, literature in this field has been growing recently. This thanks to researches that discuss the regained relevance of touch in educational settings, together with publications which analyze individ- ual projects designed and carried through by museum re- search centers.84 A vast number of these studies highlight how haptic technologies allow visitors to “explore new par- adigms of interaction”85 leveraging on the “quality and use- fulness of computer-based exhibits.”86 This is granted as the sense of touch “is an essential part of how we interact, explore, perceive and understand our surroundings”87 and therefore incorporating object based learning in museum 84 For other interesting case studies analyzing the role of haptic technologies in museums please cfr. R. Comes, “Haptic devices and tactile experiences in museum exhibitions,” Journal of Ancient History and Archeology 3, no. 4 (2016) https://doi.org/10.14795/j.v3i4.205; F. Fischnaller “The last supper interactive project. The illusion of reality: perspective and perception,” in G. Amoruso, ed., Putting Tradition into Practice: Heritage, Place and Design, Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering 3, (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018) https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57937-5_73; M.H. Jamil et al., “The role of haptics in digital archaeology and heritage recording processes”, 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Haptic, Audio and Visual Environments and Games (HAVE) (2018): 1-6 https://doi.org/10.1109/ HAVE.2018.8547505. 85 A. Frisoli et al., “Evaluation of the pure-form haptic displays used for exploration of works of art at museums,” report on the project findings, 2005 retrieved at https://www.researchgate. net/publication/228584199_Evaluation_of_the_pure-form_haptic_displays_used_for_ exploration_of_works_of_art_at_museums/ related on the 31/01/2022. 86 S. Brewster, “The impact of haptic ‘touching’ technology on cultural applications,” in J. Hemsley, V. Cappellini, G. Stanke, eds., Digital Applications for Cultural Heritage Institutions, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005): Chap. 30, 273-284, 282. 87 M. Novak et al., “There is more to touch than meets the eye: haptic exploration in a science museum,” International Journal of Science Education 42, no. 18 (2020): 3026-3048 https://doi. org/10.1080/09500693.2020.1849855. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 151 AN-ICON  experiences increases autonomy and satisfaction.88 The information that visitors can acquire through touch appears today relevant as it did at the beginning of museum histo- ry, and it has become obtainable without endangering the artifacts. 3D replicas of material artifacts associated with a range of wearable or desktop devices are the predominant technologies used across museum experiments, engaging users through mainly force feedback and kinetic stimuli.89 While providing an account of the state of the arts of the literature and case studies in this sector is not one of the goals of this essay, a series of examples have been cho- sen as they have been deemed relevant to the research at hand: assessing to what extent haptic museum experience expand and explore their full – at times illusory – potential. A widely discussed experiment in the field is the Museum of Pure Form, “a collective project ran in the early 2000s by a series of European museums creating 3D digital replicas of their artifacts and making available a technology which allowed for the haptic experience of them.”90 This pivotal program engaged a series of museums across Eu- rope91 who collected a shared archive of digital replicas of their statues, and then produced a touring exhibition which installed wearable devices (exoskeleton wearable arm) and or desktop devices (two robotic arms departing from sup- port columns placed in front of the visualization screen) in front of the original statues.92 Overall, findings on the exper- iment registered both amusement (70% of attendees) and instructiveness (39%) across visitors.93 The shared belief, confirmed by the analysis conducted simultaneously as the 88 M. Novak et al., “There is more to touch that meets the eye:” 3044. 89 In the literature it is possible to find studies which evaluate both collaborative endeavors and researches ran by single institutions. Overall, the collaboration between universities or tech companies and cultural institutions seems a fundamental premise in order to allow for trials and studies that evaluate the impact of these projects. 90 A. Frisoli, “Evaluation of the pure-form haptic displays used for exploration of works of art at museums.” 91 The Galician Centre for Contemporary Arts in Santiago de Compostela, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Pisa, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Stockholm, the Conservation Centre at National Museums Liverpool and the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London. 92 A. Frisoli, “Evaluation of the pure-form haptic displays used for exploration of works of art at museums:” 2. 93 Ibid.: 6. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 152 AN-ICON  project, was that the opportunity to use a device to touch the digital replica of a statue while looking at it enforced the learning experience. Something which, as aforementioned, was deemed constitutive of the relevance of touch in early museum experiences. As this case study shows, together with many that have followed, it seems that one of the main concerns of museum professionals and researchers in de- signing digital haptic experiences seems to be supplying to the lost opportunity to touch the artworks, thus enabling the visitor to enjoy a wider range of information regarding the statue and, consequently, enriching the learning expe- rience. This, however, faces a series of relevant limitations on the phenomenological level, as discussed above with reference to Wang’s analysis in Haptic Display. It appears, from this first account, that the use of haptic technologies is not necessarily seen as a strategy to experiment and widen the cultural experience, yet instead as a way to re- cuperate something that contemporary curatorial practices do not allow – namely to touch originals. With reference to this point, it is interesting to see that there are several researches actually comparing the haptic experience that visitors can have touching the replica of an artifact or its 3D version.94 It appears that “the comparison between the haptic device and the replica showed that the multi-finger tactile interaction with the replica produced considerably richer information than the single-point contact of the hap- tic device.”95 What the citation implies is that the technology used provided a less phenomenologically rich experience 94 Interesting accounts on this debate can be found in M. Dima, L. Hurcombe, M. Wright, “Touching the past: haptic augmented reality for museum artefacts,” in R. Shumaker, S. Lackey, eds., Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality. Applications of Virtual and Augmented Reality. VAMR 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 8526. (Cham: Springer, 2014) https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-07464-1_1. Also cfr. S. Ceccacci et al., “The role of haptic feedback and gamification in virtual museum systems,” Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 14, no. 3 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1145/3453074, and F. Stanco et al., “Virtual anastylosis of Greek sculpture as museum policy for public outreach and cognitive accessibility,” Journal of Electronic Imaging 26, no. 1, 011025 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JEI.26.1.011025. 95 M. Dima, L. Hurcombe, M. Wright, “Touching the past: haptic augmented reality for museum artefacts:” 6. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 153 AN-ICON  compared to the touching of the printed replica, which if possible is deemed a better alternative. As of today, the technical limitations that most devices used in museums present contribute to a scenario where physical touch, even if of replicas, seems to be fa- vored. The reasons why haptic technology is preferred are not experiential factors; they have to do with practical and managerial concerns, such as the fact that digital replicas do not occupy physical space and that they can be expe- rienced also remotely. It appears that these technologies, if competing on a purely phenomenological level and trying to mirror haptic experiences that occur in reality, are des- tined to have a limited contribution to cultural experiences, being the only alternative yet not a solution which in itself holds value. Other case studies can however add further layers to the use of haptic technologies in museum set- tings, offering opportunities that neither physical statues nor printed replicas could elicit. A research published by the Journal of Electronic Imaging illustrates the case of the vir- tual anastylosis of a Greek sculpture, operated by digitally combining a head and a torso held in two different heritage sites in Sicily.96 The two ancient pieces, one hosted in the Museum of Castello Ursino in Catania and the other in the Archeological Museum of Siracusa, were hypothesized by archeologists to be parts of the same statue due to stylistic features. This theory was, however, never proved as neither of their hosting institutions was willing to dislocate one of the pieces for the necessary analysis to be performed. Through digital imaging and 3D rendering it was however possible to demonstrate the perfect match of the two parts of the statue, creating a new object that was then made accessible through the use of haptic technology – in this case the haptic device 3D Systems Touch – and thanks to the collaboration with the Center for Virtualization and Applied Spatial Technologies, University of South Florida. A 96 F. Stanco et al., “Virtual anastylosis of Greek sculpture as museum policy for public outreach and cognitive accessibility.” VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 154 AN-ICON  dedicated effort was made to ensure that the new technol- ogy would account for people with cognitive and physical disabilities, another potentiality that haptic technologies hold and on which research is being tailored.97 Whilst this case highlights the strategic contribution that modern tech- nologies can provide to both research and fruition, it could be argued that the added value here is given by the fact that this statue could have otherwise never been seen or felt, yet not in a manner which depends, from a specifically phenomenological perspective, on the haptic technology itself. Hence reinforcing the understanding that the main use of these technologies is directed towards reinstating the original – and lost – hard value of touch, not necessarily adding new levels of experience. Another case, involving virtually touching the torso of Michelangelo’s David at Monash University,98 can prove useful to enrich the discussion on the use of haptic technologies in museums. What emerges from this study, which in terms of research methodology mirrors the vast majority of cases in the literature in creating a 3D digital replica and then experiencing it through the Phantom, is that the images reproduced digitally “allow the user to focus on particular details that they may overlook otherwise.”99 What appears here is that the virtual experiential setting creates the opportunity for the user to actually grasp some details of the statue that he would have not been able to experience with either the original or with a 3D printed 97 There are a number of experiments within the field of haptic technologies which focus specifically on accessibility for people with impared cognitive and physical abilities. An interesting research center is the one of the University of Glasgow, which ran two trials in this field, one called Senses in Touch II, and the other MultiVis project. A complete account of the two researches can be found in Brewster, “The impact of haptic ‘touching’ technology on cultural applications:” 279-282. Another interesting research which discusses the potential of haptics for the visually impaired is G. Jansson, M. Bergamasco, A. Frisoli, “A new option for the visually impaired to experience 3D art at museums: manual exploration of virtual copies,” Visual Impairment Research 5, no. 1 (2003): 1-12 https://doi.org/10.1076/vimr.5.1.1.15973. Also cfr. R. Vaz, D. Freitas, A. Coelho, “Blind and visually impaired visitors’ experiences in museums: increasing accessibility through assistive technologies,” The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum 13, no. 2 (June 2020): 57-80, https://doi.org/10.18848/1835-2014/CGP/ v13i02/57-80. 98 M. Butler, P. Neave, “Object appreciation through haptic interaction,” Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (Melbourne: Ascilite, 2008), 133-141. 99 Ibid.: 140. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 155 AN-ICON  replica. The flexibility of digital images, their potential to be modulated, modified and enlarged, appears, in this case, to actually add a further layer to the visitor experience. The higher attention to detail deepens and expands the experience in a manner that is specific of, and exclusive to, digital haptic technologies. Whilst this last example seems to slightly brighten the scenario described, the cases discussed so far account for an employment of haptic technologies which struggles to emancipate itself from a traditional under- standing of touch in cultural experiences. The three cases analyzed, far from providing a comprehensive account of the multitude of programmes that have been carried out across the museum sector in the past years, have how- ever been chosen as they are representative of the main trends found in the literature. Overall, researchers seem to have been focused mainly on trying to bring back an aspect of experience which was lost, and less keen on the advanced possibilities that haptic technologies might hold. With reference to the technological and historical discus- sion presented above, regarding haptic illusions, it does not appear that these seem to be at the center of experimental designs in the museum sector, where the understanding of touch seems to recall more the “hard undeniable evidence” school than the more subtle and rich understanding of the haptic which encompasses its illusory character. This de- pends on a number of reasons, related to both cultural, professional and economic factors. A further fundamental aspect to take into account, when discussing the use of haptic technologies in museums, is in fact the high cost of these devices. The more sophisticated they are, the higher their prices, which makes it difficult for museums to afford them, even harder to update them. Main advancements with haptic technologies are in fact usually in other fields of research with richer funding, such as medicine and engi- neering. This leads to the second limitation, namely that to innovatively experiment with these technologies, technical and diverse professional skills are required. Even though most programmes within museums are run in collaboration VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 156 AN-ICON  with universities and research centers, the degree of com- plexity that pertains to these projects needs a pull of pro- fessionals which is hard to put together and coordinate in the current economic and professional climate. There are, however, a few interesting cases that, at times even without the use of high budgets and elevated skills, seem to leverage on the wider range of possibilities that these technologies offer. Interestingly enough, these also relate to two of the original functions of touch valued in early museums: the aesthetic enrichment of the expe- rience and the emotional potential of haptics. It appears that when haptic technologies are being employed with the aim of enacting and recalling these elements – as opposed to when they try to give back the evidentiary character of touch – the result are more imaginative endeavors, allowing for the creation of a further semantic level of experience. One first interesting case is a very recent ex- periment conducted at University College London, where a student has designed a device which, through the use of capacitive touch sensors, wants to “help us understand what an artist felt at the time they created their work by recreating their sensory experiences.”100 The project idea, which rests on the theoretical background of embodied knowledge as an extension of the mind and of embodied practice as a means to feel the emotions of an artist,101 was inspired by an artwork: The Face of Christ by Claude Mellan, hosted in the UCL Art Museum. By looking closely at the artwork, the author of the project realized that the whole drawing had been made through the design of one single spiraling line, a unique technique. His idea was therefore to design a device which could enable the viewer to create 100 F. Taylor, “Recreating sensory experience: how haptic technology could help us experience art in new ways,” UCL Culture Blog, (July 13, 2020) https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ museums/2020/07/13/recreating-sensory-experience-how-haptic-technology-could-help-us- experience-art-in-new-ways/ on the 31/01/2022, accessed December 11, 2022. 101 When the author discusses embodied knowledge as an extension of the mind the reference is I. Martínková, “Body ecology: avoiding body–mind dualism,” Loisir et Société / Society and Leisure 40, no. 1 (2017): 101-112, https://doi.org/10.1080/07053436.2017.1281 528; whilst when discussing embodied practices as a means to feel emotions of artists the specific reference in the literature is D. Freedberg, V. Gallese, “Motion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 5 (2007): 197-203, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.tics.2007.02.003. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 157 AN-ICON  a contact with the motion that had originated the artwork, building a direct emotional connection with the artist. As the author describes it “through an audio feedback loop, the device I designed takes in touch inputs from a view- er of the artwork and returns a religious-sounding choral soundtrack when the spiral gesture from the engraving is drawn correctly with a finger. The spiral gesture,” he adds, “was directly extracted from The Face of Christ with the help of a custom python script which made use of various image analysis libraries.”102 What can be highlighted in reading about this project, which at this point consist of just a first artisanal prototype, is the way in which haptic technologies are used to explore unusual and often overlooked aspects of artworks. Whilst the potential of these technologies in broadening the field of aesthetic experience is well estab- lished, there are some developments specific to this case worth expanding on. Interestingly enough, the author re- fers specifically to the idea of building a connection with the painter who made The Face of Christ, recuperating the same reasoning that mid eighteenth-century museum goers had when holding a precious object.103 In comparing the attempt to get in touch with the past before and after haptic technologies, moreover, the added value brought by the device seems clear. Whilst in the original case a visitor had to actively exercise the power of imagination in order to build a connection, in this instance the device guides the user into the experience, leveraging on the emotional potential of a multisensory environment which starts from the drawn line, develops into an haptic apparatus and is then sublimated through sound. What emerges with regards to this example, and in contrast with the ones analyzed before, is the way in which the designer of the project has overcome the need to merely attempt to replicate the touch- ing experience, and decided to exploit both the phenom- enological and the imaginative potential of the technology 102 F. Taylor, Recreating sensory experience: How haptic technology could help us experience art in new ways. 103 A detailed account of an emotional and imaginative encounter between a museum goer and an artifact can be found in S.A. La Roche, Sophie in London, 1786: Being the Diary of Sophie Von La Roche, trans. C. Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933): 107-108. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 158 AN-ICON  at his disposal. Further, this has been done in an artisanal and experimental fashion, not through the use of excessive resources and a big team of professionals. Another experimental program worth consid- ering, in this case definitely a more costly and collective endeavor, is an exhibition held at Tate Britain in 2015, Tate Sensorium (Fig. 2).104 The research background behind this project refers to a scientific field which experiments with the power of haptics to elicit emotions. More specifically, these projects study how mid-air haptic technology – a specific subset – is able to condition human emotions (e.g., happy, sad, excited, afraid) through tactile stimulation.105 While the literature in the field of mid haptics is still at a very early experimental stage, and definitive conclusions are yet to be drawn, progress has been made in mapping the correlation between aspects of haptics and emotional states. What was done at Tate was to organize an exhibition which built a fully sensory environment around four paintings: Interior II by Richard Hamilton, Full Stop by John Latham, In the Hold by David Bomberg, and Figure in a Landscape by Francis Bacon. In a detailed article106 presenting a study on the exhibition, the specific experience of Full Stop is analyzed. What the curators did was to position a mid-air haptic device in front of the painting, and synchronize a range of mid-air haptic patterns inside the device with a self-developed software that could read Musical Instru- ment Digital Interface (MIDI) inputs. The design was curated by a sound designer who could control the mid-air haptic patterns (frequency, intensity, and movement paths) to cre- ate a desired experience synched with music. As detailed through the article, this exhibition was the first time that mid-air haptic technology was used in a museum context VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 159 AN-ICON  over a prolonged period of time and integrated with sound to enhance the experience of visual art. This “work demon- strates how novel mid-air technology can make art more emotionally engaging and stimulating, especially abstract art that is often open to interpretation,”107 as it was proved by collecting positive feedback from over 2500 visitors. The aim of the authors, as clearly stated across the research, was to advance understanding of multisensory signals in relation to art, experiences and design, based on novel interactive technologies. Referencing back to the reasons why touch was valued in early museums, this experiment seems to fit in the category which uses haptics to enhance the aesthetic experience of the visitors: anticipating that haptics carry value not only on a purely informative sensory level, but eliciting a wider level of complexity. Conclusions Overall, there seems to be a wide potential for using haptic technologies in museum settings and leverag- ing on the ways in which these devices can contribute to the cultural experience of artifacts. The two final case studies here examined clearly exemplify how haptic technologies can help in generating a new experiential layer, one which rests on a complex phenomenological understanding of the haptics and establishes an active dialogue with the entire sensorium of the experiencer. Both cases show a designed synchronization between the tactile experience and the sense of hearing, suggesting that one of the ways to experiment with the haptic is by interrogating a more en- vironmental and organic understanding of the relationship between the senses. Interestingly, the more complex and enhancing experiences are characterized by stimuli that do not just mimic the act of touching, thus attempting to reinstate the lost chance of touching the artwork, yet play with the illusory potential of haptics and with the other 107 Ibid.: 1. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 160 AN-ICON  qualities of touch valued in early museums: the evocative and imaginistic potential of the haptic experience. The analysis from the museum sector, when linked to the technological and historical accounts regard- ing the link between the haptic and the figure of illusion, suggests the value of exploring the ways in which haptic technologies can emancipate us from a reductive under- standing of touch. Certainly, all museum endeavors and experiments will have to take into account a variety of prac- tical and concrete concerns, which also play an important part in defining the destiny of cultural projects. It is not given that exploring the illusory potential of haptic technologies represents in itself the best choice for a museum research. Yet, it can be concluded that when designed in an open dialogue with our whole sensorium these technologies ap- pear empowered in their visionary potential, making Derri- da’s observation more actual than ever: the nexus between touch and virtuality is as real as it gets. Fig 2. Tate Sensorium exhibition at Tate Britain in 2015, installation shot of Full Stop (1961) by John Latham © John Latham Estate. Photo: Tate. Illustration of a participant experiencing the second painting combining vision, auditory, and haptic. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 161 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/17297

The haptics of illusion: an account of touch across theories, technologies and museums by Valentina Bartalesi and Anna Calise Haptic Technology Illusion Virtuality Museums Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing The haptics of il usion. An account of touch across theories, technologies and museums VALENTINA BARTALESI, Università IULM – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8596-4014 ANNA CALISE, Università IULM – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2966-7613 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17297 Abstract Touch represents one of the latest and most complex frontiers of virtuality: a sense which historical- ly seems to have carried the burden of proof on reality, by definition resistant to illusory environments. The paper begins from this assumption to trace a history of illusion across authors and theorists that have debated the stat- ute of haptics, building a dialogue between philosophical dilemmas and technological developments. Moving both from an aesthetic and psychophysiological viewpoint, the article will root its analysis in an historical-artistic account, augmenting the discussion with a series of case studies from the museum sector. The introduction of haptic tech- nologies within cultural institutions, which dates back to the last three decades, proves an interesting field to test the functions which touch plays in both educational and imaginative scenarios. The open question being whether modern technologies should aim at replicating haptic re- alism in miming phenomenological accuracy, or whether the most innovative applications need to aspire to a more environmental employment of touch. Keywords Haptic Technology Illusion Virtuality Museums To quote this essay: V. Bartalesi, A. Calise, “The haptics of illusion. An account of touch across theories, technologies and museums,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 133-161, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17297 VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 133 AN-ICON Fig 1. Creation of a new style of media art using digital paints in a harmonization of the senses of vision and touch. It seems that we have so often been warned not to touch that we are reluctant to probe the tactile world even with our minds. Constance Classen The Deepest Sense. A Cultural History of Touch, 2012 Introduction In his Post-Scriptum addendum, alongside his monumental survey on the polysemy of touch in Nancy through the history of Western philosophy, Derrida de- nounced a widespread prejudice whereby “one sponta- neously has the tendency to believe that touching re­sists virtualization.”1 Through this acute remark, the French phi- losopher underlies a consolidated topos that attributes to the sense of touch the ability to convey a direct and objec- tive knowledge of the things of the world, captured in their physical and even theoretical dimension.2 By questioning the supposed identity relationship between touch and ob- jectivity, the author opens a new perspective on the sub- ject, widening the ways in which the world of haptics could be conceptualized and practiced. For the purpose of the 1 J. Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005): 300. 2 Cfr. J.-L. Nancy, Corpus (Paris: Metailie, 1992): 76; M. Paterson, The Sense of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Oxford: Berg, 2007): 2-3; C. Classen, D. Howes, Ways of Sensing (New York: Routledge, 2014): 89; A. Gallace, C. Spence, In Touch with the Future: The Sense of Touch from Cognitive Neuroscience to Virtual Reality, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 3. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 134 AN-ICON  argument presented here, Derrida’s considerations prove pivotal: the aim will be to try and deepen his assumption, investigating the relationship between illusion, haptic per- ception and works of art. Addressing the possibility that both the theory and practice which anticipate and guide haptic experiences and technologies account for an illusory character, escaping the grounds of undeniable certainty and adherence to reality which are at times linked to the discourse on touch. This study will in fact envisage the possibility that illusion imposes itself as a constitutive figure of haptic feeling both on a theoretical level and on a technical one. The research will focus on how the experience of touching plastic objects changes from the analogical dimension to the digital one, first from a theoretical point of view and then across a range of case studies within the museum sector. In the peculiar phenomenon of touching sculpture in a virtual environment employing haptic devices, the il- lusion changes its function: before a theoretical figure, it becomes an experiential strategy. Not necessarily aimed at generating a phenomenological surplus, which as we will see most technologies are not able to offer, but at of- fering the possibility of a semantic shift on an emotional and aesthetic level. The study will begin with an assess- ment of Derrida’s theorizing on the haptic and on virtuality, highlighting the inherent illusory character that seems to be shared by both virtual haptic museological experiences and the theorizing of “haptic” itself, a link captured by the author already in his work On Touching. While borrowing from Derrida the relevance of museum practices as case studies for the discussion on the haptic, this article will however assess evidentiary accounts in the second sec- tion of the text. Before addressing the case studies, it was deemed necessary to elaborate two relevant premises. On the one hand, a thorough account of haptic technologies and of the current theoretical issues that guide their design will be presented, with reference to the challenges posed by haptic illusions. On the other hand, a historiographic account of the fundamental role that the concept of illusion VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 135 AN-ICON  has played in the theorizing of the haptic discourse will be offered. Through this analysis, we aim to hopefully demon- strate the structural role played by the figure of illusion in both theoretical and technological designs, strengthening the rationale which serves as the guiding principle of the discussion at hand. The second section, following Derrida’s intuition and using museological haptic technologies case studies, will try to assess how these premises relate to the cultural offer available to the public. Beginning from the relationship between touching and cultural artifacts, and more specifically sculptures, which has played a central role in both philosophical and museological undertakings, a history of touch in museums will be briefly traced, con- necting contemporary endeavors to their historical pre- decessors. Then a series of relevant case studies will be presented, trying to understand, by looking closely at their design and reception, what aspect of the haptic experience they aimed to leverage on, and therefore which epistemic and experiential qualities were privileged. It will emerge that when museums are trying to reinstate the evidentiary nature of the haptic experience, and focus on mimicking a reductive understanding of the phenomenology of touch, the results might be scientifically interesting yet not experi- entially powerful. By contrast, when the more evocative and illusory qualities of the haptic are investigated, exploiting a more environmental and multifaceted account of the haptic experience, a new and promising use of haptic technolo- gies is possible.3 “Tact beyond the possible:”4 illusion as a figure of the haptic between historiography and psycho-aesthetics The teleological value of the human hand as a pro toto organ of the sense of touch is a recurring trope in the history of philosophy, from Kant, through Herder, de 3 Although the paper is the result of a collective research and reflection work made by the two authors, the first section was written by Valentina Bartalesi, the second one by Anna Calise. 4 J. Derrida, On Touching: 66. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 136 AN-ICON  Miran, Husserl, until Katz, Focillon, Révész, and Gibson.5 In Derrida’s analysis the haptic, assumed as a not stric- tu sensu6 sense that “virtually” involves the sensorium in its obscure intricacy,7 is qualified by the peculiar “motor activity”8 of the human hand. Yet, while recognizing the constitutive motility of this sensory faculty, Derrida refus- es such preliminary immediacy, claiming with Nancy its “local, fractal, modal” nature.9 If these adjectives partially complicate the meaning of touching on an ontological level, they seem to encourage the reflection towards a technical sphere, according to an address that Derrida tries to verify. As a proof of the fragility of a way of thinking that a priori denies the possibility of virtualizing touch, the philosopher presents a significant case study for that time: the Haptic Museum in California.10 In spite of the limited evidence still available with regards to this institution, its mission appears clear. As Margaret L. Mclaughlin of the Integrated Media Systems Center (University of Southern California) states: Our IMSC team has used haptics to allow museum visitors to ex- plore three-dimensional works of art by “touching” them, some- thing that is not possible in ordinary museums due to prevailing “hands-off” policies. Haptics involves the modality of touch-the sensation of shape and texture an observer feels when exploring 5 J. Derrida, On Touching: 41-42, 95, 122, 140. See in this respect: L.A. Jones, S.J. Lederman, Human Hand Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006): 6; A. Benjamin, “Endless touching: Herder and sculpture,” Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico 4, no. 1, (2011): 73-92, https://doi.org/10.13128/Aisthesis-10983; H. Focillon, “Éloge de la main” (1934), in Vie des Formes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981); G. Révész, The Human Hand (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958); J.J. Gibson, “Observations on active touch,” Psychological Review 69, no. 6 (November 1962): 477-491, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0046962. 6 J. Derrida, On Touching: 53, 149. 7 Ibid.: 42. 8 Ibid.: 142. 9 As noted by: “But there again-and this, too, has to be clear only upon the condition that tact does not concentrate, does not lay claim as Descartes’s touching does to the privilege given to immediacy, which would bring about the fusion of all the senses and of ‘sense.’ Touching, too, touching, first, is local, modal, fractal”, J.L. Nancy, Corpus: 76. 10 J. Derrida, On Touching: 300-301; M.L. Mclaughlin et al., “The haptic museum,” Conference: Proc. of the EVA 2000 Florence Conf. on Electronic Imaging and the Visual Arts (March 2000), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229433104_The_Haptic_Museum, accessed December 11, 2022. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 137 AN-ICON a virtual object, such as a 3D model of a piece of pottery or art glass.11 Although presumably the first example of a haptic museum equipped with exosomatic technologies,12 Derrida’s case includes many factors that have become constitutive in subsequent museological proposals. By in- teracting with the PHANToM haptic device13 or wearing the exoskeleton glove CyberGrasp,14 at those times fu- turistic apparatuses, visitors could proceed to the manual exploration of virtual artifacts, digitized by employing 3D cameras such as ColorScan or Virtuoso.15 Technically, the “haptic human-computer interaction (HCI)” requires a struc- tural triad composed of “human user, interface device, and virtual environment synthesized by computer.”16 Through “haptic-rendering algorithms,”17 the device provides spe- cific stimuli arising from the interaction between the “hap- tic device representation” (the user’s avatar) and the 11 M.L. Mclaughlin et al., “The haptic museum:” w.p. 12 Among the twentieth-century experiences, one of the first tactile museum exhibitions dedicated to blind people was organized by The American Museum of New York in 1909. While in the 1970s, numerous worldwide museums realized tactile pathways dedicated to the visually impaired, the first Haptic Gallery was opened by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. on March 1st 1979, as the Smithsonian Archive documentation testifies. See in this respect: H.F. Osborn, The American Museum of Natural History: its origin, its history, the growth of its departments to December 31, 1909 (New York: The American Museum of Natural History, 1909): 148; Chronology of Smithsonian History, “NPH Haptic Gallery Opens” (March 1st 1979): https://siris-sihistory.si.edu/ipac20/ipac. jsp?&profile=all&source=~!sichronology&uri=full=3100001~!1462~!0#focus accessed December 11, 2022; Council on Museums and Education in the Visual Arts, The art museum as educator: a collection of studies as guides to practice and policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 13 Designed by the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1994, “PHANToM is a convenient desktop device which provides a force-reflecting interface between a human user and a computer.” Inserting the index fingertip into a thimble or interacting with a stick, PHANToM consists in “a system capable of presenting convincing sensations of contact, constrained motion, surface compliance, surface friction, texture and other mechanical attributes of virtual objects.” T.H. Massie, J.K. Salisbury, “The PHANToM haptic interface: a device for probing virtual objects,” Dynamic Systems and Control 55, no. 1 (1994): w.p. 14 Commercialized in 2009, “the CyberGrasp device is a lightweight, force-reflecting exoskeleton that fits over a CyberGlove data glove (wired version) and adds resistive force feedback to each finger. With the CyberGrasp force feedback system, users are able to feel the size and shape of computer-generated 3D objects in a simulated virtual world.” Please see: CyberGrasp, CyberGlove System: https://static1.squarespace.com/ static/559c381ee4b0ff7423b6b6a4/t/5602fc01e4b07ebf58d480fb/1443036161782/ CyberGrasp_Brochure.pdf, accessed December 11, 2022. 15 M.L. Mclaughlin et al., “The haptic museum:” w.p. 16 D. Wang et al., “Haptic display for virtual reality: progress and challenges,” Virtual Reality & Intelligent Hardware 1, no. 2 (April 2019): 137 https://doi.org/10.3724/SP.J.2096- 5796.2019.0008. 17 Ibid.: 141-143. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 138 AN-ICON  photogrammetric restitution of the object in a virtual en- vironment (the haptic image).18 Hence, according to the object-relational data model, users receive tactile and kin- esthetic feedback geared towards the stimulation of the mechanoreceptors on the fingertip (for PHANToM) and on the whole hand surface (if wearing CyberGrasp) during the exploration of the virtual object.19 More specifically, the sub- ject perceives vibrotactile feedback which should make him or her feel those sensations that are connotative of touching the physical object,20 absent in its ilemorphic habitus albeit realistically tangible in its morphological properties of size, weight, surface, and texture.21 Beyond the issues more strictly related to the physiology of the experience, it is here relevant to examine how these researchers have recorded the act of touching a virtual object. Unexpectedly, the members of the Califor- nian IMSC, as well as the French philosopher, feel the need to put in inverted commas locutions such as “touching,” “remote touching,” or “realistic sensations of touching.”22 The grammatical escamotage of the quotation marks clear- ly betrays the necessity, be it more or less incidental, to denounce the presence of expressions bent to a “special or translated” use. In the technical gesture that the Haptic Museum visitor makes exploring virtual artifacts, Derrida glimpses the theoretical locus where “immediate contact”23 discloses its own illusory and ontologically fictitious dimen- sion, opening a chasm within the very meaning of touch: ultimately, what is the object of touch? Is this an illusion of 18 K. Salisbury, F. Conti, F. Barbagli, “Haptic rendering: introductory concepts,” IEEE Computer Society 24, no. 2 (March/April 2004): 25-26, https://doi.org/10.1109/ MCG.2004.1274058. 19 P.P. Pott, “Haptic Interfaces,” in L. Manfredi, ed., Endorobotics. Design, R&D, Future Trends (Academic Press, 2022). 20 Even if, according to Salisbury and Srinivasan “the resulting sensations prove startling, and many first-time users are quite surprised at the compelling sense of physical presence they encounter when touching virtual objects,” the improvement of haptic feedback constitutes one of the main purposes of this kind of technology. J.K. Salisbury, M.A. Srinivasan, “Phantom- based haptic interaction with virtual objects,” IEEE (September/October 1997): 6-10, https:// doi.org/10.1109/MCG.1997.1626171. 21 As Derrida notes, describing the above-mentioned experience, “we can thus feel the weight, form, and structure of the surface of a Chinese vase while ‘holding’ a three- dimensional digital model,” J. Derrida, On Touching: 301. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 139 AN-ICON  touch or what Madalina Diacuno prefers to define in terms of “illusionary touch”?24 If so, how to illustrate the phenom- enology of such an illusion? The noun “illusion,” from the Latin illudere (in, “against,” ludere “to play”), describes an “act of deception; deceptive appearance, apparition; delusion of the mind.”25 However, in the specialist lexicon on haptic perception the expression “haptic illusion” more rigorously recounts a “disruption of the physical coherence between real move- ment and feedback forces, used to create the illusion of a non-existent feature or to compensate with the illusion the sensation of an undesired detail.”26 As convincingly established by the critical literature since Révész, several haptic illusions have been codified and are currently under investigation.27 It should also be noted that a similar illusion, even though different in terms of the neurological reaction experienced with haptic prostheses in virtual environments, is daily negotiated by the user in the interaction with touch screens. The most recent media-archeological studies have investigated this ambiguous nature of “touching,” recording the hiatus which systematically occurs when the consum- er digitally interacts with the contents that pass through the “display.”28 In this regard, Simone Arcagni has recently pointed out how touch screens solicit a kind of experience “as if there were no longer a mediation between the idea of doing and the action that takes place in our hands” by 24 M. Diaconu, “Illusionary touch, and touching illusions,” in A. Tymieniecka, ed., Analecta Husserliana. The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research. Human Creation Between Reality and Illusion, vol. 87 (Cham: Springer, 2005): 115-125. 25 “Illusion,” Online Etymology Dictionary: https://www.etymonline.com/word/illusion, accessed December 11, 2022. 26 M. Grunwald, ed., Human Haptic Perception. Basics and Applications (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008): 649. 27 The main haptic illusions include “size-weight illusion,” a tangible version of the “Muller- Lyer illusion,” the “horizontal-vertical illusion” and the “Ponzio illusion.” See in this regard: M.A. Heller, E. Gentaz, “Illusions,” in M.A. Heller, E. Gentaz, eds., Psychology of Touch and Blindness (New York-London: Psychology Press - Taylor & Francis Group, 2014): 61-78. 28 F. Casetti, “Primal screens,” in C. Buckley, R. Campe, F. Casetti, eds., Screen Genealogies. From Optical Device to Environmental Medium (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019): 45; F. Casetti, “Che cos’è uno schermo, oggi?,” Rivista di Estetica 55 (2014): 28- 34 https://doi.org/10.4000/estetica.969. According to Francesco Casetti, touch screens represent the most effective type of display (ibid.: 29), a device that the author links to an instant, “passive” and disengaged communication. Consistently to the current hypertrophic consumption of images, Casetti’s display “exhibits, not reveals. It offers, not engages” (ibid.) and this happens because the touch screen “puts images in our hands” (ibid.). VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 140 AN-ICON  intensifying the sensation of proximity between user and content.29 Raising attention to the dangers inherent in the automation of touching, David Parisi has introduced the mil- itary phrase “Fingerbombing,” highlighting the “distanced, detached and destructive” nature of interaction with the touchscreen of a Nintendo DS.30 Furthermore, citing Thom- as Hirschhorn’s brutal video clip Touching Reality (2012), Wanda Strauven has denounced the moral and technical break between screen and display, whereby the object of touch results in the screen and not the images passing through it.31 Once more, what do the subjects touch and what do they perceive by touching and consuming?32 In light of this ontological uncertainty, the abil- ity to confer and simulate the highest degree of realism to the haptic experience of virtual content through a het- erogeneous range of devices – among the most futuristic devices should be mentioned AirPiano,33 VibroWeight,34 WeHAPTIC35 – is generally considered one of the overriding 29 S. Arcagni, Visioni Digitali: Video, Web e Nuove tecnologie (Torino: Einaudi, 2016): 301. 30 D. Parisi, “Fingerbombing, or ‘Touching is Good’: The Cultural Construction of Technologized Touch,” in M. Elo, M. Luoto, eds., Figure of Touch: Sense, Technics, Body (Helsinki: The Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki, Tallinna Raamatutrükikoja OÜ, 2018): 83. 31 W. Strauven, Touchscreen Archeology (Lüneberg: Meson Press, 2021): 112-116. Cfr. W. Strauven, “Marinetti’s tattilismo revisited hand travels, tactile screens, and touch cinema in the 21st Century,” in R. Catanese, ed., Futurist Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018): 70. 32 See in this respect: M. Racat, S. Capelli, “Touching without touching: the paradox of the digital age,” in M. Racat, S. Capelli, eds., Haptic Sensation and Consumer Behavior. The Influence of Tactile Stimulation in Physical and Online Environments (Nature Switzerland: Springer, 2020). 33 AirPiano constitutes “an enhanced music playing system to provide touchable experiences in HMD-based virtual reality with mid-air haptic feedback”. For more information see: I. Hwang et. al., “AirPiano: enhancing music playing experience in virtual reality with mid-air haptic feedback,” 2017 IEEE World Haptics Conference (WHC): 213-218 https://doi.org/10.1109/ WHC.2017.7989903. 34 VibroWeight represents “low-cost hardware prototype with liquid metal” employing “bimodal feedback cues in VR, driven by adaptive absolute mass (weights) and gravity shift:” X. Wang et. al., “VibroWeight: simulating weight and center of gravity changes of objects in virtual reality for enhanced realism,” Human Computer Interaction (2022): https://doi.org/10.48550/ arXiv.2201.07078. 35 WeHAPTIC (Wearable Haptic interface for Accurate Position Tracking and Interactive force Control) “shows improved performances in terms of finger motion measurement and force feedback compared with existing systems such as finger joint angle calculation and precise force control:” Y. Park et. al., “WeHAPTIC: a Wearable Haptic interface for Accurate Position Tracking and Interactive force Control,” Mechanism and Machine Theory 153, (November 2020): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mechmachtheory.2020.104005. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 141 AN-ICON  objectives for improving these technologies.36 Furthermore, even though since the invention of the first haptic device in 194837 continuous improvements have been made, contem- porary interfaces present both a qualitative and quantitative deficit compared to the human haptic sensitivity, calling for “urgent requirement to improve the realism of haptic feed- back for VR systems, and thus to achieve equivalent sen- sation comparable to the interaction in a physical world.”38 While the expression “haptic realism,” coined by the philosopher of science Mazviita Chirimuuta in 2016, opens the hypothesis of a scientific perspectivism based on interaction with the world,39 the same expression when related to haptic interfaces assumes a more technical con- notation. As Sushma Subramanian points out in a conversa- tion during the 2020 World Haptics Conference with Ed Col- gate, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University, although haptic technologies still go through a “primitive” state, the short-term goal in their design is to “develop a new tactile language that mimics the kinds of maneuvers we make with three-dimensional objects” in which “the challenging part is to make us feel them.”40 A leading producer such as the Berlin-based Lofelt attempts to make interaction with the touch screen more realistic by combining sounds with the corresponding haptic vibrations 36 A. Brogni, D.G. Caldwell, M. Slater, “Touching sharp virtual objects produces a haptic illusion,” in R. Shumaker, ed., Virtual and Mixed Reality (Berlin Heidelberg: Springer, 2011): 234-242; A. Gallace, M. Girondini, “Social touch in virtual reality,” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 43 (February 2022): 249-254, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.11.006. It should be noted how the design of “pseudo-haptic feedback” is also nodal to the experience of touching in virtual environments. See in this regard A. Maehigashi et. al., “Virtual weight illusion: weight perception of virtual objects using weight illusion,” CHI ’21 Extended Abstracts (May 2021), https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451842. Furthermore, the design of an effective haptic illusion in a virtual environment is related to scale and precisely to the so-called “Body- scaling effect”: P. Abtahi, “From illusions to beyond-real interactions in virtual reality,” UIST ‘21: The Adjunct Publication of the 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (October 2021): 153-157, https://doi.org/10.1145/3474349.3477586. 37 As David Parisi reports, the invention of the first mechanical force feedback master- slave manipulator in nuclear field is due to the engineer Raymond Goertz of the Atomic Energy Commission for the Argonne National Laboratory. D. Parisi, Archaeologies of Touch. Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2018): 220-221. 38 D. Wang, “Haptic display:” 137. 39 M. Chirimuuta, “Vision, perspectivism, and haptic realism,” Philosophy of Science 83, no. 5 (December 2016), 746-756 https://doi.org/10.1086/687860. 40 S. Subramanian, How to Feel. The Science and Meaning of Touch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021): 250-251. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 142 AN-ICON  so that the user participates in an immersive experience. As Lofelt founder Daniel Büttner asserts: “it is all an illu- sion, but it seems incredibly real.”41 In a similar direction, the most advanced research conducted by the Intelligent Haptic program of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligence System aims to implement the sensitivity of electrovibra- tions.42 Evidence that haptic perception is one of the most promising experimental fields for the virtual world is reflect- ed in the great number of HORIZON programs supported by the European Union in the last five years,43 mainly dedi- cated to Mid-Air and Mixed Haptic Feedback technologies. Ultrahaptics, launched in 2013, consists in a haptic device system in which the force feedback is positioned above interactive surfaces and requires no contact with either tool, attaching to the surface itself. Instead, haptic sensations are projected through a screen and directly onto the user’s hands. It employs the principle of acoustic radiation force whereby a phased array of ultrasonic transducers is used to exert forces on a target in mid-air.44 H-Reality devices, on the other hand, employing mixed haptic feedback technology “aim at combining the contactless haptic technology with the contact haptic tech- nology and then apply it into virtual and augmented reality 41 R. Banham, “Haptic happenings: how touch technologies are taking on new meaning,” Dell Technologies (October 21, 2019): https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-us/perspectives/ haptic-happenings-how-touch-technologies-are-taking-on-new-meaning/, accessed December 11, 2022. 42 Y. Vardar, K.J. Kuchenbeker, L. Behringer, “Challenging the design of electrovibrations to generate a more realistic feel,” Haptic Intelligence Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (April 6, 2021): https://hi.is.mpg.de/news/challenging-the-design-of-electrovibrations-to- generate-a-more-realistic-feel, accessed December 11, 2022. 43 Among them we point out: Horizon 2020 (CORDIS), TACTIle Feedback Enriched Virtual Interaction through Virtual RealITY and beyond, (July 1, 2019-September 30, 2022): https:// cordis.europa.eu/project/id/856718/it, accessed December 11, 2022; Horizon 2020 (CORDIS), Multimodal Haptic with Touch Devices (March 1, 2020-February 29, 2024): https://cordis. europa.eu/project/id/860114/it, accessed December 11. 44 T. Carter et. al., “Ultrahaptics: multi-point mid-air haptic feedback for touch surfaces,” UIST ‘13: Proceedings of the 26th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (St. Andrews, UK: October 8-11, 2013): 505-506. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 143 AN-ICON  technologies.”45 These projects encourage “to achieve high-fidelity sensations through technology that is easy and comfortable to use, for both interactive augmented reality (AR) and immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences”;46 rendering potentially less unreachable that horizon of touch virtualisation from which Derrida took his cue. In assessing the role that illusion plays for the effective functioning of haptic technologies, it can be ques- tioned whether this prevalent position is distinctive of the digital era or if it represents a consolidated trope in haptic historiography, often centered on the theoretical and prac- tical opportunity to touch – or not! – sculpture, at times accused of being the least illusory of the arts.47 In under- taking the investigation from “haptics”48 to “haptic,”49 we will proceed in a parallel line to the essentially optical one 45 “H-Reality,” FET FX. Our future today (2020): http://www.fetfx.eu/project/h-reality/; see also: X. de Tinguy, C. Pacchierotti, A. Lécuyer, “Capacitive sensing for improving contact rendering with tangible objects in VR,” IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph – IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 27, no. 4 (December 2020): 2481-2487, https://doi. org/10.1109/TVCG.2020.3047689. 46 Horizon 2020 (CORDIS), Mixed Haptic Feedback for Mid-Air Interactions in Virtual and Augmented Realities (October 1, 2018- March 31, 2022): https://cordis.europa.eu/project/ id/801413/it, accessed December 11, 2022. 47 Is given below the renowned passage in Benedetto Varchi’s Paragone (1547) in which painters vituperate sculpture by stating: “They argue again from the difficulty of art, where, distinguishing the difficulty into two parts: in fatigue of body, and this as ignoble they leave to sculptors: and in fatigue of wit, and this as noble they reserve for them, saying that, besides the different manners and ways of working and coloring, in fresco, oil, tempera, glue and gouache, painting makes a figure foreshorten, [it] makes it seem round and raised in a flat field, making it break through and seem far away with all the appearances and vagueness that can be desired, giving to all their works lumens and shadows well observed according to the lumens and reverberations, which they hold to be a most difficult thing; and in conclusion they say that they make appear what is not: in which thing they seek effort and infinite artifice”, B. Varchi, Lezzione. Nella quale si disputa della maggioranza delle arti e qual sia più nobile, la scultura o la pittura (Firenze: Fondazione Memofonte, 1547): 38. 48 The plural noun haptics, deriving from the Greek feminine haptikós and the Neo-Latin hapticē, a term coined in 1685 by Isaac Barrow in Lectiones Mathematicae XXIII, is literally translated as “science of touch”. Haptics refers to the science of touch in a techno-media perspective, denoting the tactile feedback generated by those devices which, by sending artificial stimuli at proprioceptive, limbic and muscular levels, simulate the sensation of actual contact: “Haptics,” Merriam-Webster Dictionary (online): https://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/haptics, accessed December 11, 2022. 49 The Greek etymon haptō, from which derive the word haptos (tangible, sensitive), the predicate háptein and the adjective haptikós, from which derive the French haptique, the German haptisch/Haptik and the English haptic, means variously “able to come into contact with” (haptikós) and “to clasp, grasp, lace” (háptein). VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 144 AN-ICON  stabilized by Riegl,50 bearer of a critical fortune culminating with the later reworkings elaborated by Deleuze,51 Mald- iney,52 Dufrenne53, Marks54 and Barker.55 Concerning the covertly panoptic conception of the haptic that had been spreading in German Kunstwissenschaft since Hildebrand’s studies,56 it is necessary to turn our attention to the de- velopments taking place in the psychophysiological area around the same years. In the wake of Heinrich Weber’s pioneering studies on the sense of touch, in which sensory illusions after limbs amputation57 (the so-called Phantom Sensations)58 were classified as not accidentally probed; the first use of the term haptic in 1892 by another eclectic Berliner, Max Dessoir, was systematized almost simulta- neously by Edward Titchener.59 The rehabilitation of this 50 As Andrea Pinotti notes via Révész, “It is significant that, the year after the publication of Kunstindustrie, in an article in which he argues with Strzygowski, Riegl admits that the term taktisch (tastbar, from the Latin tangere) can lead to misunderstandings, and declares himself willing to adopt instead the term haptisch (from the Greek hapto), which the physiological literature had since long employed in its research on sensoriality. Perhaps a way, that of moving from Latin to Greek, to avoid any possible reference to the actual manual palpation and reaffirm the fundamental strength of the haptisch,” A. Pinotti, “Guardare o toccare? Un’incertezza herderiana,” Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico 2, no. 1 (2009): 186, https://doi.org/10.13128/Aisthesis-10953, trans. mine. For a first bibliographical framing of Riegl’s haptic construction see: M.R. Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); M. Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); S. Melville, “The temptation of new perspectives” (1990), in D. Preziosi, ed., The Art Of Art History. A Critic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): 274-283; G. Vasold, “‘Das Erlebnis des Sehens’. Zum Begriff der Haptik im Wiener fin de siècle,” Maske und Kothurn 62 (2016): 46-70. 51 G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon. Logic of Sensation (1981), trans. D.W. Smith (London-New York: Continuum, 2003): 122, 189. 52 See in this regard: A. Pinotti, “Style, rythme, souffle: Maldiney and kunstwissenschaft,” in J.-P. Charcosset, ed., Parole Tenue: Colloque du Centenaire du Maldiney á Lyon (Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, 2014): 49-59. 53 See in this respect: A. Pinotti, ed., Alois Riegl. Grammatica storica delle arti figurative (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2018), XLVI. 54 We refer specifically to the postcolonial construct of haptic visuality that Laura Marks derives and resemantizes from the lesson of Regl’s heritage: L.U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002): 4-7; L.U. Marks, The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham-London: Duke University Press, 2000): 162-171. 55 J.M. Barker, The Tactile Eye. Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley-Los Angeles- London: University of California Press, 2009): 37-38. 56 See in this regard: A. Pinotti, Il corpo dello stile. Storia dell’arte come storia dell’estetica a partire da Semper, Riegl, Wölfflin (Milano: Mimesis, 2001). See specifically the third section entitled “Occhio e mano:” 179-221. 57 M. Grunwald, M. John, “German pioneers of research into human haptic perception,” in M. Grunwald, ed., Human Haptic Perception. Basics and Applications (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008): 19. 58 T. Weiss, “Phantom sensations,” in M. Grunwald, ed., Human Haptic Perception. Basics and Applications (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008): 283-294. 59 D. Parisi, Archaeologies of Touch: 105. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 145 AN-ICON  obsolete Greek term, already Homeric and Aristotelian,60 reflects Dessoir’s will to deepen the investigation on touch by distinguishing the sensations of contact from the active exploration (Pselaphesie).61 This distinction, destined to become normative, emerged in the context of a network of experimental psychology laboratories scattered through- out the United States and orbiting around the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, inaugurated in 1875 by William James, although active only since 1892.62 While in 1890, James was able to discuss the “fallacy of the senses,” tak- ing his cue from the prominent Aristotelic finger illusion,63 consulting Harvard Laboratory appendix for the two years 1892-1893 shows how scientific trials on touch proceeded simultaneously to the study of optical illusions.64 A similar experimental path would culminate in 1893 with the pre- sentation of the Apparatus for Simultaneous Touches by William Krohn at Clark University.65 On the plexus mentioned above, the aestheti- cal and historiographical discourses are inserted and inter- twined, sanctioning the passage from the properly physio- logical illusion of touching to a metaphorical one, embodied by the rhetorical figure of “as if,” direct relative of Derrida’s inverted commas. That such a rhetorical stratagem con- stitutes a much older matter is recalled by the well-known querelle of Herderian uncertainty. As already pointed out by Andrea Pinotti, in his aesthetic treatise Plastik, Herder seems to allude to the possibility of a virtual touch, reproaching the sculptor who has never touched, not even in a dream, 60 M. Perniola, Il Sex Appeal dell’Inorganico (Torino: Einaudi, 1994): 95. 61 M. Dessoir, Über den Hautsinn (Separat-Abzug aus Archiv für Anatomie und Physiologie: Physiologische Abtheilung. 1892): 242. 62 G. Bruno, “Film, aesthetics, science: Hugo Münsterberg’s laboratory of moving images,” Grey Room 36 (Summer 2009): 88-113, https://doi.org/10.1162/grey.2009.1.36.88. 63 W. James, The Principles of Psychology (Ontario: York University, 1890): 87. 64 H. Munsterberg, Psychological Laboratory of Harvard University (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1893). Munsterberg recorded notes include: “Instrument for studying the fusion of touch sensations. After Krohn; made in Cambridge”; “Instrument for touch reaction, etc;” “Touch-reaction instrument, with twenty different stimuli. By Elbs, Freiburg. $20”. See also: Bruno, “Film”: 101-102. 65 W.O. Krohn, “Facilities in experimental psychology in the colleges of the United States” (1894), in C.D. Green, ed., Classics in the History of Psychology (Toronto: Tork University): https://www.sapili.org/subir-depois/en/ps000128.pdf; D. Parisi, Archaeologies: 144-147. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 146 AN-ICON  his creation.66 “The illusion has worked,”67 the philosopher will add, when the eye takes on the movements of the hand and then of a very thin ray, an emissary of the soul, which kinaesthetically embraces the sculpture as it becomes a body. In the wake of Konrad Lange’s Illusionsästhetik68 and J.H. Kirchmann and E. Von Hartmann’s doctrine of illusional feelings, the already mentioned Dessoir would achieve an even more drastic conclusion. Declaring that every work of art mainly satisfies a single sensory channel, this sensorial limitation “guarantees its illusory character,” generating the paradoxical situation of “a conscious self-deception, of a continued and deliberate confusion of reality and illusion.”69 However, it was not until the art-historical de- bate of the early 1950s – while the earliest haptic devices were designed – that an open polarization was reached regarding whether or not sculptures should be touched. On the one hand Herbert Read, moving from the psychological studies of Arnheim, Wundt, Lowenfeld, and Révész, could argue that “for the sculptor, tactile values are not an illusion to be created on a two-dimensional plane: they constitute a reality of being conveyed directly, as existent mass. Sculp- ture is an art of palpation.”70 On the other hand, a fervent detractor such as the modernist Greenberg would have drastically overturned this assumption.71 Both consistent readers of Berenson, whose normative and ambivalent 66 A. Pinotti, Guardare o toccare: 189; J.G. Herder, Sculpture. Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream (1778), ed. J. Gaiger (Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002): 41. 67 A. Pinotti, Guardare o toccare: 189; J.G. Herder, Some Observations: 41. 68 For an introduction to the subject see: D. Romand, “Konrad Lange on ‘the Illusion of Materials’ in painting and visual arts: revisiting a psychoaesthetic theory of the perception of material properties,” in J. Stumpel, M. Wijntjes, eds., Art and Perception. An International Journal of Art and Perception Science, Special Issue: The Skin of Things: On the Perception and Depiction of Materials 7, no. 3-4 (2021): 283-289. 69 M. Dessoir, Aesthetics and Theory of Art. Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (1906), trans. S.A. Emery, (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1970): 53. 70 H. Read, The Art of Sculpture (London: Faber & Faber, 1954): 49. 71 We are referring specifically to Greenberg’s harsh and inflexible review of Read’s monograph: C. Greenberg, “Roundness isn’t all,” (November 25, 1956), in J. O’ Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism 3 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995): 272. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 147 AN-ICON  “tactile values”72 find a more truthful attestation in the cor- ollary categories of “ideated sensations,” “ideated satisfac- tions” and “ideal sensation of contact,”73 Read and Green- berg finally reached an unexpected consonance. Whilst Read claimed the experience of sculpture as distinctive of haptic perception and, specifically, for the prehensility of the hand; Greenberg denied the appropriateness of such fruition, attributing tactile stimuli to the visual sphere. Mean- while, Herder’s uncertainty remains. Indeed, as David J. Getsy noted, it is ultimately unclear whether Read wished for a knowledge of the plastic work through its palpation or maintained such contact on a substantially preliminary and physiological condition.74 In order to enrich the corpus of sources of such a querelle numerous other examples could be made; none- theless, one of the most promising scenarios for its analysis, as prophetically announced by Derrida, is offered by the exploration through haptic interfaces of digitized artifacts in museums. When the veto of touching the work of art lapses and the distinction between actual and fictional flattens out, which horizons are opened by the possibility of touching? Will it be a “tactile vertigo” in the sense of Baudrillard, in which the virtual object expired at the status of a trompe- l’œil image soliciting a “tactile hyper presence of things, as though one could hold them,” despite its phantasmagorical essence?75 Can these finally touchable bodies add much 72 A. Brown, “Bernard Berenson and ‘tactile values’ in Florence,” in J. Connors, ed., Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, 2014). For an analysis highlighting the subtle pantheism underlying Berenson’s work, see: A. Pinotti, “The touchable and the untouchable. Merleau-Ponty and Bernard Berenson,” Phenomenology 2005 3, no. 2, (2007): 479-498. 73 B. Berenson, Aesthetics and History (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1948): 24-25, 74. 74 As David J. Getsy pointedly notes: “Read did not necessarily argue that the viewer must touch the sculpture in order to appreciate it, as Greenberg would have us believe. Rather, it was the aggregate experience of tactility that provides us with an ability to assess ponderability and the non-visual traits of any object. Our haptic sensibility and our sense of the physical environment are both closely tied to our own ever-developing repertoire of tactile and physical experiences”; D.J. Getsy, “Tactility or opticality, Henry Moore or David Smith: Herbert Read and Clement Greenberg on The Art of Sculpture, 1956,” in R. Peabody, ed., Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945–1975 (Los Angeles: Getty Publication, 2011): 111-112. 75 J. Baudrillard, Seduction (1979), trans. B. Singer (Montréal: New World Perspectives. Culture Text Series, 1990): 62-63. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 148 AN-ICON  to the illusory palpation of the work of art on a semantic level, if not on a phenomenological one? Haptic technologies and museums, the imaginative frontiers of the phenomenology of touch In order to present a critical account of how haptic technologies are being employed in museums, and to investigate to what extent the projects designed within these environments fully explore the illusory potential of vir- tual haptic experiences, a preliminary discussion on analog touch in museums is needed. The use of haptic technolo- gies within museum settings,76 which has widely increased in the last decades, is in fact not something new to cultural experiential models,77 and more the reinstatement of prac- tices which had been common policies in museums from their foundation to the middle of the nineteenth century. While today it is “generally taken for granted that museums collections are not for touching”78 seventeenth- and eigh- teenth-century museum visitors were customarily free to pick up precious and delicate relics, enjoying their sense of touch as a fundamental part of their overall experience. More specifically, touch in early museums was used for four different reasons:79 learning (as touching an object provided relevant information that through sight could not be obtained, like its weight), aesthetic appreciation (touch was considered to allow an embodied understanding of the 76 For a comprehensive account on how the importance of touch has been re-evaluated in the museum sector in the past three decades please cfr. G. Black, The Engaging Museum: Developing Museums for Visitor Involvement (Oxford: Routledge, 2005); E. Pye, The Power of Touch: Handling Objects in Museums and Heritage Contexts (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007), H. Chatterjee, Touch in Museums: Policy and Practice in Object Handling (Oxford: Berg, 2008); F. Candlin, Art, Museums and Touch (Manchester: University of Manchester Press: 2010), and S. Dudley, ed., Museum Objects: Experiencing the Properties of Things (London: Routledge, 2012). 77 C. Classen, The Deepest Sense. A Cultural History of Touch (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012): 136-146. 78 Ibid.: 137. 79 A synthetic account of the reasons why touch was a common practice in museums can be found in Classen, The Deepest Sense: 139-142. For other discussions on the topic please cfr. D. Howes, “Introduction to sensory museology,” The Senses and Society 9, no. 3 (2014): 259- 267 https://doi.org/10.2752/174589314X14023847039917 and R.F. Ovenell, The Ashmolean Museum, 1683–1894 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 149 AN-ICON  nature of the display), imaginary potential (by holding an ar- tifact visitors could get emotionally in touch with its original owner or maker) and healing powers (especially religious relics, when touched or eaten,80 where deemed able to cure illnesses and pains). As it appears evident already from this first account, not all yet some of the functions of touch in museums had to do with the potential to empower imagina- tive accounts, associating the role of touching not only with evidentiary information, yet also with intangible and elusive, even powerful, qualities. From the mid of the nineteenth century touch was banned from museums:81 conservation matters became more and more relevant, while parallelly touch in itself came to be classified as a secondary sense, one “associated with irrationality and primitivism.”82 These two reasons account for two extremely different discourses, one linked to practical aspects and to the preservation of cultural heritage, the second pertaining to a conceptual sphere, having to do with epistemic premises and their museological consequences. Today, well into the third decade of the 21st century, the situation in museums seems to be closer to that of three centuries ago than to the end of the last Millenium. Touch seems to have regained its epistemic status,83 and modern haptic technologies allow its employment without the need to endanger precious artifacts. The great differ- ence, however, is that machines and proxies mediate the haptic experience, defining its phenomenology. The ques- tion which arises, at this point, seems to be to what extent these technologies are and will be designed with the aim 80 For a historical account of the healing powers of ancient religious relics cfr. K. Arnold, “Skulls, mummies and unicorns’ horns: medicinal chemistry in early english museums,” in R.G.W. Anderson et al., Enlightening the British: Knowledge, Discovery and the Museum in the Eighteenth Century (London: The British Museum Press, 2003), also E. Brown, An Account of Several Travels through a Great Part of Germany (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1677), and D. Murray, Museums: Their History and Use, vol. 1. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1904): 40, 50, 73. 81 For an account of the historical reasons which led to this change cfr. Classen, The Deepest Sense: 143-146, and F. Candlin, Art, Museums and Touch. 82 C. Classen, The Deepest Sense. A Cultural History of Touch: XIV. 83 For a discussion on the epistemic value of touch please cfr. C. Classen, The Book of Touch (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005), M. Peterson, The Senses of Touch (London: Routledge, 2007), M.P. Gadoua, “Making sense through touch. Handling collections with Inuit Elders at the McCord Museum,” The Senses and Society 9, no. 3 (2014): 323-341 https://doi.org/10.2752/1 74589314X14023847039719. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 150 AN-ICON  to mirror the original analog functions of touch, or whether they will be built and employed with the goal to expand the potential of the haptic experience. With regards to this, it will be important to understand on which of the qualities of touch – amongst the seventeenth century list aforemen- tioned – they will leverage on. Whilst, on the one hand, they could aim at faithfully reproducing the phenomenological qualities of touch, the paragraphs above have shown how there is a wider illusory character that these technologies could be aiming at capturing, one which could hopefully open up new experiential frontiers. Whilst there isn’t one single comprehensive ac- count which maps the state of the arts of haptic technolog- ical development in the museum system, literature in this field has been growing recently. This thanks to researches that discuss the regained relevance of touch in educational settings, together with publications which analyze individ- ual projects designed and carried through by museum re- search centers.84 A vast number of these studies highlight how haptic technologies allow visitors to “explore new par- adigms of interaction”85 leveraging on the “quality and use- fulness of computer-based exhibits.”86 This is granted as the sense of touch “is an essential part of how we interact, explore, perceive and understand our surroundings”87 and therefore incorporating object based learning in museum 84 For other interesting case studies analyzing the role of haptic technologies in museums please cfr. R. Comes, “Haptic devices and tactile experiences in museum exhibitions,” Journal of Ancient History and Archeology 3, no. 4 (2016) https://doi.org/10.14795/j.v3i4.205; F. Fischnaller “The last supper interactive project. The illusion of reality: perspective and perception,” in G. Amoruso, ed., Putting Tradition into Practice: Heritage, Place and Design, Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering 3, (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018) https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57937-5_73; M.H. Jamil et al., “The role of haptics in digital archaeology and heritage recording processes”, 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Haptic, Audio and Visual Environments and Games (HAVE) (2018): 1-6 https://doi.org/10.1109/ HAVE.2018.8547505. 85 A. Frisoli et al., “Evaluation of the pure-form haptic displays used for exploration of works of art at museums,” report on the project findings, 2005 retrieved at https://www.researchgate. net/publication/228584199_Evaluation_of_the_pure-form_haptic_displays_used_for_ exploration_of_works_of_art_at_museums/ related on the 31/01/2022. 86 S. Brewster, “The impact of haptic ‘touching’ technology on cultural applications,” in J. Hemsley, V. Cappellini, G. Stanke, eds., Digital Applications for Cultural Heritage Institutions, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005): Chap. 30, 273-284, 282. 87 M. Novak et al., “There is more to touch than meets the eye: haptic exploration in a science museum,” International Journal of Science Education 42, no. 18 (2020): 3026-3048 https://doi. org/10.1080/09500693.2020.1849855. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 151 AN-ICON  experiences increases autonomy and satisfaction.88 The information that visitors can acquire through touch appears today relevant as it did at the beginning of museum histo- ry, and it has become obtainable without endangering the artifacts. 3D replicas of material artifacts associated with a range of wearable or desktop devices are the predominant technologies used across museum experiments, engaging users through mainly force feedback and kinetic stimuli.89 While providing an account of the state of the arts of the literature and case studies in this sector is not one of the goals of this essay, a series of examples have been cho- sen as they have been deemed relevant to the research at hand: assessing to what extent haptic museum experience expand and explore their full – at times illusory – potential. A widely discussed experiment in the field is the Museum of Pure Form, “a collective project ran in the early 2000s by a series of European museums creating 3D digital replicas of their artifacts and making available a technology which allowed for the haptic experience of them.”90 This pivotal program engaged a series of museums across Eu- rope91 who collected a shared archive of digital replicas of their statues, and then produced a touring exhibition which installed wearable devices (exoskeleton wearable arm) and or desktop devices (two robotic arms departing from sup- port columns placed in front of the visualization screen) in front of the original statues.92 Overall, findings on the exper- iment registered both amusement (70% of attendees) and instructiveness (39%) across visitors.93 The shared belief, confirmed by the analysis conducted simultaneously as the 88 M. Novak et al., “There is more to touch that meets the eye:” 3044. 89 In the literature it is possible to find studies which evaluate both collaborative endeavors and researches ran by single institutions. Overall, the collaboration between universities or tech companies and cultural institutions seems a fundamental premise in order to allow for trials and studies that evaluate the impact of these projects. 90 A. Frisoli, “Evaluation of the pure-form haptic displays used for exploration of works of art at museums.” 91 The Galician Centre for Contemporary Arts in Santiago de Compostela, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Pisa, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Stockholm, the Conservation Centre at National Museums Liverpool and the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London. 92 A. Frisoli, “Evaluation of the pure-form haptic displays used for exploration of works of art at museums:” 2. 93 Ibid.: 6. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 152 AN-ICON  project, was that the opportunity to use a device to touch the digital replica of a statue while looking at it enforced the learning experience. Something which, as aforementioned, was deemed constitutive of the relevance of touch in early museum experiences. As this case study shows, together with many that have followed, it seems that one of the main concerns of museum professionals and researchers in de- signing digital haptic experiences seems to be supplying to the lost opportunity to touch the artworks, thus enabling the visitor to enjoy a wider range of information regarding the statue and, consequently, enriching the learning expe- rience. This, however, faces a series of relevant limitations on the phenomenological level, as discussed above with reference to Wang’s analysis in Haptic Display. It appears, from this first account, that the use of haptic technologies is not necessarily seen as a strategy to experiment and widen the cultural experience, yet instead as a way to re- cuperate something that contemporary curatorial practices do not allow – namely to touch originals. With reference to this point, it is interesting to see that there are several researches actually comparing the haptic experience that visitors can have touching the replica of an artifact or its 3D version.94 It appears that “the comparison between the haptic device and the replica showed that the multi-finger tactile interaction with the replica produced considerably richer information than the single-point contact of the hap- tic device.”95 What the citation implies is that the technology used provided a less phenomenologically rich experience 94 Interesting accounts on this debate can be found in M. Dima, L. Hurcombe, M. Wright, “Touching the past: haptic augmented reality for museum artefacts,” in R. Shumaker, S. Lackey, eds., Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality. Applications of Virtual and Augmented Reality. VAMR 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 8526. (Cham: Springer, 2014) https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-07464-1_1. Also cfr. S. Ceccacci et al., “The role of haptic feedback and gamification in virtual museum systems,” Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 14, no. 3 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1145/3453074, and F. Stanco et al., “Virtual anastylosis of Greek sculpture as museum policy for public outreach and cognitive accessibility,” Journal of Electronic Imaging 26, no. 1, 011025 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JEI.26.1.011025. 95 M. Dima, L. Hurcombe, M. Wright, “Touching the past: haptic augmented reality for museum artefacts:” 6. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 153 AN-ICON  compared to the touching of the printed replica, which if possible is deemed a better alternative. As of today, the technical limitations that most devices used in museums present contribute to a scenario where physical touch, even if of replicas, seems to be fa- vored. The reasons why haptic technology is preferred are not experiential factors; they have to do with practical and managerial concerns, such as the fact that digital replicas do not occupy physical space and that they can be expe- rienced also remotely. It appears that these technologies, if competing on a purely phenomenological level and trying to mirror haptic experiences that occur in reality, are des- tined to have a limited contribution to cultural experiences, being the only alternative yet not a solution which in itself holds value. Other case studies can however add further layers to the use of haptic technologies in museum set- tings, offering opportunities that neither physical statues nor printed replicas could elicit. A research published by the Journal of Electronic Imaging illustrates the case of the vir- tual anastylosis of a Greek sculpture, operated by digitally combining a head and a torso held in two different heritage sites in Sicily.96 The two ancient pieces, one hosted in the Museum of Castello Ursino in Catania and the other in the Archeological Museum of Siracusa, were hypothesized by archeologists to be parts of the same statue due to stylistic features. This theory was, however, never proved as neither of their hosting institutions was willing to dislocate one of the pieces for the necessary analysis to be performed. Through digital imaging and 3D rendering it was however possible to demonstrate the perfect match of the two parts of the statue, creating a new object that was then made accessible through the use of haptic technology – in this case the haptic device 3D Systems Touch – and thanks to the collaboration with the Center for Virtualization and Applied Spatial Technologies, University of South Florida. A 96 F. Stanco et al., “Virtual anastylosis of Greek sculpture as museum policy for public outreach and cognitive accessibility.” VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 154 AN-ICON  dedicated effort was made to ensure that the new technol- ogy would account for people with cognitive and physical disabilities, another potentiality that haptic technologies hold and on which research is being tailored.97 Whilst this case highlights the strategic contribution that modern tech- nologies can provide to both research and fruition, it could be argued that the added value here is given by the fact that this statue could have otherwise never been seen or felt, yet not in a manner which depends, from a specifically phenomenological perspective, on the haptic technology itself. Hence reinforcing the understanding that the main use of these technologies is directed towards reinstating the original – and lost – hard value of touch, not necessarily adding new levels of experience. Another case, involving virtually touching the torso of Michelangelo’s David at Monash University,98 can prove useful to enrich the discussion on the use of haptic technologies in museums. What emerges from this study, which in terms of research methodology mirrors the vast majority of cases in the literature in creating a 3D digital replica and then experiencing it through the Phantom, is that the images reproduced digitally “allow the user to focus on particular details that they may overlook otherwise.”99 What appears here is that the virtual experiential setting creates the opportunity for the user to actually grasp some details of the statue that he would have not been able to experience with either the original or with a 3D printed 97 There are a number of experiments within the field of haptic technologies which focus specifically on accessibility for people with impared cognitive and physical abilities. An interesting research center is the one of the University of Glasgow, which ran two trials in this field, one called Senses in Touch II, and the other MultiVis project. A complete account of the two researches can be found in Brewster, “The impact of haptic ‘touching’ technology on cultural applications:” 279-282. Another interesting research which discusses the potential of haptics for the visually impaired is G. Jansson, M. Bergamasco, A. Frisoli, “A new option for the visually impaired to experience 3D art at museums: manual exploration of virtual copies,” Visual Impairment Research 5, no. 1 (2003): 1-12 https://doi.org/10.1076/vimr.5.1.1.15973. Also cfr. R. Vaz, D. Freitas, A. Coelho, “Blind and visually impaired visitors’ experiences in museums: increasing accessibility through assistive technologies,” The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum 13, no. 2 (June 2020): 57-80, https://doi.org/10.18848/1835-2014/CGP/ v13i02/57-80. 98 M. Butler, P. Neave, “Object appreciation through haptic interaction,” Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (Melbourne: Ascilite, 2008), 133-141. 99 Ibid.: 140. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 155 AN-ICON  replica. The flexibility of digital images, their potential to be modulated, modified and enlarged, appears, in this case, to actually add a further layer to the visitor experience. The higher attention to detail deepens and expands the experience in a manner that is specific of, and exclusive to, digital haptic technologies. Whilst this last example seems to slightly brighten the scenario described, the cases discussed so far account for an employment of haptic technologies which struggles to emancipate itself from a traditional under- standing of touch in cultural experiences. The three cases analyzed, far from providing a comprehensive account of the multitude of programmes that have been carried out across the museum sector in the past years, have how- ever been chosen as they are representative of the main trends found in the literature. Overall, researchers seem to have been focused mainly on trying to bring back an aspect of experience which was lost, and less keen on the advanced possibilities that haptic technologies might hold. With reference to the technological and historical discus- sion presented above, regarding haptic illusions, it does not appear that these seem to be at the center of experimental designs in the museum sector, where the understanding of touch seems to recall more the “hard undeniable evidence” school than the more subtle and rich understanding of the haptic which encompasses its illusory character. This de- pends on a number of reasons, related to both cultural, professional and economic factors. A further fundamental aspect to take into account, when discussing the use of haptic technologies in museums, is in fact the high cost of these devices. The more sophisticated they are, the higher their prices, which makes it difficult for museums to afford them, even harder to update them. Main advancements with haptic technologies are in fact usually in other fields of research with richer funding, such as medicine and engi- neering. This leads to the second limitation, namely that to innovatively experiment with these technologies, technical and diverse professional skills are required. Even though most programmes within museums are run in collaboration VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 156 AN-ICON  with universities and research centers, the degree of com- plexity that pertains to these projects needs a pull of pro- fessionals which is hard to put together and coordinate in the current economic and professional climate. There are, however, a few interesting cases that, at times even without the use of high budgets and elevated skills, seem to leverage on the wider range of possibilities that these technologies offer. Interestingly enough, these also relate to two of the original functions of touch valued in early museums: the aesthetic enrichment of the expe- rience and the emotional potential of haptics. It appears that when haptic technologies are being employed with the aim of enacting and recalling these elements – as opposed to when they try to give back the evidentiary character of touch – the result are more imaginative endeavors, allowing for the creation of a further semantic level of experience. One first interesting case is a very recent ex- periment conducted at University College London, where a student has designed a device which, through the use of capacitive touch sensors, wants to “help us understand what an artist felt at the time they created their work by recreating their sensory experiences.”100 The project idea, which rests on the theoretical background of embodied knowledge as an extension of the mind and of embodied practice as a means to feel the emotions of an artist,101 was inspired by an artwork: The Face of Christ by Claude Mellan, hosted in the UCL Art Museum. By looking closely at the artwork, the author of the project realized that the whole drawing had been made through the design of one single spiraling line, a unique technique. His idea was therefore to design a device which could enable the viewer to create 100 F. Taylor, “Recreating sensory experience: how haptic technology could help us experience art in new ways,” UCL Culture Blog, (July 13, 2020) https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ museums/2020/07/13/recreating-sensory-experience-how-haptic-technology-could-help-us- experience-art-in-new-ways/ on the 31/01/2022, accessed December 11, 2022. 101 When the author discusses embodied knowledge as an extension of the mind the reference is I. Martínková, “Body ecology: avoiding body–mind dualism,” Loisir et Société / Society and Leisure 40, no. 1 (2017): 101-112, https://doi.org/10.1080/07053436.2017.1281 528; whilst when discussing embodied practices as a means to feel emotions of artists the specific reference in the literature is D. Freedberg, V. Gallese, “Motion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 5 (2007): 197-203, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.tics.2007.02.003. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 157 AN-ICON  a contact with the motion that had originated the artwork, building a direct emotional connection with the artist. As the author describes it “through an audio feedback loop, the device I designed takes in touch inputs from a view- er of the artwork and returns a religious-sounding choral soundtrack when the spiral gesture from the engraving is drawn correctly with a finger. The spiral gesture,” he adds, “was directly extracted from The Face of Christ with the help of a custom python script which made use of various image analysis libraries.”102 What can be highlighted in reading about this project, which at this point consist of just a first artisanal prototype, is the way in which haptic technologies are used to explore unusual and often overlooked aspects of artworks. Whilst the potential of these technologies in broadening the field of aesthetic experience is well estab- lished, there are some developments specific to this case worth expanding on. Interestingly enough, the author re- fers specifically to the idea of building a connection with the painter who made The Face of Christ, recuperating the same reasoning that mid eighteenth-century museum goers had when holding a precious object.103 In comparing the attempt to get in touch with the past before and after haptic technologies, moreover, the added value brought by the device seems clear. Whilst in the original case a visitor had to actively exercise the power of imagination in order to build a connection, in this instance the device guides the user into the experience, leveraging on the emotional potential of a multisensory environment which starts from the drawn line, develops into an haptic apparatus and is then sublimated through sound. What emerges with regards to this example, and in contrast with the ones analyzed before, is the way in which the designer of the project has overcome the need to merely attempt to replicate the touch- ing experience, and decided to exploit both the phenom- enological and the imaginative potential of the technology 102 F. Taylor, Recreating sensory experience: How haptic technology could help us experience art in new ways. 103 A detailed account of an emotional and imaginative encounter between a museum goer and an artifact can be found in S.A. La Roche, Sophie in London, 1786: Being the Diary of Sophie Von La Roche, trans. C. Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933): 107-108. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 158 AN-ICON  at his disposal. Further, this has been done in an artisanal and experimental fashion, not through the use of excessive resources and a big team of professionals. Another experimental program worth consid- ering, in this case definitely a more costly and collective endeavor, is an exhibition held at Tate Britain in 2015, Tate Sensorium (Fig. 2).104 The research background behind this project refers to a scientific field which experiments with the power of haptics to elicit emotions. More specifically, these projects study how mid-air haptic technology – a specific subset – is able to condition human emotions (e.g., happy, sad, excited, afraid) through tactile stimulation.105 While the literature in the field of mid haptics is still at a very early experimental stage, and definitive conclusions are yet to be drawn, progress has been made in mapping the correlation between aspects of haptics and emotional states. What was done at Tate was to organize an exhibition which built a fully sensory environment around four paintings: Interior II by Richard Hamilton, Full Stop by John Latham, In the Hold by David Bomberg, and Figure in a Landscape by Francis Bacon. In a detailed article106 presenting a study on the exhibition, the specific experience of Full Stop is analyzed. What the curators did was to position a mid-air haptic device in front of the painting, and synchronize a range of mid-air haptic patterns inside the device with a self-developed software that could read Musical Instru- ment Digital Interface (MIDI) inputs. The design was curated by a sound designer who could control the mid-air haptic patterns (frequency, intensity, and movement paths) to cre- ate a desired experience synched with music. As detailed through the article, this exhibition was the first time that mid-air haptic technology was used in a museum context VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 159 AN-ICON  over a prolonged period of time and integrated with sound to enhance the experience of visual art. This “work demon- strates how novel mid-air technology can make art more emotionally engaging and stimulating, especially abstract art that is often open to interpretation,”107 as it was proved by collecting positive feedback from over 2500 visitors. The aim of the authors, as clearly stated across the research, was to advance understanding of multisensory signals in relation to art, experiences and design, based on novel interactive technologies. Referencing back to the reasons why touch was valued in early museums, this experiment seems to fit in the category which uses haptics to enhance the aesthetic experience of the visitors: anticipating that haptics carry value not only on a purely informative sensory level, but eliciting a wider level of complexity. Conclusions Overall, there seems to be a wide potential for using haptic technologies in museum settings and leverag- ing on the ways in which these devices can contribute to the cultural experience of artifacts. The two final case studies here examined clearly exemplify how haptic technologies can help in generating a new experiential layer, one which rests on a complex phenomenological understanding of the haptics and establishes an active dialogue with the entire sensorium of the experiencer. Both cases show a designed synchronization between the tactile experience and the sense of hearing, suggesting that one of the ways to experiment with the haptic is by interrogating a more en- vironmental and organic understanding of the relationship between the senses. Interestingly, the more complex and enhancing experiences are characterized by stimuli that do not just mimic the act of touching, thus attempting to reinstate the lost chance of touching the artwork, yet play with the illusory potential of haptics and with the other 107 Ibid.: 1. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 160 AN-ICON  qualities of touch valued in early museums: the evocative and imaginistic potential of the haptic experience. The analysis from the museum sector, when linked to the technological and historical accounts regard- ing the link between the haptic and the figure of illusion, suggests the value of exploring the ways in which haptic technologies can emancipate us from a reductive under- standing of touch. Certainly, all museum endeavors and experiments will have to take into account a variety of prac- tical and concrete concerns, which also play an important part in defining the destiny of cultural projects. It is not given that exploring the illusory potential of haptic technologies represents in itself the best choice for a museum research. Yet, it can be concluded that when designed in an open dialogue with our whole sensorium these technologies ap- pear empowered in their visionary potential, making Derri- da’s observation more actual than ever: the nexus between touch and virtuality is as real as it gets. Fig 2. Tate Sensorium exhibition at Tate Britain in 2015, installation shot of Full Stop (1961) by John Latham © John Latham Estate. Photo: Tate. Illustration of a participant experiencing the second painting combining vision, auditory, and haptic. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 161 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/17124

Clothes with no emperors: the materiality of digital fashion by Jane Y. Zhang Digital fashion Materiality Atmosphere Hapticity Aesthetic economy Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Clothes with no emperors: the materiality of digital fashion JANE Y. ZHANG, Harvard University – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7956-2599 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17124 Abstract Digital garments are tailored computationally and dressed virtually. Intended to be displayed rather than worn, digital fashion exemplifies the function of aesthetic commodities as defined by Gernot Böhme: the production of atmospheres – intangible qualities arising from a mate- rial encounter – towards the staging of life. Yet, made from pixels instead of fabric, virtual garments beckon a new conceptual framework for the role of materiality in atmo- spheric productions. Drawing from new media and affect scholars, this essay traces the display of digital garments across three sites: the e-commerce website, social media, and the runway show. By analyzing the visual and literary production surrounding digital fashion, this essay proposes “elemental surface” as a representational technique and rhe- torical strategy through which digital garments produce and intensify the body’s affective presence. Situating Böhme’s formulation of atmosphere in dialogue with the notion of “aura” put forth by Walter Benjamin, the study of digital fashion foregrounds the role of environmental perception in the history of haptic technology. Keywords Digital fashion Materiality Atmosphere Hapticity Aesthetic economy To quote this essay: Y. Zhang, “Clothes with no emperors: the materiality of digital fashion,” AN- ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 162-181, https://doi.org/10.54103/ ai/17124 JANE Y. ZHANG 162 AN-ICON  Introduction Scrolling through an online fashion catalog, you come across a piece of clothing that reminds you of your favorite song: it is bold but not too bold, casual with just the right amount of edge. You add the item to your shop- ping cart. At checkout, you are asked to upload a photo of yourself. So you pose in front of the camera, dressed mini- mally under good lighting. One business day later, instead of arriving in a package in the mail, the garment appears as an email attachment in your inbox, carefully composited onto the photo you have uploaded. Since its inception in 2008,1 digital clothing has quickly gained traction in the fashion industry, giving rise to independent digital fashion houses as well as partnerships with well-established clothing brands. Daria Shapovalo- va, the cofounder of DRESSX, summarizes digital fashion as being “all about how we can replicate the experience of physical clothes in digital.”2 The statement is counter- intuitive at first sight. Made from pixels instead of fabric, digital garments cannot shield our bodies from the bracing winds of winter or the unwanted gaze of another. But if we refrain from taking Shapovalova’s statement at face value, it emerges as a profound commentary on the phenome- nology of clothing and, by extension, the contemporary socioeconomic system upon which the fashion industry operates. For Shapovalova, digital garments are not here to represent but to replicate. But to replicate what? Interesting is the absence of a verb: do digital garments replicate the 1 “Carlings: The First-Ever Digital Clothing Collection,” H.R. Watkins III, https://www. haywoodwatkinsiii.com/digital-clothing-collection, accessed December 7, 2021. In 2018, the Scandinavian retailer Carlings introduced the first digital fashion collection. 2 “Digital Clothing Is the Future of Fashion | Dell Talks with Daria Shapovalova,” Dell, YouTube video, 8:12, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKBePuTOB6U, accessed January 10, 2023. JANE Y. ZHANG 163 AN-ICON  experience of wearing “physical” clothes or that of seeing physical clothes? Made to be shown rather than worn, digital fashion displays the functional liberty characteristic of an aesthetic commodity. The philosopher Gernot Böhme pro- poses that capitalism has entered a new phase: under the “aesthetic economy,”3 the value of commodities extends beyond their physical utility or monetary worth. Aesthetic economics restructures the dichotomy of the “use value” and “exchange value,” triangulating them in service of an independent utility metric: the “stage value.”4 Under this metric, the aesthetic properties of a product no longer exist in addition to its ability to satisfy primary needs, but func- tion towards “the staging, the dressing up and enhance- ment of life.”5 Observing that the outward presentation of commodities is emancipated from their material function,6 Böhme refers to the study of atmospheres as engaging in “poetic phenomenology” – the study of how appearances come to be.7 Böhme’s phenomenological investment in the operation of aesthetic commodities aligns convincingly with Shapovalova’s experiential framing of digital fashion. For Böhme, the stage value of an aesthetic commodity arises from its atmosphere. Understood as the “something more” arising from aesthetic encounters, atmo- spheres are by definition “intangible” and “indeterminant.”8 As elusive as atmospheres are, they can nevertheless be theorized at the sites of their production: aesthetic laborers have long engaged in the skillful manipulation of materiality – the outward appearance of matter – to create and inten- sify the atmospheric presence of aesthetic commodities. 3 G. Böhme, Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism, trans. E. Jephcott (Milan: Mimesis International, 2017): 20. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 G. Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, ed. J.P. Thibaud (Oxon: Routledge, 2017): 144. 7 Ibid.: 33. 8 Ibid.: 29; 30. JANE Y. ZHANG 164 AN-ICON  While “pure aesthetic materials assume we won’t handle or touch them,”9 they nevertheless touch and move us emotionally.10 Bohme’s formulation of atmosphere compli- cates the reading of digital fashion as a testament to the dematerializing effect of the capitalist economy on material relations and social life.11 When all that is solid melts into air, the air becomes charged with affective presence and sensory impressions – it becomes an atmosphere. Given the nonphysical nature of virtual garments, how exactly does digital fashion engage in the production of atmospheres? Scholarships in new media studies and affect theory converge on their emphasis on embodiment as central to the study of aesthetic mediums. Informed by theories of embodied perception stemming from philos- ophers such as Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, new media scholars have challenged the “immaterial” ontology of vir- tual technologies.12 Similarly, affect theorists foreground the porous boundaries between sensory modalities and ges- tures toward the primacy of hapticity in visual encounters.13 Together, these studies provide additional methodological tools to investigate the materiality of virtual garments. This essay traces digital fashion’s atmospheric production across three sites of its exhibition: the e-com- merce website, social media, and the runway show. In the first section, I examine the proliferation of elements – spe- cific forms of materiality such as water – in digital garment designs. Drawing from Giuliana Bruno’s work, I introduce the concept of “elemental surface” as a representation- al technique utilized by virtual garments to enhance their 9 Ibid.: 146. 10 Ibid.: 97. 11 G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. D. Frisby (London - New York: Routledge, 2004): 150. 12 B. Brown, “Materiality,” in W.J.T. Mitchell, M.B.N. Hansen, eds., Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago - London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010): 49-63; W. Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2015). 13 E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). JANE Y. ZHANG 165 AN-ICON  environmental presence. In the second section, I explore how the digital imposition of virtual garments alters the background-foreground relationship of existing photo- graphs, from which the elemental surface emerges as an index for the sensation of vitality and liveliness. The opera- tion of hapticity and vitality collides in the third section. By analyzing digital garments as they appear in an animated advertisement, I contend that elemental surface mobilizes contemporary anxieties surrounding the “natural” environ- ment in service of its construction of an affective milieu. In the seminal essay, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” Walter Benjamin attributes the demise of aura to the rise of technologies of reproduction, such as photography and film.14 Made available for mass distribution and consumption, the artwork is cut off from the ritualistic contexts of its exhibition and dispossessed of its unique presence. Benjamin’s prophetic insight into the elevated importance of an artwork’s public presentability directly anticipates the domination of “staging value” man- dated by aesthetic capitalism. Yet, for Böhme, the mass circulation of aesthetic productions is accompanied by the manipulation and intensification of their presence rather than their depreciation and demise. How might we ap- proach this generative tension? Digital fashion, by demon- strating the logic and operation of stage value to its extreme, is a good place to begin. The web interface: atmosphere and hapticity Digital fashion design is not contingent upon the market availability of raw materials, nor is it constrained by the physical attributes of specific fabrics. With the recent 14 W. Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” trans. H. Zohn, in H. Arendt, ed., Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): 217-251. JANE Y. ZHANG 166 AN-ICON  integration of Adobe Substance to CLO Virtual Fashion,15 designers can manipulate the material properties of existing virtual fabric available in online databases, or create a virtual surface entirely from scratch. Roei Derhi, a Berlin-based digital fashion designer, describes the fabric selection for digital garments as “limitless.”16 Despite the wide range of fabric selections made possible by digital simulation software, digital fash- ion designers have demonstrated a particular affinity to the elemental. The classical Greek elements – earth, water, fire, air – have been cited as the inspiration for a great number of digital fashion collections, such as that of James Mack and 2WB.17 Simply entering the keyword “water” yields over 200 searches among the 2000 articles of clothing in the DRESSX database, with results ranging from digital tops, dresses, and earrings.18 Elements, according to the media scholar Nicole Starosielski, are “defined by their roles in composition.”19 Understanding elements as constitut- ing parts extends their scope to encompass other specific forms of materiality, such as electricity, botanics, and metal – images similarly popular for digital fashion designers. Given that the elemental orientation of digital garments does not correspond to trends in the physical fashion industry, its medium specificity serves as a generative avenue to begin our inquiry into the materiality of digital fashion. “Neon Pillow” (Fig. 1) is a garment designed by May Ka. Consisting of a padded jacket worn over a 15 “CLO Virtual Fashion Welcomes Substance by Adobe, Jeanologia, and ColorDigital Integrations to CLO 6.0,” Businesswire (November 11, 2020), https://www.businesswire.com/ news/home/20201111005772/en/CLO-Virtual-Fashion-Welcomes-Substance-by-Adobe- Jeanologia-and-ColorDigital-Integrations-to-CLO-6.0, accessed January 10, 2023. 16 R. Derhi. Interviewed by the author. November 2021. 17 “James Mack: TERRA MOTUS,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/products/james-mack- terra-motus?_pos=1&_sid=2fb6573d9&_ss=r, accessed December 10, 2022; “2WB Artemis,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/products/2wb-003?_pos=6&_sid=ca632080c&_ss=r, accessed December 10, 2022. 18 “DRESSX search for ‘water’,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/search?q=water, accessed January 15, 2022. 19 N. Starosielski, “The elements of media studies,” Media+Environment 1, no. 1 (2019) https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.10780. JANE Y. ZHANG 167 AN-ICON  knee-length dress, the garment is rendered in a single hue of sea glass blue. Its pliable, creased underlayer contrasts texturally with the smooth voluminous shoulder panels. Yet, the airy silhouette is softened by the drapery’s crinkled tips and deflated hemlines. A thin sheet of puffer insulator folds into a skirt with a simple side slit. The fabric combines the plasticity of polyester with the reflective glare of satin. Not only does the digital textile resemble existing fabric, the specific details of its seams and patchwork are also me- ticulously rendered. Fig. 1. The Neon Pillow, May Ka, https://dressx.com/collections/may-ka/products/ total-neon-pillow, accessed January 15, 2022. Prior to the popularization of digital garments, the fashion industry has already become increasingly de- pendent on haptic technologies – “computational systems and applications aiming to artificially reproduce the sense of touch.”20 With the rise of online fashion retailing, clothes were made available for purchase on e-commerce websites 20 L. Cantoni, M. Ornati, “Fashiontouch in e-commerce: an exploratory study of surface haptic interaction experiences,” in F.H. Nah, K. Siau, eds., HCI in Business, Government and Organizations, vol. 12204 (Cham: Springer, 2020): 493-503, 494 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3- 030-50341-3_37. JANE Y. ZHANG 168 AN-ICON  and social media; the physical constraints placed by the COVID-19 epidemic lockdowns further encouraged fashion stores to migrate to online platforms.21 While devices such as the touch screen and the mouse enabled the simula- tion of physical touch, the two-dimensional affordances of mobile and laptop screens generated the need to simulate tactility through visualization technologies. “You can wear fire, you can wear lightning, those things are done with the same sense of fashion – what kind of fire? Wings or glitter?” asks Derhi,22 gesturing to the importance of textural details in the rendering of digital garments. The “limitless” potential of fabric selection does not translate to their freedom from perceptual constraints. In addition to the employment of visualization technologies, digital fashion designers have turned to repre- sentational and narrative techniques to enhance the haptic- ity of digital garments. Freed from the need to resemble ex- isting fabric yet striving to visually simulate tactile surfaces, digital garments self-knowingly plunge into the elemental. On the website of DRESSX, the first and biggest retailer of digital fashion clothing, each garment is accompanied by a designer’s statement. May Ka’s description of her design reads as follows: This bubble put May Ka to sleep. She felt her feet were going to- wards something new, but her footsteps were inaudible. Falling into the deep water. Will she be able to breathe? The water is not transparent, but she have never seen so clear until now [sic].23 Ka describes the inspiration behind her piece as the pillow that accompanies her to sleep, whereupon the act of dreaming resembles “falling into deep water.” When viewed 21 Ibid. 22 R. Derhi, Interviewed by the author. November 2021. 23 “Ma Ka: Abstract Rose,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/products/abstract-rose?_pos=57&_ sid=ac38fecdf&_ss=r, accessed January 10, 2021. JANE Y. ZHANG 169 AN-ICON  with the imagery of water in mind, the materiality of the digital garment takes on a new dimension. The reflective fabric evokes the placid surface of a lake on a sunny day. The softness of the underlayer now takes on the fluidity characteristic of liquid as a state of matter. The sagging form of the drapery gestures towards the downward haul of gravity as one sinks into the water, just as the airy silhouette connotes a state of buoyan- cy–an opposing movement that casts the body in a state of suspension. As an existing substance, water brings to mind a particular combination of physical attributes. When Ka evokes the element of water to describe the experience of wearing the dress, specific visual details of the garment converse with each other, take on additional meaning, and cohere into a tangible surface. After all, what can evoke material presence better than the constituting units of matter itself? The technology of clothes simulation has centered around the visualization of “surfaces,” a word that permeates the field of textile engineering.24 Rather than describing the ma- teriality of digital fashion as made up of elemental images, it is more suitable to understand its composition as an “elemental surface.” The phrase might appear oxymoronic at first sight. Whereas elements are by nature fundamental and deep-seated, “surface” are merely skin-deep. The media scholar Giuliana Bru- no challenges dismissive readings of surface as ornamental and superficial, turning instead to surface as a generative conceptu- al framework to engage with the materiality of images: “Surface matters in the fabrics of the visual, for it is on the surface that textures come alive and the ‘feel’ of an aesthetic encounter can develop.”25 The phrase “‘feel’ of aesthetic encounter” dovetails with Böhme’s formulation of atmosphere as the defining charac- teristic of aesthetic production. It is at the interface of surfaces that the atmosphere becomes sensible. Viewed in this light, 24 P. Volino, N. Magnenat-Thalmann, Virtual Clothing: Theory and Practice (Cham: Springer, 2000). 25 G. Bruno, “Surface encounters: materiality and empathy,” in D. Martin, ed., Mirror-Touch Synesthesia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017): 107-125, 118. JANE Y. ZHANG 170 AN-ICON  the invocation of elements emerges as a representational – or, in Böhme’s words, “presentational” technique through which virtual garments mobilize our prior conceptions of matter to generate a greater sense of environmental presence. To attend to surfaces is to engage with media as environments. In her study of early Chinese cinema, the me- dia scholar Bao Weihong describes affect as the “platform/ interface of experience produced by media technology and media aesthetic in interaction with the perceptual subjects.”26 In this sense, affect does not designate any singular medium or sensory modality, but instead constitute a condition of me- diation that envelops individuals and machines and redraws their intimate boundaries. In Ka’s description, water envelops the dreamer just as the digital garment encloses the wearer. Water becomes an intermediary substance through which the dreamer confronts her “fears and anxieties” and sees the world with heightened lucidity. Surfaces “hold affect in its fabric” and enable “the passage of empathy,” writes Bruno.27 When beckoned to interact with the body and its surroundings, the environmentalizing tendency of the elemental surface is further dramatized. In the next section, I situate Ka’s garment in the context of its intended function: to be worn and displayed by the human body. The DF image: atmosphere and vitality Digital garments are sold digitally and dressed digitally. To wear a digital garment is to superimpose its form onto an existing photograph with the help of graphic engineer- ing technologies. This procedure is accomplished through the use of “collision detection,”28 a computation technique that simulates the points of contact between the virtual fabric and 26 W. Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945: 12. 27 G. Bruno, “Surface tension, screen space,” in S. Saether, S. Bull, eds., Screen Space Reconfigured, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 35-55, 28. 28 P. Volino, N. Magnenat-Thalmann, Virtual Clothing: 6. JANE Y. ZHANG 171 AN-ICON  the surrounding objects. Despite having little effect on the ap- pearance of the virtual garment as an independent entity, the importance of collision detection becomes readily apparent when we examine the entirety of the digital fashion image (here- on referred to as the DF image). In Fig. 2, shadows enable a dialogue between the wearer’s body and the virtual garment. The bottom rim of the dress projects its silhouette on the thighs of its wearer, assert- ing itself as a material surface that receives the light in place of the wearer’s skin. Shadows project an entity’s image upon a foreign surface. By insisting on its ability to rechannel the light, the dress appears under the same sunlight as the body. In the lower right corner of the image, the shape of the body’s shad- ow takes on the silhouette of the garment. Not only does the garment envelope the wearer, it environmentalizes the body to converse with the soft, chilly grass on a winter morning. Fig. 2. The Neon Pillow purchased from DRESSX, Cambridge, December 2022 (photographed by the author). January 15, 2022. JANE Y. ZHANG 172 AN-ICON  The digital reflects light just as it displaces light. Under the piercing sun, the dress’ monochromatic surface takes on a new life. No longer enveloped by solid hues of gen- tle blue, the garment now radiates in a purple glow marked by overexposed highlights. Hints of green make their way to the outer edges of the garment, gradually intensifying as they approach the lawn and foliage in the background. Through the skillful manipulation of shadows and reflection, the DF image is no longer a replica of the original photograph with the addition of the digital garment. Rather, it strives toward the overarching reality of the index- ical and causally affirms the existence of the constellation it depicts. Given that the staging of the digital garment implicates the entire photographic image, digital fashion’s concern with visual congruency manifests prior to the cre- ation of the DF image. Clicking into the tab “How to Wear” on the DRESSX website, an alternative title immediately appears: “Choose the right picture: recommendation for receiving the best photo looks.” The requirements for the photo fall under four groups: natural light, fitted clothes, high quality (photograph), and uncovered parts. While the expectation for compact clothing pertains to the appear- ance of the body, the demand for natural lighting concerns the environmental setup.29 In an earlier version of the web- page, the list also asked the buyer to locate themselves relatively close to the camera to ensure “less background.”30 Digital fashion demands from the wearer not only a body but a context, where the physical environment becomes an integral part of the process of “wearing” the clothes. Clothing is external to the body yet an exten- sion of the body. It is at once the interface upon which the body and the external world come into contact, but also 29 “How to wear DRESSX and digital fashion,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/pages/help, accessed January 15, 2021. 30 Ibid. JANE Y. ZHANG 173 AN-ICON  the veil that separates the body from its immediate sur- rounding. This dynamic is perfectly captured by Emanuele Coccia, “[The dress] does not act directly upon our own anatomical body or the media that surround it, but rather it incorporates extraneous fragments of the world, foreign bodies through which our self is made to appear.”31 Al- exander Knight, a London-based digital fashion designer, affirms this statement through his description of pockets: It brings me joy to see something crazy and then see the details. Like when you see a Versace evening gown with a pocket, and the model walking down the runway with their hands in the pocket. I guess it gives it life. Digital garments can have a cold, static, and unlivable quality to them. Giving it these details gives it life.32 Knight does not employ the rhetoric of realism, describing the ideal of digital garments instead as a state of aliveness. Serving as a container for not only the body but also parts of an external world, the pocket signifies a garment’s potential to enter into relationships with others. Having a pocket allows digital garments to make a promise of everyday companionship: the wearer’s hand, keys and wallet, a bus ticket, a crumpled piece of candy wrapper. In doing so, pockets endow the garment with “life.” To sim- ulate the experience of wearing physical clothes entails more than appearing unedited; it demands no less than to situate garments alongside the living so that they in turn take on a life of their own. Read this way, the DF image reaches beyond the synthetic towards the additive. The color of the gar- ment is more vibrant than the skin of the wearer, and its form more dynamic than the posture of the body it adorns. The difference in luminosity and animacy is not only one of 31 E. Coccia, Sensible Life: A Micro-Ontology of the Image, trans. S.A. Stuart (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016): 28. 32 A. Knight. Interviewed by the author. November 2021. JANE Y. ZHANG 174 AN-ICON  quantity but quality: the resolution of the dress is decidedly higher than that of the original photo. The virtual garment creates a unique region of clarity, ushering forth a sense of saliency impossible to be captured by a digital camera from the same distance away. The elemental surface steps forward in an outward radiance, endowing an otherworldly vitality to the concrete and ordinary. The seamless photo- graphic overlay creates an image of pictorial rupture – not from a sense of visual incongruity but, quite to the contrary, the hypersensitivity between the figure and ground. Similar to the pocket, the digital garment’s ability to respond to the body and the environment not only serves to conjure a realistic image, but one that feels convincingly and dra- matically alive. The language of life and liveliness permeates Böhme’s theorization surrounding aesthetic commodities. Describing the perceptual effect of atmospheres, Böhme writes, “the establishment of a world of images on the sur- face of reality, or even independently of it, may well serve the intensification of life.”33 The function of aesthetic com- modities is “made of their attractiveness, their glow, their atmosphere: they themselves contribute to the staging, the dressing up, and the enhancement of life.”34 The perceptual pattern and affective construction of digital garments relo- cate Böhme’s invocation of “life” from the general condition of living to the immediate sensation of vitality. The elemen- tal surface of digital fashion is not only elemental because it evokes hapticity through the portrayal of specific forms of materiality, but also because it endows a fundamental feeling of liveliness to the body it claims to envelop. The reciprocity between hapticity and vitality has been evoked by Bruno when she describes the sur- face as the site in which “textures come alive.”35 In the 33 G. Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres: 199. 34 G. Böhme, Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism: 21. 35 G. Bruno, “Surface encounters: materiality and empathy:” 118. JANE Y. ZHANG 175 AN-ICON  next section, I examine digital garments as they appear in a virtual runway animation in order to further excavate the mode of embodiment enacted by the elemental surface of digital fashion. The virtual runway: atmosphere and embodiment A silver parka comes to life within the first three seconds. An orange thread slithers into the right-hand sleeve, followed by the contraction of the backside pad- ding. As the full parka comes into view, additional strands fly into the frame, endowing form to an otherwise slackened figure. With its arms outstretched, the parka inhales for the first time with the simultaneous compression of its seam lines – rapidly yet unfalteringly assembled almost as if by its own will. A single decisive zip renders the garment upright, and a hood pops into place. The resurrection is complete. Such was the opening sequence to a commer- cial on digital fashion.36 The creative team, not so subtly named “ITSALIVE,” offers us a glimpse into the worldbuild- ing of industry. As the virtual garment appears increasingly alive, the body and its surroundings take on an inert and lifeless quality. This perceptual pattern, already evident in the DF image, is further dramatized by the advertisements and runway shows released by the digital fashion industry. As the animation progresses, flame emanates from the parka just as the music picks up, unleashing dy- namic dashes of green and silver light that illuminates the dark background. Just as the parka begins to dance, a satin jumpsuit walks up to the parka and unveils its head mask. A moment of revelation follows: there was nothing 36 “Digital Clothes Production | Virtual Wear Development | Digital Fashion,” ITSALIVE, YouTube video, 0:58, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDAsRGOqx0o, accessed January 10, 2023. JANE Y. ZHANG 176 AN-ICON  underneath. What we had assumed to be a mannequin has been a hollow void all along. In a sense, physical runway shows have be- come “digital” decades before the rise of digital fashion. With the rise of Instagram and other forms of digital media platforms, the clothing commodity is staged with its after- life as a photograph or short video in mind.37 One of the most notable impacts on fashion photography, as noted by Silvano Mendes, was the elevated importance of runway scenography. A runway show constitutes an intermedial event, and its success depends on the close collaboration between fashion designers, stage designers, architects, and photographers.38 On the other hand, just as digital garments are made from pixels rather than textiles, digital fashion shows prefer computer animation over live-action footage. Rather than employing specific staging technol- ogies such as fog machines or lighting equipment, digital fashion commercials employ 3D animation to portray the product, its wearer, and the surrounding. In doing so, the aforementioned revelation becomes especially jolting and unsettling, as the body’s absence renders it virtually indis- tinguishable from the background. For the philosopher Hans Jonas, the human embodiment is characterized by the simultaneous expe- rience of the body as a subject for self-invention and an object for self-scrutiny.39 While the dynamic interplay be- tween this dual perspective has enacted highly divergent modes of embodiment across temporal and cultural ge- ographies, inherent to the human experience is this gen- erative tension between the first- and third-person per- spective. Joanne Entwistle, drawing from Merleau-Ponty’s 37 S. Mendes, “The instagrammability of the runway: architecture, scenography, and the spatial turn in fashion communications,” Fashion Theory 25, no. 3 (2019): 311-338, https://doi. org/10.1080/1362704X.2019.1629758. 38 Ibid. 39 H. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: A Delta Book, 1966): 186-187. JANE Y. ZHANG 177 AN-ICON  phenomenological approach to embodiment, explores how this dual perspective of the body is evidenced and enacted by the act of dressing: “the experience of dress is a sub- jective act of attending to one’s body and making the body an object of consciousness and is also an act of attention with the body.”40 The existence of clothing, especially in its ornamental context, is not only a product of but the active site upon which the body functions, according to Berna- dette Wegenstein, as the “medium for experience itself.”41 Digital garments relocate the site of our dual perception from the body to its representation by the digital image –already when the body has become an object of its own perception, whether in a mental image of ourselves posing in front of the camera, or in the photomontage pre- pared for social media. “Contemporary technoscience is in a unique position to exploit this phenomenological con- vergence of first- and third-person perspectives,” writes Wegenstein.42 The word “exploit”– connoting the intentional instrumentalization and manipulation of fashion – precise- ly gets at the power of digital fashion: the digital garment separates and redistributes the dual perspectives along a temporal axis – our attention with our body is fated to precede our attunement to our body. And so, we watch the two headless figures dance to their own rhythm. When the jacket slips off from the satin jumpsuit, light directly passes through the regions uncovered by the garment, leaving a disembodied arm that nevertheless propels the dancer into the air. As the body fades into the dark space of projection, what remains is the outward radiance of the elemental surface. Our frisson of unease is reframed as an experience of wonder and 40 J. Entwistle, The Fashioned Body (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015): 118. 41 B. Wegenstein, M.B.N. Hansen, “Body,” in W.J.T. Mitchell, M.B.N. Hansen, eds., Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010): 21. 42 Ibid. JANE Y. ZHANG 178 AN-ICON  enchantment by the closing message: “We are the future. Wear the future.”43 Characterized by seasonal change and stylistic variation, the fashion industry actively mobilizes future-ori- ented rhetoric. Yet, digital fashion offers a specific image of the future. In the final acts of the animation, the satin jumpsuit leaps and twirls amidst the fleeting background: the sunrise over a desert, snow-capped mountains, a blos- soming flower, great waves of the ocean, thunder, clouds, the atmosphere of the earth seen from space. Marketing products made of code instead of cotton, the digital fash- ion industry brands itself as a sustainable solution to the perils of climate catastrophe. Rather than interrogating the patterns of consumption that underlie over-extraction and waste, the digital fashion industry consistently evokes im- ages of nature in celebration of the triumph of life. “The eternity of art becomes a metaphor for the eternity of the soul, the vitality of trees and flowers become a metonymy of the vitality of the body…”44 Umberto Eco’s description of sculptural replicas in California graveyards possesses strange resonances with the internal logic of digital fashion. Referring back to Starosielski’s definition, elements are specific materialities that constitute our eco- logical conditions. In the animation, it was precisely a flame emanating from the parka that transformed the background from an empty cosmos to a colorful creation myth. The sense of vitality afforded by the hapticity of the elemental surface is tasked to mediate the premonition of future ca- tastrophe and to offer a promise of humanity’s continuous livelihood. Asserting that the aura of “historical objects” may be illustrated “with reference to the aura of natural 43 “Digital Clothes Production | Virtual Wear Development | Digital Fashion,” ITSALIVE, 2022, YouTube video, 0:58, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDAsRGOqx0o, accessed January 10, 2023. 44 U. Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. W. Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt, 1986): 96. JANE Y. ZHANG 179 AN-ICON  ones,”45 Benjamin depicts a meditative encounter with na- ture: If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.46 Comparing the view of the distant mountain offered by Benjamin with the virtual projection of the land- scape in the digital fashion concept video, digital garments indeed appear to testify to the demise of aura in our age of digital reproduction. And yet, digital fashion is similarly invested in the interplay between the natural and affective environment. To situate the phenomenal structure of “at- mosphere” in dialogue with that of “aura” is to foreground the primacy of environmental perception in the history of technological mediation. By expanding the constitution of media from communicative forms to ecological conditions, elemental surfaces provide an analytic framework for eco- critique beyond the study of “nature,” focusing instead on the perceptual patterns and representational techniques through which physical and affective environments are felt, performed, and lived. Coda We are familiar with the fairy tale of an emperor without clothes; now it seems as though our clothes have lost their emperors. “What we need is the digital body to be for people to wear our clothing,”47 says Kerry Murphy, the 45 W. Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction:” 5. 46 Ibid. 47 “FASHION MADE: The Future of Digital Fashion with Kerry Murphy, The Fabricant,” Product Innovation, YouTube video, 38:2, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Up8B9WUoKg4, accessed January 10, 2023. JANE Y. ZHANG 180 AN-ICON  founder of the pioneering digital fashion brand Fabricant. For Murphy, as for many others in the industry, the current coupling of digital garments and physical bodies is only a transitory phase in the field’s progression toward complete virtuality. Before that day comes, holding our love and fear in its fabric, preserving the contours of our hollow form, the digital garment dances in a world without us. As new materialisms have argued for the inher- ent vitality vested in all matter, Mel Y. Chen reminds us that animacy is political–the assignment of liveliness to bodies is viscerally bound to the technologies and discourse of biopower.48 In the same way, as media scholars have in- creasingly expanded the notion of hapticity beyond phys- ical tactility, our experience of materiality is nevertheless structured by nonneutral social relations. What is endowed with the vitality to “touch us emotionally,”49 and whose life gets to be touched, staged, and enhanced? The elemental surface of digital garments reminds us that the questions of vitality and hapticity are tightly intertwined and invites us to interrogate their intersecting histories. More concretely, elemental surfaces beckon us to approach the history of elements—from its classical inception to its post-classical legacy—with an eye towards the sensationalization and environmentalization of life. It is from this vantage point that digital fashion’s danger emerges alongside its allure, and our critical intervention emerges alongside constructive possibilities. 48 M.Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 49 Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres: 97. JANE Y. ZHANG 181 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/17124

Clothes with no emperors: the materiality of digital fashion by Jane Y. Zhang Digital fashion Materiality Atmosphere Hapticity Aesthetic economy Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Clothes with no emperors: the materiality of digital fashion JANE Y. ZHANG, Harvard University – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7956-2599 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17124 Abstract Digital garments are tailored computationally and dressed virtually. Intended to be displayed rather than worn, digital fashion exemplifies the function of aesthetic commodities as defined by Gernot Böhme: the production of atmospheres – intangible qualities arising from a mate- rial encounter – towards the staging of life. Yet, made from pixels instead of fabric, virtual garments beckon a new conceptual framework for the role of materiality in atmo- spheric productions. Drawing from new media and affect scholars, this essay traces the display of digital garments across three sites: the e-commerce website, social media, and the runway show. By analyzing the visual and literary production surrounding digital fashion, this essay proposes “elemental surface” as a representational technique and rhe- torical strategy through which digital garments produce and intensify the body’s affective presence. Situating Böhme’s formulation of atmosphere in dialogue with the notion of “aura” put forth by Walter Benjamin, the study of digital fashion foregrounds the role of environmental perception in the history of haptic technology. Keywords Digital fashion Materiality Atmosphere Hapticity Aesthetic economy To quote this essay: Y. Zhang, “Clothes with no emperors: the materiality of digital fashion,” AN- ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 162-181, https://doi.org/10.54103/ ai/17124 JANE Y. ZHANG 162 AN-ICON  Introduction Scrolling through an online fashion catalog, you come across a piece of clothing that reminds you of your favorite song: it is bold but not too bold, casual with just the right amount of edge. You add the item to your shop- ping cart. At checkout, you are asked to upload a photo of yourself. So you pose in front of the camera, dressed mini- mally under good lighting. One business day later, instead of arriving in a package in the mail, the garment appears as an email attachment in your inbox, carefully composited onto the photo you have uploaded. Since its inception in 2008,1 digital clothing has quickly gained traction in the fashion industry, giving rise to independent digital fashion houses as well as partnerships with well-established clothing brands. Daria Shapovalo- va, the cofounder of DRESSX, summarizes digital fashion as being “all about how we can replicate the experience of physical clothes in digital.”2 The statement is counter- intuitive at first sight. Made from pixels instead of fabric, digital garments cannot shield our bodies from the bracing winds of winter or the unwanted gaze of another. But if we refrain from taking Shapovalova’s statement at face value, it emerges as a profound commentary on the phenome- nology of clothing and, by extension, the contemporary socioeconomic system upon which the fashion industry operates. For Shapovalova, digital garments are not here to represent but to replicate. But to replicate what? Interesting is the absence of a verb: do digital garments replicate the 1 “Carlings: The First-Ever Digital Clothing Collection,” H.R. Watkins III, https://www. haywoodwatkinsiii.com/digital-clothing-collection, accessed December 7, 2021. In 2018, the Scandinavian retailer Carlings introduced the first digital fashion collection. 2 “Digital Clothing Is the Future of Fashion | Dell Talks with Daria Shapovalova,” Dell, YouTube video, 8:12, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKBePuTOB6U, accessed January 10, 2023. JANE Y. ZHANG 163 AN-ICON  experience of wearing “physical” clothes or that of seeing physical clothes? Made to be shown rather than worn, digital fashion displays the functional liberty characteristic of an aesthetic commodity. The philosopher Gernot Böhme pro- poses that capitalism has entered a new phase: under the “aesthetic economy,”3 the value of commodities extends beyond their physical utility or monetary worth. Aesthetic economics restructures the dichotomy of the “use value” and “exchange value,” triangulating them in service of an independent utility metric: the “stage value.”4 Under this metric, the aesthetic properties of a product no longer exist in addition to its ability to satisfy primary needs, but func- tion towards “the staging, the dressing up and enhance- ment of life.”5 Observing that the outward presentation of commodities is emancipated from their material function,6 Böhme refers to the study of atmospheres as engaging in “poetic phenomenology” – the study of how appearances come to be.7 Böhme’s phenomenological investment in the operation of aesthetic commodities aligns convincingly with Shapovalova’s experiential framing of digital fashion. For Böhme, the stage value of an aesthetic commodity arises from its atmosphere. Understood as the “something more” arising from aesthetic encounters, atmo- spheres are by definition “intangible” and “indeterminant.”8 As elusive as atmospheres are, they can nevertheless be theorized at the sites of their production: aesthetic laborers have long engaged in the skillful manipulation of materiality – the outward appearance of matter – to create and inten- sify the atmospheric presence of aesthetic commodities. 3 G. Böhme, Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism, trans. E. Jephcott (Milan: Mimesis International, 2017): 20. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 G. Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, ed. J.P. Thibaud (Oxon: Routledge, 2017): 144. 7 Ibid.: 33. 8 Ibid.: 29; 30. JANE Y. ZHANG 164 AN-ICON  While “pure aesthetic materials assume we won’t handle or touch them,”9 they nevertheless touch and move us emotionally.10 Bohme’s formulation of atmosphere compli- cates the reading of digital fashion as a testament to the dematerializing effect of the capitalist economy on material relations and social life.11 When all that is solid melts into air, the air becomes charged with affective presence and sensory impressions – it becomes an atmosphere. Given the nonphysical nature of virtual garments, how exactly does digital fashion engage in the production of atmospheres? Scholarships in new media studies and affect theory converge on their emphasis on embodiment as central to the study of aesthetic mediums. Informed by theories of embodied perception stemming from philos- ophers such as Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, new media scholars have challenged the “immaterial” ontology of vir- tual technologies.12 Similarly, affect theorists foreground the porous boundaries between sensory modalities and ges- tures toward the primacy of hapticity in visual encounters.13 Together, these studies provide additional methodological tools to investigate the materiality of virtual garments. This essay traces digital fashion’s atmospheric production across three sites of its exhibition: the e-com- merce website, social media, and the runway show. In the first section, I examine the proliferation of elements – spe- cific forms of materiality such as water – in digital garment designs. Drawing from Giuliana Bruno’s work, I introduce the concept of “elemental surface” as a representation- al technique utilized by virtual garments to enhance their 9 Ibid.: 146. 10 Ibid.: 97. 11 G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. D. Frisby (London - New York: Routledge, 2004): 150. 12 B. Brown, “Materiality,” in W.J.T. Mitchell, M.B.N. Hansen, eds., Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago - London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010): 49-63; W. Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2015). 13 E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). JANE Y. ZHANG 165 AN-ICON  environmental presence. In the second section, I explore how the digital imposition of virtual garments alters the background-foreground relationship of existing photo- graphs, from which the elemental surface emerges as an index for the sensation of vitality and liveliness. The opera- tion of hapticity and vitality collides in the third section. By analyzing digital garments as they appear in an animated advertisement, I contend that elemental surface mobilizes contemporary anxieties surrounding the “natural” environ- ment in service of its construction of an affective milieu. In the seminal essay, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” Walter Benjamin attributes the demise of aura to the rise of technologies of reproduction, such as photography and film.14 Made available for mass distribution and consumption, the artwork is cut off from the ritualistic contexts of its exhibition and dispossessed of its unique presence. Benjamin’s prophetic insight into the elevated importance of an artwork’s public presentability directly anticipates the domination of “staging value” man- dated by aesthetic capitalism. Yet, for Böhme, the mass circulation of aesthetic productions is accompanied by the manipulation and intensification of their presence rather than their depreciation and demise. How might we ap- proach this generative tension? Digital fashion, by demon- strating the logic and operation of stage value to its extreme, is a good place to begin. The web interface: atmosphere and hapticity Digital fashion design is not contingent upon the market availability of raw materials, nor is it constrained by the physical attributes of specific fabrics. With the recent 14 W. Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” trans. H. Zohn, in H. Arendt, ed., Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): 217-251. JANE Y. ZHANG 166 AN-ICON  integration of Adobe Substance to CLO Virtual Fashion,15 designers can manipulate the material properties of existing virtual fabric available in online databases, or create a virtual surface entirely from scratch. Roei Derhi, a Berlin-based digital fashion designer, describes the fabric selection for digital garments as “limitless.”16 Despite the wide range of fabric selections made possible by digital simulation software, digital fash- ion designers have demonstrated a particular affinity to the elemental. The classical Greek elements – earth, water, fire, air – have been cited as the inspiration for a great number of digital fashion collections, such as that of James Mack and 2WB.17 Simply entering the keyword “water” yields over 200 searches among the 2000 articles of clothing in the DRESSX database, with results ranging from digital tops, dresses, and earrings.18 Elements, according to the media scholar Nicole Starosielski, are “defined by their roles in composition.”19 Understanding elements as constitut- ing parts extends their scope to encompass other specific forms of materiality, such as electricity, botanics, and metal – images similarly popular for digital fashion designers. Given that the elemental orientation of digital garments does not correspond to trends in the physical fashion industry, its medium specificity serves as a generative avenue to begin our inquiry into the materiality of digital fashion. “Neon Pillow” (Fig. 1) is a garment designed by May Ka. Consisting of a padded jacket worn over a 15 “CLO Virtual Fashion Welcomes Substance by Adobe, Jeanologia, and ColorDigital Integrations to CLO 6.0,” Businesswire (November 11, 2020), https://www.businesswire.com/ news/home/20201111005772/en/CLO-Virtual-Fashion-Welcomes-Substance-by-Adobe- Jeanologia-and-ColorDigital-Integrations-to-CLO-6.0, accessed January 10, 2023. 16 R. Derhi. Interviewed by the author. November 2021. 17 “James Mack: TERRA MOTUS,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/products/james-mack- terra-motus?_pos=1&_sid=2fb6573d9&_ss=r, accessed December 10, 2022; “2WB Artemis,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/products/2wb-003?_pos=6&_sid=ca632080c&_ss=r, accessed December 10, 2022. 18 “DRESSX search for ‘water’,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/search?q=water, accessed January 15, 2022. 19 N. Starosielski, “The elements of media studies,” Media+Environment 1, no. 1 (2019) https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.10780. JANE Y. ZHANG 167 AN-ICON  knee-length dress, the garment is rendered in a single hue of sea glass blue. Its pliable, creased underlayer contrasts texturally with the smooth voluminous shoulder panels. Yet, the airy silhouette is softened by the drapery’s crinkled tips and deflated hemlines. A thin sheet of puffer insulator folds into a skirt with a simple side slit. The fabric combines the plasticity of polyester with the reflective glare of satin. Not only does the digital textile resemble existing fabric, the specific details of its seams and patchwork are also me- ticulously rendered. Fig. 1. The Neon Pillow, May Ka, https://dressx.com/collections/may-ka/products/ total-neon-pillow, accessed January 15, 2022. Prior to the popularization of digital garments, the fashion industry has already become increasingly de- pendent on haptic technologies – “computational systems and applications aiming to artificially reproduce the sense of touch.”20 With the rise of online fashion retailing, clothes were made available for purchase on e-commerce websites 20 L. Cantoni, M. Ornati, “Fashiontouch in e-commerce: an exploratory study of surface haptic interaction experiences,” in F.H. Nah, K. Siau, eds., HCI in Business, Government and Organizations, vol. 12204 (Cham: Springer, 2020): 493-503, 494 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3- 030-50341-3_37. JANE Y. ZHANG 168 AN-ICON  and social media; the physical constraints placed by the COVID-19 epidemic lockdowns further encouraged fashion stores to migrate to online platforms.21 While devices such as the touch screen and the mouse enabled the simula- tion of physical touch, the two-dimensional affordances of mobile and laptop screens generated the need to simulate tactility through visualization technologies. “You can wear fire, you can wear lightning, those things are done with the same sense of fashion – what kind of fire? Wings or glitter?” asks Derhi,22 gesturing to the importance of textural details in the rendering of digital garments. The “limitless” potential of fabric selection does not translate to their freedom from perceptual constraints. In addition to the employment of visualization technologies, digital fashion designers have turned to repre- sentational and narrative techniques to enhance the haptic- ity of digital garments. Freed from the need to resemble ex- isting fabric yet striving to visually simulate tactile surfaces, digital garments self-knowingly plunge into the elemental. On the website of DRESSX, the first and biggest retailer of digital fashion clothing, each garment is accompanied by a designer’s statement. May Ka’s description of her design reads as follows: This bubble put May Ka to sleep. She felt her feet were going to- wards something new, but her footsteps were inaudible. Falling into the deep water. Will she be able to breathe? The water is not transparent, but she have never seen so clear until now [sic].23 Ka describes the inspiration behind her piece as the pillow that accompanies her to sleep, whereupon the act of dreaming resembles “falling into deep water.” When viewed 21 Ibid. 22 R. Derhi, Interviewed by the author. November 2021. 23 “Ma Ka: Abstract Rose,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/products/abstract-rose?_pos=57&_ sid=ac38fecdf&_ss=r, accessed January 10, 2021. JANE Y. ZHANG 169 AN-ICON  with the imagery of water in mind, the materiality of the digital garment takes on a new dimension. The reflective fabric evokes the placid surface of a lake on a sunny day. The softness of the underlayer now takes on the fluidity characteristic of liquid as a state of matter. The sagging form of the drapery gestures towards the downward haul of gravity as one sinks into the water, just as the airy silhouette connotes a state of buoyan- cy–an opposing movement that casts the body in a state of suspension. As an existing substance, water brings to mind a particular combination of physical attributes. When Ka evokes the element of water to describe the experience of wearing the dress, specific visual details of the garment converse with each other, take on additional meaning, and cohere into a tangible surface. After all, what can evoke material presence better than the constituting units of matter itself? The technology of clothes simulation has centered around the visualization of “surfaces,” a word that permeates the field of textile engineering.24 Rather than describing the ma- teriality of digital fashion as made up of elemental images, it is more suitable to understand its composition as an “elemental surface.” The phrase might appear oxymoronic at first sight. Whereas elements are by nature fundamental and deep-seated, “surface” are merely skin-deep. The media scholar Giuliana Bru- no challenges dismissive readings of surface as ornamental and superficial, turning instead to surface as a generative conceptu- al framework to engage with the materiality of images: “Surface matters in the fabrics of the visual, for it is on the surface that textures come alive and the ‘feel’ of an aesthetic encounter can develop.”25 The phrase “‘feel’ of aesthetic encounter” dovetails with Böhme’s formulation of atmosphere as the defining charac- teristic of aesthetic production. It is at the interface of surfaces that the atmosphere becomes sensible. Viewed in this light, 24 P. Volino, N. Magnenat-Thalmann, Virtual Clothing: Theory and Practice (Cham: Springer, 2000). 25 G. Bruno, “Surface encounters: materiality and empathy,” in D. Martin, ed., Mirror-Touch Synesthesia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017): 107-125, 118. JANE Y. ZHANG 170 AN-ICON  the invocation of elements emerges as a representational – or, in Böhme’s words, “presentational” technique through which virtual garments mobilize our prior conceptions of matter to generate a greater sense of environmental presence. To attend to surfaces is to engage with media as environments. In her study of early Chinese cinema, the me- dia scholar Bao Weihong describes affect as the “platform/ interface of experience produced by media technology and media aesthetic in interaction with the perceptual subjects.”26 In this sense, affect does not designate any singular medium or sensory modality, but instead constitute a condition of me- diation that envelops individuals and machines and redraws their intimate boundaries. In Ka’s description, water envelops the dreamer just as the digital garment encloses the wearer. Water becomes an intermediary substance through which the dreamer confronts her “fears and anxieties” and sees the world with heightened lucidity. Surfaces “hold affect in its fabric” and enable “the passage of empathy,” writes Bruno.27 When beckoned to interact with the body and its surroundings, the environmentalizing tendency of the elemental surface is further dramatized. In the next section, I situate Ka’s garment in the context of its intended function: to be worn and displayed by the human body. The DF image: atmosphere and vitality Digital garments are sold digitally and dressed digitally. To wear a digital garment is to superimpose its form onto an existing photograph with the help of graphic engineer- ing technologies. This procedure is accomplished through the use of “collision detection,”28 a computation technique that simulates the points of contact between the virtual fabric and 26 W. Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945: 12. 27 G. Bruno, “Surface tension, screen space,” in S. Saether, S. Bull, eds., Screen Space Reconfigured, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 35-55, 28. 28 P. Volino, N. Magnenat-Thalmann, Virtual Clothing: 6. JANE Y. ZHANG 171 AN-ICON  the surrounding objects. Despite having little effect on the ap- pearance of the virtual garment as an independent entity, the importance of collision detection becomes readily apparent when we examine the entirety of the digital fashion image (here- on referred to as the DF image). In Fig. 2, shadows enable a dialogue between the wearer’s body and the virtual garment. The bottom rim of the dress projects its silhouette on the thighs of its wearer, assert- ing itself as a material surface that receives the light in place of the wearer’s skin. Shadows project an entity’s image upon a foreign surface. By insisting on its ability to rechannel the light, the dress appears under the same sunlight as the body. In the lower right corner of the image, the shape of the body’s shad- ow takes on the silhouette of the garment. Not only does the garment envelope the wearer, it environmentalizes the body to converse with the soft, chilly grass on a winter morning. Fig. 2. The Neon Pillow purchased from DRESSX, Cambridge, December 2022 (photographed by the author). January 15, 2022. JANE Y. ZHANG 172 AN-ICON  The digital reflects light just as it displaces light. Under the piercing sun, the dress’ monochromatic surface takes on a new life. No longer enveloped by solid hues of gen- tle blue, the garment now radiates in a purple glow marked by overexposed highlights. Hints of green make their way to the outer edges of the garment, gradually intensifying as they approach the lawn and foliage in the background. Through the skillful manipulation of shadows and reflection, the DF image is no longer a replica of the original photograph with the addition of the digital garment. Rather, it strives toward the overarching reality of the index- ical and causally affirms the existence of the constellation it depicts. Given that the staging of the digital garment implicates the entire photographic image, digital fashion’s concern with visual congruency manifests prior to the cre- ation of the DF image. Clicking into the tab “How to Wear” on the DRESSX website, an alternative title immediately appears: “Choose the right picture: recommendation for receiving the best photo looks.” The requirements for the photo fall under four groups: natural light, fitted clothes, high quality (photograph), and uncovered parts. While the expectation for compact clothing pertains to the appear- ance of the body, the demand for natural lighting concerns the environmental setup.29 In an earlier version of the web- page, the list also asked the buyer to locate themselves relatively close to the camera to ensure “less background.”30 Digital fashion demands from the wearer not only a body but a context, where the physical environment becomes an integral part of the process of “wearing” the clothes. Clothing is external to the body yet an exten- sion of the body. It is at once the interface upon which the body and the external world come into contact, but also 29 “How to wear DRESSX and digital fashion,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/pages/help, accessed January 15, 2021. 30 Ibid. JANE Y. ZHANG 173 AN-ICON  the veil that separates the body from its immediate sur- rounding. This dynamic is perfectly captured by Emanuele Coccia, “[The dress] does not act directly upon our own anatomical body or the media that surround it, but rather it incorporates extraneous fragments of the world, foreign bodies through which our self is made to appear.”31 Al- exander Knight, a London-based digital fashion designer, affirms this statement through his description of pockets: It brings me joy to see something crazy and then see the details. Like when you see a Versace evening gown with a pocket, and the model walking down the runway with their hands in the pocket. I guess it gives it life. Digital garments can have a cold, static, and unlivable quality to them. Giving it these details gives it life.32 Knight does not employ the rhetoric of realism, describing the ideal of digital garments instead as a state of aliveness. Serving as a container for not only the body but also parts of an external world, the pocket signifies a garment’s potential to enter into relationships with others. Having a pocket allows digital garments to make a promise of everyday companionship: the wearer’s hand, keys and wallet, a bus ticket, a crumpled piece of candy wrapper. In doing so, pockets endow the garment with “life.” To sim- ulate the experience of wearing physical clothes entails more than appearing unedited; it demands no less than to situate garments alongside the living so that they in turn take on a life of their own. Read this way, the DF image reaches beyond the synthetic towards the additive. The color of the gar- ment is more vibrant than the skin of the wearer, and its form more dynamic than the posture of the body it adorns. The difference in luminosity and animacy is not only one of 31 E. Coccia, Sensible Life: A Micro-Ontology of the Image, trans. S.A. Stuart (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016): 28. 32 A. Knight. Interviewed by the author. November 2021. JANE Y. ZHANG 174 AN-ICON  quantity but quality: the resolution of the dress is decidedly higher than that of the original photo. The virtual garment creates a unique region of clarity, ushering forth a sense of saliency impossible to be captured by a digital camera from the same distance away. The elemental surface steps forward in an outward radiance, endowing an otherworldly vitality to the concrete and ordinary. The seamless photo- graphic overlay creates an image of pictorial rupture – not from a sense of visual incongruity but, quite to the contrary, the hypersensitivity between the figure and ground. Similar to the pocket, the digital garment’s ability to respond to the body and the environment not only serves to conjure a realistic image, but one that feels convincingly and dra- matically alive. The language of life and liveliness permeates Böhme’s theorization surrounding aesthetic commodities. Describing the perceptual effect of atmospheres, Böhme writes, “the establishment of a world of images on the sur- face of reality, or even independently of it, may well serve the intensification of life.”33 The function of aesthetic com- modities is “made of their attractiveness, their glow, their atmosphere: they themselves contribute to the staging, the dressing up, and the enhancement of life.”34 The perceptual pattern and affective construction of digital garments relo- cate Böhme’s invocation of “life” from the general condition of living to the immediate sensation of vitality. The elemen- tal surface of digital fashion is not only elemental because it evokes hapticity through the portrayal of specific forms of materiality, but also because it endows a fundamental feeling of liveliness to the body it claims to envelop. The reciprocity between hapticity and vitality has been evoked by Bruno when she describes the sur- face as the site in which “textures come alive.”35 In the 33 G. Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres: 199. 34 G. Böhme, Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism: 21. 35 G. Bruno, “Surface encounters: materiality and empathy:” 118. JANE Y. ZHANG 175 AN-ICON  next section, I examine digital garments as they appear in a virtual runway animation in order to further excavate the mode of embodiment enacted by the elemental surface of digital fashion. The virtual runway: atmosphere and embodiment A silver parka comes to life within the first three seconds. An orange thread slithers into the right-hand sleeve, followed by the contraction of the backside pad- ding. As the full parka comes into view, additional strands fly into the frame, endowing form to an otherwise slackened figure. With its arms outstretched, the parka inhales for the first time with the simultaneous compression of its seam lines – rapidly yet unfalteringly assembled almost as if by its own will. A single decisive zip renders the garment upright, and a hood pops into place. The resurrection is complete. Such was the opening sequence to a commer- cial on digital fashion.36 The creative team, not so subtly named “ITSALIVE,” offers us a glimpse into the worldbuild- ing of industry. As the virtual garment appears increasingly alive, the body and its surroundings take on an inert and lifeless quality. This perceptual pattern, already evident in the DF image, is further dramatized by the advertisements and runway shows released by the digital fashion industry. As the animation progresses, flame emanates from the parka just as the music picks up, unleashing dy- namic dashes of green and silver light that illuminates the dark background. Just as the parka begins to dance, a satin jumpsuit walks up to the parka and unveils its head mask. A moment of revelation follows: there was nothing 36 “Digital Clothes Production | Virtual Wear Development | Digital Fashion,” ITSALIVE, YouTube video, 0:58, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDAsRGOqx0o, accessed January 10, 2023. JANE Y. ZHANG 176 AN-ICON  underneath. What we had assumed to be a mannequin has been a hollow void all along. In a sense, physical runway shows have be- come “digital” decades before the rise of digital fashion. With the rise of Instagram and other forms of digital media platforms, the clothing commodity is staged with its after- life as a photograph or short video in mind.37 One of the most notable impacts on fashion photography, as noted by Silvano Mendes, was the elevated importance of runway scenography. A runway show constitutes an intermedial event, and its success depends on the close collaboration between fashion designers, stage designers, architects, and photographers.38 On the other hand, just as digital garments are made from pixels rather than textiles, digital fashion shows prefer computer animation over live-action footage. Rather than employing specific staging technol- ogies such as fog machines or lighting equipment, digital fashion commercials employ 3D animation to portray the product, its wearer, and the surrounding. In doing so, the aforementioned revelation becomes especially jolting and unsettling, as the body’s absence renders it virtually indis- tinguishable from the background. For the philosopher Hans Jonas, the human embodiment is characterized by the simultaneous expe- rience of the body as a subject for self-invention and an object for self-scrutiny.39 While the dynamic interplay be- tween this dual perspective has enacted highly divergent modes of embodiment across temporal and cultural ge- ographies, inherent to the human experience is this gen- erative tension between the first- and third-person per- spective. Joanne Entwistle, drawing from Merleau-Ponty’s 37 S. Mendes, “The instagrammability of the runway: architecture, scenography, and the spatial turn in fashion communications,” Fashion Theory 25, no. 3 (2019): 311-338, https://doi. org/10.1080/1362704X.2019.1629758. 38 Ibid. 39 H. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: A Delta Book, 1966): 186-187. JANE Y. ZHANG 177 AN-ICON  phenomenological approach to embodiment, explores how this dual perspective of the body is evidenced and enacted by the act of dressing: “the experience of dress is a sub- jective act of attending to one’s body and making the body an object of consciousness and is also an act of attention with the body.”40 The existence of clothing, especially in its ornamental context, is not only a product of but the active site upon which the body functions, according to Berna- dette Wegenstein, as the “medium for experience itself.”41 Digital garments relocate the site of our dual perception from the body to its representation by the digital image –already when the body has become an object of its own perception, whether in a mental image of ourselves posing in front of the camera, or in the photomontage pre- pared for social media. “Contemporary technoscience is in a unique position to exploit this phenomenological con- vergence of first- and third-person perspectives,” writes Wegenstein.42 The word “exploit”– connoting the intentional instrumentalization and manipulation of fashion – precise- ly gets at the power of digital fashion: the digital garment separates and redistributes the dual perspectives along a temporal axis – our attention with our body is fated to precede our attunement to our body. And so, we watch the two headless figures dance to their own rhythm. When the jacket slips off from the satin jumpsuit, light directly passes through the regions uncovered by the garment, leaving a disembodied arm that nevertheless propels the dancer into the air. As the body fades into the dark space of projection, what remains is the outward radiance of the elemental surface. Our frisson of unease is reframed as an experience of wonder and 40 J. Entwistle, The Fashioned Body (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015): 118. 41 B. Wegenstein, M.B.N. Hansen, “Body,” in W.J.T. Mitchell, M.B.N. Hansen, eds., Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010): 21. 42 Ibid. JANE Y. ZHANG 178 AN-ICON  enchantment by the closing message: “We are the future. Wear the future.”43 Characterized by seasonal change and stylistic variation, the fashion industry actively mobilizes future-ori- ented rhetoric. Yet, digital fashion offers a specific image of the future. In the final acts of the animation, the satin jumpsuit leaps and twirls amidst the fleeting background: the sunrise over a desert, snow-capped mountains, a blos- soming flower, great waves of the ocean, thunder, clouds, the atmosphere of the earth seen from space. Marketing products made of code instead of cotton, the digital fash- ion industry brands itself as a sustainable solution to the perils of climate catastrophe. Rather than interrogating the patterns of consumption that underlie over-extraction and waste, the digital fashion industry consistently evokes im- ages of nature in celebration of the triumph of life. “The eternity of art becomes a metaphor for the eternity of the soul, the vitality of trees and flowers become a metonymy of the vitality of the body…”44 Umberto Eco’s description of sculptural replicas in California graveyards possesses strange resonances with the internal logic of digital fashion. Referring back to Starosielski’s definition, elements are specific materialities that constitute our eco- logical conditions. In the animation, it was precisely a flame emanating from the parka that transformed the background from an empty cosmos to a colorful creation myth. The sense of vitality afforded by the hapticity of the elemental surface is tasked to mediate the premonition of future ca- tastrophe and to offer a promise of humanity’s continuous livelihood. Asserting that the aura of “historical objects” may be illustrated “with reference to the aura of natural 43 “Digital Clothes Production | Virtual Wear Development | Digital Fashion,” ITSALIVE, 2022, YouTube video, 0:58, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDAsRGOqx0o, accessed January 10, 2023. 44 U. Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. W. Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt, 1986): 96. JANE Y. ZHANG 179 AN-ICON  ones,”45 Benjamin depicts a meditative encounter with na- ture: If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.46 Comparing the view of the distant mountain offered by Benjamin with the virtual projection of the land- scape in the digital fashion concept video, digital garments indeed appear to testify to the demise of aura in our age of digital reproduction. And yet, digital fashion is similarly invested in the interplay between the natural and affective environment. To situate the phenomenal structure of “at- mosphere” in dialogue with that of “aura” is to foreground the primacy of environmental perception in the history of technological mediation. By expanding the constitution of media from communicative forms to ecological conditions, elemental surfaces provide an analytic framework for eco- critique beyond the study of “nature,” focusing instead on the perceptual patterns and representational techniques through which physical and affective environments are felt, performed, and lived. Coda We are familiar with the fairy tale of an emperor without clothes; now it seems as though our clothes have lost their emperors. “What we need is the digital body to be for people to wear our clothing,”47 says Kerry Murphy, the 45 W. Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction:” 5. 46 Ibid. 47 “FASHION MADE: The Future of Digital Fashion with Kerry Murphy, The Fabricant,” Product Innovation, YouTube video, 38:2, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Up8B9WUoKg4, accessed January 10, 2023. JANE Y. ZHANG 180 AN-ICON  founder of the pioneering digital fashion brand Fabricant. For Murphy, as for many others in the industry, the current coupling of digital garments and physical bodies is only a transitory phase in the field’s progression toward complete virtuality. Before that day comes, holding our love and fear in its fabric, preserving the contours of our hollow form, the digital garment dances in a world without us. As new materialisms have argued for the inher- ent vitality vested in all matter, Mel Y. Chen reminds us that animacy is political–the assignment of liveliness to bodies is viscerally bound to the technologies and discourse of biopower.48 In the same way, as media scholars have in- creasingly expanded the notion of hapticity beyond phys- ical tactility, our experience of materiality is nevertheless structured by nonneutral social relations. What is endowed with the vitality to “touch us emotionally,”49 and whose life gets to be touched, staged, and enhanced? The elemental surface of digital garments reminds us that the questions of vitality and hapticity are tightly intertwined and invites us to interrogate their intersecting histories. More concretely, elemental surfaces beckon us to approach the history of elements—from its classical inception to its post-classical legacy—with an eye towards the sensationalization and environmentalization of life. It is from this vantage point that digital fashion’s danger emerges alongside its allure, and our critical intervention emerges alongside constructive possibilities. 48 M.Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 49 Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres: 97. JANE Y. ZHANG 181 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18166

Phenomenology of space and virtual reality. An experimental course for students by Matteo Vegetti in architecture Phenomenology Virtual reality Achitecture Philosophy Education Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Phenomenology of space and virtual reality. An experimental course for students in architecture MATTEO VEGETTI, Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana, Università della Svizzera Italiana – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5149-8609 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18166 Abstract The paper presents the theoretical assumptions and the way of conducting an experimental course on the Phenom- enology of Space designed for architects and interior designers. The course made use of virtual reality to allow stu- dents to directly experience the perceptive and cognitive effects induced by the forms of space, colour, the texture of materials, and light. Virtual reality was also the medium that made it pos- sible to translate certain philosophical concepts related to the phenomenology of space into an experiential and applicative field close to the sensitivity and spatial culture of the designers. The themes addressed gave rise to a progressive development that allowed students to develop an increasingly complex project and experiment with increasingly complex is- sues. The course began with the phenomenology of thresholds, and continued with the analysis of field and synesthesia, the phenomenology of atmospheres, and the analysis of orienta- tion and mind maps. In each of these areas of research and experimentation, the common thread remained the relationship between the body and space. The article also presents the ex- ercises proposed to the students and an overall assessment of the teaching experience. Keywords Phenomenology Virtual reality Achitecture Philosophy Education To quote this essay: M. Vegetti, “Phenomenology of space and virtual reality. An experimental course for students in architecture,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 184- 229, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18166 MATTEO VEGETTI 184 AN-ICON  Presentation of the course Virtual reality (VR) holds educational potential of great interest for all disciplines that deal with spatiali- ty, and even more for those, like architecture, that have a privileged relationship with lived space, that is to say with the interaction between the body and its environment. I at- tempted to demonstrate this thesis through the conception and development of a course on Phenomenology of space that makes use of virtual reality to study the perceptual effects of architectural design. The course began as a research project funded by an internal call for proposals in the Department of en- vironments, construction, and design of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUP- SI-DACD, Mendrisio, Switzerland) dedicated to digitization. From the outset, its implementation required the formation of a small interdisciplinary research team. It included, alongside myself, philosopher and professor of spatial theory Pietro Vitali (architect and professor of the degree course in inte- rior architecture), Matteo Moriani (architect and assistant for the course developed by this project), and Marco Lurati (interaction designer and lecturer). In contrast to what often occurs, the collaboration between different areas of exper- tise in our case had a material character. The task of taking care of the content and educational aims of the course fell to me, as philosopher, while that of dealing with questions related to more strictly architectural aspects fell to the de- signers, who then guided the students in their design work. The interaction designer, finally, had the task not only of making the course possible through the development of the technology and the necessary programming, but also of teaching students how to carry out design in VR and the relevant programs (Twinmotion in particular). As is clear, no member of the working group could have proceeded without the aid of the others. The final goal was to create a course in phenomenology applied to architecture with the help of Oculus Quest 2 headsets. In other words, rather than just learning theories, the students would need to sharpen their MATTEO VEGETTI 185 AN-ICON  spatial sensibility by experimenting with these theories in a virtual environment. The challenge was thus double: on one hand to offer a course on applied philosophy, and on the other to introduce virtual reality into a theoretical course, making it the tool for the application of theory. In addition to this, in an almost unconscious, seemingly instrumental way, the students would need to learn sophisticated programming languages, a skill that is also useful from a professional standpoint. Background Virtual Reality has recently emerged in archi- tecture and the arts as novel means for visualizing different design solutions and for building up the design model and its virtual environment. Similar to these applications, VR is commonly used in architectural education in the design process, as it provides the designer with an image to create the spatial and topological relationships of a project. Although the use of VR for teaching purposes is not yet widespread in archi- tecture faculties (in Europe at least), its pedagogical effec- tiveness has been clearly documented.1 Several studies on the pedagogical function of VR in architectural studies have shown that the use of VR increases the awareness of de- signer during designing in terms of the structural properties and component assembly of a structural system,2 helps stu- dents’ way of thinking, critical thinking, and problem-solv- ing activities,3 creates the possibility to “feel like being in the place,”4 strengthens the memory and awareness of the 1 F. Kharvari, L.E. Kaiser, “Impact of extended reality on architectural education and the design process,” Automation in Construction 141 (2022): 1-19, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. autcon.2022.104393. 2 W.A. Abdelhameed, “Virtual reality in architectural design studios: a case of studying structure and construction,” Procedia Computer Science 25 (2013): 220-230, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.procs.2013.11.027. 3 F. Kharvari, L.E. Kaiser, “Impact of extended reality on architectural education and the design process.” 4 T. Chandrasekera, K. Fernando, L. Puig, “Effect of degrees of freedom on the sense of presence generated by virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display systems: a case study on the use of VR in early design studios,” Journal of Educational Technology Systems 47, no.4 (2019): 513-522. MATTEO VEGETTI 186 AN-ICON  spatial configuration,5 augments “spatial abilities” in stu- dents,6 trains the capacity to switch naturally from a planar representation of space to a 3D representation of the same space.7 To cite a concrete experience, Johan Bettum, pro- fessor of architecture at the Städelschule, has used virtual reality in the master degree studio Architecture and Aes- thetic Practice at Städelschule Architecture Class (Frank- furt) as a laboratory for spatial inquiries in relation to sub- jective experience, the construction of reality and the role of images in regimes of representation. These experiments consisted in designing immersive environments where ar- chitecture has been explored through the computerized representation of forms and spaces. According to the inten- tions of the course, this digitally produced realm of images supplemented and often supplanted the traditional role of drawing in the contemporary design process.8 A second research experiment on the integration of VR in the cur- riculum at architecture schools, took place at the College of Architecture and Planning (CAP) of Ball State University. For three years in a row, the CAP created a design virtual environment for 2nd year students, making use of an HMD (Head Mounted Display). The CAP VR Environment aimed to support the actual architectural design process, therefore aiding the process of learning how to design, rather than limiting its use as a visualization tool. In the practical terms, the immersive simulation of an actual design project (the lobby of a small hotel) was intended to enable students to recreate the architectural characteristics of the space, elic- iting an appraisal of their architectural spatial experience. According to the author, the ability to navigate through 5 A. Angulo, “Rediscovering virtual reality in the education of architectural design: the immersive simulation of spatial experience,” Ambiences. Environment Sensible, Architecture et Espace Urbain 1 (2015): 1-23, https://doi.org/10.4000/ambiances.594. 6 T. Chandrasekera, S.Y. Yoon, “Adopting augmented reality in design communication: focusing on improving spatial abilities,” The International Journal of Architectonics, Spatial and Environmental Design 9, no.1 (2015): 1-14, http://dx.doi.org/10.18848/2325-1662/CGP/ v09i01/38384; M. Schnabel, T. Kvan, E. Kruijff, D. Donath, “The first virtual environment design studio,” 19th eCAADe Conference Proceedings. Helsinki (2001): 394-400. 7 J. Milovanovic, G. Moreau, D. Siret, F. Miguet, “Virtual and augmented reality in architectural design and education. An immersive multimodal platform to support architectural pedagogy,” 17th International Conference, CAAD Futures 2017, Istanbul, Turkey. 8 J. Bettum, Architecture, Futurability and the Untimely (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022). MATTEO VEGETTI 187 AN-ICON  the simulated lobbies turned out to be key to capture the architectural spatial experience and perceive the aesthetic emotion and/or symbolic meaning embedded in the proj- ects.9 A further type of studies attempted to demon- strate, through an experimental design that also involved students from a design class at the Milan Polytechnic, the possibility of recreating complex spatial qualities through VR, for example investigating how multisensoriality (scent in particular) affects the realism of the experience contrib- uting to increase the users’ sense of presence in the virtual environment.10 Although in some ways apparently akin to the case studies cited, it must be borne in mind that the course we experimented with differs first and foremost from them for the basic reason that it does not fall within the scope of architecture, but of philosophy applied to space (a phi- losophy with a phenomenological orientation). The aim of the pedagogical experiments conducted is therefore not related to design, but to the understanding of the body- space relationship, with a specific focus on the modalities of sensory perception. In other words, thanks to virtual re- ality, the students were able to experiment in various ways, according to a number of controlled possibilities, how the manipulation of certain variables (positions of openings, colors, scales, relationships between objects in space, arti- ficial lights, sequences of spaces) impact the spatial expe- rience on a perceptive and cognitive level. The aim was not to obtain a realistic representation of space, nor was it to learn about and visualize certain spaces and construction processes through VR. The aim was rather to verify with one’s own (virtual) body the perceptual effects induced by 9 A. Angulo, “Rediscovering virtual reality in the education of architectural design: the immersive simulation of spatial experience.” 10 M. Carulli, M. Bordegoni, U. Cugini, “Integrating scents simulation in virtual reality multisensory environment for industrial products evaluation,” Computer-Aided Design & Applications 13, no. 3 (2016): 320-328, https://doi.org/10.1080/16864360.2015.1114390. MATTEO VEGETTI 188 AN-ICON  certain design choices, and to develop a method to derive generalizable knowledge from experience. Although the aforementioned studies have provided the course with useful information and a set of important examples regarding the didactic use of VR in architecture, there is - to the best of my knowledge - no previous use of VR in phenomenology of space. Theoretical framework Phenomenology is undoubtedly the theoret- ical orientation most closely related to the intelligence of architects, who are accustomed to thinking about space “live,” so to speak. Among the characteristic abilities of the architect are the capacity to consider the relationship between spaces and bodies, to imagine the atmosphere of environments and the way in which shape, color, and spatial scale influence our experience of them, and to or- ganize solids and voids, exteriors and interiors, the visible and the invisible, light and shadow, volumes and matter, as though they were elements of an aesthetically expressed spatial language. It is precisely this sort of sensibility that the course sought to thematically develop, strengthening students’ awareness of and ability to design perceptual (i.e., not only spatial) environments imbued with cognitive and emotional meanings. To best realize the desired encounter between philosophy and architecture in this pre-categor- ical level of spatial experience, I found it useful to refer to phenomenology broadly defined, broadly enough to include Gestalt psychology and some elements of behaviorist psy- chology. Before giving a synopsis of the thematic contents of the course, it will be necessary to evaluate the contribu- tion that virtual reality can offer to the encounter between phenomenology and architecture, mediating between their languages. VR’s potential consists in its particular quali- ties as an immersive medium, or more specifically in its MATTEO VEGETTI 189 AN-ICON  capacity to insert perception into an immaterial, interactive, and programmable Umwelt. The first aspect is perhaps the most important. If there is a single quality that the spatial intelligence of the architect must necessarily develop during the course of study, it lies in the capacity to move from an understand- ing of space based on plans—made up of lines, symbols, numbers, and so on—to a subjective understanding, ideally placed in the space that those signs represent abstractly. The passage from an objective and external gaze (the one that reads the plan) to an internal, embodied one, capable of bringing the signs to life in a volumetric space and cor- porealizing them, is normally entrusted to the imagination. But given the complexity of this mental operation, it is al- ways necessary to turn to a plurality of media: sketches, models, photographs of the models taken from the inside, rendering, etc. None of these tools, however, is capable of physically including the subject, who thus continues to have a distanced and disembodied understanding of space. Given the importance of the role that the body plays in spatial experience, it is clear that the value of virtual reality lies in the possibility of transferring the subject inside of the space of representation, in such a way that allows them to have a direct, aesthetic, and even synesthetic experience. Thanks to VR, the architect can jump in and out of the rep- resentation: he or she can “enter the plan,” making it into an immersive experience, and then exit, modify the design on the basis of this experience, and finally return to the virtual space to check the outcome of the operation. This move- ment in and out of the space of representation provides the intelligence of the architect with a new medium; this is not, however, virtual reality, but rather his or her own body as an “analogical” tool, one that provides an analog to em- bodied sensory experience. On the one hand, virtual space replicates the intentional structure that the world presents to us: space moves with me, shows itself and hides itself in relation to my gaze, and declares its secondary qualities (for example, showing itself to be narrow and oppressive, MATTEO VEGETTI 190 AN-ICON  or disorienting —all qualities that are related to a certain kind of subjective experience.). On the other hand, even if they are “embedded” in a virtual environment, the subjects still maintain an interior distance, a remainder of objectiv- ity; they know that they are in a representation, just like at every moment they know that their own body is only an analogon of the sentient one, which allows them to have a mediated, self-observed experience, and to register its effects. If virtual space is a distant relative of the sketchpad, the body that explores virtual space is a distant relative of the pencil that draws in the sketchpad, or more precisely of the manual intelligence involved in that experience. The risk of virtual reality causing the architect to lose an authentic relationship to space, or to “authentic space,” is, when taken from this point of view, less serious than one might fear—and all the more so due to the fact that VR does not by any means claim to substitute itself for the traditional forms of mediation, translation, and repre- sentation of space, but rather to integrate them into its own capabilities. Furthermore, VR remediates within itself many media to which we have long been accustomed, from the drawing pad to the cinema; from this perspective, rather than eliminating all mediation, it entails a deep and layered media culture. This is also confirmed by the educational usage of VR, given that in order to adequately use it, the students will necessarily continue to move through the rep- resentational languages of different media (from manual design to CAD, as well as the photos and films that can be made within virtual reality). They can also share their visual experience externally, since what they see within the virtual environment can be simultaneously projected on a screen connected to a projector. This, if we consider it closely, is no small thing. Two separate and autonomous (although co-present) environments—two different parallel Umwel- ten—can be connected in real time. Making it possible to show the outside what one sees as one sees it, VR makes ocular experience shareable, albeit through two different media (on one hand the projected film and on the oth- er the immersive reality.) The VR viewer transforms vision MATTEO VEGETTI 191 AN-ICON  into a full-fledged medium: it transmits, communicates to the outside, shows, and makes what it manifests public in real time. The virtual experience is, in effect, “replicant” by nature. In it, technological reproducibility has now caught up with the perceptual experience linked with one’s own body: today sight, tomorrow touch, and then who knows. The alienation of one’s own body, if we can call it such, may have slightly disturbing aspects for those who want to project it into dystopian future scenarios, but within the context of more modest educational ambitions, it holds enormous potential, given that it makes the lived experiences of others shareable and evaluable. As will by now be clear, the course was nothing like a normal design workshop, nor did it aspire to be. It was more like a virtual gymnasium where, through a series of guided experiments, the perceptual and psychological dimensions of space were exercised; a gymnasium that allowed for the easy modification of space and the experimental verification of its effects. Aims of the program To be concise, the use of virtual reality in the architectural context can be summarized in four points. These, as we will see, were developed in the course through a series of exercises. 1) VR allows for the modification of space at will, and for the verification of its effects on perceptual, emotion- al, and cognitive levels (depending on what one is interested in determining) in an immersive environment. For example, the height of a ceiling is, from one point of view, objective and mathematical, identical in any space. It is what it is, regardless of other spatial vari- ables like color and depth. Within the perceptual dimen- sion, however, things proceed very differently, since all of these variables intertwine and influence one another in a manner so clear that to define it as subjective would be misleading. The depth of space modifies the perception of MATTEO VEGETTI 192 AN-ICON  height in direct proportion to its increase. This can easily be experienced in virtual reality precisely because it only applies to a sentient body, which on paper does not ex- ist. Experiments of this type can examine the relationship between color and spatial perception, the modification of an environment through light (or shadows) depending on the hour of the day or the season, the perception of one’s center of balance in space, the relationship between differ- ent scales, the relationship between different volumes and shapes, synesthesia, and many other analogous situations. VR offers the opportunity to examine all of these aspects not only through vision, but also from a practical point of view, that is to say, through the study of the behav- ior of the users that interact with the organization of a given space: how they move, what they understand, what they remember, and how they describe a certain environment. All of this provides a way to test design solutions (whether realistic or experimental), or to verify theories developed in the existing literature. 2) VR allows for the implementation of phenom- enological variations and the experiencing of their effects on different levels: aesthetic, psychological, ontological. The use of phenomenological variation within the context of the project meant the possibility of varying one or two special elements, altering in a controlled way their position, breadth, depth, and other characteristics. One can, for example, modify the perception and geometry of an entire environment by changing where the entryway is located, thus deforming the environment in relation to the observer’s center. Depending on the breadth or depth of the entry, the experience of entering, and of the relationship between outside and inside, is modified. Depending where the two entries in a room are located—given that these es- tablish between themselves, on a perceptual level, a recip- rocal connection, a sort of invisible corridor—space will be “sliced” by that connection in different ways, redistributing MATTEO VEGETTI 193 AN-ICON  internal space and generating areas (compartments) of vari- able shapes and dimensions. This method requires experimenting with a lim- ited and controlled number of variations, and that the results be recorded from a perceptual and even ontological point of view. The dimensions of a window can be varied in such a way as to produce significant aesthetic discontinuities, but beyond a certain threshold of size the window changes in nature, becoming, for example, a glass door (if it alludes to the possibility of transit, taking on the potentiality of an opening-threshold), or a glass wall, where wall and window meet, each giving up one of its intrinsic potentialities (in the case of the wall, the possibility of visually separating spaces, and in the case of the window, that of connecting an inside to an outside atmosphere). The exercise of variation can take on many forms, all useful for testing a wide range of spatial effects with aesthetic, symbolic, or even ontological significance. To give a final example, which highlights the possibilities of VR, we might think of the effect of all of the possible variations applied to the height of a small room, from the minimum or even insufficient measurement to a generous one, say of 3 meters, up to a decidedly out of scale measurement of 10 or 20 meters. This modification allows for the discovery through intuitive evidence of the discontinuous relationship between stimulus and percep- tion, or of the differential thresholds that punctuate the qualitative passage from one psychophysical condition to another (claustrophobic, comfortable, roomy, oppressive, etc.). The qualitative thresholds can also cause a change in the sense of space itself. For instance, a space in which the ceiling is too low will not be perceived as inhabitable. Habitability is a spatial quality that requires a certain min- imum height, even if it is still a claustrophobic one. But if one exceeds this measurement greatly, one enters into a new context of meaning, for example that of an artistic installation, and space takes on a poetic significance that it did not have before. But this is not all. The exercise of phenomenological variation calls for the capacity to de- scribe, or better, to verbalize lived experience, developing MATTEO VEGETTI 194 AN-ICON  an appropriate (specific), effective (figurative), and meaning- ful (persuasive) language. From perception to expression: a continuous two-way transit that helps students develop a degree of spatial awareness that they do not normally pos- sess. Naturally, the exercise becomes progressively more complex depending on the number of variables one choos- es to introduce. The preceding case, for example, could be made much more complex simply with the introduction of one further variable, such as materials (say, concrete or word) or the presence of a light source (for example, an opening onto a natural light source from above). 3) VR allows for the firsthand study of relationships between form and meaning. Here, I turn to the field of Gestalt psychology, and more particularly to the possibility of simulating and studying phenomena of orientation and mental maps (at the base of which lie the tools of the psychology of shapes). To once again in this case offer some examples, one might think of virtual space as a site in which to experiment with different strategies for functionally dividing up space, for grouping families of objects on the basis of the principles of “figural unification,” for generating rhythms, for anticipat- ing the sense of space (directions and meanings), and for inducing motor responses. Within this field of experimenta- tion also lies the possibility of giving symbolic significance to a certain element of the environment (for example, the main entrance, the most important painting, the state room, etc.) as well as that of articulating in various modes the re- lationship between voids and solids, distances, or objects with different shapes and sizes. 4) VR allows for experimentation with the consti- tutive factors of atmospheres. This fourth point is the result of the interac- tion between all of the preceding spatial components and their relative interactions, and thus cannot but appear last. Experimentation with the constitutive factors of the atmo- sphere becomes explicit when attention is shifted to the MATTEO VEGETTI 195 AN-ICON  holistic aspects of the environment, the emotional impact that the space has on us, and the moment of encounter with an atmosphere and the way it can be an object of design. The usefulness of virtual reality in respect to the phenomenological analysis of atmospheres is clear: pre- cisely because an atmosphere is in itself an immersive and synesthetic phenomenon, it can only be observed through bodily presence. One is always inside an atmosphere, to the point that the very presence of a certain atmospheric connotation defines, when perceived, the confines of an interior (the interior of a work of architecture, of a certain city or neighborhood, or of a particular culture, etc.). VR thus shows itself to be extremely effective as a tool for the analysis of the psychological aspects of atmosphere, fa- cilitating an applied atmospherology. The various aspects that comprise the atmosphere of a place, that is to say its social and emotional characteristics, can become the ob- ject of critical analysis and can be used for the revision of designs. Within this field of experimentation there is also the possibility of observing space from any desired perspective and of moving, even if in a limited way, in a manner that unites visual and synesthetic experience. In addition, VR offers the possibility of introduc- ing natural sounds, background noises (for example, chatter, whose intensity depends on the number of people that we decide to put into the space), sounds of footsteps (which change depending on the surface being tread upon), and music (which can be diffused into space from a preselected source). It is not yet possible, however, to introduce tactile experiences, while olfactory ones are difficult to manage and a bit artificial. Structure of the course and workflow The course took place during the first semester of the 2022 academic year, and was divided into 12 lessons, each lasting an entire day. Excluding the first introductory lesson and the last one, dedicated to the presentation of final exercises, MATTEO VEGETTI 196 AN-ICON  five units were offered to the students, each one compris- ing two lessons. Each unit dealt with a different theme, but always built on the themes discussed in the preceding units. The course thus followed a gradual development through units. The typical organization of the units followed this order: a theoretical lecture (Matteo Vegetti); presentation of the exercise; discussion; presentation of programing tools and the use of Twinmotion for the given exercise (Marco Lurati); design work by students under the guidance of the course assistant (the architect Matteo Moriani, with the invaluable volunteer contribution of the interior architect Victoria Pham). Each unit was concluded the afternoon of the second lesson with a group review of the exercises. Since these were carried out by students in pairs, the pre- sentations took place as follows: one student explained the design choices and the outcomes of the experimentation, while the other, from within the virtual space, showed the spaces in question (thanks to a projector connected to the Oculus, or rather to the computer supporting it). Each pair of students worked on a space of a different scale (2.5x2.5; 5x5; 10x10; 20x20; 2.5x5; 5x10; 10x20). In this manner, the phenomenologically significant issue of scale was indirectly present throughout the course, presenting numerous opportunities for reflection. Given that the same exact exercise presented difficulties of different types de- pending on the scale, each group of students necessarily had to offer a different design solution. The differences be- tween scales were of course also evident in the exercises based on variations. In what follows I offer a descriptive brief of the subjects dealt with in each unit and in the corresponding exercises. The latter held a fundamental importance in the overall economy of the course, given that they connected theory with practice and formed an educational pathway that began from a few basic elements and then became progressively richer and more complex. MATTEO VEGETTI 197 AN-ICON  INTRODUCTION and UNIT 1 “I ask a young student: how would you make a door? With what dimensions? Where would you place it? In which corner of the room would you have it open? Do you understand that these different solutions are the are the very basis of architecture? Depending on the way that one enters into an apartment, on where doors are located in the walls, you feel very different sensations, and the wall that you that you drill likewise takes on very different charac- teristics. You then feel that this is architecture.”11 The first introductory lesson of the course dealt with the relationship between body and space, bringing to light some of the fundamental issues in Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger’s phenomenological approaches.12 Through the definition of these concepts and the relationship between them (space as correlate of the activity of a living body, as environment, as site, as a felt, perceived, lived space, in- vested with meanings), the course established a theoretical basis sufficient for understanding its aims. Then, a first approach to virtual reality, and a first intuitive test of the ideas learned, was carried out through the use of the Gravity Sketch program, which of- fers its users the possibility of creating space through the movements of their hands, and to choose from a vast rep- ertoire of creative resources (lines, shapes, surfaces, colors, materials, transparencies, etc.). Each pair of students ran- domly selected an aesthetic/perceptual theme (unknown to the others) to give form to. Once a pair of students created theirs in VR, the rest of the class was invited to visit it and provide a brief description of it. Based on the comments received, it was easy to tell if the students had succeeded 11 Le Corbusier, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning (1930) (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2015). 12 M. Heidegger, M. Corpo e spazio (1964), trans. F. Bolino (Genova: Il Melangolo, 2000); M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), trans. D. Landes (Abingdon-New York: Routledge, 2012). MATTEO VEGETTI 198 AN-ICON  in conveying the theme that they were tasked with inter- preting spatially. In a small way, this first contact with virtual reality reproduced the characteristic transposition of theo- retical themes into an “applied” dimension that would char- acterize the course as a whole. Most importantly, Gravity Sketch is an effective tool for becoming familiar with VR, and more particularly with the possible functions offered by the Oculus. UNIT 1 - Phenomenology of thresholds The first unit was dedicated to the theme of thresholds, or rather to the diverse configurations of the divide between interior and exterior that make the experi- ence of space as a place possible (the possibility of “en- tering” or accessing that only the crossing of a threshold allows). Experimenting with the different thresholds that comprise space and mastering their rhetorical significance means knowing how to articulate space like a complex text, full of caesuras, connections, leaps, transitions, and transformations. Each threshold represents a critical point in space because it is called upon not only to manage the different practical and symbolic functions of the environ- ment, but also the relationship between seemingly irrecon- cilable opposites: interior and exterior, public and private, the familiar and the foreign, the inside and the outside. The phenomenology of thresholds thus aimed to show through numerous examples how the threshold could be designed and conceived of in different ways depending on goals and intentions (aesthetic, symbolic, practical). The lesson took its impetus from an anthropo- logical reflection on the significance of the threshold/door, 13 to then move towards more philosophical14 and phenom- enological15 questions. Here, as elsewhere, Ching’s im- 13 J. Rykwert, The Idea of a Town (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1988). 14 G. Simmel, “Bridge and door,” Theory, Culture & Society 11 (1994): 5-10. 15 P. V. Meiss, De la forme au lieu (Lausanne: Presses polytechinques et universitaires, 1986); A. Moles, E. Rohmer, Psychologie de l’espace (Paris: Casterman, 1998). MATTEO VEGETTI 199 AN-ICON  ages and insightful observations were very useful in ac- companying the discussion.16 The lesson was also the occasion to thematize the threshold between “front” and “back,” between “stage” and “backstage,” or rather between the public and private dimension, through a series of different frames. Here, I use the language of Erving Goffman to allude to the importance of the frame in defining, on the basis of its specific material or formal qualities, the type of situated social situation that one wishes to obtain: the degree of visibility, of separation, of privacy (or of porosity, contamination, or transparency) that one wants to establish between the respective domains of “front” and “back” in order to strengthen or weaken the public valence of the place and the relationships that take place there.17 Expected outcomes: ■ Understanding the symbolic value of the entering a space and the way in which the threshold manages the relationship between interior and exterior. ■ Experimenting with the perceptual effects generated by the different positioning of a door-opening in the same identical space. ■ Experimenting with the connection that is created between two door-openings within the same space, and the modification of spatial relationships that this connection brings about. ■ Understanding the significance of the center as what or- ganizes space and its distortions. ■ Understanding the language of the window-opening through different typologies. ■ Experimenting with the concept of “frame.” ■ Analyzing the way in which an object (in this case, a work of art) reacts to space based on its position, size, relationship to light, and to its own “aura.” 16 F.D.K. Ching, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2015). 17 E. Goffman, Behavior in Public Places (New York: Free Press, 1966); and Interaction Ritual (New York: Pantheon, 1982) MATTEO VEGETTI 200 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Beyond a certain limit, an opening ceases to be an enclosed area and becomes a dominating element: a transparent plane bordered by a frame. From F.D.K. Ching, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order (Hoboken: Wiley, 2015). Fig. 2. An opening situated on the plane of a wall will appear to be a luminous form against a contrasting background. If it is centered on the plane, the opening will appear stable and will visually organize the surface around it. If it is decentered, it will create a level of visual tension with the sides of the plane towards which it has been moved. From F.D.K. Ching, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order. MATTEO VEGETTI 201 AN-ICON  Exercise Each pair of students works on a space of dif- ferent scale, with a square or rectangular base (2.5x2.5; 5x5; 10x10; 20x20; 2.5x5; 5x10; 10x20). A) Create three spaces with equal dimensions. In one of these spaces, place a door-opening in three differ- ent positions, and note how the space changes perceptu- ally, writing a description of it from within the virtual space. B) For each of the three spaces, create two door-openings placed in different ways (but on the same wall). Describe the result: how is space modified? Where is the center? C) Place a rug of shape, dimension, and mate- rial of your choice in each space. D) Place a window-opening in each space. The openings must be central, zenithal, and angular (size and shape are up to you). E) Modify the dimensions and shape of the window-openings, increasing their width or height freely. Describe the result. F) Place into one single space a combination of four of the entry-doors or windows created earlier (4 total: this could be 2 doors and 2 windows or 3 doors and 1 window, etc.) Describe the result. G) Connect in a sequence four of the spaces created earlier. Give these environments a hierarchy and connect them with a path that joins the entrance and the exit. Design the main entrance into the space from a rhe- torical standpoint. Try to convey the hierarchy between different environments through the use of different kinds of thresholds. The thresholds must anticipate the sense of the space being entered, and must convey the relation- ship between the spaces that they connect (you can use frames, stairs, boxes, ramps, partitions, false ceilings, dif- ferent thicknesses for the walls, and the form and dimen- sions of the thresholds can be modified. In this phase, the MATTEO VEGETTI 202 AN-ICON  threshold can become a volume). You may not, however, use any elements of décor. H) Place a sculpture in one of the environments in such a way as to enhance the latter. I) Design a threshold/separation (a frame) that creates a private space within one of the rooms that you have already made. J) Make a 30-second VR film of these environ- ments and describe the created space (2000 words). The description should be written subjectively (“I advance and see on my right…;” “the light from the window is illuminat- ing the threshold that I am about to cross…”) K) Take 3 photos of the interior that illustrate the design choices (that is, representative views of the interior space generated through experimental solutions.) UNIT 2 - The power of the field “By emphasizing the generated field in addition to the architectural object, one raises once more the problem of space, but in different terms by giving the concept a different value. In traditional criti- cism space is a homogeneous structure, a kind of counterform to the mural envelope, indifferent to the lighting conditions and to its position in relation to the buildings, whereas the notion of field stresses the continuous variability of what surrounds the archi- tectural structures.”18 The second unit, which clarified some of the theoretical elements already present in the first, analyzed the principles of field theory, or better, an ensemble of the- ories based on the shared presupposition that a space occupied by volumes does not coincide with their physical 18 P.P. Portoghesi, cited in R. Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form (1977) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). MATTEO VEGETTI 203 AN-ICON  space, but extends beyond it, without however being in- dependent of the originating form.19 The field thus coincides not with the borders within which everything is enclosed, but with a certain ar- rangement of forces and vectors acting in space. Space thus becomes an active and reactive environment: a field of psycho/physical forces. Every volume present in the field, by virtue of its mass and its shape(s), changes the field’s appearance. The field generated through design deeply affects our perceptual schemas through the play of forces that act within it. But within the concept of field, the concept of center, already encountered in the previous unit, plays a fundamental role. While geometrically a center is simply a point, perceptually it extends as far as the conditions of stability that it is based on will permit. Of course, the center may or may not be indicated. In architecture, it can be indicated (or suggested) by a ceiling lamp, a mobile, a decoration, or a mosaic. Or, it can be an empty space at the center of two diagonals or of the geometry dictated by the positions of the thresholds. Normally, however, there are multiple centers at work in each field, each of which attempts to prevail over the others. The lesson thus brought attention to the problem of the interaction between fields of different shapes and strengths, suggesting the possibility of making corrections to one’s designs by working on the centers, the directions of the volumes that generate the field, or their distance from one another. This illustrates the concept, well known to phe- nomenology and cognitive psychology, that space is born as the relationship between objects. On the basis of this idea, shifting attention from the shapes of objects and their interaction to the void that separates them, the lesson then also discussed the concept of “interspace,” and along with it the fundamental law of attraction-repulsion: “Objects that look ‘too close’ to each other display mutual repulsion: they want to be moved apart. At a somewhat greater distance 19 R. Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form; P.P. Portoghesi, V.G. Gigliotti, “Ricerche sulla centralità. Progetti dello studio di Porta Pinciana,” Controspazio 6 (1971); A. Marcolli, Teoria del campo (Firenze: Sansoni, 1971) and Teoria del campo 2 (Firenze: Sansoni, 1978). MATTEO VEGETTI 204 AN-ICON  the interval may look just right or the objects may seem to attract each other.”20 The final theme concerned the typical fields of basic shapes such as the circle, triangle, and square. This discussion was then applied to bidimensionally-perceived spatial forms, such as the shape of the window in respect to the wall in which it is placed. Finally, it bears noting in relation to point “C” of this unit’s exercise that VR does not exclude interaction with physical objects. Virtual and material reality can in fact overlap, generating a significant enhancement of spatial experience. In the present case, it was sufficient to place a real table where the virtual table designed by the students was, in order to allow a group of four people to share the same situation from different perspectives. The members of the group sat around the same virtual table (sharing the same design simultaneously in multiple Oculus viewers), but could at the same time establish a tactile relationship with the table around which they were seated in real space. The lesson made wide use of examples taken from architecture as well as city planning in order to explain how field theory adapts to each scale. 20 R. Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form. MATTEO VEGETTI 205 AN-ICON  Expected outcomes: ■ Understanding and experimenting with the influence of the center and the relationship between centers. ■ Perceptually experimenting with the field in terms of scope and shape of irradiation, as well as the relationship between fields in terms of interference, conflict, or harmony. ■ Perceiving the language of voids in relation to solids in terms of visual balance and variable density (compression and decompression of the spaces between elements). ■ Testing the symbolic/perceptual power of fire (that of a fireplace) in establishing a center and a space. ■ Observing the dynamics of the field together with the other students, developing a suitable language. ■ Putting the dynamics of the fields into the form of a graphic representation. P. Portoghesi, Field Theory. Space as a system of places, 1974. MATTEO VEGETTI 206 AN-ICON  Fig. 4. Modification of forces internal to a rectangular field based on the positioning of the door-openings. From P. V. Meiss, De la forme au lieu (Lausanne: Presses polytechinques et universitaires, 1986). MATTEO VEGETTI 207 AN-ICON  Fig. 5. “Irraggiamento spaziale.” Exercise Beginning from the final state of the work un- dertaken in the previous exercises, inserting objects and volumes in space, we will analyze the force fields that these create. A) Begin the exercise by observing and analyz- ing the space already created on the basis of field theory. B) Among the four volumes from the previous exercise, we have one that already contains the sculpture. In the three remaining, place: a) A fireplace and a table for 4 people b) 5 monochrome volumes (1 cylindrical, 1 cubic of 1x1, 2 parallelepipeds of 1x1x2, and a column): create a harmonious field out of these volumes, which may not touch the wall (the volumes can be sized in respect to MATTEO VEGETTI 208 AN-ICON  the space that hosts them). Describe the fields that you think you have generated. c) In the third room, place a painting and a mirror on one of the walls. C) Sit in a group of four at the table, and to- gether analyze the space with the fireplace from inside of the simulation. Improve the previous solutions by changing the placement of the volumes, or try an alternative solution. D) Now, enter the space with the geometrical volumes and analyze the field/fields generated. Improve the previous solutions by changing the position of the volumes, or try an alternative solution. E) Analyze how the spaces change at different hours of the day due to natural light and shadows. Create a film of 30 seconds, based on a narrative strategy, that shows how the fields are modified by natural light at differ- ent times of the day. Walk through the entire space, back and forth, at three different times of day: morning, afternoon, and twilight. F) Now, enter into the space with the geomet- rical volumes and analyze the field/fields generated. Im- prove the previous solutions by changing the position of the volumes, or try an alternative solution. G) From inside the space, take three photo- graphs representative of the perceptual/visual experience of the field. H) Extract the building plan from Archicad (1/100) and draw the fields, centers, and vectors that you think you have generated within the space. UNIT 3 - Multisensoriality and synesthesia “...every architectural setting has its auditive, haptic, olfactory, and even hidden gustatory qualities, and those properties give the visual percept its sense of fullness and life. Regardless of the immediate character of visual perception, paradoxically we have already unconsciously touched a surface before we become aware MATTEO VEGETTI 209 AN-ICON of its visual characteristics; we understand its texture, hardness, temperature, moisture instantaneously.” 21 The third unit was carried out in collaboration with Dr. Fabrizia Bandi, researcher in the “AN-ICON” group led by Andrea Pinotti, who was a guest of the course thanks to the SEMP international exchange program. The aim of the unit was to guide students to the discovery of the uni- verse of synesthetic effects attributable to sight and hearing. Fabrizia Bandi, an expert in the thought of Mikel Dufrenne, introduced the students to elements relating to synesthesia in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Pal- lasmaa, and Dufrenne.22 The lesson insisted on the im- portance of understanding the multisensorial character of perception since, whether one likes it or not, space com- municates with bodies in this way, through the intertwining of different perceptual faculties. Synaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the center of gravity of expe- rience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel, in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the physicist conceives it, what we are to see, hear and feel . . . The senses intercommunicate by opening on to the structure of the thing. One sees the hardness and brittleness of glass, and when, with a tinkling sound, it breaks, this sound is conveyed by the visible glass. One sees the springiness of steel, the ductility of red-hot steel, the hardness of a plane blade, the softness of shavings.23 By relativizing the predominance of sight in the structure of perception, the theorists of synesthesia invite us to discover the persistence of “unauthorized” sensory registers (like sound and temperature in colors, or touch in something perceived visually), which condition experience 21 J. Pallasmaa, The Embodied Image (Hoboken: Wiley and Sons, 2012): 51-52. 22 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; J. Pallasmaa, The Embodied Image; M. Dufrenne, L’oeil et l’oreille (1987) (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Place, 2020). 23 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception: 266-267. MATTEO VEGETTI 210 AN-ICON  in mostly unconscious and unconditioned ways. The many examples referring to the field of architecture had the aim of leading the students to a decisive point: given the origi- nal complicity between body and space, to design means, perhaps before anything else, to organize a complex per- ceptual environment in which each element not only has multisensory potential in itself but also inevitably relates with that of the others. By experimentally testing the synes- thetic effects of the designed space in virtual reality, inter- twining their own bodies with it, the students had a way to determine the results of their choices on multiple perceptual levels. These could work towards creating syntonic or dys- tonic effects, or could play with the composition of different synesthetic qualities within the same element, for example, combining a given material with a color that contrasts with it in temperature, or background music of a certain kind, for example, soft and enveloping, with an environment imbued with the opposite synesthetic characteristics (cold, sharp, shrill). The general goal was to create a perceptually rich and coherent environment. Here, it is important to note that it is possible to import images of any material, including photographs of existing surfaces, into the Oculus. This unit also allowed for the development of a discourse straddling the border between the phenomeno- logical aspects of multisensory experience and the findings of the neurosciences.24 24 For example N. Bruno, F., Pavani, M., Zampini, La percezione multisensoriale (Bologna: il Mulino, 2010). MATTEO VEGETTI 211 AN-ICON  Expected outcomes: ■ Cultivating sensitivity to the multisensory aspects of ma- terial and texture. ■ Developing a language capable of translating synesthetic experience and allowing it to be shared with others. ■ Studying the possibilities of using multisensoriality to de- sign and compose different perceptual environments in logical sequences. ■ Experimenting with the encounter between the synesthetic aspects of music and those of the designed environments. ■ Verifying the efficacy of the desired perceptual effects through a questionnaire. Exercise Beginning with the previously-created space, gen- erate four different perceptual environments, working with ma- terials, colors, and sounds. The environments must create an ordered sequence, a perceptual-synesthetic path imbued with meaning. A) Work with tactile perception: use textures on different parts of the environment (floor, ceiling, objects pres- ent in the room, etc.) while also modulating the qualities of the materials (transparency, opacity, reflectiveness, etc.) to create an effect that induces a multisensorial/synesthetic sensation. B) Use materials and colors to elicit a specific sensation (hot/cold; rough/smooth; sharp/soft; enveloping/ repelling; lightness/oppression, etc.) C) Work with sound: test the impact of the sound of footsteps, introducing different numbers of people into the space based on its size as follows: • 2.5x2.5: 1 person, 5 people, 20 people • 5x5: 1 person, 10 people, 40 people • 10x10: 1 person, 20 people, 80 people • 20x20: 1 person, 40 people, 400 people • 2.5x5: 1 person, 10 people, 40 people • 5x10: 1 person, 20 people, 80 people • 10x20: 1 person, 40 people, 400 people MATTEO VEGETTI 212 AN-ICON  Once the highest number of people within the space has been reached, add voices. Finally, walk through the space and test the sounds of your footsteps in different environments. D) In an environment of your choice, introduce a sound effect (natural or artificial) or music that reinforces the synesthetic character of the space. E) The environments must create a percep- tual itinerary. Through the characteristics that you give the environments, try to construct a pathway that will make a hierarchy apparent, with the clearest possible succession. F) Describe in writing the synesthetic effect that you think you have generated in each of the fourenvironments (without sharing the responses with the rest of the class); a) How can the environments that you have created be defined as multisensory? b) What type of sensation did you want to make emerge from the different spaces? c) What is the relationship between the choice of materials/sound and the sensation that you wanted to transmit to those within the space? d) How did the choice of sound relate to the choice of materials and colors? G) Take one photo in each environment. H) Shoot a video of the four environments, lasting 24 hours (with all natural light). Compress it into a film of 2-3 minutes. I) During the morning of the second day, each group will visit the rooms created by the others and respond in writing to some questions aimed at verifying the effect pro- duced by the space on its users: a) How do the spaces visited constitute an example of multisensoriality? Which factors contribute most? b) What sort of sensation emerges from the different spaces. Try to describe which elements caused this sensation. c) Was the sound particularly significant in your experience of the space? Why? MATTEO VEGETTI 213 AN-ICON  UNIT 4 - Light and color: phenomenology of atmosphere The fourth didactic unit was dedicated exclu- sively to the topic of light and color. The reason for this choice resided primarily in the importance of these two factors for spatial perception (in various ways: from colored light to the relationship between natural light and materials that reflect it). Furthermore, light and color play a decisive role in the connotations of atmospheres. In dialogue with various others, from Goethe25 to Conrad-Martius,26 from Sedlmayr27 to James Turrel,28 the lesson highlighted both aspects: the perceptual dimension and what Conrad Mar- tius calls “the character” of light, or rather the way in which a given property of light is intermittently given expression. Light is undoubtedly a special atmospheric agent, since temperature and color can give space a very clear emotion- al timbre. But it can be used—as in the phenomenological art of James Turrel and Robert Irwin—to change the form of space, up to the point of distorting it and erasing its borders. VR is a unique instrument for testing how light reacts to surfaces, their textures, and their colors in the widest range of different conditions (for example, depend- ing on the time of day, and also by adding natural light to artificial light sources). It is also useful, though, to create spaces and spatial languages linked to the psychology of shapes. Five possible functions of light capable of perceptually altering space in respect to different design aims: illumination, indi- cation, division/unification, connection, creation of rhythm. Of course, each of these functions raises specific questions 25 J.W. Goethe, Theory of Colours (1810) (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1970). 26 H. Conrad-Martius, “Realontologie,” Jahrbüch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 6 (1923): 159-333; H. Conrad-Martius, “Farben. Ein Kapitel aus der Realontologie,” Festschrift Edmund Husserl zum 70. Geburstag gewidmet (Jahrbüch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung) 10 (1929): 339-370. 27 H. Sedlmayr, La luce nelle sue manifestazioni artistiche, ed. A. Pinotti (Palermo: Aesthetica, 2009). 28 J. Turrell, Extraordinary Ideas-Realized (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2018). See also M. Govan, C.Y. Kim, eds., James Turrell: A Retrospective (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013). MATTEO VEGETTI 214 AN-ICON  (the type of light source and its temperature, the shape and position of the light sources, the relationship between light and darkness, background and foreground, etc.), but in a theoretical sense, the exercise aimed above all to demon- strate the potential applications of a complex theoretical framework like the one mentioned above. Finally, the discussion turned to the phenom- enological theme of atmospheres, a field that, as already noted, could only appear last, once the basic elements for an analytic understanding of the body-space relationship had been acquired. With few exceptions, “atmosphere” is a concept used in a very intuitive way by architects, yet is central to their specific form of spatial intelligence. It is here that VR perhaps offers its greatest contribution: it is one thing to introduce students to the thought of the usual authors on the subject, such as Böhme,29 Norberg-Schulz,30 Schmitz,31 Ströker32 or Zumthor,33 and quite another for them to have the chance to analyze atmospheres from within, to study their perceptual effects, and to modify their factors in the desired (often experimental) way. Describ- ing the extraordinary power of atmospheres to influence our mood is much simpler and more effective when one has the possibility of interacting with a virtual environment. From within these environments, variation in light can be understood atmospherically in all of its significance. The capacity to design an/the entrance as a tool to understand, expand, or focus an encounter with a given atmosphere can be carried out in all possible ways, giving life to the theoretical hypotheses learned through the creativity of the designed. The symbolic and potential connotations of an atmosphere—which are often an involuntary outcome, but 29 G. Böhme, “Atmosphere as the subject matter of architecture,” in P. Ursprung, ed., Herzog and de Meuron: Natural History (Montreal: Lars Müller and Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2002) and Atmosfere, estasi, messe in scena. L’estetica come teoria generale della percezione, trans. T. Griffero (Milano: Christian Marinotti, 2010). 30 C. Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991). 31 H. Schmitz, “Atmosphärische Räume,” in Atmosphäre(n) II. Interdisziplinäre Annäherungen an einen unscharfen Begriff (München: Kopaed, 2012). 32 E. Ströker, Investigations in Philosophy of Space (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987). 33 P. Zumthor, Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2006). MATTEO VEGETTI 215 AN-ICON  nonetheless entirely controllable, through the composition and interaction of the conditions present in a given space, and at times even a result produced by a “heterogenesis of ends”—can finally become the objects of direct experi- ence, which would otherwise be impossible. I think these examples are sufficient to illustrate a field of research that goes far beyond virtual reality’s capacity to change one floor into another, in order to find which one best suit the environment. For architectural professionals, though, this as- pect should truly not be underestimated. VR offers them a precious medium of communication with their clients, who often lack the ability to imagine the design solutions being proposed, or to read plans and “visualize” them in three dimensions. But even if bridging the gap between the spatial competencies of architect and client may sooner or later prove to be the main use of virtual reality, it is not, however, the most important for, nor does it lie within the specific aims of the course. MATTEO VEGETTI 216 AN-ICON  Expected outcomes: ■ Experimenting with environmental effects of lighting. ■ Experimenting with the semiotic and Gestaltic use of light. ■ Testing the atmospheric effects relating to light and color. Exercise A) Use artificial light to strengthen the synes- thetic connotations of the environment in an atmospheric way. B) Use light to unify a part of the space and the objects within it. C) Use light to generate a threshold. D) Generate variations in the temperature, in- tensity, and type of artificial light, and observe how the colors of surfaces and the texture of materials change. E) Analyze how the spaces change under the different variations of artificial light. F) Modify the color of the materials through the effects of variations of artificial light. G) Using a narrative strategy, make an atmo- spheric film of 30 seconds that shows how the spaces are modified by different types of artificial light. If necessary, you can animate the space with the movement of a virtual character. UNIT 5 - Orientation and legibility of space The final didactic unit dealt with the theme of spatial orientation on the basis of the line of research opened up by the work of Kevin Lynch.34 At the basis of this choice are two assumptions. The first is that Lynch has given us a scalable methodology, which can also be effective when applied to interior spaces. The second is 34 K. Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1960). See also L. Letenyei, J. Dobák, eds., Mental Mapping (Passau: Schenk Verlag, 2019). MATTEO VEGETTI 217 AN-ICON  that such a methodology, based on psychology of shapes and on a study of mental maps that we might say are akin to phenomenology, places itself in continuity or in dialogue with the content already explored in the preceding units of the course. The formation of mental maps takes place in the interaction between subject and environment. On a cogni- tive level, for Lynch the maps reveal the constant presence of five elements, which we can also define as structures, in the sense that they structure the experience of (urban) space by connecting it back to a universal mental schema. Such irreducible elements, even if they are not necessarily always co-present, are the path, the edge, the district, the node, and the landmark. A space’s degree of comprehen- sibility, or rather our own capacity to orient ourselves in space and to have a clear mental image of it, depends on the form, character, and composition of these structures. The capacity of design to give spaces identity, structure, figurability, and meaning is fundamental in fostering a pos- itive interaction between subject and environment, or even to induce emotional well-being. This gives us the capacity to anticipate how space will be understood, to support our spatial awareness (and hence our confidence in the space), and to develop a positive identification with spaces. All of this holds for any interior space, even if it is clearest on a large scale (for example that of a museum). Each interior indeed presents us with paths, both introverted and extroverted nodes, helpful or disori- enting edges (like walls, partitions, or anything that divides space), landmarks (prominent aesthetic elements), and even districts, since the term designates first and fore- most for Lynch whatever distinguishes the characteristic atmosphere of a place. To demonstrate and test this hypothesis, the students had to empty out the spaces they had created up to this point, multiply them by four, and connect them in a freely-chosen sequence. Using only the spatial language of the five fundamental elements and working in syntony with the principles of the psychology of shapes that make space recognizable and possible to remember (uniqueness, MATTEO VEGETTI 218 AN-ICON  formal simplicity, continuity, preeminence, clarity of con- nection, directional differentiation, visual field, awareness of movement, rhythm) the students were asked to give their design a high cognitive value for the users. In order to test the result obtained, each student visited the design created by the others in virtual reality, and at the end of the visit drew a mental map for each. The study of the maps, finally, allowed sever- al problems linked to the understanding of space to be brought into the discussion: errors in the reconstruction of the shape of the space, missing places, unclear dimensions and hierarchies, and incongruencies and hesitations of var- ious types. The critical evaluation of the most problematic spaces (and, on the other hand, of those that almost al- ways elicited a clear representation) allowed the students to rethink their design, seeking effective solutions. VR is a very useful tool for studying phenomena of orientation and environmental image. Its usage, however, can be extended to other psychological aspects related to the design of the environment, as for example to the concept of affordance, which in Gibson’s language refers to the physical qualities of objects that suggest to a subject the appropriate actions for manipulating them.35 The greater the affordance, the more the use of the tool becomes automatic and intuitive (a passage to cross, a door to open in a given direction, a switch to turn or press, etc.). Another possible use of a virtual space with “public” dimensions, like the one created in the last unit, is the study of the rules of proxemics.36 This can be accomplished through the possibility of inserting a number of virtual people, who move according to estab- lished or casual paths, interacting in various ways, into the scene. 35 J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979) (New York: Psychology Press, 2015). 36 T.E. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (New York: Anchor Books, 1990). MATTEO VEGETTI 219 AN-ICON  Expected outcomes: ■ Experimenting with the principles of Lynch’s theory from the perspective of design and develop a sensitivity to the cognitive structure of space. ■ Learning the method of mental maps. Exercise A) Return to the basic space in its starting con- dition, taking away all of the elements aside from the open- ings (doors and windows). Multiply the space you created before by four times. Then generate a sequence of twelve connected environments. Four spatial elements must be present in the design: pathways, edges, introverted nodes, extroverted nodes, and landmarks. Design the entrance and exit of the building. The goal is to create a fluid and figurable space. To achieve this goal, plasterboard walls can be taken away or added (also to change the shape of the space); or you can redesign them in such a way as to weaking or strengthen the frame (the edges) to create visual and auditory connec- tions, light effects, or transparencies. Each room can have a landmark (painting, stat- ue, mirror, geometric volumes). In order to orient the user on the path and to support the figurability of the space you can use: colors, materials, lights, sounds, and frames. You may not, however, use symbols or signs. B) Make a film of the space. C) Once it has been designed, the space will be visited by other groups for a set period of time. These visitors will then be asked to draw a map of the space as they remember it. On the basis of these mental maps, try to understand the strong and weak points of the designed space through a synthetic map. The project will be evaluated in respect to the fol- lowing categories: uniqueness/originality, formal simplicity, MATTEO VEGETTI 220 AN-ICON  hierarchical continuity, clarity of connections, directional differentiation, scope of vision, awareness of movement. The maps will be collectively discussed. We will try to understand why certain spatial elements were forgotten, misunderstood, and memorized with difficulty. D) Change the space in order to modify it on the basis of the suggestions that emerged from the discussion. Technical specifications There are dozens of 3D and VR software pro- grams specialized in various types of applications. The criteria that guided our choice were the following: possibly free software, so that the students could continue to use it as professionals, simplicity of the interface and usage, simplified workflow, and the capacity to model in 3D and have VR visualization and navigation functions. Based on these criteria, we chose Twinmotion (https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/twinmotion), a soft- ware specifically designed for architecture and interior ar- chitecture based on the Unreal motor; the VR experience is native “out-of-the box,” with features allowing for the real-time modifications of materials, time of day, etc. Fig. 6. The interface is very simple, but on a deep- er level allows for all of the necessary modifications of MATTEO VEGETTI 221 AN-ICON  parameters. It can also simulate sounds in the space when one moves through the VR scene. Twinmotion has an internal library of 3D models (animated and otherwise) that can be added to the scene one is working on in a very intuitive way, but does not allow for the creation of new 3D models from within. The solution to this problem was to use the Twinmotion plugin, which allows for the importation from various 3D modelling programs such as Rhinoceros, Ar- chiCAD, or 3DS Max, of 3D objects with a simple transfer. This solution was ideal insofar as the students were able to use ArchiCAD for 3D modeling and then to synchronize it with Twinmotion for VR and rendering. Also, the main design remained in ArchiCAD, where various sections and plans were designed as usual. The VR viewer market has developed in inter- esting ways in the past few years, moving from solutions with fixed stations (with the viewer connected to the com- puter by cable and external sensors to map the area of the game) to mobile ones, with integrated sensors that function independently, without a cable and the need for an external computer to function. The main need of the project was to have a quick working process with the fewest possible number of intermediate steps. The product chose was the Oculus Quest 2 (https://www.oculus.com/quest-2), a “standalone” viewer with an integrated graphics processor, which can also function as an external viewer for a computer when connected via cable. The price and the image quality were important factors in the final selection. The possibility of using the students’ own lap- top computers was quickly rejected, due to the issue of the computing power of graphics cards, different operating systems, and the installation of necessary programs that use a large amount of disc space (at least 30 GB). To solve these problems, Windows laptops with the latest video cards (Nvidia RTX 3070), with all of the nec- essary programs installed (ArchiCAD, Oculus, Twinmotion) were acquired. MATTEO VEGETTI 222 AN-ICON  Discussion and recommendations The structure of the course proved to be effec- tive and engaging, and gained very positive evaluations from the students, confirming in its own way the positive effects on VR learning already cited.37 The strongest point was the integration of theory and practice, two dimensions that normally are clearly separated and, despite good in- tentions, mutually indifferent. This also signaled a danger and a difficulty: un- fortunately, the results of the course could not be measured by looking at the end outcomes —as would take place in a design workshop— because the design, in our case, was the means and not the end. Furthermore, some of the starting conditions (for example, the position of the door-openings) can seem absurd from an architectural point of view, and are incom- prehensible if one is not aware of the specific educational goals of the course. The attention dedicated by the students to cer- tain environmental, spatial, compositional, formal, percep- tual, and atmospheric factors definitely produced surpris- ing results, which were also appreciated by our architect colleagues, but in order to avoid misunderstandings it was always necessary to strongly reiterate the theoretical/phil- osophical specificity of the course and its objectives. From this point of view, even the spaces that were seemingly less successful from an architectural standpoint could have a positive significance in regard to what interested us: the essential was not in fact in the results in themselves, but in the process that led to them, in the experimental inten- tions of those who made them, and in the documentary traces that recorded and commented on the experience on a theoretical and critical level. The essential, in short, was the degree of awareness developed by students in each phase of the course and their level of understanding 37 F. Kharvari, L.E. Kaiser, “Impact of extended reality on architectural education and the design process.” MATTEO VEGETTI 223 AN-ICON  regarding the ways in which certain spatial factors impact our relationship with space on conscious and unconscious, and cognitive and perceptual levels. However, in view of the Academic Year 2022- 2023, in order to better distinguish the intentions of the course from those of the project work, we decided to mod- ify the course. In particular, we have attempted to simplify the exercises and standardise them so that the results are com- parable. In addition, we placed emphasis on experiment- ing with spatial variants of an element (e.g. the threshold/ door) to allow students to test the most significant per- ceptual changes between the choices made. Finally, we required the students to present the experiments they had tried, a selection of the most interesting results, and writ- ten descriptions of their experiences in a common layout. Redefined in these terms, the first point of the new exer- cise relating to the first unit asks the students to place a gap-threshold in the starting space, to experiment with dif- ferent solutions capable of generating a meaningful spatial experience; to describe in writing the criterion used, the most paradigmatic solutions, and the quality of space de- termined by these solutions. The same method, based on the study of variations, was applied to the composition of the rooms, the shape of the threshold/windows, the posi- tion of the sculpture, etc. Overall, the course has become much more analytical than before, and somewhat more phenomenological. MATTEO VEGETTI 224 AN-ICON  Fig. 7. Fig. 8. MATTEO VEGETTI 225 AN-ICON  Fig. 9. Fig. 10. Fig. 11. Fig. 12. Figg. 9-12. Four pictures related to the exercise on the thresholds: projects of Elmira Rabbani and Gabriele Luciani, Giada Pettenati and Michelle Rosato, Giorgio Ghielmetti e Mattia Buttinoni. Bachelor of Interior Architecture, SUPSI, DACD. MATTEO VEGETTI 226 AN-ICON  Fig. 13. Fig. 14. Fig. 15. Fig. 16. Figg. 13-16: Four pictures related to the exercise on light and colour. Projects of Sandra Burn and Asia Camoia, Elmira Rabbani and Gabriele Luciani, Jessica Corti and Silvia Zehnder. Bachelor of Interior Architecture, SUPSI, DACD. MATTEO VEGETTI 227 AN-ICON Unità 1 es.1 - Diversi modi di inserire un varco/soglia nello spazio spazio analizzato: 3 x 4.5 x 2.5m Dal momento che il nostro parallelepi- pedo è di base rettangolare abbiamo iniziato ad analizzare le sperimen- tazioni in cuiNun varco viene posto sulla facciata più lunga, ossia 4,5 m. Abbiamo sperimentato varie possibilià di soglie utilizzando i seguenti criteri: locazione, altezza e larghezza. Inizialmente abbiamo posto la soglia al centro della facciata e abbiamo osservato come variava la percezione cambiando l’altezza (1.60m, 2.10m, 2.50m) del varco e in seguito cambian- do la larghezza (0.50m, 0.70m, 1m, 1.50m, 2m, 2.50m). Successivamente abbiamo decentrato la soglia, ed infine abbiamo fatto lo stesso procedimento anche per la facciata più corta, os- sia 3m. Dopo aver sviluppato queste svariate possibilità ne abbiamo selezio- nate alcune che secondo noi sono più significative: 1.1: - Apertura minima - Si fa quasi fatica a passare - Non si è invogliati a varcare la soglia - Luogo molto riservato 1.2: -Le senzazioni elencate precedente- mente vengono accentuate decentran- do la soglia 1.3 - Forte collegamento interno-esterno - Luogo arioso 1.4: -Le senzazioni elencate precedente- mente diminuiscono decentrando la soglia V1.5: - Sorge la domanda se si tratta ancora di una soglia 1.7: - Non è vivibile - Quasi non ci si rende conto che si tratta di una vera e propria soglia 1.8: - Altezza standard - In correlazione con i cambiamenti di larghezza sperimentati non influisce granché 1.9: - Direzionalità: dona verticalità allo spazio AIS200 Fenomenologia dello spazio_2022-23 Zoe Togni e Silvia Pedeferri Fig. 17. Unità 1 es.2 - Varianti migliori spazio analizzato: 3 x 4.5 x 2.5m orem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse lobortis urna id velit tempor, in gravida est hen- drerit. Mauris vestibulum facilisis erat sit amet consequat. Curabitur ullamcor- per eros enim, eget interdum dolor feugiat at. Etiam viverra orci ac quam lobortis, ac posuere turpis ultricies. Sed facilisis dictum turpis eget venenatis. Nunc vehicula augue enim, at viverra turpis ornare vel. Phasellus vel mollis augue. Curabitur luctus, erat ut bibendum bibendum, lacus nisl molestie eros, sed cursus turpis magna quis nibh. Sed ac volutpat magna, id mattis risus. Fusce ipsum neque, placerat ac posuere at, sollicitudin in nulla. Maecenas ege- stas nibh ac ultricies laoreet. Integer tristique fermentum neque, sit amet vehicula sapien. Morbi condimentum consequat turpis a rutrum. Proin nec dolor eu purus ultrices rutrum. Ut rutrum semper dictum. Morbi sapien lacus, feugiat sit amet commodo et, feugiat ut felis. Mauris tellus justo, laoreet ut quam in, molestie ultrices sapien. Sed tincidunt, augue ut inter- dum cursus, lorem dui laoreet augue, in semper urna dolor sed tellus. Su- spendisse molestie urna id commodo pretium. Ut non dui tincidunt, dictum justo in, posuere sapien. Sed non est at purus fermentum tincidunt vulputate id libero. Etiam mi ante, rutrum a libero vel, feugiat pharetra sem. In volutpat metus arcu, eget fringilla ipsum soda- les ac. AIS200 Fenomenologia dello spazio_2022-23 Zoe Togni e Silvia Pedeferri Fig. 18. Figg. 17-18. Examples of the layout used in the course 2022-2023 (first point of the Unit 1 exercise). Students: Zoe Togni and Silvia Pedeferri. MATTEO VEGETTI 228 AN-ICON Unità 3 es.G - Fotogrammi video obiettivi Il nostro obiettivo è di creare un’atmo- scelte Ci siamo focalizzate principalmente con tutte le pareti in clacestruzzo, ma sfera che metta in contrapposizione sull’utilizzo di un materiale base, quale questa volta laccate, in modo da dare una sensazione di apertura e leggerez- il calcestruzzo, che abbiamo adopera- ancora l’effetto della leggerezza e del za con una sensazione di chiusura e to in primo luogo, su tutti i pavimenti, freddo, ma creando un climax con la pesantezza, tramite l’utilizzo di texture, e successivamente sule pareti tre prima stanza. coliri e materiali che possano aiutare stanze. La terza stanza, caratterizzata da ad enfatizzare tali emozioni. La prima stanza è caratterizzata da un pareti in calcestruzzo grezzo, invece, pavimento chiaro, con tonalità azzurra- ha come colorazioni un grigio scuro, stre e pareti in alluminio riflettente per che introducono un effetto sinestetico creare un effetto sinestetico che ricor- di pesantezza ed oppressione. dasse il freddo e la leggerezza, qualità L’ultima stanza, invece, è caratterizzata innate del metallo. da un pavimento blu scuro, notte, e da La seconda stanza, invece, è valoriz- pareti e soffitto rivestite da pietra nera. zata da una colorazione, sempre sulle tonalità dell’azzurro, ma più calde, riscontri Attraverso l’utilizzo del visore abbiamo La terza stanza è particolarmente constatato come le le nostre iniziali tangibile e concreta. Crea un netto ipotesi non fossero del tutto errate. contrasto con la stanza precedente, Nella prima stanza, ci si trova in uno trasportandoci in un’atmosfera pesante spazio freddo, quasi fantascientifico e reale. La sensazione che si prova è e irreale, ma a differenza di come quasi di calma e tranquillità. pensavamo, si ha una sensazione di Il contrasto con le due stanze prece- maggiore chiusura rispetto alla secon- dente viene inoltre accentutato dall’ul- da stanza. tima stanza che è buia, opprimente Proseguendo la stanza successiva e quasi soffocante, da non riuscire a ci trasporta in una relatà anch’essa stare al suo interno per troppo tempo. fredda, nella quale si crea un gioco di colori che nasconde il fatto che sia stato utilizzato lo stesso colore su tutte le pareti. AIS200 Fenomenologia dello spazio_2022-23 Anna Bolla e Camilla Tosi Fig. 19. Fig. 19. Examples of the layout used in the course 2022-2023 (Unit 3, synoptic view of tested variants). Students: Anna Bolla e Camilla Tosi. MATTEO VEGETTI 229 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18166

Phenomenology of space and virtual reality. An experimental course for students by Matteo Vegetti in architecture Phenomenology Virtual reality Achitecture Philosophy Education Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Phenomenology of space and virtual reality. An experimental course for students in architecture MATTEO VEGETTI, Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana, Università della Svizzera Italiana – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5149-8609 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18166 Abstract The paper presents the theoretical assumptions and the way of conducting an experimental course on the Phenom- enology of Space designed for architects and interior designers. The course made use of virtual reality to allow stu- dents to directly experience the perceptive and cognitive effects induced by the forms of space, colour, the texture of materials, and light. Virtual reality was also the medium that made it pos- sible to translate certain philosophical concepts related to the phenomenology of space into an experiential and applicative field close to the sensitivity and spatial culture of the designers. The themes addressed gave rise to a progressive development that allowed students to develop an increasingly complex project and experiment with increasingly complex is- sues. The course began with the phenomenology of thresholds, and continued with the analysis of field and synesthesia, the phenomenology of atmospheres, and the analysis of orienta- tion and mind maps. In each of these areas of research and experimentation, the common thread remained the relationship between the body and space. The article also presents the ex- ercises proposed to the students and an overall assessment of the teaching experience. Keywords Phenomenology Virtual reality Achitecture Philosophy Education To quote this essay: M. Vegetti, “Phenomenology of space and virtual reality. An experimental course for students in architecture,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 184- 229, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18166 MATTEO VEGETTI 184 AN-ICON  Presentation of the course Virtual reality (VR) holds educational potential of great interest for all disciplines that deal with spatiali- ty, and even more for those, like architecture, that have a privileged relationship with lived space, that is to say with the interaction between the body and its environment. I at- tempted to demonstrate this thesis through the conception and development of a course on Phenomenology of space that makes use of virtual reality to study the perceptual effects of architectural design. The course began as a research project funded by an internal call for proposals in the Department of en- vironments, construction, and design of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUP- SI-DACD, Mendrisio, Switzerland) dedicated to digitization. From the outset, its implementation required the formation of a small interdisciplinary research team. It included, alongside myself, philosopher and professor of spatial theory Pietro Vitali (architect and professor of the degree course in inte- rior architecture), Matteo Moriani (architect and assistant for the course developed by this project), and Marco Lurati (interaction designer and lecturer). In contrast to what often occurs, the collaboration between different areas of exper- tise in our case had a material character. The task of taking care of the content and educational aims of the course fell to me, as philosopher, while that of dealing with questions related to more strictly architectural aspects fell to the de- signers, who then guided the students in their design work. The interaction designer, finally, had the task not only of making the course possible through the development of the technology and the necessary programming, but also of teaching students how to carry out design in VR and the relevant programs (Twinmotion in particular). As is clear, no member of the working group could have proceeded without the aid of the others. The final goal was to create a course in phenomenology applied to architecture with the help of Oculus Quest 2 headsets. In other words, rather than just learning theories, the students would need to sharpen their MATTEO VEGETTI 185 AN-ICON  spatial sensibility by experimenting with these theories in a virtual environment. The challenge was thus double: on one hand to offer a course on applied philosophy, and on the other to introduce virtual reality into a theoretical course, making it the tool for the application of theory. In addition to this, in an almost unconscious, seemingly instrumental way, the students would need to learn sophisticated programming languages, a skill that is also useful from a professional standpoint. Background Virtual Reality has recently emerged in archi- tecture and the arts as novel means for visualizing different design solutions and for building up the design model and its virtual environment. Similar to these applications, VR is commonly used in architectural education in the design process, as it provides the designer with an image to create the spatial and topological relationships of a project. Although the use of VR for teaching purposes is not yet widespread in archi- tecture faculties (in Europe at least), its pedagogical effec- tiveness has been clearly documented.1 Several studies on the pedagogical function of VR in architectural studies have shown that the use of VR increases the awareness of de- signer during designing in terms of the structural properties and component assembly of a structural system,2 helps stu- dents’ way of thinking, critical thinking, and problem-solv- ing activities,3 creates the possibility to “feel like being in the place,”4 strengthens the memory and awareness of the 1 F. Kharvari, L.E. Kaiser, “Impact of extended reality on architectural education and the design process,” Automation in Construction 141 (2022): 1-19, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. autcon.2022.104393. 2 W.A. Abdelhameed, “Virtual reality in architectural design studios: a case of studying structure and construction,” Procedia Computer Science 25 (2013): 220-230, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.procs.2013.11.027. 3 F. Kharvari, L.E. Kaiser, “Impact of extended reality on architectural education and the design process.” 4 T. Chandrasekera, K. Fernando, L. Puig, “Effect of degrees of freedom on the sense of presence generated by virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display systems: a case study on the use of VR in early design studios,” Journal of Educational Technology Systems 47, no.4 (2019): 513-522. MATTEO VEGETTI 186 AN-ICON  spatial configuration,5 augments “spatial abilities” in stu- dents,6 trains the capacity to switch naturally from a planar representation of space to a 3D representation of the same space.7 To cite a concrete experience, Johan Bettum, pro- fessor of architecture at the Städelschule, has used virtual reality in the master degree studio Architecture and Aes- thetic Practice at Städelschule Architecture Class (Frank- furt) as a laboratory for spatial inquiries in relation to sub- jective experience, the construction of reality and the role of images in regimes of representation. These experiments consisted in designing immersive environments where ar- chitecture has been explored through the computerized representation of forms and spaces. According to the inten- tions of the course, this digitally produced realm of images supplemented and often supplanted the traditional role of drawing in the contemporary design process.8 A second research experiment on the integration of VR in the cur- riculum at architecture schools, took place at the College of Architecture and Planning (CAP) of Ball State University. For three years in a row, the CAP created a design virtual environment for 2nd year students, making use of an HMD (Head Mounted Display). The CAP VR Environment aimed to support the actual architectural design process, therefore aiding the process of learning how to design, rather than limiting its use as a visualization tool. In the practical terms, the immersive simulation of an actual design project (the lobby of a small hotel) was intended to enable students to recreate the architectural characteristics of the space, elic- iting an appraisal of their architectural spatial experience. According to the author, the ability to navigate through 5 A. Angulo, “Rediscovering virtual reality in the education of architectural design: the immersive simulation of spatial experience,” Ambiences. Environment Sensible, Architecture et Espace Urbain 1 (2015): 1-23, https://doi.org/10.4000/ambiances.594. 6 T. Chandrasekera, S.Y. Yoon, “Adopting augmented reality in design communication: focusing on improving spatial abilities,” The International Journal of Architectonics, Spatial and Environmental Design 9, no.1 (2015): 1-14, http://dx.doi.org/10.18848/2325-1662/CGP/ v09i01/38384; M. Schnabel, T. Kvan, E. Kruijff, D. Donath, “The first virtual environment design studio,” 19th eCAADe Conference Proceedings. Helsinki (2001): 394-400. 7 J. Milovanovic, G. Moreau, D. Siret, F. Miguet, “Virtual and augmented reality in architectural design and education. An immersive multimodal platform to support architectural pedagogy,” 17th International Conference, CAAD Futures 2017, Istanbul, Turkey. 8 J. Bettum, Architecture, Futurability and the Untimely (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022). MATTEO VEGETTI 187 AN-ICON  the simulated lobbies turned out to be key to capture the architectural spatial experience and perceive the aesthetic emotion and/or symbolic meaning embedded in the proj- ects.9 A further type of studies attempted to demon- strate, through an experimental design that also involved students from a design class at the Milan Polytechnic, the possibility of recreating complex spatial qualities through VR, for example investigating how multisensoriality (scent in particular) affects the realism of the experience contrib- uting to increase the users’ sense of presence in the virtual environment.10 Although in some ways apparently akin to the case studies cited, it must be borne in mind that the course we experimented with differs first and foremost from them for the basic reason that it does not fall within the scope of architecture, but of philosophy applied to space (a phi- losophy with a phenomenological orientation). The aim of the pedagogical experiments conducted is therefore not related to design, but to the understanding of the body- space relationship, with a specific focus on the modalities of sensory perception. In other words, thanks to virtual re- ality, the students were able to experiment in various ways, according to a number of controlled possibilities, how the manipulation of certain variables (positions of openings, colors, scales, relationships between objects in space, arti- ficial lights, sequences of spaces) impact the spatial expe- rience on a perceptive and cognitive level. The aim was not to obtain a realistic representation of space, nor was it to learn about and visualize certain spaces and construction processes through VR. The aim was rather to verify with one’s own (virtual) body the perceptual effects induced by 9 A. Angulo, “Rediscovering virtual reality in the education of architectural design: the immersive simulation of spatial experience.” 10 M. Carulli, M. Bordegoni, U. Cugini, “Integrating scents simulation in virtual reality multisensory environment for industrial products evaluation,” Computer-Aided Design & Applications 13, no. 3 (2016): 320-328, https://doi.org/10.1080/16864360.2015.1114390. MATTEO VEGETTI 188 AN-ICON  certain design choices, and to develop a method to derive generalizable knowledge from experience. Although the aforementioned studies have provided the course with useful information and a set of important examples regarding the didactic use of VR in architecture, there is - to the best of my knowledge - no previous use of VR in phenomenology of space. Theoretical framework Phenomenology is undoubtedly the theoret- ical orientation most closely related to the intelligence of architects, who are accustomed to thinking about space “live,” so to speak. Among the characteristic abilities of the architect are the capacity to consider the relationship between spaces and bodies, to imagine the atmosphere of environments and the way in which shape, color, and spatial scale influence our experience of them, and to or- ganize solids and voids, exteriors and interiors, the visible and the invisible, light and shadow, volumes and matter, as though they were elements of an aesthetically expressed spatial language. It is precisely this sort of sensibility that the course sought to thematically develop, strengthening students’ awareness of and ability to design perceptual (i.e., not only spatial) environments imbued with cognitive and emotional meanings. To best realize the desired encounter between philosophy and architecture in this pre-categor- ical level of spatial experience, I found it useful to refer to phenomenology broadly defined, broadly enough to include Gestalt psychology and some elements of behaviorist psy- chology. Before giving a synopsis of the thematic contents of the course, it will be necessary to evaluate the contribu- tion that virtual reality can offer to the encounter between phenomenology and architecture, mediating between their languages. VR’s potential consists in its particular quali- ties as an immersive medium, or more specifically in its MATTEO VEGETTI 189 AN-ICON  capacity to insert perception into an immaterial, interactive, and programmable Umwelt. The first aspect is perhaps the most important. If there is a single quality that the spatial intelligence of the architect must necessarily develop during the course of study, it lies in the capacity to move from an understand- ing of space based on plans—made up of lines, symbols, numbers, and so on—to a subjective understanding, ideally placed in the space that those signs represent abstractly. The passage from an objective and external gaze (the one that reads the plan) to an internal, embodied one, capable of bringing the signs to life in a volumetric space and cor- porealizing them, is normally entrusted to the imagination. But given the complexity of this mental operation, it is al- ways necessary to turn to a plurality of media: sketches, models, photographs of the models taken from the inside, rendering, etc. None of these tools, however, is capable of physically including the subject, who thus continues to have a distanced and disembodied understanding of space. Given the importance of the role that the body plays in spatial experience, it is clear that the value of virtual reality lies in the possibility of transferring the subject inside of the space of representation, in such a way that allows them to have a direct, aesthetic, and even synesthetic experience. Thanks to VR, the architect can jump in and out of the rep- resentation: he or she can “enter the plan,” making it into an immersive experience, and then exit, modify the design on the basis of this experience, and finally return to the virtual space to check the outcome of the operation. This move- ment in and out of the space of representation provides the intelligence of the architect with a new medium; this is not, however, virtual reality, but rather his or her own body as an “analogical” tool, one that provides an analog to em- bodied sensory experience. On the one hand, virtual space replicates the intentional structure that the world presents to us: space moves with me, shows itself and hides itself in relation to my gaze, and declares its secondary qualities (for example, showing itself to be narrow and oppressive, MATTEO VEGETTI 190 AN-ICON  or disorienting —all qualities that are related to a certain kind of subjective experience.). On the other hand, even if they are “embedded” in a virtual environment, the subjects still maintain an interior distance, a remainder of objectiv- ity; they know that they are in a representation, just like at every moment they know that their own body is only an analogon of the sentient one, which allows them to have a mediated, self-observed experience, and to register its effects. If virtual space is a distant relative of the sketchpad, the body that explores virtual space is a distant relative of the pencil that draws in the sketchpad, or more precisely of the manual intelligence involved in that experience. The risk of virtual reality causing the architect to lose an authentic relationship to space, or to “authentic space,” is, when taken from this point of view, less serious than one might fear—and all the more so due to the fact that VR does not by any means claim to substitute itself for the traditional forms of mediation, translation, and repre- sentation of space, but rather to integrate them into its own capabilities. Furthermore, VR remediates within itself many media to which we have long been accustomed, from the drawing pad to the cinema; from this perspective, rather than eliminating all mediation, it entails a deep and layered media culture. This is also confirmed by the educational usage of VR, given that in order to adequately use it, the students will necessarily continue to move through the rep- resentational languages of different media (from manual design to CAD, as well as the photos and films that can be made within virtual reality). They can also share their visual experience externally, since what they see within the virtual environment can be simultaneously projected on a screen connected to a projector. This, if we consider it closely, is no small thing. Two separate and autonomous (although co-present) environments—two different parallel Umwel- ten—can be connected in real time. Making it possible to show the outside what one sees as one sees it, VR makes ocular experience shareable, albeit through two different media (on one hand the projected film and on the oth- er the immersive reality.) The VR viewer transforms vision MATTEO VEGETTI 191 AN-ICON  into a full-fledged medium: it transmits, communicates to the outside, shows, and makes what it manifests public in real time. The virtual experience is, in effect, “replicant” by nature. In it, technological reproducibility has now caught up with the perceptual experience linked with one’s own body: today sight, tomorrow touch, and then who knows. The alienation of one’s own body, if we can call it such, may have slightly disturbing aspects for those who want to project it into dystopian future scenarios, but within the context of more modest educational ambitions, it holds enormous potential, given that it makes the lived experiences of others shareable and evaluable. As will by now be clear, the course was nothing like a normal design workshop, nor did it aspire to be. It was more like a virtual gymnasium where, through a series of guided experiments, the perceptual and psychological dimensions of space were exercised; a gymnasium that allowed for the easy modification of space and the experimental verification of its effects. Aims of the program To be concise, the use of virtual reality in the architectural context can be summarized in four points. These, as we will see, were developed in the course through a series of exercises. 1) VR allows for the modification of space at will, and for the verification of its effects on perceptual, emotion- al, and cognitive levels (depending on what one is interested in determining) in an immersive environment. For example, the height of a ceiling is, from one point of view, objective and mathematical, identical in any space. It is what it is, regardless of other spatial vari- ables like color and depth. Within the perceptual dimen- sion, however, things proceed very differently, since all of these variables intertwine and influence one another in a manner so clear that to define it as subjective would be misleading. The depth of space modifies the perception of MATTEO VEGETTI 192 AN-ICON  height in direct proportion to its increase. This can easily be experienced in virtual reality precisely because it only applies to a sentient body, which on paper does not ex- ist. Experiments of this type can examine the relationship between color and spatial perception, the modification of an environment through light (or shadows) depending on the hour of the day or the season, the perception of one’s center of balance in space, the relationship between differ- ent scales, the relationship between different volumes and shapes, synesthesia, and many other analogous situations. VR offers the opportunity to examine all of these aspects not only through vision, but also from a practical point of view, that is to say, through the study of the behav- ior of the users that interact with the organization of a given space: how they move, what they understand, what they remember, and how they describe a certain environment. All of this provides a way to test design solutions (whether realistic or experimental), or to verify theories developed in the existing literature. 2) VR allows for the implementation of phenom- enological variations and the experiencing of their effects on different levels: aesthetic, psychological, ontological. The use of phenomenological variation within the context of the project meant the possibility of varying one or two special elements, altering in a controlled way their position, breadth, depth, and other characteristics. One can, for example, modify the perception and geometry of an entire environment by changing where the entryway is located, thus deforming the environment in relation to the observer’s center. Depending on the breadth or depth of the entry, the experience of entering, and of the relationship between outside and inside, is modified. Depending where the two entries in a room are located—given that these es- tablish between themselves, on a perceptual level, a recip- rocal connection, a sort of invisible corridor—space will be “sliced” by that connection in different ways, redistributing MATTEO VEGETTI 193 AN-ICON  internal space and generating areas (compartments) of vari- able shapes and dimensions. This method requires experimenting with a lim- ited and controlled number of variations, and that the results be recorded from a perceptual and even ontological point of view. The dimensions of a window can be varied in such a way as to produce significant aesthetic discontinuities, but beyond a certain threshold of size the window changes in nature, becoming, for example, a glass door (if it alludes to the possibility of transit, taking on the potentiality of an opening-threshold), or a glass wall, where wall and window meet, each giving up one of its intrinsic potentialities (in the case of the wall, the possibility of visually separating spaces, and in the case of the window, that of connecting an inside to an outside atmosphere). The exercise of variation can take on many forms, all useful for testing a wide range of spatial effects with aesthetic, symbolic, or even ontological significance. To give a final example, which highlights the possibilities of VR, we might think of the effect of all of the possible variations applied to the height of a small room, from the minimum or even insufficient measurement to a generous one, say of 3 meters, up to a decidedly out of scale measurement of 10 or 20 meters. This modification allows for the discovery through intuitive evidence of the discontinuous relationship between stimulus and percep- tion, or of the differential thresholds that punctuate the qualitative passage from one psychophysical condition to another (claustrophobic, comfortable, roomy, oppressive, etc.). The qualitative thresholds can also cause a change in the sense of space itself. For instance, a space in which the ceiling is too low will not be perceived as inhabitable. Habitability is a spatial quality that requires a certain min- imum height, even if it is still a claustrophobic one. But if one exceeds this measurement greatly, one enters into a new context of meaning, for example that of an artistic installation, and space takes on a poetic significance that it did not have before. But this is not all. The exercise of phenomenological variation calls for the capacity to de- scribe, or better, to verbalize lived experience, developing MATTEO VEGETTI 194 AN-ICON  an appropriate (specific), effective (figurative), and meaning- ful (persuasive) language. From perception to expression: a continuous two-way transit that helps students develop a degree of spatial awareness that they do not normally pos- sess. Naturally, the exercise becomes progressively more complex depending on the number of variables one choos- es to introduce. The preceding case, for example, could be made much more complex simply with the introduction of one further variable, such as materials (say, concrete or word) or the presence of a light source (for example, an opening onto a natural light source from above). 3) VR allows for the firsthand study of relationships between form and meaning. Here, I turn to the field of Gestalt psychology, and more particularly to the possibility of simulating and studying phenomena of orientation and mental maps (at the base of which lie the tools of the psychology of shapes). To once again in this case offer some examples, one might think of virtual space as a site in which to experiment with different strategies for functionally dividing up space, for grouping families of objects on the basis of the principles of “figural unification,” for generating rhythms, for anticipat- ing the sense of space (directions and meanings), and for inducing motor responses. Within this field of experimenta- tion also lies the possibility of giving symbolic significance to a certain element of the environment (for example, the main entrance, the most important painting, the state room, etc.) as well as that of articulating in various modes the re- lationship between voids and solids, distances, or objects with different shapes and sizes. 4) VR allows for experimentation with the consti- tutive factors of atmospheres. This fourth point is the result of the interac- tion between all of the preceding spatial components and their relative interactions, and thus cannot but appear last. Experimentation with the constitutive factors of the atmo- sphere becomes explicit when attention is shifted to the MATTEO VEGETTI 195 AN-ICON  holistic aspects of the environment, the emotional impact that the space has on us, and the moment of encounter with an atmosphere and the way it can be an object of design. The usefulness of virtual reality in respect to the phenomenological analysis of atmospheres is clear: pre- cisely because an atmosphere is in itself an immersive and synesthetic phenomenon, it can only be observed through bodily presence. One is always inside an atmosphere, to the point that the very presence of a certain atmospheric connotation defines, when perceived, the confines of an interior (the interior of a work of architecture, of a certain city or neighborhood, or of a particular culture, etc.). VR thus shows itself to be extremely effective as a tool for the analysis of the psychological aspects of atmosphere, fa- cilitating an applied atmospherology. The various aspects that comprise the atmosphere of a place, that is to say its social and emotional characteristics, can become the ob- ject of critical analysis and can be used for the revision of designs. Within this field of experimentation there is also the possibility of observing space from any desired perspective and of moving, even if in a limited way, in a manner that unites visual and synesthetic experience. In addition, VR offers the possibility of introduc- ing natural sounds, background noises (for example, chatter, whose intensity depends on the number of people that we decide to put into the space), sounds of footsteps (which change depending on the surface being tread upon), and music (which can be diffused into space from a preselected source). It is not yet possible, however, to introduce tactile experiences, while olfactory ones are difficult to manage and a bit artificial. Structure of the course and workflow The course took place during the first semester of the 2022 academic year, and was divided into 12 lessons, each lasting an entire day. Excluding the first introductory lesson and the last one, dedicated to the presentation of final exercises, MATTEO VEGETTI 196 AN-ICON  five units were offered to the students, each one compris- ing two lessons. Each unit dealt with a different theme, but always built on the themes discussed in the preceding units. The course thus followed a gradual development through units. The typical organization of the units followed this order: a theoretical lecture (Matteo Vegetti); presentation of the exercise; discussion; presentation of programing tools and the use of Twinmotion for the given exercise (Marco Lurati); design work by students under the guidance of the course assistant (the architect Matteo Moriani, with the invaluable volunteer contribution of the interior architect Victoria Pham). Each unit was concluded the afternoon of the second lesson with a group review of the exercises. Since these were carried out by students in pairs, the pre- sentations took place as follows: one student explained the design choices and the outcomes of the experimentation, while the other, from within the virtual space, showed the spaces in question (thanks to a projector connected to the Oculus, or rather to the computer supporting it). Each pair of students worked on a space of a different scale (2.5x2.5; 5x5; 10x10; 20x20; 2.5x5; 5x10; 10x20). In this manner, the phenomenologically significant issue of scale was indirectly present throughout the course, presenting numerous opportunities for reflection. Given that the same exact exercise presented difficulties of different types de- pending on the scale, each group of students necessarily had to offer a different design solution. The differences be- tween scales were of course also evident in the exercises based on variations. In what follows I offer a descriptive brief of the subjects dealt with in each unit and in the corresponding exercises. The latter held a fundamental importance in the overall economy of the course, given that they connected theory with practice and formed an educational pathway that began from a few basic elements and then became progressively richer and more complex. MATTEO VEGETTI 197 AN-ICON  INTRODUCTION and UNIT 1 “I ask a young student: how would you make a door? With what dimensions? Where would you place it? In which corner of the room would you have it open? Do you understand that these different solutions are the are the very basis of architecture? Depending on the way that one enters into an apartment, on where doors are located in the walls, you feel very different sensations, and the wall that you that you drill likewise takes on very different charac- teristics. You then feel that this is architecture.”11 The first introductory lesson of the course dealt with the relationship between body and space, bringing to light some of the fundamental issues in Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger’s phenomenological approaches.12 Through the definition of these concepts and the relationship between them (space as correlate of the activity of a living body, as environment, as site, as a felt, perceived, lived space, in- vested with meanings), the course established a theoretical basis sufficient for understanding its aims. Then, a first approach to virtual reality, and a first intuitive test of the ideas learned, was carried out through the use of the Gravity Sketch program, which of- fers its users the possibility of creating space through the movements of their hands, and to choose from a vast rep- ertoire of creative resources (lines, shapes, surfaces, colors, materials, transparencies, etc.). Each pair of students ran- domly selected an aesthetic/perceptual theme (unknown to the others) to give form to. Once a pair of students created theirs in VR, the rest of the class was invited to visit it and provide a brief description of it. Based on the comments received, it was easy to tell if the students had succeeded 11 Le Corbusier, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning (1930) (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2015). 12 M. Heidegger, M. Corpo e spazio (1964), trans. F. Bolino (Genova: Il Melangolo, 2000); M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), trans. D. Landes (Abingdon-New York: Routledge, 2012). MATTEO VEGETTI 198 AN-ICON  in conveying the theme that they were tasked with inter- preting spatially. In a small way, this first contact with virtual reality reproduced the characteristic transposition of theo- retical themes into an “applied” dimension that would char- acterize the course as a whole. Most importantly, Gravity Sketch is an effective tool for becoming familiar with VR, and more particularly with the possible functions offered by the Oculus. UNIT 1 - Phenomenology of thresholds The first unit was dedicated to the theme of thresholds, or rather to the diverse configurations of the divide between interior and exterior that make the experi- ence of space as a place possible (the possibility of “en- tering” or accessing that only the crossing of a threshold allows). Experimenting with the different thresholds that comprise space and mastering their rhetorical significance means knowing how to articulate space like a complex text, full of caesuras, connections, leaps, transitions, and transformations. Each threshold represents a critical point in space because it is called upon not only to manage the different practical and symbolic functions of the environ- ment, but also the relationship between seemingly irrecon- cilable opposites: interior and exterior, public and private, the familiar and the foreign, the inside and the outside. The phenomenology of thresholds thus aimed to show through numerous examples how the threshold could be designed and conceived of in different ways depending on goals and intentions (aesthetic, symbolic, practical). The lesson took its impetus from an anthropo- logical reflection on the significance of the threshold/door, 13 to then move towards more philosophical14 and phenom- enological15 questions. Here, as elsewhere, Ching’s im- 13 J. Rykwert, The Idea of a Town (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1988). 14 G. Simmel, “Bridge and door,” Theory, Culture & Society 11 (1994): 5-10. 15 P. V. Meiss, De la forme au lieu (Lausanne: Presses polytechinques et universitaires, 1986); A. Moles, E. Rohmer, Psychologie de l’espace (Paris: Casterman, 1998). MATTEO VEGETTI 199 AN-ICON  ages and insightful observations were very useful in ac- companying the discussion.16 The lesson was also the occasion to thematize the threshold between “front” and “back,” between “stage” and “backstage,” or rather between the public and private dimension, through a series of different frames. Here, I use the language of Erving Goffman to allude to the importance of the frame in defining, on the basis of its specific material or formal qualities, the type of situated social situation that one wishes to obtain: the degree of visibility, of separation, of privacy (or of porosity, contamination, or transparency) that one wants to establish between the respective domains of “front” and “back” in order to strengthen or weaken the public valence of the place and the relationships that take place there.17 Expected outcomes: ■ Understanding the symbolic value of the entering a space and the way in which the threshold manages the relationship between interior and exterior. ■ Experimenting with the perceptual effects generated by the different positioning of a door-opening in the same identical space. ■ Experimenting with the connection that is created between two door-openings within the same space, and the modification of spatial relationships that this connection brings about. ■ Understanding the significance of the center as what or- ganizes space and its distortions. ■ Understanding the language of the window-opening through different typologies. ■ Experimenting with the concept of “frame.” ■ Analyzing the way in which an object (in this case, a work of art) reacts to space based on its position, size, relationship to light, and to its own “aura.” 16 F.D.K. Ching, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2015). 17 E. Goffman, Behavior in Public Places (New York: Free Press, 1966); and Interaction Ritual (New York: Pantheon, 1982) MATTEO VEGETTI 200 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Beyond a certain limit, an opening ceases to be an enclosed area and becomes a dominating element: a transparent plane bordered by a frame. From F.D.K. Ching, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order (Hoboken: Wiley, 2015). Fig. 2. An opening situated on the plane of a wall will appear to be a luminous form against a contrasting background. If it is centered on the plane, the opening will appear stable and will visually organize the surface around it. If it is decentered, it will create a level of visual tension with the sides of the plane towards which it has been moved. From F.D.K. Ching, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order. MATTEO VEGETTI 201 AN-ICON  Exercise Each pair of students works on a space of dif- ferent scale, with a square or rectangular base (2.5x2.5; 5x5; 10x10; 20x20; 2.5x5; 5x10; 10x20). A) Create three spaces with equal dimensions. In one of these spaces, place a door-opening in three differ- ent positions, and note how the space changes perceptu- ally, writing a description of it from within the virtual space. B) For each of the three spaces, create two door-openings placed in different ways (but on the same wall). Describe the result: how is space modified? Where is the center? C) Place a rug of shape, dimension, and mate- rial of your choice in each space. D) Place a window-opening in each space. The openings must be central, zenithal, and angular (size and shape are up to you). E) Modify the dimensions and shape of the window-openings, increasing their width or height freely. Describe the result. F) Place into one single space a combination of four of the entry-doors or windows created earlier (4 total: this could be 2 doors and 2 windows or 3 doors and 1 window, etc.) Describe the result. G) Connect in a sequence four of the spaces created earlier. Give these environments a hierarchy and connect them with a path that joins the entrance and the exit. Design the main entrance into the space from a rhe- torical standpoint. Try to convey the hierarchy between different environments through the use of different kinds of thresholds. The thresholds must anticipate the sense of the space being entered, and must convey the relation- ship between the spaces that they connect (you can use frames, stairs, boxes, ramps, partitions, false ceilings, dif- ferent thicknesses for the walls, and the form and dimen- sions of the thresholds can be modified. In this phase, the MATTEO VEGETTI 202 AN-ICON  threshold can become a volume). You may not, however, use any elements of décor. H) Place a sculpture in one of the environments in such a way as to enhance the latter. I) Design a threshold/separation (a frame) that creates a private space within one of the rooms that you have already made. J) Make a 30-second VR film of these environ- ments and describe the created space (2000 words). The description should be written subjectively (“I advance and see on my right…;” “the light from the window is illuminat- ing the threshold that I am about to cross…”) K) Take 3 photos of the interior that illustrate the design choices (that is, representative views of the interior space generated through experimental solutions.) UNIT 2 - The power of the field “By emphasizing the generated field in addition to the architectural object, one raises once more the problem of space, but in different terms by giving the concept a different value. In traditional criti- cism space is a homogeneous structure, a kind of counterform to the mural envelope, indifferent to the lighting conditions and to its position in relation to the buildings, whereas the notion of field stresses the continuous variability of what surrounds the archi- tectural structures.”18 The second unit, which clarified some of the theoretical elements already present in the first, analyzed the principles of field theory, or better, an ensemble of the- ories based on the shared presupposition that a space occupied by volumes does not coincide with their physical 18 P.P. Portoghesi, cited in R. Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form (1977) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). MATTEO VEGETTI 203 AN-ICON  space, but extends beyond it, without however being in- dependent of the originating form.19 The field thus coincides not with the borders within which everything is enclosed, but with a certain ar- rangement of forces and vectors acting in space. Space thus becomes an active and reactive environment: a field of psycho/physical forces. Every volume present in the field, by virtue of its mass and its shape(s), changes the field’s appearance. The field generated through design deeply affects our perceptual schemas through the play of forces that act within it. But within the concept of field, the concept of center, already encountered in the previous unit, plays a fundamental role. While geometrically a center is simply a point, perceptually it extends as far as the conditions of stability that it is based on will permit. Of course, the center may or may not be indicated. In architecture, it can be indicated (or suggested) by a ceiling lamp, a mobile, a decoration, or a mosaic. Or, it can be an empty space at the center of two diagonals or of the geometry dictated by the positions of the thresholds. Normally, however, there are multiple centers at work in each field, each of which attempts to prevail over the others. The lesson thus brought attention to the problem of the interaction between fields of different shapes and strengths, suggesting the possibility of making corrections to one’s designs by working on the centers, the directions of the volumes that generate the field, or their distance from one another. This illustrates the concept, well known to phe- nomenology and cognitive psychology, that space is born as the relationship between objects. On the basis of this idea, shifting attention from the shapes of objects and their interaction to the void that separates them, the lesson then also discussed the concept of “interspace,” and along with it the fundamental law of attraction-repulsion: “Objects that look ‘too close’ to each other display mutual repulsion: they want to be moved apart. At a somewhat greater distance 19 R. Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form; P.P. Portoghesi, V.G. Gigliotti, “Ricerche sulla centralità. Progetti dello studio di Porta Pinciana,” Controspazio 6 (1971); A. Marcolli, Teoria del campo (Firenze: Sansoni, 1971) and Teoria del campo 2 (Firenze: Sansoni, 1978). MATTEO VEGETTI 204 AN-ICON  the interval may look just right or the objects may seem to attract each other.”20 The final theme concerned the typical fields of basic shapes such as the circle, triangle, and square. This discussion was then applied to bidimensionally-perceived spatial forms, such as the shape of the window in respect to the wall in which it is placed. Finally, it bears noting in relation to point “C” of this unit’s exercise that VR does not exclude interaction with physical objects. Virtual and material reality can in fact overlap, generating a significant enhancement of spatial experience. In the present case, it was sufficient to place a real table where the virtual table designed by the students was, in order to allow a group of four people to share the same situation from different perspectives. The members of the group sat around the same virtual table (sharing the same design simultaneously in multiple Oculus viewers), but could at the same time establish a tactile relationship with the table around which they were seated in real space. The lesson made wide use of examples taken from architecture as well as city planning in order to explain how field theory adapts to each scale. 20 R. Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form. MATTEO VEGETTI 205 AN-ICON  Expected outcomes: ■ Understanding and experimenting with the influence of the center and the relationship between centers. ■ Perceptually experimenting with the field in terms of scope and shape of irradiation, as well as the relationship between fields in terms of interference, conflict, or harmony. ■ Perceiving the language of voids in relation to solids in terms of visual balance and variable density (compression and decompression of the spaces between elements). ■ Testing the symbolic/perceptual power of fire (that of a fireplace) in establishing a center and a space. ■ Observing the dynamics of the field together with the other students, developing a suitable language. ■ Putting the dynamics of the fields into the form of a graphic representation. P. Portoghesi, Field Theory. Space as a system of places, 1974. MATTEO VEGETTI 206 AN-ICON  Fig. 4. Modification of forces internal to a rectangular field based on the positioning of the door-openings. From P. V. Meiss, De la forme au lieu (Lausanne: Presses polytechinques et universitaires, 1986). MATTEO VEGETTI 207 AN-ICON  Fig. 5. “Irraggiamento spaziale.” Exercise Beginning from the final state of the work un- dertaken in the previous exercises, inserting objects and volumes in space, we will analyze the force fields that these create. A) Begin the exercise by observing and analyz- ing the space already created on the basis of field theory. B) Among the four volumes from the previous exercise, we have one that already contains the sculpture. In the three remaining, place: a) A fireplace and a table for 4 people b) 5 monochrome volumes (1 cylindrical, 1 cubic of 1x1, 2 parallelepipeds of 1x1x2, and a column): create a harmonious field out of these volumes, which may not touch the wall (the volumes can be sized in respect to MATTEO VEGETTI 208 AN-ICON  the space that hosts them). Describe the fields that you think you have generated. c) In the third room, place a painting and a mirror on one of the walls. C) Sit in a group of four at the table, and to- gether analyze the space with the fireplace from inside of the simulation. Improve the previous solutions by changing the placement of the volumes, or try an alternative solution. D) Now, enter the space with the geometrical volumes and analyze the field/fields generated. Improve the previous solutions by changing the position of the volumes, or try an alternative solution. E) Analyze how the spaces change at different hours of the day due to natural light and shadows. Create a film of 30 seconds, based on a narrative strategy, that shows how the fields are modified by natural light at differ- ent times of the day. Walk through the entire space, back and forth, at three different times of day: morning, afternoon, and twilight. F) Now, enter into the space with the geomet- rical volumes and analyze the field/fields generated. Im- prove the previous solutions by changing the position of the volumes, or try an alternative solution. G) From inside the space, take three photo- graphs representative of the perceptual/visual experience of the field. H) Extract the building plan from Archicad (1/100) and draw the fields, centers, and vectors that you think you have generated within the space. UNIT 3 - Multisensoriality and synesthesia “...every architectural setting has its auditive, haptic, olfactory, and even hidden gustatory qualities, and those properties give the visual percept its sense of fullness and life. Regardless of the immediate character of visual perception, paradoxically we have already unconsciously touched a surface before we become aware MATTEO VEGETTI 209 AN-ICON of its visual characteristics; we understand its texture, hardness, temperature, moisture instantaneously.” 21 The third unit was carried out in collaboration with Dr. Fabrizia Bandi, researcher in the “AN-ICON” group led by Andrea Pinotti, who was a guest of the course thanks to the SEMP international exchange program. The aim of the unit was to guide students to the discovery of the uni- verse of synesthetic effects attributable to sight and hearing. Fabrizia Bandi, an expert in the thought of Mikel Dufrenne, introduced the students to elements relating to synesthesia in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Pal- lasmaa, and Dufrenne.22 The lesson insisted on the im- portance of understanding the multisensorial character of perception since, whether one likes it or not, space com- municates with bodies in this way, through the intertwining of different perceptual faculties. Synaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the center of gravity of expe- rience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel, in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the physicist conceives it, what we are to see, hear and feel . . . The senses intercommunicate by opening on to the structure of the thing. One sees the hardness and brittleness of glass, and when, with a tinkling sound, it breaks, this sound is conveyed by the visible glass. One sees the springiness of steel, the ductility of red-hot steel, the hardness of a plane blade, the softness of shavings.23 By relativizing the predominance of sight in the structure of perception, the theorists of synesthesia invite us to discover the persistence of “unauthorized” sensory registers (like sound and temperature in colors, or touch in something perceived visually), which condition experience 21 J. Pallasmaa, The Embodied Image (Hoboken: Wiley and Sons, 2012): 51-52. 22 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; J. Pallasmaa, The Embodied Image; M. Dufrenne, L’oeil et l’oreille (1987) (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Place, 2020). 23 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception: 266-267. MATTEO VEGETTI 210 AN-ICON  in mostly unconscious and unconditioned ways. The many examples referring to the field of architecture had the aim of leading the students to a decisive point: given the origi- nal complicity between body and space, to design means, perhaps before anything else, to organize a complex per- ceptual environment in which each element not only has multisensory potential in itself but also inevitably relates with that of the others. By experimentally testing the synes- thetic effects of the designed space in virtual reality, inter- twining their own bodies with it, the students had a way to determine the results of their choices on multiple perceptual levels. These could work towards creating syntonic or dys- tonic effects, or could play with the composition of different synesthetic qualities within the same element, for example, combining a given material with a color that contrasts with it in temperature, or background music of a certain kind, for example, soft and enveloping, with an environment imbued with the opposite synesthetic characteristics (cold, sharp, shrill). The general goal was to create a perceptually rich and coherent environment. Here, it is important to note that it is possible to import images of any material, including photographs of existing surfaces, into the Oculus. This unit also allowed for the development of a discourse straddling the border between the phenomeno- logical aspects of multisensory experience and the findings of the neurosciences.24 24 For example N. Bruno, F., Pavani, M., Zampini, La percezione multisensoriale (Bologna: il Mulino, 2010). MATTEO VEGETTI 211 AN-ICON  Expected outcomes: ■ Cultivating sensitivity to the multisensory aspects of ma- terial and texture. ■ Developing a language capable of translating synesthetic experience and allowing it to be shared with others. ■ Studying the possibilities of using multisensoriality to de- sign and compose different perceptual environments in logical sequences. ■ Experimenting with the encounter between the synesthetic aspects of music and those of the designed environments. ■ Verifying the efficacy of the desired perceptual effects through a questionnaire. Exercise Beginning with the previously-created space, gen- erate four different perceptual environments, working with ma- terials, colors, and sounds. The environments must create an ordered sequence, a perceptual-synesthetic path imbued with meaning. A) Work with tactile perception: use textures on different parts of the environment (floor, ceiling, objects pres- ent in the room, etc.) while also modulating the qualities of the materials (transparency, opacity, reflectiveness, etc.) to create an effect that induces a multisensorial/synesthetic sensation. B) Use materials and colors to elicit a specific sensation (hot/cold; rough/smooth; sharp/soft; enveloping/ repelling; lightness/oppression, etc.) C) Work with sound: test the impact of the sound of footsteps, introducing different numbers of people into the space based on its size as follows: • 2.5x2.5: 1 person, 5 people, 20 people • 5x5: 1 person, 10 people, 40 people • 10x10: 1 person, 20 people, 80 people • 20x20: 1 person, 40 people, 400 people • 2.5x5: 1 person, 10 people, 40 people • 5x10: 1 person, 20 people, 80 people • 10x20: 1 person, 40 people, 400 people MATTEO VEGETTI 212 AN-ICON  Once the highest number of people within the space has been reached, add voices. Finally, walk through the space and test the sounds of your footsteps in different environments. D) In an environment of your choice, introduce a sound effect (natural or artificial) or music that reinforces the synesthetic character of the space. E) The environments must create a percep- tual itinerary. Through the characteristics that you give the environments, try to construct a pathway that will make a hierarchy apparent, with the clearest possible succession. F) Describe in writing the synesthetic effect that you think you have generated in each of the fourenvironments (without sharing the responses with the rest of the class); a) How can the environments that you have created be defined as multisensory? b) What type of sensation did you want to make emerge from the different spaces? c) What is the relationship between the choice of materials/sound and the sensation that you wanted to transmit to those within the space? d) How did the choice of sound relate to the choice of materials and colors? G) Take one photo in each environment. H) Shoot a video of the four environments, lasting 24 hours (with all natural light). Compress it into a film of 2-3 minutes. I) During the morning of the second day, each group will visit the rooms created by the others and respond in writing to some questions aimed at verifying the effect pro- duced by the space on its users: a) How do the spaces visited constitute an example of multisensoriality? Which factors contribute most? b) What sort of sensation emerges from the different spaces. Try to describe which elements caused this sensation. c) Was the sound particularly significant in your experience of the space? Why? MATTEO VEGETTI 213 AN-ICON  UNIT 4 - Light and color: phenomenology of atmosphere The fourth didactic unit was dedicated exclu- sively to the topic of light and color. The reason for this choice resided primarily in the importance of these two factors for spatial perception (in various ways: from colored light to the relationship between natural light and materials that reflect it). Furthermore, light and color play a decisive role in the connotations of atmospheres. In dialogue with various others, from Goethe25 to Conrad-Martius,26 from Sedlmayr27 to James Turrel,28 the lesson highlighted both aspects: the perceptual dimension and what Conrad Mar- tius calls “the character” of light, or rather the way in which a given property of light is intermittently given expression. Light is undoubtedly a special atmospheric agent, since temperature and color can give space a very clear emotion- al timbre. But it can be used—as in the phenomenological art of James Turrel and Robert Irwin—to change the form of space, up to the point of distorting it and erasing its borders. VR is a unique instrument for testing how light reacts to surfaces, their textures, and their colors in the widest range of different conditions (for example, depend- ing on the time of day, and also by adding natural light to artificial light sources). It is also useful, though, to create spaces and spatial languages linked to the psychology of shapes. Five possible functions of light capable of perceptually altering space in respect to different design aims: illumination, indi- cation, division/unification, connection, creation of rhythm. Of course, each of these functions raises specific questions 25 J.W. Goethe, Theory of Colours (1810) (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1970). 26 H. Conrad-Martius, “Realontologie,” Jahrbüch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 6 (1923): 159-333; H. Conrad-Martius, “Farben. Ein Kapitel aus der Realontologie,” Festschrift Edmund Husserl zum 70. Geburstag gewidmet (Jahrbüch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung) 10 (1929): 339-370. 27 H. Sedlmayr, La luce nelle sue manifestazioni artistiche, ed. A. Pinotti (Palermo: Aesthetica, 2009). 28 J. Turrell, Extraordinary Ideas-Realized (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2018). See also M. Govan, C.Y. Kim, eds., James Turrell: A Retrospective (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013). MATTEO VEGETTI 214 AN-ICON  (the type of light source and its temperature, the shape and position of the light sources, the relationship between light and darkness, background and foreground, etc.), but in a theoretical sense, the exercise aimed above all to demon- strate the potential applications of a complex theoretical framework like the one mentioned above. Finally, the discussion turned to the phenom- enological theme of atmospheres, a field that, as already noted, could only appear last, once the basic elements for an analytic understanding of the body-space relationship had been acquired. With few exceptions, “atmosphere” is a concept used in a very intuitive way by architects, yet is central to their specific form of spatial intelligence. It is here that VR perhaps offers its greatest contribution: it is one thing to introduce students to the thought of the usual authors on the subject, such as Böhme,29 Norberg-Schulz,30 Schmitz,31 Ströker32 or Zumthor,33 and quite another for them to have the chance to analyze atmospheres from within, to study their perceptual effects, and to modify their factors in the desired (often experimental) way. Describ- ing the extraordinary power of atmospheres to influence our mood is much simpler and more effective when one has the possibility of interacting with a virtual environment. From within these environments, variation in light can be understood atmospherically in all of its significance. The capacity to design an/the entrance as a tool to understand, expand, or focus an encounter with a given atmosphere can be carried out in all possible ways, giving life to the theoretical hypotheses learned through the creativity of the designed. The symbolic and potential connotations of an atmosphere—which are often an involuntary outcome, but 29 G. Böhme, “Atmosphere as the subject matter of architecture,” in P. Ursprung, ed., Herzog and de Meuron: Natural History (Montreal: Lars Müller and Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2002) and Atmosfere, estasi, messe in scena. L’estetica come teoria generale della percezione, trans. T. Griffero (Milano: Christian Marinotti, 2010). 30 C. Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991). 31 H. Schmitz, “Atmosphärische Räume,” in Atmosphäre(n) II. Interdisziplinäre Annäherungen an einen unscharfen Begriff (München: Kopaed, 2012). 32 E. Ströker, Investigations in Philosophy of Space (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987). 33 P. Zumthor, Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2006). MATTEO VEGETTI 215 AN-ICON  nonetheless entirely controllable, through the composition and interaction of the conditions present in a given space, and at times even a result produced by a “heterogenesis of ends”—can finally become the objects of direct experi- ence, which would otherwise be impossible. I think these examples are sufficient to illustrate a field of research that goes far beyond virtual reality’s capacity to change one floor into another, in order to find which one best suit the environment. For architectural professionals, though, this as- pect should truly not be underestimated. VR offers them a precious medium of communication with their clients, who often lack the ability to imagine the design solutions being proposed, or to read plans and “visualize” them in three dimensions. But even if bridging the gap between the spatial competencies of architect and client may sooner or later prove to be the main use of virtual reality, it is not, however, the most important for, nor does it lie within the specific aims of the course. MATTEO VEGETTI 216 AN-ICON  Expected outcomes: ■ Experimenting with environmental effects of lighting. ■ Experimenting with the semiotic and Gestaltic use of light. ■ Testing the atmospheric effects relating to light and color. Exercise A) Use artificial light to strengthen the synes- thetic connotations of the environment in an atmospheric way. B) Use light to unify a part of the space and the objects within it. C) Use light to generate a threshold. D) Generate variations in the temperature, in- tensity, and type of artificial light, and observe how the colors of surfaces and the texture of materials change. E) Analyze how the spaces change under the different variations of artificial light. F) Modify the color of the materials through the effects of variations of artificial light. G) Using a narrative strategy, make an atmo- spheric film of 30 seconds that shows how the spaces are modified by different types of artificial light. If necessary, you can animate the space with the movement of a virtual character. UNIT 5 - Orientation and legibility of space The final didactic unit dealt with the theme of spatial orientation on the basis of the line of research opened up by the work of Kevin Lynch.34 At the basis of this choice are two assumptions. The first is that Lynch has given us a scalable methodology, which can also be effective when applied to interior spaces. The second is 34 K. Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1960). See also L. Letenyei, J. Dobák, eds., Mental Mapping (Passau: Schenk Verlag, 2019). MATTEO VEGETTI 217 AN-ICON  that such a methodology, based on psychology of shapes and on a study of mental maps that we might say are akin to phenomenology, places itself in continuity or in dialogue with the content already explored in the preceding units of the course. The formation of mental maps takes place in the interaction between subject and environment. On a cogni- tive level, for Lynch the maps reveal the constant presence of five elements, which we can also define as structures, in the sense that they structure the experience of (urban) space by connecting it back to a universal mental schema. Such irreducible elements, even if they are not necessarily always co-present, are the path, the edge, the district, the node, and the landmark. A space’s degree of comprehen- sibility, or rather our own capacity to orient ourselves in space and to have a clear mental image of it, depends on the form, character, and composition of these structures. The capacity of design to give spaces identity, structure, figurability, and meaning is fundamental in fostering a pos- itive interaction between subject and environment, or even to induce emotional well-being. This gives us the capacity to anticipate how space will be understood, to support our spatial awareness (and hence our confidence in the space), and to develop a positive identification with spaces. All of this holds for any interior space, even if it is clearest on a large scale (for example that of a museum). Each interior indeed presents us with paths, both introverted and extroverted nodes, helpful or disori- enting edges (like walls, partitions, or anything that divides space), landmarks (prominent aesthetic elements), and even districts, since the term designates first and fore- most for Lynch whatever distinguishes the characteristic atmosphere of a place. To demonstrate and test this hypothesis, the students had to empty out the spaces they had created up to this point, multiply them by four, and connect them in a freely-chosen sequence. Using only the spatial language of the five fundamental elements and working in syntony with the principles of the psychology of shapes that make space recognizable and possible to remember (uniqueness, MATTEO VEGETTI 218 AN-ICON  formal simplicity, continuity, preeminence, clarity of con- nection, directional differentiation, visual field, awareness of movement, rhythm) the students were asked to give their design a high cognitive value for the users. In order to test the result obtained, each student visited the design created by the others in virtual reality, and at the end of the visit drew a mental map for each. The study of the maps, finally, allowed sever- al problems linked to the understanding of space to be brought into the discussion: errors in the reconstruction of the shape of the space, missing places, unclear dimensions and hierarchies, and incongruencies and hesitations of var- ious types. The critical evaluation of the most problematic spaces (and, on the other hand, of those that almost al- ways elicited a clear representation) allowed the students to rethink their design, seeking effective solutions. VR is a very useful tool for studying phenomena of orientation and environmental image. Its usage, however, can be extended to other psychological aspects related to the design of the environment, as for example to the concept of affordance, which in Gibson’s language refers to the physical qualities of objects that suggest to a subject the appropriate actions for manipulating them.35 The greater the affordance, the more the use of the tool becomes automatic and intuitive (a passage to cross, a door to open in a given direction, a switch to turn or press, etc.). Another possible use of a virtual space with “public” dimensions, like the one created in the last unit, is the study of the rules of proxemics.36 This can be accomplished through the possibility of inserting a number of virtual people, who move according to estab- lished or casual paths, interacting in various ways, into the scene. 35 J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979) (New York: Psychology Press, 2015). 36 T.E. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (New York: Anchor Books, 1990). MATTEO VEGETTI 219 AN-ICON  Expected outcomes: ■ Experimenting with the principles of Lynch’s theory from the perspective of design and develop a sensitivity to the cognitive structure of space. ■ Learning the method of mental maps. Exercise A) Return to the basic space in its starting con- dition, taking away all of the elements aside from the open- ings (doors and windows). Multiply the space you created before by four times. Then generate a sequence of twelve connected environments. Four spatial elements must be present in the design: pathways, edges, introverted nodes, extroverted nodes, and landmarks. Design the entrance and exit of the building. The goal is to create a fluid and figurable space. To achieve this goal, plasterboard walls can be taken away or added (also to change the shape of the space); or you can redesign them in such a way as to weaking or strengthen the frame (the edges) to create visual and auditory connec- tions, light effects, or transparencies. Each room can have a landmark (painting, stat- ue, mirror, geometric volumes). In order to orient the user on the path and to support the figurability of the space you can use: colors, materials, lights, sounds, and frames. You may not, however, use symbols or signs. B) Make a film of the space. C) Once it has been designed, the space will be visited by other groups for a set period of time. These visitors will then be asked to draw a map of the space as they remember it. On the basis of these mental maps, try to understand the strong and weak points of the designed space through a synthetic map. The project will be evaluated in respect to the fol- lowing categories: uniqueness/originality, formal simplicity, MATTEO VEGETTI 220 AN-ICON  hierarchical continuity, clarity of connections, directional differentiation, scope of vision, awareness of movement. The maps will be collectively discussed. We will try to understand why certain spatial elements were forgotten, misunderstood, and memorized with difficulty. D) Change the space in order to modify it on the basis of the suggestions that emerged from the discussion. Technical specifications There are dozens of 3D and VR software pro- grams specialized in various types of applications. The criteria that guided our choice were the following: possibly free software, so that the students could continue to use it as professionals, simplicity of the interface and usage, simplified workflow, and the capacity to model in 3D and have VR visualization and navigation functions. Based on these criteria, we chose Twinmotion (https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/twinmotion), a soft- ware specifically designed for architecture and interior ar- chitecture based on the Unreal motor; the VR experience is native “out-of-the box,” with features allowing for the real-time modifications of materials, time of day, etc. Fig. 6. The interface is very simple, but on a deep- er level allows for all of the necessary modifications of MATTEO VEGETTI 221 AN-ICON  parameters. It can also simulate sounds in the space when one moves through the VR scene. Twinmotion has an internal library of 3D models (animated and otherwise) that can be added to the scene one is working on in a very intuitive way, but does not allow for the creation of new 3D models from within. The solution to this problem was to use the Twinmotion plugin, which allows for the importation from various 3D modelling programs such as Rhinoceros, Ar- chiCAD, or 3DS Max, of 3D objects with a simple transfer. This solution was ideal insofar as the students were able to use ArchiCAD for 3D modeling and then to synchronize it with Twinmotion for VR and rendering. Also, the main design remained in ArchiCAD, where various sections and plans were designed as usual. The VR viewer market has developed in inter- esting ways in the past few years, moving from solutions with fixed stations (with the viewer connected to the com- puter by cable and external sensors to map the area of the game) to mobile ones, with integrated sensors that function independently, without a cable and the need for an external computer to function. The main need of the project was to have a quick working process with the fewest possible number of intermediate steps. The product chose was the Oculus Quest 2 (https://www.oculus.com/quest-2), a “standalone” viewer with an integrated graphics processor, which can also function as an external viewer for a computer when connected via cable. The price and the image quality were important factors in the final selection. The possibility of using the students’ own lap- top computers was quickly rejected, due to the issue of the computing power of graphics cards, different operating systems, and the installation of necessary programs that use a large amount of disc space (at least 30 GB). To solve these problems, Windows laptops with the latest video cards (Nvidia RTX 3070), with all of the nec- essary programs installed (ArchiCAD, Oculus, Twinmotion) were acquired. MATTEO VEGETTI 222 AN-ICON  Discussion and recommendations The structure of the course proved to be effec- tive and engaging, and gained very positive evaluations from the students, confirming in its own way the positive effects on VR learning already cited.37 The strongest point was the integration of theory and practice, two dimensions that normally are clearly separated and, despite good in- tentions, mutually indifferent. This also signaled a danger and a difficulty: un- fortunately, the results of the course could not be measured by looking at the end outcomes —as would take place in a design workshop— because the design, in our case, was the means and not the end. Furthermore, some of the starting conditions (for example, the position of the door-openings) can seem absurd from an architectural point of view, and are incom- prehensible if one is not aware of the specific educational goals of the course. The attention dedicated by the students to cer- tain environmental, spatial, compositional, formal, percep- tual, and atmospheric factors definitely produced surpris- ing results, which were also appreciated by our architect colleagues, but in order to avoid misunderstandings it was always necessary to strongly reiterate the theoretical/phil- osophical specificity of the course and its objectives. From this point of view, even the spaces that were seemingly less successful from an architectural standpoint could have a positive significance in regard to what interested us: the essential was not in fact in the results in themselves, but in the process that led to them, in the experimental inten- tions of those who made them, and in the documentary traces that recorded and commented on the experience on a theoretical and critical level. The essential, in short, was the degree of awareness developed by students in each phase of the course and their level of understanding 37 F. Kharvari, L.E. Kaiser, “Impact of extended reality on architectural education and the design process.” MATTEO VEGETTI 223 AN-ICON  regarding the ways in which certain spatial factors impact our relationship with space on conscious and unconscious, and cognitive and perceptual levels. However, in view of the Academic Year 2022- 2023, in order to better distinguish the intentions of the course from those of the project work, we decided to mod- ify the course. In particular, we have attempted to simplify the exercises and standardise them so that the results are com- parable. In addition, we placed emphasis on experiment- ing with spatial variants of an element (e.g. the threshold/ door) to allow students to test the most significant per- ceptual changes between the choices made. Finally, we required the students to present the experiments they had tried, a selection of the most interesting results, and writ- ten descriptions of their experiences in a common layout. Redefined in these terms, the first point of the new exer- cise relating to the first unit asks the students to place a gap-threshold in the starting space, to experiment with dif- ferent solutions capable of generating a meaningful spatial experience; to describe in writing the criterion used, the most paradigmatic solutions, and the quality of space de- termined by these solutions. The same method, based on the study of variations, was applied to the composition of the rooms, the shape of the threshold/windows, the posi- tion of the sculpture, etc. Overall, the course has become much more analytical than before, and somewhat more phenomenological. MATTEO VEGETTI 224 AN-ICON  Fig. 7. Fig. 8. MATTEO VEGETTI 225 AN-ICON  Fig. 9. Fig. 10. Fig. 11. Fig. 12. Figg. 9-12. Four pictures related to the exercise on the thresholds: projects of Elmira Rabbani and Gabriele Luciani, Giada Pettenati and Michelle Rosato, Giorgio Ghielmetti e Mattia Buttinoni. Bachelor of Interior Architecture, SUPSI, DACD. MATTEO VEGETTI 226 AN-ICON  Fig. 13. Fig. 14. Fig. 15. Fig. 16. Figg. 13-16: Four pictures related to the exercise on light and colour. Projects of Sandra Burn and Asia Camoia, Elmira Rabbani and Gabriele Luciani, Jessica Corti and Silvia Zehnder. Bachelor of Interior Architecture, SUPSI, DACD. MATTEO VEGETTI 227 AN-ICON Unità 1 es.1 - Diversi modi di inserire un varco/soglia nello spazio spazio analizzato: 3 x 4.5 x 2.5m Dal momento che il nostro parallelepi- pedo è di base rettangolare abbiamo iniziato ad analizzare le sperimen- tazioni in cuiNun varco viene posto sulla facciata più lunga, ossia 4,5 m. Abbiamo sperimentato varie possibilià di soglie utilizzando i seguenti criteri: locazione, altezza e larghezza. Inizialmente abbiamo posto la soglia al centro della facciata e abbiamo osservato come variava la percezione cambiando l’altezza (1.60m, 2.10m, 2.50m) del varco e in seguito cambian- do la larghezza (0.50m, 0.70m, 1m, 1.50m, 2m, 2.50m). Successivamente abbiamo decentrato la soglia, ed infine abbiamo fatto lo stesso procedimento anche per la facciata più corta, os- sia 3m. Dopo aver sviluppato queste svariate possibilità ne abbiamo selezio- nate alcune che secondo noi sono più significative: 1.1: - Apertura minima - Si fa quasi fatica a passare - Non si è invogliati a varcare la soglia - Luogo molto riservato 1.2: -Le senzazioni elencate precedente- mente vengono accentuate decentran- do la soglia 1.3 - Forte collegamento interno-esterno - Luogo arioso 1.4: -Le senzazioni elencate precedente- mente diminuiscono decentrando la soglia V1.5: - Sorge la domanda se si tratta ancora di una soglia 1.7: - Non è vivibile - Quasi non ci si rende conto che si tratta di una vera e propria soglia 1.8: - Altezza standard - In correlazione con i cambiamenti di larghezza sperimentati non influisce granché 1.9: - Direzionalità: dona verticalità allo spazio AIS200 Fenomenologia dello spazio_2022-23 Zoe Togni e Silvia Pedeferri Fig. 17. Unità 1 es.2 - Varianti migliori spazio analizzato: 3 x 4.5 x 2.5m orem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse lobortis urna id velit tempor, in gravida est hen- drerit. Mauris vestibulum facilisis erat sit amet consequat. Curabitur ullamcor- per eros enim, eget interdum dolor feugiat at. Etiam viverra orci ac quam lobortis, ac posuere turpis ultricies. Sed facilisis dictum turpis eget venenatis. Nunc vehicula augue enim, at viverra turpis ornare vel. Phasellus vel mollis augue. Curabitur luctus, erat ut bibendum bibendum, lacus nisl molestie eros, sed cursus turpis magna quis nibh. Sed ac volutpat magna, id mattis risus. Fusce ipsum neque, placerat ac posuere at, sollicitudin in nulla. Maecenas ege- stas nibh ac ultricies laoreet. Integer tristique fermentum neque, sit amet vehicula sapien. Morbi condimentum consequat turpis a rutrum. Proin nec dolor eu purus ultrices rutrum. Ut rutrum semper dictum. Morbi sapien lacus, feugiat sit amet commodo et, feugiat ut felis. Mauris tellus justo, laoreet ut quam in, molestie ultrices sapien. Sed tincidunt, augue ut inter- dum cursus, lorem dui laoreet augue, in semper urna dolor sed tellus. Su- spendisse molestie urna id commodo pretium. Ut non dui tincidunt, dictum justo in, posuere sapien. Sed non est at purus fermentum tincidunt vulputate id libero. Etiam mi ante, rutrum a libero vel, feugiat pharetra sem. In volutpat metus arcu, eget fringilla ipsum soda- les ac. AIS200 Fenomenologia dello spazio_2022-23 Zoe Togni e Silvia Pedeferri Fig. 18. Figg. 17-18. Examples of the layout used in the course 2022-2023 (first point of the Unit 1 exercise). Students: Zoe Togni and Silvia Pedeferri. MATTEO VEGETTI 228 AN-ICON Unità 3 es.G - Fotogrammi video obiettivi Il nostro obiettivo è di creare un’atmo- scelte Ci siamo focalizzate principalmente con tutte le pareti in clacestruzzo, ma sfera che metta in contrapposizione sull’utilizzo di un materiale base, quale questa volta laccate, in modo da dare una sensazione di apertura e leggerez- il calcestruzzo, che abbiamo adopera- ancora l’effetto della leggerezza e del za con una sensazione di chiusura e to in primo luogo, su tutti i pavimenti, freddo, ma creando un climax con la pesantezza, tramite l’utilizzo di texture, e successivamente sule pareti tre prima stanza. coliri e materiali che possano aiutare stanze. La terza stanza, caratterizzata da ad enfatizzare tali emozioni. La prima stanza è caratterizzata da un pareti in calcestruzzo grezzo, invece, pavimento chiaro, con tonalità azzurra- ha come colorazioni un grigio scuro, stre e pareti in alluminio riflettente per che introducono un effetto sinestetico creare un effetto sinestetico che ricor- di pesantezza ed oppressione. dasse il freddo e la leggerezza, qualità L’ultima stanza, invece, è caratterizzata innate del metallo. da un pavimento blu scuro, notte, e da La seconda stanza, invece, è valoriz- pareti e soffitto rivestite da pietra nera. zata da una colorazione, sempre sulle tonalità dell’azzurro, ma più calde, riscontri Attraverso l’utilizzo del visore abbiamo La terza stanza è particolarmente constatato come le le nostre iniziali tangibile e concreta. Crea un netto ipotesi non fossero del tutto errate. contrasto con la stanza precedente, Nella prima stanza, ci si trova in uno trasportandoci in un’atmosfera pesante spazio freddo, quasi fantascientifico e reale. La sensazione che si prova è e irreale, ma a differenza di come quasi di calma e tranquillità. pensavamo, si ha una sensazione di Il contrasto con le due stanze prece- maggiore chiusura rispetto alla secon- dente viene inoltre accentutato dall’ul- da stanza. tima stanza che è buia, opprimente Proseguendo la stanza successiva e quasi soffocante, da non riuscire a ci trasporta in una relatà anch’essa stare al suo interno per troppo tempo. fredda, nella quale si crea un gioco di colori che nasconde il fatto che sia stato utilizzato lo stesso colore su tutte le pareti. AIS200 Fenomenologia dello spazio_2022-23 Anna Bolla e Camilla Tosi Fig. 19. Fig. 19. Examples of the layout used in the course 2022-2023 (Unit 3, synoptic view of tested variants). Students: Anna Bolla e Camilla Tosi. MATTEO VEGETTI 229 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

anicon

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19919

On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between illusion and deception by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Immersion Presence Virtual reality Representation Hallucination Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Introduction On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between 1 il usion and deception PIETRO CONTE, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7128-2696 LAMBERT WIESING, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19919 Illusion or delusion? Were novelists and filmmakers right in fore- shadowing the advent of 3D virtual worlds that would exist parallel to physical reality, where people could interact with each other through the full immersion of all their senses, possibly losing awareness of the artificial nature of those environments? Indeed, what has been imagined in count- less science fiction narratives, dystopian movies, and TV series seems to be turning into reality to an increasing Keywords Immersion Presence Virtual reality Representation Hallucination To quote this essay: P. Conte, L. Wiesing, “On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between illusion and deception,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 4-21, https://doi. org/10.54103/ai/19919 1 This essay is the result of research activity developed within the frame of the project AN- ICON. An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images. AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. [834033 AN-ICON]) and is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” of the University of Milan in the frame of the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2023-2027” sponsored by Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (MUR). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 4 AN-ICON  degree: a pictorially generated environment that is not per- ceived as such. A modern incarnation of René Descartes’s evil demon thought experiment, the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis famously describes a scenario in which a mad scientist might remove a person’s brain from the body, place it in a vat of life-sustaining nutrients, and wire it to a computer that feeds it with electrical stimuli identical to those the brain normally receives. In the words of Hilary Putnam, who in 1981 made the story popular and provoked much heated debate among philosophers of mind, that would cause the individual “to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal.” If, for instance, the person tries to raise her hand, the feedback from the machine will make her immediately “see” and “feel” the hand being raised. The evil scientist can cause the victim “to ‘experience’ (or hallucinate)” any situation he wishes. He can even erase the memory of the brain operation so that the victim will seem to herself to have been born and always lived in the digital environment.2 More recently, the idea of a simulation so pow- erful that people caught in it would take it for reality in the flesh has resurfaced in notions such as Peter Weibel’s “future cinema,” according to which the next coming cine- matographic apparatuses, thanks to miniature neural im- plants and interfaces that stimulate the brain directly, will be able to bypass the sensorium, thus acting immediately on the neural networks: Instead of trompe l’oeil, the next step might be trompe le cerveau [...]. There would be perception without the senses, seeing without the eyes. [...] Advances in neurophysiology and cognitive science give rise to the hope that future engineers will succeed in imple- menting these discoveries in neuronal and molecular machines that 2 H. Putnam, “Brains in a vat,” in Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981): 1-21, 6. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 5 AN-ICON transform the technology of simulation to deceive the eye into a technology of stimulation that in turn deceives the brain.3 One is certainly free to disbelieve such proph- ecies and exercise healthy scepticism. And yet, given the unprecedented rapid pace of technological innovation, one cannot help but recall Louis Marin’s argument that every representation, in order to present itself “in its function, its functioning, and, indeed, its functionality” as represen- tation, must include a frame that keeps the image-world clearly separated from the real world: “The more ‘mimetic’ transparency is manifested seductively, [...] the less the mechanisms are noticed, the less they are acknowledged.”4 The dream, or perhaps nightmare, of a medium achieving absolute transparency and of a user experiencing total immersion has yet to come true, and it will perhaps never do so. However, it is (certainly not only, but neverthe- less in a particularly powerful way) the new advancements in the field of simulation, illusion, and immersion that have contributed powerfully to determining the way we think about today’s media landscape. The evolution of technolog- ical equipment goes hand in hand with the evolution of the techno-cultural – which also means political – dispositif that supports and even guides them. One need only consider the way in which virtual reality is nowadays hailed as the last medium, capable of immersing the user in someone else’s shoes, teleporting her to some other place, making her feel as if she were really “there.” 3 P. Weibel, “The intelligent image: neurocinema or quantum cinema?,” in J. Shaw, P. Weibel, eds., Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film (Cambridge MA-London: The MIT Press, 2003): 594-601, 599. 4 L. Marin, “The frame of representation and some of its figures” (1988), trans. C. Porter, in On Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001): 352-372, 353. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 6 AN-ICON  Being there: debunking the rhetoric Such “being there” has become the catch- phrase of virtual technologies, and it often goes along with an over-romanticization of the idea of immersion, according to which immersive environments would grant the experi- encer a perfect illusion by making the medium disappear. This would differentiate the new forms of illusion from tra- ditional trompe l’œil: The concepts of trompe l’œil or illusionism aim to utilize represen- tations that appear faithful to real impressions, the pretense that two-dimensional surfaces are three-dimensional. The decisive factor in trompe l’œil, however, is that the deception is always recognizable; in most cases, because the medium is at odds with what is depicted and this is realized by the observer in seconds, or even fractions of seconds. This moment of aesthetic pleasure, of aware and conscious recognition, where perhaps the process of deception is a challenge to the connoisseur, differs from the concept of the virtual and its historic precursors, which are geared to unconscious deception.5 The concept of a virtual reality that could re- place the realm of physical existence has been criticized for resting upon an idealization of total immersion that would lead to an illegitimate equation of illusion with delusional hallucination. In particular, the assumption of a pictorial environment so hermetically sealed off from anything ex- traneous to the picture that the observer (or rather the ex- periencer) feels completely submerged in it is highly prob- lematic. Leading scholars in game studies such as Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman have labelled this assumption “the immersive fallacy,” polemically referring to the idea that 5 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge MA-London: The MIT Press, 2003): 15-16. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 7 AN-ICON  the ability of a media experience to sensually transport the participant into an illusory reality could reach a point where “the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that he or she is part of an imaginary world.”6 Emblematically expressed in the concept of the holodeck (a fictional tech- nology that made its first appearance in Star Trek: The Next Generation and consists in a holographic room where a simulation including sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste is indistinguishable from physical reality), the immersive fallacy encourages people to buy into new forms of magical thinking and overlook that virtual reality is but “a medium of representation that the brain will process in its appropriate cultural context, just as it has learned to process speech, writing, photography, or moving images.”7 Such warnings against a cyberpunk-flavoured idea of immersion point towards a different interpretation. As is made evident by the etymological presence of ludus in the Latin word inlusio, “illusion” originally refers to a lusory attitude. Being elicited by the perception of physi- cal representational artefacts, texts, or performances, the aesthetic illusion is to be distinguished from both halluci- nations and dreams. Moreover, it differs from delusions in that it is neither a conceptual nor a perceptual error, but a complex phenomenon characterized by “an asymmetrical ambivalence”8 that results from its positioning halfway be- tween the two poles of rational distance (i.e., disinterested “observation” of an artefact in its fictional nature) and im- mersion (or in Kendall Walton’s words, “participation”9) in the represented world: 6 K. Salen, E. Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge MA- London: The MIT Press, 2004): 451. 7 J. H. Murray, “Virtual/reality: how to tell the difference,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 11-27, 20. 8 W. Wolf, “Illusion (aesthetic),” in P. Hühn et al. (eds.), Handbook of Narratology (Berlin-New York: de Gruyter, 2009): 144-160, 144. 9 K.L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990): 240-289. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 8 AN-ICON When we play a game, we feel engaged and engrossed, and play seems to take on its own “reality.” This is all certainly true. But the way that a game achieves these effects does not happen in the manner the immersive fallacy implies. A game player does become engrossed in the game, yes. But it is an engagement that occurs through play itself. As we know, play is a process of metacommu- nication, a double-consciousness in which the player is well aware of the artificiality of the play situation.10 Contrary to David Hume’s conviction that all illusions should be given up to the flames,11 the contempo- rary immersive media and apparatuses make it necessary to disentangle the word “illusion” from its negative con- notation as “deception.” From this perspective, an illusion is about something that is present but not real: it marks the presence of something while at the same time making it appear as “unreal.” The key term for describing this di- chotomic phenomenon is conflict – a term that in image theory goes back to Hippolyte Taine and Edmund Husserl.12 Every perception rests upon the awareness of being there and being present, but only image perception implies a self-relativisation of real presence: the perception of every image generates artificial presence. For what is visible in the picture – one may call it, using Husserl’s vocabulary, “picture object,” or in more analytical tradition “content” or “representation” – is relativised in its character of presence by a conflict (Widerstreit). This happens in two different ways: in the case of traditional images through the visibility of the grounding materiality of the image, the visibility of the real environment and, last but not least, through the 10 K. Salen, E. Zimmerman, Rules of Play: 51 11 D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), sect. 12, pt. 3. (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover 2004): 107. 12 On this, see L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence. Philosophical Studies in Image Theory (2005), trans. N.F. Schott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010): p. 53. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 9 AN-ICON  visible frame. These forms of perceptible conflicts tend to disappear when an image expands into its surroundings, thus becoming an artificial “environment.” Yet even in the case of simulations and hyperrealistic worlds, the condition for speaking of images at all is that here, too, there must be an experience of conflict. That is the point: in the case of immersive environments, the conflict is (or, if we are re- alistic, should be) given through the knowledge of being in a simulation. The knowledge that something experienced is “not real” creates image-generating conflicts, just as traditionally the frame did. This is grasped when it is said: images produce artificial presence. This calls up numerous questions that the pres- ent issue of the AN-ICON journal aims to address: how is such a conflict between knowledge and perception to be explained, and is it to be regarded as a new form of aes- thetic illusion?13 On the one hand, it is necessary to distin- guish the conflict phenomena of the new forms of immer- sion formation empirically in their technology from those of traditional images. On the other hand, the various forms of seeing artificial presence must always be categorically differentiated and determined in their respective specificity. Is it a case of an unconscious illusion brought about by a false perception, or is it rather a matter of a lustful, playful attitude adopted in a special kind of illusory relationship? What is the difference between illusion, deception, and hallucination? How does an illusion become a delusion? As if it were not complicated enough: the de- scription of a virtual environment faces the problem that it is a double form of illusion building. On one side, this is the mostly solely themed illusion that people in simulated and immersive virtual environments have a strong feeling of presence (place illusion) and react to what they perceive 13 T. Koblížek, ed., The Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 10 AN-ICON  as if it were real (plausibility illusion).14 In doing so, however, they are fully aware that they are not “really” there and that events are not “actually” taking place. Yet as relevant as this illusion is, the attention it receives should not induce us to overlook the fact that, on the other hand, there is a second form of illusion formation that is not present in the many precursors of immersive images (such as the stereoscope and the panorama). This illusion of hyperrealism does not just concern what is seen, but also the one who sees. It is the change in the way the viewers experience themselves in relation to the image: virtual reality has the power to make users and beholders feel like they own and control a body (body ownership illusion) that can look very different from their biological one. Here, illusions are created that do not affect what one sees but rather the one who sees some- thing. One might want to think about whether there were not already precursor experiences in this respect in watching films, but it is only in the experience of virtual realities that this phenomenon seems to take on a radicality that brings about new forms of transformation of self-representation and changes in our attitudes to ourselves or to other peo- ple, which can be seen, for example, when implicit racial and gender biases are changed – in the best case reduced – in the experience of immersive virtual realities, or health problems and mental disorders are alleviated.15 Against this background, the present issue of the AN-ICON journal poses equally technological, aesthet- ic and decidedly moral questions. What are the limits of virtual reality and the possibilities it offers for empathising 14 M. Hofer et al., “The role of plausibility in the experience of spatial presence in virtual environments,” Frontiers in Virtual Reality 1, no. 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3389/ frvir.2020.00002; M. Slater, “Place illusion and plausibility can lead to realistic behaviour in immersive virtual environments,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 364, no. 1535 (2009): 3549-3557. 15 T.C. Peck et al., “Putting yourself in the skin of a black avatar reduces implicit racial bias,” Consciousness and Cognition 22, no. 3 (2013): 779-787, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. concog.2013.04.016; F. Scarpina et al., “The effect of a virtual-reality full-body illusion on body representation in obesity,” Journal of Clinical Medicine 8, no. 9 (2019), 1330, https://doi. org/10.3390/jcm8091330. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 11 AN-ICON  with others and fostering virtuous and socially adaptive processes of imitation? How can we debunk the rhetoric (which has ethical, social, and political significance) behind the celebration of virtual reality as the “ultimate empathy machine?”16 The field of these questions becomes all the larger and more unmanageable when it is noted that the new forms of digital immersion education, while not nec- essary, are also usually associated with new forms of in- teraction education. This raises questions that are often psychological. Is interactivity necessary to create illusion? Does the multisensory quality of the interaction affect the overall effect of illusion? Considering that immersive virtu- al environments are often inhabited by users’ surrogates, do avatars, in their extensive phenomenology, enhance or diminish the degree of illusion? What is the relationship between illusion and the “style” of the image? Is hyperreal- ism an important element to enhance illusion or, as Gordon Calleja claims,17 only an element among many others? The present issue A first reflection on these topics is offered by Salvatore Tedesco in his essay “Imagination and Körper- zustand,” which provides a historical overview of how the concept of illusion was understood in the Eighteenth Cen- tury by Moses Mendelssohn. Through a critical examination of Johann Georg Sulzer’s analysis of the passage from the state of thinking [Nachdenken] to that of feeling [Empfinden], Mendelssohn elaborated further on the contrast between the state of the body and the faculty of knowledge – a contrast that led the German philosopher to define illusion not merely in terms of common deception, but rather as a 16 C. Milk, “How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine,” TED conference, March 2015, https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ ultimate_empathy_machine. 17 G. Calleja, In-Game. From Immersion to Incorporation (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2011). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 12 AN-ICON  form of conscious illusion. This is made clear in the corre- spondence with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing on the nature of tragedy, where great emphasis is put on so-called “aes- thetic” or “poetic” illusion, considered as the instrument through which the dramatic poet is allowed to induce in the audience – contrary to what Aristotle and his modern followers maintained – even the most violent feelings, on condition that the reader or viewer is under the aesthetic effect of the illusion. The latter is characterized by a pecu- liar mismatch between sensitivity and the higher cognitive faculties: regardless of how deeply immersed one may be in sensory experiences, one still retains awareness of be- ing confronted with a virtual, fictional world. Precisely this contrast harmonization is the hallmark of aesthetic expe- rience as such. The anthropological relevance of aesthetic illu- sion can be grasped by describing it in terms of play, and more specifically pretend play. By referring to both clas- sical and contemporary studies on play and playfulness by scholars from many diverse scientific fields (including among others Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Roger Caillois, Donald Winnicott, Lev Vygotskij, Gregory Bateson, Brian Sutton-Smith and William Corsaro), Anna Bondioli’s article offers a reading of illusion as a non-imitative form of play. Far from limiting themselves to reproducing the activities that adults undertake in the surrounding world, children distort reality in a creative way by performing actions that differ from those already seen and known. Children collect elements of the external world and use them in an inter-sub- jective process of co-construction of meanings in order to open up new possible worlds, without hallucinating: they know for sure that “this is play.”18 From this perspective, the semantic field of illusion shifts from the negative meaning of pretence as lying, mocking, or simulating, to the positive 18 G. Bateson, The Message “This Is Play” (Princeton: Josia Macy Jr. Foundation, 1956). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 13 AN-ICON  notion of pretending meant as a poietic activity of model- ling, building, and giving form. In play, the two cognitive frames – “this is the real world” and “this is the fictional world” – are not to be conceived as completely separate. Players move on the threshold between physical reality and the peculiar (un)reality of fiction. Play isn’t real – it is, indeed, “pretend” – but this does not mean it is false. If it were (that is, if it lost the link with the meanings that objects, actions, and events represented during the playful activity denote in the “real” context), it would lose its significance. Yet this is not the case: play (similar in this respect to the poietic use of language in the creation of metaphors) allows the participants to put together things that do not belong to the same category, thereby opening up the possibility to generate new references and meanings that go beyond the logical contrast between the “real” and the “imaginary,” between the “true” and the “possible,” between “believing” and “not believing.” The ambiguity surrounding the notion of illusion has been made all the more evident by the theoretical re- flection on the nature and power of contemporary images. Vilém Flusser’s thought, which is the subject of Francesco Restuccia’s essay, provides an emblematic example. Illusion is first described as a form of deception, with dangerous and deplorable effects. This is especially true when tech- nical media – starting from photography – are employed in a way that aims to conceal their nature as artefacts. In this sense, the most illusionary images are those that appear transparent and present themselves as objective reality, thus bringing about a new form of “idolatry” or “hal- lucination:” “Instead of representing [vorstellen] the world, they obscure [verstellen] it.”19 This dangerous reversal of imagination happens when we do not recognize a medium, 19 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), trans. A. Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000): 10. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 14 AN-ICON  especially a visual one, as such. In this sense, technical images are the most deceiving, because their mechanical, automatic production seems to grant a “noninterventionist objectivity”20 freed from human and cultural interference. But this objectivity is deceptive, because technology is a human product, therefore always culturally biased. In Flusser’s work, however, a second interpretation of illusion is given that unveils its possible use as a precious artistic and epistemic tool. In Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch, the notion is introduced to understand the filmic experience as a modern version of Plato’s cave. While sitting in the dark space of the movie theatre, people ignore the world outside the “cave.” They do so not because they are deceived by the moving images projected on the screen in front of them. On the contrary, they choose to abandon themselves to the fascination of the medium. They do not want to be freed from the enchantment: their illusion is voluntary, self-im- posed, like a specific form of fiction or make-believe play. When illusion is conceived in a positive way as a practice of sense-making, Flusser replaces the German term täuschen (“to deceive”) with vortäuschen (to simulate, to feign). In this sense, simulation is not about producing a copy [Abbild], it is about shaping a model [Vorbild]. Technical media can allow for a new, “experimental” approach to image making: one inserts a certain input, sees what the outcome is, and then changes the input so as to achieve a different result. According to Flusser, this is the greatest potentiality of vir- tual simulations: they allow us to experience what until now we were only able to calculate; and vice versa, they allow us to calculate and control experiences that until now we could only vaguely imagine. The peculiar experience that contemporary vir- tual environments grant access to lies at the core of Fran- cesco Zucconi’s essay, which follows an anachronistic path 20 L. Daston, P. Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 15 AN-ICON  through art history and theory by taking some of Caravag- gio’s paintings as an anticipation of the invention of gyro- scope technology that made possible the first immersive experience in the history of Western painting. Building on Frank Stella’s interpretation of the Italian master’s “realistic illusionism”21 and reformulating Michael Fried’s concepts of “absorption” and “theatricality”22 through the categories of “immersion” and “specularity,” Zucconi focuses on the double effect of attraction and distancing as the funda- mental structure of the experience of virtual reality cinema. On the one side, as I put on a VR headset, I find myself “teleported” to the simulated environment: I feel “there.”23 On the other side, there is always something that reminds me that I am just inhabiting a digital milieu: a bodily, cog- nitive, and affective frame brings me back to the “here” of physical reality. Such experience of bilocation24 is most often conceived of as a negative aspect of even the most sophisticated (and expensive) immersive apparatuses cur- rently on the market – a limitation that, according to many techno-deterministic enthusiasts, will be overcome in some unspecified future, when total immersion will be eventually achieved. Arguing against this view, Zucconi maintains that such ambivalent and even paradoxical coexistence of at- traction and distancing should be better understood as an intrinsic quality of cinematic virtual reality experiences as such. This medium-specific trait, in turn, can help debunk the bombastic rhetoric that hails virtual reality as the “ul- timate empathy machine” capable of making the user not only understand but also directly experience someone’s 21 F. Stella, Working Space (Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 1986): 11. 22 M. Fried, Theatricality and Absorption: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 23 See among others M. Lombard et al., Immersed in Media. Telepresence Theory, Measurement & Technology (Cham: Springer, 2015); M. Lombard, Th. Ditton, “At the heart of it all. The concept of presence,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3, no. 2 (1997), https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997.tb00072.x. 24 A. Pinotti, “Staying here, being there. Bilocation, empathy and self-empathy in virtual reality,” Bollettino Filosofico 37 (2022): 142-162, https://doi.org/10.6093/1593-7178/9657 PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 16 AN-ICON  other pain and worries. Through reference to Susan Son- tag’s critical theory of photography, Zucconi challenges the simplistic use of notions such as those of “empathy,” “compassion,” and “immersion” which accompanies the launch of many virtual reality projects, holding instead that the (alleged) absolute transparency of the medium is not only unattainable but not even desirable. From this perspec- tive, the co-presence of illusionistic and counter-illusionistic effects is not to be interpreted as a weakening of the expe- riential and testimonial value of immersive experiences. On the contrary, it paves the way to a conscious ethical and political approach to virtual reality, according to which the most interesting aspect of such technology is precisely its capacity to produce both identification and estrangement, thus making viewers feel at the razor’s edge between pres- ence and absence, between “here” and “there,” between empathizing with others and being aware that we can never truly walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. If virtual reality as it exists today struggles to make us experience things from the perspective of another human being, can it allow us to feel what it is like to be a non-human creature? Philippe Bédard’s article tackles this question by critically examining the fundamental anthropo- centrism of virtual reality’s dominant mode of experience. Designed as it is around a technological apparatus such as the head-mounted display, which is tuned to the human sensorium, and more in particular, to the subjective qualities of human vision (its binocularity, its “egocentric” perspec- tive, and the individuals’ ability to move their point of view through six degrees of freedom of movement along three dimensions), the medium of virtual reality is also intrinsically anthropocentric. This, in turn, seems to rule out from the outset the possibility of bypassing our perceptual habi- tus by using immersive virtual environments as a tool for PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 17 AN-ICON  exploring and understanding how non-human (or post-hu- man) beings exist in, and make sense of, a version of the world that is completely different from ours: as Ian Bogost puts it, “when we ask what it means to be something, we pose a question that exceeds our own grasp of the being of the world.”25 This does not mean, however, that virtual reality cannot help us imagine what the world might look like to a different being. In Bédard’s essay, nonnormative, artistic uses of immersive technologies are described that encourage the user to imaginatively explore what the Um- welt of a mosquito, dragonfly, or even a tree might appear. Particular attention is paid to the fact that the induction of illusory ownership of, and agency over, a virtual body does not require a fake, hyperrealistic appearance of the avatar; factors like first-person perspective, sensorimotor coherence, multisensory feedback, and the possibility to interact with the virtual environment play a much greater role.26 This opens the door to artistic experimentation with bodies that do not have human (visual) appearance. The illusory ownership over implausible digital bodies makes it possible for virtual reality artists to produce immersive experiences that facilitate the users’ (temporary) engage- ment in a foray into non-human worlds, notwithstanding the fact that they remain perfectly aware of the impossi- bility to perceive the environment differently from what our sensorium gives access to. The idea that analogue and digital immersive devices could be used to expand our sensory knowledge is key for their commercial success. As Marcin Sobieszczans- ki shows, marketing strategies that pass off virtual reality as the perfect machine to make dreams come true are common. After being applied to cinema, such “oneiric” 25 I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012): 30. 26 M. Slater et al., “Inducing illusory ownership of a virtual body,” Frontiers in Neuroscience 3, no. 2 (2009): 214-220, https://doi.org/10.3389/neuro.01.029.2009. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 18 AN-ICON  interpretation now tends to assimilate the immersive expe- rience granted by increasingly sophisticated head-mounted displays to hallucinatory phenomena.27 By sketching out a history of some classical theories that have drawn a com- parison between dreams and the “unreal” dimension of the image, Sobieszczanski concentrates on the scientific debate around the nature of illusory phenomena in order to disclose the heuristic potential of the metaphor of vir- tual reality as hallucination. Highlighting both similarities and dissimilarities between the cognitive mechanisms un- derlying perception (or perception failure) in hallucinatory states and perception in immersive environments provides an interesting intellectual tool to make a cultural practice evident that is deeply rooted in the human understanding of image-making as the attempt to cross the boundaries that keep the physical world separated from the pictorial world. One of the biggest challenges this attempt must face is providing, within the virtual environment, multisen- sory and synaesthetic experiences comparable to those of everyday life. Traditionally, so-called distal senses (vision and hearing) have often been considered more suitable than proximal senses (touch, taste, and smell) to experi- ence images, due to the assumption that genuine aesthetic experience would necessarily imply distance and disinter- estedness. Yet the new digital and immersive mediascape calls for going beyond a merely visual or audio-visual way of experiencing the image: when pictures turn into environ- ments, a reorganization of the whole sensory experience is required. Valentina Bartalesi and Anna Calise’s contribu- tion deals with this issue by examining the current struggle to include haptic technologies within immersive projects developed by different cultural institutions. Indeed, touch 27 On this, see G. Grossi, La notte dei simulacri. Sogno, cinema, realtà virtuale (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2021). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 19 AN-ICON  seems to resist virtualisation: being the sense that, histor- ically and theoretically, has carried the burden of proof on “true reality,” it appears a priori unsuited for illusory environ- ments. Proof of this would be that, while haptic technolo- gies are certainly useful to allow users to “touch” – if only virtually – precious artefacts that could not otherwise be touched, they nevertheless present both a qualitative and quantitative deficit compared to the human haptic sensitiv- ity in physical reality: the illusion of touch would be in fact better described as an illusionary touch. However, haptic technologies do not need to be designed to mimic the original functions of touch. Rather than merely attempting to make them replicate the touching experience, program- mers and developers can exploit their illusory potential in non-hyperrealistic ways, focussing on the power of haptics to elicit emotions. By reviewing some recent case studies, Bartalesi and Calise show how haptic technologies can enrich our cultural and aesthetic experience of artefacts, offering medium-specific opportunities that neither physical objects nor printed replicas – no matter how accurate they may be – could elicit. The blurring of the threshold between physi- cal reality and virtual reality is also at the centre of Yizeng Zhang’s essay, where the case study of digital fashion is investigated in its function of giving birth to a completely new form of materiality. While creating their clothes, fashion designers have been limited so far by the available fabrics (and their price), the manufacturing technologies at their disposal, and, of course, the laws of physics. The so-called metaverse is in this respect a game changer. Using virtual avatars and models to sell clothing and accessories made of code instead of cotton or wool, designers are free to imagine any type of garment or fabric and to “manufacture” products never seen before. Given that our everyday lives have moved online so much that a new term “phygital” was PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 20 AN-ICON  coined to indicate the increasing blending of digital experi- ences with physical ones, it is a safe bet that digital fashion will become a vital category for every brand’s business model, being more and more sold as NFTs, showcased on virtual catwalks and in virtual showrooms, or worn by both physical and virtual influencers on social networks. Under the auspices of Gernot Böhme’s philosophy, Zhang takes on the notion of atmosphere to reflect on the “stage values” of digital fashion, that is, on its ability to emancipate from the material function of garments and to produce new forms of self-presentation. Digital garments are thus intended as experiences whose value arises from the atmosphere they are able to generate. By tracing such atmospheric production across three sites of its exhibition (the e-com- merce website, social media, and the runway show), Zhang shows how digital fashion contributes to the construction of a new kind of affective milieu. If the generation of such atmospheres can be said to be just an illusion or, rather, if the illusion itself can be conceived of as providing access to a new reality, is a question that fits well into the thematic section of this issue of the AN-ICON journal. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 21 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19919

On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between illusion and deception by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Immersion Presence Virtual reality Representation Hallucination Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Introduction On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between 1 il usion and deception PIETRO CONTE, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7128-2696 LAMBERT WIESING, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19919 Illusion or delusion? Were novelists and filmmakers right in fore- shadowing the advent of 3D virtual worlds that would exist parallel to physical reality, where people could interact with each other through the full immersion of all their senses, possibly losing awareness of the artificial nature of those environments? Indeed, what has been imagined in count- less science fiction narratives, dystopian movies, and TV series seems to be turning into reality to an increasing Keywords Immersion Presence Virtual reality Representation Hallucination To quote this essay: P. Conte, L. Wiesing, “On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between illusion and deception,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 4-21, https://doi. org/10.54103/ai/19919 1 This essay is the result of research activity developed within the frame of the project AN- ICON. An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images. AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. [834033 AN-ICON]) and is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” of the University of Milan in the frame of the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2023-2027” sponsored by Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (MUR). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 4 AN-ICON  degree: a pictorially generated environment that is not per- ceived as such. A modern incarnation of René Descartes’s evil demon thought experiment, the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis famously describes a scenario in which a mad scientist might remove a person’s brain from the body, place it in a vat of life-sustaining nutrients, and wire it to a computer that feeds it with electrical stimuli identical to those the brain normally receives. In the words of Hilary Putnam, who in 1981 made the story popular and provoked much heated debate among philosophers of mind, that would cause the individual “to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal.” If, for instance, the person tries to raise her hand, the feedback from the machine will make her immediately “see” and “feel” the hand being raised. The evil scientist can cause the victim “to ‘experience’ (or hallucinate)” any situation he wishes. He can even erase the memory of the brain operation so that the victim will seem to herself to have been born and always lived in the digital environment.2 More recently, the idea of a simulation so pow- erful that people caught in it would take it for reality in the flesh has resurfaced in notions such as Peter Weibel’s “future cinema,” according to which the next coming cine- matographic apparatuses, thanks to miniature neural im- plants and interfaces that stimulate the brain directly, will be able to bypass the sensorium, thus acting immediately on the neural networks: Instead of trompe l’oeil, the next step might be trompe le cerveau [...]. There would be perception without the senses, seeing without the eyes. [...] Advances in neurophysiology and cognitive science give rise to the hope that future engineers will succeed in imple- menting these discoveries in neuronal and molecular machines that 2 H. Putnam, “Brains in a vat,” in Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981): 1-21, 6. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 5 AN-ICON transform the technology of simulation to deceive the eye into a technology of stimulation that in turn deceives the brain.3 One is certainly free to disbelieve such proph- ecies and exercise healthy scepticism. And yet, given the unprecedented rapid pace of technological innovation, one cannot help but recall Louis Marin’s argument that every representation, in order to present itself “in its function, its functioning, and, indeed, its functionality” as represen- tation, must include a frame that keeps the image-world clearly separated from the real world: “The more ‘mimetic’ transparency is manifested seductively, [...] the less the mechanisms are noticed, the less they are acknowledged.”4 The dream, or perhaps nightmare, of a medium achieving absolute transparency and of a user experiencing total immersion has yet to come true, and it will perhaps never do so. However, it is (certainly not only, but neverthe- less in a particularly powerful way) the new advancements in the field of simulation, illusion, and immersion that have contributed powerfully to determining the way we think about today’s media landscape. The evolution of technolog- ical equipment goes hand in hand with the evolution of the techno-cultural – which also means political – dispositif that supports and even guides them. One need only consider the way in which virtual reality is nowadays hailed as the last medium, capable of immersing the user in someone else’s shoes, teleporting her to some other place, making her feel as if she were really “there.” 3 P. Weibel, “The intelligent image: neurocinema or quantum cinema?,” in J. Shaw, P. Weibel, eds., Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film (Cambridge MA-London: The MIT Press, 2003): 594-601, 599. 4 L. Marin, “The frame of representation and some of its figures” (1988), trans. C. Porter, in On Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001): 352-372, 353. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 6 AN-ICON  Being there: debunking the rhetoric Such “being there” has become the catch- phrase of virtual technologies, and it often goes along with an over-romanticization of the idea of immersion, according to which immersive environments would grant the experi- encer a perfect illusion by making the medium disappear. This would differentiate the new forms of illusion from tra- ditional trompe l’œil: The concepts of trompe l’œil or illusionism aim to utilize represen- tations that appear faithful to real impressions, the pretense that two-dimensional surfaces are three-dimensional. The decisive factor in trompe l’œil, however, is that the deception is always recognizable; in most cases, because the medium is at odds with what is depicted and this is realized by the observer in seconds, or even fractions of seconds. This moment of aesthetic pleasure, of aware and conscious recognition, where perhaps the process of deception is a challenge to the connoisseur, differs from the concept of the virtual and its historic precursors, which are geared to unconscious deception.5 The concept of a virtual reality that could re- place the realm of physical existence has been criticized for resting upon an idealization of total immersion that would lead to an illegitimate equation of illusion with delusional hallucination. In particular, the assumption of a pictorial environment so hermetically sealed off from anything ex- traneous to the picture that the observer (or rather the ex- periencer) feels completely submerged in it is highly prob- lematic. Leading scholars in game studies such as Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman have labelled this assumption “the immersive fallacy,” polemically referring to the idea that 5 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge MA-London: The MIT Press, 2003): 15-16. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 7 AN-ICON  the ability of a media experience to sensually transport the participant into an illusory reality could reach a point where “the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that he or she is part of an imaginary world.”6 Emblematically expressed in the concept of the holodeck (a fictional tech- nology that made its first appearance in Star Trek: The Next Generation and consists in a holographic room where a simulation including sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste is indistinguishable from physical reality), the immersive fallacy encourages people to buy into new forms of magical thinking and overlook that virtual reality is but “a medium of representation that the brain will process in its appropriate cultural context, just as it has learned to process speech, writing, photography, or moving images.”7 Such warnings against a cyberpunk-flavoured idea of immersion point towards a different interpretation. As is made evident by the etymological presence of ludus in the Latin word inlusio, “illusion” originally refers to a lusory attitude. Being elicited by the perception of physi- cal representational artefacts, texts, or performances, the aesthetic illusion is to be distinguished from both halluci- nations and dreams. Moreover, it differs from delusions in that it is neither a conceptual nor a perceptual error, but a complex phenomenon characterized by “an asymmetrical ambivalence”8 that results from its positioning halfway be- tween the two poles of rational distance (i.e., disinterested “observation” of an artefact in its fictional nature) and im- mersion (or in Kendall Walton’s words, “participation”9) in the represented world: 6 K. Salen, E. Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge MA- London: The MIT Press, 2004): 451. 7 J. H. Murray, “Virtual/reality: how to tell the difference,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 11-27, 20. 8 W. Wolf, “Illusion (aesthetic),” in P. Hühn et al. (eds.), Handbook of Narratology (Berlin-New York: de Gruyter, 2009): 144-160, 144. 9 K.L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990): 240-289. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 8 AN-ICON When we play a game, we feel engaged and engrossed, and play seems to take on its own “reality.” This is all certainly true. But the way that a game achieves these effects does not happen in the manner the immersive fallacy implies. A game player does become engrossed in the game, yes. But it is an engagement that occurs through play itself. As we know, play is a process of metacommu- nication, a double-consciousness in which the player is well aware of the artificiality of the play situation.10 Contrary to David Hume’s conviction that all illusions should be given up to the flames,11 the contempo- rary immersive media and apparatuses make it necessary to disentangle the word “illusion” from its negative con- notation as “deception.” From this perspective, an illusion is about something that is present but not real: it marks the presence of something while at the same time making it appear as “unreal.” The key term for describing this di- chotomic phenomenon is conflict – a term that in image theory goes back to Hippolyte Taine and Edmund Husserl.12 Every perception rests upon the awareness of being there and being present, but only image perception implies a self-relativisation of real presence: the perception of every image generates artificial presence. For what is visible in the picture – one may call it, using Husserl’s vocabulary, “picture object,” or in more analytical tradition “content” or “representation” – is relativised in its character of presence by a conflict (Widerstreit). This happens in two different ways: in the case of traditional images through the visibility of the grounding materiality of the image, the visibility of the real environment and, last but not least, through the 10 K. Salen, E. Zimmerman, Rules of Play: 51 11 D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), sect. 12, pt. 3. (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover 2004): 107. 12 On this, see L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence. Philosophical Studies in Image Theory (2005), trans. N.F. Schott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010): p. 53. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 9 AN-ICON  visible frame. These forms of perceptible conflicts tend to disappear when an image expands into its surroundings, thus becoming an artificial “environment.” Yet even in the case of simulations and hyperrealistic worlds, the condition for speaking of images at all is that here, too, there must be an experience of conflict. That is the point: in the case of immersive environments, the conflict is (or, if we are re- alistic, should be) given through the knowledge of being in a simulation. The knowledge that something experienced is “not real” creates image-generating conflicts, just as traditionally the frame did. This is grasped when it is said: images produce artificial presence. This calls up numerous questions that the pres- ent issue of the AN-ICON journal aims to address: how is such a conflict between knowledge and perception to be explained, and is it to be regarded as a new form of aes- thetic illusion?13 On the one hand, it is necessary to distin- guish the conflict phenomena of the new forms of immer- sion formation empirically in their technology from those of traditional images. On the other hand, the various forms of seeing artificial presence must always be categorically differentiated and determined in their respective specificity. Is it a case of an unconscious illusion brought about by a false perception, or is it rather a matter of a lustful, playful attitude adopted in a special kind of illusory relationship? What is the difference between illusion, deception, and hallucination? How does an illusion become a delusion? As if it were not complicated enough: the de- scription of a virtual environment faces the problem that it is a double form of illusion building. On one side, this is the mostly solely themed illusion that people in simulated and immersive virtual environments have a strong feeling of presence (place illusion) and react to what they perceive 13 T. Koblížek, ed., The Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 10 AN-ICON  as if it were real (plausibility illusion).14 In doing so, however, they are fully aware that they are not “really” there and that events are not “actually” taking place. Yet as relevant as this illusion is, the attention it receives should not induce us to overlook the fact that, on the other hand, there is a second form of illusion formation that is not present in the many precursors of immersive images (such as the stereoscope and the panorama). This illusion of hyperrealism does not just concern what is seen, but also the one who sees. It is the change in the way the viewers experience themselves in relation to the image: virtual reality has the power to make users and beholders feel like they own and control a body (body ownership illusion) that can look very different from their biological one. Here, illusions are created that do not affect what one sees but rather the one who sees some- thing. One might want to think about whether there were not already precursor experiences in this respect in watching films, but it is only in the experience of virtual realities that this phenomenon seems to take on a radicality that brings about new forms of transformation of self-representation and changes in our attitudes to ourselves or to other peo- ple, which can be seen, for example, when implicit racial and gender biases are changed – in the best case reduced – in the experience of immersive virtual realities, or health problems and mental disorders are alleviated.15 Against this background, the present issue of the AN-ICON journal poses equally technological, aesthet- ic and decidedly moral questions. What are the limits of virtual reality and the possibilities it offers for empathising 14 M. Hofer et al., “The role of plausibility in the experience of spatial presence in virtual environments,” Frontiers in Virtual Reality 1, no. 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3389/ frvir.2020.00002; M. Slater, “Place illusion and plausibility can lead to realistic behaviour in immersive virtual environments,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 364, no. 1535 (2009): 3549-3557. 15 T.C. Peck et al., “Putting yourself in the skin of a black avatar reduces implicit racial bias,” Consciousness and Cognition 22, no. 3 (2013): 779-787, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. concog.2013.04.016; F. Scarpina et al., “The effect of a virtual-reality full-body illusion on body representation in obesity,” Journal of Clinical Medicine 8, no. 9 (2019), 1330, https://doi. org/10.3390/jcm8091330. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 11 AN-ICON  with others and fostering virtuous and socially adaptive processes of imitation? How can we debunk the rhetoric (which has ethical, social, and political significance) behind the celebration of virtual reality as the “ultimate empathy machine?”16 The field of these questions becomes all the larger and more unmanageable when it is noted that the new forms of digital immersion education, while not nec- essary, are also usually associated with new forms of in- teraction education. This raises questions that are often psychological. Is interactivity necessary to create illusion? Does the multisensory quality of the interaction affect the overall effect of illusion? Considering that immersive virtu- al environments are often inhabited by users’ surrogates, do avatars, in their extensive phenomenology, enhance or diminish the degree of illusion? What is the relationship between illusion and the “style” of the image? Is hyperreal- ism an important element to enhance illusion or, as Gordon Calleja claims,17 only an element among many others? The present issue A first reflection on these topics is offered by Salvatore Tedesco in his essay “Imagination and Körper- zustand,” which provides a historical overview of how the concept of illusion was understood in the Eighteenth Cen- tury by Moses Mendelssohn. Through a critical examination of Johann Georg Sulzer’s analysis of the passage from the state of thinking [Nachdenken] to that of feeling [Empfinden], Mendelssohn elaborated further on the contrast between the state of the body and the faculty of knowledge – a contrast that led the German philosopher to define illusion not merely in terms of common deception, but rather as a 16 C. Milk, “How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine,” TED conference, March 2015, https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ ultimate_empathy_machine. 17 G. Calleja, In-Game. From Immersion to Incorporation (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2011). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 12 AN-ICON  form of conscious illusion. This is made clear in the corre- spondence with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing on the nature of tragedy, where great emphasis is put on so-called “aes- thetic” or “poetic” illusion, considered as the instrument through which the dramatic poet is allowed to induce in the audience – contrary to what Aristotle and his modern followers maintained – even the most violent feelings, on condition that the reader or viewer is under the aesthetic effect of the illusion. The latter is characterized by a pecu- liar mismatch between sensitivity and the higher cognitive faculties: regardless of how deeply immersed one may be in sensory experiences, one still retains awareness of be- ing confronted with a virtual, fictional world. Precisely this contrast harmonization is the hallmark of aesthetic expe- rience as such. The anthropological relevance of aesthetic illu- sion can be grasped by describing it in terms of play, and more specifically pretend play. By referring to both clas- sical and contemporary studies on play and playfulness by scholars from many diverse scientific fields (including among others Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Roger Caillois, Donald Winnicott, Lev Vygotskij, Gregory Bateson, Brian Sutton-Smith and William Corsaro), Anna Bondioli’s article offers a reading of illusion as a non-imitative form of play. Far from limiting themselves to reproducing the activities that adults undertake in the surrounding world, children distort reality in a creative way by performing actions that differ from those already seen and known. Children collect elements of the external world and use them in an inter-sub- jective process of co-construction of meanings in order to open up new possible worlds, without hallucinating: they know for sure that “this is play.”18 From this perspective, the semantic field of illusion shifts from the negative meaning of pretence as lying, mocking, or simulating, to the positive 18 G. Bateson, The Message “This Is Play” (Princeton: Josia Macy Jr. Foundation, 1956). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 13 AN-ICON  notion of pretending meant as a poietic activity of model- ling, building, and giving form. In play, the two cognitive frames – “this is the real world” and “this is the fictional world” – are not to be conceived as completely separate. Players move on the threshold between physical reality and the peculiar (un)reality of fiction. Play isn’t real – it is, indeed, “pretend” – but this does not mean it is false. If it were (that is, if it lost the link with the meanings that objects, actions, and events represented during the playful activity denote in the “real” context), it would lose its significance. Yet this is not the case: play (similar in this respect to the poietic use of language in the creation of metaphors) allows the participants to put together things that do not belong to the same category, thereby opening up the possibility to generate new references and meanings that go beyond the logical contrast between the “real” and the “imaginary,” between the “true” and the “possible,” between “believing” and “not believing.” The ambiguity surrounding the notion of illusion has been made all the more evident by the theoretical re- flection on the nature and power of contemporary images. Vilém Flusser’s thought, which is the subject of Francesco Restuccia’s essay, provides an emblematic example. Illusion is first described as a form of deception, with dangerous and deplorable effects. This is especially true when tech- nical media – starting from photography – are employed in a way that aims to conceal their nature as artefacts. In this sense, the most illusionary images are those that appear transparent and present themselves as objective reality, thus bringing about a new form of “idolatry” or “hal- lucination:” “Instead of representing [vorstellen] the world, they obscure [verstellen] it.”19 This dangerous reversal of imagination happens when we do not recognize a medium, 19 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), trans. A. Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000): 10. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 14 AN-ICON  especially a visual one, as such. In this sense, technical images are the most deceiving, because their mechanical, automatic production seems to grant a “noninterventionist objectivity”20 freed from human and cultural interference. But this objectivity is deceptive, because technology is a human product, therefore always culturally biased. In Flusser’s work, however, a second interpretation of illusion is given that unveils its possible use as a precious artistic and epistemic tool. In Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch, the notion is introduced to understand the filmic experience as a modern version of Plato’s cave. While sitting in the dark space of the movie theatre, people ignore the world outside the “cave.” They do so not because they are deceived by the moving images projected on the screen in front of them. On the contrary, they choose to abandon themselves to the fascination of the medium. They do not want to be freed from the enchantment: their illusion is voluntary, self-im- posed, like a specific form of fiction or make-believe play. When illusion is conceived in a positive way as a practice of sense-making, Flusser replaces the German term täuschen (“to deceive”) with vortäuschen (to simulate, to feign). In this sense, simulation is not about producing a copy [Abbild], it is about shaping a model [Vorbild]. Technical media can allow for a new, “experimental” approach to image making: one inserts a certain input, sees what the outcome is, and then changes the input so as to achieve a different result. According to Flusser, this is the greatest potentiality of vir- tual simulations: they allow us to experience what until now we were only able to calculate; and vice versa, they allow us to calculate and control experiences that until now we could only vaguely imagine. The peculiar experience that contemporary vir- tual environments grant access to lies at the core of Fran- cesco Zucconi’s essay, which follows an anachronistic path 20 L. Daston, P. Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 15 AN-ICON  through art history and theory by taking some of Caravag- gio’s paintings as an anticipation of the invention of gyro- scope technology that made possible the first immersive experience in the history of Western painting. Building on Frank Stella’s interpretation of the Italian master’s “realistic illusionism”21 and reformulating Michael Fried’s concepts of “absorption” and “theatricality”22 through the categories of “immersion” and “specularity,” Zucconi focuses on the double effect of attraction and distancing as the funda- mental structure of the experience of virtual reality cinema. On the one side, as I put on a VR headset, I find myself “teleported” to the simulated environment: I feel “there.”23 On the other side, there is always something that reminds me that I am just inhabiting a digital milieu: a bodily, cog- nitive, and affective frame brings me back to the “here” of physical reality. Such experience of bilocation24 is most often conceived of as a negative aspect of even the most sophisticated (and expensive) immersive apparatuses cur- rently on the market – a limitation that, according to many techno-deterministic enthusiasts, will be overcome in some unspecified future, when total immersion will be eventually achieved. Arguing against this view, Zucconi maintains that such ambivalent and even paradoxical coexistence of at- traction and distancing should be better understood as an intrinsic quality of cinematic virtual reality experiences as such. This medium-specific trait, in turn, can help debunk the bombastic rhetoric that hails virtual reality as the “ul- timate empathy machine” capable of making the user not only understand but also directly experience someone’s 21 F. Stella, Working Space (Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 1986): 11. 22 M. Fried, Theatricality and Absorption: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 23 See among others M. Lombard et al., Immersed in Media. Telepresence Theory, Measurement & Technology (Cham: Springer, 2015); M. Lombard, Th. Ditton, “At the heart of it all. The concept of presence,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3, no. 2 (1997), https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997.tb00072.x. 24 A. Pinotti, “Staying here, being there. Bilocation, empathy and self-empathy in virtual reality,” Bollettino Filosofico 37 (2022): 142-162, https://doi.org/10.6093/1593-7178/9657 PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 16 AN-ICON  other pain and worries. Through reference to Susan Son- tag’s critical theory of photography, Zucconi challenges the simplistic use of notions such as those of “empathy,” “compassion,” and “immersion” which accompanies the launch of many virtual reality projects, holding instead that the (alleged) absolute transparency of the medium is not only unattainable but not even desirable. From this perspec- tive, the co-presence of illusionistic and counter-illusionistic effects is not to be interpreted as a weakening of the expe- riential and testimonial value of immersive experiences. On the contrary, it paves the way to a conscious ethical and political approach to virtual reality, according to which the most interesting aspect of such technology is precisely its capacity to produce both identification and estrangement, thus making viewers feel at the razor’s edge between pres- ence and absence, between “here” and “there,” between empathizing with others and being aware that we can never truly walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. If virtual reality as it exists today struggles to make us experience things from the perspective of another human being, can it allow us to feel what it is like to be a non-human creature? Philippe Bédard’s article tackles this question by critically examining the fundamental anthropo- centrism of virtual reality’s dominant mode of experience. Designed as it is around a technological apparatus such as the head-mounted display, which is tuned to the human sensorium, and more in particular, to the subjective qualities of human vision (its binocularity, its “egocentric” perspec- tive, and the individuals’ ability to move their point of view through six degrees of freedom of movement along three dimensions), the medium of virtual reality is also intrinsically anthropocentric. This, in turn, seems to rule out from the outset the possibility of bypassing our perceptual habi- tus by using immersive virtual environments as a tool for PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 17 AN-ICON  exploring and understanding how non-human (or post-hu- man) beings exist in, and make sense of, a version of the world that is completely different from ours: as Ian Bogost puts it, “when we ask what it means to be something, we pose a question that exceeds our own grasp of the being of the world.”25 This does not mean, however, that virtual reality cannot help us imagine what the world might look like to a different being. In Bédard’s essay, nonnormative, artistic uses of immersive technologies are described that encourage the user to imaginatively explore what the Um- welt of a mosquito, dragonfly, or even a tree might appear. Particular attention is paid to the fact that the induction of illusory ownership of, and agency over, a virtual body does not require a fake, hyperrealistic appearance of the avatar; factors like first-person perspective, sensorimotor coherence, multisensory feedback, and the possibility to interact with the virtual environment play a much greater role.26 This opens the door to artistic experimentation with bodies that do not have human (visual) appearance. The illusory ownership over implausible digital bodies makes it possible for virtual reality artists to produce immersive experiences that facilitate the users’ (temporary) engage- ment in a foray into non-human worlds, notwithstanding the fact that they remain perfectly aware of the impossi- bility to perceive the environment differently from what our sensorium gives access to. The idea that analogue and digital immersive devices could be used to expand our sensory knowledge is key for their commercial success. As Marcin Sobieszczans- ki shows, marketing strategies that pass off virtual reality as the perfect machine to make dreams come true are common. After being applied to cinema, such “oneiric” 25 I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012): 30. 26 M. Slater et al., “Inducing illusory ownership of a virtual body,” Frontiers in Neuroscience 3, no. 2 (2009): 214-220, https://doi.org/10.3389/neuro.01.029.2009. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 18 AN-ICON  interpretation now tends to assimilate the immersive expe- rience granted by increasingly sophisticated head-mounted displays to hallucinatory phenomena.27 By sketching out a history of some classical theories that have drawn a com- parison between dreams and the “unreal” dimension of the image, Sobieszczanski concentrates on the scientific debate around the nature of illusory phenomena in order to disclose the heuristic potential of the metaphor of vir- tual reality as hallucination. Highlighting both similarities and dissimilarities between the cognitive mechanisms un- derlying perception (or perception failure) in hallucinatory states and perception in immersive environments provides an interesting intellectual tool to make a cultural practice evident that is deeply rooted in the human understanding of image-making as the attempt to cross the boundaries that keep the physical world separated from the pictorial world. One of the biggest challenges this attempt must face is providing, within the virtual environment, multisen- sory and synaesthetic experiences comparable to those of everyday life. Traditionally, so-called distal senses (vision and hearing) have often been considered more suitable than proximal senses (touch, taste, and smell) to experi- ence images, due to the assumption that genuine aesthetic experience would necessarily imply distance and disinter- estedness. Yet the new digital and immersive mediascape calls for going beyond a merely visual or audio-visual way of experiencing the image: when pictures turn into environ- ments, a reorganization of the whole sensory experience is required. Valentina Bartalesi and Anna Calise’s contribu- tion deals with this issue by examining the current struggle to include haptic technologies within immersive projects developed by different cultural institutions. Indeed, touch 27 On this, see G. Grossi, La notte dei simulacri. Sogno, cinema, realtà virtuale (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2021). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 19 AN-ICON  seems to resist virtualisation: being the sense that, histor- ically and theoretically, has carried the burden of proof on “true reality,” it appears a priori unsuited for illusory environ- ments. Proof of this would be that, while haptic technolo- gies are certainly useful to allow users to “touch” – if only virtually – precious artefacts that could not otherwise be touched, they nevertheless present both a qualitative and quantitative deficit compared to the human haptic sensitiv- ity in physical reality: the illusion of touch would be in fact better described as an illusionary touch. However, haptic technologies do not need to be designed to mimic the original functions of touch. Rather than merely attempting to make them replicate the touching experience, program- mers and developers can exploit their illusory potential in non-hyperrealistic ways, focussing on the power of haptics to elicit emotions. By reviewing some recent case studies, Bartalesi and Calise show how haptic technologies can enrich our cultural and aesthetic experience of artefacts, offering medium-specific opportunities that neither physical objects nor printed replicas – no matter how accurate they may be – could elicit. The blurring of the threshold between physi- cal reality and virtual reality is also at the centre of Yizeng Zhang’s essay, where the case study of digital fashion is investigated in its function of giving birth to a completely new form of materiality. While creating their clothes, fashion designers have been limited so far by the available fabrics (and their price), the manufacturing technologies at their disposal, and, of course, the laws of physics. The so-called metaverse is in this respect a game changer. Using virtual avatars and models to sell clothing and accessories made of code instead of cotton or wool, designers are free to imagine any type of garment or fabric and to “manufacture” products never seen before. Given that our everyday lives have moved online so much that a new term “phygital” was PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 20 AN-ICON  coined to indicate the increasing blending of digital experi- ences with physical ones, it is a safe bet that digital fashion will become a vital category for every brand’s business model, being more and more sold as NFTs, showcased on virtual catwalks and in virtual showrooms, or worn by both physical and virtual influencers on social networks. Under the auspices of Gernot Böhme’s philosophy, Zhang takes on the notion of atmosphere to reflect on the “stage values” of digital fashion, that is, on its ability to emancipate from the material function of garments and to produce new forms of self-presentation. Digital garments are thus intended as experiences whose value arises from the atmosphere they are able to generate. By tracing such atmospheric production across three sites of its exhibition (the e-com- merce website, social media, and the runway show), Zhang shows how digital fashion contributes to the construction of a new kind of affective milieu. If the generation of such atmospheres can be said to be just an illusion or, rather, if the illusion itself can be conceived of as providing access to a new reality, is a question that fits well into the thematic section of this issue of the AN-ICON journal. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 21 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18189

Imagination and Körperzustand: illusion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflMendelssohn ection by Salvatore Tedesco Aesthetics Illusion Play Imagination Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Imagination and Körperzustand: il usion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflection SALVATORE TEDESCO, Università degli Studi di Palermo – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1584-5455 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18189 Abstract The aesthetic reflection in the eighteenth century is deeply traversed by an experience perceived as capable of disrupting the disciplinary and cognitive system of early moder- nity: To feel the “own body,” that is, to feel its state of well-being or discomfort means to somehow modify from the inside the anthropological project of the Century of Enlightenment and to create the space and the lexicon of a modality of relation- ship (play, aesthetic illusion) that redefines the relationship with oneself and the context of construction of a future community. Whereas “Knowledge” and “Will” articulate the same strategy based on the relationship between the spiritual activity of a subject and the semiotic properties of an object, the orientation towards the condition of one’s own body defines in the play and in the aesthetic illusion the space of an imag- inative reserve which is above all a reserve of time and mode of construction for a future sharing. Moses Mendelssohn’s thought constitutes the ex- emplary arrival point of an era of theoretical research that we are interested in investigating not only in terms of the solutions it has found for his time, but also in relation to the open prob- lems, which continue to question our time. Keywords Mendelssohn Aesthetics Illusion Play Imagination To quote this essay: S. Tedesco, “Imagination and Körperzustand: illusion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflection,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 22-36, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18189 SALVATORE TEDESCO 22 AN-ICON  The philosophical and aesthetic reflection in the eighteenth century is deeply traversed by an experience per- ceived as capable of disrupting the disciplinary and cognitive system of early modernity: Feeling the “own body,” that is, feeling its “state” of well-being or discomfort – before and in a way different from the cognitive approach of a subject with an object or from the desire that moves towards that object – means to somehow enter the anthropological proj- ect of the Century of Enlightenment and to create the space and the lexicon of a modality of relationship (play, aesthetic illusion) that redefines the relationship with oneself and the context of construction of a future community. In fact, where “Knowledge” and “Will” articu- late, albeit in different ways, the same strategy based on the relationship between the spiritual activity of a subject (typically, to formulate it according to the terminology of Moses Mendelssohn: geistige Bewegung der Seele and freie Entschließung des Willens) and semiotic properties [Merk- male] of an object, the orientation towards the condition of one’s own body (towards the Zustand des Körpers, as we will see, in the sign of Johann Georg Sulzer’s work) defines in play and in aesthetic illusion the space of an imaginative reserve which is above all a reserve of time and a mode of construction for a future sharing. In this dynamic, which for example the aforemen- tioned Sulzer tries to describe starting from the conceptual couple Empfinden/Erkennen (“feeling/knowing”), but which in fact would not be conceivable except as a Bewegung, that is, certainly, as a “theoretical dynamics,” but even before that as a movement of the body and soul, is profoundly inserted another decisive lexical graft, which acquires its most com- plete theoretical profile in the reflection of Johann Gottfried Herder: I mean the field of fühlen, of the tactile feeling, and therefore of its declination as hinein fühlen (“internal feeling”); Gefühl, which means a thousand things but here I would try to render it as a “tactile feeling;” Einfühlung, “empathy;” Mitgefühl, “to feel together,” “community feeling;” and finally SALVATORE TEDESCO 23 AN-ICON  Familiengefühl, in which this feeling of community undoubt- edly reveals a social dimension of identity. In this sense, decisively rethinking the Leibnizian and Baumgartenian tradition, Moses Mendelssohn speaks of a vis repraesentativa which is in and of itself indetermi- nate, but which through the reference to the state of the soul [Zustand der Seele] and of the own body is determined as Einbildungskraft facing the past, Empfindungsvermögen ad- hering to the present, Vorhersehungsvermögen of the future. But let’s look at the theoretical complex a little more closely at this point. Referring to the two short writ- ings De anima and De DEO, placed in the appendix to the famous Philosophiae naturalis Theoria by Roger Boscovi- ch,1 Moses Mendelssohn in the fifty-sixth of the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend2 proposes to take into account, together, the proximity and the difference between the laws of movement [Gesetze der Bewegung] of inorganic bodies and those brought about by the union of soul and body in the human organism, which causes from certain spatial movements [aus gewissen örtlichen Bewegun- gen] in the external limbs to derive certain spiritual movements [geis- tige Bewegungen] in the soul; some in a necessary way, like sensa- tions, others through a free choice, like the determinations of the wil . This is precisely the bipartition and parallelism be- tween geistige Bewegung der Seele and freie Entschließung 1 R.J. Boscovich, Philosophiae Naturalis Theoria (Vienna: Apud Augustinum Bernardi, 1758): 280-295. 2 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1844): vol. 4, 566. The secondary bibliography on Mendelssohn is very rich, and ranges from historical-critical questions, to aesthetics and the theory of art, to ethics and philosophy of religions, and so on. In these notes - which obviously take into account the overall developments of that critical debate, from the “classic” studies by Fr. Braitmaier, Geschichte der Poetischen Theorie und Kritik von den Diskursen der Malern bis auf Lessing (Frauenfeld: Huber, 1888-1889) and L. Goldstein, Moses Mendelssohn und die deutsche Ästhetik (Königsberg: Gräfe & Unzer, 1904), up to M. Albrecht, E.J. Engel, N. Hinske, eds., Moses Mendelssohn und die Kreise seiner Wirksamkeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), and M. Albrecht, E.J. Engel, eds., Moses Mendelssohn in Spannungsfeld der Aufklärung (Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2000), with particular reference to the large, still decisive monograph by J.P. Meier, L’Esthétique de Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) (Paris: Atelier Lille III, 1978), and for Italy refer in particular to the excellent work of L. Lattanzi, Linguaggio e poesia in Moses Mendelssohn (Pisa: ETS, 2002), and M. Mendelssohn, Scritti di Estetica, ed. L. Lattanzi (Palermo: Aesthetica, 2004) - we limit ourselves to refer from time to time to some texts by Mendelssohn himself, of which we will provide a quick theoretical framework for the purposes of our argument. SALVATORE TEDESCO 24 AN-ICON  des Willens mentioned at the beginning, according to a cog- nitive procedure that is exercised on a “semiotically config- ured” reality, in which the knowing subject captures certain Merkmale, notae characteristicae, in fact we could say se- miotic3 “representative marks” of the object, of the known reality. In this phase, therefore, Mendelssohn theorizes a perfect parallelism between the sphere of knowledge and the sphere of the will, thus inscribing himself perfectly in that theoretical tradition of the so-called “German rational- ism” which can be summarized in the positions of Christian Wolff’s Psychologia empirica or the psychological sections of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica – yet, in Mendelssohn’s par- ticular thematic declension, the salient term is certainly Be- wegung, that is the reference to a motility, of the body and of our representative faculty in relation to it, which in fact sets the whole system in motion. The theoretical framework thus “photographed” by Mendelssohn in 1759 will undergo a rapid evolution, of which we will try to retrace some passages below. At the moment, we limit ourselves to referring to that decisive turn- ing point entrusted by the author to a short private annota- tion in 1770,4 which Mendelssohn, critically returning to the path traveled by gnoseology in Germany in the eighteenth century, states that Pleasure should not have been compared with wil . That is an intimate awareness that representation “a” improves our state; the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to realize this representation. The Leibnizian affectus, Baumgarten’s sensi- tive knowledge “capable of driving force,” is now definitely 3 Obviously I am referring in this way to a very long-term semiotic strategy in the theoretical discourse that interests us here. See, limiting ourselves here of necessity to mentioning the immediate context of reference, the occurrence of the term in the fifty-fifth M. Mendelssohn, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol.1, 565. 4 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol.1, 225. SALVATORE TEDESCO 25 AN-ICON  characterized as pleasure, with the further clarification that this modality acts on (and therefore it is appropriate to say more precisely to the interior of) our state [Zustand] – we would perhaps say modernly on our “psycho-physical bal- ance” – and is therefore to be considered in reference to our intimate awareness of ourselves, rather than continuing to refer to the scope of a cognitive relationship with some external object. It is precisely here that we cross in a more articu- lated way the theories of Sulzer5 who, at the end of a long re- search path that we would define “psycho-physiological,” as well as at the start of a new season of German Enlightenment thought, definitively breaks the parallelism and the alliance between knowledge and will by contrasting, in the context of extensively understood “knowledge,” knowledge in the proper sense (i.e. the semiotic-representative relationship of a knowing subject with a known object) to a feeling devoid of an object, through which, in the strict sense, our sensory apparatus experiences itself, its own state of well-being or discomfort. But let’s take a closer look at Sulzer’s argument, in which the eye performs the function of a real paradigm of the human soul.6 Our cognitive faculty, says Sulzer develop- ing considerations that we can trace back to Christian Wolff, is structured in a way that is perfectly analogous to the sense of sight and that, in analogy to it, can be described on the basis of the laws of optics. Objects present themselves to our eye and to our cognitive faculty with a greater or lesser degree of clarity, the focus of our attention progressively focuses on every single element (imaginable as a physical point), leaving the rest of the representation in the twilight. Therefore the objects are known through a pro- cess that allows to obtain a clear knowledge of every single component of the object, so as to finally have a distinct vi- sion of the compound object; for this process to take place, 5 J.G. Sulzer, “Anmerkungen über den verschiedenen Zustand, worinn sich die Seele bey Ausübung ihrer Hauptvermögen, nämlich des Vermögens, sich etwas vorzustellen, und des Vermögens zu empfinden befindet” (1763), in Vermischte Philosophische Schriften (1773) (Hildesheim: Olms 1974): vol.1, 225-243. 6 Ibid.: 226. SALVATORE TEDESCO 26 AN-ICON  however, adequate light is required, which allows the eye to perceive the object. Conversely, when the light is so dazzling as to injure the eye, there is no longer any perception of the object, but the eye feels tactile, that is, in the manner of the darkest sense, itself, its own condition: “The luminous glow touches the ocular nerves in such a way that seeing is transformed into feeling;”7 this process represents in the best way for Sulzer the passage from the state of thinking [Nachdenken] to that of feeling [Empfinden]: the representation is no longer a representation of the object, but of my condition of plea- sure or displeasure: “We do not feel the object, but ourselves. When it reflects, the intellect takes care of something that it considers to be placed outside of it; when it feels, the soul only takes care of itself.”8 In this way, however, at the very moment in which a fundamental distinction of levels and functions of the soul is created, a very precise relationship is established between knowing and feeling, in the sense that there is a proportion- ality between the degree of darkness of our knowledge and the strength of our “sensations” and that the “sensations” are aroused, so as to give rise to the transition from the state of thinking to that of feeling, when a certain idea arouses a crowd of other obscure representations. The characteristic fact of Sulzer’s anthropolog- ical vision is that this obscurity of feeling is, in itself, an in- surmountable datum: “We feel desire or aversion without knowing why: We are moved by forces we do not know.”9 Precisely from this state of affairs – we observe here in pass- ing – the arts derive their origin and at the same time their function, destined to enter into a relationship with the darkest part of feeling and to turn it to the advantage of humanity. The caesura between knowing and feeling the- orized by Sulzer – it would be rather simple to argue – more than corresponding to a deepening of the eighteenth-century physiological discourse, more than opening a philosophical 7 Ibid.: 231. 8 Ibid.: 229-230. 9 Ibid.: 241. SALVATORE TEDESCO 27 AN-ICON  question destined to be very influential, is in a certain way the symptom, the surface effect, so to speak, of a deep landslide destined to cross the whole thinking of the second half of the eighteenth century, that of the so-called Popularphilosophie. In light of what has been seen in Mendelssohn’s Briefe, that is, in light of the attempt to describe the “mo- tions of the soul” along the lines of the laws of physical movement, it is striking that the distinction made by Sulzer undoubtedly places at the center of the analysis the opacity, the resistance of the body to the gnoseological strategies by which the body itself is crossed throughout the Leibniz- ian-Wolffian season, but the fact that this happens (and this precisely affects, and perhaps explains the intimate distrust towards Sulzer himself of many of the major protagonists of the Aufklärung), creating a static contrast between the state [Zustand] of the body and the faculty of knowledge. Conversely, it is precisely the relational dynamics that remain at the center of Moses Mendelssohn’s interests, as already exemplarily shown in his reference to Boscovich’s theses on motor skills in the investigation of the physical body and the living organism. And it is precisely here that the space for reflection opens up for the concept of illusion, destined to become central in Mendelssohn’s aesthetic re- flection. Mendelssohn’s aesthetic thought, as it is actu- ally quite well known, is very troubled and passes through different and sometimes quite intricate theoretical phases; all the more noteworthy is the fact that from the first theori- zations to the definitive results, the link between an attempt at a rational description, even a mathematization of the re- lationship between physical movements and “motions of the soul,” and the enucleation of the way to function of the aesthetic illusion. It is in fact in the correspondence on the tragic with Lessing, and therefore already in the years 1756-1757, that Mendelssohn starts his reflection on the “ästhetische” or even “poetische” Illusion, which is considered the instrument through which the dramatic poet can give space - against Aristotle and his modern followers – even to the most violent SALVATORE TEDESCO 28 AN-ICON  feelings, such as hatred or repugnance [Abscheu], on the condition that the reader and viewer are under the aesthetic effect of the illusion.10 Faced with the hesitations manifested by Less- ing in the correspondence, Mendelssohn tries to organize the theme in a more extended form by articulating a short essay Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen (About the dominion over inclinations),11 which starts from an attempt to mathematize the dynamics of motions of the soul, the- orizing a direct proportionality between the kinetic force of motivation and the expected good, as well as between the kinetic force itself and the clarity of the representation that one possesses of it, while this force would be expressed according to an inverse proportionality in relation to the time necessary for the representation itself to take shape: “Quan- tity of motivation = good × clarity ÷ time.”12 On this Platonic theoretical basis Mendelssohn also explains the effect of illusion, saying that: When an imitation bears so much resemblance to the original that our senses can be persuaded at least for a moment to see the original itself, I call this deception an aesthetic il usion. The poet must speak in a perfectly sensitive way; for this reason all his speeches must deceive us in an aesthetic way. For an imitation to be beautiful, he must deceive us aesthetically; at the same time the higher cognitive faculties must be aware that it is an imitation, and not nature itself.13 Mendelssohn therefore bases the anthropologi- cal effect of the aesthetic illusion on the discrepancy between sensitivity and intellect. The illusion is aesthetic and it is not a common deception when it is addressed directly to the sensitivity by involving the higher faculties only indirectly. This discrepancy is first of all a temporal hiatus in the effect of the aesthetic representation: 10 See K.W. Segreff, M. Mendelssohn und die Aufklärungsästhetik im 18. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Grundmann, 1984): 94. 11 M. Mendelssohn, “Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1931): vol. 2, 149-155. 12 Ibid.: 149. 13 Ibid.: 154. SALVATORE TEDESCO 29 AN-ICON It is easy to see that that judgment [that is, the aesthetic judgment] must precede, and that therefore the conviction about the similarity must be intuitive, that is, take place through il usion, while on the other hand, the conviction that it is not the original itself may come a little late, and therefore be dependent on symbolic knowledge.14 The argument itself is not fundamentally new, and to give a single example relating to a possible source, it is enough to recall Bernard de Fontenelle, who in the Ré- flexions sur la poétique of 1742 declares that our pleasure in following the painful events of a hero that we love, crying and consoling ourselves alternately for what we see, depends on our awareness that it is a fiction.15 What is new in Mendelssohn is the temporal scheme, and the theoretical framework in which it is inscribed, which is evidently influenced by the thought of Baumgarten, of which Mendelssohn becomes a continuer: While, so to speak, the awareness of the fictional character holds true in Fontenelle as an undoubtedly presupposed guarantee of “poetic” enjoyment, Mendelssohn is instead interested in the path that leads from the touched soul of the user to the aesthetic object, and in this path he discovers a double semiotic-cognitive modality, and precisely two different tem- poralities, which, however, are valid as the two necessarily coexisting stages for the realization of aesthetic pleasure. Sensitive knowledge intuitively grasps an iden- tity between original and copy where only the greater slow- ness of intellectual knowledge, due to its symbolic character, will be able to reformulate the relationship as a similarity of elements (intellectually) recognized as distinct. Only in the temporal interplay between the two cognitive stages is aesthetic pleasure realized for Mendels- sohn, which takes the form of the subsequent recognition of the similar in the imitative representation as identical and different. Identical for sensitivity and – with a short hiatus – different for the intellect. Aesthetic pleasure therefore allows 14 Ibid. 15 B.L.B. de Fontenelle, Réflexions sur la Poétique (Paris: M. Brunet, 1742): XXXVI. SALVATORE TEDESCO 30 AN-ICON  us to penetrate into the human soul, indeed to say more precisely within the motivational dynamic that governs the movements of the soul, so as to relate sensitivity and intel- lect not for the purpose of a progressive “unveiling” of re- ality that destroys illusion and error, but on the contrary for the purpose of an enjoyment that finds its root in imitation, capable of emerging with particular evidence right in the case of the imitation of passions that are violent and pain- ful,16 which would not only turn out to be such if they were experienced in reality, but which would be no less painful if we were simply faced with an “interpretative error” of our sensitivity destined to be rationally overcome. In the same year 1757, one of the decisive writ- ings of Mendelssohnian aesthetics, the Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften (Reflections on the Sources and Connec- tions of the Fine Arts and Sciences),17 added a further de- cisive element to this descriptive framework, clarifying that, from the semiotic point of view, intuitive knowledge concerns both the case in which the object is immediately present to our senses, and the case in which it is represented through signs [Zeichen] through which the ideas of the designated [Ideen des Bezeichneten] can be seen more distinctly than those of the sign. The beauty of the aesthetic relationship (but by now Mendelssohn’s discourse – precisely through the reference to the designation process – strongly gravitates towards artistic beauty) therefore offers the example of a peculiar transparency of the medium, and it is right through the transparency of the sign that the object appears with an evidence that captures and sets in motion the faculties of our soul. In the same years, in controversy with Reimarus, Mendelssohn will also return to the nature of the imagina- tion and to the overall relationship of the faculties of the 16 M. Mendelssohn, Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen: 155. 17 M. Mendelssohn, “Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie- Verlag, 1929): vol. I, 169. SALVATORE TEDESCO 31 AN-ICON  soul, saying that – far from being considered a faculty in its own right – the imagination is rather a modification of the unique, original and in principle completely indeterminate representative capacity of the soul which however “through the state of one’s own and of one’s body [durch ihren und ihres Körpers Zustand],”18 is addressed and configured in specific ways, articulating itself precisely as Einbildungsk- raft facing the past, Empfindungsvermögen adhering to the present, Vorhersehungsvermögen of the future. The famous statement of Baumgarten – accord- ing to which the individual soul represents the universe pro positu corporis –19 is therefore changed in a decisive way by redefining the position of the body as Zustand, a state or more precisely a condition of well-being or malaise. Let us pause for a moment to consider Men- delssohn’s path so far: The “aesthetic illusion” is clearly distinguished from mere “cognitive deception,” at the very moment in which the attention thus shifts one way in the direction of internal dynamics to our soul, that is towards the play, the balance of the faculties, present in our soul and set in motion by the aesthetic representations, and on the other hand it traces the dynamics of the relational movement between our soul and the aesthetic object, now more and more clearly distinguished from the cognitive one. The brief note of 1770 to which attention has already been drawn testifies to a deepening of the first question – that relating to the internal dynamics of our soul – which would not be imaginable and would probably not have assumed that configuration without the openings on one’s own body and on his condition made possible by the almost contemporary theories of Sulzer. Mendelssohn therefore writes: Pleasure should not have been compared with wil . That is an intimate awareness that representation “a” improves our state [Zustand]; 18 M. Mendelssohn, “Rezensionsartikel,” in Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend (1759- 1765), 20 nov. 1760: 300 in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Stuttgart: Frommann- Holzboog,1991): no. 5,1. 19 A.G. Baumgarten, Metaphysica (1779) (Halle: Hemmerde, 1939): § 512. SALVATORE TEDESCO 32 AN-ICON the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to realize this representation. Pleasure is, so to speak, a favorable judgment of the soul on her real state; the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to achieve this state.20 In this way, undoubtedly, Mendelssohn moves towards an overall redefinition of the “system of faculties” that distances him from the Wolffian tradition as well as from Baumgarten, his model, approaching that tripartite division between the cognitive sphere, the sphere of will and aesthet- ic pleasure that characterizes the second eighteenth cen- tury from the so-called Popularphilosophie to Kant. No less significant is that this occurs through a specific attention to one’s own body, and to the way in which the representative processes do not so much modify our relationship with reality on the objective side, as they redefine its internal resonance. However, whereas precisely on this point Sulzer chose an “extremist” reading, speaking of a “feeling devoid of an object,” through which our body senses itself and not the object, and therefore sacrificed the understanding of the dynamic relationship to highlight the question of the Zustand, of the state/condition of the organ (remember what Sulzer says about the eye and sight), of one’s own body, of the soul vitalistically considered coextensive with the body, Mendels- sohn never loses sight of the relationality, the dynamism of the framework of faculty. It is perhaps also for this reason that his is the most significant figure in the entire German debate from Baumgarten to Kant. Another short essay is dedicated to what has just been defined as the dynamics of the relational move- ment between our soul and the object, dating back to June 1776, in which, similarly to what we have just seen, Men- delssohn moves, so to speak, from “systematic reasons,” openly declared already from the title of the fragment: [Über 20 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol. 1, 225. SALVATORE TEDESCO 33 AN-ICON  das Erkenntnis-, das Empfindungs- und das Begehrungsver- mögen] On the faculty of knowing, of feeling and of appetite. What six years earlier had been entrusted to an almost incidental note here instead – even if the writing is destined not to leave the private workshop of Mendelssohn’s thought – acquires the characteristics of a system program: Between the faculty of knowing and the faculty to appetite there is the faculty of feeling [Empfindungsvermögen], by means of which we feel pleasure or displeasure about something, we appreciate it, approve it, find it pleasant, or we despise it, blame it and find it un- pleasant [.. ]. The end of the faculty of knowing is the truth; that is, as we possess a faculty of knowing, we strive to make the concepts in our soul accord with the qualities of their objects. The end of the faculty of hearing is the good; that is, insofar as we possess a faculty of feeling, we strive to make the objective qualities accord with our concepts of goodness, order and beauty.21 The truly innovative moment of this position lies in the clear distinction of areas between will and pleasure: The pleasure for a representation does not necessarily imply the desire for the object that underlies it. Mendelssohn is above all interested in distin- guishing two modalities of relationship with the object: In the cognitive relationship we modify our representations to adapt them to the truth of the object, in the case of the faculty of feeling we aim instead to harmonize the properties of the object with our own concepts of good, order, beauty, and the tool for this to happen is clearly identified in the aesthetic illusion. The peculiarity of the statute of aesthetic illusion is then the true core of Mendelssohn’s discourse, when it is distinguished both from cognitive truth and also from the concrete modification of reality which the will aims at. But there is more; Mendelssohn distinguishes two fundamental human attitudes, the first tending to truth, the second to poetic invention [Erdichtung]. If the first cor- responds to the work of the faculty of knowing, the poetic 21 Ibid.: vol. 3, 1, 276. SALVATORE TEDESCO 34 AN-ICON  invention will instead follow the intent of keeping in exercise [in Übung zu erhalten]22 the faculty of feeling. In the same days, another brief note23 completes the Mendelssohnian description, noting that this “faculty to entertain oneself” [Un- terhaltungsfähigkeit] (it is interesting how Mendelssohn tries to set the theoretical framework in motion even in proposing new names for a system of faculties perceived as in active transformation with respect to the Wolffian model) has an objective side (simplifying I would say the quantity and or- der of semiotic markers capable of “giving something to think about”) and a subjective side (the faculty itself and the ordering criteria it is able to set). The beauty will therefore reside in the harmony between the objective and subjective aspects of the new faculty, capable of arousing in us “in the contemplation of the object, the awareness of our strengths rather than our limits, and movement is pleasant.”24 Conversely, that disharmony that comes from the excess of the object over our faculties will cause dizzi- ness, and on a conceptual level it will give life to the sublime. The conclusive synthesis of the Morgenstunden, in 1785, will insert the considerations that we have followed up to now into a much broader theoretical framework, without however further introducing profound changes; confirming and reformulating again the tripartition between the faculty of knowing, that of desiring and the “aesthetic faculty,” now re- defined as the capacity of appreciation [Billigungsvermögen], Mendelssohn now distinguishes between two fundamental aspects of human knowledge, depending on whether one considers its material relevance or the formal configuration. From the material point of view, that is, a given notion can be true or false; considered from this point of view, knowledge knows no degrees, truth is an “indivisible unity.”25 It is quite another thing to consider knowledge as capable of arousing pleasure or displeasure, that is, as an object of 22 Ibid. 23 M. Mendelssohn, “Über objektive und subjektive Unterhaltungsfähigkeit,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol. 3, 1, 275. 24 Ibid. 25 M. Mendelssohn, “Morgenstunden,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog; 1974): vol. 3, 2, 62. SALVATORE TEDESCO 35 AN-ICON  the faculty of appreciation: precisely this can be defined as the formal aspect. And vice versa, this consists exclusively in evaluating, in comparison, in gradation, in plus and minus; moreover, every conceivable degree of this scale of values can be thought of “with the same truth,”26 which is evidently a truth of the formal aspect of knowledge, a peculiar truth of aesthetic illusion. Moses Mendelssohn’s thought, in its different phases and declinations, through the collaboration with Lessing and up to the final results of the Morgenstunden, constitutes the exemplary arrival point of an era of theo- retical research that we are interested in investigating not only in terms of the solutions that he found for his time, but also in relation to open problems, which continue to question our time. 26 Ibid.: 63. SALVATORE TEDESCO 36 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18189

Imagination and Körperzustand: illusion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflMendelssohn ection by Salvatore Tedesco Aesthetics Illusion Play Imagination Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Imagination and Körperzustand: il usion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflection SALVATORE TEDESCO, Università degli Studi di Palermo – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1584-5455 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18189 Abstract The aesthetic reflection in the eighteenth century is deeply traversed by an experience perceived as capable of disrupting the disciplinary and cognitive system of early moder- nity: To feel the “own body,” that is, to feel its state of well-being or discomfort means to somehow modify from the inside the anthropological project of the Century of Enlightenment and to create the space and the lexicon of a modality of relation- ship (play, aesthetic illusion) that redefines the relationship with oneself and the context of construction of a future community. Whereas “Knowledge” and “Will” articulate the same strategy based on the relationship between the spiritual activity of a subject and the semiotic properties of an object, the orientation towards the condition of one’s own body defines in the play and in the aesthetic illusion the space of an imag- inative reserve which is above all a reserve of time and mode of construction for a future sharing. Moses Mendelssohn’s thought constitutes the ex- emplary arrival point of an era of theoretical research that we are interested in investigating not only in terms of the solutions it has found for his time, but also in relation to the open prob- lems, which continue to question our time. Keywords Mendelssohn Aesthetics Illusion Play Imagination To quote this essay: S. Tedesco, “Imagination and Körperzustand: illusion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflection,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 22-36, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18189 SALVATORE TEDESCO 22 AN-ICON  The philosophical and aesthetic reflection in the eighteenth century is deeply traversed by an experience per- ceived as capable of disrupting the disciplinary and cognitive system of early modernity: Feeling the “own body,” that is, feeling its “state” of well-being or discomfort – before and in a way different from the cognitive approach of a subject with an object or from the desire that moves towards that object – means to somehow enter the anthropological proj- ect of the Century of Enlightenment and to create the space and the lexicon of a modality of relationship (play, aesthetic illusion) that redefines the relationship with oneself and the context of construction of a future community. In fact, where “Knowledge” and “Will” articu- late, albeit in different ways, the same strategy based on the relationship between the spiritual activity of a subject (typically, to formulate it according to the terminology of Moses Mendelssohn: geistige Bewegung der Seele and freie Entschließung des Willens) and semiotic properties [Merk- male] of an object, the orientation towards the condition of one’s own body (towards the Zustand des Körpers, as we will see, in the sign of Johann Georg Sulzer’s work) defines in play and in aesthetic illusion the space of an imaginative reserve which is above all a reserve of time and a mode of construction for a future sharing. In this dynamic, which for example the aforemen- tioned Sulzer tries to describe starting from the conceptual couple Empfinden/Erkennen (“feeling/knowing”), but which in fact would not be conceivable except as a Bewegung, that is, certainly, as a “theoretical dynamics,” but even before that as a movement of the body and soul, is profoundly inserted another decisive lexical graft, which acquires its most com- plete theoretical profile in the reflection of Johann Gottfried Herder: I mean the field of fühlen, of the tactile feeling, and therefore of its declination as hinein fühlen (“internal feeling”); Gefühl, which means a thousand things but here I would try to render it as a “tactile feeling;” Einfühlung, “empathy;” Mitgefühl, “to feel together,” “community feeling;” and finally SALVATORE TEDESCO 23 AN-ICON  Familiengefühl, in which this feeling of community undoubt- edly reveals a social dimension of identity. In this sense, decisively rethinking the Leibnizian and Baumgartenian tradition, Moses Mendelssohn speaks of a vis repraesentativa which is in and of itself indetermi- nate, but which through the reference to the state of the soul [Zustand der Seele] and of the own body is determined as Einbildungskraft facing the past, Empfindungsvermögen ad- hering to the present, Vorhersehungsvermögen of the future. But let’s look at the theoretical complex a little more closely at this point. Referring to the two short writ- ings De anima and De DEO, placed in the appendix to the famous Philosophiae naturalis Theoria by Roger Boscovi- ch,1 Moses Mendelssohn in the fifty-sixth of the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend2 proposes to take into account, together, the proximity and the difference between the laws of movement [Gesetze der Bewegung] of inorganic bodies and those brought about by the union of soul and body in the human organism, which causes from certain spatial movements [aus gewissen örtlichen Bewegun- gen] in the external limbs to derive certain spiritual movements [geis- tige Bewegungen] in the soul; some in a necessary way, like sensa- tions, others through a free choice, like the determinations of the wil . This is precisely the bipartition and parallelism be- tween geistige Bewegung der Seele and freie Entschließung 1 R.J. Boscovich, Philosophiae Naturalis Theoria (Vienna: Apud Augustinum Bernardi, 1758): 280-295. 2 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1844): vol. 4, 566. The secondary bibliography on Mendelssohn is very rich, and ranges from historical-critical questions, to aesthetics and the theory of art, to ethics and philosophy of religions, and so on. In these notes - which obviously take into account the overall developments of that critical debate, from the “classic” studies by Fr. Braitmaier, Geschichte der Poetischen Theorie und Kritik von den Diskursen der Malern bis auf Lessing (Frauenfeld: Huber, 1888-1889) and L. Goldstein, Moses Mendelssohn und die deutsche Ästhetik (Königsberg: Gräfe & Unzer, 1904), up to M. Albrecht, E.J. Engel, N. Hinske, eds., Moses Mendelssohn und die Kreise seiner Wirksamkeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), and M. Albrecht, E.J. Engel, eds., Moses Mendelssohn in Spannungsfeld der Aufklärung (Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2000), with particular reference to the large, still decisive monograph by J.P. Meier, L’Esthétique de Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) (Paris: Atelier Lille III, 1978), and for Italy refer in particular to the excellent work of L. Lattanzi, Linguaggio e poesia in Moses Mendelssohn (Pisa: ETS, 2002), and M. Mendelssohn, Scritti di Estetica, ed. L. Lattanzi (Palermo: Aesthetica, 2004) - we limit ourselves to refer from time to time to some texts by Mendelssohn himself, of which we will provide a quick theoretical framework for the purposes of our argument. SALVATORE TEDESCO 24 AN-ICON  des Willens mentioned at the beginning, according to a cog- nitive procedure that is exercised on a “semiotically config- ured” reality, in which the knowing subject captures certain Merkmale, notae characteristicae, in fact we could say se- miotic3 “representative marks” of the object, of the known reality. In this phase, therefore, Mendelssohn theorizes a perfect parallelism between the sphere of knowledge and the sphere of the will, thus inscribing himself perfectly in that theoretical tradition of the so-called “German rational- ism” which can be summarized in the positions of Christian Wolff’s Psychologia empirica or the psychological sections of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica – yet, in Mendelssohn’s par- ticular thematic declension, the salient term is certainly Be- wegung, that is the reference to a motility, of the body and of our representative faculty in relation to it, which in fact sets the whole system in motion. The theoretical framework thus “photographed” by Mendelssohn in 1759 will undergo a rapid evolution, of which we will try to retrace some passages below. At the moment, we limit ourselves to referring to that decisive turn- ing point entrusted by the author to a short private annota- tion in 1770,4 which Mendelssohn, critically returning to the path traveled by gnoseology in Germany in the eighteenth century, states that Pleasure should not have been compared with wil . That is an intimate awareness that representation “a” improves our state; the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to realize this representation. The Leibnizian affectus, Baumgarten’s sensi- tive knowledge “capable of driving force,” is now definitely 3 Obviously I am referring in this way to a very long-term semiotic strategy in the theoretical discourse that interests us here. See, limiting ourselves here of necessity to mentioning the immediate context of reference, the occurrence of the term in the fifty-fifth M. Mendelssohn, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol.1, 565. 4 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol.1, 225. SALVATORE TEDESCO 25 AN-ICON  characterized as pleasure, with the further clarification that this modality acts on (and therefore it is appropriate to say more precisely to the interior of) our state [Zustand] – we would perhaps say modernly on our “psycho-physical bal- ance” – and is therefore to be considered in reference to our intimate awareness of ourselves, rather than continuing to refer to the scope of a cognitive relationship with some external object. It is precisely here that we cross in a more articu- lated way the theories of Sulzer5 who, at the end of a long re- search path that we would define “psycho-physiological,” as well as at the start of a new season of German Enlightenment thought, definitively breaks the parallelism and the alliance between knowledge and will by contrasting, in the context of extensively understood “knowledge,” knowledge in the proper sense (i.e. the semiotic-representative relationship of a knowing subject with a known object) to a feeling devoid of an object, through which, in the strict sense, our sensory apparatus experiences itself, its own state of well-being or discomfort. But let’s take a closer look at Sulzer’s argument, in which the eye performs the function of a real paradigm of the human soul.6 Our cognitive faculty, says Sulzer develop- ing considerations that we can trace back to Christian Wolff, is structured in a way that is perfectly analogous to the sense of sight and that, in analogy to it, can be described on the basis of the laws of optics. Objects present themselves to our eye and to our cognitive faculty with a greater or lesser degree of clarity, the focus of our attention progressively focuses on every single element (imaginable as a physical point), leaving the rest of the representation in the twilight. Therefore the objects are known through a pro- cess that allows to obtain a clear knowledge of every single component of the object, so as to finally have a distinct vi- sion of the compound object; for this process to take place, 5 J.G. Sulzer, “Anmerkungen über den verschiedenen Zustand, worinn sich die Seele bey Ausübung ihrer Hauptvermögen, nämlich des Vermögens, sich etwas vorzustellen, und des Vermögens zu empfinden befindet” (1763), in Vermischte Philosophische Schriften (1773) (Hildesheim: Olms 1974): vol.1, 225-243. 6 Ibid.: 226. SALVATORE TEDESCO 26 AN-ICON  however, adequate light is required, which allows the eye to perceive the object. Conversely, when the light is so dazzling as to injure the eye, there is no longer any perception of the object, but the eye feels tactile, that is, in the manner of the darkest sense, itself, its own condition: “The luminous glow touches the ocular nerves in such a way that seeing is transformed into feeling;”7 this process represents in the best way for Sulzer the passage from the state of thinking [Nachdenken] to that of feeling [Empfinden]: the representation is no longer a representation of the object, but of my condition of plea- sure or displeasure: “We do not feel the object, but ourselves. When it reflects, the intellect takes care of something that it considers to be placed outside of it; when it feels, the soul only takes care of itself.”8 In this way, however, at the very moment in which a fundamental distinction of levels and functions of the soul is created, a very precise relationship is established between knowing and feeling, in the sense that there is a proportion- ality between the degree of darkness of our knowledge and the strength of our “sensations” and that the “sensations” are aroused, so as to give rise to the transition from the state of thinking to that of feeling, when a certain idea arouses a crowd of other obscure representations. The characteristic fact of Sulzer’s anthropolog- ical vision is that this obscurity of feeling is, in itself, an in- surmountable datum: “We feel desire or aversion without knowing why: We are moved by forces we do not know.”9 Precisely from this state of affairs – we observe here in pass- ing – the arts derive their origin and at the same time their function, destined to enter into a relationship with the darkest part of feeling and to turn it to the advantage of humanity. The caesura between knowing and feeling the- orized by Sulzer – it would be rather simple to argue – more than corresponding to a deepening of the eighteenth-century physiological discourse, more than opening a philosophical 7 Ibid.: 231. 8 Ibid.: 229-230. 9 Ibid.: 241. SALVATORE TEDESCO 27 AN-ICON  question destined to be very influential, is in a certain way the symptom, the surface effect, so to speak, of a deep landslide destined to cross the whole thinking of the second half of the eighteenth century, that of the so-called Popularphilosophie. In light of what has been seen in Mendelssohn’s Briefe, that is, in light of the attempt to describe the “mo- tions of the soul” along the lines of the laws of physical movement, it is striking that the distinction made by Sulzer undoubtedly places at the center of the analysis the opacity, the resistance of the body to the gnoseological strategies by which the body itself is crossed throughout the Leibniz- ian-Wolffian season, but the fact that this happens (and this precisely affects, and perhaps explains the intimate distrust towards Sulzer himself of many of the major protagonists of the Aufklärung), creating a static contrast between the state [Zustand] of the body and the faculty of knowledge. Conversely, it is precisely the relational dynamics that remain at the center of Moses Mendelssohn’s interests, as already exemplarily shown in his reference to Boscovich’s theses on motor skills in the investigation of the physical body and the living organism. And it is precisely here that the space for reflection opens up for the concept of illusion, destined to become central in Mendelssohn’s aesthetic re- flection. Mendelssohn’s aesthetic thought, as it is actu- ally quite well known, is very troubled and passes through different and sometimes quite intricate theoretical phases; all the more noteworthy is the fact that from the first theori- zations to the definitive results, the link between an attempt at a rational description, even a mathematization of the re- lationship between physical movements and “motions of the soul,” and the enucleation of the way to function of the aesthetic illusion. It is in fact in the correspondence on the tragic with Lessing, and therefore already in the years 1756-1757, that Mendelssohn starts his reflection on the “ästhetische” or even “poetische” Illusion, which is considered the instrument through which the dramatic poet can give space - against Aristotle and his modern followers – even to the most violent SALVATORE TEDESCO 28 AN-ICON  feelings, such as hatred or repugnance [Abscheu], on the condition that the reader and viewer are under the aesthetic effect of the illusion.10 Faced with the hesitations manifested by Less- ing in the correspondence, Mendelssohn tries to organize the theme in a more extended form by articulating a short essay Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen (About the dominion over inclinations),11 which starts from an attempt to mathematize the dynamics of motions of the soul, the- orizing a direct proportionality between the kinetic force of motivation and the expected good, as well as between the kinetic force itself and the clarity of the representation that one possesses of it, while this force would be expressed according to an inverse proportionality in relation to the time necessary for the representation itself to take shape: “Quan- tity of motivation = good × clarity ÷ time.”12 On this Platonic theoretical basis Mendelssohn also explains the effect of illusion, saying that: When an imitation bears so much resemblance to the original that our senses can be persuaded at least for a moment to see the original itself, I call this deception an aesthetic il usion. The poet must speak in a perfectly sensitive way; for this reason all his speeches must deceive us in an aesthetic way. For an imitation to be beautiful, he must deceive us aesthetically; at the same time the higher cognitive faculties must be aware that it is an imitation, and not nature itself.13 Mendelssohn therefore bases the anthropologi- cal effect of the aesthetic illusion on the discrepancy between sensitivity and intellect. The illusion is aesthetic and it is not a common deception when it is addressed directly to the sensitivity by involving the higher faculties only indirectly. This discrepancy is first of all a temporal hiatus in the effect of the aesthetic representation: 10 See K.W. Segreff, M. Mendelssohn und die Aufklärungsästhetik im 18. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Grundmann, 1984): 94. 11 M. Mendelssohn, “Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1931): vol. 2, 149-155. 12 Ibid.: 149. 13 Ibid.: 154. SALVATORE TEDESCO 29 AN-ICON It is easy to see that that judgment [that is, the aesthetic judgment] must precede, and that therefore the conviction about the similarity must be intuitive, that is, take place through il usion, while on the other hand, the conviction that it is not the original itself may come a little late, and therefore be dependent on symbolic knowledge.14 The argument itself is not fundamentally new, and to give a single example relating to a possible source, it is enough to recall Bernard de Fontenelle, who in the Ré- flexions sur la poétique of 1742 declares that our pleasure in following the painful events of a hero that we love, crying and consoling ourselves alternately for what we see, depends on our awareness that it is a fiction.15 What is new in Mendelssohn is the temporal scheme, and the theoretical framework in which it is inscribed, which is evidently influenced by the thought of Baumgarten, of which Mendelssohn becomes a continuer: While, so to speak, the awareness of the fictional character holds true in Fontenelle as an undoubtedly presupposed guarantee of “poetic” enjoyment, Mendelssohn is instead interested in the path that leads from the touched soul of the user to the aesthetic object, and in this path he discovers a double semiotic-cognitive modality, and precisely two different tem- poralities, which, however, are valid as the two necessarily coexisting stages for the realization of aesthetic pleasure. Sensitive knowledge intuitively grasps an iden- tity between original and copy where only the greater slow- ness of intellectual knowledge, due to its symbolic character, will be able to reformulate the relationship as a similarity of elements (intellectually) recognized as distinct. Only in the temporal interplay between the two cognitive stages is aesthetic pleasure realized for Mendels- sohn, which takes the form of the subsequent recognition of the similar in the imitative representation as identical and different. Identical for sensitivity and – with a short hiatus – different for the intellect. Aesthetic pleasure therefore allows 14 Ibid. 15 B.L.B. de Fontenelle, Réflexions sur la Poétique (Paris: M. Brunet, 1742): XXXVI. SALVATORE TEDESCO 30 AN-ICON  us to penetrate into the human soul, indeed to say more precisely within the motivational dynamic that governs the movements of the soul, so as to relate sensitivity and intel- lect not for the purpose of a progressive “unveiling” of re- ality that destroys illusion and error, but on the contrary for the purpose of an enjoyment that finds its root in imitation, capable of emerging with particular evidence right in the case of the imitation of passions that are violent and pain- ful,16 which would not only turn out to be such if they were experienced in reality, but which would be no less painful if we were simply faced with an “interpretative error” of our sensitivity destined to be rationally overcome. In the same year 1757, one of the decisive writ- ings of Mendelssohnian aesthetics, the Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften (Reflections on the Sources and Connec- tions of the Fine Arts and Sciences),17 added a further de- cisive element to this descriptive framework, clarifying that, from the semiotic point of view, intuitive knowledge concerns both the case in which the object is immediately present to our senses, and the case in which it is represented through signs [Zeichen] through which the ideas of the designated [Ideen des Bezeichneten] can be seen more distinctly than those of the sign. The beauty of the aesthetic relationship (but by now Mendelssohn’s discourse – precisely through the reference to the designation process – strongly gravitates towards artistic beauty) therefore offers the example of a peculiar transparency of the medium, and it is right through the transparency of the sign that the object appears with an evidence that captures and sets in motion the faculties of our soul. In the same years, in controversy with Reimarus, Mendelssohn will also return to the nature of the imagina- tion and to the overall relationship of the faculties of the 16 M. Mendelssohn, Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen: 155. 17 M. Mendelssohn, “Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie- Verlag, 1929): vol. I, 169. SALVATORE TEDESCO 31 AN-ICON  soul, saying that – far from being considered a faculty in its own right – the imagination is rather a modification of the unique, original and in principle completely indeterminate representative capacity of the soul which however “through the state of one’s own and of one’s body [durch ihren und ihres Körpers Zustand],”18 is addressed and configured in specific ways, articulating itself precisely as Einbildungsk- raft facing the past, Empfindungsvermögen adhering to the present, Vorhersehungsvermögen of the future. The famous statement of Baumgarten – accord- ing to which the individual soul represents the universe pro positu corporis –19 is therefore changed in a decisive way by redefining the position of the body as Zustand, a state or more precisely a condition of well-being or malaise. Let us pause for a moment to consider Men- delssohn’s path so far: The “aesthetic illusion” is clearly distinguished from mere “cognitive deception,” at the very moment in which the attention thus shifts one way in the direction of internal dynamics to our soul, that is towards the play, the balance of the faculties, present in our soul and set in motion by the aesthetic representations, and on the other hand it traces the dynamics of the relational movement between our soul and the aesthetic object, now more and more clearly distinguished from the cognitive one. The brief note of 1770 to which attention has already been drawn testifies to a deepening of the first question – that relating to the internal dynamics of our soul – which would not be imaginable and would probably not have assumed that configuration without the openings on one’s own body and on his condition made possible by the almost contemporary theories of Sulzer. Mendelssohn therefore writes: Pleasure should not have been compared with wil . That is an intimate awareness that representation “a” improves our state [Zustand]; 18 M. Mendelssohn, “Rezensionsartikel,” in Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend (1759- 1765), 20 nov. 1760: 300 in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Stuttgart: Frommann- Holzboog,1991): no. 5,1. 19 A.G. Baumgarten, Metaphysica (1779) (Halle: Hemmerde, 1939): § 512. SALVATORE TEDESCO 32 AN-ICON the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to realize this representation. Pleasure is, so to speak, a favorable judgment of the soul on her real state; the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to achieve this state.20 In this way, undoubtedly, Mendelssohn moves towards an overall redefinition of the “system of faculties” that distances him from the Wolffian tradition as well as from Baumgarten, his model, approaching that tripartite division between the cognitive sphere, the sphere of will and aesthet- ic pleasure that characterizes the second eighteenth cen- tury from the so-called Popularphilosophie to Kant. No less significant is that this occurs through a specific attention to one’s own body, and to the way in which the representative processes do not so much modify our relationship with reality on the objective side, as they redefine its internal resonance. However, whereas precisely on this point Sulzer chose an “extremist” reading, speaking of a “feeling devoid of an object,” through which our body senses itself and not the object, and therefore sacrificed the understanding of the dynamic relationship to highlight the question of the Zustand, of the state/condition of the organ (remember what Sulzer says about the eye and sight), of one’s own body, of the soul vitalistically considered coextensive with the body, Mendels- sohn never loses sight of the relationality, the dynamism of the framework of faculty. It is perhaps also for this reason that his is the most significant figure in the entire German debate from Baumgarten to Kant. Another short essay is dedicated to what has just been defined as the dynamics of the relational move- ment between our soul and the object, dating back to June 1776, in which, similarly to what we have just seen, Men- delssohn moves, so to speak, from “systematic reasons,” openly declared already from the title of the fragment: [Über 20 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol. 1, 225. SALVATORE TEDESCO 33 AN-ICON  das Erkenntnis-, das Empfindungs- und das Begehrungsver- mögen] On the faculty of knowing, of feeling and of appetite. What six years earlier had been entrusted to an almost incidental note here instead – even if the writing is destined not to leave the private workshop of Mendelssohn’s thought – acquires the characteristics of a system program: Between the faculty of knowing and the faculty to appetite there is the faculty of feeling [Empfindungsvermögen], by means of which we feel pleasure or displeasure about something, we appreciate it, approve it, find it pleasant, or we despise it, blame it and find it un- pleasant [.. ]. The end of the faculty of knowing is the truth; that is, as we possess a faculty of knowing, we strive to make the concepts in our soul accord with the qualities of their objects. The end of the faculty of hearing is the good; that is, insofar as we possess a faculty of feeling, we strive to make the objective qualities accord with our concepts of goodness, order and beauty.21 The truly innovative moment of this position lies in the clear distinction of areas between will and pleasure: The pleasure for a representation does not necessarily imply the desire for the object that underlies it. Mendelssohn is above all interested in distin- guishing two modalities of relationship with the object: In the cognitive relationship we modify our representations to adapt them to the truth of the object, in the case of the faculty of feeling we aim instead to harmonize the properties of the object with our own concepts of good, order, beauty, and the tool for this to happen is clearly identified in the aesthetic illusion. The peculiarity of the statute of aesthetic illusion is then the true core of Mendelssohn’s discourse, when it is distinguished both from cognitive truth and also from the concrete modification of reality which the will aims at. But there is more; Mendelssohn distinguishes two fundamental human attitudes, the first tending to truth, the second to poetic invention [Erdichtung]. If the first cor- responds to the work of the faculty of knowing, the poetic 21 Ibid.: vol. 3, 1, 276. SALVATORE TEDESCO 34 AN-ICON  invention will instead follow the intent of keeping in exercise [in Übung zu erhalten]22 the faculty of feeling. In the same days, another brief note23 completes the Mendelssohnian description, noting that this “faculty to entertain oneself” [Un- terhaltungsfähigkeit] (it is interesting how Mendelssohn tries to set the theoretical framework in motion even in proposing new names for a system of faculties perceived as in active transformation with respect to the Wolffian model) has an objective side (simplifying I would say the quantity and or- der of semiotic markers capable of “giving something to think about”) and a subjective side (the faculty itself and the ordering criteria it is able to set). The beauty will therefore reside in the harmony between the objective and subjective aspects of the new faculty, capable of arousing in us “in the contemplation of the object, the awareness of our strengths rather than our limits, and movement is pleasant.”24 Conversely, that disharmony that comes from the excess of the object over our faculties will cause dizzi- ness, and on a conceptual level it will give life to the sublime. The conclusive synthesis of the Morgenstunden, in 1785, will insert the considerations that we have followed up to now into a much broader theoretical framework, without however further introducing profound changes; confirming and reformulating again the tripartition between the faculty of knowing, that of desiring and the “aesthetic faculty,” now re- defined as the capacity of appreciation [Billigungsvermögen], Mendelssohn now distinguishes between two fundamental aspects of human knowledge, depending on whether one considers its material relevance or the formal configuration. From the material point of view, that is, a given notion can be true or false; considered from this point of view, knowledge knows no degrees, truth is an “indivisible unity.”25 It is quite another thing to consider knowledge as capable of arousing pleasure or displeasure, that is, as an object of 22 Ibid. 23 M. Mendelssohn, “Über objektive und subjektive Unterhaltungsfähigkeit,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol. 3, 1, 275. 24 Ibid. 25 M. Mendelssohn, “Morgenstunden,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog; 1974): vol. 3, 2, 62. SALVATORE TEDESCO 35 AN-ICON  the faculty of appreciation: precisely this can be defined as the formal aspect. And vice versa, this consists exclusively in evaluating, in comparison, in gradation, in plus and minus; moreover, every conceivable degree of this scale of values can be thought of “with the same truth,”26 which is evidently a truth of the formal aspect of knowledge, a peculiar truth of aesthetic illusion. Moses Mendelssohn’s thought, in its different phases and declinations, through the collaboration with Lessing and up to the final results of the Morgenstunden, constitutes the exemplary arrival point of an era of theo- retical research that we are interested in investigating not only in terms of the solutions that he found for his time, but also in relation to open problems, which continue to question our time. 26 Ibid.: 63. SALVATORE TEDESCO 36 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/17655

The polysemy of Vilém Flusser’s concept of illusi o by Francesco Restuccia Flusser n Illusion Fiction Fontcuberta Idolatry Self-deception Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing The polysemy of Vilém Flusser’s concept of il usion FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA, Sapienza - Università di Roma – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8900-642X https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17655 Abstract Vilém Flusser uses the concept of illusion in a non-systematic way, resulting in two ostensible contra- dictions. First of all, he often uses the term illusion, while criticizing the metaphysic assumptions that it implies; sec- ondly, he seems to both dispraise and value the illusionary nature of technical images. This article aims at clarifying Flusser’s thoughts on illusion in the belief that they are not as conflicting as they might seem at first. In fact, when Flusser deplores the risk of de- ception associated with technical images, he refers to the illusion of transparency. He does not oppose the concept of illusion to a supposed objective truth, on the contrary, he opposes the illusion of the objective nature of images to the awareness of their constructed and mediated character. However, a rational demystification of illu- sions is not a viable option, since, according to Flusser, they are the result of a voluntary self-deception: we suppress our critical thinking because we cannot bear its complexity, we want images to “release us from the necessity for conceptual, explanatory thought.” This is why Flusser thinks that aware illusion – in other words: fiction – can help us overcome our “inertia of happiness” and develop a critical imagination. Keywords Flusser Illusion Fiction Fontcuberta Idolatry Self-deception To quote this essay: F. Restuccia, “The polysemy of Vilém Flusser’s concept of illusion,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 52-66, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17655 FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 52 AN-ICON  Leafing through the pages of Herbarium (1982- 1985) by Joan Fontcuberta one is immediately seduced by the beauty of these black and white analog photographs of exotic plants, whose geometric details remind one of Karl Blossfeldt’s work. The whole series is presented as scientific documentation, including the botanical nomencla- ture of these newly discovered species. Only at a second glance one might notice that something is wrong: some details in the image, the strange pseudo-Latin names. What appeared to be plants are actually small assemblages of pieces of plastic, fragments and parts of animals found by the artist in the industrial outskirts of Barcelona. We have been victims of an illusion. These images, both hyper-re- alistic and extremely unlikely, aim to deceive us and at the same time to reveal the deception. Without any digital ma- nipulation, Fontcuberta’s work on the one hand invites us to reflect upon the supposed immediate and documentary character of photography, on the other hand it allows us to experience unprecedented and surprising configurations. Fontcuberta had an important intellectual col- laboration with a philosopher and media theorist who ded- icated many of his writings to discussing the illusionary character of technical images: Vilém Flusser.1 Although the term “illusion” appears only rarely in his writings and in a non-systematic way, Flusser was definitely fascinated by the ambiguity of this concept, which, as it emerges in Herbarium, can be conceived both as a form of deception, with dangerous and deplorable effects, and as a precious artistic and epistemic tool.2 Often Flusser refers to illusive phenomena in a pejorative way; sometimes he tends to re- ject the metaphysical assumption – implied by the concept of illusion – that an objective truth can be found beyond 1 Flusser also wrote the introduction to the German edition of Herbarium: V. Flusser, “Einführung ‘Herbarium’ von Joan Fontcuberta,” in Standpunkte: Texte zur Fotografie (Göttingen: European Photography, 1998): 113-116. 2 As Carrillo Canán wrote, “Flusser has no explicit theory on deception but as with many critical thinkers, his theory is to a great extent a theory of deception.” A.J.L. Carrillo Canán, “Deception and the ‘magic’ of ‘technical images’ according to Flusser,” Flusser Studies, no. 4 (2008): 1-12, 1. Significantly, neither “illusion,” “deception,” nor “fiction” was chosen as one of the 235 entries that make up the glossary of Flusseriana. S. Zielinski, P. Weibel, D. Irrgang, eds., Flusseriana: An Intellectual Toolbox (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2015). FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 53 AN-ICON  appearance; on other occasions he seems convinced that the art of illusion is the best tool for the creative training of our imagination. Therefore, it could be useful to try to put an order, as far as this is possible, to Flusser’s thoughts on illusion, in the belief that they are not as conflicting as they might initially seem. First we will analyze the contexts where he deplores the risk of deception associated with any mediation, and with new media and technical images in particular; then we will consider his critiques of the con- cepts of illusion and especially of disillusion, focusing on his theory of a voluntary self-deception; finally we will see how Flusser approves of illusion when it is understood as a form of fiction. Illusion as deception The German word that Flusser uses the most when referring to the negative sense of illusion is “Täu- schung,” which could be translated as “deception.” The verb “täuschen” literally means to exchange, to swap: by exchanging two different things, one mistakes one for an- other one. Being deceived is, first of all, taking something for something else, or conferring to one thing the value that we should only confer to something else. What are the two things that, according to Flusser, might dangerously be confused? The model and its copy, the signified and the signifier, the thing and the image. Deception is “a reversal [Umkehrung] of the vectors of significance,”3 or a “reversal of the function of the image:”4 images should represent the world and help us “to orientate” ourselves within it, but we end up forgetting about the world and living in function of the images we have created.5 Images “are supposed to be 3 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), trans. A. Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000): 37, 68. 4 Ibid.: 10. 5 On the concept of reversal as the key to understanding Flusser’s conception of technical images see D. Irrgang, Vom Umkehren der Bedeutungsvektoren: Prototypen des Technischen Bildes bei Vilém Flusser (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2017). FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 54 AN-ICON  maps but they turn into screens: Instead of representing [vorstellen] the world, they obscure [verstellen] it.”6 Flusser is not concerned by the deceptions that occur when we take an image of A for an image of B. As long as we truly know that something is an image, we also know that it is a human construction, that it needs to be interpreted and that this interpretation might be wrong. The real problem arises when images conceal their own nature. Flusser’s main models for his (implicit) theory of deception are Plato’s concept of eidolon and the Jewish and early Christian conception of idolatry.7 In his interpre- tation, both Plato’s eidola and religious idols are images that should mediate and represent something else (ideas for Plato, God in the Jewish and Christian tradition), but instead of presenting themselves as such, they end up being taken for what they should refer to. Flusser rethinks the concept of idolatry in a secular way, conceiving it as that particular form of deception which occurs when we do not recognize the symbolic and cultural nature of an image. In Towards a Philosophy of Photography idolatry is defined as “the inability to read off ideas from the elements of the image, despite the ability to read these elements themselves; hence: worship of images.”8 It is important to notice that idolatry is not only a perceptual deception, but has effects on human behavior: Flusser writes, metaphor- ically, that images are “worshiped” when they “have a hold over people as objects.”9 Sometimes, in order to identify this particular form of deception Flusser uses, instead of “idolatry,” the term “hallucination.” 6 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10. 7 Ibid.: 11; V. Flusser, “The codified world” (1978), in Writings, trans. E. Eisel (Minneapolis- London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002): 35-41, 39. See also F. Restuccia, “Flusser against idolatry,” Flusser Studies, no. 26 (2018): 1-15 and F. Restuccia, Il contrattacco delle immagini. Tecnica, media e idolatria a partire da Vilém Flusser (Milan: Meltemi, 2021). 8 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 83. A similar “semiotic” definition of idolatry was proposed by Augustine: “Now, he is in bondage to a sign who uses, or pays homage to, any significant object without knowing what it signifies,” S. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson jr. (London: Pearson, 1958): III, IX, 13. 9 V. Flusser, “Design: obstacle for/to the removal of obstacles” (1993), in The Shape of Things. A Philosophy of Design (London: Reaktion Books, 1999): 58-61, 60. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 55 AN-ICON Imagination can dialectically reverse and become hallucination. Images resulting from this reversed imagination stop working as mediation and become opaque surfaces hiding the world. The se- mantic vectors invert and point towards their producer instead of pointing towards the world.10 It is important to notice that this sort of reversal can happen with any kind of mediation and not only with images. When we stop using texts and conceptual thinking to help us understand the world, and we start using the world in order to understand our texts, or forcing data to fit into our conceptual grid, then we are victims of another form of deception. In this case Flusser talks about texto- latry, as opposed to idolatry, or paranoia, as opposed to hallucination.11 This dangerous reversal of imagination hap- pens when we do not recognize a medium, especially a visual one, as such. Therefore, the most illusionary images are those that appear transparent, concealing their status of images and presenting themselves as objective reality. According to Flusser, technical images – all images pro- duced by apparatuses, starting with photography – are the most deceiving, in this sense, because their mechanical production seems to grant an automatic and almost natural process that avoids any human and cultural interference.12 “But this ‘objectivity’ of the photograph is deceptive [täus- chend],”13 because technology is a human product and is also culturally biased. The program that apparatuses use to code images was written by human beings and is an externalization of the visual schemata that they would use if they were drawing an image themselves. When we see 10 V. Flusser, “Iconoclastia,” Cavalo azul, no. 8 (1979): 78-84, 79, my translation; see also V. Flusser Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10. 11 The choice of the last couple of words is due to their etymology: “hallucination,” which might be related to the Latin word lux (light), refers to visual thinking, whereas “paranoia,” which comes from the Greek word nous (intellect), refers to conceptual thinking. See V. Flusser, “Iconoclastia:” 79, and V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10. 12 H. Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1844) was one of the first to assert such a natural character of photography. See K. Walton, “Transparent pictures: on the nature of photographic realism,” Critical Inquiry, no. 11 (1984): 246-277, https://www.doi.org/10.1086/448287. 13 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 51. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 56 AN-ICON  a drawing or any other traditional image, though, we are aware that what we are looking at is someone’s interpre- tation of the world, and not the world itself; but when we see a photograph, or a video, we assume that what we are looking at is a direct emanation of reality. “This lack of criticism of technical images is potentially dangerous […] for the reason that the ‘objectivity’ of technical images is an illusion [Täuschung].”14 The elements of a photograph appear to be “symptoms” of the world, instead of “symbols” that need to be “decoded.”15 The only way to avoid idolatry, hallucination and deception is to recognize the symbols contained in an image and decode them, discovering the “programmed concepts” they represent, “so as to identify the true significance of the photograph.”16 Based on what has been discussed so far, Flusser seems to maintain a sort of platonic dualism: im- ages are just symbols and should not be confused with the real world. However, Flusser refuses this approach as “‘metaphysical’ […] in the worst sense of the word.”17 The reason why he deplores the illusion of transparency of tech- nical images is because, according to him, no such thing as an immediate reality can be found, not even beyond images. Even “the amorphous stew of phenomena (‘the material world’) is an illusion [Täuschung],”18 since it is only accessible through our nervous system and is therefore also a construction. In an interview with Florian Rötzer he declared: The concept of simulation disturbs me. When something is simulated, that is, when it looks like something else, there must be something being simulated. In the term simulation or simulacrum lies a deep metaphysical belief that something can be simulated. I do not share 14 Ibid.: 15. 15 Ibid.; V. Flusser, “Für eine Theorie der Techno-Imagination, 1980 in Standpunkte: Texte zur Fotografie: 8-16, 8. 16 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 44. 17 Ibid.: 62. 18 V. Flusser, “Form and material,” in Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design: 22-29, 22. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 57 AN-ICON this belief [...]. In my opinion in the word simulation hides what is left of a belief in the absolute.19 Flusser is not afraid that the real world could be replaced with a simulation: on the one hand because our technologies do not allow us to build virtual worlds as defined as the experience of the world built by our nervous system, on the other hand because if this ever happened, then it would not make sense to distinguish these experi- ences as belonging to different levels of reality.20 Moreover our lifeworld and our simulations are already intertwined, since the experiences we have in the former affect those we have in the latter and vice versa. The real illusion is the possibility of accessing a pure, immediate reality. If all is construction, then why is Flusser con- cerned? Because if we assumed that images – and gener- ally our whole experience of the world – are immediate and pure, then we would accept them acritically. We would start unconsciously absorbing interpretations of reality without questioning them, and our imagination would slowly be- come lethargic. We should then try to avoid surrendering to the illusion of transparency, train our imagination and learn to decode the images we are surrounded by. But how can we do this? Is a rationalistic debunking the only way out of deception? Illusion as self-deception In the essay Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch Flusser rethinks the movie theater as a modern version of21 Plato’s cave. People sit in a dark space looking at images 19 V. Flusser, Zwiegespräche (Göttingen: European Photography, 1996): 230-231, my translation. See J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), trans. S. Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Flusser considered Baudrillard a friend and often quotes him in his final years, although mostly polemically. 20 V. Flusser, “Vom Virtuellen,” in F. Rötzer, P. Weibel, eds., Cyberspace. Zum medialen Gesamtkunstwerk (München: Boer, 2002): 65-71; V. Flusser, Kommunikologie weiter denken (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008): 75-77. 21 V. Flusser, “Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch,” in Lob der Oberflächigkeit. Für eine Phänomenologie der Medien (Bensheim-Düsseldorf: Bollman Verlag, 1993): 153-166. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 58 AN-ICON  projected on the wall in front of them, ignoring the world outside the “cave.” What does Flusser’s interpretation of the myth teach us? That people want to stay in the cave, they are not chained, they do not desire to be freed. Their illusion is voluntary. According to Flusser commercial cinema still has some degree of idolatry: people contemplate those images acritically, as pure entertainment, without question- ing the message that is being passed. Therefore they are “programmed” by the technical images to think and act in a certain way: the same people who leave the movie theater, writes Flusser, will form a line to enter the supermarket. They are victims of a double illusion: on the one hand they see the lights projected on the screen as a world taking shape in front of their eyes, on the other hand they end up believing that the people, the feelings, the values they perceived somehow exist and have a life of their own, that they are not the creation of a team of artists and technicians. However, neither of the two forms of illusion is a complete deception. Any film spectator knows how a film is made: they know the impression of movement is produced by the rapid sequence of the frames, they know the events por- trayed have been written, designed and reproduced, but they choose to believe in them. “Moviegoers are believers not in good faith, but in bad faith [böse Glaubens]: they know better, but don’t want to know. This is not magic, but something new.”22 In Towards a Philosophy of Photography, writ- ten around three years later, Flusser further develops his conception of a voluntary illusion, or belief in bad faith. Even though people nowadays act as if they were under the magic spell of technical images – they see a commer- cial and buy the product, they watch a video and change their political opinion – yet they do not believe in those images in the same way as people belonging to traditional magic cultures believed in their images. While the latter did not develop their critical consciousness (their conceptual 22 Ibid.: 163, my translation. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 59 AN-ICON  thinking), which can only be trained through literacy,23 the former do have it, but end up suppressing it. Both Native Americans and functionaries believe in the reality of images, but functionaries do this out of bad faith. After all, they have learned to write at school and consequently should know better. Functionaries have a historical consciousness and critical awareness but they suppress these. They know that the war in Lebanon is not a clash between good and evil but that specific causes have specific consequences there. They know that the toothbrush is not a sacred object but a product of Western history. But they have to suppress their superior knowledge of this.24 The main sources for Flusser’s conception of a belief in bad faith might be Johan Huizinga and Marcel Mauss.25 However, these authors developed the idea of a voluntary belief, or a partially aware illusion, in order to describe traditional magical thinking and not only the con- temporary experience of technical images.26 By trying to prove that any magic ritual has a playful dimension, just as any game has a ritual dimension, Huizinga affirms that no illusion is ever a complete deception: it is always combined with some degree of simulation. As far as I know, ethnologists and anthropologists concur in the opinion that the mental attitude in which the great religious feasts of savages are celebrated and witnessed is not one of complete illusion. There is an underlying consciousness of things “not be- ing real.” [...] A certain element of “makebelieve” is operative in all 23 V. Flusser, “Line and surface” (1973), in Writings: 21-34; V. Flusser, Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft? (Göttingen: Immatrix, 1987). 24 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 63. 25 V. Flusser, Post-History (1983), trans. R. Maltez Novaes (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013): 99- 106; V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 27; Kommunikologie weiter denken: 245. 26 The notion of “voluntary illusion” [illusion volontaire] can already be found in Paul Souriau, L’imagination de l’artiste (Paris: Librairie Hachette et cie, 1901), while the concept of aware illusion [bewußte Selbsttäuschung] was first developed by Konrad Lange, Die Bewußte Selbsttäuschung als Kern des künstlerischen Genusses (Leipzig: Verlag von Veit & Comp., 1895). FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 60 AN-ICON primitive religions. Whether one is sorcerer or sorcerized one is al- ways knower and dupe at once. But one chooses to be the dupe.27 In a similar way, a few years before, Mauss wrote that any magical performance reveals the collective will to believe in it, both on the part of the spectators and the magician: We are in no doubt that magical facts need constant encourage- ment and that even the sincerest delusions of the magician have always been self-imposed to some degree.28 Yet, one should be able to distinguish between this sort of sincere self-delusion that we can find in the ex- perience of traditional magic, from the “belief in bad faith” that Flusser identifies in the experience of technical images. On the one hand the “underlying consciousness of things ‘not being real’” is still a blurry intuition, on the other hand the critical consciousness reached by educated people is fully developed and can only coexist with illusion if it is partially suppressed. Why do we systematically suppress our critical and conceptual thinking and choose to be deluded? Flusser thinks that this human behavior is not only a result of our tendency to conform. The reason why we need to partially suppress our critical consciousness in order to function within society is that, at this level of complexity, conceptual thinking is no longer efficient. The point is not that people do not understand rational explanations; it is that they do not want to hear them. Commenting on how, during the 1982 Lebanon War, people formed their opinions based on videos and photos, rather than on theoretical analyses, Flusser writes: 27 J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938), trans. R.F.C. Hull (London-Boston-Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949): 22-23. 28 M. Mauss, General Theory of Magic (1902), trans. R. Brain (London-New York: Routledge, 2001): 118. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 61 AN-ICON We are by now sick and tired of explanations and prefer to stick to the photograph that releases us from the necessity for con- ceptual, explanatory thought and absolves us from the bother of going into the causes and consequences of the war in Lebanon: In the image we see with our own eyes what the war looks like. The text simply consists of instructions as to how we are to see.29 We suppress our conceptual thinking because of the cognitive comfort provided by technical apparatus- es that calculate and build images for us. Flusser calls the state of numbness generated by this comfort the inertia of happiness: “It is this inertia of happiness that stands in the way of a changeover.”30 This theory forces us to reconsider the rational- istic approach that one could at first read into Flusser’s cri- tique of deception. If our illusion is somehow self-imposed and the suppression of our critical consciousness is a re- action to the heaviness, the complexity and the abstract- ness of conceptual thinking, which expresses the need to expand the visual, sensory and emotional dimension of existence, we cannot simply debunk our self-delusion by rational means. The only way to overcome the negative aspects of deception is within the image world, therefore through a creative use of illusion. Illusion as fiction When the term “illusion” is used by Flusser with a positive connotation it has the meaning of construction or fiction. In the posthumous book The Surprising Phe- nomenon of Human Communication, where he defines the structure of communication as the infrastructure of human reality, Flusser writes that the act of communicating produc- es the illusion of immortality. We know, due to the suffering of our bodies, that it is an illusion: “Despite our individual and collective memories, we remain mortals. Nevertheless, 29 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 62. 30 V. Flusser, Kommunikologie weiter denken: 210. “Es ist diese Trägheit des Glücks, die einer Umschaltung entgegensteht.” FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 62 AN-ICON  this illusion is, still, our own reality, our ontological dignity.”31 In this case illusion is a different name for sense-making, the attribution of meaning, which according to Flusser is what makes us humans. When illusion is conceived in this constructive way, Flusser replaces the term “täuschen” (deceive) with the term “vortäuschen,” which could be translated as “sim- ulate,” “feign.”32 In Shape of Things he defines the verb “to design” as “to concoct something, to simulate [vortäus- chen], to draft, to sketch, to fashion, to have designs on something.”33 A simulation – this constructive form of illu- sion – is not about producing a copy [Abbild], it is about shaping a model [Vorbild].34 In “Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch” Flusser affirms that not only does the sequence of frames produce the illusion of movement, but the very frames are illusions, as they recreate the impression of three dimensional spaces through the two-dimensional disposition of colors. In this context “illusion” is not meant in a negative sense: Flusser is fascinated by the capacity of technical images to evoke meaningful and visual experiences from non-meaningful and often non-visual elements, such as the bits of infor- mation for digital photography.35 Technical images have an illusionistic effect in that they evoke an impression by means of calculation. The point-projection perspective designed by renaissance painters, the trompe-l’œil designed by baroque architects, the tricks designed by stage magicians produce emotional effects using rational techniques. Experimental photographers and programmers work in the same way, but 31 V. Flusser, The Surprising Phenomenon of Human Communication (1975), trans. R. Maltez Novaes, D. Naves (Metaflux, 2016): 154. 32 V. Flusser, “Gärten,” in Dinge und Undinge. Phänomenologische Skizzen (München-Wien: Carl Hanser, 1993): 46-52, 51. 33 V. Flusser, “About the word design,” in Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design: 17. 34 V. Flusser, “Abbild – Vorbild oder: was heißt darstellen?,” in Lob der Oberflächlichkeit (Düsseldorf: Bollmann, 1993): 293-317. 35 Even in the case of analog photography, according to Flusser, the image could be reduced to computable elements, such as the exposure time, the focal aperture, and the ISO setting. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 63 AN-ICON  with more efficient tools: they can program an apparatus that will translate an alphanumeric input into a visual output. According to Flusser, this allows for the first time for an experimental approach to image making and therefore an element of control over the visual world: a synthesis between conceptual-critical thinking and visu- al-emotional thinking. The word “experimental” is used in a literal sense: technical images can be used for experiments. One can insert a certain input, see what the outcome is, and consequently change the input in order to achieve a different result. If one writes the equation of a Mandelbrot frac- tal in a computer in order to visualize it on the screen, one may be surprised by the outcome and therefore learn from it. The complexity of that geometrical figure where the to- tality is infinitely repeated in the parts could not be perfectly foreseen. One sits in front of a keyboard, taking one dot element after another out of the memory, to fit it into an image on the screen, to compute it. This step-by-step process of extraction can be automated so that it can proceed very quickly. The images appear on the screen one after another in breathtaking speed. One can follow this sequence of images, just as if the imagination had become self-sufficient; or as if it had traveled from inside (let’s say from the cranium) to outside (into the computer); or as if one could observe one’s own dreams from the outside. In fact, some of the appearing images can be surprising: they are unexpected images.36 The idea of an experimental character of tech- nical images could be better understood by taking into consideration Flusser’s notion of science fiction, where he further develops the relationship between conceptual and emotional thinking. With this expression Flusser not only refers to the literary genre, to which, moreover, he 36 V. Flusser, “A new imagination,” in Writings: 110-116, 114. For a closer analysis of this essay and for a discussion about the idea of surprising images and the externalization of imagination, see L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence (2005), trans. N.F. Schott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010): 98-101. See also V. Flusser, “Ein neuer Platonismus?,” kulturRRevolution, no. 19 (1988): 6. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 64 AN-ICON  contributed with many charming short stories,37 but also reflects about the deep inner connection between science as fiction and fiction as science: something that has been called a “speculative fiction.”38 Any scientific knowledge is based on the development of models and simulations that are, strictly speaking, illusions. When fiction is enhanced with the experimental exactness provided by technical im- ages, it becomes a powerful tool to create surprising mod- els that will allow us to think of what we are not yet able to conceive. This is, according to Flusser, the greatest po- tentiality of virtual simulations: they allow us to experience – emotionally, visually, haptically – what until now we were only able to calculate; and at the same time they allow us to calculate and control experiences that until now we could only vaguely imagine. Flusser believes that virtual environ- ments, and in general all technical images, should not be used to reproduce what already exists for recreational pur- poses,39 but should “bring to virtuality” alternative worlds. Thanks to simulated environments, for example, we could be able to experience a world where all living creatures are sulfur-based instead of carbon-based – a world that, 37 Most of Flusser’s philosophical science fiction short stories can be found in the following publications: V. Flusser, Ficções Filosóficas (São Paulo: Edusp, 1998); V. Flusser, Angenommen: Eine Szenenfolge (Göttingen: European Photography, 2000); V. Flusser, L. Bec, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A treatise with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste (1987), trans. V.A. Pakis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). See also Flusser’s essays on fiction: V. Flusser, “Da ficção,” O diário (August 26, 1966); V. Flusser, “Science fiction” (1988), trans. W. Hanff, Flusser Studies, no. 20 (2015): 1-3, where Flusser writes about a fantasia essata (exacting fantasy), which he attributes to Leonardo da Vinci. 38 J. Torres, “Homo Fictor: em busca de uma ficção filosófica,” Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies 2, no. 4 (2020): 1-12, 7. Much has been published on Flusser’s theory of fiction, and science fiction in particular. See G. Salvi Philipson, “Flusser para além do ensaio: de outros modos possíveis de habitar a intersecção entre ficção e filosofia,” Flusser Studies, no. 25 (2018): 1-17; the sixth chapter of A. Finger, R. Guldin, G. Bernardo Krause, Vilém Flusser. An Introduction (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011): 109-129; P. Bozzi, “Rhapsody in blue: Vilém Flusser und der vampyroteuthis infernalis,” Flusser Studies, no. 1 (2005): 1-20; G. Bernardo Krause, “On philosophical fiction,” in R. Guldin, ed., Das Spiel mit der Übersetzung. Figuren der Mehrsprachigkeit im Werk Vilém Flussers (Tübingen-Basel: Francke, 2004): 119- 128. 39 Flusser is extremely skeptical about the documentary function of technical images, not only because of their illusionary character (technical images can be easily manipulated), but because he questions the neutrality of any sort of documentation. Any document presents a point of view, with a system of ethical and political implications, as it were objective. See F. Restuccia, “La realtà sta nella fotografia. Autenticazioni delle immagini della guerra del Libano,” Carte semiotiche, no. 4 (2016): 160-170. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 65 AN-ICON  without any technical help, we can anticipate, but not fully conceive.40 Rethinking illusion as an aware and voluntary simulation allows Flusser to avoid the rationalistic approach to debunking. He realizes that visual interfaces (and even more, haptic and immersive ones) allow for experiencers to overcome their inertia of happiness and take part in the model making process. However, this is only possible if technical images and virtual environments are open to a strong interactive participation.41 This way, by turning the coding process into a playful interaction, it will be possible to bridge the gap between critical and visual thinking, be- tween the elite of programmers and the mass of consumers. 40 V. Flusser, “Vom Virtuellen:” 70-71; V. Flusser, Kommunikologie weiter denken: 78. Recently Andrea Pinotti identified this approach as part of a post-human trend in VR (try to experience the world beyond the limits of the human body and mind, for example by flying as an eagle) as opposed to a humanitarian trend (VR as an empathy machine meant to move the experiencer about social issues). The main limit of the post-human approach is that it will only allow perceiving a non-human world as a human being would perceive it. A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine (Torino: Einaudi, 2021): 201; see also A. Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk? Inter-specific empathy in the age of immersive virtual environments,” in Y. Hadjinicolaou, ed., Visual Engagements. Image Practices and Falconry (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2020): 30-47. The best example of this post-human approach in Flusser is definitely his Vampyrotheutis infernalis. 41 On the (post-)political implications of Flusser’s theory of participation, see M. Menon, Vilém Flusser e la “Rivoluzione dell’Informazione”: Comunicazione, Etica, Politica (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2022): 172-178. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 66 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/17655

The polysemy of Vilém Flusser’s concept of illusi o by Francesco Restuccia Flusser n Illusion Fiction Fontcuberta Idolatry Self-deception Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing The polysemy of Vilém Flusser’s concept of il usion FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA, Sapienza - Università di Roma – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8900-642X https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17655 Abstract Vilém Flusser uses the concept of illusion in a non-systematic way, resulting in two ostensible contra- dictions. First of all, he often uses the term illusion, while criticizing the metaphysic assumptions that it implies; sec- ondly, he seems to both dispraise and value the illusionary nature of technical images. This article aims at clarifying Flusser’s thoughts on illusion in the belief that they are not as conflicting as they might seem at first. In fact, when Flusser deplores the risk of de- ception associated with technical images, he refers to the illusion of transparency. He does not oppose the concept of illusion to a supposed objective truth, on the contrary, he opposes the illusion of the objective nature of images to the awareness of their constructed and mediated character. However, a rational demystification of illu- sions is not a viable option, since, according to Flusser, they are the result of a voluntary self-deception: we suppress our critical thinking because we cannot bear its complexity, we want images to “release us from the necessity for conceptual, explanatory thought.” This is why Flusser thinks that aware illusion – in other words: fiction – can help us overcome our “inertia of happiness” and develop a critical imagination. Keywords Flusser Illusion Fiction Fontcuberta Idolatry Self-deception To quote this essay: F. Restuccia, “The polysemy of Vilém Flusser’s concept of illusion,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 52-66, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17655 FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 52 AN-ICON  Leafing through the pages of Herbarium (1982- 1985) by Joan Fontcuberta one is immediately seduced by the beauty of these black and white analog photographs of exotic plants, whose geometric details remind one of Karl Blossfeldt’s work. The whole series is presented as scientific documentation, including the botanical nomencla- ture of these newly discovered species. Only at a second glance one might notice that something is wrong: some details in the image, the strange pseudo-Latin names. What appeared to be plants are actually small assemblages of pieces of plastic, fragments and parts of animals found by the artist in the industrial outskirts of Barcelona. We have been victims of an illusion. These images, both hyper-re- alistic and extremely unlikely, aim to deceive us and at the same time to reveal the deception. Without any digital ma- nipulation, Fontcuberta’s work on the one hand invites us to reflect upon the supposed immediate and documentary character of photography, on the other hand it allows us to experience unprecedented and surprising configurations. Fontcuberta had an important intellectual col- laboration with a philosopher and media theorist who ded- icated many of his writings to discussing the illusionary character of technical images: Vilém Flusser.1 Although the term “illusion” appears only rarely in his writings and in a non-systematic way, Flusser was definitely fascinated by the ambiguity of this concept, which, as it emerges in Herbarium, can be conceived both as a form of deception, with dangerous and deplorable effects, and as a precious artistic and epistemic tool.2 Often Flusser refers to illusive phenomena in a pejorative way; sometimes he tends to re- ject the metaphysical assumption – implied by the concept of illusion – that an objective truth can be found beyond 1 Flusser also wrote the introduction to the German edition of Herbarium: V. Flusser, “Einführung ‘Herbarium’ von Joan Fontcuberta,” in Standpunkte: Texte zur Fotografie (Göttingen: European Photography, 1998): 113-116. 2 As Carrillo Canán wrote, “Flusser has no explicit theory on deception but as with many critical thinkers, his theory is to a great extent a theory of deception.” A.J.L. Carrillo Canán, “Deception and the ‘magic’ of ‘technical images’ according to Flusser,” Flusser Studies, no. 4 (2008): 1-12, 1. Significantly, neither “illusion,” “deception,” nor “fiction” was chosen as one of the 235 entries that make up the glossary of Flusseriana. S. Zielinski, P. Weibel, D. Irrgang, eds., Flusseriana: An Intellectual Toolbox (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2015). FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 53 AN-ICON  appearance; on other occasions he seems convinced that the art of illusion is the best tool for the creative training of our imagination. Therefore, it could be useful to try to put an order, as far as this is possible, to Flusser’s thoughts on illusion, in the belief that they are not as conflicting as they might initially seem. First we will analyze the contexts where he deplores the risk of deception associated with any mediation, and with new media and technical images in particular; then we will consider his critiques of the con- cepts of illusion and especially of disillusion, focusing on his theory of a voluntary self-deception; finally we will see how Flusser approves of illusion when it is understood as a form of fiction. Illusion as deception The German word that Flusser uses the most when referring to the negative sense of illusion is “Täu- schung,” which could be translated as “deception.” The verb “täuschen” literally means to exchange, to swap: by exchanging two different things, one mistakes one for an- other one. Being deceived is, first of all, taking something for something else, or conferring to one thing the value that we should only confer to something else. What are the two things that, according to Flusser, might dangerously be confused? The model and its copy, the signified and the signifier, the thing and the image. Deception is “a reversal [Umkehrung] of the vectors of significance,”3 or a “reversal of the function of the image:”4 images should represent the world and help us “to orientate” ourselves within it, but we end up forgetting about the world and living in function of the images we have created.5 Images “are supposed to be 3 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), trans. A. Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000): 37, 68. 4 Ibid.: 10. 5 On the concept of reversal as the key to understanding Flusser’s conception of technical images see D. Irrgang, Vom Umkehren der Bedeutungsvektoren: Prototypen des Technischen Bildes bei Vilém Flusser (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2017). FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 54 AN-ICON  maps but they turn into screens: Instead of representing [vorstellen] the world, they obscure [verstellen] it.”6 Flusser is not concerned by the deceptions that occur when we take an image of A for an image of B. As long as we truly know that something is an image, we also know that it is a human construction, that it needs to be interpreted and that this interpretation might be wrong. The real problem arises when images conceal their own nature. Flusser’s main models for his (implicit) theory of deception are Plato’s concept of eidolon and the Jewish and early Christian conception of idolatry.7 In his interpre- tation, both Plato’s eidola and religious idols are images that should mediate and represent something else (ideas for Plato, God in the Jewish and Christian tradition), but instead of presenting themselves as such, they end up being taken for what they should refer to. Flusser rethinks the concept of idolatry in a secular way, conceiving it as that particular form of deception which occurs when we do not recognize the symbolic and cultural nature of an image. In Towards a Philosophy of Photography idolatry is defined as “the inability to read off ideas from the elements of the image, despite the ability to read these elements themselves; hence: worship of images.”8 It is important to notice that idolatry is not only a perceptual deception, but has effects on human behavior: Flusser writes, metaphor- ically, that images are “worshiped” when they “have a hold over people as objects.”9 Sometimes, in order to identify this particular form of deception Flusser uses, instead of “idolatry,” the term “hallucination.” 6 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10. 7 Ibid.: 11; V. Flusser, “The codified world” (1978), in Writings, trans. E. Eisel (Minneapolis- London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002): 35-41, 39. See also F. Restuccia, “Flusser against idolatry,” Flusser Studies, no. 26 (2018): 1-15 and F. Restuccia, Il contrattacco delle immagini. Tecnica, media e idolatria a partire da Vilém Flusser (Milan: Meltemi, 2021). 8 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 83. A similar “semiotic” definition of idolatry was proposed by Augustine: “Now, he is in bondage to a sign who uses, or pays homage to, any significant object without knowing what it signifies,” S. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson jr. (London: Pearson, 1958): III, IX, 13. 9 V. Flusser, “Design: obstacle for/to the removal of obstacles” (1993), in The Shape of Things. A Philosophy of Design (London: Reaktion Books, 1999): 58-61, 60. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 55 AN-ICON Imagination can dialectically reverse and become hallucination. Images resulting from this reversed imagination stop working as mediation and become opaque surfaces hiding the world. The se- mantic vectors invert and point towards their producer instead of pointing towards the world.10 It is important to notice that this sort of reversal can happen with any kind of mediation and not only with images. When we stop using texts and conceptual thinking to help us understand the world, and we start using the world in order to understand our texts, or forcing data to fit into our conceptual grid, then we are victims of another form of deception. In this case Flusser talks about texto- latry, as opposed to idolatry, or paranoia, as opposed to hallucination.11 This dangerous reversal of imagination hap- pens when we do not recognize a medium, especially a visual one, as such. Therefore, the most illusionary images are those that appear transparent, concealing their status of images and presenting themselves as objective reality. According to Flusser, technical images – all images pro- duced by apparatuses, starting with photography – are the most deceiving, in this sense, because their mechanical production seems to grant an automatic and almost natural process that avoids any human and cultural interference.12 “But this ‘objectivity’ of the photograph is deceptive [täus- chend],”13 because technology is a human product and is also culturally biased. The program that apparatuses use to code images was written by human beings and is an externalization of the visual schemata that they would use if they were drawing an image themselves. When we see 10 V. Flusser, “Iconoclastia,” Cavalo azul, no. 8 (1979): 78-84, 79, my translation; see also V. Flusser Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10. 11 The choice of the last couple of words is due to their etymology: “hallucination,” which might be related to the Latin word lux (light), refers to visual thinking, whereas “paranoia,” which comes from the Greek word nous (intellect), refers to conceptual thinking. See V. Flusser, “Iconoclastia:” 79, and V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10. 12 H. Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1844) was one of the first to assert such a natural character of photography. See K. Walton, “Transparent pictures: on the nature of photographic realism,” Critical Inquiry, no. 11 (1984): 246-277, https://www.doi.org/10.1086/448287. 13 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 51. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 56 AN-ICON  a drawing or any other traditional image, though, we are aware that what we are looking at is someone’s interpre- tation of the world, and not the world itself; but when we see a photograph, or a video, we assume that what we are looking at is a direct emanation of reality. “This lack of criticism of technical images is potentially dangerous […] for the reason that the ‘objectivity’ of technical images is an illusion [Täuschung].”14 The elements of a photograph appear to be “symptoms” of the world, instead of “symbols” that need to be “decoded.”15 The only way to avoid idolatry, hallucination and deception is to recognize the symbols contained in an image and decode them, discovering the “programmed concepts” they represent, “so as to identify the true significance of the photograph.”16 Based on what has been discussed so far, Flusser seems to maintain a sort of platonic dualism: im- ages are just symbols and should not be confused with the real world. However, Flusser refuses this approach as “‘metaphysical’ […] in the worst sense of the word.”17 The reason why he deplores the illusion of transparency of tech- nical images is because, according to him, no such thing as an immediate reality can be found, not even beyond images. Even “the amorphous stew of phenomena (‘the material world’) is an illusion [Täuschung],”18 since it is only accessible through our nervous system and is therefore also a construction. In an interview with Florian Rötzer he declared: The concept of simulation disturbs me. When something is simulated, that is, when it looks like something else, there must be something being simulated. In the term simulation or simulacrum lies a deep metaphysical belief that something can be simulated. I do not share 14 Ibid.: 15. 15 Ibid.; V. Flusser, “Für eine Theorie der Techno-Imagination, 1980 in Standpunkte: Texte zur Fotografie: 8-16, 8. 16 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 44. 17 Ibid.: 62. 18 V. Flusser, “Form and material,” in Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design: 22-29, 22. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 57 AN-ICON this belief [...]. In my opinion in the word simulation hides what is left of a belief in the absolute.19 Flusser is not afraid that the real world could be replaced with a simulation: on the one hand because our technologies do not allow us to build virtual worlds as defined as the experience of the world built by our nervous system, on the other hand because if this ever happened, then it would not make sense to distinguish these experi- ences as belonging to different levels of reality.20 Moreover our lifeworld and our simulations are already intertwined, since the experiences we have in the former affect those we have in the latter and vice versa. The real illusion is the possibility of accessing a pure, immediate reality. If all is construction, then why is Flusser con- cerned? Because if we assumed that images – and gener- ally our whole experience of the world – are immediate and pure, then we would accept them acritically. We would start unconsciously absorbing interpretations of reality without questioning them, and our imagination would slowly be- come lethargic. We should then try to avoid surrendering to the illusion of transparency, train our imagination and learn to decode the images we are surrounded by. But how can we do this? Is a rationalistic debunking the only way out of deception? Illusion as self-deception In the essay Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch Flusser rethinks the movie theater as a modern version of21 Plato’s cave. People sit in a dark space looking at images 19 V. Flusser, Zwiegespräche (Göttingen: European Photography, 1996): 230-231, my translation. See J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), trans. S. Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Flusser considered Baudrillard a friend and often quotes him in his final years, although mostly polemically. 20 V. Flusser, “Vom Virtuellen,” in F. Rötzer, P. Weibel, eds., Cyberspace. Zum medialen Gesamtkunstwerk (München: Boer, 2002): 65-71; V. Flusser, Kommunikologie weiter denken (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008): 75-77. 21 V. Flusser, “Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch,” in Lob der Oberflächigkeit. Für eine Phänomenologie der Medien (Bensheim-Düsseldorf: Bollman Verlag, 1993): 153-166. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 58 AN-ICON  projected on the wall in front of them, ignoring the world outside the “cave.” What does Flusser’s interpretation of the myth teach us? That people want to stay in the cave, they are not chained, they do not desire to be freed. Their illusion is voluntary. According to Flusser commercial cinema still has some degree of idolatry: people contemplate those images acritically, as pure entertainment, without question- ing the message that is being passed. Therefore they are “programmed” by the technical images to think and act in a certain way: the same people who leave the movie theater, writes Flusser, will form a line to enter the supermarket. They are victims of a double illusion: on the one hand they see the lights projected on the screen as a world taking shape in front of their eyes, on the other hand they end up believing that the people, the feelings, the values they perceived somehow exist and have a life of their own, that they are not the creation of a team of artists and technicians. However, neither of the two forms of illusion is a complete deception. Any film spectator knows how a film is made: they know the impression of movement is produced by the rapid sequence of the frames, they know the events por- trayed have been written, designed and reproduced, but they choose to believe in them. “Moviegoers are believers not in good faith, but in bad faith [böse Glaubens]: they know better, but don’t want to know. This is not magic, but something new.”22 In Towards a Philosophy of Photography, writ- ten around three years later, Flusser further develops his conception of a voluntary illusion, or belief in bad faith. Even though people nowadays act as if they were under the magic spell of technical images – they see a commer- cial and buy the product, they watch a video and change their political opinion – yet they do not believe in those images in the same way as people belonging to traditional magic cultures believed in their images. While the latter did not develop their critical consciousness (their conceptual 22 Ibid.: 163, my translation. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 59 AN-ICON  thinking), which can only be trained through literacy,23 the former do have it, but end up suppressing it. Both Native Americans and functionaries believe in the reality of images, but functionaries do this out of bad faith. After all, they have learned to write at school and consequently should know better. Functionaries have a historical consciousness and critical awareness but they suppress these. They know that the war in Lebanon is not a clash between good and evil but that specific causes have specific consequences there. They know that the toothbrush is not a sacred object but a product of Western history. But they have to suppress their superior knowledge of this.24 The main sources for Flusser’s conception of a belief in bad faith might be Johan Huizinga and Marcel Mauss.25 However, these authors developed the idea of a voluntary belief, or a partially aware illusion, in order to describe traditional magical thinking and not only the con- temporary experience of technical images.26 By trying to prove that any magic ritual has a playful dimension, just as any game has a ritual dimension, Huizinga affirms that no illusion is ever a complete deception: it is always combined with some degree of simulation. As far as I know, ethnologists and anthropologists concur in the opinion that the mental attitude in which the great religious feasts of savages are celebrated and witnessed is not one of complete illusion. There is an underlying consciousness of things “not be- ing real.” [...] A certain element of “makebelieve” is operative in all 23 V. Flusser, “Line and surface” (1973), in Writings: 21-34; V. Flusser, Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft? (Göttingen: Immatrix, 1987). 24 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 63. 25 V. Flusser, Post-History (1983), trans. R. Maltez Novaes (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013): 99- 106; V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 27; Kommunikologie weiter denken: 245. 26 The notion of “voluntary illusion” [illusion volontaire] can already be found in Paul Souriau, L’imagination de l’artiste (Paris: Librairie Hachette et cie, 1901), while the concept of aware illusion [bewußte Selbsttäuschung] was first developed by Konrad Lange, Die Bewußte Selbsttäuschung als Kern des künstlerischen Genusses (Leipzig: Verlag von Veit & Comp., 1895). FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 60 AN-ICON primitive religions. Whether one is sorcerer or sorcerized one is al- ways knower and dupe at once. But one chooses to be the dupe.27 In a similar way, a few years before, Mauss wrote that any magical performance reveals the collective will to believe in it, both on the part of the spectators and the magician: We are in no doubt that magical facts need constant encourage- ment and that even the sincerest delusions of the magician have always been self-imposed to some degree.28 Yet, one should be able to distinguish between this sort of sincere self-delusion that we can find in the ex- perience of traditional magic, from the “belief in bad faith” that Flusser identifies in the experience of technical images. On the one hand the “underlying consciousness of things ‘not being real’” is still a blurry intuition, on the other hand the critical consciousness reached by educated people is fully developed and can only coexist with illusion if it is partially suppressed. Why do we systematically suppress our critical and conceptual thinking and choose to be deluded? Flusser thinks that this human behavior is not only a result of our tendency to conform. The reason why we need to partially suppress our critical consciousness in order to function within society is that, at this level of complexity, conceptual thinking is no longer efficient. The point is not that people do not understand rational explanations; it is that they do not want to hear them. Commenting on how, during the 1982 Lebanon War, people formed their opinions based on videos and photos, rather than on theoretical analyses, Flusser writes: 27 J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938), trans. R.F.C. Hull (London-Boston-Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949): 22-23. 28 M. Mauss, General Theory of Magic (1902), trans. R. Brain (London-New York: Routledge, 2001): 118. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 61 AN-ICON We are by now sick and tired of explanations and prefer to stick to the photograph that releases us from the necessity for con- ceptual, explanatory thought and absolves us from the bother of going into the causes and consequences of the war in Lebanon: In the image we see with our own eyes what the war looks like. The text simply consists of instructions as to how we are to see.29 We suppress our conceptual thinking because of the cognitive comfort provided by technical apparatus- es that calculate and build images for us. Flusser calls the state of numbness generated by this comfort the inertia of happiness: “It is this inertia of happiness that stands in the way of a changeover.”30 This theory forces us to reconsider the rational- istic approach that one could at first read into Flusser’s cri- tique of deception. If our illusion is somehow self-imposed and the suppression of our critical consciousness is a re- action to the heaviness, the complexity and the abstract- ness of conceptual thinking, which expresses the need to expand the visual, sensory and emotional dimension of existence, we cannot simply debunk our self-delusion by rational means. The only way to overcome the negative aspects of deception is within the image world, therefore through a creative use of illusion. Illusion as fiction When the term “illusion” is used by Flusser with a positive connotation it has the meaning of construction or fiction. In the posthumous book The Surprising Phe- nomenon of Human Communication, where he defines the structure of communication as the infrastructure of human reality, Flusser writes that the act of communicating produc- es the illusion of immortality. We know, due to the suffering of our bodies, that it is an illusion: “Despite our individual and collective memories, we remain mortals. Nevertheless, 29 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 62. 30 V. Flusser, Kommunikologie weiter denken: 210. “Es ist diese Trägheit des Glücks, die einer Umschaltung entgegensteht.” FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 62 AN-ICON  this illusion is, still, our own reality, our ontological dignity.”31 In this case illusion is a different name for sense-making, the attribution of meaning, which according to Flusser is what makes us humans. When illusion is conceived in this constructive way, Flusser replaces the term “täuschen” (deceive) with the term “vortäuschen,” which could be translated as “sim- ulate,” “feign.”32 In Shape of Things he defines the verb “to design” as “to concoct something, to simulate [vortäus- chen], to draft, to sketch, to fashion, to have designs on something.”33 A simulation – this constructive form of illu- sion – is not about producing a copy [Abbild], it is about shaping a model [Vorbild].34 In “Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch” Flusser affirms that not only does the sequence of frames produce the illusion of movement, but the very frames are illusions, as they recreate the impression of three dimensional spaces through the two-dimensional disposition of colors. In this context “illusion” is not meant in a negative sense: Flusser is fascinated by the capacity of technical images to evoke meaningful and visual experiences from non-meaningful and often non-visual elements, such as the bits of infor- mation for digital photography.35 Technical images have an illusionistic effect in that they evoke an impression by means of calculation. The point-projection perspective designed by renaissance painters, the trompe-l’œil designed by baroque architects, the tricks designed by stage magicians produce emotional effects using rational techniques. Experimental photographers and programmers work in the same way, but 31 V. Flusser, The Surprising Phenomenon of Human Communication (1975), trans. R. Maltez Novaes, D. Naves (Metaflux, 2016): 154. 32 V. Flusser, “Gärten,” in Dinge und Undinge. Phänomenologische Skizzen (München-Wien: Carl Hanser, 1993): 46-52, 51. 33 V. Flusser, “About the word design,” in Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design: 17. 34 V. Flusser, “Abbild – Vorbild oder: was heißt darstellen?,” in Lob der Oberflächlichkeit (Düsseldorf: Bollmann, 1993): 293-317. 35 Even in the case of analog photography, according to Flusser, the image could be reduced to computable elements, such as the exposure time, the focal aperture, and the ISO setting. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 63 AN-ICON  with more efficient tools: they can program an apparatus that will translate an alphanumeric input into a visual output. According to Flusser, this allows for the first time for an experimental approach to image making and therefore an element of control over the visual world: a synthesis between conceptual-critical thinking and visu- al-emotional thinking. The word “experimental” is used in a literal sense: technical images can be used for experiments. One can insert a certain input, see what the outcome is, and consequently change the input in order to achieve a different result. If one writes the equation of a Mandelbrot frac- tal in a computer in order to visualize it on the screen, one may be surprised by the outcome and therefore learn from it. The complexity of that geometrical figure where the to- tality is infinitely repeated in the parts could not be perfectly foreseen. One sits in front of a keyboard, taking one dot element after another out of the memory, to fit it into an image on the screen, to compute it. This step-by-step process of extraction can be automated so that it can proceed very quickly. The images appear on the screen one after another in breathtaking speed. One can follow this sequence of images, just as if the imagination had become self-sufficient; or as if it had traveled from inside (let’s say from the cranium) to outside (into the computer); or as if one could observe one’s own dreams from the outside. In fact, some of the appearing images can be surprising: they are unexpected images.36 The idea of an experimental character of tech- nical images could be better understood by taking into consideration Flusser’s notion of science fiction, where he further develops the relationship between conceptual and emotional thinking. With this expression Flusser not only refers to the literary genre, to which, moreover, he 36 V. Flusser, “A new imagination,” in Writings: 110-116, 114. For a closer analysis of this essay and for a discussion about the idea of surprising images and the externalization of imagination, see L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence (2005), trans. N.F. Schott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010): 98-101. See also V. Flusser, “Ein neuer Platonismus?,” kulturRRevolution, no. 19 (1988): 6. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 64 AN-ICON  contributed with many charming short stories,37 but also reflects about the deep inner connection between science as fiction and fiction as science: something that has been called a “speculative fiction.”38 Any scientific knowledge is based on the development of models and simulations that are, strictly speaking, illusions. When fiction is enhanced with the experimental exactness provided by technical im- ages, it becomes a powerful tool to create surprising mod- els that will allow us to think of what we are not yet able to conceive. This is, according to Flusser, the greatest po- tentiality of virtual simulations: they allow us to experience – emotionally, visually, haptically – what until now we were only able to calculate; and at the same time they allow us to calculate and control experiences that until now we could only vaguely imagine. Flusser believes that virtual environ- ments, and in general all technical images, should not be used to reproduce what already exists for recreational pur- poses,39 but should “bring to virtuality” alternative worlds. Thanks to simulated environments, for example, we could be able to experience a world where all living creatures are sulfur-based instead of carbon-based – a world that, 37 Most of Flusser’s philosophical science fiction short stories can be found in the following publications: V. Flusser, Ficções Filosóficas (São Paulo: Edusp, 1998); V. Flusser, Angenommen: Eine Szenenfolge (Göttingen: European Photography, 2000); V. Flusser, L. Bec, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A treatise with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste (1987), trans. V.A. Pakis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). See also Flusser’s essays on fiction: V. Flusser, “Da ficção,” O diário (August 26, 1966); V. Flusser, “Science fiction” (1988), trans. W. Hanff, Flusser Studies, no. 20 (2015): 1-3, where Flusser writes about a fantasia essata (exacting fantasy), which he attributes to Leonardo da Vinci. 38 J. Torres, “Homo Fictor: em busca de uma ficção filosófica,” Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies 2, no. 4 (2020): 1-12, 7. Much has been published on Flusser’s theory of fiction, and science fiction in particular. See G. Salvi Philipson, “Flusser para além do ensaio: de outros modos possíveis de habitar a intersecção entre ficção e filosofia,” Flusser Studies, no. 25 (2018): 1-17; the sixth chapter of A. Finger, R. Guldin, G. Bernardo Krause, Vilém Flusser. An Introduction (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011): 109-129; P. Bozzi, “Rhapsody in blue: Vilém Flusser und der vampyroteuthis infernalis,” Flusser Studies, no. 1 (2005): 1-20; G. Bernardo Krause, “On philosophical fiction,” in R. Guldin, ed., Das Spiel mit der Übersetzung. Figuren der Mehrsprachigkeit im Werk Vilém Flussers (Tübingen-Basel: Francke, 2004): 119- 128. 39 Flusser is extremely skeptical about the documentary function of technical images, not only because of their illusionary character (technical images can be easily manipulated), but because he questions the neutrality of any sort of documentation. Any document presents a point of view, with a system of ethical and political implications, as it were objective. See F. Restuccia, “La realtà sta nella fotografia. Autenticazioni delle immagini della guerra del Libano,” Carte semiotiche, no. 4 (2016): 160-170. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 65 AN-ICON  without any technical help, we can anticipate, but not fully conceive.40 Rethinking illusion as an aware and voluntary simulation allows Flusser to avoid the rationalistic approach to debunking. He realizes that visual interfaces (and even more, haptic and immersive ones) allow for experiencers to overcome their inertia of happiness and take part in the model making process. However, this is only possible if technical images and virtual environments are open to a strong interactive participation.41 This way, by turning the coding process into a playful interaction, it will be possible to bridge the gap between critical and visual thinking, be- tween the elite of programmers and the mass of consumers. 40 V. Flusser, “Vom Virtuellen:” 70-71; V. Flusser, Kommunikologie weiter denken: 78. Recently Andrea Pinotti identified this approach as part of a post-human trend in VR (try to experience the world beyond the limits of the human body and mind, for example by flying as an eagle) as opposed to a humanitarian trend (VR as an empathy machine meant to move the experiencer about social issues). The main limit of the post-human approach is that it will only allow perceiving a non-human world as a human being would perceive it. A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine (Torino: Einaudi, 2021): 201; see also A. Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk? Inter-specific empathy in the age of immersive virtual environments,” in Y. Hadjinicolaou, ed., Visual Engagements. Image Practices and Falconry (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2020): 30-47. The best example of this post-human approach in Flusser is definitely his Vampyrotheutis infernalis. 41 On the (post-)political implications of Flusser’s theory of participation, see M. Menon, Vilém Flusser e la “Rivoluzione dell’Informazione”: Comunicazione, Etica, Politica (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2022): 172-178. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 66 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18191

Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two “moments” of the virtualCaravaggio experience by Francesco Zucconi Frank Stella Michael Fried Immersion and Specularity Virtual Reality Cinema Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two “moments” of the virtual experience FRANCESCO ZUCCONI, Università IUAV di Venezia – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9580-1000 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18191 Abstract In the first of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that he gave at Harvard in 1984, Frank Stella focused on “The necessity of creating pictorial space that is capable of dissolving its own perimeter and surface plane,” and claimed that “No one helped lighten this burden more than Caravaggio.” At a certain point in his talk, the American artist went so far as to say that Caravaggio anticipated the invention of the gyroscope, the technological device which makes the virtual experience possible. Stella’s lecture is the starting point for developing an anachronistic path through pictorial and digital media, in light of their ability to produce illusionistic effects on viewers. In particular, building on Mi- chael Fried’s theory of art and image, this paper investigates virtual experience with reference to two different moments: the “immersive” moment, in which one has the impression of stepping into the frame, and the “specular” one, where the illusionistic effects are revealed; the attraction, when sinking into an image that has become an environment, and the distancing, when the image itself beckons to us and we are invited to reflect on our position as viewers. Keywords Caravaggio Frank Stella Michael Fried Immersion and Specularity Virtual Reality Cinema To quote this essay: F. Zucconi, “Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two ‘moments’ of the virtual experience,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 67-88, https://doi. org/10.54103/ai/18191 FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 67 AN-ICON  Introduction I put on the headset and immerse myself in another world – in a theme park or in a refugee camp, in a disaster-stricken village or perhaps in the city of Hiroshi- ma immediately after the launch of the atomic bomb.1 In some cases I am a mere sightseer, while in other cases I am the “witness” to significant events. I have to enter into an empathetic relationship with those who dwell very far from me, I am expected to “put myself in their shoes” and to experience their condition “directly.”2 Yet I cannot help but realize, sooner or later, that I find myself physically in the safe spaces of a museum or a gallery, in the section dedicated to VR cinema at the Venice International Film Festival, or perhaps in the pavilion of an NGO that uses virtual reality as a form for raising public awareness on sensitive topics. No matter how effectively illusionistic this virtual environment is. Always, in the media experiences of VR cinema, something pushes me inward, draws me into the virtual environment, while, at the same time, something else pushes me out, reminding me that I am just facing an image, and bringing me back to the spatial and temporal coordinates of our physical world.3 This article does not intend to analyse immer- sive videos by trying to deconstruct the nonchalant use of the notion of “empathy” and the ideology of “transparency” that has characterized their promotion, which has already 1 As an example of a virtual theme park experience, see “Disneyland Paris - 360 VR - Main Street,” Disneyland Paris, YouTube video, 1.19, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RNly6mSF0-o, accessed January 10, 2023. Regarding the applications of such technology to the field of humanitarian communication, see http://unvr.sdgactioncampaign.org, accessed January 10, 2023. As for the fourth example, please refer to the official web page of the project https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/new-virtual-reality-experience-drops- you-hiroshima-right-after-its-been-bombed-180968903, accessed January 10, 2023. 2 As an emblematic example of the promotional use of a term such as “empathy” and on the idea of putting oneself in another’s place through VR cinema, see https://youtu.be/ vAEjX9S8o2k. 3 These issues can be conceived with reference to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological lesson and the relationship among the notions of Bildding (the physical thing), Bildobjekt (image-object) and Bildsujet (image-subject). See E. Husserl, “Phantasy and Image Consciousness,” in Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898-1925). Edmund Husserl Collected Works, vol 11 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). On the illusionistic forms of virtual reality, examined through a rereading of Husserl, see P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan: Mimesis International, 2020): 46-52. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 68 AN-ICON  been the subject of several studies.4 Rather, I would like to take up and further develop some issues present in my previous works, with the aim of opening a space for reflec- tion on immersive technology following an anachronistic path through pictorial and digital media by referring to some concepts of art history and theory.5 The main objective is to focus, in analytical and theoretical terms, on the double effect of attraction and distancing described above, as structuring the experience of VR cinema. While the impossibility of fully capturing and keeping the viewers within the virtual environment has mostly been conceived as a negative limitation of such technology, in this paper I try to argue otherwise. Through the reference to a repertoire of images from the past, the aim is to describe the paradoxical character of an experi- ence that is made up as much of attraction as of distancing. But before this can be sustained there are some interme- diate steps. After this introduction, in the second section, taking up a hypothesis advanced by Frank Stella, I explain the idea that gives the title to this paper: that Caravaggio, anticipated the invention of gyroscope technology and therefore made possible the first immersive experience in the history of Western painting. In the third, fourth and fifth sections, building on Michael Fried, I try to emphasize the two moments that characterize Caravaggio’s paintings: immersion, the formal device that attracts within the image, and specularity, understood as the set of figurative and compositional elements that produce an effect of aware- ness on the viewer.6 In the conclusion, I reconsider Fried’s analysis and the concepts that characterize his theoretical 4 The literature on the notion of empathy is vast and constantly evolving with reference to new technological and expressive forms. For an early critical reflection on the facile use of this concept in relation to VR cinema, see W. Uricchio, S. Ding, S. Wolozin, and B. Boyacioglu, Virtually There: Documentary Meets Virtual Reality Conference Report (The MIT Open Documentary Laboratory, 2016): 17-18, http://opendoclab.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/ uploads/2016/11/MIT_OpenDocLab_VirtuallyThereConference.pdf, accessed January 10, 2023. 5 I refer to F. Zucconi, Displacing Caravaggio: Art, Media, and Humanitarian Visual Culture (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 6 On these two notions, which will also be referred to in the following pages, see M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 69 AN-ICON  work in relation to contemporary media. What emerges is an opportunity for developing an ethic of VR: to what extent, can immersive technology facilitate the assumption of a testimonial gaze? Under what conditions can the gesture of wearing a virtual reality headset assume a critical value? Frank Stella’s hypothesis The American artist Frank Stella is, without a doubt, someone who understands visual surfaces and me- dia frames, their ability to offer illusionistic effects. One only has to think of his works in the 1960s, where a series of frames relentlessly squeeze against each other, leaving a small coloured square in the centre. Taking inspiration from Louis Marin’s analysis of Gran Cairo (1962), it is fair to ask whether these squares-frames are a well or a pyramid (Fig. 1). As the French historian and theorist notes, they are “a well and a pyramid, but never at the same time. The eye cannot predict the necessary and the arbitrary moment of conversion in which all the serious play of the frame and its modern and contemporary figures seem to be concen- trated: the play of the rhythm of presentation and repre- sentation, the play of the subject of the art of seeing and the art of describing.”7 If we compare them to the famous example of the rabbit/duck illustration investigated by Ludwig Wittgen- stein and Ernst Gombrich, Stella’s paintings do not merely work on the viewers’ perceptual and cognitive limits in the recognition of the figures depicted. Rather, the represen- tational undecidability and instability of image produce a spatial effect, by modulating the relation between the ob- serving subject and the observed object. In other words, when confronted with the rabbit/duck illustration, the viewer does not have the illusion of being confronted with a duck or rabbit coming off the page; rather, the graphic representa- tion produces an illusionistic effect that makes it impossible to visualize the two animals at the same time. In contrast 7 L. Marin, On Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002): 372. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 70 AN-ICON  to that, Stella’s paintings produce an illusionistic effect to the extent that they alternately draw the viewer inward – as in a well – or push him or her out, as if the surface had a pyramidal shape. Those who observe Stella’s paintings are thus subjected to the rhythmic redundancy of the “opac- ity” of the painted frame that becomes recognizable – we might say that makes itself “transparent” – in the metaphors of the pyramid and the well.8 In more general terms than those used by Marin, we might speak of Stella’s work as a gestalt effect capable of inducing, alternately, in the viewer both the impression of attraction and that of rejection or distancing. In fact, beyond the series of concentric squares, Stella’s artistic research would continue in the 1970s and 1980s by focusing on the relationship between the space Fig. 1. Frank Stella, Gran Cairo, 1962, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, purchase with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art; © Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 8 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (London: Pearson, 1973); E. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 71 AN-ICON  of the canvas and the pictorial space, between the surface and depth (Fig. 2). Fig. 2. Frank Stella, Eccentric Polygon, 1974, Jane Kahan Gallery, New York; purchased by Walter and Joan Wolf, Indianapolis, Indiana; ©Frank Stella/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Beyond the theory of art that is implied in Stel- la’s works, it behoves us to pay particular attention, then, to what he had to say in the first of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that he gave at Harvard in 1984. In developing a line of thought that sweeps from Leonardo da Vinci to Seurat, and from Vermeer to Velázquez, Stella focused on a theoretical problem that is crucial in the history of arts and images; a problem that equally concerns both “old” and “new” media. “The necessity of creating pictorial space that is capable of dissolving its own perimeter and surface plane,” he says, “is the burden that modern painting was born with.”9 And immediately afterwards he goes on to state that “No one helped lighten this burden more than Caravaggio.”10 As often happens, when artists are willing to share their theory, their tone tends to be assertive: Stella’s remarks are full of ideas for creative practice but possibly a font of perplexity for art historians. Still, how can one not ap- preciate his attempt to concisely express the transformation 9 F. Stella, Working Space (Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 1986): 10. 10 Ibid. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 72 AN-ICON  that Caravaggio’s painting forced on the regimes of pictorial representation of space and bodies? Stella’s observations aptly describe Caravaggio’s propensity for experimenting with the phenomenological limits of the idea of “realism,” by creating environments in which the viewer’s gaze must grope its way around, wrapped up in the composition but equally attracted by the vivid emphasis on colour, and by the chromatic nuances seen in some of the details. Stella’s reflections did not stop here. He de- veloped his argument by examining Caravaggio’s entire body of works and focuses on a few paintings. He used anachronistic terminology to highlight several aspects that prefigure artistic and technological developments that took place in the following decades as well as to identify their potentialities: To be able to carry in our minds the space of Caravaggio’s large commanding works, such as the Vatican Deposition and the Seven Acts of Mercy from Naples, we need some kind of image to help form an idea about the design and purpose of Caravaggio’s pictorial space. The image that comes to mind is that of the gyroscope—a spinning sphere, capable of accommodating movement and tilt. We have to imagine ourselves caught up within this sphere, experienc- ing the movement and motion of painting’s action. [...] The space that Caravaggio created is something that twentieth-century painting could use: an alternative both to the space of conventional realism and to the space of what has come to be conventional painterliness. The sense of a shaped spatial presence enveloping the action of the painting and the location of the creator and spectator is a by-product of the success of Caravaggio’s realistic illusionism.11 Within a reflection on VR cinema and immersive media, it is the idea of “realistic illusionism” and even more the metaphor of the gyroscope that attracts attention. The gyroscope, invented in the 19th century by French physi- cist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault is still the basis of virtual reality devices. It is also thanks to it that the visors worn 11 Ibid.: p. 11. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 73 AN-ICON  by viewers can track head movements and thus accurately detect movement along one, two or three axes, thus mak- ing the virtual experience possible. Without the gyroscope, there is no possible balance between the viewer’s gestures and movements in the virtual environment, nor any possi- bility of orientation within it. It is time to give a chance to Stella and his hypothesis that Caravaggio invented the gyroscope and with it virtual reality helmets. But I would like to develop this suggestion in a key that is not merely “technological,” by investigating the forms of composition that character- ize the pictorial medium and the effects they produce. To do so, it is necessary to re-conceive the American artist’s hypothesis into a series of operational questions: what is or would be, exactly, in Caravaggio’s painting capable of prefiguring the conditions of illusionism made possible by contemporary technologies? How do his paintings help us understand the dual effect – hitherto described as one of attraction and distancing – that we experience within immersive environments like those of VR cinema? The two moments of Narcissus To my knowledge, no contemporary photogra- pher or artist has yet investigated in detail the instant when viewers put on or take off their virtual reality helmets. This is really a pity, because the image of that precise instant could make us think a lot about the potentialities of such technology. We must therefore be content with the myths of the past and their survival in our contemporary practices. About to plunge into a virtual world, we find the figure of Narcissus. As noted by Andrea Pinotti – who has identified in Narcissus a kind of “conceptual character” of the an-iconic tradition in Western visual culture – there are two versions of the myth: the first aimed at producing a “naïve” image of the young boy who falls into the illusionistic trap of the image (recurring in Plotinus, Pausanias, Marsilio Ficino, etc.); the second coinciding with a “conscious” Nar- cissus (Ovidian variant), who is aware of the, so to speak, FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 74 AN-ICON  media environment with which he is confronted and with which he is about to make one body.12 It matters little that the Narcissus painted at the end of the Sixteenth century is not a signed work by Caravaggio but only an attribution, widely discussed by art historians (Fig. 3). For the purposes of the reasoning proposed in this paper, it should be noted that the young man is already fully rapt and about to plunge into the world of image. Yet, the figure of the double reflection still reveals a gap between two representational and sensible worlds or regimes. Fig. 3. Caravaggio (attribution), Narcissus, 1597-1599, Rome, Palazzo Barberini. Explicitly taking up the terms proposed by Mi- chael Fried, Narcissus constitutes an explication of the two “moments” that Caravaggio’s painting produces on view- ers. According to Fried – let it be said in passing: a friend 12 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine. Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Torino: Einaudi, 2021): 3-6. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 75 AN-ICON  and one of the most important interpreter of Stella’s work – Caravaggio’s pictorial corpus involve a moment defined as “immersive, imagining the painter as so caught up, so immersed, in this phase of his work on the painting as to be less than fully aware of any sharp distinction between the painting and himself.”13 The second “‘moment,’ notionally instantaneous, of separating or indeed recoiling from the painting, of becoming detached from it, which is to say of no longer being immersed in work on it but rather of see- ing it, taking it in, as if for the first time; I call that ‘moment’ specular, meaning thereby to emphasize the strictly visual or optical relation between the artist - viewer and the image, or image - artefact, that has just brought into being.”14 Reading these pages on Caravaggio, thoughts evidently run to the dialectic between “absorption” and “theatricality”15 identified by Fried himself in the painting of the eighteenth century, or to that between “art” and “ob- jecthood”16 as a key to theoretical and critical interpreta- tion of the relationship between media, art and spatiality in the second half of the twentieth century. Even before the eighteenth century, well before the twentieth-century and, we might add, contemporary media experience, Caravag- gio would have had the ability to reflect in an original way on the tension between the painter and his work (through the use of self-portraiture), between the canvas and the pictorial space (the composition of volumes, the relation- ship between light and shadow) producing unprecedented effects on viewers, now driving them inward, now pushing them outward. Hovering between the classicism of the myth and the technological actuality of the present, Narcissus is a virtual allegory of the ‘moment’ of immersion, or perhaps I should say of absorption becoming immersion, conjoined with the strongest 13 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 39. 14 Ibid. 15 M. Fried, Theatricality and Absorption: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 16 M. Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 76 AN-ICON possible statement of the specular separation of the viewer — orig- inally the painter-viewer — from the painting. There is in it also the strongest imaginable thematization of mirroring as distinct from painting, another of the basic polarities that, in varying ratios and combinations, structure much of Caravaggio’s art. And of course, it is a scene of hyperbolic self-portraiture, the core practice of his lifelong endeavor.17 Narcissus is in a sense, for the purposes of the anachronistic reasoning I am proposing here, a portrait of the exact moment when the viewer is about to put on the headset to access the virtual experience: it is in the middle, between plunging and retreating. Within Caravaggio: immersion and reflection Beyond the myth, the comparison between contemporary media and the tradition of western art can be developed through other Caravaggio masterpieces, in which the effect of spatial encompassment is strong. Even better, it is possible to argue that some of Caravaggio’s paintings represent the virtual experience as viewed from the outside but not without investigating the effects it pro- duces in those inside. Let us focus on the Taking of Christ (1602) and The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610). In the first of these two paintings (Fig. 4), the centre of attention is located on the left, at the point of Judas’s dramatic gesture of betrayal, toward which all eyes converge, except for those of the disciple, who flees terrified toward the edge of the frame. In the second painting, considered to be the last that Car- avaggio completed before his death, what is represented is the exact moment when Saint Ursula is wounded by Attila after she refuses his advances. What connects the two works, in addition to the horizontal composition and the precise staging of a dramatic event, is the presence of 17 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 139. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 77 AN-ICON  a figure located on the right side of each painting. This is a man shown in profile: he has a black beard and bushy eyebrows. His head is stretched up, as if he were standing on tiptoe so as to better observe the violent scene unfold- ing just a few steps in front of him. In the 1602 painting the man is attempting to lighten the darkness of the night and illuminate Judas’s kiss by means of a lantern, which he holds in front of himself with his right hand. This figure is of particular interest for at least two reasons. The first, which Roberto Longhi divined earlier, is that the man on the right side of the image is Caravaggio himself. This is a self-portrait, one of the many in his picto- rial corpus, confirmed moreover by its reproduction – like a Fig. 4. Caravaggio, Taking of Christ, 1602, Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland. Fig. 5. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610, Naples, Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 78 AN-ICON  signature – in the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (Fig. 5).18 The second reason concerns the role that this figure plays in both works. The art historian Sergio Benedetti – who has the merit of having rediscovered the original Taking of Christ, after years of investigation into various copies – noted that the figure of Caravaggio “is well defined and holds up a lantern, the function of which is purely compositional as it appears to throw no light, the true light source being high on the left, beyond the scene depicted.”19 In a similar way, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit noted how, in this work, “Caravaggio puts himself within the painting not in order to get closer to his historical subject but rather in order to see himself both illuminating and experiencing congested spaces.”20 Even more explicitly, Giovanni Careri identified in this self-portrait a kind of declaration of intent of the artist that invites us to reflect on our position as spectators: “I paint with light, with light I show a scene that belongs to the past, but also to the present, the armour testifies to this. I am here to see the arrest of Christ but I cannot in- tervene, as you spectators, witnesses safe from a violence that outrages and fascinates.”21 By re-conceiving such analytical insights in Fried’s terms, the artist’s self-portrait with lantern can therefore be conceived of both as being in the process of becoming immersed in the pictorial environment and as becoming “expelled from it in a ‘moment’ of specularity which was to all intents and purposes the aim and purpose of that work (the establishment of the painting as a painting, as an artifact to be looked at.)”22 Retracing our steps to the theoretical notions structuring this paper, with these paintings we are confront- ed with two different and apparently contradictory effects. At first, like Caravaggio trying to observe the scene, with 18 R. Longhi, “Un originale di Caravaggio a Rouen e il problema delle copie caravaggesche,” Paragone 121 (1960): 23-36. 19 S. Benedetti, “Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ, a masterpiece rediscovered,” The Burlington Magazine 135, no. 1088 (1993): 731-741, 738. 20 L. Bersani, U. Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge-London: MIT Press, 1998): 57. 21 G. Careri, Caravaggio. La Fabbrica dello Spettatore (Milano: Jaca Book, 2017): 234. 22 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 217. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 79 AN-ICON  or without his lantern, we are pushed into the painting as a medial environment made of light and shadow. Then lat- er, once we have searched the environment and once we have recognized the figure of the painter-witness, we are pushed outward, that is to say that we begin to reflect on the pictorial composition and on our position as viewers: in front of an image, with our feet planted on the museum’s floor, in Dublin, Naples or in another city. Putting it in anachronistic terms, one could first argue that the contemporary experiences offered by VR cinema are also characterized by an “immersive” moment: here the field of view itself coincides with a “portable lan- tern” located on the forehead of the spectator; a wearable lantern that illuminates a spherical space that coincides with full darkness, except for the frontal portion framed from time to time. Darkness that the VR cinema viewer will never have occasion to see or feel, except when it is diegetized in the production of a given narrative effect. At the same time, a “specular” moment, always persists: pri- marily in the glitches of the digital environment; in the very fact that lowering my gaze to look for my body I tend to find nothing or at least the scarcely credible simulation of arms and legs; in the presence of extradiegetic music, in all those compositional effects – whether intended or not by the video-makers – that invite us to see the image behind the simulation of a virtual environment and in so doing to “reflect” on our position as viewers.23 Regarding the image of the pain of others As in many VR cinema projects, the two paint- ings described above are about situations of suffering or violence, scenes which invite the viewer to assume the position of a witness but in which, at the same time, it is impossible to immerse oneself completely. One painting by Caravaggio seems capable of interrogating, more than 23 On the limits of VR cinema, through some concrete examples, see F. Zucconi, “Sulla tendenza utopica nel VR cinema,” Carte Semiotiche 7 (2021): 118-126. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 80 AN-ICON  any other, the paradoxical character of virtual experience, as well as the idea of being able to experience a world and a living condition that are profoundly different from those characterizing the viewer’s everyday life. At the centre of Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St. Matthew (1600) is the half-naked, fully lit body of the assas- sin (Fig. 6). On the left, a group of men in seventeenth-cen- tury clothing recoil, trying to shield themselves from the violence. While an angel hands St. Matthew the palm of martyrdom, on the right we see the gesture of a novice walking away. In the foreground, some catechumens lying on the ground observe the scene. The composition is cen- trifugal: the viewer’s gaze gradually moves away from the centre as it moves from one body to another. In the back- ground, one meets a figure characterized by a particularly intense gaze who seems to stare at the act of violence be- fore his eyes. This is the bearded man leaning out from the black background behind the assassin. Again, that man is Caravaggio. Also in this large painting, the painter portrays himself in the role of a witness to a violent act. Those who would try to go even further in their analysis might go so far as to argue that what Caravaggio painted in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew is not simply a self-portrait, but a “self-portrait as painter.” To support this hypothesis, I would like to emphasize the inclination of the figure’s head to the side to observe the scene as if he had a canvas in front of him (Fig. 7). One could also conceive of the left hand reaching forward as a transfiguration of the palette, while the right hand holds the brush. The artist’s sad gaze might then be re-conceived as a concentrated, absorbed gaze. If this were the case, it would be an antic- ipation of some of the traits that characterize the extraor- dinary visual dispositif that is Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez, notoriously and masterfully analysed by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things: Now he [the painter] can be seen, caught in a moment of stillness, at the neutral centre of this oscillation. His dark torso and bright face are half-way between the visible and the invisible: emerging from FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 81 AN-ICON  Fig. 6. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, 1600, San Luigi dei Francesi Church, Rome. Fig. 7. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, 1600, Rome, San Luigi dei Francesi Church. Detail. that canvas beyond our view, he moves into our gaze; but when, in a moment, he makes a step to the right, removing himself from our gaze, he will be standing exactly in front of the canvas he is painting; he will enter that region where his painting, neglected for an instant, will, for him, become visible once more, free of shadow and free of reticence.24 24 M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) (London- New York: Routledge, 2002): 4. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 82 AN-ICON  In both Velazquez’s and Caravaggio’s master- piece, the self-portrait takes on a theoretical and critical function; they are within the painting and, at the same time, they explicitly invite the viewer to reflect on visual repre- sentation, on the point of view that structures it and on the limits of the composition.25 This may seem a bold interpretation. Yet, look- ing closely at the figure of Caravaggio, it can be argued that the image presented in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew is not only an image of self “regarding the pain of others” but also and at the same time – turning Susan Sontag’s famous expression – an image of self “regarding the image of the pain of others.”26 If in the Taking of Christ and The Martyrdom of St. Ursula the self-portrait is first and fore- most functional in expressing an idea of immersion of the painter-witness in the pictorial event – a closure and full autonomy of the pictorial as an “immersive environment” – in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew there is a shift that calls into question the composition of the image and the effect of immediacy of representation. Reading Fried again, this is a work “in which a Caravaggio semblable at once rush- es to leave the painting and looks back in evident distress, thereby enabling the viewer to recognize his characteristic features on the far threshold of the depicted space.”27 It is not so much or simply that the figure depicting the painter seems about to leave the scene but, as the art historian and theorist writes with great acumen, “rushes to leave the painting” and pushes the viewer’s gaze to the threshold of the image. If the self-portraits of 1602 and 1610 tend to provoke an identification between painter and viewer and reinforce the effect of immersion, that of The Martyrdom 25 For a more in-depth reflection on this painting and on the modernity of Caravaggio’s self- portrait, capable of activating paths of critical reflection on contemporary media and visual culture, see F. Zucconi, “Regarding the image of the pain of others: Caravaggio, Sontag, Leogrande,” Humanities 11 (2022), 44. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11020044. 26 The reference is to the title and thoughts developed in the famous book by S. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003). 27 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 209. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 83 AN-ICON  of St. Matthew traces the effect of immediacy back to the pictorial composition that produces it. As Sontag herself points out in the above-men- tioned book, from the seventeenth century to the tradition of twentieth-century reportage, a self-portrait of the painter, photographer, or director is certainly not enough to vali- date the authenticity and effectiveness of the testimony or its ethical value. The risk of a self-referential drift, even a “narcissistic” tendency, is also discernible behind this trend: why represent ourselves when we are faced with the pain of others? Rather than glibly promote all self-reflexive ten- dencies, the self-portrait of Caravaggio in The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew is useful and interesting to the extent that it is a manifestation of the fact that, despite its illusionistic realism, it remains an image among many other possible images of this event and does not claim to coincide with it and reproduce it through the media for the viewer’s benefit. The self-portrait on the threshold thus becomes a way to intensify the “specular moment” or, in other terms, to underline the fact that even during the more immersive virtual experience, we are just facing an image, a very well structured one. On the one hand, with his gaze, Caravaggio invites the viewer to immerse himself in an encompassing pictorial image; on the other hand, with his positioning and posture, he leads the viewer to observe the theatricality of the scene from another point of view, to analyse it as seen from the outside. Attraction and distancing Picking up the thread, Stella’s hypothesis was taken up and developed in this paper as a theoretical and analytical metaphor, certainly not in mere technological terms. If the gyroscope fitted in virtual reality helmets makes possible the stable connection between the movements we actually make in the physical world and those in the world of images, talking about Caravaggio’s gyroscope meant reflecting on the strategies of producing illusionistic and counter-illusionistic effects, on the balance between the FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 84 AN-ICON  “immersive” and “specular” moments. Reference to the the- oretical and methodological notions proposed by Michael Fried thus made it possible to observe the co-presence of such moments or, rather, such spectatorial effects that per- sist, by transforming, from the history of Western painting to contemporary immersive devices. Through reference to Susan Sontag’s critical theory of photography, it was thus possible to propose a hypothesis for an ethical and political approach to VR. In particular, what has emerged is that the co-presence of illusionistic and counter-illusionistic effects does not constitute a weakening of the experien- tial and testimonial value of immersive experience. On the contrary, a conscious ethical and political approach to VR seems to be able to develop precisely by making viewers feel the threshold between the environment in which they are physically situated and the virtual one. This is why it is not necessary to rely on technological implementations devoted to perfecting, once and for all, the immersive char- acter of VR cinema and other technological devices. While the slogans that accompanied the launch of many virtual reality projects relied on the simplistic use of the notions of “empathy,” “compassion,” and “immersion” in a geo- graphical elsewhere, the most interesting aspect of such technology seems to involve its capacity to produce both identification and estrangement. Like Caravaggio observing the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, even the gap between the physical world, in which the viewer is placed, and the virtual one can be re-conceived in positive terms within artistic experimen- tations capable of reflecting critically on the asymmetrical relations between the observer and the observed, between the here in which we find ourselves and the elsewhere of which we claim to have “direct” experience. In fact, the very ideas of virtual “presence” must be conceived as a media effect, resulting from specific compositional and FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 85 AN-ICON  technological determinations capable of modulating the relationship between subject and environment.28 Examples of artistic projects aimed at inves- tigating such limits are few, but their number is certainly growing. The survey and in-depth study of such exper- iments exceeds the specific objectives of this paper. To name but one – the most important, and often-addressed29 – the installation Carne y arena (2017) by Alejandro González Iñárritu seems precisely to spur spectators into experienc- ing their own awkward extraneousness and powerlessness toward a group of refugees from Mexico who are trying to cross over the border to the United States (Fig. 8). Iñárritu’s subtitle for the installation – “Virtually present, physically invisible” – expresses, perhaps, the urgent need to tackle the paradoxical character of virtual experience. Beyond Caravaggio, building on the analysis and concepts elicited by his painting, the field of experi- mentations of VR cinema and, more generally, virtual reality seems to be able to develop only by taking into account the co-presence of the different moments or effects that define our relationship with such media. Of course, in con- temporary virtual experiences, the viewer never has the opportunity to mirror himself or herself, that is, to see his or her own image reflected inside the media environment. The notion of “specularity” as understood in Narcissus and Caravaggio’s self-portraits seems in this sense to lose rel- evance. But at this point it should be clear that this notion 28 On this point, see V. Catricalà, R. Eugeni, “Technologically modified self–centred worlds. Modes of presence as effects of sense in virtual, augmented, mixed and extended reality,” in F. Biggio, V. Dos Santos, G.T. Giuliana, eds., Meaning-Making in Extended Reality (Roma: Aracne, 2020): 63-90. For reflection in the different forms of exposure, interactivity and modes of presence, see R. Eugeni, Capitale algoritmico. Cinque dispositivi postmediali (Più Uno) (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2021): 127-174. 29 For an analysis of Iñárritu’s installation, see P. Montani, Tre Forme di Creatività: Tecnica, Arte, Politica (Napoli: Cronopio, 2017): 132-138; A. D’Aloia, “Virtually present, physically invisible: virtual reality immersion and emersion in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena,” in Senses of Cinema (June 2018), http://sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/ virtually-present-physically-invisible-virtual-reality-immersion-and-emersion-in-alejandro- gonzalez-inarritus-carne-y-arena/, accessed January 10, 2022; A.C. Dalmasso, “The body as virtual frame. Performativity of the image in immersive environments,” Cinéma & Cie 19, no. 23 (2019): 101-119; L. Acquarelli, “The spectacle of re-enactment and the critical time of the testimony in Inarritu’s Carne y Arena,” in F. Aldama, A. Rafele, eds., Cultural Studies in the Digital Age (San Diego: San Diego University Press, 2020): 103-118; R. Diodato, Image, Art, and Virtuality: Towards an Aesthetics of Relation (Cham: Springer, 2021): 72-74. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 86 AN-ICON  expresses not so much or only the mirroring of one’s own image, but the possibility of observing and reflecting on the relationship between subject and environment, between what separates us and what binds us to the image. Fig. 8. Alejandro González Iñárritu, Carne y arena, 2017. ©Emmanuel Lubezki/Alejandro González Iñárritu To avoid any misunderstanding, let me propose, in conclusion, to call these moments by two very simple terms that I also used in the introduction: attraction and distancing, where – as in the case of the oppositions pro- posed by Fried – the second term encompasses the first, constituting a form of meta-reflection on the forms of artis- tic and media experience.30 In this sense, attraction defines the concave side of images, the one capable of becoming environment and drawing the viewer to show solidarity with them. On the other hand, distancing expresses the convex side or the modular spatiality of images, the one pointing at the viewer as such and forcing him or her to reflect on his or her own position, on the complex character of ev- ery experience. Whether such terms are convincing or not, the articulation of the two “moments” seems to define the ethical and political limits of both old and new immersive 30 For a reflection on the notion of “distance” in the field of media studies, I refer to the introduction and the various contributions in M. Treleani, F. Zucconi, eds., “Remediating Distances,” IMG Journal 3 (2020). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 87 AN-ICON  technologies. Hence the need to keep the door of art history open, imagining an anachronistic approach and aiming for artistic experimentations poised between different media, between two different moments. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 88 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18191

Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two “moments” of the virtualCaravaggio experience by Francesco Zucconi Frank Stella Michael Fried Immersion and Specularity Virtual Reality Cinema Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two “moments” of the virtual experience FRANCESCO ZUCCONI, Università IUAV di Venezia – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9580-1000 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18191 Abstract In the first of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that he gave at Harvard in 1984, Frank Stella focused on “The necessity of creating pictorial space that is capable of dissolving its own perimeter and surface plane,” and claimed that “No one helped lighten this burden more than Caravaggio.” At a certain point in his talk, the American artist went so far as to say that Caravaggio anticipated the invention of the gyroscope, the technological device which makes the virtual experience possible. Stella’s lecture is the starting point for developing an anachronistic path through pictorial and digital media, in light of their ability to produce illusionistic effects on viewers. In particular, building on Mi- chael Fried’s theory of art and image, this paper investigates virtual experience with reference to two different moments: the “immersive” moment, in which one has the impression of stepping into the frame, and the “specular” one, where the illusionistic effects are revealed; the attraction, when sinking into an image that has become an environment, and the distancing, when the image itself beckons to us and we are invited to reflect on our position as viewers. Keywords Caravaggio Frank Stella Michael Fried Immersion and Specularity Virtual Reality Cinema To quote this essay: F. Zucconi, “Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two ‘moments’ of the virtual experience,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 67-88, https://doi. org/10.54103/ai/18191 FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 67 AN-ICON  Introduction I put on the headset and immerse myself in another world – in a theme park or in a refugee camp, in a disaster-stricken village or perhaps in the city of Hiroshi- ma immediately after the launch of the atomic bomb.1 In some cases I am a mere sightseer, while in other cases I am the “witness” to significant events. I have to enter into an empathetic relationship with those who dwell very far from me, I am expected to “put myself in their shoes” and to experience their condition “directly.”2 Yet I cannot help but realize, sooner or later, that I find myself physically in the safe spaces of a museum or a gallery, in the section dedicated to VR cinema at the Venice International Film Festival, or perhaps in the pavilion of an NGO that uses virtual reality as a form for raising public awareness on sensitive topics. No matter how effectively illusionistic this virtual environment is. Always, in the media experiences of VR cinema, something pushes me inward, draws me into the virtual environment, while, at the same time, something else pushes me out, reminding me that I am just facing an image, and bringing me back to the spatial and temporal coordinates of our physical world.3 This article does not intend to analyse immer- sive videos by trying to deconstruct the nonchalant use of the notion of “empathy” and the ideology of “transparency” that has characterized their promotion, which has already 1 As an example of a virtual theme park experience, see “Disneyland Paris - 360 VR - Main Street,” Disneyland Paris, YouTube video, 1.19, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RNly6mSF0-o, accessed January 10, 2023. Regarding the applications of such technology to the field of humanitarian communication, see http://unvr.sdgactioncampaign.org, accessed January 10, 2023. As for the fourth example, please refer to the official web page of the project https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/new-virtual-reality-experience-drops- you-hiroshima-right-after-its-been-bombed-180968903, accessed January 10, 2023. 2 As an emblematic example of the promotional use of a term such as “empathy” and on the idea of putting oneself in another’s place through VR cinema, see https://youtu.be/ vAEjX9S8o2k. 3 These issues can be conceived with reference to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological lesson and the relationship among the notions of Bildding (the physical thing), Bildobjekt (image-object) and Bildsujet (image-subject). See E. Husserl, “Phantasy and Image Consciousness,” in Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898-1925). Edmund Husserl Collected Works, vol 11 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). On the illusionistic forms of virtual reality, examined through a rereading of Husserl, see P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan: Mimesis International, 2020): 46-52. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 68 AN-ICON  been the subject of several studies.4 Rather, I would like to take up and further develop some issues present in my previous works, with the aim of opening a space for reflec- tion on immersive technology following an anachronistic path through pictorial and digital media by referring to some concepts of art history and theory.5 The main objective is to focus, in analytical and theoretical terms, on the double effect of attraction and distancing described above, as structuring the experience of VR cinema. While the impossibility of fully capturing and keeping the viewers within the virtual environment has mostly been conceived as a negative limitation of such technology, in this paper I try to argue otherwise. Through the reference to a repertoire of images from the past, the aim is to describe the paradoxical character of an experi- ence that is made up as much of attraction as of distancing. But before this can be sustained there are some interme- diate steps. After this introduction, in the second section, taking up a hypothesis advanced by Frank Stella, I explain the idea that gives the title to this paper: that Caravaggio, anticipated the invention of gyroscope technology and therefore made possible the first immersive experience in the history of Western painting. In the third, fourth and fifth sections, building on Michael Fried, I try to emphasize the two moments that characterize Caravaggio’s paintings: immersion, the formal device that attracts within the image, and specularity, understood as the set of figurative and compositional elements that produce an effect of aware- ness on the viewer.6 In the conclusion, I reconsider Fried’s analysis and the concepts that characterize his theoretical 4 The literature on the notion of empathy is vast and constantly evolving with reference to new technological and expressive forms. For an early critical reflection on the facile use of this concept in relation to VR cinema, see W. Uricchio, S. Ding, S. Wolozin, and B. Boyacioglu, Virtually There: Documentary Meets Virtual Reality Conference Report (The MIT Open Documentary Laboratory, 2016): 17-18, http://opendoclab.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/ uploads/2016/11/MIT_OpenDocLab_VirtuallyThereConference.pdf, accessed January 10, 2023. 5 I refer to F. Zucconi, Displacing Caravaggio: Art, Media, and Humanitarian Visual Culture (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 6 On these two notions, which will also be referred to in the following pages, see M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 69 AN-ICON  work in relation to contemporary media. What emerges is an opportunity for developing an ethic of VR: to what extent, can immersive technology facilitate the assumption of a testimonial gaze? Under what conditions can the gesture of wearing a virtual reality headset assume a critical value? Frank Stella’s hypothesis The American artist Frank Stella is, without a doubt, someone who understands visual surfaces and me- dia frames, their ability to offer illusionistic effects. One only has to think of his works in the 1960s, where a series of frames relentlessly squeeze against each other, leaving a small coloured square in the centre. Taking inspiration from Louis Marin’s analysis of Gran Cairo (1962), it is fair to ask whether these squares-frames are a well or a pyramid (Fig. 1). As the French historian and theorist notes, they are “a well and a pyramid, but never at the same time. The eye cannot predict the necessary and the arbitrary moment of conversion in which all the serious play of the frame and its modern and contemporary figures seem to be concen- trated: the play of the rhythm of presentation and repre- sentation, the play of the subject of the art of seeing and the art of describing.”7 If we compare them to the famous example of the rabbit/duck illustration investigated by Ludwig Wittgen- stein and Ernst Gombrich, Stella’s paintings do not merely work on the viewers’ perceptual and cognitive limits in the recognition of the figures depicted. Rather, the represen- tational undecidability and instability of image produce a spatial effect, by modulating the relation between the ob- serving subject and the observed object. In other words, when confronted with the rabbit/duck illustration, the viewer does not have the illusion of being confronted with a duck or rabbit coming off the page; rather, the graphic representa- tion produces an illusionistic effect that makes it impossible to visualize the two animals at the same time. In contrast 7 L. Marin, On Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002): 372. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 70 AN-ICON  to that, Stella’s paintings produce an illusionistic effect to the extent that they alternately draw the viewer inward – as in a well – or push him or her out, as if the surface had a pyramidal shape. Those who observe Stella’s paintings are thus subjected to the rhythmic redundancy of the “opac- ity” of the painted frame that becomes recognizable – we might say that makes itself “transparent” – in the metaphors of the pyramid and the well.8 In more general terms than those used by Marin, we might speak of Stella’s work as a gestalt effect capable of inducing, alternately, in the viewer both the impression of attraction and that of rejection or distancing. In fact, beyond the series of concentric squares, Stella’s artistic research would continue in the 1970s and 1980s by focusing on the relationship between the space Fig. 1. Frank Stella, Gran Cairo, 1962, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, purchase with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art; © Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 8 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (London: Pearson, 1973); E. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 71 AN-ICON  of the canvas and the pictorial space, between the surface and depth (Fig. 2). Fig. 2. Frank Stella, Eccentric Polygon, 1974, Jane Kahan Gallery, New York; purchased by Walter and Joan Wolf, Indianapolis, Indiana; ©Frank Stella/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Beyond the theory of art that is implied in Stel- la’s works, it behoves us to pay particular attention, then, to what he had to say in the first of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that he gave at Harvard in 1984. In developing a line of thought that sweeps from Leonardo da Vinci to Seurat, and from Vermeer to Velázquez, Stella focused on a theoretical problem that is crucial in the history of arts and images; a problem that equally concerns both “old” and “new” media. “The necessity of creating pictorial space that is capable of dissolving its own perimeter and surface plane,” he says, “is the burden that modern painting was born with.”9 And immediately afterwards he goes on to state that “No one helped lighten this burden more than Caravaggio.”10 As often happens, when artists are willing to share their theory, their tone tends to be assertive: Stella’s remarks are full of ideas for creative practice but possibly a font of perplexity for art historians. Still, how can one not ap- preciate his attempt to concisely express the transformation 9 F. Stella, Working Space (Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 1986): 10. 10 Ibid. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 72 AN-ICON  that Caravaggio’s painting forced on the regimes of pictorial representation of space and bodies? Stella’s observations aptly describe Caravaggio’s propensity for experimenting with the phenomenological limits of the idea of “realism,” by creating environments in which the viewer’s gaze must grope its way around, wrapped up in the composition but equally attracted by the vivid emphasis on colour, and by the chromatic nuances seen in some of the details. Stella’s reflections did not stop here. He de- veloped his argument by examining Caravaggio’s entire body of works and focuses on a few paintings. He used anachronistic terminology to highlight several aspects that prefigure artistic and technological developments that took place in the following decades as well as to identify their potentialities: To be able to carry in our minds the space of Caravaggio’s large commanding works, such as the Vatican Deposition and the Seven Acts of Mercy from Naples, we need some kind of image to help form an idea about the design and purpose of Caravaggio’s pictorial space. The image that comes to mind is that of the gyroscope—a spinning sphere, capable of accommodating movement and tilt. We have to imagine ourselves caught up within this sphere, experienc- ing the movement and motion of painting’s action. [...] The space that Caravaggio created is something that twentieth-century painting could use: an alternative both to the space of conventional realism and to the space of what has come to be conventional painterliness. The sense of a shaped spatial presence enveloping the action of the painting and the location of the creator and spectator is a by-product of the success of Caravaggio’s realistic illusionism.11 Within a reflection on VR cinema and immersive media, it is the idea of “realistic illusionism” and even more the metaphor of the gyroscope that attracts attention. The gyroscope, invented in the 19th century by French physi- cist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault is still the basis of virtual reality devices. It is also thanks to it that the visors worn 11 Ibid.: p. 11. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 73 AN-ICON  by viewers can track head movements and thus accurately detect movement along one, two or three axes, thus mak- ing the virtual experience possible. Without the gyroscope, there is no possible balance between the viewer’s gestures and movements in the virtual environment, nor any possi- bility of orientation within it. It is time to give a chance to Stella and his hypothesis that Caravaggio invented the gyroscope and with it virtual reality helmets. But I would like to develop this suggestion in a key that is not merely “technological,” by investigating the forms of composition that character- ize the pictorial medium and the effects they produce. To do so, it is necessary to re-conceive the American artist’s hypothesis into a series of operational questions: what is or would be, exactly, in Caravaggio’s painting capable of prefiguring the conditions of illusionism made possible by contemporary technologies? How do his paintings help us understand the dual effect – hitherto described as one of attraction and distancing – that we experience within immersive environments like those of VR cinema? The two moments of Narcissus To my knowledge, no contemporary photogra- pher or artist has yet investigated in detail the instant when viewers put on or take off their virtual reality helmets. This is really a pity, because the image of that precise instant could make us think a lot about the potentialities of such technology. We must therefore be content with the myths of the past and their survival in our contemporary practices. About to plunge into a virtual world, we find the figure of Narcissus. As noted by Andrea Pinotti – who has identified in Narcissus a kind of “conceptual character” of the an-iconic tradition in Western visual culture – there are two versions of the myth: the first aimed at producing a “naïve” image of the young boy who falls into the illusionistic trap of the image (recurring in Plotinus, Pausanias, Marsilio Ficino, etc.); the second coinciding with a “conscious” Nar- cissus (Ovidian variant), who is aware of the, so to speak, FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 74 AN-ICON  media environment with which he is confronted and with which he is about to make one body.12 It matters little that the Narcissus painted at the end of the Sixteenth century is not a signed work by Caravaggio but only an attribution, widely discussed by art historians (Fig. 3). For the purposes of the reasoning proposed in this paper, it should be noted that the young man is already fully rapt and about to plunge into the world of image. Yet, the figure of the double reflection still reveals a gap between two representational and sensible worlds or regimes. Fig. 3. Caravaggio (attribution), Narcissus, 1597-1599, Rome, Palazzo Barberini. Explicitly taking up the terms proposed by Mi- chael Fried, Narcissus constitutes an explication of the two “moments” that Caravaggio’s painting produces on view- ers. According to Fried – let it be said in passing: a friend 12 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine. Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Torino: Einaudi, 2021): 3-6. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 75 AN-ICON  and one of the most important interpreter of Stella’s work – Caravaggio’s pictorial corpus involve a moment defined as “immersive, imagining the painter as so caught up, so immersed, in this phase of his work on the painting as to be less than fully aware of any sharp distinction between the painting and himself.”13 The second “‘moment,’ notionally instantaneous, of separating or indeed recoiling from the painting, of becoming detached from it, which is to say of no longer being immersed in work on it but rather of see- ing it, taking it in, as if for the first time; I call that ‘moment’ specular, meaning thereby to emphasize the strictly visual or optical relation between the artist - viewer and the image, or image - artefact, that has just brought into being.”14 Reading these pages on Caravaggio, thoughts evidently run to the dialectic between “absorption” and “theatricality”15 identified by Fried himself in the painting of the eighteenth century, or to that between “art” and “ob- jecthood”16 as a key to theoretical and critical interpreta- tion of the relationship between media, art and spatiality in the second half of the twentieth century. Even before the eighteenth century, well before the twentieth-century and, we might add, contemporary media experience, Caravag- gio would have had the ability to reflect in an original way on the tension between the painter and his work (through the use of self-portraiture), between the canvas and the pictorial space (the composition of volumes, the relation- ship between light and shadow) producing unprecedented effects on viewers, now driving them inward, now pushing them outward. Hovering between the classicism of the myth and the technological actuality of the present, Narcissus is a virtual allegory of the ‘moment’ of immersion, or perhaps I should say of absorption becoming immersion, conjoined with the strongest 13 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 39. 14 Ibid. 15 M. Fried, Theatricality and Absorption: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 16 M. Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 76 AN-ICON possible statement of the specular separation of the viewer — orig- inally the painter-viewer — from the painting. There is in it also the strongest imaginable thematization of mirroring as distinct from painting, another of the basic polarities that, in varying ratios and combinations, structure much of Caravaggio’s art. And of course, it is a scene of hyperbolic self-portraiture, the core practice of his lifelong endeavor.17 Narcissus is in a sense, for the purposes of the anachronistic reasoning I am proposing here, a portrait of the exact moment when the viewer is about to put on the headset to access the virtual experience: it is in the middle, between plunging and retreating. Within Caravaggio: immersion and reflection Beyond the myth, the comparison between contemporary media and the tradition of western art can be developed through other Caravaggio masterpieces, in which the effect of spatial encompassment is strong. Even better, it is possible to argue that some of Caravaggio’s paintings represent the virtual experience as viewed from the outside but not without investigating the effects it pro- duces in those inside. Let us focus on the Taking of Christ (1602) and The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610). In the first of these two paintings (Fig. 4), the centre of attention is located on the left, at the point of Judas’s dramatic gesture of betrayal, toward which all eyes converge, except for those of the disciple, who flees terrified toward the edge of the frame. In the second painting, considered to be the last that Car- avaggio completed before his death, what is represented is the exact moment when Saint Ursula is wounded by Attila after she refuses his advances. What connects the two works, in addition to the horizontal composition and the precise staging of a dramatic event, is the presence of 17 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 139. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 77 AN-ICON  a figure located on the right side of each painting. This is a man shown in profile: he has a black beard and bushy eyebrows. His head is stretched up, as if he were standing on tiptoe so as to better observe the violent scene unfold- ing just a few steps in front of him. In the 1602 painting the man is attempting to lighten the darkness of the night and illuminate Judas’s kiss by means of a lantern, which he holds in front of himself with his right hand. This figure is of particular interest for at least two reasons. The first, which Roberto Longhi divined earlier, is that the man on the right side of the image is Caravaggio himself. This is a self-portrait, one of the many in his picto- rial corpus, confirmed moreover by its reproduction – like a Fig. 4. Caravaggio, Taking of Christ, 1602, Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland. Fig. 5. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610, Naples, Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 78 AN-ICON  signature – in the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (Fig. 5).18 The second reason concerns the role that this figure plays in both works. The art historian Sergio Benedetti – who has the merit of having rediscovered the original Taking of Christ, after years of investigation into various copies – noted that the figure of Caravaggio “is well defined and holds up a lantern, the function of which is purely compositional as it appears to throw no light, the true light source being high on the left, beyond the scene depicted.”19 In a similar way, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit noted how, in this work, “Caravaggio puts himself within the painting not in order to get closer to his historical subject but rather in order to see himself both illuminating and experiencing congested spaces.”20 Even more explicitly, Giovanni Careri identified in this self-portrait a kind of declaration of intent of the artist that invites us to reflect on our position as spectators: “I paint with light, with light I show a scene that belongs to the past, but also to the present, the armour testifies to this. I am here to see the arrest of Christ but I cannot in- tervene, as you spectators, witnesses safe from a violence that outrages and fascinates.”21 By re-conceiving such analytical insights in Fried’s terms, the artist’s self-portrait with lantern can therefore be conceived of both as being in the process of becoming immersed in the pictorial environment and as becoming “expelled from it in a ‘moment’ of specularity which was to all intents and purposes the aim and purpose of that work (the establishment of the painting as a painting, as an artifact to be looked at.)”22 Retracing our steps to the theoretical notions structuring this paper, with these paintings we are confront- ed with two different and apparently contradictory effects. At first, like Caravaggio trying to observe the scene, with 18 R. Longhi, “Un originale di Caravaggio a Rouen e il problema delle copie caravaggesche,” Paragone 121 (1960): 23-36. 19 S. Benedetti, “Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ, a masterpiece rediscovered,” The Burlington Magazine 135, no. 1088 (1993): 731-741, 738. 20 L. Bersani, U. Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge-London: MIT Press, 1998): 57. 21 G. Careri, Caravaggio. La Fabbrica dello Spettatore (Milano: Jaca Book, 2017): 234. 22 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 217. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 79 AN-ICON  or without his lantern, we are pushed into the painting as a medial environment made of light and shadow. Then lat- er, once we have searched the environment and once we have recognized the figure of the painter-witness, we are pushed outward, that is to say that we begin to reflect on the pictorial composition and on our position as viewers: in front of an image, with our feet planted on the museum’s floor, in Dublin, Naples or in another city. Putting it in anachronistic terms, one could first argue that the contemporary experiences offered by VR cinema are also characterized by an “immersive” moment: here the field of view itself coincides with a “portable lan- tern” located on the forehead of the spectator; a wearable lantern that illuminates a spherical space that coincides with full darkness, except for the frontal portion framed from time to time. Darkness that the VR cinema viewer will never have occasion to see or feel, except when it is diegetized in the production of a given narrative effect. At the same time, a “specular” moment, always persists: pri- marily in the glitches of the digital environment; in the very fact that lowering my gaze to look for my body I tend to find nothing or at least the scarcely credible simulation of arms and legs; in the presence of extradiegetic music, in all those compositional effects – whether intended or not by the video-makers – that invite us to see the image behind the simulation of a virtual environment and in so doing to “reflect” on our position as viewers.23 Regarding the image of the pain of others As in many VR cinema projects, the two paint- ings described above are about situations of suffering or violence, scenes which invite the viewer to assume the position of a witness but in which, at the same time, it is impossible to immerse oneself completely. One painting by Caravaggio seems capable of interrogating, more than 23 On the limits of VR cinema, through some concrete examples, see F. Zucconi, “Sulla tendenza utopica nel VR cinema,” Carte Semiotiche 7 (2021): 118-126. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 80 AN-ICON  any other, the paradoxical character of virtual experience, as well as the idea of being able to experience a world and a living condition that are profoundly different from those characterizing the viewer’s everyday life. At the centre of Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St. Matthew (1600) is the half-naked, fully lit body of the assas- sin (Fig. 6). On the left, a group of men in seventeenth-cen- tury clothing recoil, trying to shield themselves from the violence. While an angel hands St. Matthew the palm of martyrdom, on the right we see the gesture of a novice walking away. In the foreground, some catechumens lying on the ground observe the scene. The composition is cen- trifugal: the viewer’s gaze gradually moves away from the centre as it moves from one body to another. In the back- ground, one meets a figure characterized by a particularly intense gaze who seems to stare at the act of violence be- fore his eyes. This is the bearded man leaning out from the black background behind the assassin. Again, that man is Caravaggio. Also in this large painting, the painter portrays himself in the role of a witness to a violent act. Those who would try to go even further in their analysis might go so far as to argue that what Caravaggio painted in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew is not simply a self-portrait, but a “self-portrait as painter.” To support this hypothesis, I would like to emphasize the inclination of the figure’s head to the side to observe the scene as if he had a canvas in front of him (Fig. 7). One could also conceive of the left hand reaching forward as a transfiguration of the palette, while the right hand holds the brush. The artist’s sad gaze might then be re-conceived as a concentrated, absorbed gaze. If this were the case, it would be an antic- ipation of some of the traits that characterize the extraor- dinary visual dispositif that is Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez, notoriously and masterfully analysed by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things: Now he [the painter] can be seen, caught in a moment of stillness, at the neutral centre of this oscillation. His dark torso and bright face are half-way between the visible and the invisible: emerging from FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 81 AN-ICON  Fig. 6. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, 1600, San Luigi dei Francesi Church, Rome. Fig. 7. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, 1600, Rome, San Luigi dei Francesi Church. Detail. that canvas beyond our view, he moves into our gaze; but when, in a moment, he makes a step to the right, removing himself from our gaze, he will be standing exactly in front of the canvas he is painting; he will enter that region where his painting, neglected for an instant, will, for him, become visible once more, free of shadow and free of reticence.24 24 M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) (London- New York: Routledge, 2002): 4. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 82 AN-ICON  In both Velazquez’s and Caravaggio’s master- piece, the self-portrait takes on a theoretical and critical function; they are within the painting and, at the same time, they explicitly invite the viewer to reflect on visual repre- sentation, on the point of view that structures it and on the limits of the composition.25 This may seem a bold interpretation. Yet, look- ing closely at the figure of Caravaggio, it can be argued that the image presented in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew is not only an image of self “regarding the pain of others” but also and at the same time – turning Susan Sontag’s famous expression – an image of self “regarding the image of the pain of others.”26 If in the Taking of Christ and The Martyrdom of St. Ursula the self-portrait is first and fore- most functional in expressing an idea of immersion of the painter-witness in the pictorial event – a closure and full autonomy of the pictorial as an “immersive environment” – in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew there is a shift that calls into question the composition of the image and the effect of immediacy of representation. Reading Fried again, this is a work “in which a Caravaggio semblable at once rush- es to leave the painting and looks back in evident distress, thereby enabling the viewer to recognize his characteristic features on the far threshold of the depicted space.”27 It is not so much or simply that the figure depicting the painter seems about to leave the scene but, as the art historian and theorist writes with great acumen, “rushes to leave the painting” and pushes the viewer’s gaze to the threshold of the image. If the self-portraits of 1602 and 1610 tend to provoke an identification between painter and viewer and reinforce the effect of immersion, that of The Martyrdom 25 For a more in-depth reflection on this painting and on the modernity of Caravaggio’s self- portrait, capable of activating paths of critical reflection on contemporary media and visual culture, see F. Zucconi, “Regarding the image of the pain of others: Caravaggio, Sontag, Leogrande,” Humanities 11 (2022), 44. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11020044. 26 The reference is to the title and thoughts developed in the famous book by S. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003). 27 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 209. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 83 AN-ICON  of St. Matthew traces the effect of immediacy back to the pictorial composition that produces it. As Sontag herself points out in the above-men- tioned book, from the seventeenth century to the tradition of twentieth-century reportage, a self-portrait of the painter, photographer, or director is certainly not enough to vali- date the authenticity and effectiveness of the testimony or its ethical value. The risk of a self-referential drift, even a “narcissistic” tendency, is also discernible behind this trend: why represent ourselves when we are faced with the pain of others? Rather than glibly promote all self-reflexive ten- dencies, the self-portrait of Caravaggio in The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew is useful and interesting to the extent that it is a manifestation of the fact that, despite its illusionistic realism, it remains an image among many other possible images of this event and does not claim to coincide with it and reproduce it through the media for the viewer’s benefit. The self-portrait on the threshold thus becomes a way to intensify the “specular moment” or, in other terms, to underline the fact that even during the more immersive virtual experience, we are just facing an image, a very well structured one. On the one hand, with his gaze, Caravaggio invites the viewer to immerse himself in an encompassing pictorial image; on the other hand, with his positioning and posture, he leads the viewer to observe the theatricality of the scene from another point of view, to analyse it as seen from the outside. Attraction and distancing Picking up the thread, Stella’s hypothesis was taken up and developed in this paper as a theoretical and analytical metaphor, certainly not in mere technological terms. If the gyroscope fitted in virtual reality helmets makes possible the stable connection between the movements we actually make in the physical world and those in the world of images, talking about Caravaggio’s gyroscope meant reflecting on the strategies of producing illusionistic and counter-illusionistic effects, on the balance between the FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 84 AN-ICON  “immersive” and “specular” moments. Reference to the the- oretical and methodological notions proposed by Michael Fried thus made it possible to observe the co-presence of such moments or, rather, such spectatorial effects that per- sist, by transforming, from the history of Western painting to contemporary immersive devices. Through reference to Susan Sontag’s critical theory of photography, it was thus possible to propose a hypothesis for an ethical and political approach to VR. In particular, what has emerged is that the co-presence of illusionistic and counter-illusionistic effects does not constitute a weakening of the experien- tial and testimonial value of immersive experience. On the contrary, a conscious ethical and political approach to VR seems to be able to develop precisely by making viewers feel the threshold between the environment in which they are physically situated and the virtual one. This is why it is not necessary to rely on technological implementations devoted to perfecting, once and for all, the immersive char- acter of VR cinema and other technological devices. While the slogans that accompanied the launch of many virtual reality projects relied on the simplistic use of the notions of “empathy,” “compassion,” and “immersion” in a geo- graphical elsewhere, the most interesting aspect of such technology seems to involve its capacity to produce both identification and estrangement. Like Caravaggio observing the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, even the gap between the physical world, in which the viewer is placed, and the virtual one can be re-conceived in positive terms within artistic experimen- tations capable of reflecting critically on the asymmetrical relations between the observer and the observed, between the here in which we find ourselves and the elsewhere of which we claim to have “direct” experience. In fact, the very ideas of virtual “presence” must be conceived as a media effect, resulting from specific compositional and FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 85 AN-ICON  technological determinations capable of modulating the relationship between subject and environment.28 Examples of artistic projects aimed at inves- tigating such limits are few, but their number is certainly growing. The survey and in-depth study of such exper- iments exceeds the specific objectives of this paper. To name but one – the most important, and often-addressed29 – the installation Carne y arena (2017) by Alejandro González Iñárritu seems precisely to spur spectators into experienc- ing their own awkward extraneousness and powerlessness toward a group of refugees from Mexico who are trying to cross over the border to the United States (Fig. 8). Iñárritu’s subtitle for the installation – “Virtually present, physically invisible” – expresses, perhaps, the urgent need to tackle the paradoxical character of virtual experience. Beyond Caravaggio, building on the analysis and concepts elicited by his painting, the field of experi- mentations of VR cinema and, more generally, virtual reality seems to be able to develop only by taking into account the co-presence of the different moments or effects that define our relationship with such media. Of course, in con- temporary virtual experiences, the viewer never has the opportunity to mirror himself or herself, that is, to see his or her own image reflected inside the media environment. The notion of “specularity” as understood in Narcissus and Caravaggio’s self-portraits seems in this sense to lose rel- evance. But at this point it should be clear that this notion 28 On this point, see V. Catricalà, R. Eugeni, “Technologically modified self–centred worlds. Modes of presence as effects of sense in virtual, augmented, mixed and extended reality,” in F. Biggio, V. Dos Santos, G.T. Giuliana, eds., Meaning-Making in Extended Reality (Roma: Aracne, 2020): 63-90. For reflection in the different forms of exposure, interactivity and modes of presence, see R. Eugeni, Capitale algoritmico. Cinque dispositivi postmediali (Più Uno) (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2021): 127-174. 29 For an analysis of Iñárritu’s installation, see P. Montani, Tre Forme di Creatività: Tecnica, Arte, Politica (Napoli: Cronopio, 2017): 132-138; A. D’Aloia, “Virtually present, physically invisible: virtual reality immersion and emersion in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena,” in Senses of Cinema (June 2018), http://sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/ virtually-present-physically-invisible-virtual-reality-immersion-and-emersion-in-alejandro- gonzalez-inarritus-carne-y-arena/, accessed January 10, 2022; A.C. Dalmasso, “The body as virtual frame. Performativity of the image in immersive environments,” Cinéma & Cie 19, no. 23 (2019): 101-119; L. Acquarelli, “The spectacle of re-enactment and the critical time of the testimony in Inarritu’s Carne y Arena,” in F. Aldama, A. Rafele, eds., Cultural Studies in the Digital Age (San Diego: San Diego University Press, 2020): 103-118; R. Diodato, Image, Art, and Virtuality: Towards an Aesthetics of Relation (Cham: Springer, 2021): 72-74. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 86 AN-ICON  expresses not so much or only the mirroring of one’s own image, but the possibility of observing and reflecting on the relationship between subject and environment, between what separates us and what binds us to the image. Fig. 8. Alejandro González Iñárritu, Carne y arena, 2017. ©Emmanuel Lubezki/Alejandro González Iñárritu To avoid any misunderstanding, let me propose, in conclusion, to call these moments by two very simple terms that I also used in the introduction: attraction and distancing, where – as in the case of the oppositions pro- posed by Fried – the second term encompasses the first, constituting a form of meta-reflection on the forms of artis- tic and media experience.30 In this sense, attraction defines the concave side of images, the one capable of becoming environment and drawing the viewer to show solidarity with them. On the other hand, distancing expresses the convex side or the modular spatiality of images, the one pointing at the viewer as such and forcing him or her to reflect on his or her own position, on the complex character of ev- ery experience. Whether such terms are convincing or not, the articulation of the two “moments” seems to define the ethical and political limits of both old and new immersive 30 For a reflection on the notion of “distance” in the field of media studies, I refer to the introduction and the various contributions in M. Treleani, F. Zucconi, eds., “Remediating Distances,” IMG Journal 3 (2020). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 87 AN-ICON  technologies. Hence the need to keep the door of art history open, imagining an anachronistic approach and aiming for artistic experimentations poised between different media, between two different moments. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 88 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18458

Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality by Philippe Bédard art Virtual Reality Illusion Anthropocentrism Umwelt Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality art PHILIPPE BÉDARD, McGill University – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4100-5249 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18458 “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unpreju- diced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception”1 Abstract In the following essay, I consider if and how VR’s uncanny ability to create an illusion of presence and generate a sense of body ownership might be used to go beyond our anthropocentric perspective, towards non-hu- man experiences. By adventuring outside the domain of human experience, my goal is to address the affordances and limitations of VR’s illusionistic potential. Knowing full well that certain economic pressures preclude artists from pursuing the kinds of provocations I describe in this essay, I nevertheless invite readers to follow along as I explore alternative potentialities of contemporary VR. Specifically, I approach VR here in the hopes of finding ways of engaging with different bodies, spaces, and realities, even if illusorily. Keywords Virtual reality Illusion Anthropocentrism Umwelt To quote this essay: P. Bédard, “Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality art,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 89-112, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18458 1 S. Brakhage, “From Metaphors on Vision,” in P.A. Sitney, ed., The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1978): 120. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 89 AN-ICON  Introduction Many things have changed between the origi- nal heyday of virtual reality (VR) in the 1980–1990s and the current revival of the technology since the early 2010s. But while today VR might benefit from the leaps and bounds computers and graphic technologies have witnessed in the intervening decades, and while it might enjoy greater commercial success than ever before, I often feel our imag- ination around the kinds of experiences enabled by VR has suffered somewhat. We are far removed today from Mere- dith Bricken’s suggestion that in VR: “You can be the mad hatter or you can be the teapot; you can move back and forth to the rhythm of a song. You can be a tiny droplet in the rain or in the river.”2 Likewise, we seem to have strayed from Jaron Lanier’s proposition that in virtual reality, “you can visit the world of the dinosaur, then become a Tyran- nosaurus. Not only can you see DNA, you can experience what it’s like to be a molecule.”3 While Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin use these two quotes to highlight the illusion of “perceptual immediacy”4 of immersive virtual reality experiences, I see in these statements something else entirely more interesting: the idea that VR might give us experiences that far exceed the limits of human under- standing. In the following essay, I consider if and how VR’s uncanny ability to create an illusion of presence and generate a sense of body ownership might be used to go beyond our anthropocentric perspective, towards non-hu- man experiences. By adventuring outside the domain of human experience, my goal is to address the affordances 2 M. Bricken, “Virtual worlds: no interface to design,” in M. Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1991): 363-382, 372. 3 S. Ditlea, “False starts aside, virtual reality finds new roles,” New York Times (March 23, 1998): 97. 4 J. Bolter, R. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2000): 22. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 90 AN-ICON  and limitations of VR’s illusionistic potential. In so doing, I also aim to explore how VR might be thought of as more than a means to foster empathy for other human beings, whatever the purpose for that endeavour might be.5 This allows me to discuss immersive technologies and experi- ences in a context devoid of the problems typically asso- ciated with discourses around the concept of “empathy machine.” I begin this essay by addressing the illusion of presence in VR, specifically as it relates to our experience of body-space relations in physical reality. I start by address- ing what I argue to be the fundamental anthropocentrism of VR’s dominant mode of experience. This crucial detour has me discussing whether VR is capable of representing non-human modes of being in the world. Necessarily, this also means addressing earlier thought experiments in the field of psychology, biology, and philosophy that sought to question “what it is like to be” something other than human. Having done so, I then consider whether VR might have the ability to give us access to non-human realities, or whether it is limited by a fundamental anthropocentrism. Finally, I 5 On the issue of empathy in VR, see J.H. Murray, “Not a film and not an empathy machine,” Immerse (October 6, 2016): https://immerse.news/not-a-film-and-not-an-empathy-machine- 48b63b0eda93, accessed January 10, 2023; S. Gregory, “Immersive witnessing: from empathy and outrage to action,” WITNESS blog (2016), https://blog.witness.org/2016/08/ immersive-witnessing-from-empathy-and-outrage-to-action/, accessed January 10, 2023; G. Bollmer, “Empathy machines,” Media International Australia 165, no. 1 (2017): 63-76, https:// doi.org/10.1177/1329878X17726794; R. Yang, “If you walk in someone else’s shoes, then you’ve taken their shoes: empathy machines as appropriation machines,” Radiator Blog (April 5, 2017), https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2017/04/if-you-walk-in-someone-elses-shoes- then.html, accessed January 10, 2023; H. Farmer, “A broken empathy machine,” Immerse (September 30, 2019), https://immerse.news/a-broken-empathy-machine-can-virtual-reality- increase-pro-social-behaviour-and-reduce-prejudice-cbcefb30525b, accessed January 10, 2023; P. Roquet, “Empathy for the game master: how virtual reality creates empathy for those seen to be creating VR,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 65-80, https://doi. org/10.1177/1470412920906260; L. Nakamura, “Feeling good about feeling bad: virtuous virtual reality and the automation of racial empathy,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 47-64, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906259; G. Bollmer and K. Guinness, “Empathy and nausea: virtual reality and Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 28-46, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906261. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 91 AN-ICON  look at experiments relating to illusions of body ownership in VR, specifically as they relate to non-human bodies. As will become abundantly clear over the course of this essay, my goal is speculative—perhaps even provocative—rather than earnest. I write this text as an exercise in exploring what I perceive to be a bias towards anthropocentrism in VR, a medium which has so often been lauded for its ability to simulate otherwise impossible real- ities.6 Readers may also see this as a call to action to VR designers and consumers to open their minds to the pos- sibilities offered by contemporary immersive technologies beyond those practices that currently dominate the market. Knowing full well that certain economic pressures preclude artists from pursuing the kinds of provocations I describe in this essay, I nevertheless invite readers to follow along as I explore alternative potentialities of contemporary VR.7 Specifically, I approach VR here in the hopes of finding ways of engaging with different bodies, spaces, and real- ities, even if illusorily. Virtual reality environments: immediacy and presence It has become something of a truism to recog- nize that VR is able to foster a sense of presence, that is, the impression of “being there” in a virtual environment dis- tinct from the physical environment that one’s body is also occupying. Or, as Mathew Lombard et al. put it, presence 6 I maintain that VR is currently driven by profoundly anthropocentric forces, despite the “anti-anthropocentric drive which,” according to Andrea Pinotti, “currently characterises not only the VR world but contemporary visual culture, in various mediums, more generally.” A. Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?,” in Y. Hadjinicolaou, ed., Visual Engagements: Image Practices and Falconry (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020): 30-47, 44, https:// doi.org/10.1515/9783110618587-003. See also R. Grusin, The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 7 I also want to recognize that there are the effects of VR are not currently fully known and that much more work must be done to ensure current VR technologies are accessible and ethical. These pressing issues certainly deserve more attention before we can move towards more elaborate explorations of the outer limits of VR. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 92 AN-ICON  describes, “the perceptual illusion of non-mediation.”8 In this context, the perceived lack of mediation is predicated on VR’s ability to foster a convincing illusion of a space that reproduces the way we see the world in our daily lives: as a three-dimensional volume in which our bodies can move and act. And while on their own the affordances of head-mounted displays (HMD) could be used to create any number of effects and illusions, the dominant practice of contemporary immersive media has been to reproduce our habitual modes of (visual) perception: looking ahead from an upright position through a pair of eyes which we can move around (either in their orbits, by moving our head, or our body) to see the surrounding environment. In an earlier essay, I described VR as inherently subjective, following Jonathan Crary’s incisive discussion of “subjective vision.”9 By extension, I would also argue its default mode of experience–that for which it was designed and that which is dominant to this day–is also intrinsically anthropocentric. This is because “subjective,” in this con- text, refers to the idiosyncrasies of human vision.10 By the same token, I describe an apparatus which relies on these unique and fallible qualities of perception as subjective. In the case of VR, the HMD hinges upon the following sub- jective qualities of human vision: its binocularity, its “ego- centric” perspective, and the individual’s ability to move their point of view on the world through six degrees of freedom of movement along three dimensions. Here, ego- centrism describes an approach to body-space relations 8 M. Lombard, T. Ditton, “At the heart of it all: the concept of presence,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3, no. 2 (1997), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997. tb00072.x. 9 P. Bédard, “La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 28, no. 1 (2019): 66-92, 74, https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs.28.1.2019-0012; J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992). 10 See again J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 93 AN-ICON  which take the individual as a point of reference.11 In other words, the egocentric perspective considers the human body as a “pivot around which the three dimensions of spatial extension arrange themselves and from which they ultimately proceed.”12 This could just as easily be called anthropocentric. I continue to subscribe to the idea that VR’s apparatus and the default mode of experience it proposes are subjective, egocentric, and anthropocentric. That is because in most cases, the illusion of presence fostered by immersive virtual environments plays off this charac- teristic centrality of our body in our perception of space. Head-mounted displays become viewports into different and often completely fantastical realities, but these spaces are still explored from an egocentric perspective, with the body as invariable centre of gravity. If we assume the goal of most virtual reality experiences is to create a satisfying illusion of presence in a virtual environment–whatever the purpose for that may be–it makes perfect sense why this strategy has remained so dominant. However, this is not the only avenue. As an example, a slew of recent (flat) vid- eo games have embraced the affordances of their medi- um’s monocular perspective to create fascinating optical illusions and truly impossible body-space relations. The worlds explored in Antichamber (Demruth, 2013), Superlim- inal (Pillow Castle Games, 2019), Manifold Garden (William Chyr, 2019), Spaceflux (Colin Ardelean, 2020), Hyperbolica (CodeParade, 2022), and Parallelia (SincArt Studio, 2022) exceed our natural conception of space by presenting all manner of physically impossible environments: non-Euclid- ean, hyperbolic, fractal, etc. In so doing, they draw more inspiration from M.C. Escher’s depictions of space than 11 W.R. Sherman, A.B. Craig, Understanding Virtual Reality: Interface, Application, and Design (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman Publishers, 2003): 296. 12 E.S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): 208. Emphasis added. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 94 AN-ICON  from what we find in Leon Battista Alberti’s theorization of renaissance perspective. What if VR were to also stray from the beaten path and indulge in such perspectival fancies? In the contemporary immersive media land- scape, precious few experiments with non-anthropocen- tric spaces have surfaced–at least to my knowledge.13 In mid-2020, Diego Montoya shared Spacetime, which he described as a “special relativity VR simulation.” The ex- periment allows users to explore a room where the speed of light is much slower than usual: “You can experience space contraction, time dilation and light Doppler effects as you move”14 (Fig. 1a and 1b). Among various physical distortions the experience enables–all of which are impos- sible to encapsulate in written form–the designer explains that “[t]he world feels very ‘wobbly’ when moving very close to the speed of light, almost liquid.” While space remains Fig. 1a 13 I discuss the limits of any analysis of contemporary virtual reality in P. Bédard, “La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains.” 14 D. Montoya (@diego_montoya _), “I built a special #relativity VR simulation for @oculus Quest, where the speed of light c is much lower than usual. You can experience space contraction, time dilation and light Doppler effect as you move. 1/n,” Tweet, August 7, 2020, https://twitter.com/diego_montoya_/status/1291745102700765184, accessed January 10, 2023. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 95 AN-ICON  Fig. 1a and 1b. Diego Montoya, Fig. 1b Spacetime, 2020 three-dimensional in Spacetime, the user’s relations to that space far exceed the limits of our habitual modes of per- ception. With that said, I would hesitate to say that they exceed anthropocentrism, since the transformations that space undergoes throughout the experiment result from the user’s movements. Space is not transformed. Our per- ception of it is. As with the earlier quoted videogames, Mon- toya’s project is the exception rather than the norm. Indeed, I still believe that as long as VR remains tied to the three or six degrees of freedom model of spatial engagement which takes the body as its centre, there is little it can do to avoid this egocentric mode of experience. With that said, nothing is keeping VR designers from creating virtual environments which are abstract rather than representa- tional.15 In other words, perhaps the solution to exceeding anthropocentric perspectives in VR might be to reject the notion of “perspective” altogether. However, doing so might 15 An example I recently encountered would merit further attention in this regard. In Lockdown Dreamscape (Nicolas Gebbe, 2022), an innovative visual process was used to distort the image such that objects seemed to meld into one another. A slow movement through the distorted space led me to discover novel spatial relations. The experience was at once nauseating and thrilling. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 96 AN-ICON  require more nuanced explorations of the affordances of virtual bodies. It might also ask that we question “what it is like to be” non-human, and whether VR is at all capable to furnish an answer to that question. What it is like to be [ ] Whether it has been asked about animals, in- sects, or “things” in general, the question of “what it is like to be” this or that–whatever it may be–recognizes that our perspective as human animals is limited and distinct enough from other forms of being to preclude us from knowing or even understanding them.16 The reality behind this seem- ingly impassable chasm between ourselves and others is made clear through the concept of Umwelt, as theorized by Jakob von Uexküll. While it is true that all things (living or otherwise) occupy the same physical reality, Von Uexküll introduces the notion of Umwelt to suggest that all beings do not necessarily share the same environment or world.17 The sensorial attunement of different animals varies to such a degree that the very meaning of “world” differs from one creature to another. The word Umwelt can be translated as “self-cen- tred world.” This suggests the inherently subjective or egocentric nature of a given entity’s particular version of, and relation to, a world. This interpretation of Umwelt as “self-centred” or “subjectively-perceived” world is made even more evident when looking at the notion of subjectivity itself, understood here as that which is exclusive to a given 16 This has far-reaching implications within debates on the notion of empathy in virtual reality. 17 J. von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning (1934), trans. J.D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). The ties between von Uexküll’s Umwelt and VR have been highlighted by Andrea Pinotti in an illuminating chapter. See Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?” PHILIPPE BÉDARD 97 AN-ICON  individual (i.e., subject).18 Indeed, as Maike Sarah Reinerth and Jan-Noël Thon define it, “subjectivity” designates that to which an individual has privileged access. While this definition of subjectivity does satisfyingly describe the ex- clusive character of Umwelt, the parallel breaks down when we realize subjectivity is most often discussed in terms of the unique way in which a given subject “sees” things. The reason for this breakdown has far-reaching implications, specifically when it comes to the non-anthropocentric aims of this essay. Where the concept of Umwelt shines and where the questions of “what it is like to be” something other than human come into play is precisely when the human sen- sorium–of which sight is often taken to be the most privi- leged example–is no longer sufficient. Von Uexküll with his famous study of the tick, Thomas Nagel with his example of the bat, and Ian Bogost in his Alien Phenomenology all focus on the worldly experience of insects, animals and things that are commonly understood as blind–that is, when sight is understood from an anthropocentric perspective.19 What drives these thinkers, then, is precisely to understand how these creatures sense, navigate and exist in a version of the world that is completely different from that of hu- mans, even though we might inhabit the same spaces at any given time. How does the world of the bat differ from ours when its primary mode of experience is defined by its use of echolocation? How is the tick’s experience of the world influenced by its reliance on sensing the heat, fur, and butyric acid that signify the presence of its main prey, namely mammals? How different is the world for things 18 M.S. Reinerth, J.N. Thon, eds., Subjectivity Across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2017). For a more sustained discussion of subjectivity in VR, see P. Bédard, “La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains.” 19 T. Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?,” The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435-450, https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914; I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). PHILIPPE BÉDARD 98 AN-ICON  whose very mode of existence would even preclude us from describing them has “experiencing” the world? “When we ask what it means to be something,” Bogost summarizes, “we pose a question that exceeds our own grasp of the being of the world.”20 In brief, these ask that we set aside our privileged modes of experience for a moment and engage–even if imaginatively–with other realities parallel and equal to our own. My interest in ask- ing these questions in the context of an essay on virtual reality, then, comes from the fact that I see it as a tool for exploring and perhaps even exceeding the limits of anthro- pocentric perspectives.21 Indeed, while Reinerth and Thon remark upon the impossibility of accessing the subjectivity of others per se, the editors also suggest that media of all kinds (from literature, to movies, to games, etc.) can succeed in fostering a sense of intersubjectivity. This pro- cess could also be called empathy, namely “the ability to share and understand the experiences of others,” or, as Kate Nash defines it, “an affective response grounded in an imaginative engagement with the experience of the other.”22 Whether we call it intersubjectivity or empathy, the belief behind these concepts is that different media can make use of their unique affordances to suggest to users how a given character might subjectively perceive a given event or experience. Can VR overcome its fundamental anthropo- centrism and help users imaginatively project themselves in the experiences of others, precisely when these exceed their habitual range of possible experiences? 20 I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to be a Thing: 30. Original emphasis. 21 Pinotti might say that this desire to exceed anthropocentrism is itself anthropocentric, as it posits humans as having an exceptional capacity to access other modes of being in the world, which other creatures do not possess. See Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?”. 22 H. Farmer, “A broken empathy machine,” K. Nash, “Virtual reality witness: exploring the ethics of mediated presence,” Studies in Documentary Film 12, no. 2 (2018): 119-131, 124, https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2017.1340796. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 99 AN-ICON  Accessing non-human realities through technology An initial response to this last question might be that it cannot. Because VR HMDs are (predominantly) audiovisual devices and because they are tuned to the hu- man sensorium, they cannot, by definition, make us see and hear more than what our eyes and ears can perceive nor- mally.23 As Andrea Pinotti adroitly explains, such attempts to represent non-human realities through technology: [...] cannot patently hope to escape Nagel’s caveat. Since they are visually rendered on a screen, a compound-eye vision, a left-right- eye independent vision or an infrared vision will always be visions processed by a human eye-brain system. Human species-specific organisation operates as a physiological and phenomenological a priori that cannot simply be bypassed. This is, of course, true also for any sort of VR simulation of non-human ways of experiencing the world: they all ultimately have to be processed by such human a priori.24 This makes it seemingly impossible for HMDs to exceed our typical senses of sight and hearing, to say nothing of being able to use it to go beyond our ordinary perceptual habitus and perceive the world as a bat, tick, or other creature might. But does it mean VR cannot help us imagine what the world might look like to a different being? The fact is that we already use tools in our dai- ly lives that make visible to us phenomena to which our eyes and ears are not sensitive. The clock makes visible 23 To that effect, “[David] Eagleman has noted that the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to humans is less than a ten-trillionth of the electromagnetic field, and therefore much goes undetected in our lives apart from a ‘shockingly small fraction of the surrounding reality.” L. Jarvis, “Body-swapping: self-attribution and body transfer illusions (BTIs),” in Immersive Embodiment: Theatres of Mislocalized Sensation (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019): 99-154, 113. See also D. Eagleman, “The Umwelt,” in J. Brockman, ed., This Will Make You Smarter (London: Doubleday, 2012): 143-145. 24 A. Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?:” 46. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 100 AN-ICON  the passage of time, while other instruments transform a range of different extrasensory stimuli into visible data (e.g., spectrometer, barometer, Geiger counter, Magnetic Res- onance Imaging scanner, etc.). Through these tools, we can gain access to phenomena that are strictly speaking “invisible,” yet which become visible all the same thanks to the appropriate apparatus. Having been made visible, these phenomena are not necessarily legible to all. As Don Ihde explains, the relation with the world in which we enter when using such tools is hermeneutic, meaning it requires that we possess the knowledge and skills necessary to interpret the data presented to us through these instruments; one must know how to speak the machine’s language, and to read the world through it.25 Thinking of VR as a tool to engage hermeneu- tically with aspects of the world which we cannot natural- ly perceive is one possible avenue for thinking of it as a way to exceed the anthropocentric perspectives to which it has generally been relegated. We can see traces of this approach at play in several projects by the artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF), notably in In the Eyes of the Animal (2015), Treehugger: Wawona (2016), and We live in an Ocean of Air (2018). In each of these projects, the artists use “terrestrial laser scanners” to create what are commonly known as “point clouds.” The density and colour of these clouds can be changed to create more or less detailed pointillist representations of physical spaces. MLF uses these to translate ways of “seeing” or being in the world that are in excess of human understanding. The 25 “Hermeneutic relations,” Evan Selinger explains, “do not amplify or replicate the body’s sensory abilities; instead, they engage our linguistic and interpretative aptitudes. In this context, technologies that facilitate hermeneutic relations are best understood as being ‘text- like’; their effective utilization requires interpretation through the activity of reading.” E. Selinger, Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde (New York: SUNY Press, 2012): 5. An example that is closer to art and illusion might be anamorphosis. To see the anamorphosis hidden in an image, viewers must know how to position themselves in such a way as to reveal the image. See D.L. Collins, “Anamorphosis and the eccentric observer: inverted perspective and construction of the gaze,” Leonardo (1992): 73-82, https://www.jstor.org/stable/i270958. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 101 AN-ICON  effect lies halfway between scientific imagery and impres- sionism, as sparse arrays of point clouds leave much to the viewer’s imagination. In the Eyes of the Animal, for example, puts its viewers in the eyes of four different animals and insects (owl, frog, dragonfly, and mosquito), each with its Fig. 2a Fig. 2b Fig. 2a and 2b. Marshmallow Laser Feast, In the Eyes of the Animal, 2015 own way of perceiving a forest (Fig. 2a and 2b). Meanwhile, Treehugger and Ocean of Air each focus on trees and on the scope and time frame of their biological processes. Al- though all the creatures represented in these projects share the same environments (i.e., the forest), they each have PHILIPPE BÉDARD 102 AN-ICON  their own Umwelt, which MLF represents through different densities of point clouds and different colour filters. Some critics may point to the fact that what MLF does in their project may not be called hermeneutical, in that the tools they use do not translate the actual, literal perception of these insects and animals.26 It would also be fair to note that users would not be adequately equipped to interpret the world as perceived through these tools, even if their scientific accuracy was beyond reproach. This would be missing the point. It would be more appropriate to say that what MLF creates are artistic renditions of what the authors imagine the world might look like to different non-human animals. Their projects are best understood, then, as invitations to imaginatively explore what the Um- welt of a mosquito, dragonfly, frog, owl, or even a tree might be made of. Recall that for Reinerth and Thon, different me- dia can effectively seek to simulate certain aspects of a sub- jective experience as perceived by a particular individual by appealing to different aesthetic or narrative strategies, as well as the imagination of the user (viewer, reader, player, etc.).27 What we have yet to explore, however, is whether VR is capable of simulating experiences that exceed the boundaries of the human body. And since, as Maurice Mer- leau-Ponty writes, “I am conscious of the world through the medium of my body,”28 how the body appears and functions in VR has far-reaching implications. So while what MLF (among other artists) creates might look different than how we see the world, the question still stands as to if and 26 MLF typically collaborates with scientists in relevant fields to help them translate the data recorded. With that said, Pinotti’s reminder that data represented onscreen for human consumption is not equivalent to the source stimuli still holds true, lessening any claim these artistic experiences might want to make as to their accuracy. See Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?” 27 M.S. Reinerth, J.N. Thon, “Introduction,” in M.S. Reinerth, J.N. Thon, eds., Subjectivity Across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives: 1-25, 3. Original emphasis. 28 M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2010): 94-95. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 103 AN-ICON  how might VR allow users to act differently than they can in their own human bodies. Embodying the non-human While the illusion of presence is often acknowl- edged in discussions of VR, the various kinds of embod- ied illusions the medium offers are just as relevant, readily achievable, and arguably even more fundamental.29 It is not surprising, then, that the body, its representations, and our perception thereof have received much attention from the fields of psychology and neuroscience, especially in recent years. For instance, in their work on the so-called “Proteus effect,” Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson have demonstrat- ed how “an individual’s behaviour conforms to their digital self-representation independent of how others perceive them.”30 While most scholarship that invokes this effect focuses on the behavioural aftereffects of inhabiting other kinds of human bodies (e.g., in terms of gender, age, race, ability, etc.), some have explored the effects derived from inhabiting non-human bodies.31 These lay the groundwork for the explorations to which this essay aspires, but it is possible to go further still. A great many studies have been conducted on the topic of the “body ownership illusion,” or the so-called “body transfer illusion.” These illustrate how our body sche- ma is amenable to change when presented with sufficiently 29 I use the term “medium” loosely here, as contemporary VR is more appropriately described as an apparatus which pre-existing media are attempting to adopt. For more on that debate, see my forthcoming “Many births of VR.” 30 N. Yee, J.N. Bailenson, “The Proteus effect: the effect of transformed self-representation on behavior,” Human Communication Research 33, no. 3 (2007): 271-290, https://doi. org/10.1177/0093650208330254. 31 See S.J. Ahn et al., “Experiencing nature. Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 21, no. 6 (2016): 399-419, https://doi.org/10.1111/ jcc4.12173. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 104 AN-ICON  convincing data.32 Importantly, this adaptation also works in cases of illusion, when the brain is tricked into adopting external elements. This process can also be triggered in virtual reality applications. Starting from the now famous rubber hand illusion, studies have detailed different ways in which users can feel ownership of an artificial limb, such that they are deluded into thinking that this foreign object is part of their own body.33 Others have focussed on body transfer illusions, suggesting that even full-body stand-ins such as mannequins and digital avatars can be absorbed into a user’s body schema. VR is a particularly powerful tool for fostering this illusion since, as one notable paper suggests, “in VR, there are near-infinite opportunities for both extending and radically altering our virtual (and hence perceptually real) bodies.”34 The notion of “homuncular flexibility” further supports the idea that the mind can adapt to “exotic mor- phologies, distortions, extensions and reductions” of body 32 See M.R. Lesur et al., “The plasticity of the bodily self: head movements in bodily illusions and their relation to Gallagher’s body image and body schema,” Constructivist Foundations 14, no. 1 (2018): 94-105, https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-162795; S. Seinfeld et al., “User representations in human-computer interaction,” Human–Computer Interaction 36, no. 5-6 (2021): 400-438, https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2020.1724790; A. Maselli, M. Slater, “The building blocks of the full body ownership illusion,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2013): 1-15, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00083; M. Botvinick, J. Cohen, “Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see,” Nature 391, no. 6669 (1998): 756, https://doi.org/10.1038/35784; S. J. Ahn et al., “Experiencing nature. Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature;” N. Yee, J.N. Bailenson, “The difference between being and seeing: the relative contribution of self-perception and priming to behavioral changes via digital self-representation,” Media Psychology 12, no. 2 (2009): 195-209, https://doi.org/10.1080/15213260902849943; H. Farmer, A. Tajadura-Jiménez, M. Tsakiris, “Beyond the colour of my skin: how skin colour affects the sense of body-ownership,” Consciousness and Cognition 21, no. 3 (2012): 1242-1256, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. concog.2012.04.011; H. Farmer, L. Maister, M. Tsakiris, “Change my body, change my mind: the effects of illusory ownership of an outgroup hand on implicit attitudes toward that outgroup,” Frontiers in Psychology 4, no. 13 (2014), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.01016; H. Farmer, L. Maister, “Putting ourselves in another’s skin: using the plasticity of self- perception to enhance empathy and decrease prejudice,” Social Justice Research 30, no. 4 (2017): 323-354, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-017-0294-1. 33 M. Botvinick, J. Cohen, “Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see:” 756. 34 W. Steptoe, A. Steed, M. Slater, “Human tails: ownership and control of extended humanoid avatars,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 19, no. 4 (2013): 583-590, https://doi.org/10.1109/tvcg.2013.32. Notably, the authors also suggest that: “Our instinctive ability to rapidly and dexterously incorporate such objects and learn how to use such tools provides a clue to the remarkable plasticity of how the human brain represents the body and encodes space.” PHILIPPE BÉDARD 105 AN-ICON  configurations.35 It is interesting to note that already be- tween 1989 and 1991, ad hoc experiments were being conducted by VR pioneer Jaron Lanier and his team at VPL on an individual’s ability to take ownership of “weird ava- tars that were still usable.”36 Avatars with unusual point of view placements (e.g., eyes at hip level), extremely long ex- tremities, and even non-human avatars were experimented with.37 In the latter case, Lanier reminisces about a lobster avatar which was designed by Ann Lasko-Harvill, then Director of Product Design at VPL Research.38 Some of these informal experiments have since been proven by more robust studies. Notably, Andrea Stevenson Won and Jeremy Bailenson teamed up with and Jaron Lanier to test the ability of users to incorporate supernumerary limbs by mapping their controls to “the rotation of a wrist, the flex of an ankle, or some combination of the two.”39 This came as a response to the limitation of the human body in re- gard to the fact that, “[a]s the lobster body includes more limbs than a person, there were not enough parameters measured by the body suit to drive the lobster avatar in a one-to-one map.”40 An important limitation to the illusion of body ownership or transfer which studies on the topic often 35 Ibid. See also A.S. Won et al., “Homuncular flexibility in virtual reality,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 20, no. 3 (2015): 241-259, https://doi.org/10.1111/ jcc4.12107; A.S. Won, J. Bailenson, J. Lanier, “Homuncular flexibility: the human ability to inhabit nonhuman avatars,” Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource (2015): 1-16. 36 Ibid.: 2. 37 K. Kilteni et al., “Extending body space in immersive virtual reality: a very long arm illusion,” PloS one 7, no. 7 (2012): 1-15, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0040867; S.J. Ahn et al., “Experiencing nature. Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature;” T. Feuchtner, J. Müller, “Extending the body for interaction with reality,” Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2017), https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025689. 38 J. Lanier, “Homuncular flexibility,” in 2006: What is your Dangerous Idea? Edge: The World Question Center (2006), https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11182, accessed January 10, 2023. 39 A.S. Won et al., “Homuncular flexibility in virtual reality:” 242. Interestingly, the authors gesture towards our earlier discussion of “what it is like to be [ ]” when, in the very first line of their article, they ask: “What if you could become a bat.” Ibid.: 241. 40 A.S. Won, J. Bailenson, J. Lanier, “Homuncular flexibility: the human ability to inhabit nonhuman avatars:” 2-3. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 106 AN-ICON  highlight is the required “realism” of the external object. That is, “the need for an object to preserve precise, informa- tive corporeal structural features in order to be integrable as one’s own body part.”41 In other words, anthropomorphism is often presented as an important–if not essential–factor in the illusion of body ownership. Does this mean the move beyond human perspectives for which I am advocating in this essay is a nonstarter? Redemption for this idea might yet be found in more recent approaches to the illusion of body own- ership which point to a crucial element that is otherwise overlooked in the earlier quoted studies. Namely, in their meta-analysis of “user representations,” Sofía Seinfeld and colleagues have shown that while “[u]nrealistic visual ap- pearance, such as the visual discontinuity of the artificial body, also reduces the feeling of body ownership,” it is also true that “[b]ody ownership illusions are effectively in- duced through congruent multisensory stimulation.”42 Earli- er studies focussed on illusions generated by visual stimuli supplemented with synchronous tactile feedback (e.g., the rubber hand is stroked at the same time as the physical hand). Meanwhile, active engagement with the illusory body augmentation has been shown to play an important role in the success of this illusion. For instance, Marte Roel Lesur et al. suggest that while “the literature shows that not just any fake body or object can elicit illusory owner- ship,” at the same time, “in the presence of sensorimotor coherence, there are some examples of illusory ownership over implausible virtual bodies.”43 The redeeming quality of contemporary VR technologies in this regard is precisely their ability to afford their users agency, interactivity, and 41 A. Maselli, M. Slater, “The building blocks of the full body ownership illusion:” 12. 42 S. Seinfeld et al., “User representations in human-computer interaction:” 416-417. Emphasis added. 43 M.R. Lesur et al., “The plasticity of the bodily self: head movements in bodily illusions and their relation to Gallagher’s body image and body schema:” 101 PHILIPPE BÉDARD 107 AN-ICON  multisensory feedback which work in concert to create many of the contingencies that are known to facilitate such body ownership illusions. Fig. 3a Fig. 3b Fig. 3a and 3b. Non-human bodies in Plastisapiens (Miri Chekhanovich and Édith Jorisch, 2022). Credit: National Film Board of Canada (2022) True as it might be that most recent VR ex- periences remain tied to humanoid avatars, some have pushed the boundaries of what counts as realistic body, while others have experimented with bodies that are alto- gether non-human. One such notable example is the VR experience Plastisapiens (Miri Chekhanovich and Édith Jorisch, 2022), a piece of “surrealist ecofiction” which asks viewers to imagine a future where human evolution has been shaped by our exposure to microplastics in the air we PHILIPPE BÉDARD 108 AN-ICON  breathe, the water we drink, and the food we ingest; the An- thropocene has here been replaced by what we might call the Plasticene. Throughout its 15–minutes runtime, Plasti- sapiens asks its viewers to adopt a number of new bodies, from a prehistoric betentacled creature to the eponymous human-plastic hybrid, whose hands seem to be made of thin plastic (Fig. 3a and 3b). In both cases, “hands” are the only part of their body users can see, leaving the rest up to their imagination. Meanwhile, hand tracking is used to manip- ulate these new alien-looking appendages. The player’s agency is made evident in their ability to move their hands in predictable ways. Here, part of the success for the body ownership illusion is ensured by the synchronous move- ment of the hand in physical reality and the appearance of the corresponding movement of the alien limb, as seen in the HMD. In my own experience of Plastisapiens, I had no issue whatsoever knowing how to manipulate my tentacles to successfully reach the objects in my vicinity, adapting to their limits and affordances within a matter of seconds. Fur- thermore, the experience employs haptic feedback through the controllers to add a sense of multisensory correspon- dence between what the eye registers the tentacle having touched, and what the physical (i.e., human) hand feels having touched as well. Agency, interactivity, and multi- sensory feedback therefore join forces to foster a sense of sensorimotor coherence, thereby facilitating the illusion of body ownership despite the lack of realism of the bodies on offer.44 44 See also the oft-cited experience Birdly (Somniacs AG, 2015), another good example of agency and synchronous multisensory feedback contributing to successful illusory ownership of non-human animal bodies. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 109 AN-ICON  Conclusion Fascinated as I am by the possibilities opened up by the idea of inhabiting non-human bodies, I can- not help but see the limitations of this kind of temporary foray into the world of non-human animals. If VR as it exists today struggles to make us see things from the perspective of another human being, as so many have already demonstrated, can it truly show us what it is like to be an animal, or any other non-human creature for that matter? Further limitations come up when we begin to question VR’s efficacy as an illusion. In a recent essay on the myth of total illusion in virtual reality, Janet Murray insists that, more than any medium before: Interactive environments demand more explicit partnership than just the willing suspension of disbelief; they become real through the “active creation of belief” by inducing and satis- fying specific intentional gestures of engagement. As soon as we stop participating, because we are confused or bored or uncomfortably stimulated, the illusion vanishes.45 Indeed, Murray is careful to remind us of a fact that is rarely highlighted in studies on illusions in VR, namely that effects such as the body ownership illusion are difficult to achieve and more difficult still to maintain.46 On one hand, I want to join Murray in insist- ing on the important role played by individual users in fostering the kinds of illusions for which I am advocat- ing in this essay. In an earlier paper on empathy in VR, I came to a conclusion that applies just as well to the idea 45 J.H. Murray, “Virtual/reality: how to tell the difference,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 11-27 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1470412920906253. Emphasis added. See also J.H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1997) (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2017): 136-139. 46 “The rubber/virtual hand experiment is truly delusional, but it is important to note that it is a fragile and momentary delusion.” Ibid.: 17. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 110 AN-ICON  of imaginatively projecting oneself in the experience of non-human or non-living beings: “users must know how and want to use this tool.”47 The non-anthropocentric ef- fects which I describe in this essay are difficult to achieve for users who do not know how–or much less care–to use VR as a tool to explore spaces and bodies which exceed their natural capabilities. On the other hand, I also want to recognize that the very idea of optical illu- sion hinges upon the illusory nature of the phenomenon. This assumes the automatic and involuntary process by which we can succumb to illusions; optical or otherwise. When the necessary conditions are met, we cannot help but fall victim to illusions. Could VR’s affordances be used to such effect? I am also keen on suggesting a fruitful ave- nue might lie in effects that are not quite illusions, but rather something we might call “games of perception,” or even hallucinations.48 Further research could be done in this regard to echo Crary’s work on subjective vision as it was utilized in the creation on optical toys in the 18th and 19th centuries. To that effect, we should also consider the scholarship that has been produced on the revelatory potentials of optical technologies used in ways that defy anthropocentric concerns. I am thinking here of Stan Brakhage’s call for a radical exploration of cinema’s visual capabilities, as well as of William Wees’ study of experimental cinema’s ability to “exceed” the limitations of human vision.49 In both cases, nonnormative uses of a technology lead to drastic effects, as heretofore dom- inant modes of representation are swept aside in favour 47 This essay is forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. 48 For more on illusions and hallucinations in VR, see C. Paolucci, “Perception, hallucination, virtual reality. From controlled hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 112-128, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/15443; P. Montani, “The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the image as a ‘bilderschrift’,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 154-172, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/15441. 49 W.C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). PHILIPPE BÉDARD 111 AN-ICON  of more eccentric–or even excessive–ways of engaging with worldly phenomena. And while both examples re- late to cinema, there is no reason why VR should not be amenable to such experimental fancies. Where is VR’s Brakhage? Its surrealist or Dadaist movement? Its fear- less pioneers? PHILIPPE BÉDARD 112 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18458

Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality by Philippe Bédard art Virtual Reality Illusion Anthropocentrism Umwelt Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality art PHILIPPE BÉDARD, McGill University – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4100-5249 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18458 “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unpreju- diced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception”1 Abstract In the following essay, I consider if and how VR’s uncanny ability to create an illusion of presence and generate a sense of body ownership might be used to go beyond our anthropocentric perspective, towards non-hu- man experiences. By adventuring outside the domain of human experience, my goal is to address the affordances and limitations of VR’s illusionistic potential. Knowing full well that certain economic pressures preclude artists from pursuing the kinds of provocations I describe in this essay, I nevertheless invite readers to follow along as I explore alternative potentialities of contemporary VR. Specifically, I approach VR here in the hopes of finding ways of engaging with different bodies, spaces, and realities, even if illusorily. Keywords Virtual reality Illusion Anthropocentrism Umwelt To quote this essay: P. Bédard, “Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality art,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 89-112, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18458 1 S. Brakhage, “From Metaphors on Vision,” in P.A. Sitney, ed., The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1978): 120. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 89 AN-ICON  Introduction Many things have changed between the origi- nal heyday of virtual reality (VR) in the 1980–1990s and the current revival of the technology since the early 2010s. But while today VR might benefit from the leaps and bounds computers and graphic technologies have witnessed in the intervening decades, and while it might enjoy greater commercial success than ever before, I often feel our imag- ination around the kinds of experiences enabled by VR has suffered somewhat. We are far removed today from Mere- dith Bricken’s suggestion that in VR: “You can be the mad hatter or you can be the teapot; you can move back and forth to the rhythm of a song. You can be a tiny droplet in the rain or in the river.”2 Likewise, we seem to have strayed from Jaron Lanier’s proposition that in virtual reality, “you can visit the world of the dinosaur, then become a Tyran- nosaurus. Not only can you see DNA, you can experience what it’s like to be a molecule.”3 While Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin use these two quotes to highlight the illusion of “perceptual immediacy”4 of immersive virtual reality experiences, I see in these statements something else entirely more interesting: the idea that VR might give us experiences that far exceed the limits of human under- standing. In the following essay, I consider if and how VR’s uncanny ability to create an illusion of presence and generate a sense of body ownership might be used to go beyond our anthropocentric perspective, towards non-hu- man experiences. By adventuring outside the domain of human experience, my goal is to address the affordances 2 M. Bricken, “Virtual worlds: no interface to design,” in M. Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1991): 363-382, 372. 3 S. Ditlea, “False starts aside, virtual reality finds new roles,” New York Times (March 23, 1998): 97. 4 J. Bolter, R. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2000): 22. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 90 AN-ICON  and limitations of VR’s illusionistic potential. In so doing, I also aim to explore how VR might be thought of as more than a means to foster empathy for other human beings, whatever the purpose for that endeavour might be.5 This allows me to discuss immersive technologies and experi- ences in a context devoid of the problems typically asso- ciated with discourses around the concept of “empathy machine.” I begin this essay by addressing the illusion of presence in VR, specifically as it relates to our experience of body-space relations in physical reality. I start by address- ing what I argue to be the fundamental anthropocentrism of VR’s dominant mode of experience. This crucial detour has me discussing whether VR is capable of representing non-human modes of being in the world. Necessarily, this also means addressing earlier thought experiments in the field of psychology, biology, and philosophy that sought to question “what it is like to be” something other than human. Having done so, I then consider whether VR might have the ability to give us access to non-human realities, or whether it is limited by a fundamental anthropocentrism. Finally, I 5 On the issue of empathy in VR, see J.H. Murray, “Not a film and not an empathy machine,” Immerse (October 6, 2016): https://immerse.news/not-a-film-and-not-an-empathy-machine- 48b63b0eda93, accessed January 10, 2023; S. Gregory, “Immersive witnessing: from empathy and outrage to action,” WITNESS blog (2016), https://blog.witness.org/2016/08/ immersive-witnessing-from-empathy-and-outrage-to-action/, accessed January 10, 2023; G. Bollmer, “Empathy machines,” Media International Australia 165, no. 1 (2017): 63-76, https:// doi.org/10.1177/1329878X17726794; R. Yang, “If you walk in someone else’s shoes, then you’ve taken their shoes: empathy machines as appropriation machines,” Radiator Blog (April 5, 2017), https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2017/04/if-you-walk-in-someone-elses-shoes- then.html, accessed January 10, 2023; H. Farmer, “A broken empathy machine,” Immerse (September 30, 2019), https://immerse.news/a-broken-empathy-machine-can-virtual-reality- increase-pro-social-behaviour-and-reduce-prejudice-cbcefb30525b, accessed January 10, 2023; P. Roquet, “Empathy for the game master: how virtual reality creates empathy for those seen to be creating VR,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 65-80, https://doi. org/10.1177/1470412920906260; L. Nakamura, “Feeling good about feeling bad: virtuous virtual reality and the automation of racial empathy,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 47-64, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906259; G. Bollmer and K. Guinness, “Empathy and nausea: virtual reality and Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 28-46, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906261. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 91 AN-ICON  look at experiments relating to illusions of body ownership in VR, specifically as they relate to non-human bodies. As will become abundantly clear over the course of this essay, my goal is speculative—perhaps even provocative—rather than earnest. I write this text as an exercise in exploring what I perceive to be a bias towards anthropocentrism in VR, a medium which has so often been lauded for its ability to simulate otherwise impossible real- ities.6 Readers may also see this as a call to action to VR designers and consumers to open their minds to the pos- sibilities offered by contemporary immersive technologies beyond those practices that currently dominate the market. Knowing full well that certain economic pressures preclude artists from pursuing the kinds of provocations I describe in this essay, I nevertheless invite readers to follow along as I explore alternative potentialities of contemporary VR.7 Specifically, I approach VR here in the hopes of finding ways of engaging with different bodies, spaces, and real- ities, even if illusorily. Virtual reality environments: immediacy and presence It has become something of a truism to recog- nize that VR is able to foster a sense of presence, that is, the impression of “being there” in a virtual environment dis- tinct from the physical environment that one’s body is also occupying. Or, as Mathew Lombard et al. put it, presence 6 I maintain that VR is currently driven by profoundly anthropocentric forces, despite the “anti-anthropocentric drive which,” according to Andrea Pinotti, “currently characterises not only the VR world but contemporary visual culture, in various mediums, more generally.” A. Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?,” in Y. Hadjinicolaou, ed., Visual Engagements: Image Practices and Falconry (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020): 30-47, 44, https:// doi.org/10.1515/9783110618587-003. See also R. Grusin, The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 7 I also want to recognize that there are the effects of VR are not currently fully known and that much more work must be done to ensure current VR technologies are accessible and ethical. These pressing issues certainly deserve more attention before we can move towards more elaborate explorations of the outer limits of VR. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 92 AN-ICON  describes, “the perceptual illusion of non-mediation.”8 In this context, the perceived lack of mediation is predicated on VR’s ability to foster a convincing illusion of a space that reproduces the way we see the world in our daily lives: as a three-dimensional volume in which our bodies can move and act. And while on their own the affordances of head-mounted displays (HMD) could be used to create any number of effects and illusions, the dominant practice of contemporary immersive media has been to reproduce our habitual modes of (visual) perception: looking ahead from an upright position through a pair of eyes which we can move around (either in their orbits, by moving our head, or our body) to see the surrounding environment. In an earlier essay, I described VR as inherently subjective, following Jonathan Crary’s incisive discussion of “subjective vision.”9 By extension, I would also argue its default mode of experience–that for which it was designed and that which is dominant to this day–is also intrinsically anthropocentric. This is because “subjective,” in this con- text, refers to the idiosyncrasies of human vision.10 By the same token, I describe an apparatus which relies on these unique and fallible qualities of perception as subjective. In the case of VR, the HMD hinges upon the following sub- jective qualities of human vision: its binocularity, its “ego- centric” perspective, and the individual’s ability to move their point of view on the world through six degrees of freedom of movement along three dimensions. Here, ego- centrism describes an approach to body-space relations 8 M. Lombard, T. Ditton, “At the heart of it all: the concept of presence,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3, no. 2 (1997), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997. tb00072.x. 9 P. Bédard, “La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 28, no. 1 (2019): 66-92, 74, https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs.28.1.2019-0012; J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992). 10 See again J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 93 AN-ICON  which take the individual as a point of reference.11 In other words, the egocentric perspective considers the human body as a “pivot around which the three dimensions of spatial extension arrange themselves and from which they ultimately proceed.”12 This could just as easily be called anthropocentric. I continue to subscribe to the idea that VR’s apparatus and the default mode of experience it proposes are subjective, egocentric, and anthropocentric. That is because in most cases, the illusion of presence fostered by immersive virtual environments plays off this charac- teristic centrality of our body in our perception of space. Head-mounted displays become viewports into different and often completely fantastical realities, but these spaces are still explored from an egocentric perspective, with the body as invariable centre of gravity. If we assume the goal of most virtual reality experiences is to create a satisfying illusion of presence in a virtual environment–whatever the purpose for that may be–it makes perfect sense why this strategy has remained so dominant. However, this is not the only avenue. As an example, a slew of recent (flat) vid- eo games have embraced the affordances of their medi- um’s monocular perspective to create fascinating optical illusions and truly impossible body-space relations. The worlds explored in Antichamber (Demruth, 2013), Superlim- inal (Pillow Castle Games, 2019), Manifold Garden (William Chyr, 2019), Spaceflux (Colin Ardelean, 2020), Hyperbolica (CodeParade, 2022), and Parallelia (SincArt Studio, 2022) exceed our natural conception of space by presenting all manner of physically impossible environments: non-Euclid- ean, hyperbolic, fractal, etc. In so doing, they draw more inspiration from M.C. Escher’s depictions of space than 11 W.R. Sherman, A.B. Craig, Understanding Virtual Reality: Interface, Application, and Design (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman Publishers, 2003): 296. 12 E.S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): 208. Emphasis added. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 94 AN-ICON  from what we find in Leon Battista Alberti’s theorization of renaissance perspective. What if VR were to also stray from the beaten path and indulge in such perspectival fancies? In the contemporary immersive media land- scape, precious few experiments with non-anthropocen- tric spaces have surfaced–at least to my knowledge.13 In mid-2020, Diego Montoya shared Spacetime, which he described as a “special relativity VR simulation.” The ex- periment allows users to explore a room where the speed of light is much slower than usual: “You can experience space contraction, time dilation and light Doppler effects as you move”14 (Fig. 1a and 1b). Among various physical distortions the experience enables–all of which are impos- sible to encapsulate in written form–the designer explains that “[t]he world feels very ‘wobbly’ when moving very close to the speed of light, almost liquid.” While space remains Fig. 1a 13 I discuss the limits of any analysis of contemporary virtual reality in P. Bédard, “La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains.” 14 D. Montoya (@diego_montoya _), “I built a special #relativity VR simulation for @oculus Quest, where the speed of light c is much lower than usual. You can experience space contraction, time dilation and light Doppler effect as you move. 1/n,” Tweet, August 7, 2020, https://twitter.com/diego_montoya_/status/1291745102700765184, accessed January 10, 2023. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 95 AN-ICON  Fig. 1a and 1b. Diego Montoya, Fig. 1b Spacetime, 2020 three-dimensional in Spacetime, the user’s relations to that space far exceed the limits of our habitual modes of per- ception. With that said, I would hesitate to say that they exceed anthropocentrism, since the transformations that space undergoes throughout the experiment result from the user’s movements. Space is not transformed. Our per- ception of it is. As with the earlier quoted videogames, Mon- toya’s project is the exception rather than the norm. Indeed, I still believe that as long as VR remains tied to the three or six degrees of freedom model of spatial engagement which takes the body as its centre, there is little it can do to avoid this egocentric mode of experience. With that said, nothing is keeping VR designers from creating virtual environments which are abstract rather than representa- tional.15 In other words, perhaps the solution to exceeding anthropocentric perspectives in VR might be to reject the notion of “perspective” altogether. However, doing so might 15 An example I recently encountered would merit further attention in this regard. In Lockdown Dreamscape (Nicolas Gebbe, 2022), an innovative visual process was used to distort the image such that objects seemed to meld into one another. A slow movement through the distorted space led me to discover novel spatial relations. The experience was at once nauseating and thrilling. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 96 AN-ICON  require more nuanced explorations of the affordances of virtual bodies. It might also ask that we question “what it is like to be” non-human, and whether VR is at all capable to furnish an answer to that question. What it is like to be [ ] Whether it has been asked about animals, in- sects, or “things” in general, the question of “what it is like to be” this or that–whatever it may be–recognizes that our perspective as human animals is limited and distinct enough from other forms of being to preclude us from knowing or even understanding them.16 The reality behind this seem- ingly impassable chasm between ourselves and others is made clear through the concept of Umwelt, as theorized by Jakob von Uexküll. While it is true that all things (living or otherwise) occupy the same physical reality, Von Uexküll introduces the notion of Umwelt to suggest that all beings do not necessarily share the same environment or world.17 The sensorial attunement of different animals varies to such a degree that the very meaning of “world” differs from one creature to another. The word Umwelt can be translated as “self-cen- tred world.” This suggests the inherently subjective or egocentric nature of a given entity’s particular version of, and relation to, a world. This interpretation of Umwelt as “self-centred” or “subjectively-perceived” world is made even more evident when looking at the notion of subjectivity itself, understood here as that which is exclusive to a given 16 This has far-reaching implications within debates on the notion of empathy in virtual reality. 17 J. von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning (1934), trans. J.D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). The ties between von Uexküll’s Umwelt and VR have been highlighted by Andrea Pinotti in an illuminating chapter. See Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?” PHILIPPE BÉDARD 97 AN-ICON  individual (i.e., subject).18 Indeed, as Maike Sarah Reinerth and Jan-Noël Thon define it, “subjectivity” designates that to which an individual has privileged access. While this definition of subjectivity does satisfyingly describe the ex- clusive character of Umwelt, the parallel breaks down when we realize subjectivity is most often discussed in terms of the unique way in which a given subject “sees” things. The reason for this breakdown has far-reaching implications, specifically when it comes to the non-anthropocentric aims of this essay. Where the concept of Umwelt shines and where the questions of “what it is like to be” something other than human come into play is precisely when the human sen- sorium–of which sight is often taken to be the most privi- leged example–is no longer sufficient. Von Uexküll with his famous study of the tick, Thomas Nagel with his example of the bat, and Ian Bogost in his Alien Phenomenology all focus on the worldly experience of insects, animals and things that are commonly understood as blind–that is, when sight is understood from an anthropocentric perspective.19 What drives these thinkers, then, is precisely to understand how these creatures sense, navigate and exist in a version of the world that is completely different from that of hu- mans, even though we might inhabit the same spaces at any given time. How does the world of the bat differ from ours when its primary mode of experience is defined by its use of echolocation? How is the tick’s experience of the world influenced by its reliance on sensing the heat, fur, and butyric acid that signify the presence of its main prey, namely mammals? How different is the world for things 18 M.S. Reinerth, J.N. Thon, eds., Subjectivity Across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2017). For a more sustained discussion of subjectivity in VR, see P. Bédard, “La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains.” 19 T. Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?,” The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435-450, https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914; I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). PHILIPPE BÉDARD 98 AN-ICON  whose very mode of existence would even preclude us from describing them has “experiencing” the world? “When we ask what it means to be something,” Bogost summarizes, “we pose a question that exceeds our own grasp of the being of the world.”20 In brief, these ask that we set aside our privileged modes of experience for a moment and engage–even if imaginatively–with other realities parallel and equal to our own. My interest in ask- ing these questions in the context of an essay on virtual reality, then, comes from the fact that I see it as a tool for exploring and perhaps even exceeding the limits of anthro- pocentric perspectives.21 Indeed, while Reinerth and Thon remark upon the impossibility of accessing the subjectivity of others per se, the editors also suggest that media of all kinds (from literature, to movies, to games, etc.) can succeed in fostering a sense of intersubjectivity. This pro- cess could also be called empathy, namely “the ability to share and understand the experiences of others,” or, as Kate Nash defines it, “an affective response grounded in an imaginative engagement with the experience of the other.”22 Whether we call it intersubjectivity or empathy, the belief behind these concepts is that different media can make use of their unique affordances to suggest to users how a given character might subjectively perceive a given event or experience. Can VR overcome its fundamental anthropo- centrism and help users imaginatively project themselves in the experiences of others, precisely when these exceed their habitual range of possible experiences? 20 I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to be a Thing: 30. Original emphasis. 21 Pinotti might say that this desire to exceed anthropocentrism is itself anthropocentric, as it posits humans as having an exceptional capacity to access other modes of being in the world, which other creatures do not possess. See Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?”. 22 H. Farmer, “A broken empathy machine,” K. Nash, “Virtual reality witness: exploring the ethics of mediated presence,” Studies in Documentary Film 12, no. 2 (2018): 119-131, 124, https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2017.1340796. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 99 AN-ICON  Accessing non-human realities through technology An initial response to this last question might be that it cannot. Because VR HMDs are (predominantly) audiovisual devices and because they are tuned to the hu- man sensorium, they cannot, by definition, make us see and hear more than what our eyes and ears can perceive nor- mally.23 As Andrea Pinotti adroitly explains, such attempts to represent non-human realities through technology: [...] cannot patently hope to escape Nagel’s caveat. Since they are visually rendered on a screen, a compound-eye vision, a left-right- eye independent vision or an infrared vision will always be visions processed by a human eye-brain system. Human species-specific organisation operates as a physiological and phenomenological a priori that cannot simply be bypassed. This is, of course, true also for any sort of VR simulation of non-human ways of experiencing the world: they all ultimately have to be processed by such human a priori.24 This makes it seemingly impossible for HMDs to exceed our typical senses of sight and hearing, to say nothing of being able to use it to go beyond our ordinary perceptual habitus and perceive the world as a bat, tick, or other creature might. But does it mean VR cannot help us imagine what the world might look like to a different being? The fact is that we already use tools in our dai- ly lives that make visible to us phenomena to which our eyes and ears are not sensitive. The clock makes visible 23 To that effect, “[David] Eagleman has noted that the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to humans is less than a ten-trillionth of the electromagnetic field, and therefore much goes undetected in our lives apart from a ‘shockingly small fraction of the surrounding reality.” L. Jarvis, “Body-swapping: self-attribution and body transfer illusions (BTIs),” in Immersive Embodiment: Theatres of Mislocalized Sensation (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019): 99-154, 113. See also D. Eagleman, “The Umwelt,” in J. Brockman, ed., This Will Make You Smarter (London: Doubleday, 2012): 143-145. 24 A. Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?:” 46. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 100 AN-ICON  the passage of time, while other instruments transform a range of different extrasensory stimuli into visible data (e.g., spectrometer, barometer, Geiger counter, Magnetic Res- onance Imaging scanner, etc.). Through these tools, we can gain access to phenomena that are strictly speaking “invisible,” yet which become visible all the same thanks to the appropriate apparatus. Having been made visible, these phenomena are not necessarily legible to all. As Don Ihde explains, the relation with the world in which we enter when using such tools is hermeneutic, meaning it requires that we possess the knowledge and skills necessary to interpret the data presented to us through these instruments; one must know how to speak the machine’s language, and to read the world through it.25 Thinking of VR as a tool to engage hermeneu- tically with aspects of the world which we cannot natural- ly perceive is one possible avenue for thinking of it as a way to exceed the anthropocentric perspectives to which it has generally been relegated. We can see traces of this approach at play in several projects by the artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF), notably in In the Eyes of the Animal (2015), Treehugger: Wawona (2016), and We live in an Ocean of Air (2018). In each of these projects, the artists use “terrestrial laser scanners” to create what are commonly known as “point clouds.” The density and colour of these clouds can be changed to create more or less detailed pointillist representations of physical spaces. MLF uses these to translate ways of “seeing” or being in the world that are in excess of human understanding. The 25 “Hermeneutic relations,” Evan Selinger explains, “do not amplify or replicate the body’s sensory abilities; instead, they engage our linguistic and interpretative aptitudes. In this context, technologies that facilitate hermeneutic relations are best understood as being ‘text- like’; their effective utilization requires interpretation through the activity of reading.” E. Selinger, Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde (New York: SUNY Press, 2012): 5. An example that is closer to art and illusion might be anamorphosis. To see the anamorphosis hidden in an image, viewers must know how to position themselves in such a way as to reveal the image. See D.L. Collins, “Anamorphosis and the eccentric observer: inverted perspective and construction of the gaze,” Leonardo (1992): 73-82, https://www.jstor.org/stable/i270958. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 101 AN-ICON  effect lies halfway between scientific imagery and impres- sionism, as sparse arrays of point clouds leave much to the viewer’s imagination. In the Eyes of the Animal, for example, puts its viewers in the eyes of four different animals and insects (owl, frog, dragonfly, and mosquito), each with its Fig. 2a Fig. 2b Fig. 2a and 2b. Marshmallow Laser Feast, In the Eyes of the Animal, 2015 own way of perceiving a forest (Fig. 2a and 2b). Meanwhile, Treehugger and Ocean of Air each focus on trees and on the scope and time frame of their biological processes. Al- though all the creatures represented in these projects share the same environments (i.e., the forest), they each have PHILIPPE BÉDARD 102 AN-ICON  their own Umwelt, which MLF represents through different densities of point clouds and different colour filters. Some critics may point to the fact that what MLF does in their project may not be called hermeneutical, in that the tools they use do not translate the actual, literal perception of these insects and animals.26 It would also be fair to note that users would not be adequately equipped to interpret the world as perceived through these tools, even if their scientific accuracy was beyond reproach. This would be missing the point. It would be more appropriate to say that what MLF creates are artistic renditions of what the authors imagine the world might look like to different non-human animals. Their projects are best understood, then, as invitations to imaginatively explore what the Um- welt of a mosquito, dragonfly, frog, owl, or even a tree might be made of. Recall that for Reinerth and Thon, different me- dia can effectively seek to simulate certain aspects of a sub- jective experience as perceived by a particular individual by appealing to different aesthetic or narrative strategies, as well as the imagination of the user (viewer, reader, player, etc.).27 What we have yet to explore, however, is whether VR is capable of simulating experiences that exceed the boundaries of the human body. And since, as Maurice Mer- leau-Ponty writes, “I am conscious of the world through the medium of my body,”28 how the body appears and functions in VR has far-reaching implications. So while what MLF (among other artists) creates might look different than how we see the world, the question still stands as to if and 26 MLF typically collaborates with scientists in relevant fields to help them translate the data recorded. With that said, Pinotti’s reminder that data represented onscreen for human consumption is not equivalent to the source stimuli still holds true, lessening any claim these artistic experiences might want to make as to their accuracy. See Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?” 27 M.S. Reinerth, J.N. Thon, “Introduction,” in M.S. Reinerth, J.N. Thon, eds., Subjectivity Across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives: 1-25, 3. Original emphasis. 28 M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2010): 94-95. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 103 AN-ICON  how might VR allow users to act differently than they can in their own human bodies. Embodying the non-human While the illusion of presence is often acknowl- edged in discussions of VR, the various kinds of embod- ied illusions the medium offers are just as relevant, readily achievable, and arguably even more fundamental.29 It is not surprising, then, that the body, its representations, and our perception thereof have received much attention from the fields of psychology and neuroscience, especially in recent years. For instance, in their work on the so-called “Proteus effect,” Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson have demonstrat- ed how “an individual’s behaviour conforms to their digital self-representation independent of how others perceive them.”30 While most scholarship that invokes this effect focuses on the behavioural aftereffects of inhabiting other kinds of human bodies (e.g., in terms of gender, age, race, ability, etc.), some have explored the effects derived from inhabiting non-human bodies.31 These lay the groundwork for the explorations to which this essay aspires, but it is possible to go further still. A great many studies have been conducted on the topic of the “body ownership illusion,” or the so-called “body transfer illusion.” These illustrate how our body sche- ma is amenable to change when presented with sufficiently 29 I use the term “medium” loosely here, as contemporary VR is more appropriately described as an apparatus which pre-existing media are attempting to adopt. For more on that debate, see my forthcoming “Many births of VR.” 30 N. Yee, J.N. Bailenson, “The Proteus effect: the effect of transformed self-representation on behavior,” Human Communication Research 33, no. 3 (2007): 271-290, https://doi. org/10.1177/0093650208330254. 31 See S.J. Ahn et al., “Experiencing nature. Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 21, no. 6 (2016): 399-419, https://doi.org/10.1111/ jcc4.12173. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 104 AN-ICON  convincing data.32 Importantly, this adaptation also works in cases of illusion, when the brain is tricked into adopting external elements. This process can also be triggered in virtual reality applications. Starting from the now famous rubber hand illusion, studies have detailed different ways in which users can feel ownership of an artificial limb, such that they are deluded into thinking that this foreign object is part of their own body.33 Others have focussed on body transfer illusions, suggesting that even full-body stand-ins such as mannequins and digital avatars can be absorbed into a user’s body schema. VR is a particularly powerful tool for fostering this illusion since, as one notable paper suggests, “in VR, there are near-infinite opportunities for both extending and radically altering our virtual (and hence perceptually real) bodies.”34 The notion of “homuncular flexibility” further supports the idea that the mind can adapt to “exotic mor- phologies, distortions, extensions and reductions” of body 32 See M.R. Lesur et al., “The plasticity of the bodily self: head movements in bodily illusions and their relation to Gallagher’s body image and body schema,” Constructivist Foundations 14, no. 1 (2018): 94-105, https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-162795; S. Seinfeld et al., “User representations in human-computer interaction,” Human–Computer Interaction 36, no. 5-6 (2021): 400-438, https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2020.1724790; A. Maselli, M. Slater, “The building blocks of the full body ownership illusion,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2013): 1-15, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00083; M. Botvinick, J. Cohen, “Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see,” Nature 391, no. 6669 (1998): 756, https://doi.org/10.1038/35784; S. J. Ahn et al., “Experiencing nature. Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature;” N. Yee, J.N. Bailenson, “The difference between being and seeing: the relative contribution of self-perception and priming to behavioral changes via digital self-representation,” Media Psychology 12, no. 2 (2009): 195-209, https://doi.org/10.1080/15213260902849943; H. Farmer, A. Tajadura-Jiménez, M. Tsakiris, “Beyond the colour of my skin: how skin colour affects the sense of body-ownership,” Consciousness and Cognition 21, no. 3 (2012): 1242-1256, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. concog.2012.04.011; H. Farmer, L. Maister, M. Tsakiris, “Change my body, change my mind: the effects of illusory ownership of an outgroup hand on implicit attitudes toward that outgroup,” Frontiers in Psychology 4, no. 13 (2014), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.01016; H. Farmer, L. Maister, “Putting ourselves in another’s skin: using the plasticity of self- perception to enhance empathy and decrease prejudice,” Social Justice Research 30, no. 4 (2017): 323-354, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-017-0294-1. 33 M. Botvinick, J. Cohen, “Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see:” 756. 34 W. Steptoe, A. Steed, M. Slater, “Human tails: ownership and control of extended humanoid avatars,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 19, no. 4 (2013): 583-590, https://doi.org/10.1109/tvcg.2013.32. Notably, the authors also suggest that: “Our instinctive ability to rapidly and dexterously incorporate such objects and learn how to use such tools provides a clue to the remarkable plasticity of how the human brain represents the body and encodes space.” PHILIPPE BÉDARD 105 AN-ICON  configurations.35 It is interesting to note that already be- tween 1989 and 1991, ad hoc experiments were being conducted by VR pioneer Jaron Lanier and his team at VPL on an individual’s ability to take ownership of “weird ava- tars that were still usable.”36 Avatars with unusual point of view placements (e.g., eyes at hip level), extremely long ex- tremities, and even non-human avatars were experimented with.37 In the latter case, Lanier reminisces about a lobster avatar which was designed by Ann Lasko-Harvill, then Director of Product Design at VPL Research.38 Some of these informal experiments have since been proven by more robust studies. Notably, Andrea Stevenson Won and Jeremy Bailenson teamed up with and Jaron Lanier to test the ability of users to incorporate supernumerary limbs by mapping their controls to “the rotation of a wrist, the flex of an ankle, or some combination of the two.”39 This came as a response to the limitation of the human body in re- gard to the fact that, “[a]s the lobster body includes more limbs than a person, there were not enough parameters measured by the body suit to drive the lobster avatar in a one-to-one map.”40 An important limitation to the illusion of body ownership or transfer which studies on the topic often 35 Ibid. See also A.S. Won et al., “Homuncular flexibility in virtual reality,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 20, no. 3 (2015): 241-259, https://doi.org/10.1111/ jcc4.12107; A.S. Won, J. Bailenson, J. Lanier, “Homuncular flexibility: the human ability to inhabit nonhuman avatars,” Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource (2015): 1-16. 36 Ibid.: 2. 37 K. Kilteni et al., “Extending body space in immersive virtual reality: a very long arm illusion,” PloS one 7, no. 7 (2012): 1-15, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0040867; S.J. Ahn et al., “Experiencing nature. Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature;” T. Feuchtner, J. Müller, “Extending the body for interaction with reality,” Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2017), https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025689. 38 J. Lanier, “Homuncular flexibility,” in 2006: What is your Dangerous Idea? Edge: The World Question Center (2006), https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11182, accessed January 10, 2023. 39 A.S. Won et al., “Homuncular flexibility in virtual reality:” 242. Interestingly, the authors gesture towards our earlier discussion of “what it is like to be [ ]” when, in the very first line of their article, they ask: “What if you could become a bat.” Ibid.: 241. 40 A.S. Won, J. Bailenson, J. Lanier, “Homuncular flexibility: the human ability to inhabit nonhuman avatars:” 2-3. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 106 AN-ICON  highlight is the required “realism” of the external object. That is, “the need for an object to preserve precise, informa- tive corporeal structural features in order to be integrable as one’s own body part.”41 In other words, anthropomorphism is often presented as an important–if not essential–factor in the illusion of body ownership. Does this mean the move beyond human perspectives for which I am advocating in this essay is a nonstarter? Redemption for this idea might yet be found in more recent approaches to the illusion of body own- ership which point to a crucial element that is otherwise overlooked in the earlier quoted studies. Namely, in their meta-analysis of “user representations,” Sofía Seinfeld and colleagues have shown that while “[u]nrealistic visual ap- pearance, such as the visual discontinuity of the artificial body, also reduces the feeling of body ownership,” it is also true that “[b]ody ownership illusions are effectively in- duced through congruent multisensory stimulation.”42 Earli- er studies focussed on illusions generated by visual stimuli supplemented with synchronous tactile feedback (e.g., the rubber hand is stroked at the same time as the physical hand). Meanwhile, active engagement with the illusory body augmentation has been shown to play an important role in the success of this illusion. For instance, Marte Roel Lesur et al. suggest that while “the literature shows that not just any fake body or object can elicit illusory owner- ship,” at the same time, “in the presence of sensorimotor coherence, there are some examples of illusory ownership over implausible virtual bodies.”43 The redeeming quality of contemporary VR technologies in this regard is precisely their ability to afford their users agency, interactivity, and 41 A. Maselli, M. Slater, “The building blocks of the full body ownership illusion:” 12. 42 S. Seinfeld et al., “User representations in human-computer interaction:” 416-417. Emphasis added. 43 M.R. Lesur et al., “The plasticity of the bodily self: head movements in bodily illusions and their relation to Gallagher’s body image and body schema:” 101 PHILIPPE BÉDARD 107 AN-ICON  multisensory feedback which work in concert to create many of the contingencies that are known to facilitate such body ownership illusions. Fig. 3a Fig. 3b Fig. 3a and 3b. Non-human bodies in Plastisapiens (Miri Chekhanovich and Édith Jorisch, 2022). Credit: National Film Board of Canada (2022) True as it might be that most recent VR ex- periences remain tied to humanoid avatars, some have pushed the boundaries of what counts as realistic body, while others have experimented with bodies that are alto- gether non-human. One such notable example is the VR experience Plastisapiens (Miri Chekhanovich and Édith Jorisch, 2022), a piece of “surrealist ecofiction” which asks viewers to imagine a future where human evolution has been shaped by our exposure to microplastics in the air we PHILIPPE BÉDARD 108 AN-ICON  breathe, the water we drink, and the food we ingest; the An- thropocene has here been replaced by what we might call the Plasticene. Throughout its 15–minutes runtime, Plasti- sapiens asks its viewers to adopt a number of new bodies, from a prehistoric betentacled creature to the eponymous human-plastic hybrid, whose hands seem to be made of thin plastic (Fig. 3a and 3b). In both cases, “hands” are the only part of their body users can see, leaving the rest up to their imagination. Meanwhile, hand tracking is used to manip- ulate these new alien-looking appendages. The player’s agency is made evident in their ability to move their hands in predictable ways. Here, part of the success for the body ownership illusion is ensured by the synchronous move- ment of the hand in physical reality and the appearance of the corresponding movement of the alien limb, as seen in the HMD. In my own experience of Plastisapiens, I had no issue whatsoever knowing how to manipulate my tentacles to successfully reach the objects in my vicinity, adapting to their limits and affordances within a matter of seconds. Fur- thermore, the experience employs haptic feedback through the controllers to add a sense of multisensory correspon- dence between what the eye registers the tentacle having touched, and what the physical (i.e., human) hand feels having touched as well. Agency, interactivity, and multi- sensory feedback therefore join forces to foster a sense of sensorimotor coherence, thereby facilitating the illusion of body ownership despite the lack of realism of the bodies on offer.44 44 See also the oft-cited experience Birdly (Somniacs AG, 2015), another good example of agency and synchronous multisensory feedback contributing to successful illusory ownership of non-human animal bodies. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 109 AN-ICON  Conclusion Fascinated as I am by the possibilities opened up by the idea of inhabiting non-human bodies, I can- not help but see the limitations of this kind of temporary foray into the world of non-human animals. If VR as it exists today struggles to make us see things from the perspective of another human being, as so many have already demonstrated, can it truly show us what it is like to be an animal, or any other non-human creature for that matter? Further limitations come up when we begin to question VR’s efficacy as an illusion. In a recent essay on the myth of total illusion in virtual reality, Janet Murray insists that, more than any medium before: Interactive environments demand more explicit partnership than just the willing suspension of disbelief; they become real through the “active creation of belief” by inducing and satis- fying specific intentional gestures of engagement. As soon as we stop participating, because we are confused or bored or uncomfortably stimulated, the illusion vanishes.45 Indeed, Murray is careful to remind us of a fact that is rarely highlighted in studies on illusions in VR, namely that effects such as the body ownership illusion are difficult to achieve and more difficult still to maintain.46 On one hand, I want to join Murray in insist- ing on the important role played by individual users in fostering the kinds of illusions for which I am advocat- ing in this essay. In an earlier paper on empathy in VR, I came to a conclusion that applies just as well to the idea 45 J.H. Murray, “Virtual/reality: how to tell the difference,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 11-27 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1470412920906253. Emphasis added. See also J.H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1997) (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2017): 136-139. 46 “The rubber/virtual hand experiment is truly delusional, but it is important to note that it is a fragile and momentary delusion.” Ibid.: 17. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 110 AN-ICON  of imaginatively projecting oneself in the experience of non-human or non-living beings: “users must know how and want to use this tool.”47 The non-anthropocentric ef- fects which I describe in this essay are difficult to achieve for users who do not know how–or much less care–to use VR as a tool to explore spaces and bodies which exceed their natural capabilities. On the other hand, I also want to recognize that the very idea of optical illu- sion hinges upon the illusory nature of the phenomenon. This assumes the automatic and involuntary process by which we can succumb to illusions; optical or otherwise. When the necessary conditions are met, we cannot help but fall victim to illusions. Could VR’s affordances be used to such effect? I am also keen on suggesting a fruitful ave- nue might lie in effects that are not quite illusions, but rather something we might call “games of perception,” or even hallucinations.48 Further research could be done in this regard to echo Crary’s work on subjective vision as it was utilized in the creation on optical toys in the 18th and 19th centuries. To that effect, we should also consider the scholarship that has been produced on the revelatory potentials of optical technologies used in ways that defy anthropocentric concerns. I am thinking here of Stan Brakhage’s call for a radical exploration of cinema’s visual capabilities, as well as of William Wees’ study of experimental cinema’s ability to “exceed” the limitations of human vision.49 In both cases, nonnormative uses of a technology lead to drastic effects, as heretofore dom- inant modes of representation are swept aside in favour 47 This essay is forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. 48 For more on illusions and hallucinations in VR, see C. Paolucci, “Perception, hallucination, virtual reality. From controlled hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 112-128, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/15443; P. Montani, “The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the image as a ‘bilderschrift’,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 154-172, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/15441. 49 W.C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). PHILIPPE BÉDARD 111 AN-ICON  of more eccentric–or even excessive–ways of engaging with worldly phenomena. And while both examples re- late to cinema, there is no reason why VR should not be amenable to such experimental fancies. Where is VR’s Brakhage? Its surrealist or Dadaist movement? Its fear- less pioneers? PHILIPPE BÉDARD 112 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19595

Hallucinatory syndromes / Immersion in the image. Classical theories and perspectives by Marcin Sobieszczanski Hallucinatory syndromes Immersion in the image Classical theories and perspectives Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Hallucinatory syndromes / Immersion in the image. Classical theories and perspectives MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI, Université Côte d’Azur – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8024-8780 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19595 Abstract From the outset, the inventors of 3D, VR/AR and analogue and digital immersion thought of these devices as functional models of our perceptive capacities, serving to expand our sensory knowledge and to support our commu- nications based on multisensory storytelling. How is it that a solid critical tradition then assimilates them to hallucinatory phenomena? The answer lies in marketing techniques that have always associated dreams and illusions with the desire to play with reality. But there is a deeper, epistemic reason. The sources of scientific thought of hallucinations are marked, in the 19th century, by the theory of “sensations without ob- jects.” Perception being distorted, the knowledge it provides is pointless. It is therefore possible to replace the vacant object with our desires to act out subjectively the real. This conviction initiated by Dr. Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol has survived to the present day. However, the history of the scientific approach of hallucinations shows another theoret- ical framework, particularly prolific but curiously forgotten: the theory of reality monitoring and arbitration of sources of information provided from Dr. Henri Ey. We propose to forge on these concepts a critical tool of the current mediadesign. Keywords Hallucinatory syndromes Immersion in the image Classical theories and perspectives To quote this essay: M. Sobieszczanski, “Hallucinatory syndromes / Immersion in the image. Classical theories and perspectives,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 113-132, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19595 MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 113 AN-ICON  What if we were to compare immersion in artifi- cial sensoriality (or “virtual” - although this last word is more of a showcase than a solid concept) to all the phenomena of treachery, feints, and sensory artifices, phosphenes, il- lusions, dreams, effects of psychotropic substances, and more specifically to hallucinatory states? This is, obviously, a marketing slogan for vari- ous VR devices, but let’s not forget that in the similar con- text of the appearance of technical novelties in the cinema of the 1970s, Jean-Louis Baudry1 has been able to make a banality forged in extra-scientific circles the foundation of an important vein in the theory of filmic narration. It was also at this time that the controversy around the “oneiric” char- acter of cinema sometimes led to accusations of oneirism, the latter term clearly designating a mental disorder. If then today, we evoke the comparison VR / illusion, it is to take advantage of the heuristic potential of this metaphor. In- deed, the long history of scientific understanding of illusion phenomena and their methods of remediation can provide an interesting intellectual tool for clarifying the relationship between cultural practices in VR and reality. We will pro- ceed in parallel, on the perceptual level, by approaching the comparison between the episodes of disturbed perception and the sessions of immersion in the sensory peripherals of computers acting on the mode of interactivity and vi- sual and sound spatialization, as well as on the intelligible content plan, by approaching the comparison between the construction of illusory meaning by the subject presenting nosologies relating to perception, and the construction of narrative meaning during the use of VR products. This approach will first lead to the highlighting of contrasting results, similarities and dissimilarities be- tween the mechanisms of perception in different types of perceptual failure and of perception in immersive environ- ments. Secondly, faced with a certain lack of intelligibility in the relationship between VR practices and the real world, we will take advantage of a brief history of the theories of 1 J.-L. Baudry, “The device,” Communications 23 (1975): 56-72. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 114 AN-ICON  sensory dysfunctions and hallucinations which, after a ter- minological reframing in the light of standards in the current cognitive sciences, will allow us to propose, on the inspi- ration of the theory of monitoring of informational sources of Dr. Ey, a critical epistemology of Virtual and Extended Reality. Nature of sensory experiences in immersive devices: towards the digital modeling of vision and gesture In the register of symbolic behaviors, the visual production of Man started, according to the facts attested since 100,000 BP, probably by adornment and the addition of aesthetic elements to natural or artificial objects such as tools, to then pour in the production of artifacts aimed at reproducing, in a gesture of externalization, the retinal image and the process of its mental treating, the vision of the world. Thus, appeared pictorial artefacts, around 40,000 BP and sculptural and architectural productions (additions to natural shelters) around 32,000 BP. The first representations (the bestiary) already implicitly composed with the notion of dimension, first by spreading out over the surfaces (2D + the roughness of the natural surface) and then by regaining the rudiments of perspective, which is a way of raising awareness of the constraints of the process of visual perception: the light imprint of reality in three di- mensions, its projection on the retina (in 2D + the concave nature of the back of the eye) and the cerebral processing of the image retinal reconstruction, thanks to the various 3D indices, the reality of the spatial relationships present in the ecological niche.2,3 The ergonomics of vision dispenses with the 3D image since the human brain is capable of restoring depth from the flat image. But it should be noted that if it is just 2 T. Deacon, Symbolic Species (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997); J.-L. Baudry, “The device:” 56-72. 3 D. Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002). MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 115 AN-ICON  suggested in the 2D image by the elements of perspective reproducing the indices of depth, spatiality is present in the imagery from the art of caves and rocky surfaces, also by the bias of the accumulation of the sources of visual information, an accumulation which, once again by cere- bral processing, reproduces the immersion of the cognitive subject in the environment parameterized in three dimen- sions. Humans have never ceased to reproduce space in their visual symbolic productions, from rock walls, through the vaults of temples and dwellings, to immersive “analog” installations such as “circular perspectives” or the “vedute.” Digital immersive devices, which appeared in the mid-1960s, took over the game of 3D/2D/3D transition, first optical and then mental. But unlike previous devices, the pioneer of digital graphics and VR, Ivan Sutherland, drawing inspiration from Gestalt Theory, by descent from Köhler, passing through Green, Wallach, O’Connell and Gibson, adds an important element, by placing ourselves from the start on the level of bio-inspiration that we also call cognitive realism.4 The fundamental idea behind the three-dimensional display is to present the user with a perspective image which changes as he moves. The retinal image of the real objects which we see is, after all, only two-dimensional. Thus, if we can place suitable two-dimensional images on the observer’s retinas, we can create the illusion that he is seeing a three-dimensional object. Although stereo presentation is important to the three-dimensional illusion, it is less important than the change that takes place in the image when the observer moves his head. The image presented by the three-dimensional display must change in exactly the way that the image of a real object would change for similar motions of the us- er’s head. Psychologists have long known that moving perspective images appear strikingly three-dimensional even without stereo 4 B.F. Green, “Figure coherence in the kinetic depth effect,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 62, no. 3 (1961): 272-282, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045622; H. Wallach, D.N. O’Connell, “The kinetic depth effect,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 45, no. 4 (1953): 205; J.J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1950), https://doi.org/10.1037/h0056880. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 116 AN-ICON presentation; the three-dimensional display described in this paper depends heavily on this “kinetic depth effect.”5 The physiological approach adopted by the inventors of immersive environments places us not only in the 3D image, in the saturation of the visual field by the circular and spatial character of this image or by the accu- mulation of images imitating the surrounding space, but it also allows us to add to our relationship to the image, the motor and gestural dimension, through which we regain one more stage in the process of symbolic representation of reality: its “kinesthetic” and “manipulative” dimension, the possibility of acting on the image inspired by the actions that the Human exercises on his environment. In an experience of immersive cave or a semi-im- mersive installation, we are subject to the perceptual action of a 3D image produced by the display device: the projec- tion run by a computer equipped with graphic synthesis capabilities of a synthetic image itself produced by graphics software or resulting from the capture of reality as it is the case with a digital image captured by photography, vide- ography, or scanning then synthesized as a 3D model of this captured reality. The visual effects of the embossed image, which is not a real 3D model that can be positioned at will within the geometrically simulated 3D space and be used, but rather a handling of the image reduced to its positioning relative to the surface of objects and not with the conservation of truthful reports of depth. This narrow depth technique is broadly used in 3D cinema which, for obvious economic reasons, using the twin-lens cameras with surface relief vision more often than real “full” 3D mod- els constructed geometrically or raised by algorithms. In several installations, the 3D image is also reinforced by the stimulations coming from other sensory generators. This image, alone or reinforced, fills a large part of our sensory field. It imposes itself as perceived reality so much so that 5 I.E. Sutherland, “A head-mounted three-dimensional display,” Proceeding AFIPS ‘68, (1968) https://doi.org/10.1145/1476589.1476686. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 117 AN-ICON  it constitutes a partial substitution of reality that coexists with the other fragments of reality felt through the active fields of the senses that are not, or not entirely affected by the 3D image or by generators of complementary sensa- tions. In this way, the perceptual field6 of the subject in the immersive experience is composed of a blend of sensations coming from the directly perceived external and internal reality, and sensations coming from a digital generator of 3D images often combined with other digital generators of sensations, auditory, olfactory, or even tactile. Review of illusion-producing phenomena The phosphene was commented on by the An- cient Greeks as a specific mode of appearance of images, by the pressure7 of the eyeball. The famous South African anthropologist David Lewis-Williams attributes to the phos- phene a preponderant role in the creation of non-figurative parietal icons of the Upper Paleolithic. Hermann von Helm- holtz was passionate about the study of this phenomenon and recorded several varieties of it. Produced by direct, mechanical, or electromagnetic stimulation of the sight’s organs, the phosphene constitutes an experience often founding the awareness of the functioning of the sensory pathways in juvenile subjects, experience of the duality and at the same time of the interdependence of the ocular and mental image. The illusions, studied since antiquity among the peoples of the Mediterranean region but also in Asia, especially in India, they are first linked to the problem of apparent and relative magnitudes in astronomical obser- vations of the celestial vault, and then to atmospheric phe- nomena, to the role of shadow and finally to all sorts of 6 Also called “receptive field” and defined as follows: “A specific region of sensory space in which an appropriate stimulus can drive an electrical response in a sensory neuron.” D.H. Hubel, T.N. Wiesel, Brain and Visual Perception: The Story of a 25-year Collaboration (Oxford- New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 7 O.J. Gruesser, M. Hagner, “On the history of deformation phosphenes and the idea of internal light generated in the eye for the purpose of vision,” Documenta Ophthalmologica 74 (1990): 57-85. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 118 AN-ICON  optical reverberations produced by different “screens,” va- pors, smooth surfaces, and liquid surfaces. Although the Platonic philosophical teaching of perceptual skepticism derives directly from this experience, the study of illusions nevertheless leads to the beginning of sensory realism.8 The Platonic analysis of the cave with “screen” effects (projec- tions, reflections, traces, etc.)9 is also one of the first trea- tises on perception in which the foundation of all prescien- tific and scientific theories of knowledge (gnoseology), the dichotomy “perception versus cognition” clearly appears. From an epistemic perspective, it should be remembered that perception is considered in Antiquity as an interaction between the sensory organs, the medium (undulatory, ca- loric, material, etc.) of contact with the thing, and the thing itself, the object of perception, while the term cognition is reserved for the mental interpretation of the signal that the sensory organs transmit to the understanding. Both Plato, Aristotle, and philosophers of late Antiquity like Plotinus attached great importance to the versatile nature of the contact medium which under different conditions and un- der different surrounding constraints can give the distorted image of the thing. The role of the mind, the understanding or the intellection is above all to exercise control over the sensory sphere. Current cognitive sciences have a rather unitary vision of the nervous system and consider the sen- sory organs as extensions of the brain... Oneiric activities provide Ancient Humanity with an enormous reservoir of stories that are both mne- sic and premonitory. The imaginary, the abductive force of the creative projection on the “commonplace” world pro- duces a reasoning that confirms the subject in his role, if not central then certainly active, in the gnostic process. In short, the dream is an omnipresent source of the explana- tory hypotheses of reality, as Baudry says when relating the contributions of the dreamlike sphere discovered by Freud: 8 M. Sobieszczanski, “Two key factors in the history of communicating immersive environments: mix of reality vs. cognitive realism,” LINKs-series, no. 1-2 (2019), https://hal. archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02281583. 9 Plato, The Republic, Book VII. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 119 AN-ICON The transformations wrought by the sleep in the psychic appara- tus: removal of cathexis, lability of the different systems, return to narcissism, withdrawal of motor skills (impossibility of resorting to the reality test), contribute to producing the specific characteristics of the dream: its capacity for figuration, translation of thought into image, reality accorded to representations.10 Another experience, at the individual level, and - among all prehistoric peoples - strongly collective, is pro- vided using psychotropic substances. The inoculation of a chemical factor modifying both, perception, and con- sciousness, affects as well the centripetal sensory afferents, and their centrifugal control, most often thalamic but also caused by neocortical intellectual patterns. And if in cur- rent societies the practice of narcotics is mainly associated with personal deviance and destructuring addictions, in prehistory and antiquity, drugs served as a (bio)chemical substrate for divinatory trances. These states were both reserved for the use by a restricted class of hierophants, and essential for social regulation in general and for the management of individuals, particularly during initiation rites and rites of passage.11 Towards the clinical approach of hallucinatory phenomena Often times, individuals performing the same types of behaviors without the (bio)chemical support are viewed by the Ancients as representatives of the deity itself, and their verbal and iconic creations as direct expressions of religious truths that may serve as a vehicle for the intelli- gibility of reality. Western science began to take interest in the pathological dimension of these people and to associ- ate different clinics with them. Thus, the head doctor of the 10 J.L. Baudry, “The device:” 56-72. 11 J. Clottes, D. Lewis-Williams, Les Chamans de la Préhistoire. Trans et Magie dans les Grottes Ornées (Paris: Le Seuil, 1996); E. Guerra-Doce, “The origins of inebriation: archaeological evidence of the consumption of fermented beverages and drugs in prehistoric Eurasia,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory Theory 22 (2014): 751-782 https://doi. org/10.1007/s10816-014-9205-z. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 120 AN-ICON  Salpêtrière, Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, interpreted in 1838 the difference between illusions and hallucinations based on the nature of their references to reality, which led him to the definition of pathological hallucinations by preterition. “Perception without an object” is a normative view of the phenomenon which insists on its perceptual nature while denying the percept of this perception, and ultimately its object, in accordance with a “common sense.” Relayed without any critical readjustment by later research- ers, J. Baillarger, J.-P. Falret, E. Régis or P. Guiraud,12 this conception had to wait for the second half of the twentieth century to finally, in the research of Dr. Henri Ey, lead to the study of the nature of the hallucinatory process itself. The much-vaunted merit of Ey’s synthesis is first of all its distinction between hallucinosic eidolia and delirious hallucinations which are, alone, hallucinations properly speaking. “The eidolia do not come from a delusional func- tioning of the patient and are compatible with reason, in this they can be qualified as ‘psychonomy’. It is a ‘non-delusion- al hallucinatory modality’. The subject finds them ‘unreal’, incongruous in relation to his perceptual experience: he knows that he is hallucinating.”13 We will return to this definition in the context of certain immersive experiences with virtual spaces, such as vacuum or narrowing, producing effects of somatic re- actions even though the subject is aware of the “virtuality” of these spaces and their characteristics. On the other hand, the definition of delusional hallucinations provides us with another important theoret- ical dimension: Thus, for Ey “The hallucinatory phenomenon experienced by the subject must [...] have a double character: that of affecting his sensitivity or his sensoriality and that of being projected out of his subjectivity” ([2] p. 44-45). The patient must thus be able to attest 12 G. Gimenez, M. Guimont, J. Pedinielli, “Study of the evolution of the concept of hallucination in classical psychiatric literature,” L’evolution psychiatrique 68 (2003): 289-298. 13 Ibid. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 121 AN-ICON to a sensory experience (“I see, I hear, I feel”) by his reference to the attributes of sensoriality and support the objectivity and reality of this experience.14 This means, in essence, that a cerebral effect positioned in the sensory information processing areas, in certain clinical circumstances, can be correlated by intra- cerebral communication pathways with a cortical effect that mobilizes the oscillation between knowledge current (operational) and the thought of presumption, inclinations, convictions (doxic). In this situation, it is clear that there is a de- tachment of the sensory areas from the sensory organs, or rather a functional doubling of the cerebral support. On the one hand, there is evidence that patients suffering from hallucinations often achieve to conceive that the people accompanying them, the caregivers in this case, are not subject to the same phenomenon. On the other hand, the same patient simultaneously develops a hallucinatory syn- drome. The sensations “with object” do not disappear, on the contrary, the “generic” sensory excitations accompany the delirious subject throughout his “specific” experiences. In the article by G. Gimenez, M. Guimont, J.- L. Pedinielli, we read: “Minkowsky’s remarkable text on Le temps vivant, and in particular the chapter ‘Towards a psychopathology of space’, which shows very well the possible cohabitation, in the same subject, of a hallucina- tory neo-reality and a perceptual reality, often remaining actively separated by processes of splitting.”15 The “Perception without an object” was biased by its implicit use of the physiologically improbable, direct inversion of nervous influx16 in the optic or auditory nerves. In reality, the sick subject carries out two processes both highly demanding in terms of synaptic energy: that of the 14 Ibid. Here the article refers to H. Ey, Treatise on Hallucinations, vol. 2 (Paris: Masson and Co, 1973). 15 Ibid. The article refers to E. Minkowsky, The Lived Time. Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies (Neuchatel: Delachaux and Niesle, 1933). 16 The blocking of the inversion is ensured by the mechanism of the alternation of refractory periods and periods of excitability of the elementary nerve cell. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 122 AN-ICON  control of the real and that of the control of his own cere- bral activities of the sensory areas pathologically auton- omized to the point of competing with the gnosic results of perception. Under the light of current neuroscience re- sults supported by functional cerebral imaging, MRI and positron emission device, the etiology and consequently the nosography of delusional pathologies is shifting from the psychoanalytical vision where the sphere of symbolic topics takes pathologically precedence on the phenomenal sphere, towards a neuro-cognitivist vision compatible with the hypotheses of Dr. Ey, as Thomas Rabeyron states it: hallucinations should first be considered from the point of view of “reality monitoring,” a process that is part of a larger whole called “source monitoring.” According to Bentall (1990), hallucina- tions would thus be the consequence of a bad categorization: an internal perception, a representation, or a reminiscence, instead of being represented as coming from inside, would be categorized by the brain as coming from outside. There would therefore be confusion between internal source and external source, confusion being more specifically at the level of the thalamus, a real system for filtering information reaching the cerebral cortex.17 In fact, we are here in a process of intracerebral communication where, both in the presence of a meticu- lous monitoring of reality18 and independently of its gnosic results and its metacognitive achievements,19 the different neocortical areas exchange with each other. In this play, essentially triangular, the central position is ensured by (1) the thalamic zones which seem to distribute flows joining (2) the prefrontal cortex with (3) sensory, parietal or posterior, 17 T. Rabeyron, “Exceptional experiences: between neuroscience and psychoanalysis,” Research in Psychoanalysis, no. 8 (2009). The reference “Bentall (1990)” refers to R.P. Bentall, “The illusion of reality: at review and integration of psychological research on hallucinations,” Psychological Bulletin 107, no. 1 (1990): 82. 18 Let us remember the experiences cited by Merleau-Ponty where schizophrenics systematically thwarted attempts at scenographies recalling their imaginary world: M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945) (Paris: Gallimard, 2011). See also the connection between Merleau-Ponty and Dr. Ey, in: T. Grohmann, “Délire et hallucination en schizophrénie: une perspective phénoménologique,” Phainomenon 28 (2018): 103-125. 19 On this subject, see the “Higher-order thought theory” by David Rosenthal, in D. Rosenthal, Consciousness and Mind (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 123 AN-ICON  somatosensory, auditory and visual areas. The implication of the latter is proved indirectly by research combining the pathological phenomenon of synesthesia, the non-volun- tary association of sensations originating from different sen- sory modes, and hallucinatory sensations. This particular research has produced increasing evidences since Binet’s founding experiments.20 Reality monitoring With the dimension of “reality monitoring,” the theories of hallucinations begin to move away from their origins anchored in a naive realism where the third instance of a healthy observer arbitrated, in the light of “common” and “objective” representations, the pathological represen- tations of reality produced by the sick subject. In fact, they also abandon the solipsistic simplifications of a “a world to yourself” in which the patient would have been locked up. We are here within the framework of a duality where the two gnosic procedures hold comparable “realizing” forces from the point of view of their aesthesies. The nosological qualification of dysfunctions no longer consists in arbitrat- ing between the flow of consciousness of the sick subject and the flow of consciousness of the healthy subject, but in qualifying the way in which a subject oscillates between the two gnosic modes reputed to be constructive. It is therefore the attentional processes that make the nosology of delusional mental behaviors and not the hallucinations themselves, or again, in other words: we speak on hallucinations when the “fictio-creative” activities occur, by the alteration of the attentional processes, to sub- stitute themselves to the interoceptive and exteroceptive controls of reality. Attentional processes, whether defined accord- ing to peripheral filter theories or central manager theories, cannot be associated with an organic function or, even less, with a delimited convolution or a particular nerve bundle. 20 A. Binet, “The problem of colored hearing,” Revue des Deux Mondes 113 (1892): 586-614. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 124 AN-ICON  These are complex states of mobilization of cognitive re- sources assembling different parts of the nervous system, appearing to be identifiable with the different functional aspects of the circuits assigned to the different other pur- poses, as it is the case of the reticular system disposed on the path joining the lower bulbar region to the lateral and posterior hypothalamus. Following the inventory of con- vergent experimental facts, some theories on the rhythms of cerebral electro-biological activities, detectable at the cortical and subcortical level, propose here some interest- ing hypotheses, in particular on the role of theta waves.21 These processes are also associated with the presence of certain cognitive event-related potential (ERP) and in par- ticular the famous N400 discovered in 1978 by Kutas and Hillyard.22 The attentional processes have the capacity 23 to move, by means of calibration and thalamic reinforce- ments, not only in the direction of association or selection of external sources of sensory stimuli but also in the direc- tion of interchange and variation of the internal sources,24 among which we count usually different kinds of memo- ry,25 but also hallucinogenic stimuli.26 It is at this level that the problem of indissociation between the veracity and 21 M.C.M. Bastiaansen et al., “I see what you mean: theta power increases are involved in the retrieval of lexical semantic information,” Brain and Language 106 (2008): 15-28, https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2007.10.006. 22 M. Kutas, K.D. Federmeier, “Electrophysiology reveals semantic memory use in language comprehension,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, no. 12 (2000): 463-470, https://doi. org/10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01560-6. 23 M.I. Posner, “Orienting of attention,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 32 (1980): 3-25. 24 J.K. Roth et al., “Similar and dissociable mechanisms for attention to internal versus external information,” NeuroImage 48 (2009): 601-608. 25 E. Awh, E.K. Vogel, S.H. Oh, “Interactions between attention and working memory,” Neuroscience 139, no. 1 (2006): 201-208, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2005.08.023. 26 R.P. Bentall, “The illusion of reality: at review and integration of psychological research on hallucinations,” Psychological Bulletin 107, no. 1 (1990): 82, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033- 2909.107.1.82; M.K. Johnson, C.L. Raye, “Reality monitoring,” Psychological Review 88 (1981): 67-85, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-295X.88.1.67; M.K. Johnson, S. Hashtroudi, D.S. Lindsay, “Source monitoring,” Psychlogical Bulletin 114 (1993): 3-28, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.114.1.3; G. Brébion et al., “Reality monitoring failure in schizophrenia: The role of selective attention,” Schizophrenia Research 22, no. 2 (15 Nov. 1996): 173-180, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0920-9964(96)00054-0; A. Schnider, “Spontaneous confabulation, reality monitoring, and the limbic system - a review,” Brain Research Reviews 36, no. 2–3 (2001): 150-160, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0165-0173(01)00090-X; J.K. Roth et al., “Similar and dissociable mechanisms for attention to internal versus external information,” NeuroImage 48 (2009): 601-608. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 125 AN-ICON  the coherence of different topics, imaginary and sensory, must occur. From then on, the fictitious topics that we will begin to call fictional (see below), can exercise a “realizing” role they can effectively embed into the sensible real, by the means of intensity of esthesia (contribution from sen- sory areas), sequential plausibility, and causal relevance (contributions from frontal areas). From the moment when the “realization” efficiency is obtained, the altered attention moves indiscriminately from the external to the internal and withdraws from its task as a source checker. Thus, on the double psychic substrate, emerges an internal fiction without the subject being able to exercise any criticism towards it. In the patient, the source of suffering stems more from the awareness of this impotence of discernment than from the disconcerting contents of the hallucinations themselves. Even if the patient still has the possibility of diverting his attention, what his attention points to is, in both directions, internal and external, impetuously “real.” As Dr. Ey said, delusional work is characterized by “foreignness, incoercibility, assertiveness and aesthesis.” Foreignness, because the internal and external sources have the same rank of veracity and can therefore be interchangeable; in- coercibility because this process prevails over the mecha- nisms of anti-hallucinatory coercion; assertiveness because the sequences of topics obtained through hallucinations can serve as a basis for the subject’s discursive activities; and aesthesia because the subject is aware of the fact that thanks to the strident aesthesia of his hallucinations he can distinguish them from ordinary memory material, but cannot to mobilize enough to distinguish them from perceptual sensations. We are touching here on the doxic status of hallucinations and in this the comparison between sensory immersion with artificial origin and hallucinations becomes for us more than a superficial metaphor. In schizophrenia, the activations of sensory areas stimulated by prefrontal activities and categorized by thalamic operations bring out a threshold effect beyond which the complex neural sub- strate is ready to exercise a creative role and generates MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 126 AN-ICON  a fictional “effect.” This “effect” is both gnosic, active in the symbolic sphere, and assertoric in the domain of the subject’s discursive approach. To summarize, in patholog- ical states of this type, fiction begins to compete, through attentional maneuvers, with the real apprehended by the sensorial way.27 Hallucinogenic function vs. Cultural and artistic creations It is obvious that the comparison between immersion in artificial sensory devices and hallucinatory states overlaps with the very old theoretical concerns of specialists in literature and cinema, notably René Wellek and Austin Warren,28 and Jean-Louis Baudry,29 concerning the status of the “presented reality” in the verbal story and in the visual narration. On this topic, for methodological reasons, we propose to dissociate two blocks of questions: what comes from diếgêsis and what comes from mimesis, in order to better synthesize them later on.30 On the one hand, the comparison of immersion and hallucination appears as existential experiences. We call “existential” the situations and the experiences that are attached to them, when it is a question, for a human subject, of facing an immediate environment, offering to his perception the sensory substrate which allows him to carry out his habitual activities: standing, sitting, walking, etc., 27 The subject being aware of the imbalance between the respective parts of the internal fiction and of its “reality monitoring,” falls into the suffering stemming from the anxiety of failing in reality. In this, schizophrenia involves a double danger: that which stems from the often disconcerting nature of the “visions” and that of the depression provoked by the awareness of one’s own failures in the duty of reality. 28 R. Wellek, A. Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948). “As Wellek and Warren (La Théorie littéraire) point out, there is a use for these invented stories, which is to entertain and instruct, a use that should not be confused with forgetting boredom. Fiction triggers desire, pleasure, escape and knowledge, without the seriousness of a duty to accomplish, a lesson to learn. This plural pleasure is to live adventures that daily life refuses us, to which we access by proxy. The knowledge transmitted by fiction is of a different order from that provided by science, philosophy or history.” Yves Chemla about F. Tremblay, La Fiction en Question (Balzac-Le Griot editor, 1999) coll. Littératures à l’essai, Montréal, in Acta Fabula, Autumn 2000, vol. 1, no 2, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris. 29 J.L. Baudry, “The device:” 56-72. 30 E. Souriau, “The structure of the film universe and the vocabulary of filmology,” Revue internationale de filmologie 7-8 (1951). MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 127 AN-ICON  activities whose purpose lacks a delayed-causal goal, the “short-term” behavior. The notion of immediacy must also be addressed. Situations are immediate when the goals pursued by the subject affect his current vital needs, unlike the pursuit of medium and long-term goals. In this sense, we are forced to separate, for example, the expectation of resolution of a legal case that mobilizes our energy for several years, from the posture that we adopt in the last minutes before the last trial, although the lasting experience conditions, to a certain extent, the momentary behaviors, and vice versa; the punctual and immediate existential ex- perience merges, in a certain way, with the image and the memory that we have of the entire event.31 On the other hand, the immersion can be com- pared with the effects of fiction which are elaborated in the brain of the readers of literary stories and the spectators of cinematographic storytelling. Here, it is not a question of evaluating the effects of immersion by the yardstick of immediate perceptions, which can feed temporary postural reactions, move in the relative field of vision, explore its space immediately adjoining our body or behave according to the volumes found, suggested by the 3D image-models of the show unfolding before the eyes of the subject, but it is a question of listing the psychological and somatic effects of a “world” which is constructed in the process of mediated communication, through signs and their bodi- ly and technical supports, i.e. writing, icon, image-move- ment. It is a question, for example, of distinguishing two perceptual occurrences, in the complex reaction that we can have when seeing and manipulating, including by our movements, the model of the staircase of the Capitol of Washington drawn up for the CAVE at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CALIT2) in San Diego: the monumental effect of architecture and the symbolic effect produced by the political heritage of the 31 In The Trial of Franz Kafka, the literary effect of “reversal of experiences” consists precisely in this substitution of the momentary experiences of the waiting corridors in the legal institutions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for the synthetic experience of the long period between the indictment and the execution of the sentence. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 128 AN-ICON  United States. Although the distance separating the sign from its denotat is arranged as a continuum running from presence, through deferred presence and through the trace of presence, to the sign of presence, the consciousness and gnosic processes arising therefrom are categorized according to the jurisdiction of discrete boundaries. Verbal and visual narrations do not lead to the same results as immediate perceptions, coming from the real environment. Our hypothesis is that the productions of hu- man culture both generate and use the same human abili- ties to produce fiction, without this process resulting from any pathology. In other words, in the healthy creative sub- ject, fiction benefits from substantially the same psychic substrate as hallucinations in schizophrenics, but the at- tentional processes retain all their effectiveness in them. In delirious patients, there is an increase of the psychic substrate which manages and admits to the doxic sphere the different sources, internal and external, without mak- ing any discernment between them, or rather transgresses this discernment. In the healthy creative human, the same fictional process does not come from a doubling of the psy- chic apparatus but from an externalization of the psychic contents “projected” on an apparatus or a device which in the process of communication exercises a fictional function. In humans as “consumer” of culture and receivers of the creative message, there is no confusion between the two flows either, there is, on the other hand, from his point of view, a duplication of the substrate of cultural productions, a substrate that sometimes can be apprehended in what it offers as affordances to direct sensory and postural cog- nitive actions, and sometimes as a generator of fiction on the basis of quasi-affordances that can be seized by the sensory-motor brain areas correlated to the frontal areas via the weighting of the thalamic zone. This latter process can be initiated by the action of the mirror neuron system. The person subject to hallucinations oscillates between the two streams of consciousness, the creator mobilizes his attentional processes in order to work on the perceived reality in a manner similar to the ways fictional MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 129 AN-ICON  topics inhabit him. And since the parity of the flows of the “intus” and of the flows of the “extra” is in him maintained and oriented according to the precedence of the perceptual, his internal fiction is itself “perception oriented.” Perspectives of applied research in 360° imaging The tradition of research definitely established since the 2010s, especially at the continuation of the theo- retical work of David Bordwell,32 first in different academic centers, in Japan,33 in the United States,34 and then spread in vast circles of internationals researchers,35 offers ex- perimental research involving spectators, individual and collective,36 engaged in actions of narrative construction based on the video-film creations. In our book from 201537 we commented on the difference between the spatio-sym- bolic narrative construction in the frontal cinema with cen- tral and oriented projection and attempts of the spherical and interactive cinema. In this latter area the theory pre- dominant seems to be organized around the environmental concept of enaction.38 Note that this concept also applies 32 D. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London-New York: Routledge, 1987). 33 M. Kimura et al., “Human visual system automatically encodes sequential regularities of discrete events,” Journal of Cognitive Neurosciences 22, no. 6 (2010): 1124-1139, https://doi. org/10.1162/jocn.2009.21299. 34 J.E. Cutting, “Perceiving scenes in film and in the world,” in J.D. Anderson, B.F. Anderson, eds., Moving Image Theory: Ecological Considerations (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005): 9-27. 35 K.S. Heimann et al., “Cuts in action: a high-density EEG study investigating the neural correlates of different editing techniques in film,” Cognitive Science 41 (2017): 1555-1588, https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12439; K. Pajunen, Immersed in Illusion, an Ecological Approach to the Virtual (Jyväskylä: Bookwell, Acta Universitatis Lapponiensis, 2012); P. Francuz, E. Zabielska-Mendyk, “Does the brain differentiate between related and unrelated cuts when processing audiovisual messages? An ERP study,” Media Psychology 16, no. 4 (2013): 461- 475; P. Tikka et al., “Enactive cinema paves way for understanding complex real-time social interaction in neuroimaging experiments,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (2012), https://doi. org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00298. 36 K. Lankine et al., “Consistency and similarity of MEG- and fMRI-signal time courses during movie viewing,” NeuroImage 173 (2018): 361-369. 37 M. Sobieszczanski, Les Médias Immersifs Informatisés. Raisons Cognitives de la Ré- analogisation (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015): 300. 38 P. Tikka, V. Rasmus, K. Mauri, “Narrative logic of enactive cinema: obsession,” Digital Creativity 17, no. 4 (2006): 205-212, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14626260601074078. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 130 AN-ICON  to classical cinema, as has been underlined in Bordwell’s founding works... Can we believe that going through the com- parison between hallucinations and cognitive effects of the interactive and immersive cinema can provide us with a tool, both theoretical and empirical, even more powerful? If we imagine a multi-scale analysis proving the existence of a multi-layered and harmonized neural substrate, spe- cialized in performing arbitration tasks between different sources of information: external, internal, and those used for weighting memory of sensory-motor anticipations, we can hope that the monitoring of reality can become this powerful tool. There are three preliminary problems to pose as the epistemological background before proceeding to analysis of information sources in video-film products. Frontal cinema operates its management of attentional points within the framework of a language put into place through the process of acculturation for 120 years. This device, both technical, grammatical and se- mantic shapes the audience of the cinema by constituting a quasi-cognitive functionality which participates in the construction of the image of the world in the broad sense. There is here a kind of sloping of a cultural function in the field of generic cognition. Experiences in spectation and the construction of the image of the world, both: from truthful world and the world as illusion, must first take care to put out of the game the artefact of the appearance of classic cinema. Immersive or spherical cinema is part of an- other “grammar.” Its “editing,” the rules of his language, is a “natural editing,” called for by Pasolini,39 is operated by bodily movements, gaze movements and ocular saccades. The same “objective” real can be looked at in different 39 “When we talk about the semiology of cinematographic language, we must at the same time talk about the semiology of reality,” extract from an interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini by André S. Labarthe on 15/11/1966. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 131 AN-ICON  ways by the same person and by the different spectators, according to their own management of attentional points. And finally, immersive cinema manages its spa- tio-temporal referential external to the device of the same way that it manages the spatiality and the dynamics of the contents which are presented into the device. In other words, the grammar of cutting and exploring of the sen- sitive, natural and artefactual material, is the same as that which governs our spatio-temporal relationship to the world. The perspective of empirical research on the hallucinatory illusion can then lead to the establishment of a normative system allowing people subject to hallucinations to ex- change with their caregivers not by means of art-therapy, but by means of the shared control of sources of informa- tion on reality. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 132 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19595

Hallucinatory syndromes / Immersion in the image. Classical theories and perspectives by Marcin Sobieszczanski Hallucinatory syndromes Immersion in the image Classical theories and perspectives Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Hallucinatory syndromes / Immersion in the image. Classical theories and perspectives MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI, Université Côte d’Azur – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8024-8780 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19595 Abstract From the outset, the inventors of 3D, VR/AR and analogue and digital immersion thought of these devices as functional models of our perceptive capacities, serving to expand our sensory knowledge and to support our commu- nications based on multisensory storytelling. How is it that a solid critical tradition then assimilates them to hallucinatory phenomena? The answer lies in marketing techniques that have always associated dreams and illusions with the desire to play with reality. But there is a deeper, epistemic reason. The sources of scientific thought of hallucinations are marked, in the 19th century, by the theory of “sensations without ob- jects.” Perception being distorted, the knowledge it provides is pointless. It is therefore possible to replace the vacant object with our desires to act out subjectively the real. This conviction initiated by Dr. Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol has survived to the present day. However, the history of the scientific approach of hallucinations shows another theoret- ical framework, particularly prolific but curiously forgotten: the theory of reality monitoring and arbitration of sources of information provided from Dr. Henri Ey. We propose to forge on these concepts a critical tool of the current mediadesign. Keywords Hallucinatory syndromes Immersion in the image Classical theories and perspectives To quote this essay: M. Sobieszczanski, “Hallucinatory syndromes / Immersion in the image. Classical theories and perspectives,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 113-132, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19595 MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 113 AN-ICON  What if we were to compare immersion in artifi- cial sensoriality (or “virtual” - although this last word is more of a showcase than a solid concept) to all the phenomena of treachery, feints, and sensory artifices, phosphenes, il- lusions, dreams, effects of psychotropic substances, and more specifically to hallucinatory states? This is, obviously, a marketing slogan for vari- ous VR devices, but let’s not forget that in the similar con- text of the appearance of technical novelties in the cinema of the 1970s, Jean-Louis Baudry1 has been able to make a banality forged in extra-scientific circles the foundation of an important vein in the theory of filmic narration. It was also at this time that the controversy around the “oneiric” char- acter of cinema sometimes led to accusations of oneirism, the latter term clearly designating a mental disorder. If then today, we evoke the comparison VR / illusion, it is to take advantage of the heuristic potential of this metaphor. In- deed, the long history of scientific understanding of illusion phenomena and their methods of remediation can provide an interesting intellectual tool for clarifying the relationship between cultural practices in VR and reality. We will pro- ceed in parallel, on the perceptual level, by approaching the comparison between the episodes of disturbed perception and the sessions of immersion in the sensory peripherals of computers acting on the mode of interactivity and vi- sual and sound spatialization, as well as on the intelligible content plan, by approaching the comparison between the construction of illusory meaning by the subject presenting nosologies relating to perception, and the construction of narrative meaning during the use of VR products. This approach will first lead to the highlighting of contrasting results, similarities and dissimilarities be- tween the mechanisms of perception in different types of perceptual failure and of perception in immersive environ- ments. Secondly, faced with a certain lack of intelligibility in the relationship between VR practices and the real world, we will take advantage of a brief history of the theories of 1 J.-L. Baudry, “The device,” Communications 23 (1975): 56-72. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 114 AN-ICON  sensory dysfunctions and hallucinations which, after a ter- minological reframing in the light of standards in the current cognitive sciences, will allow us to propose, on the inspi- ration of the theory of monitoring of informational sources of Dr. Ey, a critical epistemology of Virtual and Extended Reality. Nature of sensory experiences in immersive devices: towards the digital modeling of vision and gesture In the register of symbolic behaviors, the visual production of Man started, according to the facts attested since 100,000 BP, probably by adornment and the addition of aesthetic elements to natural or artificial objects such as tools, to then pour in the production of artifacts aimed at reproducing, in a gesture of externalization, the retinal image and the process of its mental treating, the vision of the world. Thus, appeared pictorial artefacts, around 40,000 BP and sculptural and architectural productions (additions to natural shelters) around 32,000 BP. The first representations (the bestiary) already implicitly composed with the notion of dimension, first by spreading out over the surfaces (2D + the roughness of the natural surface) and then by regaining the rudiments of perspective, which is a way of raising awareness of the constraints of the process of visual perception: the light imprint of reality in three di- mensions, its projection on the retina (in 2D + the concave nature of the back of the eye) and the cerebral processing of the image retinal reconstruction, thanks to the various 3D indices, the reality of the spatial relationships present in the ecological niche.2,3 The ergonomics of vision dispenses with the 3D image since the human brain is capable of restoring depth from the flat image. But it should be noted that if it is just 2 T. Deacon, Symbolic Species (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997); J.-L. Baudry, “The device:” 56-72. 3 D. Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002). MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 115 AN-ICON  suggested in the 2D image by the elements of perspective reproducing the indices of depth, spatiality is present in the imagery from the art of caves and rocky surfaces, also by the bias of the accumulation of the sources of visual information, an accumulation which, once again by cere- bral processing, reproduces the immersion of the cognitive subject in the environment parameterized in three dimen- sions. Humans have never ceased to reproduce space in their visual symbolic productions, from rock walls, through the vaults of temples and dwellings, to immersive “analog” installations such as “circular perspectives” or the “vedute.” Digital immersive devices, which appeared in the mid-1960s, took over the game of 3D/2D/3D transition, first optical and then mental. But unlike previous devices, the pioneer of digital graphics and VR, Ivan Sutherland, drawing inspiration from Gestalt Theory, by descent from Köhler, passing through Green, Wallach, O’Connell and Gibson, adds an important element, by placing ourselves from the start on the level of bio-inspiration that we also call cognitive realism.4 The fundamental idea behind the three-dimensional display is to present the user with a perspective image which changes as he moves. The retinal image of the real objects which we see is, after all, only two-dimensional. Thus, if we can place suitable two-dimensional images on the observer’s retinas, we can create the illusion that he is seeing a three-dimensional object. Although stereo presentation is important to the three-dimensional illusion, it is less important than the change that takes place in the image when the observer moves his head. The image presented by the three-dimensional display must change in exactly the way that the image of a real object would change for similar motions of the us- er’s head. Psychologists have long known that moving perspective images appear strikingly three-dimensional even without stereo 4 B.F. Green, “Figure coherence in the kinetic depth effect,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 62, no. 3 (1961): 272-282, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045622; H. Wallach, D.N. O’Connell, “The kinetic depth effect,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 45, no. 4 (1953): 205; J.J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1950), https://doi.org/10.1037/h0056880. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 116 AN-ICON presentation; the three-dimensional display described in this paper depends heavily on this “kinetic depth effect.”5 The physiological approach adopted by the inventors of immersive environments places us not only in the 3D image, in the saturation of the visual field by the circular and spatial character of this image or by the accu- mulation of images imitating the surrounding space, but it also allows us to add to our relationship to the image, the motor and gestural dimension, through which we regain one more stage in the process of symbolic representation of reality: its “kinesthetic” and “manipulative” dimension, the possibility of acting on the image inspired by the actions that the Human exercises on his environment. In an experience of immersive cave or a semi-im- mersive installation, we are subject to the perceptual action of a 3D image produced by the display device: the projec- tion run by a computer equipped with graphic synthesis capabilities of a synthetic image itself produced by graphics software or resulting from the capture of reality as it is the case with a digital image captured by photography, vide- ography, or scanning then synthesized as a 3D model of this captured reality. The visual effects of the embossed image, which is not a real 3D model that can be positioned at will within the geometrically simulated 3D space and be used, but rather a handling of the image reduced to its positioning relative to the surface of objects and not with the conservation of truthful reports of depth. This narrow depth technique is broadly used in 3D cinema which, for obvious economic reasons, using the twin-lens cameras with surface relief vision more often than real “full” 3D mod- els constructed geometrically or raised by algorithms. In several installations, the 3D image is also reinforced by the stimulations coming from other sensory generators. This image, alone or reinforced, fills a large part of our sensory field. It imposes itself as perceived reality so much so that 5 I.E. Sutherland, “A head-mounted three-dimensional display,” Proceeding AFIPS ‘68, (1968) https://doi.org/10.1145/1476589.1476686. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 117 AN-ICON  it constitutes a partial substitution of reality that coexists with the other fragments of reality felt through the active fields of the senses that are not, or not entirely affected by the 3D image or by generators of complementary sensa- tions. In this way, the perceptual field6 of the subject in the immersive experience is composed of a blend of sensations coming from the directly perceived external and internal reality, and sensations coming from a digital generator of 3D images often combined with other digital generators of sensations, auditory, olfactory, or even tactile. Review of illusion-producing phenomena The phosphene was commented on by the An- cient Greeks as a specific mode of appearance of images, by the pressure7 of the eyeball. The famous South African anthropologist David Lewis-Williams attributes to the phos- phene a preponderant role in the creation of non-figurative parietal icons of the Upper Paleolithic. Hermann von Helm- holtz was passionate about the study of this phenomenon and recorded several varieties of it. Produced by direct, mechanical, or electromagnetic stimulation of the sight’s organs, the phosphene constitutes an experience often founding the awareness of the functioning of the sensory pathways in juvenile subjects, experience of the duality and at the same time of the interdependence of the ocular and mental image. The illusions, studied since antiquity among the peoples of the Mediterranean region but also in Asia, especially in India, they are first linked to the problem of apparent and relative magnitudes in astronomical obser- vations of the celestial vault, and then to atmospheric phe- nomena, to the role of shadow and finally to all sorts of 6 Also called “receptive field” and defined as follows: “A specific region of sensory space in which an appropriate stimulus can drive an electrical response in a sensory neuron.” D.H. Hubel, T.N. Wiesel, Brain and Visual Perception: The Story of a 25-year Collaboration (Oxford- New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 7 O.J. Gruesser, M. Hagner, “On the history of deformation phosphenes and the idea of internal light generated in the eye for the purpose of vision,” Documenta Ophthalmologica 74 (1990): 57-85. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 118 AN-ICON  optical reverberations produced by different “screens,” va- pors, smooth surfaces, and liquid surfaces. Although the Platonic philosophical teaching of perceptual skepticism derives directly from this experience, the study of illusions nevertheless leads to the beginning of sensory realism.8 The Platonic analysis of the cave with “screen” effects (projec- tions, reflections, traces, etc.)9 is also one of the first trea- tises on perception in which the foundation of all prescien- tific and scientific theories of knowledge (gnoseology), the dichotomy “perception versus cognition” clearly appears. From an epistemic perspective, it should be remembered that perception is considered in Antiquity as an interaction between the sensory organs, the medium (undulatory, ca- loric, material, etc.) of contact with the thing, and the thing itself, the object of perception, while the term cognition is reserved for the mental interpretation of the signal that the sensory organs transmit to the understanding. Both Plato, Aristotle, and philosophers of late Antiquity like Plotinus attached great importance to the versatile nature of the contact medium which under different conditions and un- der different surrounding constraints can give the distorted image of the thing. The role of the mind, the understanding or the intellection is above all to exercise control over the sensory sphere. Current cognitive sciences have a rather unitary vision of the nervous system and consider the sen- sory organs as extensions of the brain... Oneiric activities provide Ancient Humanity with an enormous reservoir of stories that are both mne- sic and premonitory. The imaginary, the abductive force of the creative projection on the “commonplace” world pro- duces a reasoning that confirms the subject in his role, if not central then certainly active, in the gnostic process. In short, the dream is an omnipresent source of the explana- tory hypotheses of reality, as Baudry says when relating the contributions of the dreamlike sphere discovered by Freud: 8 M. Sobieszczanski, “Two key factors in the history of communicating immersive environments: mix of reality vs. cognitive realism,” LINKs-series, no. 1-2 (2019), https://hal. archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02281583. 9 Plato, The Republic, Book VII. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 119 AN-ICON The transformations wrought by the sleep in the psychic appara- tus: removal of cathexis, lability of the different systems, return to narcissism, withdrawal of motor skills (impossibility of resorting to the reality test), contribute to producing the specific characteristics of the dream: its capacity for figuration, translation of thought into image, reality accorded to representations.10 Another experience, at the individual level, and - among all prehistoric peoples - strongly collective, is pro- vided using psychotropic substances. The inoculation of a chemical factor modifying both, perception, and con- sciousness, affects as well the centripetal sensory afferents, and their centrifugal control, most often thalamic but also caused by neocortical intellectual patterns. And if in cur- rent societies the practice of narcotics is mainly associated with personal deviance and destructuring addictions, in prehistory and antiquity, drugs served as a (bio)chemical substrate for divinatory trances. These states were both reserved for the use by a restricted class of hierophants, and essential for social regulation in general and for the management of individuals, particularly during initiation rites and rites of passage.11 Towards the clinical approach of hallucinatory phenomena Often times, individuals performing the same types of behaviors without the (bio)chemical support are viewed by the Ancients as representatives of the deity itself, and their verbal and iconic creations as direct expressions of religious truths that may serve as a vehicle for the intelli- gibility of reality. Western science began to take interest in the pathological dimension of these people and to associ- ate different clinics with them. Thus, the head doctor of the 10 J.L. Baudry, “The device:” 56-72. 11 J. Clottes, D. Lewis-Williams, Les Chamans de la Préhistoire. Trans et Magie dans les Grottes Ornées (Paris: Le Seuil, 1996); E. Guerra-Doce, “The origins of inebriation: archaeological evidence of the consumption of fermented beverages and drugs in prehistoric Eurasia,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory Theory 22 (2014): 751-782 https://doi. org/10.1007/s10816-014-9205-z. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 120 AN-ICON  Salpêtrière, Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, interpreted in 1838 the difference between illusions and hallucinations based on the nature of their references to reality, which led him to the definition of pathological hallucinations by preterition. “Perception without an object” is a normative view of the phenomenon which insists on its perceptual nature while denying the percept of this perception, and ultimately its object, in accordance with a “common sense.” Relayed without any critical readjustment by later research- ers, J. Baillarger, J.-P. Falret, E. Régis or P. Guiraud,12 this conception had to wait for the second half of the twentieth century to finally, in the research of Dr. Henri Ey, lead to the study of the nature of the hallucinatory process itself. The much-vaunted merit of Ey’s synthesis is first of all its distinction between hallucinosic eidolia and delirious hallucinations which are, alone, hallucinations properly speaking. “The eidolia do not come from a delusional func- tioning of the patient and are compatible with reason, in this they can be qualified as ‘psychonomy’. It is a ‘non-delusion- al hallucinatory modality’. The subject finds them ‘unreal’, incongruous in relation to his perceptual experience: he knows that he is hallucinating.”13 We will return to this definition in the context of certain immersive experiences with virtual spaces, such as vacuum or narrowing, producing effects of somatic re- actions even though the subject is aware of the “virtuality” of these spaces and their characteristics. On the other hand, the definition of delusional hallucinations provides us with another important theoret- ical dimension: Thus, for Ey “The hallucinatory phenomenon experienced by the subject must [...] have a double character: that of affecting his sensitivity or his sensoriality and that of being projected out of his subjectivity” ([2] p. 44-45). The patient must thus be able to attest 12 G. Gimenez, M. Guimont, J. Pedinielli, “Study of the evolution of the concept of hallucination in classical psychiatric literature,” L’evolution psychiatrique 68 (2003): 289-298. 13 Ibid. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 121 AN-ICON to a sensory experience (“I see, I hear, I feel”) by his reference to the attributes of sensoriality and support the objectivity and reality of this experience.14 This means, in essence, that a cerebral effect positioned in the sensory information processing areas, in certain clinical circumstances, can be correlated by intra- cerebral communication pathways with a cortical effect that mobilizes the oscillation between knowledge current (operational) and the thought of presumption, inclinations, convictions (doxic). In this situation, it is clear that there is a de- tachment of the sensory areas from the sensory organs, or rather a functional doubling of the cerebral support. On the one hand, there is evidence that patients suffering from hallucinations often achieve to conceive that the people accompanying them, the caregivers in this case, are not subject to the same phenomenon. On the other hand, the same patient simultaneously develops a hallucinatory syn- drome. The sensations “with object” do not disappear, on the contrary, the “generic” sensory excitations accompany the delirious subject throughout his “specific” experiences. In the article by G. Gimenez, M. Guimont, J.- L. Pedinielli, we read: “Minkowsky’s remarkable text on Le temps vivant, and in particular the chapter ‘Towards a psychopathology of space’, which shows very well the possible cohabitation, in the same subject, of a hallucina- tory neo-reality and a perceptual reality, often remaining actively separated by processes of splitting.”15 The “Perception without an object” was biased by its implicit use of the physiologically improbable, direct inversion of nervous influx16 in the optic or auditory nerves. In reality, the sick subject carries out two processes both highly demanding in terms of synaptic energy: that of the 14 Ibid. Here the article refers to H. Ey, Treatise on Hallucinations, vol. 2 (Paris: Masson and Co, 1973). 15 Ibid. The article refers to E. Minkowsky, The Lived Time. Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies (Neuchatel: Delachaux and Niesle, 1933). 16 The blocking of the inversion is ensured by the mechanism of the alternation of refractory periods and periods of excitability of the elementary nerve cell. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 122 AN-ICON  control of the real and that of the control of his own cere- bral activities of the sensory areas pathologically auton- omized to the point of competing with the gnosic results of perception. Under the light of current neuroscience re- sults supported by functional cerebral imaging, MRI and positron emission device, the etiology and consequently the nosography of delusional pathologies is shifting from the psychoanalytical vision where the sphere of symbolic topics takes pathologically precedence on the phenomenal sphere, towards a neuro-cognitivist vision compatible with the hypotheses of Dr. Ey, as Thomas Rabeyron states it: hallucinations should first be considered from the point of view of “reality monitoring,” a process that is part of a larger whole called “source monitoring.” According to Bentall (1990), hallucina- tions would thus be the consequence of a bad categorization: an internal perception, a representation, or a reminiscence, instead of being represented as coming from inside, would be categorized by the brain as coming from outside. There would therefore be confusion between internal source and external source, confusion being more specifically at the level of the thalamus, a real system for filtering information reaching the cerebral cortex.17 In fact, we are here in a process of intracerebral communication where, both in the presence of a meticu- lous monitoring of reality18 and independently of its gnosic results and its metacognitive achievements,19 the different neocortical areas exchange with each other. In this play, essentially triangular, the central position is ensured by (1) the thalamic zones which seem to distribute flows joining (2) the prefrontal cortex with (3) sensory, parietal or posterior, 17 T. Rabeyron, “Exceptional experiences: between neuroscience and psychoanalysis,” Research in Psychoanalysis, no. 8 (2009). The reference “Bentall (1990)” refers to R.P. Bentall, “The illusion of reality: at review and integration of psychological research on hallucinations,” Psychological Bulletin 107, no. 1 (1990): 82. 18 Let us remember the experiences cited by Merleau-Ponty where schizophrenics systematically thwarted attempts at scenographies recalling their imaginary world: M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945) (Paris: Gallimard, 2011). See also the connection between Merleau-Ponty and Dr. Ey, in: T. Grohmann, “Délire et hallucination en schizophrénie: une perspective phénoménologique,” Phainomenon 28 (2018): 103-125. 19 On this subject, see the “Higher-order thought theory” by David Rosenthal, in D. Rosenthal, Consciousness and Mind (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 123 AN-ICON  somatosensory, auditory and visual areas. The implication of the latter is proved indirectly by research combining the pathological phenomenon of synesthesia, the non-volun- tary association of sensations originating from different sen- sory modes, and hallucinatory sensations. This particular research has produced increasing evidences since Binet’s founding experiments.20 Reality monitoring With the dimension of “reality monitoring,” the theories of hallucinations begin to move away from their origins anchored in a naive realism where the third instance of a healthy observer arbitrated, in the light of “common” and “objective” representations, the pathological represen- tations of reality produced by the sick subject. In fact, they also abandon the solipsistic simplifications of a “a world to yourself” in which the patient would have been locked up. We are here within the framework of a duality where the two gnosic procedures hold comparable “realizing” forces from the point of view of their aesthesies. The nosological qualification of dysfunctions no longer consists in arbitrat- ing between the flow of consciousness of the sick subject and the flow of consciousness of the healthy subject, but in qualifying the way in which a subject oscillates between the two gnosic modes reputed to be constructive. It is therefore the attentional processes that make the nosology of delusional mental behaviors and not the hallucinations themselves, or again, in other words: we speak on hallucinations when the “fictio-creative” activities occur, by the alteration of the attentional processes, to sub- stitute themselves to the interoceptive and exteroceptive controls of reality. Attentional processes, whether defined accord- ing to peripheral filter theories or central manager theories, cannot be associated with an organic function or, even less, with a delimited convolution or a particular nerve bundle. 20 A. Binet, “The problem of colored hearing,” Revue des Deux Mondes 113 (1892): 586-614. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 124 AN-ICON  These are complex states of mobilization of cognitive re- sources assembling different parts of the nervous system, appearing to be identifiable with the different functional aspects of the circuits assigned to the different other pur- poses, as it is the case of the reticular system disposed on the path joining the lower bulbar region to the lateral and posterior hypothalamus. Following the inventory of con- vergent experimental facts, some theories on the rhythms of cerebral electro-biological activities, detectable at the cortical and subcortical level, propose here some interest- ing hypotheses, in particular on the role of theta waves.21 These processes are also associated with the presence of certain cognitive event-related potential (ERP) and in par- ticular the famous N400 discovered in 1978 by Kutas and Hillyard.22 The attentional processes have the capacity 23 to move, by means of calibration and thalamic reinforce- ments, not only in the direction of association or selection of external sources of sensory stimuli but also in the direc- tion of interchange and variation of the internal sources,24 among which we count usually different kinds of memo- ry,25 but also hallucinogenic stimuli.26 It is at this level that the problem of indissociation between the veracity and 21 M.C.M. Bastiaansen et al., “I see what you mean: theta power increases are involved in the retrieval of lexical semantic information,” Brain and Language 106 (2008): 15-28, https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2007.10.006. 22 M. Kutas, K.D. Federmeier, “Electrophysiology reveals semantic memory use in language comprehension,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, no. 12 (2000): 463-470, https://doi. org/10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01560-6. 23 M.I. Posner, “Orienting of attention,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 32 (1980): 3-25. 24 J.K. Roth et al., “Similar and dissociable mechanisms for attention to internal versus external information,” NeuroImage 48 (2009): 601-608. 25 E. Awh, E.K. Vogel, S.H. Oh, “Interactions between attention and working memory,” Neuroscience 139, no. 1 (2006): 201-208, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2005.08.023. 26 R.P. Bentall, “The illusion of reality: at review and integration of psychological research on hallucinations,” Psychological Bulletin 107, no. 1 (1990): 82, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033- 2909.107.1.82; M.K. Johnson, C.L. Raye, “Reality monitoring,” Psychological Review 88 (1981): 67-85, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-295X.88.1.67; M.K. Johnson, S. Hashtroudi, D.S. Lindsay, “Source monitoring,” Psychlogical Bulletin 114 (1993): 3-28, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.114.1.3; G. Brébion et al., “Reality monitoring failure in schizophrenia: The role of selective attention,” Schizophrenia Research 22, no. 2 (15 Nov. 1996): 173-180, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0920-9964(96)00054-0; A. Schnider, “Spontaneous confabulation, reality monitoring, and the limbic system - a review,” Brain Research Reviews 36, no. 2–3 (2001): 150-160, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0165-0173(01)00090-X; J.K. Roth et al., “Similar and dissociable mechanisms for attention to internal versus external information,” NeuroImage 48 (2009): 601-608. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 125 AN-ICON  the coherence of different topics, imaginary and sensory, must occur. From then on, the fictitious topics that we will begin to call fictional (see below), can exercise a “realizing” role they can effectively embed into the sensible real, by the means of intensity of esthesia (contribution from sen- sory areas), sequential plausibility, and causal relevance (contributions from frontal areas). From the moment when the “realization” efficiency is obtained, the altered attention moves indiscriminately from the external to the internal and withdraws from its task as a source checker. Thus, on the double psychic substrate, emerges an internal fiction without the subject being able to exercise any criticism towards it. In the patient, the source of suffering stems more from the awareness of this impotence of discernment than from the disconcerting contents of the hallucinations themselves. Even if the patient still has the possibility of diverting his attention, what his attention points to is, in both directions, internal and external, impetuously “real.” As Dr. Ey said, delusional work is characterized by “foreignness, incoercibility, assertiveness and aesthesis.” Foreignness, because the internal and external sources have the same rank of veracity and can therefore be interchangeable; in- coercibility because this process prevails over the mecha- nisms of anti-hallucinatory coercion; assertiveness because the sequences of topics obtained through hallucinations can serve as a basis for the subject’s discursive activities; and aesthesia because the subject is aware of the fact that thanks to the strident aesthesia of his hallucinations he can distinguish them from ordinary memory material, but cannot to mobilize enough to distinguish them from perceptual sensations. We are touching here on the doxic status of hallucinations and in this the comparison between sensory immersion with artificial origin and hallucinations becomes for us more than a superficial metaphor. In schizophrenia, the activations of sensory areas stimulated by prefrontal activities and categorized by thalamic operations bring out a threshold effect beyond which the complex neural sub- strate is ready to exercise a creative role and generates MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 126 AN-ICON  a fictional “effect.” This “effect” is both gnosic, active in the symbolic sphere, and assertoric in the domain of the subject’s discursive approach. To summarize, in patholog- ical states of this type, fiction begins to compete, through attentional maneuvers, with the real apprehended by the sensorial way.27 Hallucinogenic function vs. Cultural and artistic creations It is obvious that the comparison between immersion in artificial sensory devices and hallucinatory states overlaps with the very old theoretical concerns of specialists in literature and cinema, notably René Wellek and Austin Warren,28 and Jean-Louis Baudry,29 concerning the status of the “presented reality” in the verbal story and in the visual narration. On this topic, for methodological reasons, we propose to dissociate two blocks of questions: what comes from diếgêsis and what comes from mimesis, in order to better synthesize them later on.30 On the one hand, the comparison of immersion and hallucination appears as existential experiences. We call “existential” the situations and the experiences that are attached to them, when it is a question, for a human subject, of facing an immediate environment, offering to his perception the sensory substrate which allows him to carry out his habitual activities: standing, sitting, walking, etc., 27 The subject being aware of the imbalance between the respective parts of the internal fiction and of its “reality monitoring,” falls into the suffering stemming from the anxiety of failing in reality. In this, schizophrenia involves a double danger: that which stems from the often disconcerting nature of the “visions” and that of the depression provoked by the awareness of one’s own failures in the duty of reality. 28 R. Wellek, A. Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948). “As Wellek and Warren (La Théorie littéraire) point out, there is a use for these invented stories, which is to entertain and instruct, a use that should not be confused with forgetting boredom. Fiction triggers desire, pleasure, escape and knowledge, without the seriousness of a duty to accomplish, a lesson to learn. This plural pleasure is to live adventures that daily life refuses us, to which we access by proxy. The knowledge transmitted by fiction is of a different order from that provided by science, philosophy or history.” Yves Chemla about F. Tremblay, La Fiction en Question (Balzac-Le Griot editor, 1999) coll. Littératures à l’essai, Montréal, in Acta Fabula, Autumn 2000, vol. 1, no 2, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris. 29 J.L. Baudry, “The device:” 56-72. 30 E. Souriau, “The structure of the film universe and the vocabulary of filmology,” Revue internationale de filmologie 7-8 (1951). MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 127 AN-ICON  activities whose purpose lacks a delayed-causal goal, the “short-term” behavior. The notion of immediacy must also be addressed. Situations are immediate when the goals pursued by the subject affect his current vital needs, unlike the pursuit of medium and long-term goals. In this sense, we are forced to separate, for example, the expectation of resolution of a legal case that mobilizes our energy for several years, from the posture that we adopt in the last minutes before the last trial, although the lasting experience conditions, to a certain extent, the momentary behaviors, and vice versa; the punctual and immediate existential ex- perience merges, in a certain way, with the image and the memory that we have of the entire event.31 On the other hand, the immersion can be com- pared with the effects of fiction which are elaborated in the brain of the readers of literary stories and the spectators of cinematographic storytelling. Here, it is not a question of evaluating the effects of immersion by the yardstick of immediate perceptions, which can feed temporary postural reactions, move in the relative field of vision, explore its space immediately adjoining our body or behave according to the volumes found, suggested by the 3D image-models of the show unfolding before the eyes of the subject, but it is a question of listing the psychological and somatic effects of a “world” which is constructed in the process of mediated communication, through signs and their bodi- ly and technical supports, i.e. writing, icon, image-move- ment. It is a question, for example, of distinguishing two perceptual occurrences, in the complex reaction that we can have when seeing and manipulating, including by our movements, the model of the staircase of the Capitol of Washington drawn up for the CAVE at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CALIT2) in San Diego: the monumental effect of architecture and the symbolic effect produced by the political heritage of the 31 In The Trial of Franz Kafka, the literary effect of “reversal of experiences” consists precisely in this substitution of the momentary experiences of the waiting corridors in the legal institutions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for the synthetic experience of the long period between the indictment and the execution of the sentence. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 128 AN-ICON  United States. Although the distance separating the sign from its denotat is arranged as a continuum running from presence, through deferred presence and through the trace of presence, to the sign of presence, the consciousness and gnosic processes arising therefrom are categorized according to the jurisdiction of discrete boundaries. Verbal and visual narrations do not lead to the same results as immediate perceptions, coming from the real environment. Our hypothesis is that the productions of hu- man culture both generate and use the same human abili- ties to produce fiction, without this process resulting from any pathology. In other words, in the healthy creative sub- ject, fiction benefits from substantially the same psychic substrate as hallucinations in schizophrenics, but the at- tentional processes retain all their effectiveness in them. In delirious patients, there is an increase of the psychic substrate which manages and admits to the doxic sphere the different sources, internal and external, without mak- ing any discernment between them, or rather transgresses this discernment. In the healthy creative human, the same fictional process does not come from a doubling of the psy- chic apparatus but from an externalization of the psychic contents “projected” on an apparatus or a device which in the process of communication exercises a fictional function. In humans as “consumer” of culture and receivers of the creative message, there is no confusion between the two flows either, there is, on the other hand, from his point of view, a duplication of the substrate of cultural productions, a substrate that sometimes can be apprehended in what it offers as affordances to direct sensory and postural cog- nitive actions, and sometimes as a generator of fiction on the basis of quasi-affordances that can be seized by the sensory-motor brain areas correlated to the frontal areas via the weighting of the thalamic zone. This latter process can be initiated by the action of the mirror neuron system. The person subject to hallucinations oscillates between the two streams of consciousness, the creator mobilizes his attentional processes in order to work on the perceived reality in a manner similar to the ways fictional MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 129 AN-ICON  topics inhabit him. And since the parity of the flows of the “intus” and of the flows of the “extra” is in him maintained and oriented according to the precedence of the perceptual, his internal fiction is itself “perception oriented.” Perspectives of applied research in 360° imaging The tradition of research definitely established since the 2010s, especially at the continuation of the theo- retical work of David Bordwell,32 first in different academic centers, in Japan,33 in the United States,34 and then spread in vast circles of internationals researchers,35 offers ex- perimental research involving spectators, individual and collective,36 engaged in actions of narrative construction based on the video-film creations. In our book from 201537 we commented on the difference between the spatio-sym- bolic narrative construction in the frontal cinema with cen- tral and oriented projection and attempts of the spherical and interactive cinema. In this latter area the theory pre- dominant seems to be organized around the environmental concept of enaction.38 Note that this concept also applies 32 D. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London-New York: Routledge, 1987). 33 M. Kimura et al., “Human visual system automatically encodes sequential regularities of discrete events,” Journal of Cognitive Neurosciences 22, no. 6 (2010): 1124-1139, https://doi. org/10.1162/jocn.2009.21299. 34 J.E. Cutting, “Perceiving scenes in film and in the world,” in J.D. Anderson, B.F. Anderson, eds., Moving Image Theory: Ecological Considerations (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005): 9-27. 35 K.S. Heimann et al., “Cuts in action: a high-density EEG study investigating the neural correlates of different editing techniques in film,” Cognitive Science 41 (2017): 1555-1588, https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12439; K. Pajunen, Immersed in Illusion, an Ecological Approach to the Virtual (Jyväskylä: Bookwell, Acta Universitatis Lapponiensis, 2012); P. Francuz, E. Zabielska-Mendyk, “Does the brain differentiate between related and unrelated cuts when processing audiovisual messages? An ERP study,” Media Psychology 16, no. 4 (2013): 461- 475; P. Tikka et al., “Enactive cinema paves way for understanding complex real-time social interaction in neuroimaging experiments,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (2012), https://doi. org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00298. 36 K. Lankine et al., “Consistency and similarity of MEG- and fMRI-signal time courses during movie viewing,” NeuroImage 173 (2018): 361-369. 37 M. Sobieszczanski, Les Médias Immersifs Informatisés. Raisons Cognitives de la Ré- analogisation (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015): 300. 38 P. Tikka, V. Rasmus, K. Mauri, “Narrative logic of enactive cinema: obsession,” Digital Creativity 17, no. 4 (2006): 205-212, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14626260601074078. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 130 AN-ICON  to classical cinema, as has been underlined in Bordwell’s founding works... Can we believe that going through the com- parison between hallucinations and cognitive effects of the interactive and immersive cinema can provide us with a tool, both theoretical and empirical, even more powerful? If we imagine a multi-scale analysis proving the existence of a multi-layered and harmonized neural substrate, spe- cialized in performing arbitration tasks between different sources of information: external, internal, and those used for weighting memory of sensory-motor anticipations, we can hope that the monitoring of reality can become this powerful tool. There are three preliminary problems to pose as the epistemological background before proceeding to analysis of information sources in video-film products. Frontal cinema operates its management of attentional points within the framework of a language put into place through the process of acculturation for 120 years. This device, both technical, grammatical and se- mantic shapes the audience of the cinema by constituting a quasi-cognitive functionality which participates in the construction of the image of the world in the broad sense. There is here a kind of sloping of a cultural function in the field of generic cognition. Experiences in spectation and the construction of the image of the world, both: from truthful world and the world as illusion, must first take care to put out of the game the artefact of the appearance of classic cinema. Immersive or spherical cinema is part of an- other “grammar.” Its “editing,” the rules of his language, is a “natural editing,” called for by Pasolini,39 is operated by bodily movements, gaze movements and ocular saccades. The same “objective” real can be looked at in different 39 “When we talk about the semiology of cinematographic language, we must at the same time talk about the semiology of reality,” extract from an interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini by André S. Labarthe on 15/11/1966. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 131 AN-ICON  ways by the same person and by the different spectators, according to their own management of attentional points. And finally, immersive cinema manages its spa- tio-temporal referential external to the device of the same way that it manages the spatiality and the dynamics of the contents which are presented into the device. In other words, the grammar of cutting and exploring of the sen- sitive, natural and artefactual material, is the same as that which governs our spatio-temporal relationship to the world. The perspective of empirical research on the hallucinatory illusion can then lead to the establishment of a normative system allowing people subject to hallucinations to ex- change with their caregivers not by means of art-therapy, but by means of the shared control of sources of informa- tion on reality. MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI 132 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/17297

The haptics of illusion: an account of touch across theories, technologies and museums by Valentina Bartalesi and Anna Calise Haptic Technology Illusion Virtuality Museums Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing The haptics of il usion. An account of touch across theories, technologies and museums VALENTINA BARTALESI, Università IULM – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8596-4014 ANNA CALISE, Università IULM – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2966-7613 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17297 Abstract Touch represents one of the latest and most complex frontiers of virtuality: a sense which historical- ly seems to have carried the burden of proof on reality, by definition resistant to illusory environments. The paper begins from this assumption to trace a history of illusion across authors and theorists that have debated the stat- ute of haptics, building a dialogue between philosophical dilemmas and technological developments. Moving both from an aesthetic and psychophysiological viewpoint, the article will root its analysis in an historical-artistic account, augmenting the discussion with a series of case studies from the museum sector. The introduction of haptic tech- nologies within cultural institutions, which dates back to the last three decades, proves an interesting field to test the functions which touch plays in both educational and imaginative scenarios. The open question being whether modern technologies should aim at replicating haptic re- alism in miming phenomenological accuracy, or whether the most innovative applications need to aspire to a more environmental employment of touch. Keywords Haptic Technology Illusion Virtuality Museums To quote this essay: V. Bartalesi, A. Calise, “The haptics of illusion. An account of touch across theories, technologies and museums,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 133-161, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17297 VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 133 AN-ICON Fig 1. Creation of a new style of media art using digital paints in a harmonization of the senses of vision and touch. It seems that we have so often been warned not to touch that we are reluctant to probe the tactile world even with our minds. Constance Classen The Deepest Sense. A Cultural History of Touch, 2012 Introduction In his Post-Scriptum addendum, alongside his monumental survey on the polysemy of touch in Nancy through the history of Western philosophy, Derrida de- nounced a widespread prejudice whereby “one sponta- neously has the tendency to believe that touching re­sists virtualization.”1 Through this acute remark, the French phi- losopher underlies a consolidated topos that attributes to the sense of touch the ability to convey a direct and objec- tive knowledge of the things of the world, captured in their physical and even theoretical dimension.2 By questioning the supposed identity relationship between touch and ob- jectivity, the author opens a new perspective on the sub- ject, widening the ways in which the world of haptics could be conceptualized and practiced. For the purpose of the 1 J. Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005): 300. 2 Cfr. J.-L. Nancy, Corpus (Paris: Metailie, 1992): 76; M. Paterson, The Sense of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Oxford: Berg, 2007): 2-3; C. Classen, D. Howes, Ways of Sensing (New York: Routledge, 2014): 89; A. Gallace, C. Spence, In Touch with the Future: The Sense of Touch from Cognitive Neuroscience to Virtual Reality, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 3. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 134 AN-ICON  argument presented here, Derrida’s considerations prove pivotal: the aim will be to try and deepen his assumption, investigating the relationship between illusion, haptic per- ception and works of art. Addressing the possibility that both the theory and practice which anticipate and guide haptic experiences and technologies account for an illusory character, escaping the grounds of undeniable certainty and adherence to reality which are at times linked to the discourse on touch. This study will in fact envisage the possibility that illusion imposes itself as a constitutive figure of haptic feeling both on a theoretical level and on a technical one. The research will focus on how the experience of touching plastic objects changes from the analogical dimension to the digital one, first from a theoretical point of view and then across a range of case studies within the museum sector. In the peculiar phenomenon of touching sculpture in a virtual environment employing haptic devices, the il- lusion changes its function: before a theoretical figure, it becomes an experiential strategy. Not necessarily aimed at generating a phenomenological surplus, which as we will see most technologies are not able to offer, but at of- fering the possibility of a semantic shift on an emotional and aesthetic level. The study will begin with an assess- ment of Derrida’s theorizing on the haptic and on virtuality, highlighting the inherent illusory character that seems to be shared by both virtual haptic museological experiences and the theorizing of “haptic” itself, a link captured by the author already in his work On Touching. While borrowing from Derrida the relevance of museum practices as case studies for the discussion on the haptic, this article will however assess evidentiary accounts in the second sec- tion of the text. Before addressing the case studies, it was deemed necessary to elaborate two relevant premises. On the one hand, a thorough account of haptic technologies and of the current theoretical issues that guide their design will be presented, with reference to the challenges posed by haptic illusions. On the other hand, a historiographic account of the fundamental role that the concept of illusion VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 135 AN-ICON  has played in the theorizing of the haptic discourse will be offered. Through this analysis, we aim to hopefully demon- strate the structural role played by the figure of illusion in both theoretical and technological designs, strengthening the rationale which serves as the guiding principle of the discussion at hand. The second section, following Derrida’s intuition and using museological haptic technologies case studies, will try to assess how these premises relate to the cultural offer available to the public. Beginning from the relationship between touching and cultural artifacts, and more specifically sculptures, which has played a central role in both philosophical and museological undertakings, a history of touch in museums will be briefly traced, con- necting contemporary endeavors to their historical pre- decessors. Then a series of relevant case studies will be presented, trying to understand, by looking closely at their design and reception, what aspect of the haptic experience they aimed to leverage on, and therefore which epistemic and experiential qualities were privileged. It will emerge that when museums are trying to reinstate the evidentiary nature of the haptic experience, and focus on mimicking a reductive understanding of the phenomenology of touch, the results might be scientifically interesting yet not experi- entially powerful. By contrast, when the more evocative and illusory qualities of the haptic are investigated, exploiting a more environmental and multifaceted account of the haptic experience, a new and promising use of haptic technolo- gies is possible.3 “Tact beyond the possible:”4 illusion as a figure of the haptic between historiography and psycho-aesthetics The teleological value of the human hand as a pro toto organ of the sense of touch is a recurring trope in the history of philosophy, from Kant, through Herder, de 3 Although the paper is the result of a collective research and reflection work made by the two authors, the first section was written by Valentina Bartalesi, the second one by Anna Calise. 4 J. Derrida, On Touching: 66. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 136 AN-ICON  Miran, Husserl, until Katz, Focillon, Révész, and Gibson.5 In Derrida’s analysis the haptic, assumed as a not stric- tu sensu6 sense that “virtually” involves the sensorium in its obscure intricacy,7 is qualified by the peculiar “motor activity”8 of the human hand. Yet, while recognizing the constitutive motility of this sensory faculty, Derrida refus- es such preliminary immediacy, claiming with Nancy its “local, fractal, modal” nature.9 If these adjectives partially complicate the meaning of touching on an ontological level, they seem to encourage the reflection towards a technical sphere, according to an address that Derrida tries to verify. As a proof of the fragility of a way of thinking that a priori denies the possibility of virtualizing touch, the philosopher presents a significant case study for that time: the Haptic Museum in California.10 In spite of the limited evidence still available with regards to this institution, its mission appears clear. As Margaret L. Mclaughlin of the Integrated Media Systems Center (University of Southern California) states: Our IMSC team has used haptics to allow museum visitors to ex- plore three-dimensional works of art by “touching” them, some- thing that is not possible in ordinary museums due to prevailing “hands-off” policies. Haptics involves the modality of touch-the sensation of shape and texture an observer feels when exploring 5 J. Derrida, On Touching: 41-42, 95, 122, 140. See in this respect: L.A. Jones, S.J. Lederman, Human Hand Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006): 6; A. Benjamin, “Endless touching: Herder and sculpture,” Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico 4, no. 1, (2011): 73-92, https://doi.org/10.13128/Aisthesis-10983; H. Focillon, “Éloge de la main” (1934), in Vie des Formes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981); G. Révész, The Human Hand (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958); J.J. Gibson, “Observations on active touch,” Psychological Review 69, no. 6 (November 1962): 477-491, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0046962. 6 J. Derrida, On Touching: 53, 149. 7 Ibid.: 42. 8 Ibid.: 142. 9 As noted by: “But there again-and this, too, has to be clear only upon the condition that tact does not concentrate, does not lay claim as Descartes’s touching does to the privilege given to immediacy, which would bring about the fusion of all the senses and of ‘sense.’ Touching, too, touching, first, is local, modal, fractal”, J.L. Nancy, Corpus: 76. 10 J. Derrida, On Touching: 300-301; M.L. Mclaughlin et al., “The haptic museum,” Conference: Proc. of the EVA 2000 Florence Conf. on Electronic Imaging and the Visual Arts (March 2000), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229433104_The_Haptic_Museum, accessed December 11, 2022. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 137 AN-ICON a virtual object, such as a 3D model of a piece of pottery or art glass.11 Although presumably the first example of a haptic museum equipped with exosomatic technologies,12 Derrida’s case includes many factors that have become constitutive in subsequent museological proposals. By in- teracting with the PHANToM haptic device13 or wearing the exoskeleton glove CyberGrasp,14 at those times fu- turistic apparatuses, visitors could proceed to the manual exploration of virtual artifacts, digitized by employing 3D cameras such as ColorScan or Virtuoso.15 Technically, the “haptic human-computer interaction (HCI)” requires a struc- tural triad composed of “human user, interface device, and virtual environment synthesized by computer.”16 Through “haptic-rendering algorithms,”17 the device provides spe- cific stimuli arising from the interaction between the “hap- tic device representation” (the user’s avatar) and the 11 M.L. Mclaughlin et al., “The haptic museum:” w.p. 12 Among the twentieth-century experiences, one of the first tactile museum exhibitions dedicated to blind people was organized by The American Museum of New York in 1909. While in the 1970s, numerous worldwide museums realized tactile pathways dedicated to the visually impaired, the first Haptic Gallery was opened by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. on March 1st 1979, as the Smithsonian Archive documentation testifies. See in this respect: H.F. Osborn, The American Museum of Natural History: its origin, its history, the growth of its departments to December 31, 1909 (New York: The American Museum of Natural History, 1909): 148; Chronology of Smithsonian History, “NPH Haptic Gallery Opens” (March 1st 1979): https://siris-sihistory.si.edu/ipac20/ipac. jsp?&profile=all&source=~!sichronology&uri=full=3100001~!1462~!0#focus accessed December 11, 2022; Council on Museums and Education in the Visual Arts, The art museum as educator: a collection of studies as guides to practice and policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 13 Designed by the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1994, “PHANToM is a convenient desktop device which provides a force-reflecting interface between a human user and a computer.” Inserting the index fingertip into a thimble or interacting with a stick, PHANToM consists in “a system capable of presenting convincing sensations of contact, constrained motion, surface compliance, surface friction, texture and other mechanical attributes of virtual objects.” T.H. Massie, J.K. Salisbury, “The PHANToM haptic interface: a device for probing virtual objects,” Dynamic Systems and Control 55, no. 1 (1994): w.p. 14 Commercialized in 2009, “the CyberGrasp device is a lightweight, force-reflecting exoskeleton that fits over a CyberGlove data glove (wired version) and adds resistive force feedback to each finger. With the CyberGrasp force feedback system, users are able to feel the size and shape of computer-generated 3D objects in a simulated virtual world.” Please see: CyberGrasp, CyberGlove System: https://static1.squarespace.com/ static/559c381ee4b0ff7423b6b6a4/t/5602fc01e4b07ebf58d480fb/1443036161782/ CyberGrasp_Brochure.pdf, accessed December 11, 2022. 15 M.L. Mclaughlin et al., “The haptic museum:” w.p. 16 D. Wang et al., “Haptic display for virtual reality: progress and challenges,” Virtual Reality & Intelligent Hardware 1, no. 2 (April 2019): 137 https://doi.org/10.3724/SP.J.2096- 5796.2019.0008. 17 Ibid.: 141-143. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 138 AN-ICON  photogrammetric restitution of the object in a virtual en- vironment (the haptic image).18 Hence, according to the object-relational data model, users receive tactile and kin- esthetic feedback geared towards the stimulation of the mechanoreceptors on the fingertip (for PHANToM) and on the whole hand surface (if wearing CyberGrasp) during the exploration of the virtual object.19 More specifically, the sub- ject perceives vibrotactile feedback which should make him or her feel those sensations that are connotative of touching the physical object,20 absent in its ilemorphic habitus albeit realistically tangible in its morphological properties of size, weight, surface, and texture.21 Beyond the issues more strictly related to the physiology of the experience, it is here relevant to examine how these researchers have recorded the act of touching a virtual object. Unexpectedly, the members of the Califor- nian IMSC, as well as the French philosopher, feel the need to put in inverted commas locutions such as “touching,” “remote touching,” or “realistic sensations of touching.”22 The grammatical escamotage of the quotation marks clear- ly betrays the necessity, be it more or less incidental, to denounce the presence of expressions bent to a “special or translated” use. In the technical gesture that the Haptic Museum visitor makes exploring virtual artifacts, Derrida glimpses the theoretical locus where “immediate contact”23 discloses its own illusory and ontologically fictitious dimen- sion, opening a chasm within the very meaning of touch: ultimately, what is the object of touch? Is this an illusion of 18 K. Salisbury, F. Conti, F. Barbagli, “Haptic rendering: introductory concepts,” IEEE Computer Society 24, no. 2 (March/April 2004): 25-26, https://doi.org/10.1109/ MCG.2004.1274058. 19 P.P. Pott, “Haptic Interfaces,” in L. Manfredi, ed., Endorobotics. Design, R&D, Future Trends (Academic Press, 2022). 20 Even if, according to Salisbury and Srinivasan “the resulting sensations prove startling, and many first-time users are quite surprised at the compelling sense of physical presence they encounter when touching virtual objects,” the improvement of haptic feedback constitutes one of the main purposes of this kind of technology. J.K. Salisbury, M.A. Srinivasan, “Phantom- based haptic interaction with virtual objects,” IEEE (September/October 1997): 6-10, https:// doi.org/10.1109/MCG.1997.1626171. 21 As Derrida notes, describing the above-mentioned experience, “we can thus feel the weight, form, and structure of the surface of a Chinese vase while ‘holding’ a three- dimensional digital model,” J. Derrida, On Touching: 301. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 139 AN-ICON  touch or what Madalina Diacuno prefers to define in terms of “illusionary touch”?24 If so, how to illustrate the phenom- enology of such an illusion? The noun “illusion,” from the Latin illudere (in, “against,” ludere “to play”), describes an “act of deception; deceptive appearance, apparition; delusion of the mind.”25 However, in the specialist lexicon on haptic perception the expression “haptic illusion” more rigorously recounts a “disruption of the physical coherence between real move- ment and feedback forces, used to create the illusion of a non-existent feature or to compensate with the illusion the sensation of an undesired detail.”26 As convincingly established by the critical literature since Révész, several haptic illusions have been codified and are currently under investigation.27 It should also be noted that a similar illusion, even though different in terms of the neurological reaction experienced with haptic prostheses in virtual environments, is daily negotiated by the user in the interaction with touch screens. The most recent media-archeological studies have investigated this ambiguous nature of “touching,” recording the hiatus which systematically occurs when the consum- er digitally interacts with the contents that pass through the “display.”28 In this regard, Simone Arcagni has recently pointed out how touch screens solicit a kind of experience “as if there were no longer a mediation between the idea of doing and the action that takes place in our hands” by 24 M. Diaconu, “Illusionary touch, and touching illusions,” in A. Tymieniecka, ed., Analecta Husserliana. The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research. Human Creation Between Reality and Illusion, vol. 87 (Cham: Springer, 2005): 115-125. 25 “Illusion,” Online Etymology Dictionary: https://www.etymonline.com/word/illusion, accessed December 11, 2022. 26 M. Grunwald, ed., Human Haptic Perception. Basics and Applications (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008): 649. 27 The main haptic illusions include “size-weight illusion,” a tangible version of the “Muller- Lyer illusion,” the “horizontal-vertical illusion” and the “Ponzio illusion.” See in this regard: M.A. Heller, E. Gentaz, “Illusions,” in M.A. Heller, E. Gentaz, eds., Psychology of Touch and Blindness (New York-London: Psychology Press - Taylor & Francis Group, 2014): 61-78. 28 F. Casetti, “Primal screens,” in C. Buckley, R. Campe, F. Casetti, eds., Screen Genealogies. From Optical Device to Environmental Medium (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019): 45; F. Casetti, “Che cos’è uno schermo, oggi?,” Rivista di Estetica 55 (2014): 28- 34 https://doi.org/10.4000/estetica.969. According to Francesco Casetti, touch screens represent the most effective type of display (ibid.: 29), a device that the author links to an instant, “passive” and disengaged communication. Consistently to the current hypertrophic consumption of images, Casetti’s display “exhibits, not reveals. It offers, not engages” (ibid.) and this happens because the touch screen “puts images in our hands” (ibid.). VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 140 AN-ICON  intensifying the sensation of proximity between user and content.29 Raising attention to the dangers inherent in the automation of touching, David Parisi has introduced the mil- itary phrase “Fingerbombing,” highlighting the “distanced, detached and destructive” nature of interaction with the touchscreen of a Nintendo DS.30 Furthermore, citing Thom- as Hirschhorn’s brutal video clip Touching Reality (2012), Wanda Strauven has denounced the moral and technical break between screen and display, whereby the object of touch results in the screen and not the images passing through it.31 Once more, what do the subjects touch and what do they perceive by touching and consuming?32 In light of this ontological uncertainty, the abil- ity to confer and simulate the highest degree of realism to the haptic experience of virtual content through a het- erogeneous range of devices – among the most futuristic devices should be mentioned AirPiano,33 VibroWeight,34 WeHAPTIC35 – is generally considered one of the overriding 29 S. Arcagni, Visioni Digitali: Video, Web e Nuove tecnologie (Torino: Einaudi, 2016): 301. 30 D. Parisi, “Fingerbombing, or ‘Touching is Good’: The Cultural Construction of Technologized Touch,” in M. Elo, M. Luoto, eds., Figure of Touch: Sense, Technics, Body (Helsinki: The Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki, Tallinna Raamatutrükikoja OÜ, 2018): 83. 31 W. Strauven, Touchscreen Archeology (Lüneberg: Meson Press, 2021): 112-116. Cfr. W. Strauven, “Marinetti’s tattilismo revisited hand travels, tactile screens, and touch cinema in the 21st Century,” in R. Catanese, ed., Futurist Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018): 70. 32 See in this respect: M. Racat, S. Capelli, “Touching without touching: the paradox of the digital age,” in M. Racat, S. Capelli, eds., Haptic Sensation and Consumer Behavior. The Influence of Tactile Stimulation in Physical and Online Environments (Nature Switzerland: Springer, 2020). 33 AirPiano constitutes “an enhanced music playing system to provide touchable experiences in HMD-based virtual reality with mid-air haptic feedback”. For more information see: I. Hwang et. al., “AirPiano: enhancing music playing experience in virtual reality with mid-air haptic feedback,” 2017 IEEE World Haptics Conference (WHC): 213-218 https://doi.org/10.1109/ WHC.2017.7989903. 34 VibroWeight represents “low-cost hardware prototype with liquid metal” employing “bimodal feedback cues in VR, driven by adaptive absolute mass (weights) and gravity shift:” X. Wang et. al., “VibroWeight: simulating weight and center of gravity changes of objects in virtual reality for enhanced realism,” Human Computer Interaction (2022): https://doi.org/10.48550/ arXiv.2201.07078. 35 WeHAPTIC (Wearable Haptic interface for Accurate Position Tracking and Interactive force Control) “shows improved performances in terms of finger motion measurement and force feedback compared with existing systems such as finger joint angle calculation and precise force control:” Y. Park et. al., “WeHAPTIC: a Wearable Haptic interface for Accurate Position Tracking and Interactive force Control,” Mechanism and Machine Theory 153, (November 2020): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mechmachtheory.2020.104005. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 141 AN-ICON  objectives for improving these technologies.36 Furthermore, even though since the invention of the first haptic device in 194837 continuous improvements have been made, contem- porary interfaces present both a qualitative and quantitative deficit compared to the human haptic sensitivity, calling for “urgent requirement to improve the realism of haptic feed- back for VR systems, and thus to achieve equivalent sen- sation comparable to the interaction in a physical world.”38 While the expression “haptic realism,” coined by the philosopher of science Mazviita Chirimuuta in 2016, opens the hypothesis of a scientific perspectivism based on interaction with the world,39 the same expression when related to haptic interfaces assumes a more technical con- notation. As Sushma Subramanian points out in a conversa- tion during the 2020 World Haptics Conference with Ed Col- gate, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University, although haptic technologies still go through a “primitive” state, the short-term goal in their design is to “develop a new tactile language that mimics the kinds of maneuvers we make with three-dimensional objects” in which “the challenging part is to make us feel them.”40 A leading producer such as the Berlin-based Lofelt attempts to make interaction with the touch screen more realistic by combining sounds with the corresponding haptic vibrations 36 A. Brogni, D.G. Caldwell, M. Slater, “Touching sharp virtual objects produces a haptic illusion,” in R. Shumaker, ed., Virtual and Mixed Reality (Berlin Heidelberg: Springer, 2011): 234-242; A. Gallace, M. Girondini, “Social touch in virtual reality,” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 43 (February 2022): 249-254, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.11.006. It should be noted how the design of “pseudo-haptic feedback” is also nodal to the experience of touching in virtual environments. See in this regard A. Maehigashi et. al., “Virtual weight illusion: weight perception of virtual objects using weight illusion,” CHI ’21 Extended Abstracts (May 2021), https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451842. Furthermore, the design of an effective haptic illusion in a virtual environment is related to scale and precisely to the so-called “Body- scaling effect”: P. Abtahi, “From illusions to beyond-real interactions in virtual reality,” UIST ‘21: The Adjunct Publication of the 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (October 2021): 153-157, https://doi.org/10.1145/3474349.3477586. 37 As David Parisi reports, the invention of the first mechanical force feedback master- slave manipulator in nuclear field is due to the engineer Raymond Goertz of the Atomic Energy Commission for the Argonne National Laboratory. D. Parisi, Archaeologies of Touch. Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2018): 220-221. 38 D. Wang, “Haptic display:” 137. 39 M. Chirimuuta, “Vision, perspectivism, and haptic realism,” Philosophy of Science 83, no. 5 (December 2016), 746-756 https://doi.org/10.1086/687860. 40 S. Subramanian, How to Feel. The Science and Meaning of Touch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021): 250-251. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 142 AN-ICON  so that the user participates in an immersive experience. As Lofelt founder Daniel Büttner asserts: “it is all an illu- sion, but it seems incredibly real.”41 In a similar direction, the most advanced research conducted by the Intelligent Haptic program of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligence System aims to implement the sensitivity of electrovibra- tions.42 Evidence that haptic perception is one of the most promising experimental fields for the virtual world is reflect- ed in the great number of HORIZON programs supported by the European Union in the last five years,43 mainly dedi- cated to Mid-Air and Mixed Haptic Feedback technologies. Ultrahaptics, launched in 2013, consists in a haptic device system in which the force feedback is positioned above interactive surfaces and requires no contact with either tool, attaching to the surface itself. Instead, haptic sensations are projected through a screen and directly onto the user’s hands. It employs the principle of acoustic radiation force whereby a phased array of ultrasonic transducers is used to exert forces on a target in mid-air.44 H-Reality devices, on the other hand, employing mixed haptic feedback technology “aim at combining the contactless haptic technology with the contact haptic tech- nology and then apply it into virtual and augmented reality 41 R. Banham, “Haptic happenings: how touch technologies are taking on new meaning,” Dell Technologies (October 21, 2019): https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-us/perspectives/ haptic-happenings-how-touch-technologies-are-taking-on-new-meaning/, accessed December 11, 2022. 42 Y. Vardar, K.J. Kuchenbeker, L. Behringer, “Challenging the design of electrovibrations to generate a more realistic feel,” Haptic Intelligence Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (April 6, 2021): https://hi.is.mpg.de/news/challenging-the-design-of-electrovibrations-to- generate-a-more-realistic-feel, accessed December 11, 2022. 43 Among them we point out: Horizon 2020 (CORDIS), TACTIle Feedback Enriched Virtual Interaction through Virtual RealITY and beyond, (July 1, 2019-September 30, 2022): https:// cordis.europa.eu/project/id/856718/it, accessed December 11, 2022; Horizon 2020 (CORDIS), Multimodal Haptic with Touch Devices (March 1, 2020-February 29, 2024): https://cordis. europa.eu/project/id/860114/it, accessed December 11. 44 T. Carter et. al., “Ultrahaptics: multi-point mid-air haptic feedback for touch surfaces,” UIST ‘13: Proceedings of the 26th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (St. Andrews, UK: October 8-11, 2013): 505-506. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 143 AN-ICON  technologies.”45 These projects encourage “to achieve high-fidelity sensations through technology that is easy and comfortable to use, for both interactive augmented reality (AR) and immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences”;46 rendering potentially less unreachable that horizon of touch virtualisation from which Derrida took his cue. In assessing the role that illusion plays for the effective functioning of haptic technologies, it can be ques- tioned whether this prevalent position is distinctive of the digital era or if it represents a consolidated trope in haptic historiography, often centered on the theoretical and prac- tical opportunity to touch – or not! – sculpture, at times accused of being the least illusory of the arts.47 In under- taking the investigation from “haptics”48 to “haptic,”49 we will proceed in a parallel line to the essentially optical one 45 “H-Reality,” FET FX. Our future today (2020): http://www.fetfx.eu/project/h-reality/; see also: X. de Tinguy, C. Pacchierotti, A. Lécuyer, “Capacitive sensing for improving contact rendering with tangible objects in VR,” IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph – IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 27, no. 4 (December 2020): 2481-2487, https://doi. org/10.1109/TVCG.2020.3047689. 46 Horizon 2020 (CORDIS), Mixed Haptic Feedback for Mid-Air Interactions in Virtual and Augmented Realities (October 1, 2018- March 31, 2022): https://cordis.europa.eu/project/ id/801413/it, accessed December 11, 2022. 47 Is given below the renowned passage in Benedetto Varchi’s Paragone (1547) in which painters vituperate sculpture by stating: “They argue again from the difficulty of art, where, distinguishing the difficulty into two parts: in fatigue of body, and this as ignoble they leave to sculptors: and in fatigue of wit, and this as noble they reserve for them, saying that, besides the different manners and ways of working and coloring, in fresco, oil, tempera, glue and gouache, painting makes a figure foreshorten, [it] makes it seem round and raised in a flat field, making it break through and seem far away with all the appearances and vagueness that can be desired, giving to all their works lumens and shadows well observed according to the lumens and reverberations, which they hold to be a most difficult thing; and in conclusion they say that they make appear what is not: in which thing they seek effort and infinite artifice”, B. Varchi, Lezzione. Nella quale si disputa della maggioranza delle arti e qual sia più nobile, la scultura o la pittura (Firenze: Fondazione Memofonte, 1547): 38. 48 The plural noun haptics, deriving from the Greek feminine haptikós and the Neo-Latin hapticē, a term coined in 1685 by Isaac Barrow in Lectiones Mathematicae XXIII, is literally translated as “science of touch”. Haptics refers to the science of touch in a techno-media perspective, denoting the tactile feedback generated by those devices which, by sending artificial stimuli at proprioceptive, limbic and muscular levels, simulate the sensation of actual contact: “Haptics,” Merriam-Webster Dictionary (online): https://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/haptics, accessed December 11, 2022. 49 The Greek etymon haptō, from which derive the word haptos (tangible, sensitive), the predicate háptein and the adjective haptikós, from which derive the French haptique, the German haptisch/Haptik and the English haptic, means variously “able to come into contact with” (haptikós) and “to clasp, grasp, lace” (háptein). VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 144 AN-ICON  stabilized by Riegl,50 bearer of a critical fortune culminating with the later reworkings elaborated by Deleuze,51 Mald- iney,52 Dufrenne53, Marks54 and Barker.55 Concerning the covertly panoptic conception of the haptic that had been spreading in German Kunstwissenschaft since Hildebrand’s studies,56 it is necessary to turn our attention to the de- velopments taking place in the psychophysiological area around the same years. In the wake of Heinrich Weber’s pioneering studies on the sense of touch, in which sensory illusions after limbs amputation57 (the so-called Phantom Sensations)58 were classified as not accidentally probed; the first use of the term haptic in 1892 by another eclectic Berliner, Max Dessoir, was systematized almost simulta- neously by Edward Titchener.59 The rehabilitation of this 50 As Andrea Pinotti notes via Révész, “It is significant that, the year after the publication of Kunstindustrie, in an article in which he argues with Strzygowski, Riegl admits that the term taktisch (tastbar, from the Latin tangere) can lead to misunderstandings, and declares himself willing to adopt instead the term haptisch (from the Greek hapto), which the physiological literature had since long employed in its research on sensoriality. Perhaps a way, that of moving from Latin to Greek, to avoid any possible reference to the actual manual palpation and reaffirm the fundamental strength of the haptisch,” A. Pinotti, “Guardare o toccare? Un’incertezza herderiana,” Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico 2, no. 1 (2009): 186, https://doi.org/10.13128/Aisthesis-10953, trans. mine. For a first bibliographical framing of Riegl’s haptic construction see: M.R. Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); M. Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); S. Melville, “The temptation of new perspectives” (1990), in D. Preziosi, ed., The Art Of Art History. A Critic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): 274-283; G. Vasold, “‘Das Erlebnis des Sehens’. Zum Begriff der Haptik im Wiener fin de siècle,” Maske und Kothurn 62 (2016): 46-70. 51 G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon. Logic of Sensation (1981), trans. D.W. Smith (London-New York: Continuum, 2003): 122, 189. 52 See in this regard: A. Pinotti, “Style, rythme, souffle: Maldiney and kunstwissenschaft,” in J.-P. Charcosset, ed., Parole Tenue: Colloque du Centenaire du Maldiney á Lyon (Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, 2014): 49-59. 53 See in this respect: A. Pinotti, ed., Alois Riegl. Grammatica storica delle arti figurative (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2018), XLVI. 54 We refer specifically to the postcolonial construct of haptic visuality that Laura Marks derives and resemantizes from the lesson of Regl’s heritage: L.U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002): 4-7; L.U. Marks, The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham-London: Duke University Press, 2000): 162-171. 55 J.M. Barker, The Tactile Eye. Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley-Los Angeles- London: University of California Press, 2009): 37-38. 56 See in this regard: A. Pinotti, Il corpo dello stile. Storia dell’arte come storia dell’estetica a partire da Semper, Riegl, Wölfflin (Milano: Mimesis, 2001). See specifically the third section entitled “Occhio e mano:” 179-221. 57 M. Grunwald, M. John, “German pioneers of research into human haptic perception,” in M. Grunwald, ed., Human Haptic Perception. Basics and Applications (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008): 19. 58 T. Weiss, “Phantom sensations,” in M. Grunwald, ed., Human Haptic Perception. Basics and Applications (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008): 283-294. 59 D. Parisi, Archaeologies of Touch: 105. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 145 AN-ICON  obsolete Greek term, already Homeric and Aristotelian,60 reflects Dessoir’s will to deepen the investigation on touch by distinguishing the sensations of contact from the active exploration (Pselaphesie).61 This distinction, destined to become normative, emerged in the context of a network of experimental psychology laboratories scattered through- out the United States and orbiting around the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, inaugurated in 1875 by William James, although active only since 1892.62 While in 1890, James was able to discuss the “fallacy of the senses,” tak- ing his cue from the prominent Aristotelic finger illusion,63 consulting Harvard Laboratory appendix for the two years 1892-1893 shows how scientific trials on touch proceeded simultaneously to the study of optical illusions.64 A similar experimental path would culminate in 1893 with the pre- sentation of the Apparatus for Simultaneous Touches by William Krohn at Clark University.65 On the plexus mentioned above, the aestheti- cal and historiographical discourses are inserted and inter- twined, sanctioning the passage from the properly physio- logical illusion of touching to a metaphorical one, embodied by the rhetorical figure of “as if,” direct relative of Derrida’s inverted commas. That such a rhetorical stratagem con- stitutes a much older matter is recalled by the well-known querelle of Herderian uncertainty. As already pointed out by Andrea Pinotti, in his aesthetic treatise Plastik, Herder seems to allude to the possibility of a virtual touch, reproaching the sculptor who has never touched, not even in a dream, 60 M. Perniola, Il Sex Appeal dell’Inorganico (Torino: Einaudi, 1994): 95. 61 M. Dessoir, Über den Hautsinn (Separat-Abzug aus Archiv für Anatomie und Physiologie: Physiologische Abtheilung. 1892): 242. 62 G. Bruno, “Film, aesthetics, science: Hugo Münsterberg’s laboratory of moving images,” Grey Room 36 (Summer 2009): 88-113, https://doi.org/10.1162/grey.2009.1.36.88. 63 W. James, The Principles of Psychology (Ontario: York University, 1890): 87. 64 H. Munsterberg, Psychological Laboratory of Harvard University (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1893). Munsterberg recorded notes include: “Instrument for studying the fusion of touch sensations. After Krohn; made in Cambridge”; “Instrument for touch reaction, etc;” “Touch-reaction instrument, with twenty different stimuli. By Elbs, Freiburg. $20”. See also: Bruno, “Film”: 101-102. 65 W.O. Krohn, “Facilities in experimental psychology in the colleges of the United States” (1894), in C.D. Green, ed., Classics in the History of Psychology (Toronto: Tork University): https://www.sapili.org/subir-depois/en/ps000128.pdf; D. Parisi, Archaeologies: 144-147. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 146 AN-ICON  his creation.66 “The illusion has worked,”67 the philosopher will add, when the eye takes on the movements of the hand and then of a very thin ray, an emissary of the soul, which kinaesthetically embraces the sculpture as it becomes a body. In the wake of Konrad Lange’s Illusionsästhetik68 and J.H. Kirchmann and E. Von Hartmann’s doctrine of illusional feelings, the already mentioned Dessoir would achieve an even more drastic conclusion. Declaring that every work of art mainly satisfies a single sensory channel, this sensorial limitation “guarantees its illusory character,” generating the paradoxical situation of “a conscious self-deception, of a continued and deliberate confusion of reality and illusion.”69 However, it was not until the art-historical de- bate of the early 1950s – while the earliest haptic devices were designed – that an open polarization was reached regarding whether or not sculptures should be touched. On the one hand Herbert Read, moving from the psychological studies of Arnheim, Wundt, Lowenfeld, and Révész, could argue that “for the sculptor, tactile values are not an illusion to be created on a two-dimensional plane: they constitute a reality of being conveyed directly, as existent mass. Sculp- ture is an art of palpation.”70 On the other hand, a fervent detractor such as the modernist Greenberg would have drastically overturned this assumption.71 Both consistent readers of Berenson, whose normative and ambivalent 66 A. Pinotti, Guardare o toccare: 189; J.G. Herder, Sculpture. Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream (1778), ed. J. Gaiger (Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002): 41. 67 A. Pinotti, Guardare o toccare: 189; J.G. Herder, Some Observations: 41. 68 For an introduction to the subject see: D. Romand, “Konrad Lange on ‘the Illusion of Materials’ in painting and visual arts: revisiting a psychoaesthetic theory of the perception of material properties,” in J. Stumpel, M. Wijntjes, eds., Art and Perception. An International Journal of Art and Perception Science, Special Issue: The Skin of Things: On the Perception and Depiction of Materials 7, no. 3-4 (2021): 283-289. 69 M. Dessoir, Aesthetics and Theory of Art. Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (1906), trans. S.A. Emery, (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1970): 53. 70 H. Read, The Art of Sculpture (London: Faber & Faber, 1954): 49. 71 We are referring specifically to Greenberg’s harsh and inflexible review of Read’s monograph: C. Greenberg, “Roundness isn’t all,” (November 25, 1956), in J. O’ Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism 3 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995): 272. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 147 AN-ICON  “tactile values”72 find a more truthful attestation in the cor- ollary categories of “ideated sensations,” “ideated satisfac- tions” and “ideal sensation of contact,”73 Read and Green- berg finally reached an unexpected consonance. Whilst Read claimed the experience of sculpture as distinctive of haptic perception and, specifically, for the prehensility of the hand; Greenberg denied the appropriateness of such fruition, attributing tactile stimuli to the visual sphere. Mean- while, Herder’s uncertainty remains. Indeed, as David J. Getsy noted, it is ultimately unclear whether Read wished for a knowledge of the plastic work through its palpation or maintained such contact on a substantially preliminary and physiological condition.74 In order to enrich the corpus of sources of such a querelle numerous other examples could be made; none- theless, one of the most promising scenarios for its analysis, as prophetically announced by Derrida, is offered by the exploration through haptic interfaces of digitized artifacts in museums. When the veto of touching the work of art lapses and the distinction between actual and fictional flattens out, which horizons are opened by the possibility of touching? Will it be a “tactile vertigo” in the sense of Baudrillard, in which the virtual object expired at the status of a trompe- l’œil image soliciting a “tactile hyper presence of things, as though one could hold them,” despite its phantasmagorical essence?75 Can these finally touchable bodies add much 72 A. Brown, “Bernard Berenson and ‘tactile values’ in Florence,” in J. Connors, ed., Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, 2014). For an analysis highlighting the subtle pantheism underlying Berenson’s work, see: A. Pinotti, “The touchable and the untouchable. Merleau-Ponty and Bernard Berenson,” Phenomenology 2005 3, no. 2, (2007): 479-498. 73 B. Berenson, Aesthetics and History (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1948): 24-25, 74. 74 As David J. Getsy pointedly notes: “Read did not necessarily argue that the viewer must touch the sculpture in order to appreciate it, as Greenberg would have us believe. Rather, it was the aggregate experience of tactility that provides us with an ability to assess ponderability and the non-visual traits of any object. Our haptic sensibility and our sense of the physical environment are both closely tied to our own ever-developing repertoire of tactile and physical experiences”; D.J. Getsy, “Tactility or opticality, Henry Moore or David Smith: Herbert Read and Clement Greenberg on The Art of Sculpture, 1956,” in R. Peabody, ed., Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945–1975 (Los Angeles: Getty Publication, 2011): 111-112. 75 J. Baudrillard, Seduction (1979), trans. B. Singer (Montréal: New World Perspectives. Culture Text Series, 1990): 62-63. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 148 AN-ICON  to the illusory palpation of the work of art on a semantic level, if not on a phenomenological one? Haptic technologies and museums, the imaginative frontiers of the phenomenology of touch In order to present a critical account of how haptic technologies are being employed in museums, and to investigate to what extent the projects designed within these environments fully explore the illusory potential of vir- tual haptic experiences, a preliminary discussion on analog touch in museums is needed. The use of haptic technolo- gies within museum settings,76 which has widely increased in the last decades, is in fact not something new to cultural experiential models,77 and more the reinstatement of prac- tices which had been common policies in museums from their foundation to the middle of the nineteenth century. While today it is “generally taken for granted that museums collections are not for touching”78 seventeenth- and eigh- teenth-century museum visitors were customarily free to pick up precious and delicate relics, enjoying their sense of touch as a fundamental part of their overall experience. More specifically, touch in early museums was used for four different reasons:79 learning (as touching an object provided relevant information that through sight could not be obtained, like its weight), aesthetic appreciation (touch was considered to allow an embodied understanding of the 76 For a comprehensive account on how the importance of touch has been re-evaluated in the museum sector in the past three decades please cfr. G. Black, The Engaging Museum: Developing Museums for Visitor Involvement (Oxford: Routledge, 2005); E. Pye, The Power of Touch: Handling Objects in Museums and Heritage Contexts (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007), H. Chatterjee, Touch in Museums: Policy and Practice in Object Handling (Oxford: Berg, 2008); F. Candlin, Art, Museums and Touch (Manchester: University of Manchester Press: 2010), and S. Dudley, ed., Museum Objects: Experiencing the Properties of Things (London: Routledge, 2012). 77 C. Classen, The Deepest Sense. A Cultural History of Touch (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012): 136-146. 78 Ibid.: 137. 79 A synthetic account of the reasons why touch was a common practice in museums can be found in Classen, The Deepest Sense: 139-142. For other discussions on the topic please cfr. D. Howes, “Introduction to sensory museology,” The Senses and Society 9, no. 3 (2014): 259- 267 https://doi.org/10.2752/174589314X14023847039917 and R.F. Ovenell, The Ashmolean Museum, 1683–1894 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 149 AN-ICON  nature of the display), imaginary potential (by holding an ar- tifact visitors could get emotionally in touch with its original owner or maker) and healing powers (especially religious relics, when touched or eaten,80 where deemed able to cure illnesses and pains). As it appears evident already from this first account, not all yet some of the functions of touch in museums had to do with the potential to empower imagina- tive accounts, associating the role of touching not only with evidentiary information, yet also with intangible and elusive, even powerful, qualities. From the mid of the nineteenth century touch was banned from museums:81 conservation matters became more and more relevant, while parallelly touch in itself came to be classified as a secondary sense, one “associated with irrationality and primitivism.”82 These two reasons account for two extremely different discourses, one linked to practical aspects and to the preservation of cultural heritage, the second pertaining to a conceptual sphere, having to do with epistemic premises and their museological consequences. Today, well into the third decade of the 21st century, the situation in museums seems to be closer to that of three centuries ago than to the end of the last Millenium. Touch seems to have regained its epistemic status,83 and modern haptic technologies allow its employment without the need to endanger precious artifacts. The great differ- ence, however, is that machines and proxies mediate the haptic experience, defining its phenomenology. The ques- tion which arises, at this point, seems to be to what extent these technologies are and will be designed with the aim 80 For a historical account of the healing powers of ancient religious relics cfr. K. Arnold, “Skulls, mummies and unicorns’ horns: medicinal chemistry in early english museums,” in R.G.W. Anderson et al., Enlightening the British: Knowledge, Discovery and the Museum in the Eighteenth Century (London: The British Museum Press, 2003), also E. Brown, An Account of Several Travels through a Great Part of Germany (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1677), and D. Murray, Museums: Their History and Use, vol. 1. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1904): 40, 50, 73. 81 For an account of the historical reasons which led to this change cfr. Classen, The Deepest Sense: 143-146, and F. Candlin, Art, Museums and Touch. 82 C. Classen, The Deepest Sense. A Cultural History of Touch: XIV. 83 For a discussion on the epistemic value of touch please cfr. C. Classen, The Book of Touch (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005), M. Peterson, The Senses of Touch (London: Routledge, 2007), M.P. Gadoua, “Making sense through touch. Handling collections with Inuit Elders at the McCord Museum,” The Senses and Society 9, no. 3 (2014): 323-341 https://doi.org/10.2752/1 74589314X14023847039719. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 150 AN-ICON  to mirror the original analog functions of touch, or whether they will be built and employed with the goal to expand the potential of the haptic experience. With regards to this, it will be important to understand on which of the qualities of touch – amongst the seventeenth century list aforemen- tioned – they will leverage on. Whilst, on the one hand, they could aim at faithfully reproducing the phenomenological qualities of touch, the paragraphs above have shown how there is a wider illusory character that these technologies could be aiming at capturing, one which could hopefully open up new experiential frontiers. Whilst there isn’t one single comprehensive ac- count which maps the state of the arts of haptic technolog- ical development in the museum system, literature in this field has been growing recently. This thanks to researches that discuss the regained relevance of touch in educational settings, together with publications which analyze individ- ual projects designed and carried through by museum re- search centers.84 A vast number of these studies highlight how haptic technologies allow visitors to “explore new par- adigms of interaction”85 leveraging on the “quality and use- fulness of computer-based exhibits.”86 This is granted as the sense of touch “is an essential part of how we interact, explore, perceive and understand our surroundings”87 and therefore incorporating object based learning in museum 84 For other interesting case studies analyzing the role of haptic technologies in museums please cfr. R. Comes, “Haptic devices and tactile experiences in museum exhibitions,” Journal of Ancient History and Archeology 3, no. 4 (2016) https://doi.org/10.14795/j.v3i4.205; F. Fischnaller “The last supper interactive project. The illusion of reality: perspective and perception,” in G. Amoruso, ed., Putting Tradition into Practice: Heritage, Place and Design, Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering 3, (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018) https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57937-5_73; M.H. Jamil et al., “The role of haptics in digital archaeology and heritage recording processes”, 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Haptic, Audio and Visual Environments and Games (HAVE) (2018): 1-6 https://doi.org/10.1109/ HAVE.2018.8547505. 85 A. Frisoli et al., “Evaluation of the pure-form haptic displays used for exploration of works of art at museums,” report on the project findings, 2005 retrieved at https://www.researchgate. net/publication/228584199_Evaluation_of_the_pure-form_haptic_displays_used_for_ exploration_of_works_of_art_at_museums/ related on the 31/01/2022. 86 S. Brewster, “The impact of haptic ‘touching’ technology on cultural applications,” in J. Hemsley, V. Cappellini, G. Stanke, eds., Digital Applications for Cultural Heritage Institutions, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005): Chap. 30, 273-284, 282. 87 M. Novak et al., “There is more to touch than meets the eye: haptic exploration in a science museum,” International Journal of Science Education 42, no. 18 (2020): 3026-3048 https://doi. org/10.1080/09500693.2020.1849855. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 151 AN-ICON  experiences increases autonomy and satisfaction.88 The information that visitors can acquire through touch appears today relevant as it did at the beginning of museum histo- ry, and it has become obtainable without endangering the artifacts. 3D replicas of material artifacts associated with a range of wearable or desktop devices are the predominant technologies used across museum experiments, engaging users through mainly force feedback and kinetic stimuli.89 While providing an account of the state of the arts of the literature and case studies in this sector is not one of the goals of this essay, a series of examples have been cho- sen as they have been deemed relevant to the research at hand: assessing to what extent haptic museum experience expand and explore their full – at times illusory – potential. A widely discussed experiment in the field is the Museum of Pure Form, “a collective project ran in the early 2000s by a series of European museums creating 3D digital replicas of their artifacts and making available a technology which allowed for the haptic experience of them.”90 This pivotal program engaged a series of museums across Eu- rope91 who collected a shared archive of digital replicas of their statues, and then produced a touring exhibition which installed wearable devices (exoskeleton wearable arm) and or desktop devices (two robotic arms departing from sup- port columns placed in front of the visualization screen) in front of the original statues.92 Overall, findings on the exper- iment registered both amusement (70% of attendees) and instructiveness (39%) across visitors.93 The shared belief, confirmed by the analysis conducted simultaneously as the 88 M. Novak et al., “There is more to touch that meets the eye:” 3044. 89 In the literature it is possible to find studies which evaluate both collaborative endeavors and researches ran by single institutions. Overall, the collaboration between universities or tech companies and cultural institutions seems a fundamental premise in order to allow for trials and studies that evaluate the impact of these projects. 90 A. Frisoli, “Evaluation of the pure-form haptic displays used for exploration of works of art at museums.” 91 The Galician Centre for Contemporary Arts in Santiago de Compostela, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Pisa, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Stockholm, the Conservation Centre at National Museums Liverpool and the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London. 92 A. Frisoli, “Evaluation of the pure-form haptic displays used for exploration of works of art at museums:” 2. 93 Ibid.: 6. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 152 AN-ICON  project, was that the opportunity to use a device to touch the digital replica of a statue while looking at it enforced the learning experience. Something which, as aforementioned, was deemed constitutive of the relevance of touch in early museum experiences. As this case study shows, together with many that have followed, it seems that one of the main concerns of museum professionals and researchers in de- signing digital haptic experiences seems to be supplying to the lost opportunity to touch the artworks, thus enabling the visitor to enjoy a wider range of information regarding the statue and, consequently, enriching the learning expe- rience. This, however, faces a series of relevant limitations on the phenomenological level, as discussed above with reference to Wang’s analysis in Haptic Display. It appears, from this first account, that the use of haptic technologies is not necessarily seen as a strategy to experiment and widen the cultural experience, yet instead as a way to re- cuperate something that contemporary curatorial practices do not allow – namely to touch originals. With reference to this point, it is interesting to see that there are several researches actually comparing the haptic experience that visitors can have touching the replica of an artifact or its 3D version.94 It appears that “the comparison between the haptic device and the replica showed that the multi-finger tactile interaction with the replica produced considerably richer information than the single-point contact of the hap- tic device.”95 What the citation implies is that the technology used provided a less phenomenologically rich experience 94 Interesting accounts on this debate can be found in M. Dima, L. Hurcombe, M. Wright, “Touching the past: haptic augmented reality for museum artefacts,” in R. Shumaker, S. Lackey, eds., Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality. Applications of Virtual and Augmented Reality. VAMR 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 8526. (Cham: Springer, 2014) https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-07464-1_1. Also cfr. S. Ceccacci et al., “The role of haptic feedback and gamification in virtual museum systems,” Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 14, no. 3 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1145/3453074, and F. Stanco et al., “Virtual anastylosis of Greek sculpture as museum policy for public outreach and cognitive accessibility,” Journal of Electronic Imaging 26, no. 1, 011025 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JEI.26.1.011025. 95 M. Dima, L. Hurcombe, M. Wright, “Touching the past: haptic augmented reality for museum artefacts:” 6. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 153 AN-ICON  compared to the touching of the printed replica, which if possible is deemed a better alternative. As of today, the technical limitations that most devices used in museums present contribute to a scenario where physical touch, even if of replicas, seems to be fa- vored. The reasons why haptic technology is preferred are not experiential factors; they have to do with practical and managerial concerns, such as the fact that digital replicas do not occupy physical space and that they can be expe- rienced also remotely. It appears that these technologies, if competing on a purely phenomenological level and trying to mirror haptic experiences that occur in reality, are des- tined to have a limited contribution to cultural experiences, being the only alternative yet not a solution which in itself holds value. Other case studies can however add further layers to the use of haptic technologies in museum set- tings, offering opportunities that neither physical statues nor printed replicas could elicit. A research published by the Journal of Electronic Imaging illustrates the case of the vir- tual anastylosis of a Greek sculpture, operated by digitally combining a head and a torso held in two different heritage sites in Sicily.96 The two ancient pieces, one hosted in the Museum of Castello Ursino in Catania and the other in the Archeological Museum of Siracusa, were hypothesized by archeologists to be parts of the same statue due to stylistic features. This theory was, however, never proved as neither of their hosting institutions was willing to dislocate one of the pieces for the necessary analysis to be performed. Through digital imaging and 3D rendering it was however possible to demonstrate the perfect match of the two parts of the statue, creating a new object that was then made accessible through the use of haptic technology – in this case the haptic device 3D Systems Touch – and thanks to the collaboration with the Center for Virtualization and Applied Spatial Technologies, University of South Florida. A 96 F. Stanco et al., “Virtual anastylosis of Greek sculpture as museum policy for public outreach and cognitive accessibility.” VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 154 AN-ICON  dedicated effort was made to ensure that the new technol- ogy would account for people with cognitive and physical disabilities, another potentiality that haptic technologies hold and on which research is being tailored.97 Whilst this case highlights the strategic contribution that modern tech- nologies can provide to both research and fruition, it could be argued that the added value here is given by the fact that this statue could have otherwise never been seen or felt, yet not in a manner which depends, from a specifically phenomenological perspective, on the haptic technology itself. Hence reinforcing the understanding that the main use of these technologies is directed towards reinstating the original – and lost – hard value of touch, not necessarily adding new levels of experience. Another case, involving virtually touching the torso of Michelangelo’s David at Monash University,98 can prove useful to enrich the discussion on the use of haptic technologies in museums. What emerges from this study, which in terms of research methodology mirrors the vast majority of cases in the literature in creating a 3D digital replica and then experiencing it through the Phantom, is that the images reproduced digitally “allow the user to focus on particular details that they may overlook otherwise.”99 What appears here is that the virtual experiential setting creates the opportunity for the user to actually grasp some details of the statue that he would have not been able to experience with either the original or with a 3D printed 97 There are a number of experiments within the field of haptic technologies which focus specifically on accessibility for people with impared cognitive and physical abilities. An interesting research center is the one of the University of Glasgow, which ran two trials in this field, one called Senses in Touch II, and the other MultiVis project. A complete account of the two researches can be found in Brewster, “The impact of haptic ‘touching’ technology on cultural applications:” 279-282. Another interesting research which discusses the potential of haptics for the visually impaired is G. Jansson, M. Bergamasco, A. Frisoli, “A new option for the visually impaired to experience 3D art at museums: manual exploration of virtual copies,” Visual Impairment Research 5, no. 1 (2003): 1-12 https://doi.org/10.1076/vimr.5.1.1.15973. Also cfr. R. Vaz, D. Freitas, A. Coelho, “Blind and visually impaired visitors’ experiences in museums: increasing accessibility through assistive technologies,” The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum 13, no. 2 (June 2020): 57-80, https://doi.org/10.18848/1835-2014/CGP/ v13i02/57-80. 98 M. Butler, P. Neave, “Object appreciation through haptic interaction,” Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (Melbourne: Ascilite, 2008), 133-141. 99 Ibid.: 140. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 155 AN-ICON  replica. The flexibility of digital images, their potential to be modulated, modified and enlarged, appears, in this case, to actually add a further layer to the visitor experience. The higher attention to detail deepens and expands the experience in a manner that is specific of, and exclusive to, digital haptic technologies. Whilst this last example seems to slightly brighten the scenario described, the cases discussed so far account for an employment of haptic technologies which struggles to emancipate itself from a traditional under- standing of touch in cultural experiences. The three cases analyzed, far from providing a comprehensive account of the multitude of programmes that have been carried out across the museum sector in the past years, have how- ever been chosen as they are representative of the main trends found in the literature. Overall, researchers seem to have been focused mainly on trying to bring back an aspect of experience which was lost, and less keen on the advanced possibilities that haptic technologies might hold. With reference to the technological and historical discus- sion presented above, regarding haptic illusions, it does not appear that these seem to be at the center of experimental designs in the museum sector, where the understanding of touch seems to recall more the “hard undeniable evidence” school than the more subtle and rich understanding of the haptic which encompasses its illusory character. This de- pends on a number of reasons, related to both cultural, professional and economic factors. A further fundamental aspect to take into account, when discussing the use of haptic technologies in museums, is in fact the high cost of these devices. The more sophisticated they are, the higher their prices, which makes it difficult for museums to afford them, even harder to update them. Main advancements with haptic technologies are in fact usually in other fields of research with richer funding, such as medicine and engi- neering. This leads to the second limitation, namely that to innovatively experiment with these technologies, technical and diverse professional skills are required. Even though most programmes within museums are run in collaboration VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 156 AN-ICON  with universities and research centers, the degree of com- plexity that pertains to these projects needs a pull of pro- fessionals which is hard to put together and coordinate in the current economic and professional climate. There are, however, a few interesting cases that, at times even without the use of high budgets and elevated skills, seem to leverage on the wider range of possibilities that these technologies offer. Interestingly enough, these also relate to two of the original functions of touch valued in early museums: the aesthetic enrichment of the expe- rience and the emotional potential of haptics. It appears that when haptic technologies are being employed with the aim of enacting and recalling these elements – as opposed to when they try to give back the evidentiary character of touch – the result are more imaginative endeavors, allowing for the creation of a further semantic level of experience. One first interesting case is a very recent ex- periment conducted at University College London, where a student has designed a device which, through the use of capacitive touch sensors, wants to “help us understand what an artist felt at the time they created their work by recreating their sensory experiences.”100 The project idea, which rests on the theoretical background of embodied knowledge as an extension of the mind and of embodied practice as a means to feel the emotions of an artist,101 was inspired by an artwork: The Face of Christ by Claude Mellan, hosted in the UCL Art Museum. By looking closely at the artwork, the author of the project realized that the whole drawing had been made through the design of one single spiraling line, a unique technique. His idea was therefore to design a device which could enable the viewer to create 100 F. Taylor, “Recreating sensory experience: how haptic technology could help us experience art in new ways,” UCL Culture Blog, (July 13, 2020) https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ museums/2020/07/13/recreating-sensory-experience-how-haptic-technology-could-help-us- experience-art-in-new-ways/ on the 31/01/2022, accessed December 11, 2022. 101 When the author discusses embodied knowledge as an extension of the mind the reference is I. Martínková, “Body ecology: avoiding body–mind dualism,” Loisir et Société / Society and Leisure 40, no. 1 (2017): 101-112, https://doi.org/10.1080/07053436.2017.1281 528; whilst when discussing embodied practices as a means to feel emotions of artists the specific reference in the literature is D. Freedberg, V. Gallese, “Motion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 5 (2007): 197-203, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.tics.2007.02.003. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 157 AN-ICON  a contact with the motion that had originated the artwork, building a direct emotional connection with the artist. As the author describes it “through an audio feedback loop, the device I designed takes in touch inputs from a view- er of the artwork and returns a religious-sounding choral soundtrack when the spiral gesture from the engraving is drawn correctly with a finger. The spiral gesture,” he adds, “was directly extracted from The Face of Christ with the help of a custom python script which made use of various image analysis libraries.”102 What can be highlighted in reading about this project, which at this point consist of just a first artisanal prototype, is the way in which haptic technologies are used to explore unusual and often overlooked aspects of artworks. Whilst the potential of these technologies in broadening the field of aesthetic experience is well estab- lished, there are some developments specific to this case worth expanding on. Interestingly enough, the author re- fers specifically to the idea of building a connection with the painter who made The Face of Christ, recuperating the same reasoning that mid eighteenth-century museum goers had when holding a precious object.103 In comparing the attempt to get in touch with the past before and after haptic technologies, moreover, the added value brought by the device seems clear. Whilst in the original case a visitor had to actively exercise the power of imagination in order to build a connection, in this instance the device guides the user into the experience, leveraging on the emotional potential of a multisensory environment which starts from the drawn line, develops into an haptic apparatus and is then sublimated through sound. What emerges with regards to this example, and in contrast with the ones analyzed before, is the way in which the designer of the project has overcome the need to merely attempt to replicate the touch- ing experience, and decided to exploit both the phenom- enological and the imaginative potential of the technology 102 F. Taylor, Recreating sensory experience: How haptic technology could help us experience art in new ways. 103 A detailed account of an emotional and imaginative encounter between a museum goer and an artifact can be found in S.A. La Roche, Sophie in London, 1786: Being the Diary of Sophie Von La Roche, trans. C. Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933): 107-108. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 158 AN-ICON  at his disposal. Further, this has been done in an artisanal and experimental fashion, not through the use of excessive resources and a big team of professionals. Another experimental program worth consid- ering, in this case definitely a more costly and collective endeavor, is an exhibition held at Tate Britain in 2015, Tate Sensorium (Fig. 2).104 The research background behind this project refers to a scientific field which experiments with the power of haptics to elicit emotions. More specifically, these projects study how mid-air haptic technology – a specific subset – is able to condition human emotions (e.g., happy, sad, excited, afraid) through tactile stimulation.105 While the literature in the field of mid haptics is still at a very early experimental stage, and definitive conclusions are yet to be drawn, progress has been made in mapping the correlation between aspects of haptics and emotional states. What was done at Tate was to organize an exhibition which built a fully sensory environment around four paintings: Interior II by Richard Hamilton, Full Stop by John Latham, In the Hold by David Bomberg, and Figure in a Landscape by Francis Bacon. In a detailed article106 presenting a study on the exhibition, the specific experience of Full Stop is analyzed. What the curators did was to position a mid-air haptic device in front of the painting, and synchronize a range of mid-air haptic patterns inside the device with a self-developed software that could read Musical Instru- ment Digital Interface (MIDI) inputs. The design was curated by a sound designer who could control the mid-air haptic patterns (frequency, intensity, and movement paths) to cre- ate a desired experience synched with music. As detailed through the article, this exhibition was the first time that mid-air haptic technology was used in a museum context VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 159 AN-ICON  over a prolonged period of time and integrated with sound to enhance the experience of visual art. This “work demon- strates how novel mid-air technology can make art more emotionally engaging and stimulating, especially abstract art that is often open to interpretation,”107 as it was proved by collecting positive feedback from over 2500 visitors. The aim of the authors, as clearly stated across the research, was to advance understanding of multisensory signals in relation to art, experiences and design, based on novel interactive technologies. Referencing back to the reasons why touch was valued in early museums, this experiment seems to fit in the category which uses haptics to enhance the aesthetic experience of the visitors: anticipating that haptics carry value not only on a purely informative sensory level, but eliciting a wider level of complexity. Conclusions Overall, there seems to be a wide potential for using haptic technologies in museum settings and leverag- ing on the ways in which these devices can contribute to the cultural experience of artifacts. The two final case studies here examined clearly exemplify how haptic technologies can help in generating a new experiential layer, one which rests on a complex phenomenological understanding of the haptics and establishes an active dialogue with the entire sensorium of the experiencer. Both cases show a designed synchronization between the tactile experience and the sense of hearing, suggesting that one of the ways to experiment with the haptic is by interrogating a more en- vironmental and organic understanding of the relationship between the senses. Interestingly, the more complex and enhancing experiences are characterized by stimuli that do not just mimic the act of touching, thus attempting to reinstate the lost chance of touching the artwork, yet play with the illusory potential of haptics and with the other 107 Ibid.: 1. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 160 AN-ICON  qualities of touch valued in early museums: the evocative and imaginistic potential of the haptic experience. The analysis from the museum sector, when linked to the technological and historical accounts regard- ing the link between the haptic and the figure of illusion, suggests the value of exploring the ways in which haptic technologies can emancipate us from a reductive under- standing of touch. Certainly, all museum endeavors and experiments will have to take into account a variety of prac- tical and concrete concerns, which also play an important part in defining the destiny of cultural projects. It is not given that exploring the illusory potential of haptic technologies represents in itself the best choice for a museum research. Yet, it can be concluded that when designed in an open dialogue with our whole sensorium these technologies ap- pear empowered in their visionary potential, making Derri- da’s observation more actual than ever: the nexus between touch and virtuality is as real as it gets. Fig 2. Tate Sensorium exhibition at Tate Britain in 2015, installation shot of Full Stop (1961) by John Latham © John Latham Estate. Photo: Tate. Illustration of a participant experiencing the second painting combining vision, auditory, and haptic. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 161 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/17297

The haptics of illusion: an account of touch across theories, technologies and museums by Valentina Bartalesi and Anna Calise Haptic Technology Illusion Virtuality Museums Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing The haptics of il usion. An account of touch across theories, technologies and museums VALENTINA BARTALESI, Università IULM – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8596-4014 ANNA CALISE, Università IULM – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2966-7613 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17297 Abstract Touch represents one of the latest and most complex frontiers of virtuality: a sense which historical- ly seems to have carried the burden of proof on reality, by definition resistant to illusory environments. The paper begins from this assumption to trace a history of illusion across authors and theorists that have debated the stat- ute of haptics, building a dialogue between philosophical dilemmas and technological developments. Moving both from an aesthetic and psychophysiological viewpoint, the article will root its analysis in an historical-artistic account, augmenting the discussion with a series of case studies from the museum sector. The introduction of haptic tech- nologies within cultural institutions, which dates back to the last three decades, proves an interesting field to test the functions which touch plays in both educational and imaginative scenarios. The open question being whether modern technologies should aim at replicating haptic re- alism in miming phenomenological accuracy, or whether the most innovative applications need to aspire to a more environmental employment of touch. Keywords Haptic Technology Illusion Virtuality Museums To quote this essay: V. Bartalesi, A. Calise, “The haptics of illusion. An account of touch across theories, technologies and museums,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 133-161, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17297 VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 133 AN-ICON Fig 1. Creation of a new style of media art using digital paints in a harmonization of the senses of vision and touch. It seems that we have so often been warned not to touch that we are reluctant to probe the tactile world even with our minds. Constance Classen The Deepest Sense. A Cultural History of Touch, 2012 Introduction In his Post-Scriptum addendum, alongside his monumental survey on the polysemy of touch in Nancy through the history of Western philosophy, Derrida de- nounced a widespread prejudice whereby “one sponta- neously has the tendency to believe that touching re­sists virtualization.”1 Through this acute remark, the French phi- losopher underlies a consolidated topos that attributes to the sense of touch the ability to convey a direct and objec- tive knowledge of the things of the world, captured in their physical and even theoretical dimension.2 By questioning the supposed identity relationship between touch and ob- jectivity, the author opens a new perspective on the sub- ject, widening the ways in which the world of haptics could be conceptualized and practiced. For the purpose of the 1 J. Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005): 300. 2 Cfr. J.-L. Nancy, Corpus (Paris: Metailie, 1992): 76; M. Paterson, The Sense of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Oxford: Berg, 2007): 2-3; C. Classen, D. Howes, Ways of Sensing (New York: Routledge, 2014): 89; A. Gallace, C. Spence, In Touch with the Future: The Sense of Touch from Cognitive Neuroscience to Virtual Reality, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 3. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 134 AN-ICON  argument presented here, Derrida’s considerations prove pivotal: the aim will be to try and deepen his assumption, investigating the relationship between illusion, haptic per- ception and works of art. Addressing the possibility that both the theory and practice which anticipate and guide haptic experiences and technologies account for an illusory character, escaping the grounds of undeniable certainty and adherence to reality which are at times linked to the discourse on touch. This study will in fact envisage the possibility that illusion imposes itself as a constitutive figure of haptic feeling both on a theoretical level and on a technical one. The research will focus on how the experience of touching plastic objects changes from the analogical dimension to the digital one, first from a theoretical point of view and then across a range of case studies within the museum sector. In the peculiar phenomenon of touching sculpture in a virtual environment employing haptic devices, the il- lusion changes its function: before a theoretical figure, it becomes an experiential strategy. Not necessarily aimed at generating a phenomenological surplus, which as we will see most technologies are not able to offer, but at of- fering the possibility of a semantic shift on an emotional and aesthetic level. The study will begin with an assess- ment of Derrida’s theorizing on the haptic and on virtuality, highlighting the inherent illusory character that seems to be shared by both virtual haptic museological experiences and the theorizing of “haptic” itself, a link captured by the author already in his work On Touching. While borrowing from Derrida the relevance of museum practices as case studies for the discussion on the haptic, this article will however assess evidentiary accounts in the second sec- tion of the text. Before addressing the case studies, it was deemed necessary to elaborate two relevant premises. On the one hand, a thorough account of haptic technologies and of the current theoretical issues that guide their design will be presented, with reference to the challenges posed by haptic illusions. On the other hand, a historiographic account of the fundamental role that the concept of illusion VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 135 AN-ICON  has played in the theorizing of the haptic discourse will be offered. Through this analysis, we aim to hopefully demon- strate the structural role played by the figure of illusion in both theoretical and technological designs, strengthening the rationale which serves as the guiding principle of the discussion at hand. The second section, following Derrida’s intuition and using museological haptic technologies case studies, will try to assess how these premises relate to the cultural offer available to the public. Beginning from the relationship between touching and cultural artifacts, and more specifically sculptures, which has played a central role in both philosophical and museological undertakings, a history of touch in museums will be briefly traced, con- necting contemporary endeavors to their historical pre- decessors. Then a series of relevant case studies will be presented, trying to understand, by looking closely at their design and reception, what aspect of the haptic experience they aimed to leverage on, and therefore which epistemic and experiential qualities were privileged. It will emerge that when museums are trying to reinstate the evidentiary nature of the haptic experience, and focus on mimicking a reductive understanding of the phenomenology of touch, the results might be scientifically interesting yet not experi- entially powerful. By contrast, when the more evocative and illusory qualities of the haptic are investigated, exploiting a more environmental and multifaceted account of the haptic experience, a new and promising use of haptic technolo- gies is possible.3 “Tact beyond the possible:”4 illusion as a figure of the haptic between historiography and psycho-aesthetics The teleological value of the human hand as a pro toto organ of the sense of touch is a recurring trope in the history of philosophy, from Kant, through Herder, de 3 Although the paper is the result of a collective research and reflection work made by the two authors, the first section was written by Valentina Bartalesi, the second one by Anna Calise. 4 J. Derrida, On Touching: 66. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 136 AN-ICON  Miran, Husserl, until Katz, Focillon, Révész, and Gibson.5 In Derrida’s analysis the haptic, assumed as a not stric- tu sensu6 sense that “virtually” involves the sensorium in its obscure intricacy,7 is qualified by the peculiar “motor activity”8 of the human hand. Yet, while recognizing the constitutive motility of this sensory faculty, Derrida refus- es such preliminary immediacy, claiming with Nancy its “local, fractal, modal” nature.9 If these adjectives partially complicate the meaning of touching on an ontological level, they seem to encourage the reflection towards a technical sphere, according to an address that Derrida tries to verify. As a proof of the fragility of a way of thinking that a priori denies the possibility of virtualizing touch, the philosopher presents a significant case study for that time: the Haptic Museum in California.10 In spite of the limited evidence still available with regards to this institution, its mission appears clear. As Margaret L. Mclaughlin of the Integrated Media Systems Center (University of Southern California) states: Our IMSC team has used haptics to allow museum visitors to ex- plore three-dimensional works of art by “touching” them, some- thing that is not possible in ordinary museums due to prevailing “hands-off” policies. Haptics involves the modality of touch-the sensation of shape and texture an observer feels when exploring 5 J. Derrida, On Touching: 41-42, 95, 122, 140. See in this respect: L.A. Jones, S.J. Lederman, Human Hand Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006): 6; A. Benjamin, “Endless touching: Herder and sculpture,” Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico 4, no. 1, (2011): 73-92, https://doi.org/10.13128/Aisthesis-10983; H. Focillon, “Éloge de la main” (1934), in Vie des Formes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981); G. Révész, The Human Hand (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958); J.J. Gibson, “Observations on active touch,” Psychological Review 69, no. 6 (November 1962): 477-491, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0046962. 6 J. Derrida, On Touching: 53, 149. 7 Ibid.: 42. 8 Ibid.: 142. 9 As noted by: “But there again-and this, too, has to be clear only upon the condition that tact does not concentrate, does not lay claim as Descartes’s touching does to the privilege given to immediacy, which would bring about the fusion of all the senses and of ‘sense.’ Touching, too, touching, first, is local, modal, fractal”, J.L. Nancy, Corpus: 76. 10 J. Derrida, On Touching: 300-301; M.L. Mclaughlin et al., “The haptic museum,” Conference: Proc. of the EVA 2000 Florence Conf. on Electronic Imaging and the Visual Arts (March 2000), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229433104_The_Haptic_Museum, accessed December 11, 2022. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 137 AN-ICON a virtual object, such as a 3D model of a piece of pottery or art glass.11 Although presumably the first example of a haptic museum equipped with exosomatic technologies,12 Derrida’s case includes many factors that have become constitutive in subsequent museological proposals. By in- teracting with the PHANToM haptic device13 or wearing the exoskeleton glove CyberGrasp,14 at those times fu- turistic apparatuses, visitors could proceed to the manual exploration of virtual artifacts, digitized by employing 3D cameras such as ColorScan or Virtuoso.15 Technically, the “haptic human-computer interaction (HCI)” requires a struc- tural triad composed of “human user, interface device, and virtual environment synthesized by computer.”16 Through “haptic-rendering algorithms,”17 the device provides spe- cific stimuli arising from the interaction between the “hap- tic device representation” (the user’s avatar) and the 11 M.L. Mclaughlin et al., “The haptic museum:” w.p. 12 Among the twentieth-century experiences, one of the first tactile museum exhibitions dedicated to blind people was organized by The American Museum of New York in 1909. While in the 1970s, numerous worldwide museums realized tactile pathways dedicated to the visually impaired, the first Haptic Gallery was opened by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. on March 1st 1979, as the Smithsonian Archive documentation testifies. See in this respect: H.F. Osborn, The American Museum of Natural History: its origin, its history, the growth of its departments to December 31, 1909 (New York: The American Museum of Natural History, 1909): 148; Chronology of Smithsonian History, “NPH Haptic Gallery Opens” (March 1st 1979): https://siris-sihistory.si.edu/ipac20/ipac. jsp?&profile=all&source=~!sichronology&uri=full=3100001~!1462~!0#focus accessed December 11, 2022; Council on Museums and Education in the Visual Arts, The art museum as educator: a collection of studies as guides to practice and policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 13 Designed by the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1994, “PHANToM is a convenient desktop device which provides a force-reflecting interface between a human user and a computer.” Inserting the index fingertip into a thimble or interacting with a stick, PHANToM consists in “a system capable of presenting convincing sensations of contact, constrained motion, surface compliance, surface friction, texture and other mechanical attributes of virtual objects.” T.H. Massie, J.K. Salisbury, “The PHANToM haptic interface: a device for probing virtual objects,” Dynamic Systems and Control 55, no. 1 (1994): w.p. 14 Commercialized in 2009, “the CyberGrasp device is a lightweight, force-reflecting exoskeleton that fits over a CyberGlove data glove (wired version) and adds resistive force feedback to each finger. With the CyberGrasp force feedback system, users are able to feel the size and shape of computer-generated 3D objects in a simulated virtual world.” Please see: CyberGrasp, CyberGlove System: https://static1.squarespace.com/ static/559c381ee4b0ff7423b6b6a4/t/5602fc01e4b07ebf58d480fb/1443036161782/ CyberGrasp_Brochure.pdf, accessed December 11, 2022. 15 M.L. Mclaughlin et al., “The haptic museum:” w.p. 16 D. Wang et al., “Haptic display for virtual reality: progress and challenges,” Virtual Reality & Intelligent Hardware 1, no. 2 (April 2019): 137 https://doi.org/10.3724/SP.J.2096- 5796.2019.0008. 17 Ibid.: 141-143. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 138 AN-ICON  photogrammetric restitution of the object in a virtual en- vironment (the haptic image).18 Hence, according to the object-relational data model, users receive tactile and kin- esthetic feedback geared towards the stimulation of the mechanoreceptors on the fingertip (for PHANToM) and on the whole hand surface (if wearing CyberGrasp) during the exploration of the virtual object.19 More specifically, the sub- ject perceives vibrotactile feedback which should make him or her feel those sensations that are connotative of touching the physical object,20 absent in its ilemorphic habitus albeit realistically tangible in its morphological properties of size, weight, surface, and texture.21 Beyond the issues more strictly related to the physiology of the experience, it is here relevant to examine how these researchers have recorded the act of touching a virtual object. Unexpectedly, the members of the Califor- nian IMSC, as well as the French philosopher, feel the need to put in inverted commas locutions such as “touching,” “remote touching,” or “realistic sensations of touching.”22 The grammatical escamotage of the quotation marks clear- ly betrays the necessity, be it more or less incidental, to denounce the presence of expressions bent to a “special or translated” use. In the technical gesture that the Haptic Museum visitor makes exploring virtual artifacts, Derrida glimpses the theoretical locus where “immediate contact”23 discloses its own illusory and ontologically fictitious dimen- sion, opening a chasm within the very meaning of touch: ultimately, what is the object of touch? Is this an illusion of 18 K. Salisbury, F. Conti, F. Barbagli, “Haptic rendering: introductory concepts,” IEEE Computer Society 24, no. 2 (March/April 2004): 25-26, https://doi.org/10.1109/ MCG.2004.1274058. 19 P.P. Pott, “Haptic Interfaces,” in L. Manfredi, ed., Endorobotics. Design, R&D, Future Trends (Academic Press, 2022). 20 Even if, according to Salisbury and Srinivasan “the resulting sensations prove startling, and many first-time users are quite surprised at the compelling sense of physical presence they encounter when touching virtual objects,” the improvement of haptic feedback constitutes one of the main purposes of this kind of technology. J.K. Salisbury, M.A. Srinivasan, “Phantom- based haptic interaction with virtual objects,” IEEE (September/October 1997): 6-10, https:// doi.org/10.1109/MCG.1997.1626171. 21 As Derrida notes, describing the above-mentioned experience, “we can thus feel the weight, form, and structure of the surface of a Chinese vase while ‘holding’ a three- dimensional digital model,” J. Derrida, On Touching: 301. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 139 AN-ICON  touch or what Madalina Diacuno prefers to define in terms of “illusionary touch”?24 If so, how to illustrate the phenom- enology of such an illusion? The noun “illusion,” from the Latin illudere (in, “against,” ludere “to play”), describes an “act of deception; deceptive appearance, apparition; delusion of the mind.”25 However, in the specialist lexicon on haptic perception the expression “haptic illusion” more rigorously recounts a “disruption of the physical coherence between real move- ment and feedback forces, used to create the illusion of a non-existent feature or to compensate with the illusion the sensation of an undesired detail.”26 As convincingly established by the critical literature since Révész, several haptic illusions have been codified and are currently under investigation.27 It should also be noted that a similar illusion, even though different in terms of the neurological reaction experienced with haptic prostheses in virtual environments, is daily negotiated by the user in the interaction with touch screens. The most recent media-archeological studies have investigated this ambiguous nature of “touching,” recording the hiatus which systematically occurs when the consum- er digitally interacts with the contents that pass through the “display.”28 In this regard, Simone Arcagni has recently pointed out how touch screens solicit a kind of experience “as if there were no longer a mediation between the idea of doing and the action that takes place in our hands” by 24 M. Diaconu, “Illusionary touch, and touching illusions,” in A. Tymieniecka, ed., Analecta Husserliana. The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research. Human Creation Between Reality and Illusion, vol. 87 (Cham: Springer, 2005): 115-125. 25 “Illusion,” Online Etymology Dictionary: https://www.etymonline.com/word/illusion, accessed December 11, 2022. 26 M. Grunwald, ed., Human Haptic Perception. Basics and Applications (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008): 649. 27 The main haptic illusions include “size-weight illusion,” a tangible version of the “Muller- Lyer illusion,” the “horizontal-vertical illusion” and the “Ponzio illusion.” See in this regard: M.A. Heller, E. Gentaz, “Illusions,” in M.A. Heller, E. Gentaz, eds., Psychology of Touch and Blindness (New York-London: Psychology Press - Taylor & Francis Group, 2014): 61-78. 28 F. Casetti, “Primal screens,” in C. Buckley, R. Campe, F. Casetti, eds., Screen Genealogies. From Optical Device to Environmental Medium (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019): 45; F. Casetti, “Che cos’è uno schermo, oggi?,” Rivista di Estetica 55 (2014): 28- 34 https://doi.org/10.4000/estetica.969. According to Francesco Casetti, touch screens represent the most effective type of display (ibid.: 29), a device that the author links to an instant, “passive” and disengaged communication. Consistently to the current hypertrophic consumption of images, Casetti’s display “exhibits, not reveals. It offers, not engages” (ibid.) and this happens because the touch screen “puts images in our hands” (ibid.). VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 140 AN-ICON  intensifying the sensation of proximity between user and content.29 Raising attention to the dangers inherent in the automation of touching, David Parisi has introduced the mil- itary phrase “Fingerbombing,” highlighting the “distanced, detached and destructive” nature of interaction with the touchscreen of a Nintendo DS.30 Furthermore, citing Thom- as Hirschhorn’s brutal video clip Touching Reality (2012), Wanda Strauven has denounced the moral and technical break between screen and display, whereby the object of touch results in the screen and not the images passing through it.31 Once more, what do the subjects touch and what do they perceive by touching and consuming?32 In light of this ontological uncertainty, the abil- ity to confer and simulate the highest degree of realism to the haptic experience of virtual content through a het- erogeneous range of devices – among the most futuristic devices should be mentioned AirPiano,33 VibroWeight,34 WeHAPTIC35 – is generally considered one of the overriding 29 S. Arcagni, Visioni Digitali: Video, Web e Nuove tecnologie (Torino: Einaudi, 2016): 301. 30 D. Parisi, “Fingerbombing, or ‘Touching is Good’: The Cultural Construction of Technologized Touch,” in M. Elo, M. Luoto, eds., Figure of Touch: Sense, Technics, Body (Helsinki: The Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki, Tallinna Raamatutrükikoja OÜ, 2018): 83. 31 W. Strauven, Touchscreen Archeology (Lüneberg: Meson Press, 2021): 112-116. Cfr. W. Strauven, “Marinetti’s tattilismo revisited hand travels, tactile screens, and touch cinema in the 21st Century,” in R. Catanese, ed., Futurist Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018): 70. 32 See in this respect: M. Racat, S. Capelli, “Touching without touching: the paradox of the digital age,” in M. Racat, S. Capelli, eds., Haptic Sensation and Consumer Behavior. The Influence of Tactile Stimulation in Physical and Online Environments (Nature Switzerland: Springer, 2020). 33 AirPiano constitutes “an enhanced music playing system to provide touchable experiences in HMD-based virtual reality with mid-air haptic feedback”. For more information see: I. Hwang et. al., “AirPiano: enhancing music playing experience in virtual reality with mid-air haptic feedback,” 2017 IEEE World Haptics Conference (WHC): 213-218 https://doi.org/10.1109/ WHC.2017.7989903. 34 VibroWeight represents “low-cost hardware prototype with liquid metal” employing “bimodal feedback cues in VR, driven by adaptive absolute mass (weights) and gravity shift:” X. Wang et. al., “VibroWeight: simulating weight and center of gravity changes of objects in virtual reality for enhanced realism,” Human Computer Interaction (2022): https://doi.org/10.48550/ arXiv.2201.07078. 35 WeHAPTIC (Wearable Haptic interface for Accurate Position Tracking and Interactive force Control) “shows improved performances in terms of finger motion measurement and force feedback compared with existing systems such as finger joint angle calculation and precise force control:” Y. Park et. al., “WeHAPTIC: a Wearable Haptic interface for Accurate Position Tracking and Interactive force Control,” Mechanism and Machine Theory 153, (November 2020): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mechmachtheory.2020.104005. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 141 AN-ICON  objectives for improving these technologies.36 Furthermore, even though since the invention of the first haptic device in 194837 continuous improvements have been made, contem- porary interfaces present both a qualitative and quantitative deficit compared to the human haptic sensitivity, calling for “urgent requirement to improve the realism of haptic feed- back for VR systems, and thus to achieve equivalent sen- sation comparable to the interaction in a physical world.”38 While the expression “haptic realism,” coined by the philosopher of science Mazviita Chirimuuta in 2016, opens the hypothesis of a scientific perspectivism based on interaction with the world,39 the same expression when related to haptic interfaces assumes a more technical con- notation. As Sushma Subramanian points out in a conversa- tion during the 2020 World Haptics Conference with Ed Col- gate, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University, although haptic technologies still go through a “primitive” state, the short-term goal in their design is to “develop a new tactile language that mimics the kinds of maneuvers we make with three-dimensional objects” in which “the challenging part is to make us feel them.”40 A leading producer such as the Berlin-based Lofelt attempts to make interaction with the touch screen more realistic by combining sounds with the corresponding haptic vibrations 36 A. Brogni, D.G. Caldwell, M. Slater, “Touching sharp virtual objects produces a haptic illusion,” in R. Shumaker, ed., Virtual and Mixed Reality (Berlin Heidelberg: Springer, 2011): 234-242; A. Gallace, M. Girondini, “Social touch in virtual reality,” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 43 (February 2022): 249-254, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.11.006. It should be noted how the design of “pseudo-haptic feedback” is also nodal to the experience of touching in virtual environments. See in this regard A. Maehigashi et. al., “Virtual weight illusion: weight perception of virtual objects using weight illusion,” CHI ’21 Extended Abstracts (May 2021), https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451842. Furthermore, the design of an effective haptic illusion in a virtual environment is related to scale and precisely to the so-called “Body- scaling effect”: P. Abtahi, “From illusions to beyond-real interactions in virtual reality,” UIST ‘21: The Adjunct Publication of the 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (October 2021): 153-157, https://doi.org/10.1145/3474349.3477586. 37 As David Parisi reports, the invention of the first mechanical force feedback master- slave manipulator in nuclear field is due to the engineer Raymond Goertz of the Atomic Energy Commission for the Argonne National Laboratory. D. Parisi, Archaeologies of Touch. Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2018): 220-221. 38 D. Wang, “Haptic display:” 137. 39 M. Chirimuuta, “Vision, perspectivism, and haptic realism,” Philosophy of Science 83, no. 5 (December 2016), 746-756 https://doi.org/10.1086/687860. 40 S. Subramanian, How to Feel. The Science and Meaning of Touch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021): 250-251. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 142 AN-ICON  so that the user participates in an immersive experience. As Lofelt founder Daniel Büttner asserts: “it is all an illu- sion, but it seems incredibly real.”41 In a similar direction, the most advanced research conducted by the Intelligent Haptic program of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligence System aims to implement the sensitivity of electrovibra- tions.42 Evidence that haptic perception is one of the most promising experimental fields for the virtual world is reflect- ed in the great number of HORIZON programs supported by the European Union in the last five years,43 mainly dedi- cated to Mid-Air and Mixed Haptic Feedback technologies. Ultrahaptics, launched in 2013, consists in a haptic device system in which the force feedback is positioned above interactive surfaces and requires no contact with either tool, attaching to the surface itself. Instead, haptic sensations are projected through a screen and directly onto the user’s hands. It employs the principle of acoustic radiation force whereby a phased array of ultrasonic transducers is used to exert forces on a target in mid-air.44 H-Reality devices, on the other hand, employing mixed haptic feedback technology “aim at combining the contactless haptic technology with the contact haptic tech- nology and then apply it into virtual and augmented reality 41 R. Banham, “Haptic happenings: how touch technologies are taking on new meaning,” Dell Technologies (October 21, 2019): https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-us/perspectives/ haptic-happenings-how-touch-technologies-are-taking-on-new-meaning/, accessed December 11, 2022. 42 Y. Vardar, K.J. Kuchenbeker, L. Behringer, “Challenging the design of electrovibrations to generate a more realistic feel,” Haptic Intelligence Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (April 6, 2021): https://hi.is.mpg.de/news/challenging-the-design-of-electrovibrations-to- generate-a-more-realistic-feel, accessed December 11, 2022. 43 Among them we point out: Horizon 2020 (CORDIS), TACTIle Feedback Enriched Virtual Interaction through Virtual RealITY and beyond, (July 1, 2019-September 30, 2022): https:// cordis.europa.eu/project/id/856718/it, accessed December 11, 2022; Horizon 2020 (CORDIS), Multimodal Haptic with Touch Devices (March 1, 2020-February 29, 2024): https://cordis. europa.eu/project/id/860114/it, accessed December 11. 44 T. Carter et. al., “Ultrahaptics: multi-point mid-air haptic feedback for touch surfaces,” UIST ‘13: Proceedings of the 26th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (St. Andrews, UK: October 8-11, 2013): 505-506. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 143 AN-ICON  technologies.”45 These projects encourage “to achieve high-fidelity sensations through technology that is easy and comfortable to use, for both interactive augmented reality (AR) and immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences”;46 rendering potentially less unreachable that horizon of touch virtualisation from which Derrida took his cue. In assessing the role that illusion plays for the effective functioning of haptic technologies, it can be ques- tioned whether this prevalent position is distinctive of the digital era or if it represents a consolidated trope in haptic historiography, often centered on the theoretical and prac- tical opportunity to touch – or not! – sculpture, at times accused of being the least illusory of the arts.47 In under- taking the investigation from “haptics”48 to “haptic,”49 we will proceed in a parallel line to the essentially optical one 45 “H-Reality,” FET FX. Our future today (2020): http://www.fetfx.eu/project/h-reality/; see also: X. de Tinguy, C. Pacchierotti, A. Lécuyer, “Capacitive sensing for improving contact rendering with tangible objects in VR,” IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph – IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 27, no. 4 (December 2020): 2481-2487, https://doi. org/10.1109/TVCG.2020.3047689. 46 Horizon 2020 (CORDIS), Mixed Haptic Feedback for Mid-Air Interactions in Virtual and Augmented Realities (October 1, 2018- March 31, 2022): https://cordis.europa.eu/project/ id/801413/it, accessed December 11, 2022. 47 Is given below the renowned passage in Benedetto Varchi’s Paragone (1547) in which painters vituperate sculpture by stating: “They argue again from the difficulty of art, where, distinguishing the difficulty into two parts: in fatigue of body, and this as ignoble they leave to sculptors: and in fatigue of wit, and this as noble they reserve for them, saying that, besides the different manners and ways of working and coloring, in fresco, oil, tempera, glue and gouache, painting makes a figure foreshorten, [it] makes it seem round and raised in a flat field, making it break through and seem far away with all the appearances and vagueness that can be desired, giving to all their works lumens and shadows well observed according to the lumens and reverberations, which they hold to be a most difficult thing; and in conclusion they say that they make appear what is not: in which thing they seek effort and infinite artifice”, B. Varchi, Lezzione. Nella quale si disputa della maggioranza delle arti e qual sia più nobile, la scultura o la pittura (Firenze: Fondazione Memofonte, 1547): 38. 48 The plural noun haptics, deriving from the Greek feminine haptikós and the Neo-Latin hapticē, a term coined in 1685 by Isaac Barrow in Lectiones Mathematicae XXIII, is literally translated as “science of touch”. Haptics refers to the science of touch in a techno-media perspective, denoting the tactile feedback generated by those devices which, by sending artificial stimuli at proprioceptive, limbic and muscular levels, simulate the sensation of actual contact: “Haptics,” Merriam-Webster Dictionary (online): https://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/haptics, accessed December 11, 2022. 49 The Greek etymon haptō, from which derive the word haptos (tangible, sensitive), the predicate háptein and the adjective haptikós, from which derive the French haptique, the German haptisch/Haptik and the English haptic, means variously “able to come into contact with” (haptikós) and “to clasp, grasp, lace” (háptein). VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 144 AN-ICON  stabilized by Riegl,50 bearer of a critical fortune culminating with the later reworkings elaborated by Deleuze,51 Mald- iney,52 Dufrenne53, Marks54 and Barker.55 Concerning the covertly panoptic conception of the haptic that had been spreading in German Kunstwissenschaft since Hildebrand’s studies,56 it is necessary to turn our attention to the de- velopments taking place in the psychophysiological area around the same years. In the wake of Heinrich Weber’s pioneering studies on the sense of touch, in which sensory illusions after limbs amputation57 (the so-called Phantom Sensations)58 were classified as not accidentally probed; the first use of the term haptic in 1892 by another eclectic Berliner, Max Dessoir, was systematized almost simulta- neously by Edward Titchener.59 The rehabilitation of this 50 As Andrea Pinotti notes via Révész, “It is significant that, the year after the publication of Kunstindustrie, in an article in which he argues with Strzygowski, Riegl admits that the term taktisch (tastbar, from the Latin tangere) can lead to misunderstandings, and declares himself willing to adopt instead the term haptisch (from the Greek hapto), which the physiological literature had since long employed in its research on sensoriality. Perhaps a way, that of moving from Latin to Greek, to avoid any possible reference to the actual manual palpation and reaffirm the fundamental strength of the haptisch,” A. Pinotti, “Guardare o toccare? Un’incertezza herderiana,” Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico 2, no. 1 (2009): 186, https://doi.org/10.13128/Aisthesis-10953, trans. mine. For a first bibliographical framing of Riegl’s haptic construction see: M.R. Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); M. Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); S. Melville, “The temptation of new perspectives” (1990), in D. Preziosi, ed., The Art Of Art History. A Critic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): 274-283; G. Vasold, “‘Das Erlebnis des Sehens’. Zum Begriff der Haptik im Wiener fin de siècle,” Maske und Kothurn 62 (2016): 46-70. 51 G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon. Logic of Sensation (1981), trans. D.W. Smith (London-New York: Continuum, 2003): 122, 189. 52 See in this regard: A. Pinotti, “Style, rythme, souffle: Maldiney and kunstwissenschaft,” in J.-P. Charcosset, ed., Parole Tenue: Colloque du Centenaire du Maldiney á Lyon (Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, 2014): 49-59. 53 See in this respect: A. Pinotti, ed., Alois Riegl. Grammatica storica delle arti figurative (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2018), XLVI. 54 We refer specifically to the postcolonial construct of haptic visuality that Laura Marks derives and resemantizes from the lesson of Regl’s heritage: L.U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002): 4-7; L.U. Marks, The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham-London: Duke University Press, 2000): 162-171. 55 J.M. Barker, The Tactile Eye. Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley-Los Angeles- London: University of California Press, 2009): 37-38. 56 See in this regard: A. Pinotti, Il corpo dello stile. Storia dell’arte come storia dell’estetica a partire da Semper, Riegl, Wölfflin (Milano: Mimesis, 2001). See specifically the third section entitled “Occhio e mano:” 179-221. 57 M. Grunwald, M. John, “German pioneers of research into human haptic perception,” in M. Grunwald, ed., Human Haptic Perception. Basics and Applications (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008): 19. 58 T. Weiss, “Phantom sensations,” in M. Grunwald, ed., Human Haptic Perception. Basics and Applications (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008): 283-294. 59 D. Parisi, Archaeologies of Touch: 105. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 145 AN-ICON  obsolete Greek term, already Homeric and Aristotelian,60 reflects Dessoir’s will to deepen the investigation on touch by distinguishing the sensations of contact from the active exploration (Pselaphesie).61 This distinction, destined to become normative, emerged in the context of a network of experimental psychology laboratories scattered through- out the United States and orbiting around the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, inaugurated in 1875 by William James, although active only since 1892.62 While in 1890, James was able to discuss the “fallacy of the senses,” tak- ing his cue from the prominent Aristotelic finger illusion,63 consulting Harvard Laboratory appendix for the two years 1892-1893 shows how scientific trials on touch proceeded simultaneously to the study of optical illusions.64 A similar experimental path would culminate in 1893 with the pre- sentation of the Apparatus for Simultaneous Touches by William Krohn at Clark University.65 On the plexus mentioned above, the aestheti- cal and historiographical discourses are inserted and inter- twined, sanctioning the passage from the properly physio- logical illusion of touching to a metaphorical one, embodied by the rhetorical figure of “as if,” direct relative of Derrida’s inverted commas. That such a rhetorical stratagem con- stitutes a much older matter is recalled by the well-known querelle of Herderian uncertainty. As already pointed out by Andrea Pinotti, in his aesthetic treatise Plastik, Herder seems to allude to the possibility of a virtual touch, reproaching the sculptor who has never touched, not even in a dream, 60 M. Perniola, Il Sex Appeal dell’Inorganico (Torino: Einaudi, 1994): 95. 61 M. Dessoir, Über den Hautsinn (Separat-Abzug aus Archiv für Anatomie und Physiologie: Physiologische Abtheilung. 1892): 242. 62 G. Bruno, “Film, aesthetics, science: Hugo Münsterberg’s laboratory of moving images,” Grey Room 36 (Summer 2009): 88-113, https://doi.org/10.1162/grey.2009.1.36.88. 63 W. James, The Principles of Psychology (Ontario: York University, 1890): 87. 64 H. Munsterberg, Psychological Laboratory of Harvard University (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1893). Munsterberg recorded notes include: “Instrument for studying the fusion of touch sensations. After Krohn; made in Cambridge”; “Instrument for touch reaction, etc;” “Touch-reaction instrument, with twenty different stimuli. By Elbs, Freiburg. $20”. See also: Bruno, “Film”: 101-102. 65 W.O. Krohn, “Facilities in experimental psychology in the colleges of the United States” (1894), in C.D. Green, ed., Classics in the History of Psychology (Toronto: Tork University): https://www.sapili.org/subir-depois/en/ps000128.pdf; D. Parisi, Archaeologies: 144-147. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 146 AN-ICON  his creation.66 “The illusion has worked,”67 the philosopher will add, when the eye takes on the movements of the hand and then of a very thin ray, an emissary of the soul, which kinaesthetically embraces the sculpture as it becomes a body. In the wake of Konrad Lange’s Illusionsästhetik68 and J.H. Kirchmann and E. Von Hartmann’s doctrine of illusional feelings, the already mentioned Dessoir would achieve an even more drastic conclusion. Declaring that every work of art mainly satisfies a single sensory channel, this sensorial limitation “guarantees its illusory character,” generating the paradoxical situation of “a conscious self-deception, of a continued and deliberate confusion of reality and illusion.”69 However, it was not until the art-historical de- bate of the early 1950s – while the earliest haptic devices were designed – that an open polarization was reached regarding whether or not sculptures should be touched. On the one hand Herbert Read, moving from the psychological studies of Arnheim, Wundt, Lowenfeld, and Révész, could argue that “for the sculptor, tactile values are not an illusion to be created on a two-dimensional plane: they constitute a reality of being conveyed directly, as existent mass. Sculp- ture is an art of palpation.”70 On the other hand, a fervent detractor such as the modernist Greenberg would have drastically overturned this assumption.71 Both consistent readers of Berenson, whose normative and ambivalent 66 A. Pinotti, Guardare o toccare: 189; J.G. Herder, Sculpture. Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream (1778), ed. J. Gaiger (Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002): 41. 67 A. Pinotti, Guardare o toccare: 189; J.G. Herder, Some Observations: 41. 68 For an introduction to the subject see: D. Romand, “Konrad Lange on ‘the Illusion of Materials’ in painting and visual arts: revisiting a psychoaesthetic theory of the perception of material properties,” in J. Stumpel, M. Wijntjes, eds., Art and Perception. An International Journal of Art and Perception Science, Special Issue: The Skin of Things: On the Perception and Depiction of Materials 7, no. 3-4 (2021): 283-289. 69 M. Dessoir, Aesthetics and Theory of Art. Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (1906), trans. S.A. Emery, (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1970): 53. 70 H. Read, The Art of Sculpture (London: Faber & Faber, 1954): 49. 71 We are referring specifically to Greenberg’s harsh and inflexible review of Read’s monograph: C. Greenberg, “Roundness isn’t all,” (November 25, 1956), in J. O’ Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism 3 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995): 272. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 147 AN-ICON  “tactile values”72 find a more truthful attestation in the cor- ollary categories of “ideated sensations,” “ideated satisfac- tions” and “ideal sensation of contact,”73 Read and Green- berg finally reached an unexpected consonance. Whilst Read claimed the experience of sculpture as distinctive of haptic perception and, specifically, for the prehensility of the hand; Greenberg denied the appropriateness of such fruition, attributing tactile stimuli to the visual sphere. Mean- while, Herder’s uncertainty remains. Indeed, as David J. Getsy noted, it is ultimately unclear whether Read wished for a knowledge of the plastic work through its palpation or maintained such contact on a substantially preliminary and physiological condition.74 In order to enrich the corpus of sources of such a querelle numerous other examples could be made; none- theless, one of the most promising scenarios for its analysis, as prophetically announced by Derrida, is offered by the exploration through haptic interfaces of digitized artifacts in museums. When the veto of touching the work of art lapses and the distinction between actual and fictional flattens out, which horizons are opened by the possibility of touching? Will it be a “tactile vertigo” in the sense of Baudrillard, in which the virtual object expired at the status of a trompe- l’œil image soliciting a “tactile hyper presence of things, as though one could hold them,” despite its phantasmagorical essence?75 Can these finally touchable bodies add much 72 A. Brown, “Bernard Berenson and ‘tactile values’ in Florence,” in J. Connors, ed., Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, 2014). For an analysis highlighting the subtle pantheism underlying Berenson’s work, see: A. Pinotti, “The touchable and the untouchable. Merleau-Ponty and Bernard Berenson,” Phenomenology 2005 3, no. 2, (2007): 479-498. 73 B. Berenson, Aesthetics and History (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1948): 24-25, 74. 74 As David J. Getsy pointedly notes: “Read did not necessarily argue that the viewer must touch the sculpture in order to appreciate it, as Greenberg would have us believe. Rather, it was the aggregate experience of tactility that provides us with an ability to assess ponderability and the non-visual traits of any object. Our haptic sensibility and our sense of the physical environment are both closely tied to our own ever-developing repertoire of tactile and physical experiences”; D.J. Getsy, “Tactility or opticality, Henry Moore or David Smith: Herbert Read and Clement Greenberg on The Art of Sculpture, 1956,” in R. Peabody, ed., Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945–1975 (Los Angeles: Getty Publication, 2011): 111-112. 75 J. Baudrillard, Seduction (1979), trans. B. Singer (Montréal: New World Perspectives. Culture Text Series, 1990): 62-63. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 148 AN-ICON  to the illusory palpation of the work of art on a semantic level, if not on a phenomenological one? Haptic technologies and museums, the imaginative frontiers of the phenomenology of touch In order to present a critical account of how haptic technologies are being employed in museums, and to investigate to what extent the projects designed within these environments fully explore the illusory potential of vir- tual haptic experiences, a preliminary discussion on analog touch in museums is needed. The use of haptic technolo- gies within museum settings,76 which has widely increased in the last decades, is in fact not something new to cultural experiential models,77 and more the reinstatement of prac- tices which had been common policies in museums from their foundation to the middle of the nineteenth century. While today it is “generally taken for granted that museums collections are not for touching”78 seventeenth- and eigh- teenth-century museum visitors were customarily free to pick up precious and delicate relics, enjoying their sense of touch as a fundamental part of their overall experience. More specifically, touch in early museums was used for four different reasons:79 learning (as touching an object provided relevant information that through sight could not be obtained, like its weight), aesthetic appreciation (touch was considered to allow an embodied understanding of the 76 For a comprehensive account on how the importance of touch has been re-evaluated in the museum sector in the past three decades please cfr. G. Black, The Engaging Museum: Developing Museums for Visitor Involvement (Oxford: Routledge, 2005); E. Pye, The Power of Touch: Handling Objects in Museums and Heritage Contexts (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007), H. Chatterjee, Touch in Museums: Policy and Practice in Object Handling (Oxford: Berg, 2008); F. Candlin, Art, Museums and Touch (Manchester: University of Manchester Press: 2010), and S. Dudley, ed., Museum Objects: Experiencing the Properties of Things (London: Routledge, 2012). 77 C. Classen, The Deepest Sense. A Cultural History of Touch (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012): 136-146. 78 Ibid.: 137. 79 A synthetic account of the reasons why touch was a common practice in museums can be found in Classen, The Deepest Sense: 139-142. For other discussions on the topic please cfr. D. Howes, “Introduction to sensory museology,” The Senses and Society 9, no. 3 (2014): 259- 267 https://doi.org/10.2752/174589314X14023847039917 and R.F. Ovenell, The Ashmolean Museum, 1683–1894 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 149 AN-ICON  nature of the display), imaginary potential (by holding an ar- tifact visitors could get emotionally in touch with its original owner or maker) and healing powers (especially religious relics, when touched or eaten,80 where deemed able to cure illnesses and pains). As it appears evident already from this first account, not all yet some of the functions of touch in museums had to do with the potential to empower imagina- tive accounts, associating the role of touching not only with evidentiary information, yet also with intangible and elusive, even powerful, qualities. From the mid of the nineteenth century touch was banned from museums:81 conservation matters became more and more relevant, while parallelly touch in itself came to be classified as a secondary sense, one “associated with irrationality and primitivism.”82 These two reasons account for two extremely different discourses, one linked to practical aspects and to the preservation of cultural heritage, the second pertaining to a conceptual sphere, having to do with epistemic premises and their museological consequences. Today, well into the third decade of the 21st century, the situation in museums seems to be closer to that of three centuries ago than to the end of the last Millenium. Touch seems to have regained its epistemic status,83 and modern haptic technologies allow its employment without the need to endanger precious artifacts. The great differ- ence, however, is that machines and proxies mediate the haptic experience, defining its phenomenology. The ques- tion which arises, at this point, seems to be to what extent these technologies are and will be designed with the aim 80 For a historical account of the healing powers of ancient religious relics cfr. K. Arnold, “Skulls, mummies and unicorns’ horns: medicinal chemistry in early english museums,” in R.G.W. Anderson et al., Enlightening the British: Knowledge, Discovery and the Museum in the Eighteenth Century (London: The British Museum Press, 2003), also E. Brown, An Account of Several Travels through a Great Part of Germany (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1677), and D. Murray, Museums: Their History and Use, vol. 1. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1904): 40, 50, 73. 81 For an account of the historical reasons which led to this change cfr. Classen, The Deepest Sense: 143-146, and F. Candlin, Art, Museums and Touch. 82 C. Classen, The Deepest Sense. A Cultural History of Touch: XIV. 83 For a discussion on the epistemic value of touch please cfr. C. Classen, The Book of Touch (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005), M. Peterson, The Senses of Touch (London: Routledge, 2007), M.P. Gadoua, “Making sense through touch. Handling collections with Inuit Elders at the McCord Museum,” The Senses and Society 9, no. 3 (2014): 323-341 https://doi.org/10.2752/1 74589314X14023847039719. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 150 AN-ICON  to mirror the original analog functions of touch, or whether they will be built and employed with the goal to expand the potential of the haptic experience. With regards to this, it will be important to understand on which of the qualities of touch – amongst the seventeenth century list aforemen- tioned – they will leverage on. Whilst, on the one hand, they could aim at faithfully reproducing the phenomenological qualities of touch, the paragraphs above have shown how there is a wider illusory character that these technologies could be aiming at capturing, one which could hopefully open up new experiential frontiers. Whilst there isn’t one single comprehensive ac- count which maps the state of the arts of haptic technolog- ical development in the museum system, literature in this field has been growing recently. This thanks to researches that discuss the regained relevance of touch in educational settings, together with publications which analyze individ- ual projects designed and carried through by museum re- search centers.84 A vast number of these studies highlight how haptic technologies allow visitors to “explore new par- adigms of interaction”85 leveraging on the “quality and use- fulness of computer-based exhibits.”86 This is granted as the sense of touch “is an essential part of how we interact, explore, perceive and understand our surroundings”87 and therefore incorporating object based learning in museum 84 For other interesting case studies analyzing the role of haptic technologies in museums please cfr. R. Comes, “Haptic devices and tactile experiences in museum exhibitions,” Journal of Ancient History and Archeology 3, no. 4 (2016) https://doi.org/10.14795/j.v3i4.205; F. Fischnaller “The last supper interactive project. The illusion of reality: perspective and perception,” in G. Amoruso, ed., Putting Tradition into Practice: Heritage, Place and Design, Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering 3, (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018) https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57937-5_73; M.H. Jamil et al., “The role of haptics in digital archaeology and heritage recording processes”, 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Haptic, Audio and Visual Environments and Games (HAVE) (2018): 1-6 https://doi.org/10.1109/ HAVE.2018.8547505. 85 A. Frisoli et al., “Evaluation of the pure-form haptic displays used for exploration of works of art at museums,” report on the project findings, 2005 retrieved at https://www.researchgate. net/publication/228584199_Evaluation_of_the_pure-form_haptic_displays_used_for_ exploration_of_works_of_art_at_museums/ related on the 31/01/2022. 86 S. Brewster, “The impact of haptic ‘touching’ technology on cultural applications,” in J. Hemsley, V. Cappellini, G. Stanke, eds., Digital Applications for Cultural Heritage Institutions, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005): Chap. 30, 273-284, 282. 87 M. Novak et al., “There is more to touch than meets the eye: haptic exploration in a science museum,” International Journal of Science Education 42, no. 18 (2020): 3026-3048 https://doi. org/10.1080/09500693.2020.1849855. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 151 AN-ICON  experiences increases autonomy and satisfaction.88 The information that visitors can acquire through touch appears today relevant as it did at the beginning of museum histo- ry, and it has become obtainable without endangering the artifacts. 3D replicas of material artifacts associated with a range of wearable or desktop devices are the predominant technologies used across museum experiments, engaging users through mainly force feedback and kinetic stimuli.89 While providing an account of the state of the arts of the literature and case studies in this sector is not one of the goals of this essay, a series of examples have been cho- sen as they have been deemed relevant to the research at hand: assessing to what extent haptic museum experience expand and explore their full – at times illusory – potential. A widely discussed experiment in the field is the Museum of Pure Form, “a collective project ran in the early 2000s by a series of European museums creating 3D digital replicas of their artifacts and making available a technology which allowed for the haptic experience of them.”90 This pivotal program engaged a series of museums across Eu- rope91 who collected a shared archive of digital replicas of their statues, and then produced a touring exhibition which installed wearable devices (exoskeleton wearable arm) and or desktop devices (two robotic arms departing from sup- port columns placed in front of the visualization screen) in front of the original statues.92 Overall, findings on the exper- iment registered both amusement (70% of attendees) and instructiveness (39%) across visitors.93 The shared belief, confirmed by the analysis conducted simultaneously as the 88 M. Novak et al., “There is more to touch that meets the eye:” 3044. 89 In the literature it is possible to find studies which evaluate both collaborative endeavors and researches ran by single institutions. Overall, the collaboration between universities or tech companies and cultural institutions seems a fundamental premise in order to allow for trials and studies that evaluate the impact of these projects. 90 A. Frisoli, “Evaluation of the pure-form haptic displays used for exploration of works of art at museums.” 91 The Galician Centre for Contemporary Arts in Santiago de Compostela, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Pisa, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Stockholm, the Conservation Centre at National Museums Liverpool and the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London. 92 A. Frisoli, “Evaluation of the pure-form haptic displays used for exploration of works of art at museums:” 2. 93 Ibid.: 6. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 152 AN-ICON  project, was that the opportunity to use a device to touch the digital replica of a statue while looking at it enforced the learning experience. Something which, as aforementioned, was deemed constitutive of the relevance of touch in early museum experiences. As this case study shows, together with many that have followed, it seems that one of the main concerns of museum professionals and researchers in de- signing digital haptic experiences seems to be supplying to the lost opportunity to touch the artworks, thus enabling the visitor to enjoy a wider range of information regarding the statue and, consequently, enriching the learning expe- rience. This, however, faces a series of relevant limitations on the phenomenological level, as discussed above with reference to Wang’s analysis in Haptic Display. It appears, from this first account, that the use of haptic technologies is not necessarily seen as a strategy to experiment and widen the cultural experience, yet instead as a way to re- cuperate something that contemporary curatorial practices do not allow – namely to touch originals. With reference to this point, it is interesting to see that there are several researches actually comparing the haptic experience that visitors can have touching the replica of an artifact or its 3D version.94 It appears that “the comparison between the haptic device and the replica showed that the multi-finger tactile interaction with the replica produced considerably richer information than the single-point contact of the hap- tic device.”95 What the citation implies is that the technology used provided a less phenomenologically rich experience 94 Interesting accounts on this debate can be found in M. Dima, L. Hurcombe, M. Wright, “Touching the past: haptic augmented reality for museum artefacts,” in R. Shumaker, S. Lackey, eds., Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality. Applications of Virtual and Augmented Reality. VAMR 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 8526. (Cham: Springer, 2014) https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-07464-1_1. Also cfr. S. Ceccacci et al., “The role of haptic feedback and gamification in virtual museum systems,” Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 14, no. 3 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1145/3453074, and F. Stanco et al., “Virtual anastylosis of Greek sculpture as museum policy for public outreach and cognitive accessibility,” Journal of Electronic Imaging 26, no. 1, 011025 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JEI.26.1.011025. 95 M. Dima, L. Hurcombe, M. Wright, “Touching the past: haptic augmented reality for museum artefacts:” 6. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 153 AN-ICON  compared to the touching of the printed replica, which if possible is deemed a better alternative. As of today, the technical limitations that most devices used in museums present contribute to a scenario where physical touch, even if of replicas, seems to be fa- vored. The reasons why haptic technology is preferred are not experiential factors; they have to do with practical and managerial concerns, such as the fact that digital replicas do not occupy physical space and that they can be expe- rienced also remotely. It appears that these technologies, if competing on a purely phenomenological level and trying to mirror haptic experiences that occur in reality, are des- tined to have a limited contribution to cultural experiences, being the only alternative yet not a solution which in itself holds value. Other case studies can however add further layers to the use of haptic technologies in museum set- tings, offering opportunities that neither physical statues nor printed replicas could elicit. A research published by the Journal of Electronic Imaging illustrates the case of the vir- tual anastylosis of a Greek sculpture, operated by digitally combining a head and a torso held in two different heritage sites in Sicily.96 The two ancient pieces, one hosted in the Museum of Castello Ursino in Catania and the other in the Archeological Museum of Siracusa, were hypothesized by archeologists to be parts of the same statue due to stylistic features. This theory was, however, never proved as neither of their hosting institutions was willing to dislocate one of the pieces for the necessary analysis to be performed. Through digital imaging and 3D rendering it was however possible to demonstrate the perfect match of the two parts of the statue, creating a new object that was then made accessible through the use of haptic technology – in this case the haptic device 3D Systems Touch – and thanks to the collaboration with the Center for Virtualization and Applied Spatial Technologies, University of South Florida. A 96 F. Stanco et al., “Virtual anastylosis of Greek sculpture as museum policy for public outreach and cognitive accessibility.” VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 154 AN-ICON  dedicated effort was made to ensure that the new technol- ogy would account for people with cognitive and physical disabilities, another potentiality that haptic technologies hold and on which research is being tailored.97 Whilst this case highlights the strategic contribution that modern tech- nologies can provide to both research and fruition, it could be argued that the added value here is given by the fact that this statue could have otherwise never been seen or felt, yet not in a manner which depends, from a specifically phenomenological perspective, on the haptic technology itself. Hence reinforcing the understanding that the main use of these technologies is directed towards reinstating the original – and lost – hard value of touch, not necessarily adding new levels of experience. Another case, involving virtually touching the torso of Michelangelo’s David at Monash University,98 can prove useful to enrich the discussion on the use of haptic technologies in museums. What emerges from this study, which in terms of research methodology mirrors the vast majority of cases in the literature in creating a 3D digital replica and then experiencing it through the Phantom, is that the images reproduced digitally “allow the user to focus on particular details that they may overlook otherwise.”99 What appears here is that the virtual experiential setting creates the opportunity for the user to actually grasp some details of the statue that he would have not been able to experience with either the original or with a 3D printed 97 There are a number of experiments within the field of haptic technologies which focus specifically on accessibility for people with impared cognitive and physical abilities. An interesting research center is the one of the University of Glasgow, which ran two trials in this field, one called Senses in Touch II, and the other MultiVis project. A complete account of the two researches can be found in Brewster, “The impact of haptic ‘touching’ technology on cultural applications:” 279-282. Another interesting research which discusses the potential of haptics for the visually impaired is G. Jansson, M. Bergamasco, A. Frisoli, “A new option for the visually impaired to experience 3D art at museums: manual exploration of virtual copies,” Visual Impairment Research 5, no. 1 (2003): 1-12 https://doi.org/10.1076/vimr.5.1.1.15973. Also cfr. R. Vaz, D. Freitas, A. Coelho, “Blind and visually impaired visitors’ experiences in museums: increasing accessibility through assistive technologies,” The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum 13, no. 2 (June 2020): 57-80, https://doi.org/10.18848/1835-2014/CGP/ v13i02/57-80. 98 M. Butler, P. Neave, “Object appreciation through haptic interaction,” Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (Melbourne: Ascilite, 2008), 133-141. 99 Ibid.: 140. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 155 AN-ICON  replica. The flexibility of digital images, their potential to be modulated, modified and enlarged, appears, in this case, to actually add a further layer to the visitor experience. The higher attention to detail deepens and expands the experience in a manner that is specific of, and exclusive to, digital haptic technologies. Whilst this last example seems to slightly brighten the scenario described, the cases discussed so far account for an employment of haptic technologies which struggles to emancipate itself from a traditional under- standing of touch in cultural experiences. The three cases analyzed, far from providing a comprehensive account of the multitude of programmes that have been carried out across the museum sector in the past years, have how- ever been chosen as they are representative of the main trends found in the literature. Overall, researchers seem to have been focused mainly on trying to bring back an aspect of experience which was lost, and less keen on the advanced possibilities that haptic technologies might hold. With reference to the technological and historical discus- sion presented above, regarding haptic illusions, it does not appear that these seem to be at the center of experimental designs in the museum sector, where the understanding of touch seems to recall more the “hard undeniable evidence” school than the more subtle and rich understanding of the haptic which encompasses its illusory character. This de- pends on a number of reasons, related to both cultural, professional and economic factors. A further fundamental aspect to take into account, when discussing the use of haptic technologies in museums, is in fact the high cost of these devices. The more sophisticated they are, the higher their prices, which makes it difficult for museums to afford them, even harder to update them. Main advancements with haptic technologies are in fact usually in other fields of research with richer funding, such as medicine and engi- neering. This leads to the second limitation, namely that to innovatively experiment with these technologies, technical and diverse professional skills are required. Even though most programmes within museums are run in collaboration VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 156 AN-ICON  with universities and research centers, the degree of com- plexity that pertains to these projects needs a pull of pro- fessionals which is hard to put together and coordinate in the current economic and professional climate. There are, however, a few interesting cases that, at times even without the use of high budgets and elevated skills, seem to leverage on the wider range of possibilities that these technologies offer. Interestingly enough, these also relate to two of the original functions of touch valued in early museums: the aesthetic enrichment of the expe- rience and the emotional potential of haptics. It appears that when haptic technologies are being employed with the aim of enacting and recalling these elements – as opposed to when they try to give back the evidentiary character of touch – the result are more imaginative endeavors, allowing for the creation of a further semantic level of experience. One first interesting case is a very recent ex- periment conducted at University College London, where a student has designed a device which, through the use of capacitive touch sensors, wants to “help us understand what an artist felt at the time they created their work by recreating their sensory experiences.”100 The project idea, which rests on the theoretical background of embodied knowledge as an extension of the mind and of embodied practice as a means to feel the emotions of an artist,101 was inspired by an artwork: The Face of Christ by Claude Mellan, hosted in the UCL Art Museum. By looking closely at the artwork, the author of the project realized that the whole drawing had been made through the design of one single spiraling line, a unique technique. His idea was therefore to design a device which could enable the viewer to create 100 F. Taylor, “Recreating sensory experience: how haptic technology could help us experience art in new ways,” UCL Culture Blog, (July 13, 2020) https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ museums/2020/07/13/recreating-sensory-experience-how-haptic-technology-could-help-us- experience-art-in-new-ways/ on the 31/01/2022, accessed December 11, 2022. 101 When the author discusses embodied knowledge as an extension of the mind the reference is I. Martínková, “Body ecology: avoiding body–mind dualism,” Loisir et Société / Society and Leisure 40, no. 1 (2017): 101-112, https://doi.org/10.1080/07053436.2017.1281 528; whilst when discussing embodied practices as a means to feel emotions of artists the specific reference in the literature is D. Freedberg, V. Gallese, “Motion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 5 (2007): 197-203, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.tics.2007.02.003. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 157 AN-ICON  a contact with the motion that had originated the artwork, building a direct emotional connection with the artist. As the author describes it “through an audio feedback loop, the device I designed takes in touch inputs from a view- er of the artwork and returns a religious-sounding choral soundtrack when the spiral gesture from the engraving is drawn correctly with a finger. The spiral gesture,” he adds, “was directly extracted from The Face of Christ with the help of a custom python script which made use of various image analysis libraries.”102 What can be highlighted in reading about this project, which at this point consist of just a first artisanal prototype, is the way in which haptic technologies are used to explore unusual and often overlooked aspects of artworks. Whilst the potential of these technologies in broadening the field of aesthetic experience is well estab- lished, there are some developments specific to this case worth expanding on. Interestingly enough, the author re- fers specifically to the idea of building a connection with the painter who made The Face of Christ, recuperating the same reasoning that mid eighteenth-century museum goers had when holding a precious object.103 In comparing the attempt to get in touch with the past before and after haptic technologies, moreover, the added value brought by the device seems clear. Whilst in the original case a visitor had to actively exercise the power of imagination in order to build a connection, in this instance the device guides the user into the experience, leveraging on the emotional potential of a multisensory environment which starts from the drawn line, develops into an haptic apparatus and is then sublimated through sound. What emerges with regards to this example, and in contrast with the ones analyzed before, is the way in which the designer of the project has overcome the need to merely attempt to replicate the touch- ing experience, and decided to exploit both the phenom- enological and the imaginative potential of the technology 102 F. Taylor, Recreating sensory experience: How haptic technology could help us experience art in new ways. 103 A detailed account of an emotional and imaginative encounter between a museum goer and an artifact can be found in S.A. La Roche, Sophie in London, 1786: Being the Diary of Sophie Von La Roche, trans. C. Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933): 107-108. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 158 AN-ICON  at his disposal. Further, this has been done in an artisanal and experimental fashion, not through the use of excessive resources and a big team of professionals. Another experimental program worth consid- ering, in this case definitely a more costly and collective endeavor, is an exhibition held at Tate Britain in 2015, Tate Sensorium (Fig. 2).104 The research background behind this project refers to a scientific field which experiments with the power of haptics to elicit emotions. More specifically, these projects study how mid-air haptic technology – a specific subset – is able to condition human emotions (e.g., happy, sad, excited, afraid) through tactile stimulation.105 While the literature in the field of mid haptics is still at a very early experimental stage, and definitive conclusions are yet to be drawn, progress has been made in mapping the correlation between aspects of haptics and emotional states. What was done at Tate was to organize an exhibition which built a fully sensory environment around four paintings: Interior II by Richard Hamilton, Full Stop by John Latham, In the Hold by David Bomberg, and Figure in a Landscape by Francis Bacon. In a detailed article106 presenting a study on the exhibition, the specific experience of Full Stop is analyzed. What the curators did was to position a mid-air haptic device in front of the painting, and synchronize a range of mid-air haptic patterns inside the device with a self-developed software that could read Musical Instru- ment Digital Interface (MIDI) inputs. The design was curated by a sound designer who could control the mid-air haptic patterns (frequency, intensity, and movement paths) to cre- ate a desired experience synched with music. As detailed through the article, this exhibition was the first time that mid-air haptic technology was used in a museum context VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 159 AN-ICON  over a prolonged period of time and integrated with sound to enhance the experience of visual art. This “work demon- strates how novel mid-air technology can make art more emotionally engaging and stimulating, especially abstract art that is often open to interpretation,”107 as it was proved by collecting positive feedback from over 2500 visitors. The aim of the authors, as clearly stated across the research, was to advance understanding of multisensory signals in relation to art, experiences and design, based on novel interactive technologies. Referencing back to the reasons why touch was valued in early museums, this experiment seems to fit in the category which uses haptics to enhance the aesthetic experience of the visitors: anticipating that haptics carry value not only on a purely informative sensory level, but eliciting a wider level of complexity. Conclusions Overall, there seems to be a wide potential for using haptic technologies in museum settings and leverag- ing on the ways in which these devices can contribute to the cultural experience of artifacts. The two final case studies here examined clearly exemplify how haptic technologies can help in generating a new experiential layer, one which rests on a complex phenomenological understanding of the haptics and establishes an active dialogue with the entire sensorium of the experiencer. Both cases show a designed synchronization between the tactile experience and the sense of hearing, suggesting that one of the ways to experiment with the haptic is by interrogating a more en- vironmental and organic understanding of the relationship between the senses. Interestingly, the more complex and enhancing experiences are characterized by stimuli that do not just mimic the act of touching, thus attempting to reinstate the lost chance of touching the artwork, yet play with the illusory potential of haptics and with the other 107 Ibid.: 1. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 160 AN-ICON  qualities of touch valued in early museums: the evocative and imaginistic potential of the haptic experience. The analysis from the museum sector, when linked to the technological and historical accounts regard- ing the link between the haptic and the figure of illusion, suggests the value of exploring the ways in which haptic technologies can emancipate us from a reductive under- standing of touch. Certainly, all museum endeavors and experiments will have to take into account a variety of prac- tical and concrete concerns, which also play an important part in defining the destiny of cultural projects. It is not given that exploring the illusory potential of haptic technologies represents in itself the best choice for a museum research. Yet, it can be concluded that when designed in an open dialogue with our whole sensorium these technologies ap- pear empowered in their visionary potential, making Derri- da’s observation more actual than ever: the nexus between touch and virtuality is as real as it gets. Fig 2. Tate Sensorium exhibition at Tate Britain in 2015, installation shot of Full Stop (1961) by John Latham © John Latham Estate. Photo: Tate. Illustration of a participant experiencing the second painting combining vision, auditory, and haptic. VALENTINA BARTALESI, ANNA CALISE 161 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/17124

Clothes with no emperors: the materiality of digital fashion by Jane Y. Zhang Digital fashion Materiality Atmosphere Hapticity Aesthetic economy Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Clothes with no emperors: the materiality of digital fashion JANE Y. ZHANG, Harvard University – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7956-2599 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17124 Abstract Digital garments are tailored computationally and dressed virtually. Intended to be displayed rather than worn, digital fashion exemplifies the function of aesthetic commodities as defined by Gernot Böhme: the production of atmospheres – intangible qualities arising from a mate- rial encounter – towards the staging of life. Yet, made from pixels instead of fabric, virtual garments beckon a new conceptual framework for the role of materiality in atmo- spheric productions. Drawing from new media and affect scholars, this essay traces the display of digital garments across three sites: the e-commerce website, social media, and the runway show. By analyzing the visual and literary production surrounding digital fashion, this essay proposes “elemental surface” as a representational technique and rhe- torical strategy through which digital garments produce and intensify the body’s affective presence. Situating Böhme’s formulation of atmosphere in dialogue with the notion of “aura” put forth by Walter Benjamin, the study of digital fashion foregrounds the role of environmental perception in the history of haptic technology. Keywords Digital fashion Materiality Atmosphere Hapticity Aesthetic economy To quote this essay: Y. Zhang, “Clothes with no emperors: the materiality of digital fashion,” AN- ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 162-181, https://doi.org/10.54103/ ai/17124 JANE Y. ZHANG 162 AN-ICON  Introduction Scrolling through an online fashion catalog, you come across a piece of clothing that reminds you of your favorite song: it is bold but not too bold, casual with just the right amount of edge. You add the item to your shop- ping cart. At checkout, you are asked to upload a photo of yourself. So you pose in front of the camera, dressed mini- mally under good lighting. One business day later, instead of arriving in a package in the mail, the garment appears as an email attachment in your inbox, carefully composited onto the photo you have uploaded. Since its inception in 2008,1 digital clothing has quickly gained traction in the fashion industry, giving rise to independent digital fashion houses as well as partnerships with well-established clothing brands. Daria Shapovalo- va, the cofounder of DRESSX, summarizes digital fashion as being “all about how we can replicate the experience of physical clothes in digital.”2 The statement is counter- intuitive at first sight. Made from pixels instead of fabric, digital garments cannot shield our bodies from the bracing winds of winter or the unwanted gaze of another. But if we refrain from taking Shapovalova’s statement at face value, it emerges as a profound commentary on the phenome- nology of clothing and, by extension, the contemporary socioeconomic system upon which the fashion industry operates. For Shapovalova, digital garments are not here to represent but to replicate. But to replicate what? Interesting is the absence of a verb: do digital garments replicate the 1 “Carlings: The First-Ever Digital Clothing Collection,” H.R. Watkins III, https://www. haywoodwatkinsiii.com/digital-clothing-collection, accessed December 7, 2021. In 2018, the Scandinavian retailer Carlings introduced the first digital fashion collection. 2 “Digital Clothing Is the Future of Fashion | Dell Talks with Daria Shapovalova,” Dell, YouTube video, 8:12, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKBePuTOB6U, accessed January 10, 2023. JANE Y. ZHANG 163 AN-ICON  experience of wearing “physical” clothes or that of seeing physical clothes? Made to be shown rather than worn, digital fashion displays the functional liberty characteristic of an aesthetic commodity. The philosopher Gernot Böhme pro- poses that capitalism has entered a new phase: under the “aesthetic economy,”3 the value of commodities extends beyond their physical utility or monetary worth. Aesthetic economics restructures the dichotomy of the “use value” and “exchange value,” triangulating them in service of an independent utility metric: the “stage value.”4 Under this metric, the aesthetic properties of a product no longer exist in addition to its ability to satisfy primary needs, but func- tion towards “the staging, the dressing up and enhance- ment of life.”5 Observing that the outward presentation of commodities is emancipated from their material function,6 Böhme refers to the study of atmospheres as engaging in “poetic phenomenology” – the study of how appearances come to be.7 Böhme’s phenomenological investment in the operation of aesthetic commodities aligns convincingly with Shapovalova’s experiential framing of digital fashion. For Böhme, the stage value of an aesthetic commodity arises from its atmosphere. Understood as the “something more” arising from aesthetic encounters, atmo- spheres are by definition “intangible” and “indeterminant.”8 As elusive as atmospheres are, they can nevertheless be theorized at the sites of their production: aesthetic laborers have long engaged in the skillful manipulation of materiality – the outward appearance of matter – to create and inten- sify the atmospheric presence of aesthetic commodities. 3 G. Böhme, Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism, trans. E. Jephcott (Milan: Mimesis International, 2017): 20. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 G. Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, ed. J.P. Thibaud (Oxon: Routledge, 2017): 144. 7 Ibid.: 33. 8 Ibid.: 29; 30. JANE Y. ZHANG 164 AN-ICON  While “pure aesthetic materials assume we won’t handle or touch them,”9 they nevertheless touch and move us emotionally.10 Bohme’s formulation of atmosphere compli- cates the reading of digital fashion as a testament to the dematerializing effect of the capitalist economy on material relations and social life.11 When all that is solid melts into air, the air becomes charged with affective presence and sensory impressions – it becomes an atmosphere. Given the nonphysical nature of virtual garments, how exactly does digital fashion engage in the production of atmospheres? Scholarships in new media studies and affect theory converge on their emphasis on embodiment as central to the study of aesthetic mediums. Informed by theories of embodied perception stemming from philos- ophers such as Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, new media scholars have challenged the “immaterial” ontology of vir- tual technologies.12 Similarly, affect theorists foreground the porous boundaries between sensory modalities and ges- tures toward the primacy of hapticity in visual encounters.13 Together, these studies provide additional methodological tools to investigate the materiality of virtual garments. This essay traces digital fashion’s atmospheric production across three sites of its exhibition: the e-com- merce website, social media, and the runway show. In the first section, I examine the proliferation of elements – spe- cific forms of materiality such as water – in digital garment designs. Drawing from Giuliana Bruno’s work, I introduce the concept of “elemental surface” as a representation- al technique utilized by virtual garments to enhance their 9 Ibid.: 146. 10 Ibid.: 97. 11 G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. D. Frisby (London - New York: Routledge, 2004): 150. 12 B. Brown, “Materiality,” in W.J.T. Mitchell, M.B.N. Hansen, eds., Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago - London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010): 49-63; W. Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2015). 13 E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). JANE Y. ZHANG 165 AN-ICON  environmental presence. In the second section, I explore how the digital imposition of virtual garments alters the background-foreground relationship of existing photo- graphs, from which the elemental surface emerges as an index for the sensation of vitality and liveliness. The opera- tion of hapticity and vitality collides in the third section. By analyzing digital garments as they appear in an animated advertisement, I contend that elemental surface mobilizes contemporary anxieties surrounding the “natural” environ- ment in service of its construction of an affective milieu. In the seminal essay, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” Walter Benjamin attributes the demise of aura to the rise of technologies of reproduction, such as photography and film.14 Made available for mass distribution and consumption, the artwork is cut off from the ritualistic contexts of its exhibition and dispossessed of its unique presence. Benjamin’s prophetic insight into the elevated importance of an artwork’s public presentability directly anticipates the domination of “staging value” man- dated by aesthetic capitalism. Yet, for Böhme, the mass circulation of aesthetic productions is accompanied by the manipulation and intensification of their presence rather than their depreciation and demise. How might we ap- proach this generative tension? Digital fashion, by demon- strating the logic and operation of stage value to its extreme, is a good place to begin. The web interface: atmosphere and hapticity Digital fashion design is not contingent upon the market availability of raw materials, nor is it constrained by the physical attributes of specific fabrics. With the recent 14 W. Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” trans. H. Zohn, in H. Arendt, ed., Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): 217-251. JANE Y. ZHANG 166 AN-ICON  integration of Adobe Substance to CLO Virtual Fashion,15 designers can manipulate the material properties of existing virtual fabric available in online databases, or create a virtual surface entirely from scratch. Roei Derhi, a Berlin-based digital fashion designer, describes the fabric selection for digital garments as “limitless.”16 Despite the wide range of fabric selections made possible by digital simulation software, digital fash- ion designers have demonstrated a particular affinity to the elemental. The classical Greek elements – earth, water, fire, air – have been cited as the inspiration for a great number of digital fashion collections, such as that of James Mack and 2WB.17 Simply entering the keyword “water” yields over 200 searches among the 2000 articles of clothing in the DRESSX database, with results ranging from digital tops, dresses, and earrings.18 Elements, according to the media scholar Nicole Starosielski, are “defined by their roles in composition.”19 Understanding elements as constitut- ing parts extends their scope to encompass other specific forms of materiality, such as electricity, botanics, and metal – images similarly popular for digital fashion designers. Given that the elemental orientation of digital garments does not correspond to trends in the physical fashion industry, its medium specificity serves as a generative avenue to begin our inquiry into the materiality of digital fashion. “Neon Pillow” (Fig. 1) is a garment designed by May Ka. Consisting of a padded jacket worn over a 15 “CLO Virtual Fashion Welcomes Substance by Adobe, Jeanologia, and ColorDigital Integrations to CLO 6.0,” Businesswire (November 11, 2020), https://www.businesswire.com/ news/home/20201111005772/en/CLO-Virtual-Fashion-Welcomes-Substance-by-Adobe- Jeanologia-and-ColorDigital-Integrations-to-CLO-6.0, accessed January 10, 2023. 16 R. Derhi. Interviewed by the author. November 2021. 17 “James Mack: TERRA MOTUS,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/products/james-mack- terra-motus?_pos=1&_sid=2fb6573d9&_ss=r, accessed December 10, 2022; “2WB Artemis,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/products/2wb-003?_pos=6&_sid=ca632080c&_ss=r, accessed December 10, 2022. 18 “DRESSX search for ‘water’,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/search?q=water, accessed January 15, 2022. 19 N. Starosielski, “The elements of media studies,” Media+Environment 1, no. 1 (2019) https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.10780. JANE Y. ZHANG 167 AN-ICON  knee-length dress, the garment is rendered in a single hue of sea glass blue. Its pliable, creased underlayer contrasts texturally with the smooth voluminous shoulder panels. Yet, the airy silhouette is softened by the drapery’s crinkled tips and deflated hemlines. A thin sheet of puffer insulator folds into a skirt with a simple side slit. The fabric combines the plasticity of polyester with the reflective glare of satin. Not only does the digital textile resemble existing fabric, the specific details of its seams and patchwork are also me- ticulously rendered. Fig. 1. The Neon Pillow, May Ka, https://dressx.com/collections/may-ka/products/ total-neon-pillow, accessed January 15, 2022. Prior to the popularization of digital garments, the fashion industry has already become increasingly de- pendent on haptic technologies – “computational systems and applications aiming to artificially reproduce the sense of touch.”20 With the rise of online fashion retailing, clothes were made available for purchase on e-commerce websites 20 L. Cantoni, M. Ornati, “Fashiontouch in e-commerce: an exploratory study of surface haptic interaction experiences,” in F.H. Nah, K. Siau, eds., HCI in Business, Government and Organizations, vol. 12204 (Cham: Springer, 2020): 493-503, 494 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3- 030-50341-3_37. JANE Y. ZHANG 168 AN-ICON  and social media; the physical constraints placed by the COVID-19 epidemic lockdowns further encouraged fashion stores to migrate to online platforms.21 While devices such as the touch screen and the mouse enabled the simula- tion of physical touch, the two-dimensional affordances of mobile and laptop screens generated the need to simulate tactility through visualization technologies. “You can wear fire, you can wear lightning, those things are done with the same sense of fashion – what kind of fire? Wings or glitter?” asks Derhi,22 gesturing to the importance of textural details in the rendering of digital garments. The “limitless” potential of fabric selection does not translate to their freedom from perceptual constraints. In addition to the employment of visualization technologies, digital fashion designers have turned to repre- sentational and narrative techniques to enhance the haptic- ity of digital garments. Freed from the need to resemble ex- isting fabric yet striving to visually simulate tactile surfaces, digital garments self-knowingly plunge into the elemental. On the website of DRESSX, the first and biggest retailer of digital fashion clothing, each garment is accompanied by a designer’s statement. May Ka’s description of her design reads as follows: This bubble put May Ka to sleep. She felt her feet were going to- wards something new, but her footsteps were inaudible. Falling into the deep water. Will she be able to breathe? The water is not transparent, but she have never seen so clear until now [sic].23 Ka describes the inspiration behind her piece as the pillow that accompanies her to sleep, whereupon the act of dreaming resembles “falling into deep water.” When viewed 21 Ibid. 22 R. Derhi, Interviewed by the author. November 2021. 23 “Ma Ka: Abstract Rose,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/products/abstract-rose?_pos=57&_ sid=ac38fecdf&_ss=r, accessed January 10, 2021. JANE Y. ZHANG 169 AN-ICON  with the imagery of water in mind, the materiality of the digital garment takes on a new dimension. The reflective fabric evokes the placid surface of a lake on a sunny day. The softness of the underlayer now takes on the fluidity characteristic of liquid as a state of matter. The sagging form of the drapery gestures towards the downward haul of gravity as one sinks into the water, just as the airy silhouette connotes a state of buoyan- cy–an opposing movement that casts the body in a state of suspension. As an existing substance, water brings to mind a particular combination of physical attributes. When Ka evokes the element of water to describe the experience of wearing the dress, specific visual details of the garment converse with each other, take on additional meaning, and cohere into a tangible surface. After all, what can evoke material presence better than the constituting units of matter itself? The technology of clothes simulation has centered around the visualization of “surfaces,” a word that permeates the field of textile engineering.24 Rather than describing the ma- teriality of digital fashion as made up of elemental images, it is more suitable to understand its composition as an “elemental surface.” The phrase might appear oxymoronic at first sight. Whereas elements are by nature fundamental and deep-seated, “surface” are merely skin-deep. The media scholar Giuliana Bru- no challenges dismissive readings of surface as ornamental and superficial, turning instead to surface as a generative conceptu- al framework to engage with the materiality of images: “Surface matters in the fabrics of the visual, for it is on the surface that textures come alive and the ‘feel’ of an aesthetic encounter can develop.”25 The phrase “‘feel’ of aesthetic encounter” dovetails with Böhme’s formulation of atmosphere as the defining charac- teristic of aesthetic production. It is at the interface of surfaces that the atmosphere becomes sensible. Viewed in this light, 24 P. Volino, N. Magnenat-Thalmann, Virtual Clothing: Theory and Practice (Cham: Springer, 2000). 25 G. Bruno, “Surface encounters: materiality and empathy,” in D. Martin, ed., Mirror-Touch Synesthesia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017): 107-125, 118. JANE Y. ZHANG 170 AN-ICON  the invocation of elements emerges as a representational – or, in Böhme’s words, “presentational” technique through which virtual garments mobilize our prior conceptions of matter to generate a greater sense of environmental presence. To attend to surfaces is to engage with media as environments. In her study of early Chinese cinema, the me- dia scholar Bao Weihong describes affect as the “platform/ interface of experience produced by media technology and media aesthetic in interaction with the perceptual subjects.”26 In this sense, affect does not designate any singular medium or sensory modality, but instead constitute a condition of me- diation that envelops individuals and machines and redraws their intimate boundaries. In Ka’s description, water envelops the dreamer just as the digital garment encloses the wearer. Water becomes an intermediary substance through which the dreamer confronts her “fears and anxieties” and sees the world with heightened lucidity. Surfaces “hold affect in its fabric” and enable “the passage of empathy,” writes Bruno.27 When beckoned to interact with the body and its surroundings, the environmentalizing tendency of the elemental surface is further dramatized. In the next section, I situate Ka’s garment in the context of its intended function: to be worn and displayed by the human body. The DF image: atmosphere and vitality Digital garments are sold digitally and dressed digitally. To wear a digital garment is to superimpose its form onto an existing photograph with the help of graphic engineer- ing technologies. This procedure is accomplished through the use of “collision detection,”28 a computation technique that simulates the points of contact between the virtual fabric and 26 W. Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945: 12. 27 G. Bruno, “Surface tension, screen space,” in S. Saether, S. Bull, eds., Screen Space Reconfigured, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 35-55, 28. 28 P. Volino, N. Magnenat-Thalmann, Virtual Clothing: 6. JANE Y. ZHANG 171 AN-ICON  the surrounding objects. Despite having little effect on the ap- pearance of the virtual garment as an independent entity, the importance of collision detection becomes readily apparent when we examine the entirety of the digital fashion image (here- on referred to as the DF image). In Fig. 2, shadows enable a dialogue between the wearer’s body and the virtual garment. The bottom rim of the dress projects its silhouette on the thighs of its wearer, assert- ing itself as a material surface that receives the light in place of the wearer’s skin. Shadows project an entity’s image upon a foreign surface. By insisting on its ability to rechannel the light, the dress appears under the same sunlight as the body. In the lower right corner of the image, the shape of the body’s shad- ow takes on the silhouette of the garment. Not only does the garment envelope the wearer, it environmentalizes the body to converse with the soft, chilly grass on a winter morning. Fig. 2. The Neon Pillow purchased from DRESSX, Cambridge, December 2022 (photographed by the author). January 15, 2022. JANE Y. ZHANG 172 AN-ICON  The digital reflects light just as it displaces light. Under the piercing sun, the dress’ monochromatic surface takes on a new life. No longer enveloped by solid hues of gen- tle blue, the garment now radiates in a purple glow marked by overexposed highlights. Hints of green make their way to the outer edges of the garment, gradually intensifying as they approach the lawn and foliage in the background. Through the skillful manipulation of shadows and reflection, the DF image is no longer a replica of the original photograph with the addition of the digital garment. Rather, it strives toward the overarching reality of the index- ical and causally affirms the existence of the constellation it depicts. Given that the staging of the digital garment implicates the entire photographic image, digital fashion’s concern with visual congruency manifests prior to the cre- ation of the DF image. Clicking into the tab “How to Wear” on the DRESSX website, an alternative title immediately appears: “Choose the right picture: recommendation for receiving the best photo looks.” The requirements for the photo fall under four groups: natural light, fitted clothes, high quality (photograph), and uncovered parts. While the expectation for compact clothing pertains to the appear- ance of the body, the demand for natural lighting concerns the environmental setup.29 In an earlier version of the web- page, the list also asked the buyer to locate themselves relatively close to the camera to ensure “less background.”30 Digital fashion demands from the wearer not only a body but a context, where the physical environment becomes an integral part of the process of “wearing” the clothes. Clothing is external to the body yet an exten- sion of the body. It is at once the interface upon which the body and the external world come into contact, but also 29 “How to wear DRESSX and digital fashion,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/pages/help, accessed January 15, 2021. 30 Ibid. JANE Y. ZHANG 173 AN-ICON  the veil that separates the body from its immediate sur- rounding. This dynamic is perfectly captured by Emanuele Coccia, “[The dress] does not act directly upon our own anatomical body or the media that surround it, but rather it incorporates extraneous fragments of the world, foreign bodies through which our self is made to appear.”31 Al- exander Knight, a London-based digital fashion designer, affirms this statement through his description of pockets: It brings me joy to see something crazy and then see the details. Like when you see a Versace evening gown with a pocket, and the model walking down the runway with their hands in the pocket. I guess it gives it life. Digital garments can have a cold, static, and unlivable quality to them. Giving it these details gives it life.32 Knight does not employ the rhetoric of realism, describing the ideal of digital garments instead as a state of aliveness. Serving as a container for not only the body but also parts of an external world, the pocket signifies a garment’s potential to enter into relationships with others. Having a pocket allows digital garments to make a promise of everyday companionship: the wearer’s hand, keys and wallet, a bus ticket, a crumpled piece of candy wrapper. In doing so, pockets endow the garment with “life.” To sim- ulate the experience of wearing physical clothes entails more than appearing unedited; it demands no less than to situate garments alongside the living so that they in turn take on a life of their own. Read this way, the DF image reaches beyond the synthetic towards the additive. The color of the gar- ment is more vibrant than the skin of the wearer, and its form more dynamic than the posture of the body it adorns. The difference in luminosity and animacy is not only one of 31 E. Coccia, Sensible Life: A Micro-Ontology of the Image, trans. S.A. Stuart (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016): 28. 32 A. Knight. Interviewed by the author. November 2021. JANE Y. ZHANG 174 AN-ICON  quantity but quality: the resolution of the dress is decidedly higher than that of the original photo. The virtual garment creates a unique region of clarity, ushering forth a sense of saliency impossible to be captured by a digital camera from the same distance away. The elemental surface steps forward in an outward radiance, endowing an otherworldly vitality to the concrete and ordinary. The seamless photo- graphic overlay creates an image of pictorial rupture – not from a sense of visual incongruity but, quite to the contrary, the hypersensitivity between the figure and ground. Similar to the pocket, the digital garment’s ability to respond to the body and the environment not only serves to conjure a realistic image, but one that feels convincingly and dra- matically alive. The language of life and liveliness permeates Böhme’s theorization surrounding aesthetic commodities. Describing the perceptual effect of atmospheres, Böhme writes, “the establishment of a world of images on the sur- face of reality, or even independently of it, may well serve the intensification of life.”33 The function of aesthetic com- modities is “made of their attractiveness, their glow, their atmosphere: they themselves contribute to the staging, the dressing up, and the enhancement of life.”34 The perceptual pattern and affective construction of digital garments relo- cate Böhme’s invocation of “life” from the general condition of living to the immediate sensation of vitality. The elemen- tal surface of digital fashion is not only elemental because it evokes hapticity through the portrayal of specific forms of materiality, but also because it endows a fundamental feeling of liveliness to the body it claims to envelop. The reciprocity between hapticity and vitality has been evoked by Bruno when she describes the sur- face as the site in which “textures come alive.”35 In the 33 G. Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres: 199. 34 G. Böhme, Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism: 21. 35 G. Bruno, “Surface encounters: materiality and empathy:” 118. JANE Y. ZHANG 175 AN-ICON  next section, I examine digital garments as they appear in a virtual runway animation in order to further excavate the mode of embodiment enacted by the elemental surface of digital fashion. The virtual runway: atmosphere and embodiment A silver parka comes to life within the first three seconds. An orange thread slithers into the right-hand sleeve, followed by the contraction of the backside pad- ding. As the full parka comes into view, additional strands fly into the frame, endowing form to an otherwise slackened figure. With its arms outstretched, the parka inhales for the first time with the simultaneous compression of its seam lines – rapidly yet unfalteringly assembled almost as if by its own will. A single decisive zip renders the garment upright, and a hood pops into place. The resurrection is complete. Such was the opening sequence to a commer- cial on digital fashion.36 The creative team, not so subtly named “ITSALIVE,” offers us a glimpse into the worldbuild- ing of industry. As the virtual garment appears increasingly alive, the body and its surroundings take on an inert and lifeless quality. This perceptual pattern, already evident in the DF image, is further dramatized by the advertisements and runway shows released by the digital fashion industry. As the animation progresses, flame emanates from the parka just as the music picks up, unleashing dy- namic dashes of green and silver light that illuminates the dark background. Just as the parka begins to dance, a satin jumpsuit walks up to the parka and unveils its head mask. A moment of revelation follows: there was nothing 36 “Digital Clothes Production | Virtual Wear Development | Digital Fashion,” ITSALIVE, YouTube video, 0:58, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDAsRGOqx0o, accessed January 10, 2023. JANE Y. ZHANG 176 AN-ICON  underneath. What we had assumed to be a mannequin has been a hollow void all along. In a sense, physical runway shows have be- come “digital” decades before the rise of digital fashion. With the rise of Instagram and other forms of digital media platforms, the clothing commodity is staged with its after- life as a photograph or short video in mind.37 One of the most notable impacts on fashion photography, as noted by Silvano Mendes, was the elevated importance of runway scenography. A runway show constitutes an intermedial event, and its success depends on the close collaboration between fashion designers, stage designers, architects, and photographers.38 On the other hand, just as digital garments are made from pixels rather than textiles, digital fashion shows prefer computer animation over live-action footage. Rather than employing specific staging technol- ogies such as fog machines or lighting equipment, digital fashion commercials employ 3D animation to portray the product, its wearer, and the surrounding. In doing so, the aforementioned revelation becomes especially jolting and unsettling, as the body’s absence renders it virtually indis- tinguishable from the background. For the philosopher Hans Jonas, the human embodiment is characterized by the simultaneous expe- rience of the body as a subject for self-invention and an object for self-scrutiny.39 While the dynamic interplay be- tween this dual perspective has enacted highly divergent modes of embodiment across temporal and cultural ge- ographies, inherent to the human experience is this gen- erative tension between the first- and third-person per- spective. Joanne Entwistle, drawing from Merleau-Ponty’s 37 S. Mendes, “The instagrammability of the runway: architecture, scenography, and the spatial turn in fashion communications,” Fashion Theory 25, no. 3 (2019): 311-338, https://doi. org/10.1080/1362704X.2019.1629758. 38 Ibid. 39 H. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: A Delta Book, 1966): 186-187. JANE Y. ZHANG 177 AN-ICON  phenomenological approach to embodiment, explores how this dual perspective of the body is evidenced and enacted by the act of dressing: “the experience of dress is a sub- jective act of attending to one’s body and making the body an object of consciousness and is also an act of attention with the body.”40 The existence of clothing, especially in its ornamental context, is not only a product of but the active site upon which the body functions, according to Berna- dette Wegenstein, as the “medium for experience itself.”41 Digital garments relocate the site of our dual perception from the body to its representation by the digital image –already when the body has become an object of its own perception, whether in a mental image of ourselves posing in front of the camera, or in the photomontage pre- pared for social media. “Contemporary technoscience is in a unique position to exploit this phenomenological con- vergence of first- and third-person perspectives,” writes Wegenstein.42 The word “exploit”– connoting the intentional instrumentalization and manipulation of fashion – precise- ly gets at the power of digital fashion: the digital garment separates and redistributes the dual perspectives along a temporal axis – our attention with our body is fated to precede our attunement to our body. And so, we watch the two headless figures dance to their own rhythm. When the jacket slips off from the satin jumpsuit, light directly passes through the regions uncovered by the garment, leaving a disembodied arm that nevertheless propels the dancer into the air. As the body fades into the dark space of projection, what remains is the outward radiance of the elemental surface. Our frisson of unease is reframed as an experience of wonder and 40 J. Entwistle, The Fashioned Body (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015): 118. 41 B. Wegenstein, M.B.N. Hansen, “Body,” in W.J.T. Mitchell, M.B.N. Hansen, eds., Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010): 21. 42 Ibid. JANE Y. ZHANG 178 AN-ICON  enchantment by the closing message: “We are the future. Wear the future.”43 Characterized by seasonal change and stylistic variation, the fashion industry actively mobilizes future-ori- ented rhetoric. Yet, digital fashion offers a specific image of the future. In the final acts of the animation, the satin jumpsuit leaps and twirls amidst the fleeting background: the sunrise over a desert, snow-capped mountains, a blos- soming flower, great waves of the ocean, thunder, clouds, the atmosphere of the earth seen from space. Marketing products made of code instead of cotton, the digital fash- ion industry brands itself as a sustainable solution to the perils of climate catastrophe. Rather than interrogating the patterns of consumption that underlie over-extraction and waste, the digital fashion industry consistently evokes im- ages of nature in celebration of the triumph of life. “The eternity of art becomes a metaphor for the eternity of the soul, the vitality of trees and flowers become a metonymy of the vitality of the body…”44 Umberto Eco’s description of sculptural replicas in California graveyards possesses strange resonances with the internal logic of digital fashion. Referring back to Starosielski’s definition, elements are specific materialities that constitute our eco- logical conditions. In the animation, it was precisely a flame emanating from the parka that transformed the background from an empty cosmos to a colorful creation myth. The sense of vitality afforded by the hapticity of the elemental surface is tasked to mediate the premonition of future ca- tastrophe and to offer a promise of humanity’s continuous livelihood. Asserting that the aura of “historical objects” may be illustrated “with reference to the aura of natural 43 “Digital Clothes Production | Virtual Wear Development | Digital Fashion,” ITSALIVE, 2022, YouTube video, 0:58, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDAsRGOqx0o, accessed January 10, 2023. 44 U. Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. W. Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt, 1986): 96. JANE Y. ZHANG 179 AN-ICON  ones,”45 Benjamin depicts a meditative encounter with na- ture: If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.46 Comparing the view of the distant mountain offered by Benjamin with the virtual projection of the land- scape in the digital fashion concept video, digital garments indeed appear to testify to the demise of aura in our age of digital reproduction. And yet, digital fashion is similarly invested in the interplay between the natural and affective environment. To situate the phenomenal structure of “at- mosphere” in dialogue with that of “aura” is to foreground the primacy of environmental perception in the history of technological mediation. By expanding the constitution of media from communicative forms to ecological conditions, elemental surfaces provide an analytic framework for eco- critique beyond the study of “nature,” focusing instead on the perceptual patterns and representational techniques through which physical and affective environments are felt, performed, and lived. Coda We are familiar with the fairy tale of an emperor without clothes; now it seems as though our clothes have lost their emperors. “What we need is the digital body to be for people to wear our clothing,”47 says Kerry Murphy, the 45 W. Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction:” 5. 46 Ibid. 47 “FASHION MADE: The Future of Digital Fashion with Kerry Murphy, The Fabricant,” Product Innovation, YouTube video, 38:2, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Up8B9WUoKg4, accessed January 10, 2023. JANE Y. ZHANG 180 AN-ICON  founder of the pioneering digital fashion brand Fabricant. For Murphy, as for many others in the industry, the current coupling of digital garments and physical bodies is only a transitory phase in the field’s progression toward complete virtuality. Before that day comes, holding our love and fear in its fabric, preserving the contours of our hollow form, the digital garment dances in a world without us. As new materialisms have argued for the inher- ent vitality vested in all matter, Mel Y. Chen reminds us that animacy is political–the assignment of liveliness to bodies is viscerally bound to the technologies and discourse of biopower.48 In the same way, as media scholars have in- creasingly expanded the notion of hapticity beyond phys- ical tactility, our experience of materiality is nevertheless structured by nonneutral social relations. What is endowed with the vitality to “touch us emotionally,”49 and whose life gets to be touched, staged, and enhanced? The elemental surface of digital garments reminds us that the questions of vitality and hapticity are tightly intertwined and invites us to interrogate their intersecting histories. More concretely, elemental surfaces beckon us to approach the history of elements—from its classical inception to its post-classical legacy—with an eye towards the sensationalization and environmentalization of life. It is from this vantage point that digital fashion’s danger emerges alongside its allure, and our critical intervention emerges alongside constructive possibilities. 48 M.Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 49 Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres: 97. JANE Y. ZHANG 181 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/17124

Clothes with no emperors: the materiality of digital fashion by Jane Y. Zhang Digital fashion Materiality Atmosphere Hapticity Aesthetic economy Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Clothes with no emperors: the materiality of digital fashion JANE Y. ZHANG, Harvard University – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7956-2599 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17124 Abstract Digital garments are tailored computationally and dressed virtually. Intended to be displayed rather than worn, digital fashion exemplifies the function of aesthetic commodities as defined by Gernot Böhme: the production of atmospheres – intangible qualities arising from a mate- rial encounter – towards the staging of life. Yet, made from pixels instead of fabric, virtual garments beckon a new conceptual framework for the role of materiality in atmo- spheric productions. Drawing from new media and affect scholars, this essay traces the display of digital garments across three sites: the e-commerce website, social media, and the runway show. By analyzing the visual and literary production surrounding digital fashion, this essay proposes “elemental surface” as a representational technique and rhe- torical strategy through which digital garments produce and intensify the body’s affective presence. Situating Böhme’s formulation of atmosphere in dialogue with the notion of “aura” put forth by Walter Benjamin, the study of digital fashion foregrounds the role of environmental perception in the history of haptic technology. Keywords Digital fashion Materiality Atmosphere Hapticity Aesthetic economy To quote this essay: Y. Zhang, “Clothes with no emperors: the materiality of digital fashion,” AN- ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 162-181, https://doi.org/10.54103/ ai/17124 JANE Y. ZHANG 162 AN-ICON  Introduction Scrolling through an online fashion catalog, you come across a piece of clothing that reminds you of your favorite song: it is bold but not too bold, casual with just the right amount of edge. You add the item to your shop- ping cart. At checkout, you are asked to upload a photo of yourself. So you pose in front of the camera, dressed mini- mally under good lighting. One business day later, instead of arriving in a package in the mail, the garment appears as an email attachment in your inbox, carefully composited onto the photo you have uploaded. Since its inception in 2008,1 digital clothing has quickly gained traction in the fashion industry, giving rise to independent digital fashion houses as well as partnerships with well-established clothing brands. Daria Shapovalo- va, the cofounder of DRESSX, summarizes digital fashion as being “all about how we can replicate the experience of physical clothes in digital.”2 The statement is counter- intuitive at first sight. Made from pixels instead of fabric, digital garments cannot shield our bodies from the bracing winds of winter or the unwanted gaze of another. But if we refrain from taking Shapovalova’s statement at face value, it emerges as a profound commentary on the phenome- nology of clothing and, by extension, the contemporary socioeconomic system upon which the fashion industry operates. For Shapovalova, digital garments are not here to represent but to replicate. But to replicate what? Interesting is the absence of a verb: do digital garments replicate the 1 “Carlings: The First-Ever Digital Clothing Collection,” H.R. Watkins III, https://www. haywoodwatkinsiii.com/digital-clothing-collection, accessed December 7, 2021. In 2018, the Scandinavian retailer Carlings introduced the first digital fashion collection. 2 “Digital Clothing Is the Future of Fashion | Dell Talks with Daria Shapovalova,” Dell, YouTube video, 8:12, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKBePuTOB6U, accessed January 10, 2023. JANE Y. ZHANG 163 AN-ICON  experience of wearing “physical” clothes or that of seeing physical clothes? Made to be shown rather than worn, digital fashion displays the functional liberty characteristic of an aesthetic commodity. The philosopher Gernot Böhme pro- poses that capitalism has entered a new phase: under the “aesthetic economy,”3 the value of commodities extends beyond their physical utility or monetary worth. Aesthetic economics restructures the dichotomy of the “use value” and “exchange value,” triangulating them in service of an independent utility metric: the “stage value.”4 Under this metric, the aesthetic properties of a product no longer exist in addition to its ability to satisfy primary needs, but func- tion towards “the staging, the dressing up and enhance- ment of life.”5 Observing that the outward presentation of commodities is emancipated from their material function,6 Böhme refers to the study of atmospheres as engaging in “poetic phenomenology” – the study of how appearances come to be.7 Böhme’s phenomenological investment in the operation of aesthetic commodities aligns convincingly with Shapovalova’s experiential framing of digital fashion. For Böhme, the stage value of an aesthetic commodity arises from its atmosphere. Understood as the “something more” arising from aesthetic encounters, atmo- spheres are by definition “intangible” and “indeterminant.”8 As elusive as atmospheres are, they can nevertheless be theorized at the sites of their production: aesthetic laborers have long engaged in the skillful manipulation of materiality – the outward appearance of matter – to create and inten- sify the atmospheric presence of aesthetic commodities. 3 G. Böhme, Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism, trans. E. Jephcott (Milan: Mimesis International, 2017): 20. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 G. Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, ed. J.P. Thibaud (Oxon: Routledge, 2017): 144. 7 Ibid.: 33. 8 Ibid.: 29; 30. JANE Y. ZHANG 164 AN-ICON  While “pure aesthetic materials assume we won’t handle or touch them,”9 they nevertheless touch and move us emotionally.10 Bohme’s formulation of atmosphere compli- cates the reading of digital fashion as a testament to the dematerializing effect of the capitalist economy on material relations and social life.11 When all that is solid melts into air, the air becomes charged with affective presence and sensory impressions – it becomes an atmosphere. Given the nonphysical nature of virtual garments, how exactly does digital fashion engage in the production of atmospheres? Scholarships in new media studies and affect theory converge on their emphasis on embodiment as central to the study of aesthetic mediums. Informed by theories of embodied perception stemming from philos- ophers such as Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, new media scholars have challenged the “immaterial” ontology of vir- tual technologies.12 Similarly, affect theorists foreground the porous boundaries between sensory modalities and ges- tures toward the primacy of hapticity in visual encounters.13 Together, these studies provide additional methodological tools to investigate the materiality of virtual garments. This essay traces digital fashion’s atmospheric production across three sites of its exhibition: the e-com- merce website, social media, and the runway show. In the first section, I examine the proliferation of elements – spe- cific forms of materiality such as water – in digital garment designs. Drawing from Giuliana Bruno’s work, I introduce the concept of “elemental surface” as a representation- al technique utilized by virtual garments to enhance their 9 Ibid.: 146. 10 Ibid.: 97. 11 G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. D. Frisby (London - New York: Routledge, 2004): 150. 12 B. Brown, “Materiality,” in W.J.T. Mitchell, M.B.N. Hansen, eds., Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago - London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010): 49-63; W. Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2015). 13 E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). JANE Y. ZHANG 165 AN-ICON  environmental presence. In the second section, I explore how the digital imposition of virtual garments alters the background-foreground relationship of existing photo- graphs, from which the elemental surface emerges as an index for the sensation of vitality and liveliness. The opera- tion of hapticity and vitality collides in the third section. By analyzing digital garments as they appear in an animated advertisement, I contend that elemental surface mobilizes contemporary anxieties surrounding the “natural” environ- ment in service of its construction of an affective milieu. In the seminal essay, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” Walter Benjamin attributes the demise of aura to the rise of technologies of reproduction, such as photography and film.14 Made available for mass distribution and consumption, the artwork is cut off from the ritualistic contexts of its exhibition and dispossessed of its unique presence. Benjamin’s prophetic insight into the elevated importance of an artwork’s public presentability directly anticipates the domination of “staging value” man- dated by aesthetic capitalism. Yet, for Böhme, the mass circulation of aesthetic productions is accompanied by the manipulation and intensification of their presence rather than their depreciation and demise. How might we ap- proach this generative tension? Digital fashion, by demon- strating the logic and operation of stage value to its extreme, is a good place to begin. The web interface: atmosphere and hapticity Digital fashion design is not contingent upon the market availability of raw materials, nor is it constrained by the physical attributes of specific fabrics. With the recent 14 W. Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” trans. H. Zohn, in H. Arendt, ed., Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): 217-251. JANE Y. ZHANG 166 AN-ICON  integration of Adobe Substance to CLO Virtual Fashion,15 designers can manipulate the material properties of existing virtual fabric available in online databases, or create a virtual surface entirely from scratch. Roei Derhi, a Berlin-based digital fashion designer, describes the fabric selection for digital garments as “limitless.”16 Despite the wide range of fabric selections made possible by digital simulation software, digital fash- ion designers have demonstrated a particular affinity to the elemental. The classical Greek elements – earth, water, fire, air – have been cited as the inspiration for a great number of digital fashion collections, such as that of James Mack and 2WB.17 Simply entering the keyword “water” yields over 200 searches among the 2000 articles of clothing in the DRESSX database, with results ranging from digital tops, dresses, and earrings.18 Elements, according to the media scholar Nicole Starosielski, are “defined by their roles in composition.”19 Understanding elements as constitut- ing parts extends their scope to encompass other specific forms of materiality, such as electricity, botanics, and metal – images similarly popular for digital fashion designers. Given that the elemental orientation of digital garments does not correspond to trends in the physical fashion industry, its medium specificity serves as a generative avenue to begin our inquiry into the materiality of digital fashion. “Neon Pillow” (Fig. 1) is a garment designed by May Ka. Consisting of a padded jacket worn over a 15 “CLO Virtual Fashion Welcomes Substance by Adobe, Jeanologia, and ColorDigital Integrations to CLO 6.0,” Businesswire (November 11, 2020), https://www.businesswire.com/ news/home/20201111005772/en/CLO-Virtual-Fashion-Welcomes-Substance-by-Adobe- Jeanologia-and-ColorDigital-Integrations-to-CLO-6.0, accessed January 10, 2023. 16 R. Derhi. Interviewed by the author. November 2021. 17 “James Mack: TERRA MOTUS,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/products/james-mack- terra-motus?_pos=1&_sid=2fb6573d9&_ss=r, accessed December 10, 2022; “2WB Artemis,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/products/2wb-003?_pos=6&_sid=ca632080c&_ss=r, accessed December 10, 2022. 18 “DRESSX search for ‘water’,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/search?q=water, accessed January 15, 2022. 19 N. Starosielski, “The elements of media studies,” Media+Environment 1, no. 1 (2019) https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.10780. JANE Y. ZHANG 167 AN-ICON  knee-length dress, the garment is rendered in a single hue of sea glass blue. Its pliable, creased underlayer contrasts texturally with the smooth voluminous shoulder panels. Yet, the airy silhouette is softened by the drapery’s crinkled tips and deflated hemlines. A thin sheet of puffer insulator folds into a skirt with a simple side slit. The fabric combines the plasticity of polyester with the reflective glare of satin. Not only does the digital textile resemble existing fabric, the specific details of its seams and patchwork are also me- ticulously rendered. Fig. 1. The Neon Pillow, May Ka, https://dressx.com/collections/may-ka/products/ total-neon-pillow, accessed January 15, 2022. Prior to the popularization of digital garments, the fashion industry has already become increasingly de- pendent on haptic technologies – “computational systems and applications aiming to artificially reproduce the sense of touch.”20 With the rise of online fashion retailing, clothes were made available for purchase on e-commerce websites 20 L. Cantoni, M. Ornati, “Fashiontouch in e-commerce: an exploratory study of surface haptic interaction experiences,” in F.H. Nah, K. Siau, eds., HCI in Business, Government and Organizations, vol. 12204 (Cham: Springer, 2020): 493-503, 494 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3- 030-50341-3_37. JANE Y. ZHANG 168 AN-ICON  and social media; the physical constraints placed by the COVID-19 epidemic lockdowns further encouraged fashion stores to migrate to online platforms.21 While devices such as the touch screen and the mouse enabled the simula- tion of physical touch, the two-dimensional affordances of mobile and laptop screens generated the need to simulate tactility through visualization technologies. “You can wear fire, you can wear lightning, those things are done with the same sense of fashion – what kind of fire? Wings or glitter?” asks Derhi,22 gesturing to the importance of textural details in the rendering of digital garments. The “limitless” potential of fabric selection does not translate to their freedom from perceptual constraints. In addition to the employment of visualization technologies, digital fashion designers have turned to repre- sentational and narrative techniques to enhance the haptic- ity of digital garments. Freed from the need to resemble ex- isting fabric yet striving to visually simulate tactile surfaces, digital garments self-knowingly plunge into the elemental. On the website of DRESSX, the first and biggest retailer of digital fashion clothing, each garment is accompanied by a designer’s statement. May Ka’s description of her design reads as follows: This bubble put May Ka to sleep. She felt her feet were going to- wards something new, but her footsteps were inaudible. Falling into the deep water. Will she be able to breathe? The water is not transparent, but she have never seen so clear until now [sic].23 Ka describes the inspiration behind her piece as the pillow that accompanies her to sleep, whereupon the act of dreaming resembles “falling into deep water.” When viewed 21 Ibid. 22 R. Derhi, Interviewed by the author. November 2021. 23 “Ma Ka: Abstract Rose,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/products/abstract-rose?_pos=57&_ sid=ac38fecdf&_ss=r, accessed January 10, 2021. JANE Y. ZHANG 169 AN-ICON  with the imagery of water in mind, the materiality of the digital garment takes on a new dimension. The reflective fabric evokes the placid surface of a lake on a sunny day. The softness of the underlayer now takes on the fluidity characteristic of liquid as a state of matter. The sagging form of the drapery gestures towards the downward haul of gravity as one sinks into the water, just as the airy silhouette connotes a state of buoyan- cy–an opposing movement that casts the body in a state of suspension. As an existing substance, water brings to mind a particular combination of physical attributes. When Ka evokes the element of water to describe the experience of wearing the dress, specific visual details of the garment converse with each other, take on additional meaning, and cohere into a tangible surface. After all, what can evoke material presence better than the constituting units of matter itself? The technology of clothes simulation has centered around the visualization of “surfaces,” a word that permeates the field of textile engineering.24 Rather than describing the ma- teriality of digital fashion as made up of elemental images, it is more suitable to understand its composition as an “elemental surface.” The phrase might appear oxymoronic at first sight. Whereas elements are by nature fundamental and deep-seated, “surface” are merely skin-deep. The media scholar Giuliana Bru- no challenges dismissive readings of surface as ornamental and superficial, turning instead to surface as a generative conceptu- al framework to engage with the materiality of images: “Surface matters in the fabrics of the visual, for it is on the surface that textures come alive and the ‘feel’ of an aesthetic encounter can develop.”25 The phrase “‘feel’ of aesthetic encounter” dovetails with Böhme’s formulation of atmosphere as the defining charac- teristic of aesthetic production. It is at the interface of surfaces that the atmosphere becomes sensible. Viewed in this light, 24 P. Volino, N. Magnenat-Thalmann, Virtual Clothing: Theory and Practice (Cham: Springer, 2000). 25 G. Bruno, “Surface encounters: materiality and empathy,” in D. Martin, ed., Mirror-Touch Synesthesia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017): 107-125, 118. JANE Y. ZHANG 170 AN-ICON  the invocation of elements emerges as a representational – or, in Böhme’s words, “presentational” technique through which virtual garments mobilize our prior conceptions of matter to generate a greater sense of environmental presence. To attend to surfaces is to engage with media as environments. In her study of early Chinese cinema, the me- dia scholar Bao Weihong describes affect as the “platform/ interface of experience produced by media technology and media aesthetic in interaction with the perceptual subjects.”26 In this sense, affect does not designate any singular medium or sensory modality, but instead constitute a condition of me- diation that envelops individuals and machines and redraws their intimate boundaries. In Ka’s description, water envelops the dreamer just as the digital garment encloses the wearer. Water becomes an intermediary substance through which the dreamer confronts her “fears and anxieties” and sees the world with heightened lucidity. Surfaces “hold affect in its fabric” and enable “the passage of empathy,” writes Bruno.27 When beckoned to interact with the body and its surroundings, the environmentalizing tendency of the elemental surface is further dramatized. In the next section, I situate Ka’s garment in the context of its intended function: to be worn and displayed by the human body. The DF image: atmosphere and vitality Digital garments are sold digitally and dressed digitally. To wear a digital garment is to superimpose its form onto an existing photograph with the help of graphic engineer- ing technologies. This procedure is accomplished through the use of “collision detection,”28 a computation technique that simulates the points of contact between the virtual fabric and 26 W. Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945: 12. 27 G. Bruno, “Surface tension, screen space,” in S. Saether, S. Bull, eds., Screen Space Reconfigured, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 35-55, 28. 28 P. Volino, N. Magnenat-Thalmann, Virtual Clothing: 6. JANE Y. ZHANG 171 AN-ICON  the surrounding objects. Despite having little effect on the ap- pearance of the virtual garment as an independent entity, the importance of collision detection becomes readily apparent when we examine the entirety of the digital fashion image (here- on referred to as the DF image). In Fig. 2, shadows enable a dialogue between the wearer’s body and the virtual garment. The bottom rim of the dress projects its silhouette on the thighs of its wearer, assert- ing itself as a material surface that receives the light in place of the wearer’s skin. Shadows project an entity’s image upon a foreign surface. By insisting on its ability to rechannel the light, the dress appears under the same sunlight as the body. In the lower right corner of the image, the shape of the body’s shad- ow takes on the silhouette of the garment. Not only does the garment envelope the wearer, it environmentalizes the body to converse with the soft, chilly grass on a winter morning. Fig. 2. The Neon Pillow purchased from DRESSX, Cambridge, December 2022 (photographed by the author). January 15, 2022. JANE Y. ZHANG 172 AN-ICON  The digital reflects light just as it displaces light. Under the piercing sun, the dress’ monochromatic surface takes on a new life. No longer enveloped by solid hues of gen- tle blue, the garment now radiates in a purple glow marked by overexposed highlights. Hints of green make their way to the outer edges of the garment, gradually intensifying as they approach the lawn and foliage in the background. Through the skillful manipulation of shadows and reflection, the DF image is no longer a replica of the original photograph with the addition of the digital garment. Rather, it strives toward the overarching reality of the index- ical and causally affirms the existence of the constellation it depicts. Given that the staging of the digital garment implicates the entire photographic image, digital fashion’s concern with visual congruency manifests prior to the cre- ation of the DF image. Clicking into the tab “How to Wear” on the DRESSX website, an alternative title immediately appears: “Choose the right picture: recommendation for receiving the best photo looks.” The requirements for the photo fall under four groups: natural light, fitted clothes, high quality (photograph), and uncovered parts. While the expectation for compact clothing pertains to the appear- ance of the body, the demand for natural lighting concerns the environmental setup.29 In an earlier version of the web- page, the list also asked the buyer to locate themselves relatively close to the camera to ensure “less background.”30 Digital fashion demands from the wearer not only a body but a context, where the physical environment becomes an integral part of the process of “wearing” the clothes. Clothing is external to the body yet an exten- sion of the body. It is at once the interface upon which the body and the external world come into contact, but also 29 “How to wear DRESSX and digital fashion,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/pages/help, accessed January 15, 2021. 30 Ibid. JANE Y. ZHANG 173 AN-ICON  the veil that separates the body from its immediate sur- rounding. This dynamic is perfectly captured by Emanuele Coccia, “[The dress] does not act directly upon our own anatomical body or the media that surround it, but rather it incorporates extraneous fragments of the world, foreign bodies through which our self is made to appear.”31 Al- exander Knight, a London-based digital fashion designer, affirms this statement through his description of pockets: It brings me joy to see something crazy and then see the details. Like when you see a Versace evening gown with a pocket, and the model walking down the runway with their hands in the pocket. I guess it gives it life. Digital garments can have a cold, static, and unlivable quality to them. Giving it these details gives it life.32 Knight does not employ the rhetoric of realism, describing the ideal of digital garments instead as a state of aliveness. Serving as a container for not only the body but also parts of an external world, the pocket signifies a garment’s potential to enter into relationships with others. Having a pocket allows digital garments to make a promise of everyday companionship: the wearer’s hand, keys and wallet, a bus ticket, a crumpled piece of candy wrapper. In doing so, pockets endow the garment with “life.” To sim- ulate the experience of wearing physical clothes entails more than appearing unedited; it demands no less than to situate garments alongside the living so that they in turn take on a life of their own. Read this way, the DF image reaches beyond the synthetic towards the additive. The color of the gar- ment is more vibrant than the skin of the wearer, and its form more dynamic than the posture of the body it adorns. The difference in luminosity and animacy is not only one of 31 E. Coccia, Sensible Life: A Micro-Ontology of the Image, trans. S.A. Stuart (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016): 28. 32 A. Knight. Interviewed by the author. November 2021. JANE Y. ZHANG 174 AN-ICON  quantity but quality: the resolution of the dress is decidedly higher than that of the original photo. The virtual garment creates a unique region of clarity, ushering forth a sense of saliency impossible to be captured by a digital camera from the same distance away. The elemental surface steps forward in an outward radiance, endowing an otherworldly vitality to the concrete and ordinary. The seamless photo- graphic overlay creates an image of pictorial rupture – not from a sense of visual incongruity but, quite to the contrary, the hypersensitivity between the figure and ground. Similar to the pocket, the digital garment’s ability to respond to the body and the environment not only serves to conjure a realistic image, but one that feels convincingly and dra- matically alive. The language of life and liveliness permeates Böhme’s theorization surrounding aesthetic commodities. Describing the perceptual effect of atmospheres, Böhme writes, “the establishment of a world of images on the sur- face of reality, or even independently of it, may well serve the intensification of life.”33 The function of aesthetic com- modities is “made of their attractiveness, their glow, their atmosphere: they themselves contribute to the staging, the dressing up, and the enhancement of life.”34 The perceptual pattern and affective construction of digital garments relo- cate Böhme’s invocation of “life” from the general condition of living to the immediate sensation of vitality. The elemen- tal surface of digital fashion is not only elemental because it evokes hapticity through the portrayal of specific forms of materiality, but also because it endows a fundamental feeling of liveliness to the body it claims to envelop. The reciprocity between hapticity and vitality has been evoked by Bruno when she describes the sur- face as the site in which “textures come alive.”35 In the 33 G. Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres: 199. 34 G. Böhme, Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism: 21. 35 G. Bruno, “Surface encounters: materiality and empathy:” 118. JANE Y. ZHANG 175 AN-ICON  next section, I examine digital garments as they appear in a virtual runway animation in order to further excavate the mode of embodiment enacted by the elemental surface of digital fashion. The virtual runway: atmosphere and embodiment A silver parka comes to life within the first three seconds. An orange thread slithers into the right-hand sleeve, followed by the contraction of the backside pad- ding. As the full parka comes into view, additional strands fly into the frame, endowing form to an otherwise slackened figure. With its arms outstretched, the parka inhales for the first time with the simultaneous compression of its seam lines – rapidly yet unfalteringly assembled almost as if by its own will. A single decisive zip renders the garment upright, and a hood pops into place. The resurrection is complete. Such was the opening sequence to a commer- cial on digital fashion.36 The creative team, not so subtly named “ITSALIVE,” offers us a glimpse into the worldbuild- ing of industry. As the virtual garment appears increasingly alive, the body and its surroundings take on an inert and lifeless quality. This perceptual pattern, already evident in the DF image, is further dramatized by the advertisements and runway shows released by the digital fashion industry. As the animation progresses, flame emanates from the parka just as the music picks up, unleashing dy- namic dashes of green and silver light that illuminates the dark background. Just as the parka begins to dance, a satin jumpsuit walks up to the parka and unveils its head mask. A moment of revelation follows: there was nothing 36 “Digital Clothes Production | Virtual Wear Development | Digital Fashion,” ITSALIVE, YouTube video, 0:58, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDAsRGOqx0o, accessed January 10, 2023. JANE Y. ZHANG 176 AN-ICON  underneath. What we had assumed to be a mannequin has been a hollow void all along. In a sense, physical runway shows have be- come “digital” decades before the rise of digital fashion. With the rise of Instagram and other forms of digital media platforms, the clothing commodity is staged with its after- life as a photograph or short video in mind.37 One of the most notable impacts on fashion photography, as noted by Silvano Mendes, was the elevated importance of runway scenography. A runway show constitutes an intermedial event, and its success depends on the close collaboration between fashion designers, stage designers, architects, and photographers.38 On the other hand, just as digital garments are made from pixels rather than textiles, digital fashion shows prefer computer animation over live-action footage. Rather than employing specific staging technol- ogies such as fog machines or lighting equipment, digital fashion commercials employ 3D animation to portray the product, its wearer, and the surrounding. In doing so, the aforementioned revelation becomes especially jolting and unsettling, as the body’s absence renders it virtually indis- tinguishable from the background. For the philosopher Hans Jonas, the human embodiment is characterized by the simultaneous expe- rience of the body as a subject for self-invention and an object for self-scrutiny.39 While the dynamic interplay be- tween this dual perspective has enacted highly divergent modes of embodiment across temporal and cultural ge- ographies, inherent to the human experience is this gen- erative tension between the first- and third-person per- spective. Joanne Entwistle, drawing from Merleau-Ponty’s 37 S. Mendes, “The instagrammability of the runway: architecture, scenography, and the spatial turn in fashion communications,” Fashion Theory 25, no. 3 (2019): 311-338, https://doi. org/10.1080/1362704X.2019.1629758. 38 Ibid. 39 H. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: A Delta Book, 1966): 186-187. JANE Y. ZHANG 177 AN-ICON  phenomenological approach to embodiment, explores how this dual perspective of the body is evidenced and enacted by the act of dressing: “the experience of dress is a sub- jective act of attending to one’s body and making the body an object of consciousness and is also an act of attention with the body.”40 The existence of clothing, especially in its ornamental context, is not only a product of but the active site upon which the body functions, according to Berna- dette Wegenstein, as the “medium for experience itself.”41 Digital garments relocate the site of our dual perception from the body to its representation by the digital image –already when the body has become an object of its own perception, whether in a mental image of ourselves posing in front of the camera, or in the photomontage pre- pared for social media. “Contemporary technoscience is in a unique position to exploit this phenomenological con- vergence of first- and third-person perspectives,” writes Wegenstein.42 The word “exploit”– connoting the intentional instrumentalization and manipulation of fashion – precise- ly gets at the power of digital fashion: the digital garment separates and redistributes the dual perspectives along a temporal axis – our attention with our body is fated to precede our attunement to our body. And so, we watch the two headless figures dance to their own rhythm. When the jacket slips off from the satin jumpsuit, light directly passes through the regions uncovered by the garment, leaving a disembodied arm that nevertheless propels the dancer into the air. As the body fades into the dark space of projection, what remains is the outward radiance of the elemental surface. Our frisson of unease is reframed as an experience of wonder and 40 J. Entwistle, The Fashioned Body (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015): 118. 41 B. Wegenstein, M.B.N. Hansen, “Body,” in W.J.T. Mitchell, M.B.N. Hansen, eds., Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010): 21. 42 Ibid. JANE Y. ZHANG 178 AN-ICON  enchantment by the closing message: “We are the future. Wear the future.”43 Characterized by seasonal change and stylistic variation, the fashion industry actively mobilizes future-ori- ented rhetoric. Yet, digital fashion offers a specific image of the future. In the final acts of the animation, the satin jumpsuit leaps and twirls amidst the fleeting background: the sunrise over a desert, snow-capped mountains, a blos- soming flower, great waves of the ocean, thunder, clouds, the atmosphere of the earth seen from space. Marketing products made of code instead of cotton, the digital fash- ion industry brands itself as a sustainable solution to the perils of climate catastrophe. Rather than interrogating the patterns of consumption that underlie over-extraction and waste, the digital fashion industry consistently evokes im- ages of nature in celebration of the triumph of life. “The eternity of art becomes a metaphor for the eternity of the soul, the vitality of trees and flowers become a metonymy of the vitality of the body…”44 Umberto Eco’s description of sculptural replicas in California graveyards possesses strange resonances with the internal logic of digital fashion. Referring back to Starosielski’s definition, elements are specific materialities that constitute our eco- logical conditions. In the animation, it was precisely a flame emanating from the parka that transformed the background from an empty cosmos to a colorful creation myth. The sense of vitality afforded by the hapticity of the elemental surface is tasked to mediate the premonition of future ca- tastrophe and to offer a promise of humanity’s continuous livelihood. Asserting that the aura of “historical objects” may be illustrated “with reference to the aura of natural 43 “Digital Clothes Production | Virtual Wear Development | Digital Fashion,” ITSALIVE, 2022, YouTube video, 0:58, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDAsRGOqx0o, accessed January 10, 2023. 44 U. Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. W. Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt, 1986): 96. JANE Y. ZHANG 179 AN-ICON  ones,”45 Benjamin depicts a meditative encounter with na- ture: If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.46 Comparing the view of the distant mountain offered by Benjamin with the virtual projection of the land- scape in the digital fashion concept video, digital garments indeed appear to testify to the demise of aura in our age of digital reproduction. And yet, digital fashion is similarly invested in the interplay between the natural and affective environment. To situate the phenomenal structure of “at- mosphere” in dialogue with that of “aura” is to foreground the primacy of environmental perception in the history of technological mediation. By expanding the constitution of media from communicative forms to ecological conditions, elemental surfaces provide an analytic framework for eco- critique beyond the study of “nature,” focusing instead on the perceptual patterns and representational techniques through which physical and affective environments are felt, performed, and lived. Coda We are familiar with the fairy tale of an emperor without clothes; now it seems as though our clothes have lost their emperors. “What we need is the digital body to be for people to wear our clothing,”47 says Kerry Murphy, the 45 W. Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction:” 5. 46 Ibid. 47 “FASHION MADE: The Future of Digital Fashion with Kerry Murphy, The Fabricant,” Product Innovation, YouTube video, 38:2, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Up8B9WUoKg4, accessed January 10, 2023. JANE Y. ZHANG 180 AN-ICON  founder of the pioneering digital fashion brand Fabricant. For Murphy, as for many others in the industry, the current coupling of digital garments and physical bodies is only a transitory phase in the field’s progression toward complete virtuality. Before that day comes, holding our love and fear in its fabric, preserving the contours of our hollow form, the digital garment dances in a world without us. As new materialisms have argued for the inher- ent vitality vested in all matter, Mel Y. Chen reminds us that animacy is political–the assignment of liveliness to bodies is viscerally bound to the technologies and discourse of biopower.48 In the same way, as media scholars have in- creasingly expanded the notion of hapticity beyond phys- ical tactility, our experience of materiality is nevertheless structured by nonneutral social relations. What is endowed with the vitality to “touch us emotionally,”49 and whose life gets to be touched, staged, and enhanced? The elemental surface of digital garments reminds us that the questions of vitality and hapticity are tightly intertwined and invites us to interrogate their intersecting histories. More concretely, elemental surfaces beckon us to approach the history of elements—from its classical inception to its post-classical legacy—with an eye towards the sensationalization and environmentalization of life. It is from this vantage point that digital fashion’s danger emerges alongside its allure, and our critical intervention emerges alongside constructive possibilities. 48 M.Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 49 Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres: 97. JANE Y. ZHANG 181 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18166

Phenomenology of space and virtual reality. An experimental course for students by Matteo Vegetti in architecture Phenomenology Virtual reality Achitecture Philosophy Education Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Phenomenology of space and virtual reality. An experimental course for students in architecture MATTEO VEGETTI, Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana, Università della Svizzera Italiana – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5149-8609 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18166 Abstract The paper presents the theoretical assumptions and the way of conducting an experimental course on the Phenom- enology of Space designed for architects and interior designers. The course made use of virtual reality to allow stu- dents to directly experience the perceptive and cognitive effects induced by the forms of space, colour, the texture of materials, and light. Virtual reality was also the medium that made it pos- sible to translate certain philosophical concepts related to the phenomenology of space into an experiential and applicative field close to the sensitivity and spatial culture of the designers. The themes addressed gave rise to a progressive development that allowed students to develop an increasingly complex project and experiment with increasingly complex is- sues. The course began with the phenomenology of thresholds, and continued with the analysis of field and synesthesia, the phenomenology of atmospheres, and the analysis of orienta- tion and mind maps. In each of these areas of research and experimentation, the common thread remained the relationship between the body and space. The article also presents the ex- ercises proposed to the students and an overall assessment of the teaching experience. Keywords Phenomenology Virtual reality Achitecture Philosophy Education To quote this essay: M. Vegetti, “Phenomenology of space and virtual reality. An experimental course for students in architecture,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 184- 229, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18166 MATTEO VEGETTI 184 AN-ICON  Presentation of the course Virtual reality (VR) holds educational potential of great interest for all disciplines that deal with spatiali- ty, and even more for those, like architecture, that have a privileged relationship with lived space, that is to say with the interaction between the body and its environment. I at- tempted to demonstrate this thesis through the conception and development of a course on Phenomenology of space that makes use of virtual reality to study the perceptual effects of architectural design. The course began as a research project funded by an internal call for proposals in the Department of en- vironments, construction, and design of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUP- SI-DACD, Mendrisio, Switzerland) dedicated to digitization. From the outset, its implementation required the formation of a small interdisciplinary research team. It included, alongside myself, philosopher and professor of spatial theory Pietro Vitali (architect and professor of the degree course in inte- rior architecture), Matteo Moriani (architect and assistant for the course developed by this project), and Marco Lurati (interaction designer and lecturer). In contrast to what often occurs, the collaboration between different areas of exper- tise in our case had a material character. The task of taking care of the content and educational aims of the course fell to me, as philosopher, while that of dealing with questions related to more strictly architectural aspects fell to the de- signers, who then guided the students in their design work. The interaction designer, finally, had the task not only of making the course possible through the development of the technology and the necessary programming, but also of teaching students how to carry out design in VR and the relevant programs (Twinmotion in particular). As is clear, no member of the working group could have proceeded without the aid of the others. The final goal was to create a course in phenomenology applied to architecture with the help of Oculus Quest 2 headsets. In other words, rather than just learning theories, the students would need to sharpen their MATTEO VEGETTI 185 AN-ICON  spatial sensibility by experimenting with these theories in a virtual environment. The challenge was thus double: on one hand to offer a course on applied philosophy, and on the other to introduce virtual reality into a theoretical course, making it the tool for the application of theory. In addition to this, in an almost unconscious, seemingly instrumental way, the students would need to learn sophisticated programming languages, a skill that is also useful from a professional standpoint. Background Virtual Reality has recently emerged in archi- tecture and the arts as novel means for visualizing different design solutions and for building up the design model and its virtual environment. Similar to these applications, VR is commonly used in architectural education in the design process, as it provides the designer with an image to create the spatial and topological relationships of a project. Although the use of VR for teaching purposes is not yet widespread in archi- tecture faculties (in Europe at least), its pedagogical effec- tiveness has been clearly documented.1 Several studies on the pedagogical function of VR in architectural studies have shown that the use of VR increases the awareness of de- signer during designing in terms of the structural properties and component assembly of a structural system,2 helps stu- dents’ way of thinking, critical thinking, and problem-solv- ing activities,3 creates the possibility to “feel like being in the place,”4 strengthens the memory and awareness of the 1 F. Kharvari, L.E. Kaiser, “Impact of extended reality on architectural education and the design process,” Automation in Construction 141 (2022): 1-19, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. autcon.2022.104393. 2 W.A. Abdelhameed, “Virtual reality in architectural design studios: a case of studying structure and construction,” Procedia Computer Science 25 (2013): 220-230, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.procs.2013.11.027. 3 F. Kharvari, L.E. Kaiser, “Impact of extended reality on architectural education and the design process.” 4 T. Chandrasekera, K. Fernando, L. Puig, “Effect of degrees of freedom on the sense of presence generated by virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display systems: a case study on the use of VR in early design studios,” Journal of Educational Technology Systems 47, no.4 (2019): 513-522. MATTEO VEGETTI 186 AN-ICON  spatial configuration,5 augments “spatial abilities” in stu- dents,6 trains the capacity to switch naturally from a planar representation of space to a 3D representation of the same space.7 To cite a concrete experience, Johan Bettum, pro- fessor of architecture at the Städelschule, has used virtual reality in the master degree studio Architecture and Aes- thetic Practice at Städelschule Architecture Class (Frank- furt) as a laboratory for spatial inquiries in relation to sub- jective experience, the construction of reality and the role of images in regimes of representation. These experiments consisted in designing immersive environments where ar- chitecture has been explored through the computerized representation of forms and spaces. According to the inten- tions of the course, this digitally produced realm of images supplemented and often supplanted the traditional role of drawing in the contemporary design process.8 A second research experiment on the integration of VR in the cur- riculum at architecture schools, took place at the College of Architecture and Planning (CAP) of Ball State University. For three years in a row, the CAP created a design virtual environment for 2nd year students, making use of an HMD (Head Mounted Display). The CAP VR Environment aimed to support the actual architectural design process, therefore aiding the process of learning how to design, rather than limiting its use as a visualization tool. In the practical terms, the immersive simulation of an actual design project (the lobby of a small hotel) was intended to enable students to recreate the architectural characteristics of the space, elic- iting an appraisal of their architectural spatial experience. According to the author, the ability to navigate through 5 A. Angulo, “Rediscovering virtual reality in the education of architectural design: the immersive simulation of spatial experience,” Ambiences. Environment Sensible, Architecture et Espace Urbain 1 (2015): 1-23, https://doi.org/10.4000/ambiances.594. 6 T. Chandrasekera, S.Y. Yoon, “Adopting augmented reality in design communication: focusing on improving spatial abilities,” The International Journal of Architectonics, Spatial and Environmental Design 9, no.1 (2015): 1-14, http://dx.doi.org/10.18848/2325-1662/CGP/ v09i01/38384; M. Schnabel, T. Kvan, E. Kruijff, D. Donath, “The first virtual environment design studio,” 19th eCAADe Conference Proceedings. Helsinki (2001): 394-400. 7 J. Milovanovic, G. Moreau, D. Siret, F. Miguet, “Virtual and augmented reality in architectural design and education. An immersive multimodal platform to support architectural pedagogy,” 17th International Conference, CAAD Futures 2017, Istanbul, Turkey. 8 J. Bettum, Architecture, Futurability and the Untimely (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022). MATTEO VEGETTI 187 AN-ICON  the simulated lobbies turned out to be key to capture the architectural spatial experience and perceive the aesthetic emotion and/or symbolic meaning embedded in the proj- ects.9 A further type of studies attempted to demon- strate, through an experimental design that also involved students from a design class at the Milan Polytechnic, the possibility of recreating complex spatial qualities through VR, for example investigating how multisensoriality (scent in particular) affects the realism of the experience contrib- uting to increase the users’ sense of presence in the virtual environment.10 Although in some ways apparently akin to the case studies cited, it must be borne in mind that the course we experimented with differs first and foremost from them for the basic reason that it does not fall within the scope of architecture, but of philosophy applied to space (a phi- losophy with a phenomenological orientation). The aim of the pedagogical experiments conducted is therefore not related to design, but to the understanding of the body- space relationship, with a specific focus on the modalities of sensory perception. In other words, thanks to virtual re- ality, the students were able to experiment in various ways, according to a number of controlled possibilities, how the manipulation of certain variables (positions of openings, colors, scales, relationships between objects in space, arti- ficial lights, sequences of spaces) impact the spatial expe- rience on a perceptive and cognitive level. The aim was not to obtain a realistic representation of space, nor was it to learn about and visualize certain spaces and construction processes through VR. The aim was rather to verify with one’s own (virtual) body the perceptual effects induced by 9 A. Angulo, “Rediscovering virtual reality in the education of architectural design: the immersive simulation of spatial experience.” 10 M. Carulli, M. Bordegoni, U. Cugini, “Integrating scents simulation in virtual reality multisensory environment for industrial products evaluation,” Computer-Aided Design & Applications 13, no. 3 (2016): 320-328, https://doi.org/10.1080/16864360.2015.1114390. MATTEO VEGETTI 188 AN-ICON  certain design choices, and to develop a method to derive generalizable knowledge from experience. Although the aforementioned studies have provided the course with useful information and a set of important examples regarding the didactic use of VR in architecture, there is - to the best of my knowledge - no previous use of VR in phenomenology of space. Theoretical framework Phenomenology is undoubtedly the theoret- ical orientation most closely related to the intelligence of architects, who are accustomed to thinking about space “live,” so to speak. Among the characteristic abilities of the architect are the capacity to consider the relationship between spaces and bodies, to imagine the atmosphere of environments and the way in which shape, color, and spatial scale influence our experience of them, and to or- ganize solids and voids, exteriors and interiors, the visible and the invisible, light and shadow, volumes and matter, as though they were elements of an aesthetically expressed spatial language. It is precisely this sort of sensibility that the course sought to thematically develop, strengthening students’ awareness of and ability to design perceptual (i.e., not only spatial) environments imbued with cognitive and emotional meanings. To best realize the desired encounter between philosophy and architecture in this pre-categor- ical level of spatial experience, I found it useful to refer to phenomenology broadly defined, broadly enough to include Gestalt psychology and some elements of behaviorist psy- chology. Before giving a synopsis of the thematic contents of the course, it will be necessary to evaluate the contribu- tion that virtual reality can offer to the encounter between phenomenology and architecture, mediating between their languages. VR’s potential consists in its particular quali- ties as an immersive medium, or more specifically in its MATTEO VEGETTI 189 AN-ICON  capacity to insert perception into an immaterial, interactive, and programmable Umwelt. The first aspect is perhaps the most important. If there is a single quality that the spatial intelligence of the architect must necessarily develop during the course of study, it lies in the capacity to move from an understand- ing of space based on plans—made up of lines, symbols, numbers, and so on—to a subjective understanding, ideally placed in the space that those signs represent abstractly. The passage from an objective and external gaze (the one that reads the plan) to an internal, embodied one, capable of bringing the signs to life in a volumetric space and cor- porealizing them, is normally entrusted to the imagination. But given the complexity of this mental operation, it is al- ways necessary to turn to a plurality of media: sketches, models, photographs of the models taken from the inside, rendering, etc. None of these tools, however, is capable of physically including the subject, who thus continues to have a distanced and disembodied understanding of space. Given the importance of the role that the body plays in spatial experience, it is clear that the value of virtual reality lies in the possibility of transferring the subject inside of the space of representation, in such a way that allows them to have a direct, aesthetic, and even synesthetic experience. Thanks to VR, the architect can jump in and out of the rep- resentation: he or she can “enter the plan,” making it into an immersive experience, and then exit, modify the design on the basis of this experience, and finally return to the virtual space to check the outcome of the operation. This move- ment in and out of the space of representation provides the intelligence of the architect with a new medium; this is not, however, virtual reality, but rather his or her own body as an “analogical” tool, one that provides an analog to em- bodied sensory experience. On the one hand, virtual space replicates the intentional structure that the world presents to us: space moves with me, shows itself and hides itself in relation to my gaze, and declares its secondary qualities (for example, showing itself to be narrow and oppressive, MATTEO VEGETTI 190 AN-ICON  or disorienting —all qualities that are related to a certain kind of subjective experience.). On the other hand, even if they are “embedded” in a virtual environment, the subjects still maintain an interior distance, a remainder of objectiv- ity; they know that they are in a representation, just like at every moment they know that their own body is only an analogon of the sentient one, which allows them to have a mediated, self-observed experience, and to register its effects. If virtual space is a distant relative of the sketchpad, the body that explores virtual space is a distant relative of the pencil that draws in the sketchpad, or more precisely of the manual intelligence involved in that experience. The risk of virtual reality causing the architect to lose an authentic relationship to space, or to “authentic space,” is, when taken from this point of view, less serious than one might fear—and all the more so due to the fact that VR does not by any means claim to substitute itself for the traditional forms of mediation, translation, and repre- sentation of space, but rather to integrate them into its own capabilities. Furthermore, VR remediates within itself many media to which we have long been accustomed, from the drawing pad to the cinema; from this perspective, rather than eliminating all mediation, it entails a deep and layered media culture. This is also confirmed by the educational usage of VR, given that in order to adequately use it, the students will necessarily continue to move through the rep- resentational languages of different media (from manual design to CAD, as well as the photos and films that can be made within virtual reality). They can also share their visual experience externally, since what they see within the virtual environment can be simultaneously projected on a screen connected to a projector. This, if we consider it closely, is no small thing. Two separate and autonomous (although co-present) environments—two different parallel Umwel- ten—can be connected in real time. Making it possible to show the outside what one sees as one sees it, VR makes ocular experience shareable, albeit through two different media (on one hand the projected film and on the oth- er the immersive reality.) The VR viewer transforms vision MATTEO VEGETTI 191 AN-ICON  into a full-fledged medium: it transmits, communicates to the outside, shows, and makes what it manifests public in real time. The virtual experience is, in effect, “replicant” by nature. In it, technological reproducibility has now caught up with the perceptual experience linked with one’s own body: today sight, tomorrow touch, and then who knows. The alienation of one’s own body, if we can call it such, may have slightly disturbing aspects for those who want to project it into dystopian future scenarios, but within the context of more modest educational ambitions, it holds enormous potential, given that it makes the lived experiences of others shareable and evaluable. As will by now be clear, the course was nothing like a normal design workshop, nor did it aspire to be. It was more like a virtual gymnasium where, through a series of guided experiments, the perceptual and psychological dimensions of space were exercised; a gymnasium that allowed for the easy modification of space and the experimental verification of its effects. Aims of the program To be concise, the use of virtual reality in the architectural context can be summarized in four points. These, as we will see, were developed in the course through a series of exercises. 1) VR allows for the modification of space at will, and for the verification of its effects on perceptual, emotion- al, and cognitive levels (depending on what one is interested in determining) in an immersive environment. For example, the height of a ceiling is, from one point of view, objective and mathematical, identical in any space. It is what it is, regardless of other spatial vari- ables like color and depth. Within the perceptual dimen- sion, however, things proceed very differently, since all of these variables intertwine and influence one another in a manner so clear that to define it as subjective would be misleading. The depth of space modifies the perception of MATTEO VEGETTI 192 AN-ICON  height in direct proportion to its increase. This can easily be experienced in virtual reality precisely because it only applies to a sentient body, which on paper does not ex- ist. Experiments of this type can examine the relationship between color and spatial perception, the modification of an environment through light (or shadows) depending on the hour of the day or the season, the perception of one’s center of balance in space, the relationship between differ- ent scales, the relationship between different volumes and shapes, synesthesia, and many other analogous situations. VR offers the opportunity to examine all of these aspects not only through vision, but also from a practical point of view, that is to say, through the study of the behav- ior of the users that interact with the organization of a given space: how they move, what they understand, what they remember, and how they describe a certain environment. All of this provides a way to test design solutions (whether realistic or experimental), or to verify theories developed in the existing literature. 2) VR allows for the implementation of phenom- enological variations and the experiencing of their effects on different levels: aesthetic, psychological, ontological. The use of phenomenological variation within the context of the project meant the possibility of varying one or two special elements, altering in a controlled way their position, breadth, depth, and other characteristics. One can, for example, modify the perception and geometry of an entire environment by changing where the entryway is located, thus deforming the environment in relation to the observer’s center. Depending on the breadth or depth of the entry, the experience of entering, and of the relationship between outside and inside, is modified. Depending where the two entries in a room are located—given that these es- tablish between themselves, on a perceptual level, a recip- rocal connection, a sort of invisible corridor—space will be “sliced” by that connection in different ways, redistributing MATTEO VEGETTI 193 AN-ICON  internal space and generating areas (compartments) of vari- able shapes and dimensions. This method requires experimenting with a lim- ited and controlled number of variations, and that the results be recorded from a perceptual and even ontological point of view. The dimensions of a window can be varied in such a way as to produce significant aesthetic discontinuities, but beyond a certain threshold of size the window changes in nature, becoming, for example, a glass door (if it alludes to the possibility of transit, taking on the potentiality of an opening-threshold), or a glass wall, where wall and window meet, each giving up one of its intrinsic potentialities (in the case of the wall, the possibility of visually separating spaces, and in the case of the window, that of connecting an inside to an outside atmosphere). The exercise of variation can take on many forms, all useful for testing a wide range of spatial effects with aesthetic, symbolic, or even ontological significance. To give a final example, which highlights the possibilities of VR, we might think of the effect of all of the possible variations applied to the height of a small room, from the minimum or even insufficient measurement to a generous one, say of 3 meters, up to a decidedly out of scale measurement of 10 or 20 meters. This modification allows for the discovery through intuitive evidence of the discontinuous relationship between stimulus and percep- tion, or of the differential thresholds that punctuate the qualitative passage from one psychophysical condition to another (claustrophobic, comfortable, roomy, oppressive, etc.). The qualitative thresholds can also cause a change in the sense of space itself. For instance, a space in which the ceiling is too low will not be perceived as inhabitable. Habitability is a spatial quality that requires a certain min- imum height, even if it is still a claustrophobic one. But if one exceeds this measurement greatly, one enters into a new context of meaning, for example that of an artistic installation, and space takes on a poetic significance that it did not have before. But this is not all. The exercise of phenomenological variation calls for the capacity to de- scribe, or better, to verbalize lived experience, developing MATTEO VEGETTI 194 AN-ICON  an appropriate (specific), effective (figurative), and meaning- ful (persuasive) language. From perception to expression: a continuous two-way transit that helps students develop a degree of spatial awareness that they do not normally pos- sess. Naturally, the exercise becomes progressively more complex depending on the number of variables one choos- es to introduce. The preceding case, for example, could be made much more complex simply with the introduction of one further variable, such as materials (say, concrete or word) or the presence of a light source (for example, an opening onto a natural light source from above). 3) VR allows for the firsthand study of relationships between form and meaning. Here, I turn to the field of Gestalt psychology, and more particularly to the possibility of simulating and studying phenomena of orientation and mental maps (at the base of which lie the tools of the psychology of shapes). To once again in this case offer some examples, one might think of virtual space as a site in which to experiment with different strategies for functionally dividing up space, for grouping families of objects on the basis of the principles of “figural unification,” for generating rhythms, for anticipat- ing the sense of space (directions and meanings), and for inducing motor responses. Within this field of experimenta- tion also lies the possibility of giving symbolic significance to a certain element of the environment (for example, the main entrance, the most important painting, the state room, etc.) as well as that of articulating in various modes the re- lationship between voids and solids, distances, or objects with different shapes and sizes. 4) VR allows for experimentation with the consti- tutive factors of atmospheres. This fourth point is the result of the interac- tion between all of the preceding spatial components and their relative interactions, and thus cannot but appear last. Experimentation with the constitutive factors of the atmo- sphere becomes explicit when attention is shifted to the MATTEO VEGETTI 195 AN-ICON  holistic aspects of the environment, the emotional impact that the space has on us, and the moment of encounter with an atmosphere and the way it can be an object of design. The usefulness of virtual reality in respect to the phenomenological analysis of atmospheres is clear: pre- cisely because an atmosphere is in itself an immersive and synesthetic phenomenon, it can only be observed through bodily presence. One is always inside an atmosphere, to the point that the very presence of a certain atmospheric connotation defines, when perceived, the confines of an interior (the interior of a work of architecture, of a certain city or neighborhood, or of a particular culture, etc.). VR thus shows itself to be extremely effective as a tool for the analysis of the psychological aspects of atmosphere, fa- cilitating an applied atmospherology. The various aspects that comprise the atmosphere of a place, that is to say its social and emotional characteristics, can become the ob- ject of critical analysis and can be used for the revision of designs. Within this field of experimentation there is also the possibility of observing space from any desired perspective and of moving, even if in a limited way, in a manner that unites visual and synesthetic experience. In addition, VR offers the possibility of introduc- ing natural sounds, background noises (for example, chatter, whose intensity depends on the number of people that we decide to put into the space), sounds of footsteps (which change depending on the surface being tread upon), and music (which can be diffused into space from a preselected source). It is not yet possible, however, to introduce tactile experiences, while olfactory ones are difficult to manage and a bit artificial. Structure of the course and workflow The course took place during the first semester of the 2022 academic year, and was divided into 12 lessons, each lasting an entire day. Excluding the first introductory lesson and the last one, dedicated to the presentation of final exercises, MATTEO VEGETTI 196 AN-ICON  five units were offered to the students, each one compris- ing two lessons. Each unit dealt with a different theme, but always built on the themes discussed in the preceding units. The course thus followed a gradual development through units. The typical organization of the units followed this order: a theoretical lecture (Matteo Vegetti); presentation of the exercise; discussion; presentation of programing tools and the use of Twinmotion for the given exercise (Marco Lurati); design work by students under the guidance of the course assistant (the architect Matteo Moriani, with the invaluable volunteer contribution of the interior architect Victoria Pham). Each unit was concluded the afternoon of the second lesson with a group review of the exercises. Since these were carried out by students in pairs, the pre- sentations took place as follows: one student explained the design choices and the outcomes of the experimentation, while the other, from within the virtual space, showed the spaces in question (thanks to a projector connected to the Oculus, or rather to the computer supporting it). Each pair of students worked on a space of a different scale (2.5x2.5; 5x5; 10x10; 20x20; 2.5x5; 5x10; 10x20). In this manner, the phenomenologically significant issue of scale was indirectly present throughout the course, presenting numerous opportunities for reflection. Given that the same exact exercise presented difficulties of different types de- pending on the scale, each group of students necessarily had to offer a different design solution. The differences be- tween scales were of course also evident in the exercises based on variations. In what follows I offer a descriptive brief of the subjects dealt with in each unit and in the corresponding exercises. The latter held a fundamental importance in the overall economy of the course, given that they connected theory with practice and formed an educational pathway that began from a few basic elements and then became progressively richer and more complex. MATTEO VEGETTI 197 AN-ICON  INTRODUCTION and UNIT 1 “I ask a young student: how would you make a door? With what dimensions? Where would you place it? In which corner of the room would you have it open? Do you understand that these different solutions are the are the very basis of architecture? Depending on the way that one enters into an apartment, on where doors are located in the walls, you feel very different sensations, and the wall that you that you drill likewise takes on very different charac- teristics. You then feel that this is architecture.”11 The first introductory lesson of the course dealt with the relationship between body and space, bringing to light some of the fundamental issues in Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger’s phenomenological approaches.12 Through the definition of these concepts and the relationship between them (space as correlate of the activity of a living body, as environment, as site, as a felt, perceived, lived space, in- vested with meanings), the course established a theoretical basis sufficient for understanding its aims. Then, a first approach to virtual reality, and a first intuitive test of the ideas learned, was carried out through the use of the Gravity Sketch program, which of- fers its users the possibility of creating space through the movements of their hands, and to choose from a vast rep- ertoire of creative resources (lines, shapes, surfaces, colors, materials, transparencies, etc.). Each pair of students ran- domly selected an aesthetic/perceptual theme (unknown to the others) to give form to. Once a pair of students created theirs in VR, the rest of the class was invited to visit it and provide a brief description of it. Based on the comments received, it was easy to tell if the students had succeeded 11 Le Corbusier, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning (1930) (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2015). 12 M. Heidegger, M. Corpo e spazio (1964), trans. F. Bolino (Genova: Il Melangolo, 2000); M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), trans. D. Landes (Abingdon-New York: Routledge, 2012). MATTEO VEGETTI 198 AN-ICON  in conveying the theme that they were tasked with inter- preting spatially. In a small way, this first contact with virtual reality reproduced the characteristic transposition of theo- retical themes into an “applied” dimension that would char- acterize the course as a whole. Most importantly, Gravity Sketch is an effective tool for becoming familiar with VR, and more particularly with the possible functions offered by the Oculus. UNIT 1 - Phenomenology of thresholds The first unit was dedicated to the theme of thresholds, or rather to the diverse configurations of the divide between interior and exterior that make the experi- ence of space as a place possible (the possibility of “en- tering” or accessing that only the crossing of a threshold allows). Experimenting with the different thresholds that comprise space and mastering their rhetorical significance means knowing how to articulate space like a complex text, full of caesuras, connections, leaps, transitions, and transformations. Each threshold represents a critical point in space because it is called upon not only to manage the different practical and symbolic functions of the environ- ment, but also the relationship between seemingly irrecon- cilable opposites: interior and exterior, public and private, the familiar and the foreign, the inside and the outside. The phenomenology of thresholds thus aimed to show through numerous examples how the threshold could be designed and conceived of in different ways depending on goals and intentions (aesthetic, symbolic, practical). The lesson took its impetus from an anthropo- logical reflection on the significance of the threshold/door, 13 to then move towards more philosophical14 and phenom- enological15 questions. Here, as elsewhere, Ching’s im- 13 J. Rykwert, The Idea of a Town (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1988). 14 G. Simmel, “Bridge and door,” Theory, Culture & Society 11 (1994): 5-10. 15 P. V. Meiss, De la forme au lieu (Lausanne: Presses polytechinques et universitaires, 1986); A. Moles, E. Rohmer, Psychologie de l’espace (Paris: Casterman, 1998). MATTEO VEGETTI 199 AN-ICON  ages and insightful observations were very useful in ac- companying the discussion.16 The lesson was also the occasion to thematize the threshold between “front” and “back,” between “stage” and “backstage,” or rather between the public and private dimension, through a series of different frames. Here, I use the language of Erving Goffman to allude to the importance of the frame in defining, on the basis of its specific material or formal qualities, the type of situated social situation that one wishes to obtain: the degree of visibility, of separation, of privacy (or of porosity, contamination, or transparency) that one wants to establish between the respective domains of “front” and “back” in order to strengthen or weaken the public valence of the place and the relationships that take place there.17 Expected outcomes: ■ Understanding the symbolic value of the entering a space and the way in which the threshold manages the relationship between interior and exterior. ■ Experimenting with the perceptual effects generated by the different positioning of a door-opening in the same identical space. ■ Experimenting with the connection that is created between two door-openings within the same space, and the modification of spatial relationships that this connection brings about. ■ Understanding the significance of the center as what or- ganizes space and its distortions. ■ Understanding the language of the window-opening through different typologies. ■ Experimenting with the concept of “frame.” ■ Analyzing the way in which an object (in this case, a work of art) reacts to space based on its position, size, relationship to light, and to its own “aura.” 16 F.D.K. Ching, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2015). 17 E. Goffman, Behavior in Public Places (New York: Free Press, 1966); and Interaction Ritual (New York: Pantheon, 1982) MATTEO VEGETTI 200 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Beyond a certain limit, an opening ceases to be an enclosed area and becomes a dominating element: a transparent plane bordered by a frame. From F.D.K. Ching, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order (Hoboken: Wiley, 2015). Fig. 2. An opening situated on the plane of a wall will appear to be a luminous form against a contrasting background. If it is centered on the plane, the opening will appear stable and will visually organize the surface around it. If it is decentered, it will create a level of visual tension with the sides of the plane towards which it has been moved. From F.D.K. Ching, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order. MATTEO VEGETTI 201 AN-ICON  Exercise Each pair of students works on a space of dif- ferent scale, with a square or rectangular base (2.5x2.5; 5x5; 10x10; 20x20; 2.5x5; 5x10; 10x20). A) Create three spaces with equal dimensions. In one of these spaces, place a door-opening in three differ- ent positions, and note how the space changes perceptu- ally, writing a description of it from within the virtual space. B) For each of the three spaces, create two door-openings placed in different ways (but on the same wall). Describe the result: how is space modified? Where is the center? C) Place a rug of shape, dimension, and mate- rial of your choice in each space. D) Place a window-opening in each space. The openings must be central, zenithal, and angular (size and shape are up to you). E) Modify the dimensions and shape of the window-openings, increasing their width or height freely. Describe the result. F) Place into one single space a combination of four of the entry-doors or windows created earlier (4 total: this could be 2 doors and 2 windows or 3 doors and 1 window, etc.) Describe the result. G) Connect in a sequence four of the spaces created earlier. Give these environments a hierarchy and connect them with a path that joins the entrance and the exit. Design the main entrance into the space from a rhe- torical standpoint. Try to convey the hierarchy between different environments through the use of different kinds of thresholds. The thresholds must anticipate the sense of the space being entered, and must convey the relation- ship between the spaces that they connect (you can use frames, stairs, boxes, ramps, partitions, false ceilings, dif- ferent thicknesses for the walls, and the form and dimen- sions of the thresholds can be modified. In this phase, the MATTEO VEGETTI 202 AN-ICON  threshold can become a volume). You may not, however, use any elements of décor. H) Place a sculpture in one of the environments in such a way as to enhance the latter. I) Design a threshold/separation (a frame) that creates a private space within one of the rooms that you have already made. J) Make a 30-second VR film of these environ- ments and describe the created space (2000 words). The description should be written subjectively (“I advance and see on my right…;” “the light from the window is illuminat- ing the threshold that I am about to cross…”) K) Take 3 photos of the interior that illustrate the design choices (that is, representative views of the interior space generated through experimental solutions.) UNIT 2 - The power of the field “By emphasizing the generated field in addition to the architectural object, one raises once more the problem of space, but in different terms by giving the concept a different value. In traditional criti- cism space is a homogeneous structure, a kind of counterform to the mural envelope, indifferent to the lighting conditions and to its position in relation to the buildings, whereas the notion of field stresses the continuous variability of what surrounds the archi- tectural structures.”18 The second unit, which clarified some of the theoretical elements already present in the first, analyzed the principles of field theory, or better, an ensemble of the- ories based on the shared presupposition that a space occupied by volumes does not coincide with their physical 18 P.P. Portoghesi, cited in R. Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form (1977) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). MATTEO VEGETTI 203 AN-ICON  space, but extends beyond it, without however being in- dependent of the originating form.19 The field thus coincides not with the borders within which everything is enclosed, but with a certain ar- rangement of forces and vectors acting in space. Space thus becomes an active and reactive environment: a field of psycho/physical forces. Every volume present in the field, by virtue of its mass and its shape(s), changes the field’s appearance. The field generated through design deeply affects our perceptual schemas through the play of forces that act within it. But within the concept of field, the concept of center, already encountered in the previous unit, plays a fundamental role. While geometrically a center is simply a point, perceptually it extends as far as the conditions of stability that it is based on will permit. Of course, the center may or may not be indicated. In architecture, it can be indicated (or suggested) by a ceiling lamp, a mobile, a decoration, or a mosaic. Or, it can be an empty space at the center of two diagonals or of the geometry dictated by the positions of the thresholds. Normally, however, there are multiple centers at work in each field, each of which attempts to prevail over the others. The lesson thus brought attention to the problem of the interaction between fields of different shapes and strengths, suggesting the possibility of making corrections to one’s designs by working on the centers, the directions of the volumes that generate the field, or their distance from one another. This illustrates the concept, well known to phe- nomenology and cognitive psychology, that space is born as the relationship between objects. On the basis of this idea, shifting attention from the shapes of objects and their interaction to the void that separates them, the lesson then also discussed the concept of “interspace,” and along with it the fundamental law of attraction-repulsion: “Objects that look ‘too close’ to each other display mutual repulsion: they want to be moved apart. At a somewhat greater distance 19 R. Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form; P.P. Portoghesi, V.G. Gigliotti, “Ricerche sulla centralità. Progetti dello studio di Porta Pinciana,” Controspazio 6 (1971); A. Marcolli, Teoria del campo (Firenze: Sansoni, 1971) and Teoria del campo 2 (Firenze: Sansoni, 1978). MATTEO VEGETTI 204 AN-ICON  the interval may look just right or the objects may seem to attract each other.”20 The final theme concerned the typical fields of basic shapes such as the circle, triangle, and square. This discussion was then applied to bidimensionally-perceived spatial forms, such as the shape of the window in respect to the wall in which it is placed. Finally, it bears noting in relation to point “C” of this unit’s exercise that VR does not exclude interaction with physical objects. Virtual and material reality can in fact overlap, generating a significant enhancement of spatial experience. In the present case, it was sufficient to place a real table where the virtual table designed by the students was, in order to allow a group of four people to share the same situation from different perspectives. The members of the group sat around the same virtual table (sharing the same design simultaneously in multiple Oculus viewers), but could at the same time establish a tactile relationship with the table around which they were seated in real space. The lesson made wide use of examples taken from architecture as well as city planning in order to explain how field theory adapts to each scale. 20 R. Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form. MATTEO VEGETTI 205 AN-ICON  Expected outcomes: ■ Understanding and experimenting with the influence of the center and the relationship between centers. ■ Perceptually experimenting with the field in terms of scope and shape of irradiation, as well as the relationship between fields in terms of interference, conflict, or harmony. ■ Perceiving the language of voids in relation to solids in terms of visual balance and variable density (compression and decompression of the spaces between elements). ■ Testing the symbolic/perceptual power of fire (that of a fireplace) in establishing a center and a space. ■ Observing the dynamics of the field together with the other students, developing a suitable language. ■ Putting the dynamics of the fields into the form of a graphic representation. P. Portoghesi, Field Theory. Space as a system of places, 1974. MATTEO VEGETTI 206 AN-ICON  Fig. 4. Modification of forces internal to a rectangular field based on the positioning of the door-openings. From P. V. Meiss, De la forme au lieu (Lausanne: Presses polytechinques et universitaires, 1986). MATTEO VEGETTI 207 AN-ICON  Fig. 5. “Irraggiamento spaziale.” Exercise Beginning from the final state of the work un- dertaken in the previous exercises, inserting objects and volumes in space, we will analyze the force fields that these create. A) Begin the exercise by observing and analyz- ing the space already created on the basis of field theory. B) Among the four volumes from the previous exercise, we have one that already contains the sculpture. In the three remaining, place: a) A fireplace and a table for 4 people b) 5 monochrome volumes (1 cylindrical, 1 cubic of 1x1, 2 parallelepipeds of 1x1x2, and a column): create a harmonious field out of these volumes, which may not touch the wall (the volumes can be sized in respect to MATTEO VEGETTI 208 AN-ICON  the space that hosts them). Describe the fields that you think you have generated. c) In the third room, place a painting and a mirror on one of the walls. C) Sit in a group of four at the table, and to- gether analyze the space with the fireplace from inside of the simulation. Improve the previous solutions by changing the placement of the volumes, or try an alternative solution. D) Now, enter the space with the geometrical volumes and analyze the field/fields generated. Improve the previous solutions by changing the position of the volumes, or try an alternative solution. E) Analyze how the spaces change at different hours of the day due to natural light and shadows. Create a film of 30 seconds, based on a narrative strategy, that shows how the fields are modified by natural light at differ- ent times of the day. Walk through the entire space, back and forth, at three different times of day: morning, afternoon, and twilight. F) Now, enter into the space with the geomet- rical volumes and analyze the field/fields generated. Im- prove the previous solutions by changing the position of the volumes, or try an alternative solution. G) From inside the space, take three photo- graphs representative of the perceptual/visual experience of the field. H) Extract the building plan from Archicad (1/100) and draw the fields, centers, and vectors that you think you have generated within the space. UNIT 3 - Multisensoriality and synesthesia “...every architectural setting has its auditive, haptic, olfactory, and even hidden gustatory qualities, and those properties give the visual percept its sense of fullness and life. Regardless of the immediate character of visual perception, paradoxically we have already unconsciously touched a surface before we become aware MATTEO VEGETTI 209 AN-ICON of its visual characteristics; we understand its texture, hardness, temperature, moisture instantaneously.” 21 The third unit was carried out in collaboration with Dr. Fabrizia Bandi, researcher in the “AN-ICON” group led by Andrea Pinotti, who was a guest of the course thanks to the SEMP international exchange program. The aim of the unit was to guide students to the discovery of the uni- verse of synesthetic effects attributable to sight and hearing. Fabrizia Bandi, an expert in the thought of Mikel Dufrenne, introduced the students to elements relating to synesthesia in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Pal- lasmaa, and Dufrenne.22 The lesson insisted on the im- portance of understanding the multisensorial character of perception since, whether one likes it or not, space com- municates with bodies in this way, through the intertwining of different perceptual faculties. Synaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the center of gravity of expe- rience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel, in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the physicist conceives it, what we are to see, hear and feel . . . The senses intercommunicate by opening on to the structure of the thing. One sees the hardness and brittleness of glass, and when, with a tinkling sound, it breaks, this sound is conveyed by the visible glass. One sees the springiness of steel, the ductility of red-hot steel, the hardness of a plane blade, the softness of shavings.23 By relativizing the predominance of sight in the structure of perception, the theorists of synesthesia invite us to discover the persistence of “unauthorized” sensory registers (like sound and temperature in colors, or touch in something perceived visually), which condition experience 21 J. Pallasmaa, The Embodied Image (Hoboken: Wiley and Sons, 2012): 51-52. 22 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; J. Pallasmaa, The Embodied Image; M. Dufrenne, L’oeil et l’oreille (1987) (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Place, 2020). 23 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception: 266-267. MATTEO VEGETTI 210 AN-ICON  in mostly unconscious and unconditioned ways. The many examples referring to the field of architecture had the aim of leading the students to a decisive point: given the origi- nal complicity between body and space, to design means, perhaps before anything else, to organize a complex per- ceptual environment in which each element not only has multisensory potential in itself but also inevitably relates with that of the others. By experimentally testing the synes- thetic effects of the designed space in virtual reality, inter- twining their own bodies with it, the students had a way to determine the results of their choices on multiple perceptual levels. These could work towards creating syntonic or dys- tonic effects, or could play with the composition of different synesthetic qualities within the same element, for example, combining a given material with a color that contrasts with it in temperature, or background music of a certain kind, for example, soft and enveloping, with an environment imbued with the opposite synesthetic characteristics (cold, sharp, shrill). The general goal was to create a perceptually rich and coherent environment. Here, it is important to note that it is possible to import images of any material, including photographs of existing surfaces, into the Oculus. This unit also allowed for the development of a discourse straddling the border between the phenomeno- logical aspects of multisensory experience and the findings of the neurosciences.24 24 For example N. Bruno, F., Pavani, M., Zampini, La percezione multisensoriale (Bologna: il Mulino, 2010). MATTEO VEGETTI 211 AN-ICON  Expected outcomes: ■ Cultivating sensitivity to the multisensory aspects of ma- terial and texture. ■ Developing a language capable of translating synesthetic experience and allowing it to be shared with others. ■ Studying the possibilities of using multisensoriality to de- sign and compose different perceptual environments in logical sequences. ■ Experimenting with the encounter between the synesthetic aspects of music and those of the designed environments. ■ Verifying the efficacy of the desired perceptual effects through a questionnaire. Exercise Beginning with the previously-created space, gen- erate four different perceptual environments, working with ma- terials, colors, and sounds. The environments must create an ordered sequence, a perceptual-synesthetic path imbued with meaning. A) Work with tactile perception: use textures on different parts of the environment (floor, ceiling, objects pres- ent in the room, etc.) while also modulating the qualities of the materials (transparency, opacity, reflectiveness, etc.) to create an effect that induces a multisensorial/synesthetic sensation. B) Use materials and colors to elicit a specific sensation (hot/cold; rough/smooth; sharp/soft; enveloping/ repelling; lightness/oppression, etc.) C) Work with sound: test the impact of the sound of footsteps, introducing different numbers of people into the space based on its size as follows: • 2.5x2.5: 1 person, 5 people, 20 people • 5x5: 1 person, 10 people, 40 people • 10x10: 1 person, 20 people, 80 people • 20x20: 1 person, 40 people, 400 people • 2.5x5: 1 person, 10 people, 40 people • 5x10: 1 person, 20 people, 80 people • 10x20: 1 person, 40 people, 400 people MATTEO VEGETTI 212 AN-ICON  Once the highest number of people within the space has been reached, add voices. Finally, walk through the space and test the sounds of your footsteps in different environments. D) In an environment of your choice, introduce a sound effect (natural or artificial) or music that reinforces the synesthetic character of the space. E) The environments must create a percep- tual itinerary. Through the characteristics that you give the environments, try to construct a pathway that will make a hierarchy apparent, with the clearest possible succession. F) Describe in writing the synesthetic effect that you think you have generated in each of the fourenvironments (without sharing the responses with the rest of the class); a) How can the environments that you have created be defined as multisensory? b) What type of sensation did you want to make emerge from the different spaces? c) What is the relationship between the choice of materials/sound and the sensation that you wanted to transmit to those within the space? d) How did the choice of sound relate to the choice of materials and colors? G) Take one photo in each environment. H) Shoot a video of the four environments, lasting 24 hours (with all natural light). Compress it into a film of 2-3 minutes. I) During the morning of the second day, each group will visit the rooms created by the others and respond in writing to some questions aimed at verifying the effect pro- duced by the space on its users: a) How do the spaces visited constitute an example of multisensoriality? Which factors contribute most? b) What sort of sensation emerges from the different spaces. Try to describe which elements caused this sensation. c) Was the sound particularly significant in your experience of the space? Why? MATTEO VEGETTI 213 AN-ICON  UNIT 4 - Light and color: phenomenology of atmosphere The fourth didactic unit was dedicated exclu- sively to the topic of light and color. The reason for this choice resided primarily in the importance of these two factors for spatial perception (in various ways: from colored light to the relationship between natural light and materials that reflect it). Furthermore, light and color play a decisive role in the connotations of atmospheres. In dialogue with various others, from Goethe25 to Conrad-Martius,26 from Sedlmayr27 to James Turrel,28 the lesson highlighted both aspects: the perceptual dimension and what Conrad Mar- tius calls “the character” of light, or rather the way in which a given property of light is intermittently given expression. Light is undoubtedly a special atmospheric agent, since temperature and color can give space a very clear emotion- al timbre. But it can be used—as in the phenomenological art of James Turrel and Robert Irwin—to change the form of space, up to the point of distorting it and erasing its borders. VR is a unique instrument for testing how light reacts to surfaces, their textures, and their colors in the widest range of different conditions (for example, depend- ing on the time of day, and also by adding natural light to artificial light sources). It is also useful, though, to create spaces and spatial languages linked to the psychology of shapes. Five possible functions of light capable of perceptually altering space in respect to different design aims: illumination, indi- cation, division/unification, connection, creation of rhythm. Of course, each of these functions raises specific questions 25 J.W. Goethe, Theory of Colours (1810) (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1970). 26 H. Conrad-Martius, “Realontologie,” Jahrbüch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 6 (1923): 159-333; H. Conrad-Martius, “Farben. Ein Kapitel aus der Realontologie,” Festschrift Edmund Husserl zum 70. Geburstag gewidmet (Jahrbüch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung) 10 (1929): 339-370. 27 H. Sedlmayr, La luce nelle sue manifestazioni artistiche, ed. A. Pinotti (Palermo: Aesthetica, 2009). 28 J. Turrell, Extraordinary Ideas-Realized (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2018). See also M. Govan, C.Y. Kim, eds., James Turrell: A Retrospective (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013). MATTEO VEGETTI 214 AN-ICON  (the type of light source and its temperature, the shape and position of the light sources, the relationship between light and darkness, background and foreground, etc.), but in a theoretical sense, the exercise aimed above all to demon- strate the potential applications of a complex theoretical framework like the one mentioned above. Finally, the discussion turned to the phenom- enological theme of atmospheres, a field that, as already noted, could only appear last, once the basic elements for an analytic understanding of the body-space relationship had been acquired. With few exceptions, “atmosphere” is a concept used in a very intuitive way by architects, yet is central to their specific form of spatial intelligence. It is here that VR perhaps offers its greatest contribution: it is one thing to introduce students to the thought of the usual authors on the subject, such as Böhme,29 Norberg-Schulz,30 Schmitz,31 Ströker32 or Zumthor,33 and quite another for them to have the chance to analyze atmospheres from within, to study their perceptual effects, and to modify their factors in the desired (often experimental) way. Describ- ing the extraordinary power of atmospheres to influence our mood is much simpler and more effective when one has the possibility of interacting with a virtual environment. From within these environments, variation in light can be understood atmospherically in all of its significance. The capacity to design an/the entrance as a tool to understand, expand, or focus an encounter with a given atmosphere can be carried out in all possible ways, giving life to the theoretical hypotheses learned through the creativity of the designed. The symbolic and potential connotations of an atmosphere—which are often an involuntary outcome, but 29 G. Böhme, “Atmosphere as the subject matter of architecture,” in P. Ursprung, ed., Herzog and de Meuron: Natural History (Montreal: Lars Müller and Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2002) and Atmosfere, estasi, messe in scena. L’estetica come teoria generale della percezione, trans. T. Griffero (Milano: Christian Marinotti, 2010). 30 C. Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991). 31 H. Schmitz, “Atmosphärische Räume,” in Atmosphäre(n) II. Interdisziplinäre Annäherungen an einen unscharfen Begriff (München: Kopaed, 2012). 32 E. Ströker, Investigations in Philosophy of Space (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987). 33 P. Zumthor, Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2006). MATTEO VEGETTI 215 AN-ICON  nonetheless entirely controllable, through the composition and interaction of the conditions present in a given space, and at times even a result produced by a “heterogenesis of ends”—can finally become the objects of direct experi- ence, which would otherwise be impossible. I think these examples are sufficient to illustrate a field of research that goes far beyond virtual reality’s capacity to change one floor into another, in order to find which one best suit the environment. For architectural professionals, though, this as- pect should truly not be underestimated. VR offers them a precious medium of communication with their clients, who often lack the ability to imagine the design solutions being proposed, or to read plans and “visualize” them in three dimensions. But even if bridging the gap between the spatial competencies of architect and client may sooner or later prove to be the main use of virtual reality, it is not, however, the most important for, nor does it lie within the specific aims of the course. MATTEO VEGETTI 216 AN-ICON  Expected outcomes: ■ Experimenting with environmental effects of lighting. ■ Experimenting with the semiotic and Gestaltic use of light. ■ Testing the atmospheric effects relating to light and color. Exercise A) Use artificial light to strengthen the synes- thetic connotations of the environment in an atmospheric way. B) Use light to unify a part of the space and the objects within it. C) Use light to generate a threshold. D) Generate variations in the temperature, in- tensity, and type of artificial light, and observe how the colors of surfaces and the texture of materials change. E) Analyze how the spaces change under the different variations of artificial light. F) Modify the color of the materials through the effects of variations of artificial light. G) Using a narrative strategy, make an atmo- spheric film of 30 seconds that shows how the spaces are modified by different types of artificial light. If necessary, you can animate the space with the movement of a virtual character. UNIT 5 - Orientation and legibility of space The final didactic unit dealt with the theme of spatial orientation on the basis of the line of research opened up by the work of Kevin Lynch.34 At the basis of this choice are two assumptions. The first is that Lynch has given us a scalable methodology, which can also be effective when applied to interior spaces. The second is 34 K. Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1960). See also L. Letenyei, J. Dobák, eds., Mental Mapping (Passau: Schenk Verlag, 2019). MATTEO VEGETTI 217 AN-ICON  that such a methodology, based on psychology of shapes and on a study of mental maps that we might say are akin to phenomenology, places itself in continuity or in dialogue with the content already explored in the preceding units of the course. The formation of mental maps takes place in the interaction between subject and environment. On a cogni- tive level, for Lynch the maps reveal the constant presence of five elements, which we can also define as structures, in the sense that they structure the experience of (urban) space by connecting it back to a universal mental schema. Such irreducible elements, even if they are not necessarily always co-present, are the path, the edge, the district, the node, and the landmark. A space’s degree of comprehen- sibility, or rather our own capacity to orient ourselves in space and to have a clear mental image of it, depends on the form, character, and composition of these structures. The capacity of design to give spaces identity, structure, figurability, and meaning is fundamental in fostering a pos- itive interaction between subject and environment, or even to induce emotional well-being. This gives us the capacity to anticipate how space will be understood, to support our spatial awareness (and hence our confidence in the space), and to develop a positive identification with spaces. All of this holds for any interior space, even if it is clearest on a large scale (for example that of a museum). Each interior indeed presents us with paths, both introverted and extroverted nodes, helpful or disori- enting edges (like walls, partitions, or anything that divides space), landmarks (prominent aesthetic elements), and even districts, since the term designates first and fore- most for Lynch whatever distinguishes the characteristic atmosphere of a place. To demonstrate and test this hypothesis, the students had to empty out the spaces they had created up to this point, multiply them by four, and connect them in a freely-chosen sequence. Using only the spatial language of the five fundamental elements and working in syntony with the principles of the psychology of shapes that make space recognizable and possible to remember (uniqueness, MATTEO VEGETTI 218 AN-ICON  formal simplicity, continuity, preeminence, clarity of con- nection, directional differentiation, visual field, awareness of movement, rhythm) the students were asked to give their design a high cognitive value for the users. In order to test the result obtained, each student visited the design created by the others in virtual reality, and at the end of the visit drew a mental map for each. The study of the maps, finally, allowed sever- al problems linked to the understanding of space to be brought into the discussion: errors in the reconstruction of the shape of the space, missing places, unclear dimensions and hierarchies, and incongruencies and hesitations of var- ious types. The critical evaluation of the most problematic spaces (and, on the other hand, of those that almost al- ways elicited a clear representation) allowed the students to rethink their design, seeking effective solutions. VR is a very useful tool for studying phenomena of orientation and environmental image. Its usage, however, can be extended to other psychological aspects related to the design of the environment, as for example to the concept of affordance, which in Gibson’s language refers to the physical qualities of objects that suggest to a subject the appropriate actions for manipulating them.35 The greater the affordance, the more the use of the tool becomes automatic and intuitive (a passage to cross, a door to open in a given direction, a switch to turn or press, etc.). Another possible use of a virtual space with “public” dimensions, like the one created in the last unit, is the study of the rules of proxemics.36 This can be accomplished through the possibility of inserting a number of virtual people, who move according to estab- lished or casual paths, interacting in various ways, into the scene. 35 J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979) (New York: Psychology Press, 2015). 36 T.E. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (New York: Anchor Books, 1990). MATTEO VEGETTI 219 AN-ICON  Expected outcomes: ■ Experimenting with the principles of Lynch’s theory from the perspective of design and develop a sensitivity to the cognitive structure of space. ■ Learning the method of mental maps. Exercise A) Return to the basic space in its starting con- dition, taking away all of the elements aside from the open- ings (doors and windows). Multiply the space you created before by four times. Then generate a sequence of twelve connected environments. Four spatial elements must be present in the design: pathways, edges, introverted nodes, extroverted nodes, and landmarks. Design the entrance and exit of the building. The goal is to create a fluid and figurable space. To achieve this goal, plasterboard walls can be taken away or added (also to change the shape of the space); or you can redesign them in such a way as to weaking or strengthen the frame (the edges) to create visual and auditory connec- tions, light effects, or transparencies. Each room can have a landmark (painting, stat- ue, mirror, geometric volumes). In order to orient the user on the path and to support the figurability of the space you can use: colors, materials, lights, sounds, and frames. You may not, however, use symbols or signs. B) Make a film of the space. C) Once it has been designed, the space will be visited by other groups for a set period of time. These visitors will then be asked to draw a map of the space as they remember it. On the basis of these mental maps, try to understand the strong and weak points of the designed space through a synthetic map. The project will be evaluated in respect to the fol- lowing categories: uniqueness/originality, formal simplicity, MATTEO VEGETTI 220 AN-ICON  hierarchical continuity, clarity of connections, directional differentiation, scope of vision, awareness of movement. The maps will be collectively discussed. We will try to understand why certain spatial elements were forgotten, misunderstood, and memorized with difficulty. D) Change the space in order to modify it on the basis of the suggestions that emerged from the discussion. Technical specifications There are dozens of 3D and VR software pro- grams specialized in various types of applications. The criteria that guided our choice were the following: possibly free software, so that the students could continue to use it as professionals, simplicity of the interface and usage, simplified workflow, and the capacity to model in 3D and have VR visualization and navigation functions. Based on these criteria, we chose Twinmotion (https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/twinmotion), a soft- ware specifically designed for architecture and interior ar- chitecture based on the Unreal motor; the VR experience is native “out-of-the box,” with features allowing for the real-time modifications of materials, time of day, etc. Fig. 6. The interface is very simple, but on a deep- er level allows for all of the necessary modifications of MATTEO VEGETTI 221 AN-ICON  parameters. It can also simulate sounds in the space when one moves through the VR scene. Twinmotion has an internal library of 3D models (animated and otherwise) that can be added to the scene one is working on in a very intuitive way, but does not allow for the creation of new 3D models from within. The solution to this problem was to use the Twinmotion plugin, which allows for the importation from various 3D modelling programs such as Rhinoceros, Ar- chiCAD, or 3DS Max, of 3D objects with a simple transfer. This solution was ideal insofar as the students were able to use ArchiCAD for 3D modeling and then to synchronize it with Twinmotion for VR and rendering. Also, the main design remained in ArchiCAD, where various sections and plans were designed as usual. The VR viewer market has developed in inter- esting ways in the past few years, moving from solutions with fixed stations (with the viewer connected to the com- puter by cable and external sensors to map the area of the game) to mobile ones, with integrated sensors that function independently, without a cable and the need for an external computer to function. The main need of the project was to have a quick working process with the fewest possible number of intermediate steps. The product chose was the Oculus Quest 2 (https://www.oculus.com/quest-2), a “standalone” viewer with an integrated graphics processor, which can also function as an external viewer for a computer when connected via cable. The price and the image quality were important factors in the final selection. The possibility of using the students’ own lap- top computers was quickly rejected, due to the issue of the computing power of graphics cards, different operating systems, and the installation of necessary programs that use a large amount of disc space (at least 30 GB). To solve these problems, Windows laptops with the latest video cards (Nvidia RTX 3070), with all of the nec- essary programs installed (ArchiCAD, Oculus, Twinmotion) were acquired. MATTEO VEGETTI 222 AN-ICON  Discussion and recommendations The structure of the course proved to be effec- tive and engaging, and gained very positive evaluations from the students, confirming in its own way the positive effects on VR learning already cited.37 The strongest point was the integration of theory and practice, two dimensions that normally are clearly separated and, despite good in- tentions, mutually indifferent. This also signaled a danger and a difficulty: un- fortunately, the results of the course could not be measured by looking at the end outcomes —as would take place in a design workshop— because the design, in our case, was the means and not the end. Furthermore, some of the starting conditions (for example, the position of the door-openings) can seem absurd from an architectural point of view, and are incom- prehensible if one is not aware of the specific educational goals of the course. The attention dedicated by the students to cer- tain environmental, spatial, compositional, formal, percep- tual, and atmospheric factors definitely produced surpris- ing results, which were also appreciated by our architect colleagues, but in order to avoid misunderstandings it was always necessary to strongly reiterate the theoretical/phil- osophical specificity of the course and its objectives. From this point of view, even the spaces that were seemingly less successful from an architectural standpoint could have a positive significance in regard to what interested us: the essential was not in fact in the results in themselves, but in the process that led to them, in the experimental inten- tions of those who made them, and in the documentary traces that recorded and commented on the experience on a theoretical and critical level. The essential, in short, was the degree of awareness developed by students in each phase of the course and their level of understanding 37 F. Kharvari, L.E. Kaiser, “Impact of extended reality on architectural education and the design process.” MATTEO VEGETTI 223 AN-ICON  regarding the ways in which certain spatial factors impact our relationship with space on conscious and unconscious, and cognitive and perceptual levels. However, in view of the Academic Year 2022- 2023, in order to better distinguish the intentions of the course from those of the project work, we decided to mod- ify the course. In particular, we have attempted to simplify the exercises and standardise them so that the results are com- parable. In addition, we placed emphasis on experiment- ing with spatial variants of an element (e.g. the threshold/ door) to allow students to test the most significant per- ceptual changes between the choices made. Finally, we required the students to present the experiments they had tried, a selection of the most interesting results, and writ- ten descriptions of their experiences in a common layout. Redefined in these terms, the first point of the new exer- cise relating to the first unit asks the students to place a gap-threshold in the starting space, to experiment with dif- ferent solutions capable of generating a meaningful spatial experience; to describe in writing the criterion used, the most paradigmatic solutions, and the quality of space de- termined by these solutions. The same method, based on the study of variations, was applied to the composition of the rooms, the shape of the threshold/windows, the posi- tion of the sculpture, etc. Overall, the course has become much more analytical than before, and somewhat more phenomenological. MATTEO VEGETTI 224 AN-ICON  Fig. 7. Fig. 8. MATTEO VEGETTI 225 AN-ICON  Fig. 9. Fig. 10. Fig. 11. Fig. 12. Figg. 9-12. Four pictures related to the exercise on the thresholds: projects of Elmira Rabbani and Gabriele Luciani, Giada Pettenati and Michelle Rosato, Giorgio Ghielmetti e Mattia Buttinoni. Bachelor of Interior Architecture, SUPSI, DACD. MATTEO VEGETTI 226 AN-ICON  Fig. 13. Fig. 14. Fig. 15. Fig. 16. Figg. 13-16: Four pictures related to the exercise on light and colour. Projects of Sandra Burn and Asia Camoia, Elmira Rabbani and Gabriele Luciani, Jessica Corti and Silvia Zehnder. Bachelor of Interior Architecture, SUPSI, DACD. MATTEO VEGETTI 227 AN-ICON Unità 1 es.1 - Diversi modi di inserire un varco/soglia nello spazio spazio analizzato: 3 x 4.5 x 2.5m Dal momento che il nostro parallelepi- pedo è di base rettangolare abbiamo iniziato ad analizzare le sperimen- tazioni in cuiNun varco viene posto sulla facciata più lunga, ossia 4,5 m. Abbiamo sperimentato varie possibilià di soglie utilizzando i seguenti criteri: locazione, altezza e larghezza. Inizialmente abbiamo posto la soglia al centro della facciata e abbiamo osservato come variava la percezione cambiando l’altezza (1.60m, 2.10m, 2.50m) del varco e in seguito cambian- do la larghezza (0.50m, 0.70m, 1m, 1.50m, 2m, 2.50m). Successivamente abbiamo decentrato la soglia, ed infine abbiamo fatto lo stesso procedimento anche per la facciata più corta, os- sia 3m. Dopo aver sviluppato queste svariate possibilità ne abbiamo selezio- nate alcune che secondo noi sono più significative: 1.1: - Apertura minima - Si fa quasi fatica a passare - Non si è invogliati a varcare la soglia - Luogo molto riservato 1.2: -Le senzazioni elencate precedente- mente vengono accentuate decentran- do la soglia 1.3 - Forte collegamento interno-esterno - Luogo arioso 1.4: -Le senzazioni elencate precedente- mente diminuiscono decentrando la soglia V1.5: - Sorge la domanda se si tratta ancora di una soglia 1.7: - Non è vivibile - Quasi non ci si rende conto che si tratta di una vera e propria soglia 1.8: - Altezza standard - In correlazione con i cambiamenti di larghezza sperimentati non influisce granché 1.9: - Direzionalità: dona verticalità allo spazio AIS200 Fenomenologia dello spazio_2022-23 Zoe Togni e Silvia Pedeferri Fig. 17. Unità 1 es.2 - Varianti migliori spazio analizzato: 3 x 4.5 x 2.5m orem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse lobortis urna id velit tempor, in gravida est hen- drerit. Mauris vestibulum facilisis erat sit amet consequat. Curabitur ullamcor- per eros enim, eget interdum dolor feugiat at. Etiam viverra orci ac quam lobortis, ac posuere turpis ultricies. Sed facilisis dictum turpis eget venenatis. Nunc vehicula augue enim, at viverra turpis ornare vel. Phasellus vel mollis augue. Curabitur luctus, erat ut bibendum bibendum, lacus nisl molestie eros, sed cursus turpis magna quis nibh. Sed ac volutpat magna, id mattis risus. Fusce ipsum neque, placerat ac posuere at, sollicitudin in nulla. Maecenas ege- stas nibh ac ultricies laoreet. Integer tristique fermentum neque, sit amet vehicula sapien. Morbi condimentum consequat turpis a rutrum. Proin nec dolor eu purus ultrices rutrum. Ut rutrum semper dictum. Morbi sapien lacus, feugiat sit amet commodo et, feugiat ut felis. Mauris tellus justo, laoreet ut quam in, molestie ultrices sapien. Sed tincidunt, augue ut inter- dum cursus, lorem dui laoreet augue, in semper urna dolor sed tellus. Su- spendisse molestie urna id commodo pretium. Ut non dui tincidunt, dictum justo in, posuere sapien. Sed non est at purus fermentum tincidunt vulputate id libero. Etiam mi ante, rutrum a libero vel, feugiat pharetra sem. In volutpat metus arcu, eget fringilla ipsum soda- les ac. AIS200 Fenomenologia dello spazio_2022-23 Zoe Togni e Silvia Pedeferri Fig. 18. Figg. 17-18. Examples of the layout used in the course 2022-2023 (first point of the Unit 1 exercise). Students: Zoe Togni and Silvia Pedeferri. MATTEO VEGETTI 228 AN-ICON Unità 3 es.G - Fotogrammi video obiettivi Il nostro obiettivo è di creare un’atmo- scelte Ci siamo focalizzate principalmente con tutte le pareti in clacestruzzo, ma sfera che metta in contrapposizione sull’utilizzo di un materiale base, quale questa volta laccate, in modo da dare una sensazione di apertura e leggerez- il calcestruzzo, che abbiamo adopera- ancora l’effetto della leggerezza e del za con una sensazione di chiusura e to in primo luogo, su tutti i pavimenti, freddo, ma creando un climax con la pesantezza, tramite l’utilizzo di texture, e successivamente sule pareti tre prima stanza. coliri e materiali che possano aiutare stanze. La terza stanza, caratterizzata da ad enfatizzare tali emozioni. La prima stanza è caratterizzata da un pareti in calcestruzzo grezzo, invece, pavimento chiaro, con tonalità azzurra- ha come colorazioni un grigio scuro, stre e pareti in alluminio riflettente per che introducono un effetto sinestetico creare un effetto sinestetico che ricor- di pesantezza ed oppressione. dasse il freddo e la leggerezza, qualità L’ultima stanza, invece, è caratterizzata innate del metallo. da un pavimento blu scuro, notte, e da La seconda stanza, invece, è valoriz- pareti e soffitto rivestite da pietra nera. zata da una colorazione, sempre sulle tonalità dell’azzurro, ma più calde, riscontri Attraverso l’utilizzo del visore abbiamo La terza stanza è particolarmente constatato come le le nostre iniziali tangibile e concreta. Crea un netto ipotesi non fossero del tutto errate. contrasto con la stanza precedente, Nella prima stanza, ci si trova in uno trasportandoci in un’atmosfera pesante spazio freddo, quasi fantascientifico e reale. La sensazione che si prova è e irreale, ma a differenza di come quasi di calma e tranquillità. pensavamo, si ha una sensazione di Il contrasto con le due stanze prece- maggiore chiusura rispetto alla secon- dente viene inoltre accentutato dall’ul- da stanza. tima stanza che è buia, opprimente Proseguendo la stanza successiva e quasi soffocante, da non riuscire a ci trasporta in una relatà anch’essa stare al suo interno per troppo tempo. fredda, nella quale si crea un gioco di colori che nasconde il fatto che sia stato utilizzato lo stesso colore su tutte le pareti. AIS200 Fenomenologia dello spazio_2022-23 Anna Bolla e Camilla Tosi Fig. 19. Fig. 19. Examples of the layout used in the course 2022-2023 (Unit 3, synoptic view of tested variants). Students: Anna Bolla e Camilla Tosi. MATTEO VEGETTI 229 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18166

Phenomenology of space and virtual reality. An experimental course for students by Matteo Vegetti in architecture Phenomenology Virtual reality Achitecture Philosophy Education Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Phenomenology of space and virtual reality. An experimental course for students in architecture MATTEO VEGETTI, Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana, Università della Svizzera Italiana – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5149-8609 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18166 Abstract The paper presents the theoretical assumptions and the way of conducting an experimental course on the Phenom- enology of Space designed for architects and interior designers. The course made use of virtual reality to allow stu- dents to directly experience the perceptive and cognitive effects induced by the forms of space, colour, the texture of materials, and light. Virtual reality was also the medium that made it pos- sible to translate certain philosophical concepts related to the phenomenology of space into an experiential and applicative field close to the sensitivity and spatial culture of the designers. The themes addressed gave rise to a progressive development that allowed students to develop an increasingly complex project and experiment with increasingly complex is- sues. The course began with the phenomenology of thresholds, and continued with the analysis of field and synesthesia, the phenomenology of atmospheres, and the analysis of orienta- tion and mind maps. In each of these areas of research and experimentation, the common thread remained the relationship between the body and space. The article also presents the ex- ercises proposed to the students and an overall assessment of the teaching experience. Keywords Phenomenology Virtual reality Achitecture Philosophy Education To quote this essay: M. Vegetti, “Phenomenology of space and virtual reality. An experimental course for students in architecture,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 184- 229, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18166 MATTEO VEGETTI 184 AN-ICON  Presentation of the course Virtual reality (VR) holds educational potential of great interest for all disciplines that deal with spatiali- ty, and even more for those, like architecture, that have a privileged relationship with lived space, that is to say with the interaction between the body and its environment. I at- tempted to demonstrate this thesis through the conception and development of a course on Phenomenology of space that makes use of virtual reality to study the perceptual effects of architectural design. The course began as a research project funded by an internal call for proposals in the Department of en- vironments, construction, and design of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUP- SI-DACD, Mendrisio, Switzerland) dedicated to digitization. From the outset, its implementation required the formation of a small interdisciplinary research team. It included, alongside myself, philosopher and professor of spatial theory Pietro Vitali (architect and professor of the degree course in inte- rior architecture), Matteo Moriani (architect and assistant for the course developed by this project), and Marco Lurati (interaction designer and lecturer). In contrast to what often occurs, the collaboration between different areas of exper- tise in our case had a material character. The task of taking care of the content and educational aims of the course fell to me, as philosopher, while that of dealing with questions related to more strictly architectural aspects fell to the de- signers, who then guided the students in their design work. The interaction designer, finally, had the task not only of making the course possible through the development of the technology and the necessary programming, but also of teaching students how to carry out design in VR and the relevant programs (Twinmotion in particular). As is clear, no member of the working group could have proceeded without the aid of the others. The final goal was to create a course in phenomenology applied to architecture with the help of Oculus Quest 2 headsets. In other words, rather than just learning theories, the students would need to sharpen their MATTEO VEGETTI 185 AN-ICON  spatial sensibility by experimenting with these theories in a virtual environment. The challenge was thus double: on one hand to offer a course on applied philosophy, and on the other to introduce virtual reality into a theoretical course, making it the tool for the application of theory. In addition to this, in an almost unconscious, seemingly instrumental way, the students would need to learn sophisticated programming languages, a skill that is also useful from a professional standpoint. Background Virtual Reality has recently emerged in archi- tecture and the arts as novel means for visualizing different design solutions and for building up the design model and its virtual environment. Similar to these applications, VR is commonly used in architectural education in the design process, as it provides the designer with an image to create the spatial and topological relationships of a project. Although the use of VR for teaching purposes is not yet widespread in archi- tecture faculties (in Europe at least), its pedagogical effec- tiveness has been clearly documented.1 Several studies on the pedagogical function of VR in architectural studies have shown that the use of VR increases the awareness of de- signer during designing in terms of the structural properties and component assembly of a structural system,2 helps stu- dents’ way of thinking, critical thinking, and problem-solv- ing activities,3 creates the possibility to “feel like being in the place,”4 strengthens the memory and awareness of the 1 F. Kharvari, L.E. Kaiser, “Impact of extended reality on architectural education and the design process,” Automation in Construction 141 (2022): 1-19, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. autcon.2022.104393. 2 W.A. Abdelhameed, “Virtual reality in architectural design studios: a case of studying structure and construction,” Procedia Computer Science 25 (2013): 220-230, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.procs.2013.11.027. 3 F. Kharvari, L.E. Kaiser, “Impact of extended reality on architectural education and the design process.” 4 T. Chandrasekera, K. Fernando, L. Puig, “Effect of degrees of freedom on the sense of presence generated by virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display systems: a case study on the use of VR in early design studios,” Journal of Educational Technology Systems 47, no.4 (2019): 513-522. MATTEO VEGETTI 186 AN-ICON  spatial configuration,5 augments “spatial abilities” in stu- dents,6 trains the capacity to switch naturally from a planar representation of space to a 3D representation of the same space.7 To cite a concrete experience, Johan Bettum, pro- fessor of architecture at the Städelschule, has used virtual reality in the master degree studio Architecture and Aes- thetic Practice at Städelschule Architecture Class (Frank- furt) as a laboratory for spatial inquiries in relation to sub- jective experience, the construction of reality and the role of images in regimes of representation. These experiments consisted in designing immersive environments where ar- chitecture has been explored through the computerized representation of forms and spaces. According to the inten- tions of the course, this digitally produced realm of images supplemented and often supplanted the traditional role of drawing in the contemporary design process.8 A second research experiment on the integration of VR in the cur- riculum at architecture schools, took place at the College of Architecture and Planning (CAP) of Ball State University. For three years in a row, the CAP created a design virtual environment for 2nd year students, making use of an HMD (Head Mounted Display). The CAP VR Environment aimed to support the actual architectural design process, therefore aiding the process of learning how to design, rather than limiting its use as a visualization tool. In the practical terms, the immersive simulation of an actual design project (the lobby of a small hotel) was intended to enable students to recreate the architectural characteristics of the space, elic- iting an appraisal of their architectural spatial experience. According to the author, the ability to navigate through 5 A. Angulo, “Rediscovering virtual reality in the education of architectural design: the immersive simulation of spatial experience,” Ambiences. Environment Sensible, Architecture et Espace Urbain 1 (2015): 1-23, https://doi.org/10.4000/ambiances.594. 6 T. Chandrasekera, S.Y. Yoon, “Adopting augmented reality in design communication: focusing on improving spatial abilities,” The International Journal of Architectonics, Spatial and Environmental Design 9, no.1 (2015): 1-14, http://dx.doi.org/10.18848/2325-1662/CGP/ v09i01/38384; M. Schnabel, T. Kvan, E. Kruijff, D. Donath, “The first virtual environment design studio,” 19th eCAADe Conference Proceedings. Helsinki (2001): 394-400. 7 J. Milovanovic, G. Moreau, D. Siret, F. Miguet, “Virtual and augmented reality in architectural design and education. An immersive multimodal platform to support architectural pedagogy,” 17th International Conference, CAAD Futures 2017, Istanbul, Turkey. 8 J. Bettum, Architecture, Futurability and the Untimely (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022). MATTEO VEGETTI 187 AN-ICON  the simulated lobbies turned out to be key to capture the architectural spatial experience and perceive the aesthetic emotion and/or symbolic meaning embedded in the proj- ects.9 A further type of studies attempted to demon- strate, through an experimental design that also involved students from a design class at the Milan Polytechnic, the possibility of recreating complex spatial qualities through VR, for example investigating how multisensoriality (scent in particular) affects the realism of the experience contrib- uting to increase the users’ sense of presence in the virtual environment.10 Although in some ways apparently akin to the case studies cited, it must be borne in mind that the course we experimented with differs first and foremost from them for the basic reason that it does not fall within the scope of architecture, but of philosophy applied to space (a phi- losophy with a phenomenological orientation). The aim of the pedagogical experiments conducted is therefore not related to design, but to the understanding of the body- space relationship, with a specific focus on the modalities of sensory perception. In other words, thanks to virtual re- ality, the students were able to experiment in various ways, according to a number of controlled possibilities, how the manipulation of certain variables (positions of openings, colors, scales, relationships between objects in space, arti- ficial lights, sequences of spaces) impact the spatial expe- rience on a perceptive and cognitive level. The aim was not to obtain a realistic representation of space, nor was it to learn about and visualize certain spaces and construction processes through VR. The aim was rather to verify with one’s own (virtual) body the perceptual effects induced by 9 A. Angulo, “Rediscovering virtual reality in the education of architectural design: the immersive simulation of spatial experience.” 10 M. Carulli, M. Bordegoni, U. Cugini, “Integrating scents simulation in virtual reality multisensory environment for industrial products evaluation,” Computer-Aided Design & Applications 13, no. 3 (2016): 320-328, https://doi.org/10.1080/16864360.2015.1114390. MATTEO VEGETTI 188 AN-ICON  certain design choices, and to develop a method to derive generalizable knowledge from experience. Although the aforementioned studies have provided the course with useful information and a set of important examples regarding the didactic use of VR in architecture, there is - to the best of my knowledge - no previous use of VR in phenomenology of space. Theoretical framework Phenomenology is undoubtedly the theoret- ical orientation most closely related to the intelligence of architects, who are accustomed to thinking about space “live,” so to speak. Among the characteristic abilities of the architect are the capacity to consider the relationship between spaces and bodies, to imagine the atmosphere of environments and the way in which shape, color, and spatial scale influence our experience of them, and to or- ganize solids and voids, exteriors and interiors, the visible and the invisible, light and shadow, volumes and matter, as though they were elements of an aesthetically expressed spatial language. It is precisely this sort of sensibility that the course sought to thematically develop, strengthening students’ awareness of and ability to design perceptual (i.e., not only spatial) environments imbued with cognitive and emotional meanings. To best realize the desired encounter between philosophy and architecture in this pre-categor- ical level of spatial experience, I found it useful to refer to phenomenology broadly defined, broadly enough to include Gestalt psychology and some elements of behaviorist psy- chology. Before giving a synopsis of the thematic contents of the course, it will be necessary to evaluate the contribu- tion that virtual reality can offer to the encounter between phenomenology and architecture, mediating between their languages. VR’s potential consists in its particular quali- ties as an immersive medium, or more specifically in its MATTEO VEGETTI 189 AN-ICON  capacity to insert perception into an immaterial, interactive, and programmable Umwelt. The first aspect is perhaps the most important. If there is a single quality that the spatial intelligence of the architect must necessarily develop during the course of study, it lies in the capacity to move from an understand- ing of space based on plans—made up of lines, symbols, numbers, and so on—to a subjective understanding, ideally placed in the space that those signs represent abstractly. The passage from an objective and external gaze (the one that reads the plan) to an internal, embodied one, capable of bringing the signs to life in a volumetric space and cor- porealizing them, is normally entrusted to the imagination. But given the complexity of this mental operation, it is al- ways necessary to turn to a plurality of media: sketches, models, photographs of the models taken from the inside, rendering, etc. None of these tools, however, is capable of physically including the subject, who thus continues to have a distanced and disembodied understanding of space. Given the importance of the role that the body plays in spatial experience, it is clear that the value of virtual reality lies in the possibility of transferring the subject inside of the space of representation, in such a way that allows them to have a direct, aesthetic, and even synesthetic experience. Thanks to VR, the architect can jump in and out of the rep- resentation: he or she can “enter the plan,” making it into an immersive experience, and then exit, modify the design on the basis of this experience, and finally return to the virtual space to check the outcome of the operation. This move- ment in and out of the space of representation provides the intelligence of the architect with a new medium; this is not, however, virtual reality, but rather his or her own body as an “analogical” tool, one that provides an analog to em- bodied sensory experience. On the one hand, virtual space replicates the intentional structure that the world presents to us: space moves with me, shows itself and hides itself in relation to my gaze, and declares its secondary qualities (for example, showing itself to be narrow and oppressive, MATTEO VEGETTI 190 AN-ICON  or disorienting —all qualities that are related to a certain kind of subjective experience.). On the other hand, even if they are “embedded” in a virtual environment, the subjects still maintain an interior distance, a remainder of objectiv- ity; they know that they are in a representation, just like at every moment they know that their own body is only an analogon of the sentient one, which allows them to have a mediated, self-observed experience, and to register its effects. If virtual space is a distant relative of the sketchpad, the body that explores virtual space is a distant relative of the pencil that draws in the sketchpad, or more precisely of the manual intelligence involved in that experience. The risk of virtual reality causing the architect to lose an authentic relationship to space, or to “authentic space,” is, when taken from this point of view, less serious than one might fear—and all the more so due to the fact that VR does not by any means claim to substitute itself for the traditional forms of mediation, translation, and repre- sentation of space, but rather to integrate them into its own capabilities. Furthermore, VR remediates within itself many media to which we have long been accustomed, from the drawing pad to the cinema; from this perspective, rather than eliminating all mediation, it entails a deep and layered media culture. This is also confirmed by the educational usage of VR, given that in order to adequately use it, the students will necessarily continue to move through the rep- resentational languages of different media (from manual design to CAD, as well as the photos and films that can be made within virtual reality). They can also share their visual experience externally, since what they see within the virtual environment can be simultaneously projected on a screen connected to a projector. This, if we consider it closely, is no small thing. Two separate and autonomous (although co-present) environments—two different parallel Umwel- ten—can be connected in real time. Making it possible to show the outside what one sees as one sees it, VR makes ocular experience shareable, albeit through two different media (on one hand the projected film and on the oth- er the immersive reality.) The VR viewer transforms vision MATTEO VEGETTI 191 AN-ICON  into a full-fledged medium: it transmits, communicates to the outside, shows, and makes what it manifests public in real time. The virtual experience is, in effect, “replicant” by nature. In it, technological reproducibility has now caught up with the perceptual experience linked with one’s own body: today sight, tomorrow touch, and then who knows. The alienation of one’s own body, if we can call it such, may have slightly disturbing aspects for those who want to project it into dystopian future scenarios, but within the context of more modest educational ambitions, it holds enormous potential, given that it makes the lived experiences of others shareable and evaluable. As will by now be clear, the course was nothing like a normal design workshop, nor did it aspire to be. It was more like a virtual gymnasium where, through a series of guided experiments, the perceptual and psychological dimensions of space were exercised; a gymnasium that allowed for the easy modification of space and the experimental verification of its effects. Aims of the program To be concise, the use of virtual reality in the architectural context can be summarized in four points. These, as we will see, were developed in the course through a series of exercises. 1) VR allows for the modification of space at will, and for the verification of its effects on perceptual, emotion- al, and cognitive levels (depending on what one is interested in determining) in an immersive environment. For example, the height of a ceiling is, from one point of view, objective and mathematical, identical in any space. It is what it is, regardless of other spatial vari- ables like color and depth. Within the perceptual dimen- sion, however, things proceed very differently, since all of these variables intertwine and influence one another in a manner so clear that to define it as subjective would be misleading. The depth of space modifies the perception of MATTEO VEGETTI 192 AN-ICON  height in direct proportion to its increase. This can easily be experienced in virtual reality precisely because it only applies to a sentient body, which on paper does not ex- ist. Experiments of this type can examine the relationship between color and spatial perception, the modification of an environment through light (or shadows) depending on the hour of the day or the season, the perception of one’s center of balance in space, the relationship between differ- ent scales, the relationship between different volumes and shapes, synesthesia, and many other analogous situations. VR offers the opportunity to examine all of these aspects not only through vision, but also from a practical point of view, that is to say, through the study of the behav- ior of the users that interact with the organization of a given space: how they move, what they understand, what they remember, and how they describe a certain environment. All of this provides a way to test design solutions (whether realistic or experimental), or to verify theories developed in the existing literature. 2) VR allows for the implementation of phenom- enological variations and the experiencing of their effects on different levels: aesthetic, psychological, ontological. The use of phenomenological variation within the context of the project meant the possibility of varying one or two special elements, altering in a controlled way their position, breadth, depth, and other characteristics. One can, for example, modify the perception and geometry of an entire environment by changing where the entryway is located, thus deforming the environment in relation to the observer’s center. Depending on the breadth or depth of the entry, the experience of entering, and of the relationship between outside and inside, is modified. Depending where the two entries in a room are located—given that these es- tablish between themselves, on a perceptual level, a recip- rocal connection, a sort of invisible corridor—space will be “sliced” by that connection in different ways, redistributing MATTEO VEGETTI 193 AN-ICON  internal space and generating areas (compartments) of vari- able shapes and dimensions. This method requires experimenting with a lim- ited and controlled number of variations, and that the results be recorded from a perceptual and even ontological point of view. The dimensions of a window can be varied in such a way as to produce significant aesthetic discontinuities, but beyond a certain threshold of size the window changes in nature, becoming, for example, a glass door (if it alludes to the possibility of transit, taking on the potentiality of an opening-threshold), or a glass wall, where wall and window meet, each giving up one of its intrinsic potentialities (in the case of the wall, the possibility of visually separating spaces, and in the case of the window, that of connecting an inside to an outside atmosphere). The exercise of variation can take on many forms, all useful for testing a wide range of spatial effects with aesthetic, symbolic, or even ontological significance. To give a final example, which highlights the possibilities of VR, we might think of the effect of all of the possible variations applied to the height of a small room, from the minimum or even insufficient measurement to a generous one, say of 3 meters, up to a decidedly out of scale measurement of 10 or 20 meters. This modification allows for the discovery through intuitive evidence of the discontinuous relationship between stimulus and percep- tion, or of the differential thresholds that punctuate the qualitative passage from one psychophysical condition to another (claustrophobic, comfortable, roomy, oppressive, etc.). The qualitative thresholds can also cause a change in the sense of space itself. For instance, a space in which the ceiling is too low will not be perceived as inhabitable. Habitability is a spatial quality that requires a certain min- imum height, even if it is still a claustrophobic one. But if one exceeds this measurement greatly, one enters into a new context of meaning, for example that of an artistic installation, and space takes on a poetic significance that it did not have before. But this is not all. The exercise of phenomenological variation calls for the capacity to de- scribe, or better, to verbalize lived experience, developing MATTEO VEGETTI 194 AN-ICON  an appropriate (specific), effective (figurative), and meaning- ful (persuasive) language. From perception to expression: a continuous two-way transit that helps students develop a degree of spatial awareness that they do not normally pos- sess. Naturally, the exercise becomes progressively more complex depending on the number of variables one choos- es to introduce. The preceding case, for example, could be made much more complex simply with the introduction of one further variable, such as materials (say, concrete or word) or the presence of a light source (for example, an opening onto a natural light source from above). 3) VR allows for the firsthand study of relationships between form and meaning. Here, I turn to the field of Gestalt psychology, and more particularly to the possibility of simulating and studying phenomena of orientation and mental maps (at the base of which lie the tools of the psychology of shapes). To once again in this case offer some examples, one might think of virtual space as a site in which to experiment with different strategies for functionally dividing up space, for grouping families of objects on the basis of the principles of “figural unification,” for generating rhythms, for anticipat- ing the sense of space (directions and meanings), and for inducing motor responses. Within this field of experimenta- tion also lies the possibility of giving symbolic significance to a certain element of the environment (for example, the main entrance, the most important painting, the state room, etc.) as well as that of articulating in various modes the re- lationship between voids and solids, distances, or objects with different shapes and sizes. 4) VR allows for experimentation with the consti- tutive factors of atmospheres. This fourth point is the result of the interac- tion between all of the preceding spatial components and their relative interactions, and thus cannot but appear last. Experimentation with the constitutive factors of the atmo- sphere becomes explicit when attention is shifted to the MATTEO VEGETTI 195 AN-ICON  holistic aspects of the environment, the emotional impact that the space has on us, and the moment of encounter with an atmosphere and the way it can be an object of design. The usefulness of virtual reality in respect to the phenomenological analysis of atmospheres is clear: pre- cisely because an atmosphere is in itself an immersive and synesthetic phenomenon, it can only be observed through bodily presence. One is always inside an atmosphere, to the point that the very presence of a certain atmospheric connotation defines, when perceived, the confines of an interior (the interior of a work of architecture, of a certain city or neighborhood, or of a particular culture, etc.). VR thus shows itself to be extremely effective as a tool for the analysis of the psychological aspects of atmosphere, fa- cilitating an applied atmospherology. The various aspects that comprise the atmosphere of a place, that is to say its social and emotional characteristics, can become the ob- ject of critical analysis and can be used for the revision of designs. Within this field of experimentation there is also the possibility of observing space from any desired perspective and of moving, even if in a limited way, in a manner that unites visual and synesthetic experience. In addition, VR offers the possibility of introduc- ing natural sounds, background noises (for example, chatter, whose intensity depends on the number of people that we decide to put into the space), sounds of footsteps (which change depending on the surface being tread upon), and music (which can be diffused into space from a preselected source). It is not yet possible, however, to introduce tactile experiences, while olfactory ones are difficult to manage and a bit artificial. Structure of the course and workflow The course took place during the first semester of the 2022 academic year, and was divided into 12 lessons, each lasting an entire day. Excluding the first introductory lesson and the last one, dedicated to the presentation of final exercises, MATTEO VEGETTI 196 AN-ICON  five units were offered to the students, each one compris- ing two lessons. Each unit dealt with a different theme, but always built on the themes discussed in the preceding units. The course thus followed a gradual development through units. The typical organization of the units followed this order: a theoretical lecture (Matteo Vegetti); presentation of the exercise; discussion; presentation of programing tools and the use of Twinmotion for the given exercise (Marco Lurati); design work by students under the guidance of the course assistant (the architect Matteo Moriani, with the invaluable volunteer contribution of the interior architect Victoria Pham). Each unit was concluded the afternoon of the second lesson with a group review of the exercises. Since these were carried out by students in pairs, the pre- sentations took place as follows: one student explained the design choices and the outcomes of the experimentation, while the other, from within the virtual space, showed the spaces in question (thanks to a projector connected to the Oculus, or rather to the computer supporting it). Each pair of students worked on a space of a different scale (2.5x2.5; 5x5; 10x10; 20x20; 2.5x5; 5x10; 10x20). In this manner, the phenomenologically significant issue of scale was indirectly present throughout the course, presenting numerous opportunities for reflection. Given that the same exact exercise presented difficulties of different types de- pending on the scale, each group of students necessarily had to offer a different design solution. The differences be- tween scales were of course also evident in the exercises based on variations. In what follows I offer a descriptive brief of the subjects dealt with in each unit and in the corresponding exercises. The latter held a fundamental importance in the overall economy of the course, given that they connected theory with practice and formed an educational pathway that began from a few basic elements and then became progressively richer and more complex. MATTEO VEGETTI 197 AN-ICON  INTRODUCTION and UNIT 1 “I ask a young student: how would you make a door? With what dimensions? Where would you place it? In which corner of the room would you have it open? Do you understand that these different solutions are the are the very basis of architecture? Depending on the way that one enters into an apartment, on where doors are located in the walls, you feel very different sensations, and the wall that you that you drill likewise takes on very different charac- teristics. You then feel that this is architecture.”11 The first introductory lesson of the course dealt with the relationship between body and space, bringing to light some of the fundamental issues in Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger’s phenomenological approaches.12 Through the definition of these concepts and the relationship between them (space as correlate of the activity of a living body, as environment, as site, as a felt, perceived, lived space, in- vested with meanings), the course established a theoretical basis sufficient for understanding its aims. Then, a first approach to virtual reality, and a first intuitive test of the ideas learned, was carried out through the use of the Gravity Sketch program, which of- fers its users the possibility of creating space through the movements of their hands, and to choose from a vast rep- ertoire of creative resources (lines, shapes, surfaces, colors, materials, transparencies, etc.). Each pair of students ran- domly selected an aesthetic/perceptual theme (unknown to the others) to give form to. Once a pair of students created theirs in VR, the rest of the class was invited to visit it and provide a brief description of it. Based on the comments received, it was easy to tell if the students had succeeded 11 Le Corbusier, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning (1930) (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2015). 12 M. Heidegger, M. Corpo e spazio (1964), trans. F. Bolino (Genova: Il Melangolo, 2000); M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), trans. D. Landes (Abingdon-New York: Routledge, 2012). MATTEO VEGETTI 198 AN-ICON  in conveying the theme that they were tasked with inter- preting spatially. In a small way, this first contact with virtual reality reproduced the characteristic transposition of theo- retical themes into an “applied” dimension that would char- acterize the course as a whole. Most importantly, Gravity Sketch is an effective tool for becoming familiar with VR, and more particularly with the possible functions offered by the Oculus. UNIT 1 - Phenomenology of thresholds The first unit was dedicated to the theme of thresholds, or rather to the diverse configurations of the divide between interior and exterior that make the experi- ence of space as a place possible (the possibility of “en- tering” or accessing that only the crossing of a threshold allows). Experimenting with the different thresholds that comprise space and mastering their rhetorical significance means knowing how to articulate space like a complex text, full of caesuras, connections, leaps, transitions, and transformations. Each threshold represents a critical point in space because it is called upon not only to manage the different practical and symbolic functions of the environ- ment, but also the relationship between seemingly irrecon- cilable opposites: interior and exterior, public and private, the familiar and the foreign, the inside and the outside. The phenomenology of thresholds thus aimed to show through numerous examples how the threshold could be designed and conceived of in different ways depending on goals and intentions (aesthetic, symbolic, practical). The lesson took its impetus from an anthropo- logical reflection on the significance of the threshold/door, 13 to then move towards more philosophical14 and phenom- enological15 questions. Here, as elsewhere, Ching’s im- 13 J. Rykwert, The Idea of a Town (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1988). 14 G. Simmel, “Bridge and door,” Theory, Culture & Society 11 (1994): 5-10. 15 P. V. Meiss, De la forme au lieu (Lausanne: Presses polytechinques et universitaires, 1986); A. Moles, E. Rohmer, Psychologie de l’espace (Paris: Casterman, 1998). MATTEO VEGETTI 199 AN-ICON  ages and insightful observations were very useful in ac- companying the discussion.16 The lesson was also the occasion to thematize the threshold between “front” and “back,” between “stage” and “backstage,” or rather between the public and private dimension, through a series of different frames. Here, I use the language of Erving Goffman to allude to the importance of the frame in defining, on the basis of its specific material or formal qualities, the type of situated social situation that one wishes to obtain: the degree of visibility, of separation, of privacy (or of porosity, contamination, or transparency) that one wants to establish between the respective domains of “front” and “back” in order to strengthen or weaken the public valence of the place and the relationships that take place there.17 Expected outcomes: ■ Understanding the symbolic value of the entering a space and the way in which the threshold manages the relationship between interior and exterior. ■ Experimenting with the perceptual effects generated by the different positioning of a door-opening in the same identical space. ■ Experimenting with the connection that is created between two door-openings within the same space, and the modification of spatial relationships that this connection brings about. ■ Understanding the significance of the center as what or- ganizes space and its distortions. ■ Understanding the language of the window-opening through different typologies. ■ Experimenting with the concept of “frame.” ■ Analyzing the way in which an object (in this case, a work of art) reacts to space based on its position, size, relationship to light, and to its own “aura.” 16 F.D.K. Ching, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2015). 17 E. Goffman, Behavior in Public Places (New York: Free Press, 1966); and Interaction Ritual (New York: Pantheon, 1982) MATTEO VEGETTI 200 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Beyond a certain limit, an opening ceases to be an enclosed area and becomes a dominating element: a transparent plane bordered by a frame. From F.D.K. Ching, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order (Hoboken: Wiley, 2015). Fig. 2. An opening situated on the plane of a wall will appear to be a luminous form against a contrasting background. If it is centered on the plane, the opening will appear stable and will visually organize the surface around it. If it is decentered, it will create a level of visual tension with the sides of the plane towards which it has been moved. From F.D.K. Ching, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order. MATTEO VEGETTI 201 AN-ICON  Exercise Each pair of students works on a space of dif- ferent scale, with a square or rectangular base (2.5x2.5; 5x5; 10x10; 20x20; 2.5x5; 5x10; 10x20). A) Create three spaces with equal dimensions. In one of these spaces, place a door-opening in three differ- ent positions, and note how the space changes perceptu- ally, writing a description of it from within the virtual space. B) For each of the three spaces, create two door-openings placed in different ways (but on the same wall). Describe the result: how is space modified? Where is the center? C) Place a rug of shape, dimension, and mate- rial of your choice in each space. D) Place a window-opening in each space. The openings must be central, zenithal, and angular (size and shape are up to you). E) Modify the dimensions and shape of the window-openings, increasing their width or height freely. Describe the result. F) Place into one single space a combination of four of the entry-doors or windows created earlier (4 total: this could be 2 doors and 2 windows or 3 doors and 1 window, etc.) Describe the result. G) Connect in a sequence four of the spaces created earlier. Give these environments a hierarchy and connect them with a path that joins the entrance and the exit. Design the main entrance into the space from a rhe- torical standpoint. Try to convey the hierarchy between different environments through the use of different kinds of thresholds. The thresholds must anticipate the sense of the space being entered, and must convey the relation- ship between the spaces that they connect (you can use frames, stairs, boxes, ramps, partitions, false ceilings, dif- ferent thicknesses for the walls, and the form and dimen- sions of the thresholds can be modified. In this phase, the MATTEO VEGETTI 202 AN-ICON  threshold can become a volume). You may not, however, use any elements of décor. H) Place a sculpture in one of the environments in such a way as to enhance the latter. I) Design a threshold/separation (a frame) that creates a private space within one of the rooms that you have already made. J) Make a 30-second VR film of these environ- ments and describe the created space (2000 words). The description should be written subjectively (“I advance and see on my right…;” “the light from the window is illuminat- ing the threshold that I am about to cross…”) K) Take 3 photos of the interior that illustrate the design choices (that is, representative views of the interior space generated through experimental solutions.) UNIT 2 - The power of the field “By emphasizing the generated field in addition to the architectural object, one raises once more the problem of space, but in different terms by giving the concept a different value. In traditional criti- cism space is a homogeneous structure, a kind of counterform to the mural envelope, indifferent to the lighting conditions and to its position in relation to the buildings, whereas the notion of field stresses the continuous variability of what surrounds the archi- tectural structures.”18 The second unit, which clarified some of the theoretical elements already present in the first, analyzed the principles of field theory, or better, an ensemble of the- ories based on the shared presupposition that a space occupied by volumes does not coincide with their physical 18 P.P. Portoghesi, cited in R. Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form (1977) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). MATTEO VEGETTI 203 AN-ICON  space, but extends beyond it, without however being in- dependent of the originating form.19 The field thus coincides not with the borders within which everything is enclosed, but with a certain ar- rangement of forces and vectors acting in space. Space thus becomes an active and reactive environment: a field of psycho/physical forces. Every volume present in the field, by virtue of its mass and its shape(s), changes the field’s appearance. The field generated through design deeply affects our perceptual schemas through the play of forces that act within it. But within the concept of field, the concept of center, already encountered in the previous unit, plays a fundamental role. While geometrically a center is simply a point, perceptually it extends as far as the conditions of stability that it is based on will permit. Of course, the center may or may not be indicated. In architecture, it can be indicated (or suggested) by a ceiling lamp, a mobile, a decoration, or a mosaic. Or, it can be an empty space at the center of two diagonals or of the geometry dictated by the positions of the thresholds. Normally, however, there are multiple centers at work in each field, each of which attempts to prevail over the others. The lesson thus brought attention to the problem of the interaction between fields of different shapes and strengths, suggesting the possibility of making corrections to one’s designs by working on the centers, the directions of the volumes that generate the field, or their distance from one another. This illustrates the concept, well known to phe- nomenology and cognitive psychology, that space is born as the relationship between objects. On the basis of this idea, shifting attention from the shapes of objects and their interaction to the void that separates them, the lesson then also discussed the concept of “interspace,” and along with it the fundamental law of attraction-repulsion: “Objects that look ‘too close’ to each other display mutual repulsion: they want to be moved apart. At a somewhat greater distance 19 R. Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form; P.P. Portoghesi, V.G. Gigliotti, “Ricerche sulla centralità. Progetti dello studio di Porta Pinciana,” Controspazio 6 (1971); A. Marcolli, Teoria del campo (Firenze: Sansoni, 1971) and Teoria del campo 2 (Firenze: Sansoni, 1978). MATTEO VEGETTI 204 AN-ICON  the interval may look just right or the objects may seem to attract each other.”20 The final theme concerned the typical fields of basic shapes such as the circle, triangle, and square. This discussion was then applied to bidimensionally-perceived spatial forms, such as the shape of the window in respect to the wall in which it is placed. Finally, it bears noting in relation to point “C” of this unit’s exercise that VR does not exclude interaction with physical objects. Virtual and material reality can in fact overlap, generating a significant enhancement of spatial experience. In the present case, it was sufficient to place a real table where the virtual table designed by the students was, in order to allow a group of four people to share the same situation from different perspectives. The members of the group sat around the same virtual table (sharing the same design simultaneously in multiple Oculus viewers), but could at the same time establish a tactile relationship with the table around which they were seated in real space. The lesson made wide use of examples taken from architecture as well as city planning in order to explain how field theory adapts to each scale. 20 R. Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form. MATTEO VEGETTI 205 AN-ICON  Expected outcomes: ■ Understanding and experimenting with the influence of the center and the relationship between centers. ■ Perceptually experimenting with the field in terms of scope and shape of irradiation, as well as the relationship between fields in terms of interference, conflict, or harmony. ■ Perceiving the language of voids in relation to solids in terms of visual balance and variable density (compression and decompression of the spaces between elements). ■ Testing the symbolic/perceptual power of fire (that of a fireplace) in establishing a center and a space. ■ Observing the dynamics of the field together with the other students, developing a suitable language. ■ Putting the dynamics of the fields into the form of a graphic representation. P. Portoghesi, Field Theory. Space as a system of places, 1974. MATTEO VEGETTI 206 AN-ICON  Fig. 4. Modification of forces internal to a rectangular field based on the positioning of the door-openings. From P. V. Meiss, De la forme au lieu (Lausanne: Presses polytechinques et universitaires, 1986). MATTEO VEGETTI 207 AN-ICON  Fig. 5. “Irraggiamento spaziale.” Exercise Beginning from the final state of the work un- dertaken in the previous exercises, inserting objects and volumes in space, we will analyze the force fields that these create. A) Begin the exercise by observing and analyz- ing the space already created on the basis of field theory. B) Among the four volumes from the previous exercise, we have one that already contains the sculpture. In the three remaining, place: a) A fireplace and a table for 4 people b) 5 monochrome volumes (1 cylindrical, 1 cubic of 1x1, 2 parallelepipeds of 1x1x2, and a column): create a harmonious field out of these volumes, which may not touch the wall (the volumes can be sized in respect to MATTEO VEGETTI 208 AN-ICON  the space that hosts them). Describe the fields that you think you have generated. c) In the third room, place a painting and a mirror on one of the walls. C) Sit in a group of four at the table, and to- gether analyze the space with the fireplace from inside of the simulation. Improve the previous solutions by changing the placement of the volumes, or try an alternative solution. D) Now, enter the space with the geometrical volumes and analyze the field/fields generated. Improve the previous solutions by changing the position of the volumes, or try an alternative solution. E) Analyze how the spaces change at different hours of the day due to natural light and shadows. Create a film of 30 seconds, based on a narrative strategy, that shows how the fields are modified by natural light at differ- ent times of the day. Walk through the entire space, back and forth, at three different times of day: morning, afternoon, and twilight. F) Now, enter into the space with the geomet- rical volumes and analyze the field/fields generated. Im- prove the previous solutions by changing the position of the volumes, or try an alternative solution. G) From inside the space, take three photo- graphs representative of the perceptual/visual experience of the field. H) Extract the building plan from Archicad (1/100) and draw the fields, centers, and vectors that you think you have generated within the space. UNIT 3 - Multisensoriality and synesthesia “...every architectural setting has its auditive, haptic, olfactory, and even hidden gustatory qualities, and those properties give the visual percept its sense of fullness and life. Regardless of the immediate character of visual perception, paradoxically we have already unconsciously touched a surface before we become aware MATTEO VEGETTI 209 AN-ICON of its visual characteristics; we understand its texture, hardness, temperature, moisture instantaneously.” 21 The third unit was carried out in collaboration with Dr. Fabrizia Bandi, researcher in the “AN-ICON” group led by Andrea Pinotti, who was a guest of the course thanks to the SEMP international exchange program. The aim of the unit was to guide students to the discovery of the uni- verse of synesthetic effects attributable to sight and hearing. Fabrizia Bandi, an expert in the thought of Mikel Dufrenne, introduced the students to elements relating to synesthesia in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Pal- lasmaa, and Dufrenne.22 The lesson insisted on the im- portance of understanding the multisensorial character of perception since, whether one likes it or not, space com- municates with bodies in this way, through the intertwining of different perceptual faculties. Synaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the center of gravity of expe- rience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel, in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the physicist conceives it, what we are to see, hear and feel . . . The senses intercommunicate by opening on to the structure of the thing. One sees the hardness and brittleness of glass, and when, with a tinkling sound, it breaks, this sound is conveyed by the visible glass. One sees the springiness of steel, the ductility of red-hot steel, the hardness of a plane blade, the softness of shavings.23 By relativizing the predominance of sight in the structure of perception, the theorists of synesthesia invite us to discover the persistence of “unauthorized” sensory registers (like sound and temperature in colors, or touch in something perceived visually), which condition experience 21 J. Pallasmaa, The Embodied Image (Hoboken: Wiley and Sons, 2012): 51-52. 22 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; J. Pallasmaa, The Embodied Image; M. Dufrenne, L’oeil et l’oreille (1987) (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Place, 2020). 23 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception: 266-267. MATTEO VEGETTI 210 AN-ICON  in mostly unconscious and unconditioned ways. The many examples referring to the field of architecture had the aim of leading the students to a decisive point: given the origi- nal complicity between body and space, to design means, perhaps before anything else, to organize a complex per- ceptual environment in which each element not only has multisensory potential in itself but also inevitably relates with that of the others. By experimentally testing the synes- thetic effects of the designed space in virtual reality, inter- twining their own bodies with it, the students had a way to determine the results of their choices on multiple perceptual levels. These could work towards creating syntonic or dys- tonic effects, or could play with the composition of different synesthetic qualities within the same element, for example, combining a given material with a color that contrasts with it in temperature, or background music of a certain kind, for example, soft and enveloping, with an environment imbued with the opposite synesthetic characteristics (cold, sharp, shrill). The general goal was to create a perceptually rich and coherent environment. Here, it is important to note that it is possible to import images of any material, including photographs of existing surfaces, into the Oculus. This unit also allowed for the development of a discourse straddling the border between the phenomeno- logical aspects of multisensory experience and the findings of the neurosciences.24 24 For example N. Bruno, F., Pavani, M., Zampini, La percezione multisensoriale (Bologna: il Mulino, 2010). MATTEO VEGETTI 211 AN-ICON  Expected outcomes: ■ Cultivating sensitivity to the multisensory aspects of ma- terial and texture. ■ Developing a language capable of translating synesthetic experience and allowing it to be shared with others. ■ Studying the possibilities of using multisensoriality to de- sign and compose different perceptual environments in logical sequences. ■ Experimenting with the encounter between the synesthetic aspects of music and those of the designed environments. ■ Verifying the efficacy of the desired perceptual effects through a questionnaire. Exercise Beginning with the previously-created space, gen- erate four different perceptual environments, working with ma- terials, colors, and sounds. The environments must create an ordered sequence, a perceptual-synesthetic path imbued with meaning. A) Work with tactile perception: use textures on different parts of the environment (floor, ceiling, objects pres- ent in the room, etc.) while also modulating the qualities of the materials (transparency, opacity, reflectiveness, etc.) to create an effect that induces a multisensorial/synesthetic sensation. B) Use materials and colors to elicit a specific sensation (hot/cold; rough/smooth; sharp/soft; enveloping/ repelling; lightness/oppression, etc.) C) Work with sound: test the impact of the sound of footsteps, introducing different numbers of people into the space based on its size as follows: • 2.5x2.5: 1 person, 5 people, 20 people • 5x5: 1 person, 10 people, 40 people • 10x10: 1 person, 20 people, 80 people • 20x20: 1 person, 40 people, 400 people • 2.5x5: 1 person, 10 people, 40 people • 5x10: 1 person, 20 people, 80 people • 10x20: 1 person, 40 people, 400 people MATTEO VEGETTI 212 AN-ICON  Once the highest number of people within the space has been reached, add voices. Finally, walk through the space and test the sounds of your footsteps in different environments. D) In an environment of your choice, introduce a sound effect (natural or artificial) or music that reinforces the synesthetic character of the space. E) The environments must create a percep- tual itinerary. Through the characteristics that you give the environments, try to construct a pathway that will make a hierarchy apparent, with the clearest possible succession. F) Describe in writing the synesthetic effect that you think you have generated in each of the fourenvironments (without sharing the responses with the rest of the class); a) How can the environments that you have created be defined as multisensory? b) What type of sensation did you want to make emerge from the different spaces? c) What is the relationship between the choice of materials/sound and the sensation that you wanted to transmit to those within the space? d) How did the choice of sound relate to the choice of materials and colors? G) Take one photo in each environment. H) Shoot a video of the four environments, lasting 24 hours (with all natural light). Compress it into a film of 2-3 minutes. I) During the morning of the second day, each group will visit the rooms created by the others and respond in writing to some questions aimed at verifying the effect pro- duced by the space on its users: a) How do the spaces visited constitute an example of multisensoriality? Which factors contribute most? b) What sort of sensation emerges from the different spaces. Try to describe which elements caused this sensation. c) Was the sound particularly significant in your experience of the space? Why? MATTEO VEGETTI 213 AN-ICON  UNIT 4 - Light and color: phenomenology of atmosphere The fourth didactic unit was dedicated exclu- sively to the topic of light and color. The reason for this choice resided primarily in the importance of these two factors for spatial perception (in various ways: from colored light to the relationship between natural light and materials that reflect it). Furthermore, light and color play a decisive role in the connotations of atmospheres. In dialogue with various others, from Goethe25 to Conrad-Martius,26 from Sedlmayr27 to James Turrel,28 the lesson highlighted both aspects: the perceptual dimension and what Conrad Mar- tius calls “the character” of light, or rather the way in which a given property of light is intermittently given expression. Light is undoubtedly a special atmospheric agent, since temperature and color can give space a very clear emotion- al timbre. But it can be used—as in the phenomenological art of James Turrel and Robert Irwin—to change the form of space, up to the point of distorting it and erasing its borders. VR is a unique instrument for testing how light reacts to surfaces, their textures, and their colors in the widest range of different conditions (for example, depend- ing on the time of day, and also by adding natural light to artificial light sources). It is also useful, though, to create spaces and spatial languages linked to the psychology of shapes. Five possible functions of light capable of perceptually altering space in respect to different design aims: illumination, indi- cation, division/unification, connection, creation of rhythm. Of course, each of these functions raises specific questions 25 J.W. Goethe, Theory of Colours (1810) (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1970). 26 H. Conrad-Martius, “Realontologie,” Jahrbüch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 6 (1923): 159-333; H. Conrad-Martius, “Farben. Ein Kapitel aus der Realontologie,” Festschrift Edmund Husserl zum 70. Geburstag gewidmet (Jahrbüch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung) 10 (1929): 339-370. 27 H. Sedlmayr, La luce nelle sue manifestazioni artistiche, ed. A. Pinotti (Palermo: Aesthetica, 2009). 28 J. Turrell, Extraordinary Ideas-Realized (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2018). See also M. Govan, C.Y. Kim, eds., James Turrell: A Retrospective (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013). MATTEO VEGETTI 214 AN-ICON  (the type of light source and its temperature, the shape and position of the light sources, the relationship between light and darkness, background and foreground, etc.), but in a theoretical sense, the exercise aimed above all to demon- strate the potential applications of a complex theoretical framework like the one mentioned above. Finally, the discussion turned to the phenom- enological theme of atmospheres, a field that, as already noted, could only appear last, once the basic elements for an analytic understanding of the body-space relationship had been acquired. With few exceptions, “atmosphere” is a concept used in a very intuitive way by architects, yet is central to their specific form of spatial intelligence. It is here that VR perhaps offers its greatest contribution: it is one thing to introduce students to the thought of the usual authors on the subject, such as Böhme,29 Norberg-Schulz,30 Schmitz,31 Ströker32 or Zumthor,33 and quite another for them to have the chance to analyze atmospheres from within, to study their perceptual effects, and to modify their factors in the desired (often experimental) way. Describ- ing the extraordinary power of atmospheres to influence our mood is much simpler and more effective when one has the possibility of interacting with a virtual environment. From within these environments, variation in light can be understood atmospherically in all of its significance. The capacity to design an/the entrance as a tool to understand, expand, or focus an encounter with a given atmosphere can be carried out in all possible ways, giving life to the theoretical hypotheses learned through the creativity of the designed. The symbolic and potential connotations of an atmosphere—which are often an involuntary outcome, but 29 G. Böhme, “Atmosphere as the subject matter of architecture,” in P. Ursprung, ed., Herzog and de Meuron: Natural History (Montreal: Lars Müller and Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2002) and Atmosfere, estasi, messe in scena. L’estetica come teoria generale della percezione, trans. T. Griffero (Milano: Christian Marinotti, 2010). 30 C. Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991). 31 H. Schmitz, “Atmosphärische Räume,” in Atmosphäre(n) II. Interdisziplinäre Annäherungen an einen unscharfen Begriff (München: Kopaed, 2012). 32 E. Ströker, Investigations in Philosophy of Space (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987). 33 P. Zumthor, Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2006). MATTEO VEGETTI 215 AN-ICON  nonetheless entirely controllable, through the composition and interaction of the conditions present in a given space, and at times even a result produced by a “heterogenesis of ends”—can finally become the objects of direct experi- ence, which would otherwise be impossible. I think these examples are sufficient to illustrate a field of research that goes far beyond virtual reality’s capacity to change one floor into another, in order to find which one best suit the environment. For architectural professionals, though, this as- pect should truly not be underestimated. VR offers them a precious medium of communication with their clients, who often lack the ability to imagine the design solutions being proposed, or to read plans and “visualize” them in three dimensions. But even if bridging the gap between the spatial competencies of architect and client may sooner or later prove to be the main use of virtual reality, it is not, however, the most important for, nor does it lie within the specific aims of the course. MATTEO VEGETTI 216 AN-ICON  Expected outcomes: ■ Experimenting with environmental effects of lighting. ■ Experimenting with the semiotic and Gestaltic use of light. ■ Testing the atmospheric effects relating to light and color. Exercise A) Use artificial light to strengthen the synes- thetic connotations of the environment in an atmospheric way. B) Use light to unify a part of the space and the objects within it. C) Use light to generate a threshold. D) Generate variations in the temperature, in- tensity, and type of artificial light, and observe how the colors of surfaces and the texture of materials change. E) Analyze how the spaces change under the different variations of artificial light. F) Modify the color of the materials through the effects of variations of artificial light. G) Using a narrative strategy, make an atmo- spheric film of 30 seconds that shows how the spaces are modified by different types of artificial light. If necessary, you can animate the space with the movement of a virtual character. UNIT 5 - Orientation and legibility of space The final didactic unit dealt with the theme of spatial orientation on the basis of the line of research opened up by the work of Kevin Lynch.34 At the basis of this choice are two assumptions. The first is that Lynch has given us a scalable methodology, which can also be effective when applied to interior spaces. The second is 34 K. Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1960). See also L. Letenyei, J. Dobák, eds., Mental Mapping (Passau: Schenk Verlag, 2019). MATTEO VEGETTI 217 AN-ICON  that such a methodology, based on psychology of shapes and on a study of mental maps that we might say are akin to phenomenology, places itself in continuity or in dialogue with the content already explored in the preceding units of the course. The formation of mental maps takes place in the interaction between subject and environment. On a cogni- tive level, for Lynch the maps reveal the constant presence of five elements, which we can also define as structures, in the sense that they structure the experience of (urban) space by connecting it back to a universal mental schema. Such irreducible elements, even if they are not necessarily always co-present, are the path, the edge, the district, the node, and the landmark. A space’s degree of comprehen- sibility, or rather our own capacity to orient ourselves in space and to have a clear mental image of it, depends on the form, character, and composition of these structures. The capacity of design to give spaces identity, structure, figurability, and meaning is fundamental in fostering a pos- itive interaction between subject and environment, or even to induce emotional well-being. This gives us the capacity to anticipate how space will be understood, to support our spatial awareness (and hence our confidence in the space), and to develop a positive identification with spaces. All of this holds for any interior space, even if it is clearest on a large scale (for example that of a museum). Each interior indeed presents us with paths, both introverted and extroverted nodes, helpful or disori- enting edges (like walls, partitions, or anything that divides space), landmarks (prominent aesthetic elements), and even districts, since the term designates first and fore- most for Lynch whatever distinguishes the characteristic atmosphere of a place. To demonstrate and test this hypothesis, the students had to empty out the spaces they had created up to this point, multiply them by four, and connect them in a freely-chosen sequence. Using only the spatial language of the five fundamental elements and working in syntony with the principles of the psychology of shapes that make space recognizable and possible to remember (uniqueness, MATTEO VEGETTI 218 AN-ICON  formal simplicity, continuity, preeminence, clarity of con- nection, directional differentiation, visual field, awareness of movement, rhythm) the students were asked to give their design a high cognitive value for the users. In order to test the result obtained, each student visited the design created by the others in virtual reality, and at the end of the visit drew a mental map for each. The study of the maps, finally, allowed sever- al problems linked to the understanding of space to be brought into the discussion: errors in the reconstruction of the shape of the space, missing places, unclear dimensions and hierarchies, and incongruencies and hesitations of var- ious types. The critical evaluation of the most problematic spaces (and, on the other hand, of those that almost al- ways elicited a clear representation) allowed the students to rethink their design, seeking effective solutions. VR is a very useful tool for studying phenomena of orientation and environmental image. Its usage, however, can be extended to other psychological aspects related to the design of the environment, as for example to the concept of affordance, which in Gibson’s language refers to the physical qualities of objects that suggest to a subject the appropriate actions for manipulating them.35 The greater the affordance, the more the use of the tool becomes automatic and intuitive (a passage to cross, a door to open in a given direction, a switch to turn or press, etc.). Another possible use of a virtual space with “public” dimensions, like the one created in the last unit, is the study of the rules of proxemics.36 This can be accomplished through the possibility of inserting a number of virtual people, who move according to estab- lished or casual paths, interacting in various ways, into the scene. 35 J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979) (New York: Psychology Press, 2015). 36 T.E. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (New York: Anchor Books, 1990). MATTEO VEGETTI 219 AN-ICON  Expected outcomes: ■ Experimenting with the principles of Lynch’s theory from the perspective of design and develop a sensitivity to the cognitive structure of space. ■ Learning the method of mental maps. Exercise A) Return to the basic space in its starting con- dition, taking away all of the elements aside from the open- ings (doors and windows). Multiply the space you created before by four times. Then generate a sequence of twelve connected environments. Four spatial elements must be present in the design: pathways, edges, introverted nodes, extroverted nodes, and landmarks. Design the entrance and exit of the building. The goal is to create a fluid and figurable space. To achieve this goal, plasterboard walls can be taken away or added (also to change the shape of the space); or you can redesign them in such a way as to weaking or strengthen the frame (the edges) to create visual and auditory connec- tions, light effects, or transparencies. Each room can have a landmark (painting, stat- ue, mirror, geometric volumes). In order to orient the user on the path and to support the figurability of the space you can use: colors, materials, lights, sounds, and frames. You may not, however, use symbols or signs. B) Make a film of the space. C) Once it has been designed, the space will be visited by other groups for a set period of time. These visitors will then be asked to draw a map of the space as they remember it. On the basis of these mental maps, try to understand the strong and weak points of the designed space through a synthetic map. The project will be evaluated in respect to the fol- lowing categories: uniqueness/originality, formal simplicity, MATTEO VEGETTI 220 AN-ICON  hierarchical continuity, clarity of connections, directional differentiation, scope of vision, awareness of movement. The maps will be collectively discussed. We will try to understand why certain spatial elements were forgotten, misunderstood, and memorized with difficulty. D) Change the space in order to modify it on the basis of the suggestions that emerged from the discussion. Technical specifications There are dozens of 3D and VR software pro- grams specialized in various types of applications. The criteria that guided our choice were the following: possibly free software, so that the students could continue to use it as professionals, simplicity of the interface and usage, simplified workflow, and the capacity to model in 3D and have VR visualization and navigation functions. Based on these criteria, we chose Twinmotion (https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/twinmotion), a soft- ware specifically designed for architecture and interior ar- chitecture based on the Unreal motor; the VR experience is native “out-of-the box,” with features allowing for the real-time modifications of materials, time of day, etc. Fig. 6. The interface is very simple, but on a deep- er level allows for all of the necessary modifications of MATTEO VEGETTI 221 AN-ICON  parameters. It can also simulate sounds in the space when one moves through the VR scene. Twinmotion has an internal library of 3D models (animated and otherwise) that can be added to the scene one is working on in a very intuitive way, but does not allow for the creation of new 3D models from within. The solution to this problem was to use the Twinmotion plugin, which allows for the importation from various 3D modelling programs such as Rhinoceros, Ar- chiCAD, or 3DS Max, of 3D objects with a simple transfer. This solution was ideal insofar as the students were able to use ArchiCAD for 3D modeling and then to synchronize it with Twinmotion for VR and rendering. Also, the main design remained in ArchiCAD, where various sections and plans were designed as usual. The VR viewer market has developed in inter- esting ways in the past few years, moving from solutions with fixed stations (with the viewer connected to the com- puter by cable and external sensors to map the area of the game) to mobile ones, with integrated sensors that function independently, without a cable and the need for an external computer to function. The main need of the project was to have a quick working process with the fewest possible number of intermediate steps. The product chose was the Oculus Quest 2 (https://www.oculus.com/quest-2), a “standalone” viewer with an integrated graphics processor, which can also function as an external viewer for a computer when connected via cable. The price and the image quality were important factors in the final selection. The possibility of using the students’ own lap- top computers was quickly rejected, due to the issue of the computing power of graphics cards, different operating systems, and the installation of necessary programs that use a large amount of disc space (at least 30 GB). To solve these problems, Windows laptops with the latest video cards (Nvidia RTX 3070), with all of the nec- essary programs installed (ArchiCAD, Oculus, Twinmotion) were acquired. MATTEO VEGETTI 222 AN-ICON  Discussion and recommendations The structure of the course proved to be effec- tive and engaging, and gained very positive evaluations from the students, confirming in its own way the positive effects on VR learning already cited.37 The strongest point was the integration of theory and practice, two dimensions that normally are clearly separated and, despite good in- tentions, mutually indifferent. This also signaled a danger and a difficulty: un- fortunately, the results of the course could not be measured by looking at the end outcomes —as would take place in a design workshop— because the design, in our case, was the means and not the end. Furthermore, some of the starting conditions (for example, the position of the door-openings) can seem absurd from an architectural point of view, and are incom- prehensible if one is not aware of the specific educational goals of the course. The attention dedicated by the students to cer- tain environmental, spatial, compositional, formal, percep- tual, and atmospheric factors definitely produced surpris- ing results, which were also appreciated by our architect colleagues, but in order to avoid misunderstandings it was always necessary to strongly reiterate the theoretical/phil- osophical specificity of the course and its objectives. From this point of view, even the spaces that were seemingly less successful from an architectural standpoint could have a positive significance in regard to what interested us: the essential was not in fact in the results in themselves, but in the process that led to them, in the experimental inten- tions of those who made them, and in the documentary traces that recorded and commented on the experience on a theoretical and critical level. The essential, in short, was the degree of awareness developed by students in each phase of the course and their level of understanding 37 F. Kharvari, L.E. Kaiser, “Impact of extended reality on architectural education and the design process.” MATTEO VEGETTI 223 AN-ICON  regarding the ways in which certain spatial factors impact our relationship with space on conscious and unconscious, and cognitive and perceptual levels. However, in view of the Academic Year 2022- 2023, in order to better distinguish the intentions of the course from those of the project work, we decided to mod- ify the course. In particular, we have attempted to simplify the exercises and standardise them so that the results are com- parable. In addition, we placed emphasis on experiment- ing with spatial variants of an element (e.g. the threshold/ door) to allow students to test the most significant per- ceptual changes between the choices made. Finally, we required the students to present the experiments they had tried, a selection of the most interesting results, and writ- ten descriptions of their experiences in a common layout. Redefined in these terms, the first point of the new exer- cise relating to the first unit asks the students to place a gap-threshold in the starting space, to experiment with dif- ferent solutions capable of generating a meaningful spatial experience; to describe in writing the criterion used, the most paradigmatic solutions, and the quality of space de- termined by these solutions. The same method, based on the study of variations, was applied to the composition of the rooms, the shape of the threshold/windows, the posi- tion of the sculpture, etc. Overall, the course has become much more analytical than before, and somewhat more phenomenological. MATTEO VEGETTI 224 AN-ICON  Fig. 7. Fig. 8. MATTEO VEGETTI 225 AN-ICON  Fig. 9. Fig. 10. Fig. 11. Fig. 12. Figg. 9-12. Four pictures related to the exercise on the thresholds: projects of Elmira Rabbani and Gabriele Luciani, Giada Pettenati and Michelle Rosato, Giorgio Ghielmetti e Mattia Buttinoni. Bachelor of Interior Architecture, SUPSI, DACD. MATTEO VEGETTI 226 AN-ICON  Fig. 13. Fig. 14. Fig. 15. Fig. 16. Figg. 13-16: Four pictures related to the exercise on light and colour. Projects of Sandra Burn and Asia Camoia, Elmira Rabbani and Gabriele Luciani, Jessica Corti and Silvia Zehnder. Bachelor of Interior Architecture, SUPSI, DACD. MATTEO VEGETTI 227 AN-ICON Unità 1 es.1 - Diversi modi di inserire un varco/soglia nello spazio spazio analizzato: 3 x 4.5 x 2.5m Dal momento che il nostro parallelepi- pedo è di base rettangolare abbiamo iniziato ad analizzare le sperimen- tazioni in cuiNun varco viene posto sulla facciata più lunga, ossia 4,5 m. Abbiamo sperimentato varie possibilià di soglie utilizzando i seguenti criteri: locazione, altezza e larghezza. Inizialmente abbiamo posto la soglia al centro della facciata e abbiamo osservato come variava la percezione cambiando l’altezza (1.60m, 2.10m, 2.50m) del varco e in seguito cambian- do la larghezza (0.50m, 0.70m, 1m, 1.50m, 2m, 2.50m). Successivamente abbiamo decentrato la soglia, ed infine abbiamo fatto lo stesso procedimento anche per la facciata più corta, os- sia 3m. Dopo aver sviluppato queste svariate possibilità ne abbiamo selezio- nate alcune che secondo noi sono più significative: 1.1: - Apertura minima - Si fa quasi fatica a passare - Non si è invogliati a varcare la soglia - Luogo molto riservato 1.2: -Le senzazioni elencate precedente- mente vengono accentuate decentran- do la soglia 1.3 - Forte collegamento interno-esterno - Luogo arioso 1.4: -Le senzazioni elencate precedente- mente diminuiscono decentrando la soglia V1.5: - Sorge la domanda se si tratta ancora di una soglia 1.7: - Non è vivibile - Quasi non ci si rende conto che si tratta di una vera e propria soglia 1.8: - Altezza standard - In correlazione con i cambiamenti di larghezza sperimentati non influisce granché 1.9: - Direzionalità: dona verticalità allo spazio AIS200 Fenomenologia dello spazio_2022-23 Zoe Togni e Silvia Pedeferri Fig. 17. Unità 1 es.2 - Varianti migliori spazio analizzato: 3 x 4.5 x 2.5m orem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse lobortis urna id velit tempor, in gravida est hen- drerit. Mauris vestibulum facilisis erat sit amet consequat. Curabitur ullamcor- per eros enim, eget interdum dolor feugiat at. Etiam viverra orci ac quam lobortis, ac posuere turpis ultricies. Sed facilisis dictum turpis eget venenatis. Nunc vehicula augue enim, at viverra turpis ornare vel. Phasellus vel mollis augue. Curabitur luctus, erat ut bibendum bibendum, lacus nisl molestie eros, sed cursus turpis magna quis nibh. Sed ac volutpat magna, id mattis risus. Fusce ipsum neque, placerat ac posuere at, sollicitudin in nulla. Maecenas ege- stas nibh ac ultricies laoreet. Integer tristique fermentum neque, sit amet vehicula sapien. Morbi condimentum consequat turpis a rutrum. Proin nec dolor eu purus ultrices rutrum. Ut rutrum semper dictum. Morbi sapien lacus, feugiat sit amet commodo et, feugiat ut felis. Mauris tellus justo, laoreet ut quam in, molestie ultrices sapien. Sed tincidunt, augue ut inter- dum cursus, lorem dui laoreet augue, in semper urna dolor sed tellus. Su- spendisse molestie urna id commodo pretium. Ut non dui tincidunt, dictum justo in, posuere sapien. Sed non est at purus fermentum tincidunt vulputate id libero. Etiam mi ante, rutrum a libero vel, feugiat pharetra sem. In volutpat metus arcu, eget fringilla ipsum soda- les ac. AIS200 Fenomenologia dello spazio_2022-23 Zoe Togni e Silvia Pedeferri Fig. 18. Figg. 17-18. Examples of the layout used in the course 2022-2023 (first point of the Unit 1 exercise). Students: Zoe Togni and Silvia Pedeferri. MATTEO VEGETTI 228 AN-ICON Unità 3 es.G - Fotogrammi video obiettivi Il nostro obiettivo è di creare un’atmo- scelte Ci siamo focalizzate principalmente con tutte le pareti in clacestruzzo, ma sfera che metta in contrapposizione sull’utilizzo di un materiale base, quale questa volta laccate, in modo da dare una sensazione di apertura e leggerez- il calcestruzzo, che abbiamo adopera- ancora l’effetto della leggerezza e del za con una sensazione di chiusura e to in primo luogo, su tutti i pavimenti, freddo, ma creando un climax con la pesantezza, tramite l’utilizzo di texture, e successivamente sule pareti tre prima stanza. coliri e materiali che possano aiutare stanze. La terza stanza, caratterizzata da ad enfatizzare tali emozioni. La prima stanza è caratterizzata da un pareti in calcestruzzo grezzo, invece, pavimento chiaro, con tonalità azzurra- ha come colorazioni un grigio scuro, stre e pareti in alluminio riflettente per che introducono un effetto sinestetico creare un effetto sinestetico che ricor- di pesantezza ed oppressione. dasse il freddo e la leggerezza, qualità L’ultima stanza, invece, è caratterizzata innate del metallo. da un pavimento blu scuro, notte, e da La seconda stanza, invece, è valoriz- pareti e soffitto rivestite da pietra nera. zata da una colorazione, sempre sulle tonalità dell’azzurro, ma più calde, riscontri Attraverso l’utilizzo del visore abbiamo La terza stanza è particolarmente constatato come le le nostre iniziali tangibile e concreta. Crea un netto ipotesi non fossero del tutto errate. contrasto con la stanza precedente, Nella prima stanza, ci si trova in uno trasportandoci in un’atmosfera pesante spazio freddo, quasi fantascientifico e reale. La sensazione che si prova è e irreale, ma a differenza di come quasi di calma e tranquillità. pensavamo, si ha una sensazione di Il contrasto con le due stanze prece- maggiore chiusura rispetto alla secon- dente viene inoltre accentutato dall’ul- da stanza. tima stanza che è buia, opprimente Proseguendo la stanza successiva e quasi soffocante, da non riuscire a ci trasporta in una relatà anch’essa stare al suo interno per troppo tempo. fredda, nella quale si crea un gioco di colori che nasconde il fatto che sia stato utilizzato lo stesso colore su tutte le pareti. AIS200 Fenomenologia dello spazio_2022-23 Anna Bolla e Camilla Tosi Fig. 19. Fig. 19. Examples of the layout used in the course 2022-2023 (Unit 3, synoptic view of tested variants). Students: Anna Bolla e Camilla Tosi. MATTEO VEGETTI 229 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19919

On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between illusion and deception by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Immersion Presence Virtual reality Representation Hallucination Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Introduction On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between 1 il usion and deception PIETRO CONTE, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7128-2696 LAMBERT WIESING, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19919 Illusion or delusion? Were novelists and filmmakers right in fore- shadowing the advent of 3D virtual worlds that would exist parallel to physical reality, where people could interact with each other through the full immersion of all their senses, possibly losing awareness of the artificial nature of those environments? Indeed, what has been imagined in count- less science fiction narratives, dystopian movies, and TV series seems to be turning into reality to an increasing Keywords Immersion Presence Virtual reality Representation Hallucination To quote this essay: P. Conte, L. Wiesing, “On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between illusion and deception,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 4-21, https://doi. org/10.54103/ai/19919 1 This essay is the result of research activity developed within the frame of the project AN- ICON. An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images. AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. [834033 AN-ICON]) and is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” of the University of Milan in the frame of the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2023-2027” sponsored by Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (MUR). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 4 AN-ICON  degree: a pictorially generated environment that is not per- ceived as such. A modern incarnation of René Descartes’s evil demon thought experiment, the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis famously describes a scenario in which a mad scientist might remove a person’s brain from the body, place it in a vat of life-sustaining nutrients, and wire it to a computer that feeds it with electrical stimuli identical to those the brain normally receives. In the words of Hilary Putnam, who in 1981 made the story popular and provoked much heated debate among philosophers of mind, that would cause the individual “to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal.” If, for instance, the person tries to raise her hand, the feedback from the machine will make her immediately “see” and “feel” the hand being raised. The evil scientist can cause the victim “to ‘experience’ (or hallucinate)” any situation he wishes. He can even erase the memory of the brain operation so that the victim will seem to herself to have been born and always lived in the digital environment.2 More recently, the idea of a simulation so pow- erful that people caught in it would take it for reality in the flesh has resurfaced in notions such as Peter Weibel’s “future cinema,” according to which the next coming cine- matographic apparatuses, thanks to miniature neural im- plants and interfaces that stimulate the brain directly, will be able to bypass the sensorium, thus acting immediately on the neural networks: Instead of trompe l’oeil, the next step might be trompe le cerveau [...]. There would be perception without the senses, seeing without the eyes. [...] Advances in neurophysiology and cognitive science give rise to the hope that future engineers will succeed in imple- menting these discoveries in neuronal and molecular machines that 2 H. Putnam, “Brains in a vat,” in Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981): 1-21, 6. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 5 AN-ICON transform the technology of simulation to deceive the eye into a technology of stimulation that in turn deceives the brain.3 One is certainly free to disbelieve such proph- ecies and exercise healthy scepticism. And yet, given the unprecedented rapid pace of technological innovation, one cannot help but recall Louis Marin’s argument that every representation, in order to present itself “in its function, its functioning, and, indeed, its functionality” as represen- tation, must include a frame that keeps the image-world clearly separated from the real world: “The more ‘mimetic’ transparency is manifested seductively, [...] the less the mechanisms are noticed, the less they are acknowledged.”4 The dream, or perhaps nightmare, of a medium achieving absolute transparency and of a user experiencing total immersion has yet to come true, and it will perhaps never do so. However, it is (certainly not only, but neverthe- less in a particularly powerful way) the new advancements in the field of simulation, illusion, and immersion that have contributed powerfully to determining the way we think about today’s media landscape. The evolution of technolog- ical equipment goes hand in hand with the evolution of the techno-cultural – which also means political – dispositif that supports and even guides them. One need only consider the way in which virtual reality is nowadays hailed as the last medium, capable of immersing the user in someone else’s shoes, teleporting her to some other place, making her feel as if she were really “there.” 3 P. Weibel, “The intelligent image: neurocinema or quantum cinema?,” in J. Shaw, P. Weibel, eds., Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film (Cambridge MA-London: The MIT Press, 2003): 594-601, 599. 4 L. Marin, “The frame of representation and some of its figures” (1988), trans. C. Porter, in On Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001): 352-372, 353. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 6 AN-ICON  Being there: debunking the rhetoric Such “being there” has become the catch- phrase of virtual technologies, and it often goes along with an over-romanticization of the idea of immersion, according to which immersive environments would grant the experi- encer a perfect illusion by making the medium disappear. This would differentiate the new forms of illusion from tra- ditional trompe l’œil: The concepts of trompe l’œil or illusionism aim to utilize represen- tations that appear faithful to real impressions, the pretense that two-dimensional surfaces are three-dimensional. The decisive factor in trompe l’œil, however, is that the deception is always recognizable; in most cases, because the medium is at odds with what is depicted and this is realized by the observer in seconds, or even fractions of seconds. This moment of aesthetic pleasure, of aware and conscious recognition, where perhaps the process of deception is a challenge to the connoisseur, differs from the concept of the virtual and its historic precursors, which are geared to unconscious deception.5 The concept of a virtual reality that could re- place the realm of physical existence has been criticized for resting upon an idealization of total immersion that would lead to an illegitimate equation of illusion with delusional hallucination. In particular, the assumption of a pictorial environment so hermetically sealed off from anything ex- traneous to the picture that the observer (or rather the ex- periencer) feels completely submerged in it is highly prob- lematic. Leading scholars in game studies such as Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman have labelled this assumption “the immersive fallacy,” polemically referring to the idea that 5 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge MA-London: The MIT Press, 2003): 15-16. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 7 AN-ICON  the ability of a media experience to sensually transport the participant into an illusory reality could reach a point where “the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that he or she is part of an imaginary world.”6 Emblematically expressed in the concept of the holodeck (a fictional tech- nology that made its first appearance in Star Trek: The Next Generation and consists in a holographic room where a simulation including sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste is indistinguishable from physical reality), the immersive fallacy encourages people to buy into new forms of magical thinking and overlook that virtual reality is but “a medium of representation that the brain will process in its appropriate cultural context, just as it has learned to process speech, writing, photography, or moving images.”7 Such warnings against a cyberpunk-flavoured idea of immersion point towards a different interpretation. As is made evident by the etymological presence of ludus in the Latin word inlusio, “illusion” originally refers to a lusory attitude. Being elicited by the perception of physi- cal representational artefacts, texts, or performances, the aesthetic illusion is to be distinguished from both halluci- nations and dreams. Moreover, it differs from delusions in that it is neither a conceptual nor a perceptual error, but a complex phenomenon characterized by “an asymmetrical ambivalence”8 that results from its positioning halfway be- tween the two poles of rational distance (i.e., disinterested “observation” of an artefact in its fictional nature) and im- mersion (or in Kendall Walton’s words, “participation”9) in the represented world: 6 K. Salen, E. Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge MA- London: The MIT Press, 2004): 451. 7 J. H. Murray, “Virtual/reality: how to tell the difference,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 11-27, 20. 8 W. Wolf, “Illusion (aesthetic),” in P. Hühn et al. (eds.), Handbook of Narratology (Berlin-New York: de Gruyter, 2009): 144-160, 144. 9 K.L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990): 240-289. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 8 AN-ICON When we play a game, we feel engaged and engrossed, and play seems to take on its own “reality.” This is all certainly true. But the way that a game achieves these effects does not happen in the manner the immersive fallacy implies. A game player does become engrossed in the game, yes. But it is an engagement that occurs through play itself. As we know, play is a process of metacommu- nication, a double-consciousness in which the player is well aware of the artificiality of the play situation.10 Contrary to David Hume’s conviction that all illusions should be given up to the flames,11 the contempo- rary immersive media and apparatuses make it necessary to disentangle the word “illusion” from its negative con- notation as “deception.” From this perspective, an illusion is about something that is present but not real: it marks the presence of something while at the same time making it appear as “unreal.” The key term for describing this di- chotomic phenomenon is conflict – a term that in image theory goes back to Hippolyte Taine and Edmund Husserl.12 Every perception rests upon the awareness of being there and being present, but only image perception implies a self-relativisation of real presence: the perception of every image generates artificial presence. For what is visible in the picture – one may call it, using Husserl’s vocabulary, “picture object,” or in more analytical tradition “content” or “representation” – is relativised in its character of presence by a conflict (Widerstreit). This happens in two different ways: in the case of traditional images through the visibility of the grounding materiality of the image, the visibility of the real environment and, last but not least, through the 10 K. Salen, E. Zimmerman, Rules of Play: 51 11 D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), sect. 12, pt. 3. (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover 2004): 107. 12 On this, see L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence. Philosophical Studies in Image Theory (2005), trans. N.F. Schott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010): p. 53. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 9 AN-ICON  visible frame. These forms of perceptible conflicts tend to disappear when an image expands into its surroundings, thus becoming an artificial “environment.” Yet even in the case of simulations and hyperrealistic worlds, the condition for speaking of images at all is that here, too, there must be an experience of conflict. That is the point: in the case of immersive environments, the conflict is (or, if we are re- alistic, should be) given through the knowledge of being in a simulation. The knowledge that something experienced is “not real” creates image-generating conflicts, just as traditionally the frame did. This is grasped when it is said: images produce artificial presence. This calls up numerous questions that the pres- ent issue of the AN-ICON journal aims to address: how is such a conflict between knowledge and perception to be explained, and is it to be regarded as a new form of aes- thetic illusion?13 On the one hand, it is necessary to distin- guish the conflict phenomena of the new forms of immer- sion formation empirically in their technology from those of traditional images. On the other hand, the various forms of seeing artificial presence must always be categorically differentiated and determined in their respective specificity. Is it a case of an unconscious illusion brought about by a false perception, or is it rather a matter of a lustful, playful attitude adopted in a special kind of illusory relationship? What is the difference between illusion, deception, and hallucination? How does an illusion become a delusion? As if it were not complicated enough: the de- scription of a virtual environment faces the problem that it is a double form of illusion building. On one side, this is the mostly solely themed illusion that people in simulated and immersive virtual environments have a strong feeling of presence (place illusion) and react to what they perceive 13 T. Koblížek, ed., The Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 10 AN-ICON  as if it were real (plausibility illusion).14 In doing so, however, they are fully aware that they are not “really” there and that events are not “actually” taking place. Yet as relevant as this illusion is, the attention it receives should not induce us to overlook the fact that, on the other hand, there is a second form of illusion formation that is not present in the many precursors of immersive images (such as the stereoscope and the panorama). This illusion of hyperrealism does not just concern what is seen, but also the one who sees. It is the change in the way the viewers experience themselves in relation to the image: virtual reality has the power to make users and beholders feel like they own and control a body (body ownership illusion) that can look very different from their biological one. Here, illusions are created that do not affect what one sees but rather the one who sees some- thing. One might want to think about whether there were not already precursor experiences in this respect in watching films, but it is only in the experience of virtual realities that this phenomenon seems to take on a radicality that brings about new forms of transformation of self-representation and changes in our attitudes to ourselves or to other peo- ple, which can be seen, for example, when implicit racial and gender biases are changed – in the best case reduced – in the experience of immersive virtual realities, or health problems and mental disorders are alleviated.15 Against this background, the present issue of the AN-ICON journal poses equally technological, aesthet- ic and decidedly moral questions. What are the limits of virtual reality and the possibilities it offers for empathising 14 M. Hofer et al., “The role of plausibility in the experience of spatial presence in virtual environments,” Frontiers in Virtual Reality 1, no. 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3389/ frvir.2020.00002; M. Slater, “Place illusion and plausibility can lead to realistic behaviour in immersive virtual environments,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 364, no. 1535 (2009): 3549-3557. 15 T.C. Peck et al., “Putting yourself in the skin of a black avatar reduces implicit racial bias,” Consciousness and Cognition 22, no. 3 (2013): 779-787, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. concog.2013.04.016; F. Scarpina et al., “The effect of a virtual-reality full-body illusion on body representation in obesity,” Journal of Clinical Medicine 8, no. 9 (2019), 1330, https://doi. org/10.3390/jcm8091330. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 11 AN-ICON  with others and fostering virtuous and socially adaptive processes of imitation? How can we debunk the rhetoric (which has ethical, social, and political significance) behind the celebration of virtual reality as the “ultimate empathy machine?”16 The field of these questions becomes all the larger and more unmanageable when it is noted that the new forms of digital immersion education, while not nec- essary, are also usually associated with new forms of in- teraction education. This raises questions that are often psychological. Is interactivity necessary to create illusion? Does the multisensory quality of the interaction affect the overall effect of illusion? Considering that immersive virtu- al environments are often inhabited by users’ surrogates, do avatars, in their extensive phenomenology, enhance or diminish the degree of illusion? What is the relationship between illusion and the “style” of the image? Is hyperreal- ism an important element to enhance illusion or, as Gordon Calleja claims,17 only an element among many others? The present issue A first reflection on these topics is offered by Salvatore Tedesco in his essay “Imagination and Körper- zustand,” which provides a historical overview of how the concept of illusion was understood in the Eighteenth Cen- tury by Moses Mendelssohn. Through a critical examination of Johann Georg Sulzer’s analysis of the passage from the state of thinking [Nachdenken] to that of feeling [Empfinden], Mendelssohn elaborated further on the contrast between the state of the body and the faculty of knowledge – a contrast that led the German philosopher to define illusion not merely in terms of common deception, but rather as a 16 C. Milk, “How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine,” TED conference, March 2015, https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ ultimate_empathy_machine. 17 G. Calleja, In-Game. From Immersion to Incorporation (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2011). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 12 AN-ICON  form of conscious illusion. This is made clear in the corre- spondence with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing on the nature of tragedy, where great emphasis is put on so-called “aes- thetic” or “poetic” illusion, considered as the instrument through which the dramatic poet is allowed to induce in the audience – contrary to what Aristotle and his modern followers maintained – even the most violent feelings, on condition that the reader or viewer is under the aesthetic effect of the illusion. The latter is characterized by a pecu- liar mismatch between sensitivity and the higher cognitive faculties: regardless of how deeply immersed one may be in sensory experiences, one still retains awareness of be- ing confronted with a virtual, fictional world. Precisely this contrast harmonization is the hallmark of aesthetic expe- rience as such. The anthropological relevance of aesthetic illu- sion can be grasped by describing it in terms of play, and more specifically pretend play. By referring to both clas- sical and contemporary studies on play and playfulness by scholars from many diverse scientific fields (including among others Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Roger Caillois, Donald Winnicott, Lev Vygotskij, Gregory Bateson, Brian Sutton-Smith and William Corsaro), Anna Bondioli’s article offers a reading of illusion as a non-imitative form of play. Far from limiting themselves to reproducing the activities that adults undertake in the surrounding world, children distort reality in a creative way by performing actions that differ from those already seen and known. Children collect elements of the external world and use them in an inter-sub- jective process of co-construction of meanings in order to open up new possible worlds, without hallucinating: they know for sure that “this is play.”18 From this perspective, the semantic field of illusion shifts from the negative meaning of pretence as lying, mocking, or simulating, to the positive 18 G. Bateson, The Message “This Is Play” (Princeton: Josia Macy Jr. Foundation, 1956). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 13 AN-ICON  notion of pretending meant as a poietic activity of model- ling, building, and giving form. In play, the two cognitive frames – “this is the real world” and “this is the fictional world” – are not to be conceived as completely separate. Players move on the threshold between physical reality and the peculiar (un)reality of fiction. Play isn’t real – it is, indeed, “pretend” – but this does not mean it is false. If it were (that is, if it lost the link with the meanings that objects, actions, and events represented during the playful activity denote in the “real” context), it would lose its significance. Yet this is not the case: play (similar in this respect to the poietic use of language in the creation of metaphors) allows the participants to put together things that do not belong to the same category, thereby opening up the possibility to generate new references and meanings that go beyond the logical contrast between the “real” and the “imaginary,” between the “true” and the “possible,” between “believing” and “not believing.” The ambiguity surrounding the notion of illusion has been made all the more evident by the theoretical re- flection on the nature and power of contemporary images. Vilém Flusser’s thought, which is the subject of Francesco Restuccia’s essay, provides an emblematic example. Illusion is first described as a form of deception, with dangerous and deplorable effects. This is especially true when tech- nical media – starting from photography – are employed in a way that aims to conceal their nature as artefacts. In this sense, the most illusionary images are those that appear transparent and present themselves as objective reality, thus bringing about a new form of “idolatry” or “hal- lucination:” “Instead of representing [vorstellen] the world, they obscure [verstellen] it.”19 This dangerous reversal of imagination happens when we do not recognize a medium, 19 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), trans. A. Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000): 10. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 14 AN-ICON  especially a visual one, as such. In this sense, technical images are the most deceiving, because their mechanical, automatic production seems to grant a “noninterventionist objectivity”20 freed from human and cultural interference. But this objectivity is deceptive, because technology is a human product, therefore always culturally biased. In Flusser’s work, however, a second interpretation of illusion is given that unveils its possible use as a precious artistic and epistemic tool. In Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch, the notion is introduced to understand the filmic experience as a modern version of Plato’s cave. While sitting in the dark space of the movie theatre, people ignore the world outside the “cave.” They do so not because they are deceived by the moving images projected on the screen in front of them. On the contrary, they choose to abandon themselves to the fascination of the medium. They do not want to be freed from the enchantment: their illusion is voluntary, self-im- posed, like a specific form of fiction or make-believe play. When illusion is conceived in a positive way as a practice of sense-making, Flusser replaces the German term täuschen (“to deceive”) with vortäuschen (to simulate, to feign). In this sense, simulation is not about producing a copy [Abbild], it is about shaping a model [Vorbild]. Technical media can allow for a new, “experimental” approach to image making: one inserts a certain input, sees what the outcome is, and then changes the input so as to achieve a different result. According to Flusser, this is the greatest potentiality of vir- tual simulations: they allow us to experience what until now we were only able to calculate; and vice versa, they allow us to calculate and control experiences that until now we could only vaguely imagine. The peculiar experience that contemporary vir- tual environments grant access to lies at the core of Fran- cesco Zucconi’s essay, which follows an anachronistic path 20 L. Daston, P. Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 15 AN-ICON  through art history and theory by taking some of Caravag- gio’s paintings as an anticipation of the invention of gyro- scope technology that made possible the first immersive experience in the history of Western painting. Building on Frank Stella’s interpretation of the Italian master’s “realistic illusionism”21 and reformulating Michael Fried’s concepts of “absorption” and “theatricality”22 through the categories of “immersion” and “specularity,” Zucconi focuses on the double effect of attraction and distancing as the funda- mental structure of the experience of virtual reality cinema. On the one side, as I put on a VR headset, I find myself “teleported” to the simulated environment: I feel “there.”23 On the other side, there is always something that reminds me that I am just inhabiting a digital milieu: a bodily, cog- nitive, and affective frame brings me back to the “here” of physical reality. Such experience of bilocation24 is most often conceived of as a negative aspect of even the most sophisticated (and expensive) immersive apparatuses cur- rently on the market – a limitation that, according to many techno-deterministic enthusiasts, will be overcome in some unspecified future, when total immersion will be eventually achieved. Arguing against this view, Zucconi maintains that such ambivalent and even paradoxical coexistence of at- traction and distancing should be better understood as an intrinsic quality of cinematic virtual reality experiences as such. This medium-specific trait, in turn, can help debunk the bombastic rhetoric that hails virtual reality as the “ul- timate empathy machine” capable of making the user not only understand but also directly experience someone’s 21 F. Stella, Working Space (Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 1986): 11. 22 M. Fried, Theatricality and Absorption: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 23 See among others M. Lombard et al., Immersed in Media. Telepresence Theory, Measurement & Technology (Cham: Springer, 2015); M. Lombard, Th. Ditton, “At the heart of it all. The concept of presence,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3, no. 2 (1997), https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997.tb00072.x. 24 A. Pinotti, “Staying here, being there. Bilocation, empathy and self-empathy in virtual reality,” Bollettino Filosofico 37 (2022): 142-162, https://doi.org/10.6093/1593-7178/9657 PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 16 AN-ICON  other pain and worries. Through reference to Susan Son- tag’s critical theory of photography, Zucconi challenges the simplistic use of notions such as those of “empathy,” “compassion,” and “immersion” which accompanies the launch of many virtual reality projects, holding instead that the (alleged) absolute transparency of the medium is not only unattainable but not even desirable. From this perspec- tive, the co-presence of illusionistic and counter-illusionistic effects is not to be interpreted as a weakening of the expe- riential and testimonial value of immersive experiences. On the contrary, it paves the way to a conscious ethical and political approach to virtual reality, according to which the most interesting aspect of such technology is precisely its capacity to produce both identification and estrangement, thus making viewers feel at the razor’s edge between pres- ence and absence, between “here” and “there,” between empathizing with others and being aware that we can never truly walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. If virtual reality as it exists today struggles to make us experience things from the perspective of another human being, can it allow us to feel what it is like to be a non-human creature? Philippe Bédard’s article tackles this question by critically examining the fundamental anthropo- centrism of virtual reality’s dominant mode of experience. Designed as it is around a technological apparatus such as the head-mounted display, which is tuned to the human sensorium, and more in particular, to the subjective qualities of human vision (its binocularity, its “egocentric” perspec- tive, and the individuals’ ability to move their point of view through six degrees of freedom of movement along three dimensions), the medium of virtual reality is also intrinsically anthropocentric. This, in turn, seems to rule out from the outset the possibility of bypassing our perceptual habi- tus by using immersive virtual environments as a tool for PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 17 AN-ICON  exploring and understanding how non-human (or post-hu- man) beings exist in, and make sense of, a version of the world that is completely different from ours: as Ian Bogost puts it, “when we ask what it means to be something, we pose a question that exceeds our own grasp of the being of the world.”25 This does not mean, however, that virtual reality cannot help us imagine what the world might look like to a different being. In Bédard’s essay, nonnormative, artistic uses of immersive technologies are described that encourage the user to imaginatively explore what the Um- welt of a mosquito, dragonfly, or even a tree might appear. Particular attention is paid to the fact that the induction of illusory ownership of, and agency over, a virtual body does not require a fake, hyperrealistic appearance of the avatar; factors like first-person perspective, sensorimotor coherence, multisensory feedback, and the possibility to interact with the virtual environment play a much greater role.26 This opens the door to artistic experimentation with bodies that do not have human (visual) appearance. The illusory ownership over implausible digital bodies makes it possible for virtual reality artists to produce immersive experiences that facilitate the users’ (temporary) engage- ment in a foray into non-human worlds, notwithstanding the fact that they remain perfectly aware of the impossi- bility to perceive the environment differently from what our sensorium gives access to. The idea that analogue and digital immersive devices could be used to expand our sensory knowledge is key for their commercial success. As Marcin Sobieszczans- ki shows, marketing strategies that pass off virtual reality as the perfect machine to make dreams come true are common. After being applied to cinema, such “oneiric” 25 I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012): 30. 26 M. Slater et al., “Inducing illusory ownership of a virtual body,” Frontiers in Neuroscience 3, no. 2 (2009): 214-220, https://doi.org/10.3389/neuro.01.029.2009. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 18 AN-ICON  interpretation now tends to assimilate the immersive expe- rience granted by increasingly sophisticated head-mounted displays to hallucinatory phenomena.27 By sketching out a history of some classical theories that have drawn a com- parison between dreams and the “unreal” dimension of the image, Sobieszczanski concentrates on the scientific debate around the nature of illusory phenomena in order to disclose the heuristic potential of the metaphor of vir- tual reality as hallucination. Highlighting both similarities and dissimilarities between the cognitive mechanisms un- derlying perception (or perception failure) in hallucinatory states and perception in immersive environments provides an interesting intellectual tool to make a cultural practice evident that is deeply rooted in the human understanding of image-making as the attempt to cross the boundaries that keep the physical world separated from the pictorial world. One of the biggest challenges this attempt must face is providing, within the virtual environment, multisen- sory and synaesthetic experiences comparable to those of everyday life. Traditionally, so-called distal senses (vision and hearing) have often been considered more suitable than proximal senses (touch, taste, and smell) to experi- ence images, due to the assumption that genuine aesthetic experience would necessarily imply distance and disinter- estedness. Yet the new digital and immersive mediascape calls for going beyond a merely visual or audio-visual way of experiencing the image: when pictures turn into environ- ments, a reorganization of the whole sensory experience is required. Valentina Bartalesi and Anna Calise’s contribu- tion deals with this issue by examining the current struggle to include haptic technologies within immersive projects developed by different cultural institutions. Indeed, touch 27 On this, see G. Grossi, La notte dei simulacri. Sogno, cinema, realtà virtuale (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2021). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 19 AN-ICON  seems to resist virtualisation: being the sense that, histor- ically and theoretically, has carried the burden of proof on “true reality,” it appears a priori unsuited for illusory environ- ments. Proof of this would be that, while haptic technolo- gies are certainly useful to allow users to “touch” – if only virtually – precious artefacts that could not otherwise be touched, they nevertheless present both a qualitative and quantitative deficit compared to the human haptic sensitiv- ity in physical reality: the illusion of touch would be in fact better described as an illusionary touch. However, haptic technologies do not need to be designed to mimic the original functions of touch. Rather than merely attempting to make them replicate the touching experience, program- mers and developers can exploit their illusory potential in non-hyperrealistic ways, focussing on the power of haptics to elicit emotions. By reviewing some recent case studies, Bartalesi and Calise show how haptic technologies can enrich our cultural and aesthetic experience of artefacts, offering medium-specific opportunities that neither physical objects nor printed replicas – no matter how accurate they may be – could elicit. The blurring of the threshold between physi- cal reality and virtual reality is also at the centre of Yizeng Zhang’s essay, where the case study of digital fashion is investigated in its function of giving birth to a completely new form of materiality. While creating their clothes, fashion designers have been limited so far by the available fabrics (and their price), the manufacturing technologies at their disposal, and, of course, the laws of physics. The so-called metaverse is in this respect a game changer. Using virtual avatars and models to sell clothing and accessories made of code instead of cotton or wool, designers are free to imagine any type of garment or fabric and to “manufacture” products never seen before. Given that our everyday lives have moved online so much that a new term “phygital” was PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 20 AN-ICON  coined to indicate the increasing blending of digital experi- ences with physical ones, it is a safe bet that digital fashion will become a vital category for every brand’s business model, being more and more sold as NFTs, showcased on virtual catwalks and in virtual showrooms, or worn by both physical and virtual influencers on social networks. Under the auspices of Gernot Böhme’s philosophy, Zhang takes on the notion of atmosphere to reflect on the “stage values” of digital fashion, that is, on its ability to emancipate from the material function of garments and to produce new forms of self-presentation. Digital garments are thus intended as experiences whose value arises from the atmosphere they are able to generate. By tracing such atmospheric production across three sites of its exhibition (the e-com- merce website, social media, and the runway show), Zhang shows how digital fashion contributes to the construction of a new kind of affective milieu. If the generation of such atmospheres can be said to be just an illusion or, rather, if the illusion itself can be conceived of as providing access to a new reality, is a question that fits well into the thematic section of this issue of the AN-ICON journal. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 21 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/19919

On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between illusion and deception by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Immersion Presence Virtual reality Representation Hallucination Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Introduction On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between 1 il usion and deception PIETRO CONTE, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7128-2696 LAMBERT WIESING, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19919 Illusion or delusion? Were novelists and filmmakers right in fore- shadowing the advent of 3D virtual worlds that would exist parallel to physical reality, where people could interact with each other through the full immersion of all their senses, possibly losing awareness of the artificial nature of those environments? Indeed, what has been imagined in count- less science fiction narratives, dystopian movies, and TV series seems to be turning into reality to an increasing Keywords Immersion Presence Virtual reality Representation Hallucination To quote this essay: P. Conte, L. Wiesing, “On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between illusion and deception,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 4-21, https://doi. org/10.54103/ai/19919 1 This essay is the result of research activity developed within the frame of the project AN- ICON. An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images. AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. [834033 AN-ICON]) and is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” of the University of Milan in the frame of the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2023-2027” sponsored by Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (MUR). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 4 AN-ICON  degree: a pictorially generated environment that is not per- ceived as such. A modern incarnation of René Descartes’s evil demon thought experiment, the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis famously describes a scenario in which a mad scientist might remove a person’s brain from the body, place it in a vat of life-sustaining nutrients, and wire it to a computer that feeds it with electrical stimuli identical to those the brain normally receives. In the words of Hilary Putnam, who in 1981 made the story popular and provoked much heated debate among philosophers of mind, that would cause the individual “to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal.” If, for instance, the person tries to raise her hand, the feedback from the machine will make her immediately “see” and “feel” the hand being raised. The evil scientist can cause the victim “to ‘experience’ (or hallucinate)” any situation he wishes. He can even erase the memory of the brain operation so that the victim will seem to herself to have been born and always lived in the digital environment.2 More recently, the idea of a simulation so pow- erful that people caught in it would take it for reality in the flesh has resurfaced in notions such as Peter Weibel’s “future cinema,” according to which the next coming cine- matographic apparatuses, thanks to miniature neural im- plants and interfaces that stimulate the brain directly, will be able to bypass the sensorium, thus acting immediately on the neural networks: Instead of trompe l’oeil, the next step might be trompe le cerveau [...]. There would be perception without the senses, seeing without the eyes. [...] Advances in neurophysiology and cognitive science give rise to the hope that future engineers will succeed in imple- menting these discoveries in neuronal and molecular machines that 2 H. Putnam, “Brains in a vat,” in Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981): 1-21, 6. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 5 AN-ICON transform the technology of simulation to deceive the eye into a technology of stimulation that in turn deceives the brain.3 One is certainly free to disbelieve such proph- ecies and exercise healthy scepticism. And yet, given the unprecedented rapid pace of technological innovation, one cannot help but recall Louis Marin’s argument that every representation, in order to present itself “in its function, its functioning, and, indeed, its functionality” as represen- tation, must include a frame that keeps the image-world clearly separated from the real world: “The more ‘mimetic’ transparency is manifested seductively, [...] the less the mechanisms are noticed, the less they are acknowledged.”4 The dream, or perhaps nightmare, of a medium achieving absolute transparency and of a user experiencing total immersion has yet to come true, and it will perhaps never do so. However, it is (certainly not only, but neverthe- less in a particularly powerful way) the new advancements in the field of simulation, illusion, and immersion that have contributed powerfully to determining the way we think about today’s media landscape. The evolution of technolog- ical equipment goes hand in hand with the evolution of the techno-cultural – which also means political – dispositif that supports and even guides them. One need only consider the way in which virtual reality is nowadays hailed as the last medium, capable of immersing the user in someone else’s shoes, teleporting her to some other place, making her feel as if she were really “there.” 3 P. Weibel, “The intelligent image: neurocinema or quantum cinema?,” in J. Shaw, P. Weibel, eds., Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film (Cambridge MA-London: The MIT Press, 2003): 594-601, 599. 4 L. Marin, “The frame of representation and some of its figures” (1988), trans. C. Porter, in On Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001): 352-372, 353. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 6 AN-ICON  Being there: debunking the rhetoric Such “being there” has become the catch- phrase of virtual technologies, and it often goes along with an over-romanticization of the idea of immersion, according to which immersive environments would grant the experi- encer a perfect illusion by making the medium disappear. This would differentiate the new forms of illusion from tra- ditional trompe l’œil: The concepts of trompe l’œil or illusionism aim to utilize represen- tations that appear faithful to real impressions, the pretense that two-dimensional surfaces are three-dimensional. The decisive factor in trompe l’œil, however, is that the deception is always recognizable; in most cases, because the medium is at odds with what is depicted and this is realized by the observer in seconds, or even fractions of seconds. This moment of aesthetic pleasure, of aware and conscious recognition, where perhaps the process of deception is a challenge to the connoisseur, differs from the concept of the virtual and its historic precursors, which are geared to unconscious deception.5 The concept of a virtual reality that could re- place the realm of physical existence has been criticized for resting upon an idealization of total immersion that would lead to an illegitimate equation of illusion with delusional hallucination. In particular, the assumption of a pictorial environment so hermetically sealed off from anything ex- traneous to the picture that the observer (or rather the ex- periencer) feels completely submerged in it is highly prob- lematic. Leading scholars in game studies such as Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman have labelled this assumption “the immersive fallacy,” polemically referring to the idea that 5 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge MA-London: The MIT Press, 2003): 15-16. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 7 AN-ICON  the ability of a media experience to sensually transport the participant into an illusory reality could reach a point where “the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that he or she is part of an imaginary world.”6 Emblematically expressed in the concept of the holodeck (a fictional tech- nology that made its first appearance in Star Trek: The Next Generation and consists in a holographic room where a simulation including sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste is indistinguishable from physical reality), the immersive fallacy encourages people to buy into new forms of magical thinking and overlook that virtual reality is but “a medium of representation that the brain will process in its appropriate cultural context, just as it has learned to process speech, writing, photography, or moving images.”7 Such warnings against a cyberpunk-flavoured idea of immersion point towards a different interpretation. As is made evident by the etymological presence of ludus in the Latin word inlusio, “illusion” originally refers to a lusory attitude. Being elicited by the perception of physi- cal representational artefacts, texts, or performances, the aesthetic illusion is to be distinguished from both halluci- nations and dreams. Moreover, it differs from delusions in that it is neither a conceptual nor a perceptual error, but a complex phenomenon characterized by “an asymmetrical ambivalence”8 that results from its positioning halfway be- tween the two poles of rational distance (i.e., disinterested “observation” of an artefact in its fictional nature) and im- mersion (or in Kendall Walton’s words, “participation”9) in the represented world: 6 K. Salen, E. Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge MA- London: The MIT Press, 2004): 451. 7 J. H. Murray, “Virtual/reality: how to tell the difference,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 11-27, 20. 8 W. Wolf, “Illusion (aesthetic),” in P. Hühn et al. (eds.), Handbook of Narratology (Berlin-New York: de Gruyter, 2009): 144-160, 144. 9 K.L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990): 240-289. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 8 AN-ICON When we play a game, we feel engaged and engrossed, and play seems to take on its own “reality.” This is all certainly true. But the way that a game achieves these effects does not happen in the manner the immersive fallacy implies. A game player does become engrossed in the game, yes. But it is an engagement that occurs through play itself. As we know, play is a process of metacommu- nication, a double-consciousness in which the player is well aware of the artificiality of the play situation.10 Contrary to David Hume’s conviction that all illusions should be given up to the flames,11 the contempo- rary immersive media and apparatuses make it necessary to disentangle the word “illusion” from its negative con- notation as “deception.” From this perspective, an illusion is about something that is present but not real: it marks the presence of something while at the same time making it appear as “unreal.” The key term for describing this di- chotomic phenomenon is conflict – a term that in image theory goes back to Hippolyte Taine and Edmund Husserl.12 Every perception rests upon the awareness of being there and being present, but only image perception implies a self-relativisation of real presence: the perception of every image generates artificial presence. For what is visible in the picture – one may call it, using Husserl’s vocabulary, “picture object,” or in more analytical tradition “content” or “representation” – is relativised in its character of presence by a conflict (Widerstreit). This happens in two different ways: in the case of traditional images through the visibility of the grounding materiality of the image, the visibility of the real environment and, last but not least, through the 10 K. Salen, E. Zimmerman, Rules of Play: 51 11 D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), sect. 12, pt. 3. (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover 2004): 107. 12 On this, see L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence. Philosophical Studies in Image Theory (2005), trans. N.F. Schott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010): p. 53. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 9 AN-ICON  visible frame. These forms of perceptible conflicts tend to disappear when an image expands into its surroundings, thus becoming an artificial “environment.” Yet even in the case of simulations and hyperrealistic worlds, the condition for speaking of images at all is that here, too, there must be an experience of conflict. That is the point: in the case of immersive environments, the conflict is (or, if we are re- alistic, should be) given through the knowledge of being in a simulation. The knowledge that something experienced is “not real” creates image-generating conflicts, just as traditionally the frame did. This is grasped when it is said: images produce artificial presence. This calls up numerous questions that the pres- ent issue of the AN-ICON journal aims to address: how is such a conflict between knowledge and perception to be explained, and is it to be regarded as a new form of aes- thetic illusion?13 On the one hand, it is necessary to distin- guish the conflict phenomena of the new forms of immer- sion formation empirically in their technology from those of traditional images. On the other hand, the various forms of seeing artificial presence must always be categorically differentiated and determined in their respective specificity. Is it a case of an unconscious illusion brought about by a false perception, or is it rather a matter of a lustful, playful attitude adopted in a special kind of illusory relationship? What is the difference between illusion, deception, and hallucination? How does an illusion become a delusion? As if it were not complicated enough: the de- scription of a virtual environment faces the problem that it is a double form of illusion building. On one side, this is the mostly solely themed illusion that people in simulated and immersive virtual environments have a strong feeling of presence (place illusion) and react to what they perceive 13 T. Koblížek, ed., The Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 10 AN-ICON  as if it were real (plausibility illusion).14 In doing so, however, they are fully aware that they are not “really” there and that events are not “actually” taking place. Yet as relevant as this illusion is, the attention it receives should not induce us to overlook the fact that, on the other hand, there is a second form of illusion formation that is not present in the many precursors of immersive images (such as the stereoscope and the panorama). This illusion of hyperrealism does not just concern what is seen, but also the one who sees. It is the change in the way the viewers experience themselves in relation to the image: virtual reality has the power to make users and beholders feel like they own and control a body (body ownership illusion) that can look very different from their biological one. Here, illusions are created that do not affect what one sees but rather the one who sees some- thing. One might want to think about whether there were not already precursor experiences in this respect in watching films, but it is only in the experience of virtual realities that this phenomenon seems to take on a radicality that brings about new forms of transformation of self-representation and changes in our attitudes to ourselves or to other peo- ple, which can be seen, for example, when implicit racial and gender biases are changed – in the best case reduced – in the experience of immersive virtual realities, or health problems and mental disorders are alleviated.15 Against this background, the present issue of the AN-ICON journal poses equally technological, aesthet- ic and decidedly moral questions. What are the limits of virtual reality and the possibilities it offers for empathising 14 M. Hofer et al., “The role of plausibility in the experience of spatial presence in virtual environments,” Frontiers in Virtual Reality 1, no. 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3389/ frvir.2020.00002; M. Slater, “Place illusion and plausibility can lead to realistic behaviour in immersive virtual environments,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 364, no. 1535 (2009): 3549-3557. 15 T.C. Peck et al., “Putting yourself in the skin of a black avatar reduces implicit racial bias,” Consciousness and Cognition 22, no. 3 (2013): 779-787, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. concog.2013.04.016; F. Scarpina et al., “The effect of a virtual-reality full-body illusion on body representation in obesity,” Journal of Clinical Medicine 8, no. 9 (2019), 1330, https://doi. org/10.3390/jcm8091330. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 11 AN-ICON  with others and fostering virtuous and socially adaptive processes of imitation? How can we debunk the rhetoric (which has ethical, social, and political significance) behind the celebration of virtual reality as the “ultimate empathy machine?”16 The field of these questions becomes all the larger and more unmanageable when it is noted that the new forms of digital immersion education, while not nec- essary, are also usually associated with new forms of in- teraction education. This raises questions that are often psychological. Is interactivity necessary to create illusion? Does the multisensory quality of the interaction affect the overall effect of illusion? Considering that immersive virtu- al environments are often inhabited by users’ surrogates, do avatars, in their extensive phenomenology, enhance or diminish the degree of illusion? What is the relationship between illusion and the “style” of the image? Is hyperreal- ism an important element to enhance illusion or, as Gordon Calleja claims,17 only an element among many others? The present issue A first reflection on these topics is offered by Salvatore Tedesco in his essay “Imagination and Körper- zustand,” which provides a historical overview of how the concept of illusion was understood in the Eighteenth Cen- tury by Moses Mendelssohn. Through a critical examination of Johann Georg Sulzer’s analysis of the passage from the state of thinking [Nachdenken] to that of feeling [Empfinden], Mendelssohn elaborated further on the contrast between the state of the body and the faculty of knowledge – a contrast that led the German philosopher to define illusion not merely in terms of common deception, but rather as a 16 C. Milk, “How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine,” TED conference, March 2015, https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ ultimate_empathy_machine. 17 G. Calleja, In-Game. From Immersion to Incorporation (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2011). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 12 AN-ICON  form of conscious illusion. This is made clear in the corre- spondence with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing on the nature of tragedy, where great emphasis is put on so-called “aes- thetic” or “poetic” illusion, considered as the instrument through which the dramatic poet is allowed to induce in the audience – contrary to what Aristotle and his modern followers maintained – even the most violent feelings, on condition that the reader or viewer is under the aesthetic effect of the illusion. The latter is characterized by a pecu- liar mismatch between sensitivity and the higher cognitive faculties: regardless of how deeply immersed one may be in sensory experiences, one still retains awareness of be- ing confronted with a virtual, fictional world. Precisely this contrast harmonization is the hallmark of aesthetic expe- rience as such. The anthropological relevance of aesthetic illu- sion can be grasped by describing it in terms of play, and more specifically pretend play. By referring to both clas- sical and contemporary studies on play and playfulness by scholars from many diverse scientific fields (including among others Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Roger Caillois, Donald Winnicott, Lev Vygotskij, Gregory Bateson, Brian Sutton-Smith and William Corsaro), Anna Bondioli’s article offers a reading of illusion as a non-imitative form of play. Far from limiting themselves to reproducing the activities that adults undertake in the surrounding world, children distort reality in a creative way by performing actions that differ from those already seen and known. Children collect elements of the external world and use them in an inter-sub- jective process of co-construction of meanings in order to open up new possible worlds, without hallucinating: they know for sure that “this is play.”18 From this perspective, the semantic field of illusion shifts from the negative meaning of pretence as lying, mocking, or simulating, to the positive 18 G. Bateson, The Message “This Is Play” (Princeton: Josia Macy Jr. Foundation, 1956). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 13 AN-ICON  notion of pretending meant as a poietic activity of model- ling, building, and giving form. In play, the two cognitive frames – “this is the real world” and “this is the fictional world” – are not to be conceived as completely separate. Players move on the threshold between physical reality and the peculiar (un)reality of fiction. Play isn’t real – it is, indeed, “pretend” – but this does not mean it is false. If it were (that is, if it lost the link with the meanings that objects, actions, and events represented during the playful activity denote in the “real” context), it would lose its significance. Yet this is not the case: play (similar in this respect to the poietic use of language in the creation of metaphors) allows the participants to put together things that do not belong to the same category, thereby opening up the possibility to generate new references and meanings that go beyond the logical contrast between the “real” and the “imaginary,” between the “true” and the “possible,” between “believing” and “not believing.” The ambiguity surrounding the notion of illusion has been made all the more evident by the theoretical re- flection on the nature and power of contemporary images. Vilém Flusser’s thought, which is the subject of Francesco Restuccia’s essay, provides an emblematic example. Illusion is first described as a form of deception, with dangerous and deplorable effects. This is especially true when tech- nical media – starting from photography – are employed in a way that aims to conceal their nature as artefacts. In this sense, the most illusionary images are those that appear transparent and present themselves as objective reality, thus bringing about a new form of “idolatry” or “hal- lucination:” “Instead of representing [vorstellen] the world, they obscure [verstellen] it.”19 This dangerous reversal of imagination happens when we do not recognize a medium, 19 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), trans. A. Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000): 10. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 14 AN-ICON  especially a visual one, as such. In this sense, technical images are the most deceiving, because their mechanical, automatic production seems to grant a “noninterventionist objectivity”20 freed from human and cultural interference. But this objectivity is deceptive, because technology is a human product, therefore always culturally biased. In Flusser’s work, however, a second interpretation of illusion is given that unveils its possible use as a precious artistic and epistemic tool. In Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch, the notion is introduced to understand the filmic experience as a modern version of Plato’s cave. While sitting in the dark space of the movie theatre, people ignore the world outside the “cave.” They do so not because they are deceived by the moving images projected on the screen in front of them. On the contrary, they choose to abandon themselves to the fascination of the medium. They do not want to be freed from the enchantment: their illusion is voluntary, self-im- posed, like a specific form of fiction or make-believe play. When illusion is conceived in a positive way as a practice of sense-making, Flusser replaces the German term täuschen (“to deceive”) with vortäuschen (to simulate, to feign). In this sense, simulation is not about producing a copy [Abbild], it is about shaping a model [Vorbild]. Technical media can allow for a new, “experimental” approach to image making: one inserts a certain input, sees what the outcome is, and then changes the input so as to achieve a different result. According to Flusser, this is the greatest potentiality of vir- tual simulations: they allow us to experience what until now we were only able to calculate; and vice versa, they allow us to calculate and control experiences that until now we could only vaguely imagine. The peculiar experience that contemporary vir- tual environments grant access to lies at the core of Fran- cesco Zucconi’s essay, which follows an anachronistic path 20 L. Daston, P. Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 15 AN-ICON  through art history and theory by taking some of Caravag- gio’s paintings as an anticipation of the invention of gyro- scope technology that made possible the first immersive experience in the history of Western painting. Building on Frank Stella’s interpretation of the Italian master’s “realistic illusionism”21 and reformulating Michael Fried’s concepts of “absorption” and “theatricality”22 through the categories of “immersion” and “specularity,” Zucconi focuses on the double effect of attraction and distancing as the funda- mental structure of the experience of virtual reality cinema. On the one side, as I put on a VR headset, I find myself “teleported” to the simulated environment: I feel “there.”23 On the other side, there is always something that reminds me that I am just inhabiting a digital milieu: a bodily, cog- nitive, and affective frame brings me back to the “here” of physical reality. Such experience of bilocation24 is most often conceived of as a negative aspect of even the most sophisticated (and expensive) immersive apparatuses cur- rently on the market – a limitation that, according to many techno-deterministic enthusiasts, will be overcome in some unspecified future, when total immersion will be eventually achieved. Arguing against this view, Zucconi maintains that such ambivalent and even paradoxical coexistence of at- traction and distancing should be better understood as an intrinsic quality of cinematic virtual reality experiences as such. This medium-specific trait, in turn, can help debunk the bombastic rhetoric that hails virtual reality as the “ul- timate empathy machine” capable of making the user not only understand but also directly experience someone’s 21 F. Stella, Working Space (Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 1986): 11. 22 M. Fried, Theatricality and Absorption: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 23 See among others M. Lombard et al., Immersed in Media. Telepresence Theory, Measurement & Technology (Cham: Springer, 2015); M. Lombard, Th. Ditton, “At the heart of it all. The concept of presence,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3, no. 2 (1997), https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997.tb00072.x. 24 A. Pinotti, “Staying here, being there. Bilocation, empathy and self-empathy in virtual reality,” Bollettino Filosofico 37 (2022): 142-162, https://doi.org/10.6093/1593-7178/9657 PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 16 AN-ICON  other pain and worries. Through reference to Susan Son- tag’s critical theory of photography, Zucconi challenges the simplistic use of notions such as those of “empathy,” “compassion,” and “immersion” which accompanies the launch of many virtual reality projects, holding instead that the (alleged) absolute transparency of the medium is not only unattainable but not even desirable. From this perspec- tive, the co-presence of illusionistic and counter-illusionistic effects is not to be interpreted as a weakening of the expe- riential and testimonial value of immersive experiences. On the contrary, it paves the way to a conscious ethical and political approach to virtual reality, according to which the most interesting aspect of such technology is precisely its capacity to produce both identification and estrangement, thus making viewers feel at the razor’s edge between pres- ence and absence, between “here” and “there,” between empathizing with others and being aware that we can never truly walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. If virtual reality as it exists today struggles to make us experience things from the perspective of another human being, can it allow us to feel what it is like to be a non-human creature? Philippe Bédard’s article tackles this question by critically examining the fundamental anthropo- centrism of virtual reality’s dominant mode of experience. Designed as it is around a technological apparatus such as the head-mounted display, which is tuned to the human sensorium, and more in particular, to the subjective qualities of human vision (its binocularity, its “egocentric” perspec- tive, and the individuals’ ability to move their point of view through six degrees of freedom of movement along three dimensions), the medium of virtual reality is also intrinsically anthropocentric. This, in turn, seems to rule out from the outset the possibility of bypassing our perceptual habi- tus by using immersive virtual environments as a tool for PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 17 AN-ICON  exploring and understanding how non-human (or post-hu- man) beings exist in, and make sense of, a version of the world that is completely different from ours: as Ian Bogost puts it, “when we ask what it means to be something, we pose a question that exceeds our own grasp of the being of the world.”25 This does not mean, however, that virtual reality cannot help us imagine what the world might look like to a different being. In Bédard’s essay, nonnormative, artistic uses of immersive technologies are described that encourage the user to imaginatively explore what the Um- welt of a mosquito, dragonfly, or even a tree might appear. Particular attention is paid to the fact that the induction of illusory ownership of, and agency over, a virtual body does not require a fake, hyperrealistic appearance of the avatar; factors like first-person perspective, sensorimotor coherence, multisensory feedback, and the possibility to interact with the virtual environment play a much greater role.26 This opens the door to artistic experimentation with bodies that do not have human (visual) appearance. The illusory ownership over implausible digital bodies makes it possible for virtual reality artists to produce immersive experiences that facilitate the users’ (temporary) engage- ment in a foray into non-human worlds, notwithstanding the fact that they remain perfectly aware of the impossi- bility to perceive the environment differently from what our sensorium gives access to. The idea that analogue and digital immersive devices could be used to expand our sensory knowledge is key for their commercial success. As Marcin Sobieszczans- ki shows, marketing strategies that pass off virtual reality as the perfect machine to make dreams come true are common. After being applied to cinema, such “oneiric” 25 I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012): 30. 26 M. Slater et al., “Inducing illusory ownership of a virtual body,” Frontiers in Neuroscience 3, no. 2 (2009): 214-220, https://doi.org/10.3389/neuro.01.029.2009. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 18 AN-ICON  interpretation now tends to assimilate the immersive expe- rience granted by increasingly sophisticated head-mounted displays to hallucinatory phenomena.27 By sketching out a history of some classical theories that have drawn a com- parison between dreams and the “unreal” dimension of the image, Sobieszczanski concentrates on the scientific debate around the nature of illusory phenomena in order to disclose the heuristic potential of the metaphor of vir- tual reality as hallucination. Highlighting both similarities and dissimilarities between the cognitive mechanisms un- derlying perception (or perception failure) in hallucinatory states and perception in immersive environments provides an interesting intellectual tool to make a cultural practice evident that is deeply rooted in the human understanding of image-making as the attempt to cross the boundaries that keep the physical world separated from the pictorial world. One of the biggest challenges this attempt must face is providing, within the virtual environment, multisen- sory and synaesthetic experiences comparable to those of everyday life. Traditionally, so-called distal senses (vision and hearing) have often been considered more suitable than proximal senses (touch, taste, and smell) to experi- ence images, due to the assumption that genuine aesthetic experience would necessarily imply distance and disinter- estedness. Yet the new digital and immersive mediascape calls for going beyond a merely visual or audio-visual way of experiencing the image: when pictures turn into environ- ments, a reorganization of the whole sensory experience is required. Valentina Bartalesi and Anna Calise’s contribu- tion deals with this issue by examining the current struggle to include haptic technologies within immersive projects developed by different cultural institutions. Indeed, touch 27 On this, see G. Grossi, La notte dei simulacri. Sogno, cinema, realtà virtuale (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2021). PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 19 AN-ICON  seems to resist virtualisation: being the sense that, histor- ically and theoretically, has carried the burden of proof on “true reality,” it appears a priori unsuited for illusory environ- ments. Proof of this would be that, while haptic technolo- gies are certainly useful to allow users to “touch” – if only virtually – precious artefacts that could not otherwise be touched, they nevertheless present both a qualitative and quantitative deficit compared to the human haptic sensitiv- ity in physical reality: the illusion of touch would be in fact better described as an illusionary touch. However, haptic technologies do not need to be designed to mimic the original functions of touch. Rather than merely attempting to make them replicate the touching experience, program- mers and developers can exploit their illusory potential in non-hyperrealistic ways, focussing on the power of haptics to elicit emotions. By reviewing some recent case studies, Bartalesi and Calise show how haptic technologies can enrich our cultural and aesthetic experience of artefacts, offering medium-specific opportunities that neither physical objects nor printed replicas – no matter how accurate they may be – could elicit. The blurring of the threshold between physi- cal reality and virtual reality is also at the centre of Yizeng Zhang’s essay, where the case study of digital fashion is investigated in its function of giving birth to a completely new form of materiality. While creating their clothes, fashion designers have been limited so far by the available fabrics (and their price), the manufacturing technologies at their disposal, and, of course, the laws of physics. The so-called metaverse is in this respect a game changer. Using virtual avatars and models to sell clothing and accessories made of code instead of cotton or wool, designers are free to imagine any type of garment or fabric and to “manufacture” products never seen before. Given that our everyday lives have moved online so much that a new term “phygital” was PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 20 AN-ICON  coined to indicate the increasing blending of digital experi- ences with physical ones, it is a safe bet that digital fashion will become a vital category for every brand’s business model, being more and more sold as NFTs, showcased on virtual catwalks and in virtual showrooms, or worn by both physical and virtual influencers on social networks. Under the auspices of Gernot Böhme’s philosophy, Zhang takes on the notion of atmosphere to reflect on the “stage values” of digital fashion, that is, on its ability to emancipate from the material function of garments and to produce new forms of self-presentation. Digital garments are thus intended as experiences whose value arises from the atmosphere they are able to generate. By tracing such atmospheric production across three sites of its exhibition (the e-com- merce website, social media, and the runway show), Zhang shows how digital fashion contributes to the construction of a new kind of affective milieu. If the generation of such atmospheres can be said to be just an illusion or, rather, if the illusion itself can be conceived of as providing access to a new reality, is a question that fits well into the thematic section of this issue of the AN-ICON journal. PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING 21 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18189

Imagination and Körperzustand: illusion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflMendelssohn ection by Salvatore Tedesco Aesthetics Illusion Play Imagination Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Imagination and Körperzustand: il usion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflection SALVATORE TEDESCO, Università degli Studi di Palermo – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1584-5455 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18189 Abstract The aesthetic reflection in the eighteenth century is deeply traversed by an experience perceived as capable of disrupting the disciplinary and cognitive system of early moder- nity: To feel the “own body,” that is, to feel its state of well-being or discomfort means to somehow modify from the inside the anthropological project of the Century of Enlightenment and to create the space and the lexicon of a modality of relation- ship (play, aesthetic illusion) that redefines the relationship with oneself and the context of construction of a future community. Whereas “Knowledge” and “Will” articulate the same strategy based on the relationship between the spiritual activity of a subject and the semiotic properties of an object, the orientation towards the condition of one’s own body defines in the play and in the aesthetic illusion the space of an imag- inative reserve which is above all a reserve of time and mode of construction for a future sharing. Moses Mendelssohn’s thought constitutes the ex- emplary arrival point of an era of theoretical research that we are interested in investigating not only in terms of the solutions it has found for his time, but also in relation to the open prob- lems, which continue to question our time. Keywords Mendelssohn Aesthetics Illusion Play Imagination To quote this essay: S. Tedesco, “Imagination and Körperzustand: illusion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflection,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 22-36, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18189 SALVATORE TEDESCO 22 AN-ICON  The philosophical and aesthetic reflection in the eighteenth century is deeply traversed by an experience per- ceived as capable of disrupting the disciplinary and cognitive system of early modernity: Feeling the “own body,” that is, feeling its “state” of well-being or discomfort – before and in a way different from the cognitive approach of a subject with an object or from the desire that moves towards that object – means to somehow enter the anthropological proj- ect of the Century of Enlightenment and to create the space and the lexicon of a modality of relationship (play, aesthetic illusion) that redefines the relationship with oneself and the context of construction of a future community. In fact, where “Knowledge” and “Will” articu- late, albeit in different ways, the same strategy based on the relationship between the spiritual activity of a subject (typically, to formulate it according to the terminology of Moses Mendelssohn: geistige Bewegung der Seele and freie Entschließung des Willens) and semiotic properties [Merk- male] of an object, the orientation towards the condition of one’s own body (towards the Zustand des Körpers, as we will see, in the sign of Johann Georg Sulzer’s work) defines in play and in aesthetic illusion the space of an imaginative reserve which is above all a reserve of time and a mode of construction for a future sharing. In this dynamic, which for example the aforemen- tioned Sulzer tries to describe starting from the conceptual couple Empfinden/Erkennen (“feeling/knowing”), but which in fact would not be conceivable except as a Bewegung, that is, certainly, as a “theoretical dynamics,” but even before that as a movement of the body and soul, is profoundly inserted another decisive lexical graft, which acquires its most com- plete theoretical profile in the reflection of Johann Gottfried Herder: I mean the field of fühlen, of the tactile feeling, and therefore of its declination as hinein fühlen (“internal feeling”); Gefühl, which means a thousand things but here I would try to render it as a “tactile feeling;” Einfühlung, “empathy;” Mitgefühl, “to feel together,” “community feeling;” and finally SALVATORE TEDESCO 23 AN-ICON  Familiengefühl, in which this feeling of community undoubt- edly reveals a social dimension of identity. In this sense, decisively rethinking the Leibnizian and Baumgartenian tradition, Moses Mendelssohn speaks of a vis repraesentativa which is in and of itself indetermi- nate, but which through the reference to the state of the soul [Zustand der Seele] and of the own body is determined as Einbildungskraft facing the past, Empfindungsvermögen ad- hering to the present, Vorhersehungsvermögen of the future. But let’s look at the theoretical complex a little more closely at this point. Referring to the two short writ- ings De anima and De DEO, placed in the appendix to the famous Philosophiae naturalis Theoria by Roger Boscovi- ch,1 Moses Mendelssohn in the fifty-sixth of the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend2 proposes to take into account, together, the proximity and the difference between the laws of movement [Gesetze der Bewegung] of inorganic bodies and those brought about by the union of soul and body in the human organism, which causes from certain spatial movements [aus gewissen örtlichen Bewegun- gen] in the external limbs to derive certain spiritual movements [geis- tige Bewegungen] in the soul; some in a necessary way, like sensa- tions, others through a free choice, like the determinations of the wil . This is precisely the bipartition and parallelism be- tween geistige Bewegung der Seele and freie Entschließung 1 R.J. Boscovich, Philosophiae Naturalis Theoria (Vienna: Apud Augustinum Bernardi, 1758): 280-295. 2 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1844): vol. 4, 566. The secondary bibliography on Mendelssohn is very rich, and ranges from historical-critical questions, to aesthetics and the theory of art, to ethics and philosophy of religions, and so on. In these notes - which obviously take into account the overall developments of that critical debate, from the “classic” studies by Fr. Braitmaier, Geschichte der Poetischen Theorie und Kritik von den Diskursen der Malern bis auf Lessing (Frauenfeld: Huber, 1888-1889) and L. Goldstein, Moses Mendelssohn und die deutsche Ästhetik (Königsberg: Gräfe & Unzer, 1904), up to M. Albrecht, E.J. Engel, N. Hinske, eds., Moses Mendelssohn und die Kreise seiner Wirksamkeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), and M. Albrecht, E.J. Engel, eds., Moses Mendelssohn in Spannungsfeld der Aufklärung (Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2000), with particular reference to the large, still decisive monograph by J.P. Meier, L’Esthétique de Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) (Paris: Atelier Lille III, 1978), and for Italy refer in particular to the excellent work of L. Lattanzi, Linguaggio e poesia in Moses Mendelssohn (Pisa: ETS, 2002), and M. Mendelssohn, Scritti di Estetica, ed. L. Lattanzi (Palermo: Aesthetica, 2004) - we limit ourselves to refer from time to time to some texts by Mendelssohn himself, of which we will provide a quick theoretical framework for the purposes of our argument. SALVATORE TEDESCO 24 AN-ICON  des Willens mentioned at the beginning, according to a cog- nitive procedure that is exercised on a “semiotically config- ured” reality, in which the knowing subject captures certain Merkmale, notae characteristicae, in fact we could say se- miotic3 “representative marks” of the object, of the known reality. In this phase, therefore, Mendelssohn theorizes a perfect parallelism between the sphere of knowledge and the sphere of the will, thus inscribing himself perfectly in that theoretical tradition of the so-called “German rational- ism” which can be summarized in the positions of Christian Wolff’s Psychologia empirica or the psychological sections of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica – yet, in Mendelssohn’s par- ticular thematic declension, the salient term is certainly Be- wegung, that is the reference to a motility, of the body and of our representative faculty in relation to it, which in fact sets the whole system in motion. The theoretical framework thus “photographed” by Mendelssohn in 1759 will undergo a rapid evolution, of which we will try to retrace some passages below. At the moment, we limit ourselves to referring to that decisive turn- ing point entrusted by the author to a short private annota- tion in 1770,4 which Mendelssohn, critically returning to the path traveled by gnoseology in Germany in the eighteenth century, states that Pleasure should not have been compared with wil . That is an intimate awareness that representation “a” improves our state; the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to realize this representation. The Leibnizian affectus, Baumgarten’s sensi- tive knowledge “capable of driving force,” is now definitely 3 Obviously I am referring in this way to a very long-term semiotic strategy in the theoretical discourse that interests us here. See, limiting ourselves here of necessity to mentioning the immediate context of reference, the occurrence of the term in the fifty-fifth M. Mendelssohn, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol.1, 565. 4 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol.1, 225. SALVATORE TEDESCO 25 AN-ICON  characterized as pleasure, with the further clarification that this modality acts on (and therefore it is appropriate to say more precisely to the interior of) our state [Zustand] – we would perhaps say modernly on our “psycho-physical bal- ance” – and is therefore to be considered in reference to our intimate awareness of ourselves, rather than continuing to refer to the scope of a cognitive relationship with some external object. It is precisely here that we cross in a more articu- lated way the theories of Sulzer5 who, at the end of a long re- search path that we would define “psycho-physiological,” as well as at the start of a new season of German Enlightenment thought, definitively breaks the parallelism and the alliance between knowledge and will by contrasting, in the context of extensively understood “knowledge,” knowledge in the proper sense (i.e. the semiotic-representative relationship of a knowing subject with a known object) to a feeling devoid of an object, through which, in the strict sense, our sensory apparatus experiences itself, its own state of well-being or discomfort. But let’s take a closer look at Sulzer’s argument, in which the eye performs the function of a real paradigm of the human soul.6 Our cognitive faculty, says Sulzer develop- ing considerations that we can trace back to Christian Wolff, is structured in a way that is perfectly analogous to the sense of sight and that, in analogy to it, can be described on the basis of the laws of optics. Objects present themselves to our eye and to our cognitive faculty with a greater or lesser degree of clarity, the focus of our attention progressively focuses on every single element (imaginable as a physical point), leaving the rest of the representation in the twilight. Therefore the objects are known through a pro- cess that allows to obtain a clear knowledge of every single component of the object, so as to finally have a distinct vi- sion of the compound object; for this process to take place, 5 J.G. Sulzer, “Anmerkungen über den verschiedenen Zustand, worinn sich die Seele bey Ausübung ihrer Hauptvermögen, nämlich des Vermögens, sich etwas vorzustellen, und des Vermögens zu empfinden befindet” (1763), in Vermischte Philosophische Schriften (1773) (Hildesheim: Olms 1974): vol.1, 225-243. 6 Ibid.: 226. SALVATORE TEDESCO 26 AN-ICON  however, adequate light is required, which allows the eye to perceive the object. Conversely, when the light is so dazzling as to injure the eye, there is no longer any perception of the object, but the eye feels tactile, that is, in the manner of the darkest sense, itself, its own condition: “The luminous glow touches the ocular nerves in such a way that seeing is transformed into feeling;”7 this process represents in the best way for Sulzer the passage from the state of thinking [Nachdenken] to that of feeling [Empfinden]: the representation is no longer a representation of the object, but of my condition of plea- sure or displeasure: “We do not feel the object, but ourselves. When it reflects, the intellect takes care of something that it considers to be placed outside of it; when it feels, the soul only takes care of itself.”8 In this way, however, at the very moment in which a fundamental distinction of levels and functions of the soul is created, a very precise relationship is established between knowing and feeling, in the sense that there is a proportion- ality between the degree of darkness of our knowledge and the strength of our “sensations” and that the “sensations” are aroused, so as to give rise to the transition from the state of thinking to that of feeling, when a certain idea arouses a crowd of other obscure representations. The characteristic fact of Sulzer’s anthropolog- ical vision is that this obscurity of feeling is, in itself, an in- surmountable datum: “We feel desire or aversion without knowing why: We are moved by forces we do not know.”9 Precisely from this state of affairs – we observe here in pass- ing – the arts derive their origin and at the same time their function, destined to enter into a relationship with the darkest part of feeling and to turn it to the advantage of humanity. The caesura between knowing and feeling the- orized by Sulzer – it would be rather simple to argue – more than corresponding to a deepening of the eighteenth-century physiological discourse, more than opening a philosophical 7 Ibid.: 231. 8 Ibid.: 229-230. 9 Ibid.: 241. SALVATORE TEDESCO 27 AN-ICON  question destined to be very influential, is in a certain way the symptom, the surface effect, so to speak, of a deep landslide destined to cross the whole thinking of the second half of the eighteenth century, that of the so-called Popularphilosophie. In light of what has been seen in Mendelssohn’s Briefe, that is, in light of the attempt to describe the “mo- tions of the soul” along the lines of the laws of physical movement, it is striking that the distinction made by Sulzer undoubtedly places at the center of the analysis the opacity, the resistance of the body to the gnoseological strategies by which the body itself is crossed throughout the Leibniz- ian-Wolffian season, but the fact that this happens (and this precisely affects, and perhaps explains the intimate distrust towards Sulzer himself of many of the major protagonists of the Aufklärung), creating a static contrast between the state [Zustand] of the body and the faculty of knowledge. Conversely, it is precisely the relational dynamics that remain at the center of Moses Mendelssohn’s interests, as already exemplarily shown in his reference to Boscovich’s theses on motor skills in the investigation of the physical body and the living organism. And it is precisely here that the space for reflection opens up for the concept of illusion, destined to become central in Mendelssohn’s aesthetic re- flection. Mendelssohn’s aesthetic thought, as it is actu- ally quite well known, is very troubled and passes through different and sometimes quite intricate theoretical phases; all the more noteworthy is the fact that from the first theori- zations to the definitive results, the link between an attempt at a rational description, even a mathematization of the re- lationship between physical movements and “motions of the soul,” and the enucleation of the way to function of the aesthetic illusion. It is in fact in the correspondence on the tragic with Lessing, and therefore already in the years 1756-1757, that Mendelssohn starts his reflection on the “ästhetische” or even “poetische” Illusion, which is considered the instrument through which the dramatic poet can give space - against Aristotle and his modern followers – even to the most violent SALVATORE TEDESCO 28 AN-ICON  feelings, such as hatred or repugnance [Abscheu], on the condition that the reader and viewer are under the aesthetic effect of the illusion.10 Faced with the hesitations manifested by Less- ing in the correspondence, Mendelssohn tries to organize the theme in a more extended form by articulating a short essay Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen (About the dominion over inclinations),11 which starts from an attempt to mathematize the dynamics of motions of the soul, the- orizing a direct proportionality between the kinetic force of motivation and the expected good, as well as between the kinetic force itself and the clarity of the representation that one possesses of it, while this force would be expressed according to an inverse proportionality in relation to the time necessary for the representation itself to take shape: “Quan- tity of motivation = good × clarity ÷ time.”12 On this Platonic theoretical basis Mendelssohn also explains the effect of illusion, saying that: When an imitation bears so much resemblance to the original that our senses can be persuaded at least for a moment to see the original itself, I call this deception an aesthetic il usion. The poet must speak in a perfectly sensitive way; for this reason all his speeches must deceive us in an aesthetic way. For an imitation to be beautiful, he must deceive us aesthetically; at the same time the higher cognitive faculties must be aware that it is an imitation, and not nature itself.13 Mendelssohn therefore bases the anthropologi- cal effect of the aesthetic illusion on the discrepancy between sensitivity and intellect. The illusion is aesthetic and it is not a common deception when it is addressed directly to the sensitivity by involving the higher faculties only indirectly. This discrepancy is first of all a temporal hiatus in the effect of the aesthetic representation: 10 See K.W. Segreff, M. Mendelssohn und die Aufklärungsästhetik im 18. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Grundmann, 1984): 94. 11 M. Mendelssohn, “Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1931): vol. 2, 149-155. 12 Ibid.: 149. 13 Ibid.: 154. SALVATORE TEDESCO 29 AN-ICON It is easy to see that that judgment [that is, the aesthetic judgment] must precede, and that therefore the conviction about the similarity must be intuitive, that is, take place through il usion, while on the other hand, the conviction that it is not the original itself may come a little late, and therefore be dependent on symbolic knowledge.14 The argument itself is not fundamentally new, and to give a single example relating to a possible source, it is enough to recall Bernard de Fontenelle, who in the Ré- flexions sur la poétique of 1742 declares that our pleasure in following the painful events of a hero that we love, crying and consoling ourselves alternately for what we see, depends on our awareness that it is a fiction.15 What is new in Mendelssohn is the temporal scheme, and the theoretical framework in which it is inscribed, which is evidently influenced by the thought of Baumgarten, of which Mendelssohn becomes a continuer: While, so to speak, the awareness of the fictional character holds true in Fontenelle as an undoubtedly presupposed guarantee of “poetic” enjoyment, Mendelssohn is instead interested in the path that leads from the touched soul of the user to the aesthetic object, and in this path he discovers a double semiotic-cognitive modality, and precisely two different tem- poralities, which, however, are valid as the two necessarily coexisting stages for the realization of aesthetic pleasure. Sensitive knowledge intuitively grasps an iden- tity between original and copy where only the greater slow- ness of intellectual knowledge, due to its symbolic character, will be able to reformulate the relationship as a similarity of elements (intellectually) recognized as distinct. Only in the temporal interplay between the two cognitive stages is aesthetic pleasure realized for Mendels- sohn, which takes the form of the subsequent recognition of the similar in the imitative representation as identical and different. Identical for sensitivity and – with a short hiatus – different for the intellect. Aesthetic pleasure therefore allows 14 Ibid. 15 B.L.B. de Fontenelle, Réflexions sur la Poétique (Paris: M. Brunet, 1742): XXXVI. SALVATORE TEDESCO 30 AN-ICON  us to penetrate into the human soul, indeed to say more precisely within the motivational dynamic that governs the movements of the soul, so as to relate sensitivity and intel- lect not for the purpose of a progressive “unveiling” of re- ality that destroys illusion and error, but on the contrary for the purpose of an enjoyment that finds its root in imitation, capable of emerging with particular evidence right in the case of the imitation of passions that are violent and pain- ful,16 which would not only turn out to be such if they were experienced in reality, but which would be no less painful if we were simply faced with an “interpretative error” of our sensitivity destined to be rationally overcome. In the same year 1757, one of the decisive writ- ings of Mendelssohnian aesthetics, the Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften (Reflections on the Sources and Connec- tions of the Fine Arts and Sciences),17 added a further de- cisive element to this descriptive framework, clarifying that, from the semiotic point of view, intuitive knowledge concerns both the case in which the object is immediately present to our senses, and the case in which it is represented through signs [Zeichen] through which the ideas of the designated [Ideen des Bezeichneten] can be seen more distinctly than those of the sign. The beauty of the aesthetic relationship (but by now Mendelssohn’s discourse – precisely through the reference to the designation process – strongly gravitates towards artistic beauty) therefore offers the example of a peculiar transparency of the medium, and it is right through the transparency of the sign that the object appears with an evidence that captures and sets in motion the faculties of our soul. In the same years, in controversy with Reimarus, Mendelssohn will also return to the nature of the imagina- tion and to the overall relationship of the faculties of the 16 M. Mendelssohn, Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen: 155. 17 M. Mendelssohn, “Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie- Verlag, 1929): vol. I, 169. SALVATORE TEDESCO 31 AN-ICON  soul, saying that – far from being considered a faculty in its own right – the imagination is rather a modification of the unique, original and in principle completely indeterminate representative capacity of the soul which however “through the state of one’s own and of one’s body [durch ihren und ihres Körpers Zustand],”18 is addressed and configured in specific ways, articulating itself precisely as Einbildungsk- raft facing the past, Empfindungsvermögen adhering to the present, Vorhersehungsvermögen of the future. The famous statement of Baumgarten – accord- ing to which the individual soul represents the universe pro positu corporis –19 is therefore changed in a decisive way by redefining the position of the body as Zustand, a state or more precisely a condition of well-being or malaise. Let us pause for a moment to consider Men- delssohn’s path so far: The “aesthetic illusion” is clearly distinguished from mere “cognitive deception,” at the very moment in which the attention thus shifts one way in the direction of internal dynamics to our soul, that is towards the play, the balance of the faculties, present in our soul and set in motion by the aesthetic representations, and on the other hand it traces the dynamics of the relational movement between our soul and the aesthetic object, now more and more clearly distinguished from the cognitive one. The brief note of 1770 to which attention has already been drawn testifies to a deepening of the first question – that relating to the internal dynamics of our soul – which would not be imaginable and would probably not have assumed that configuration without the openings on one’s own body and on his condition made possible by the almost contemporary theories of Sulzer. Mendelssohn therefore writes: Pleasure should not have been compared with wil . That is an intimate awareness that representation “a” improves our state [Zustand]; 18 M. Mendelssohn, “Rezensionsartikel,” in Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend (1759- 1765), 20 nov. 1760: 300 in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Stuttgart: Frommann- Holzboog,1991): no. 5,1. 19 A.G. Baumgarten, Metaphysica (1779) (Halle: Hemmerde, 1939): § 512. SALVATORE TEDESCO 32 AN-ICON the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to realize this representation. Pleasure is, so to speak, a favorable judgment of the soul on her real state; the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to achieve this state.20 In this way, undoubtedly, Mendelssohn moves towards an overall redefinition of the “system of faculties” that distances him from the Wolffian tradition as well as from Baumgarten, his model, approaching that tripartite division between the cognitive sphere, the sphere of will and aesthet- ic pleasure that characterizes the second eighteenth cen- tury from the so-called Popularphilosophie to Kant. No less significant is that this occurs through a specific attention to one’s own body, and to the way in which the representative processes do not so much modify our relationship with reality on the objective side, as they redefine its internal resonance. However, whereas precisely on this point Sulzer chose an “extremist” reading, speaking of a “feeling devoid of an object,” through which our body senses itself and not the object, and therefore sacrificed the understanding of the dynamic relationship to highlight the question of the Zustand, of the state/condition of the organ (remember what Sulzer says about the eye and sight), of one’s own body, of the soul vitalistically considered coextensive with the body, Mendels- sohn never loses sight of the relationality, the dynamism of the framework of faculty. It is perhaps also for this reason that his is the most significant figure in the entire German debate from Baumgarten to Kant. Another short essay is dedicated to what has just been defined as the dynamics of the relational move- ment between our soul and the object, dating back to June 1776, in which, similarly to what we have just seen, Men- delssohn moves, so to speak, from “systematic reasons,” openly declared already from the title of the fragment: [Über 20 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol. 1, 225. SALVATORE TEDESCO 33 AN-ICON  das Erkenntnis-, das Empfindungs- und das Begehrungsver- mögen] On the faculty of knowing, of feeling and of appetite. What six years earlier had been entrusted to an almost incidental note here instead – even if the writing is destined not to leave the private workshop of Mendelssohn’s thought – acquires the characteristics of a system program: Between the faculty of knowing and the faculty to appetite there is the faculty of feeling [Empfindungsvermögen], by means of which we feel pleasure or displeasure about something, we appreciate it, approve it, find it pleasant, or we despise it, blame it and find it un- pleasant [.. ]. The end of the faculty of knowing is the truth; that is, as we possess a faculty of knowing, we strive to make the concepts in our soul accord with the qualities of their objects. The end of the faculty of hearing is the good; that is, insofar as we possess a faculty of feeling, we strive to make the objective qualities accord with our concepts of goodness, order and beauty.21 The truly innovative moment of this position lies in the clear distinction of areas between will and pleasure: The pleasure for a representation does not necessarily imply the desire for the object that underlies it. Mendelssohn is above all interested in distin- guishing two modalities of relationship with the object: In the cognitive relationship we modify our representations to adapt them to the truth of the object, in the case of the faculty of feeling we aim instead to harmonize the properties of the object with our own concepts of good, order, beauty, and the tool for this to happen is clearly identified in the aesthetic illusion. The peculiarity of the statute of aesthetic illusion is then the true core of Mendelssohn’s discourse, when it is distinguished both from cognitive truth and also from the concrete modification of reality which the will aims at. But there is more; Mendelssohn distinguishes two fundamental human attitudes, the first tending to truth, the second to poetic invention [Erdichtung]. If the first cor- responds to the work of the faculty of knowing, the poetic 21 Ibid.: vol. 3, 1, 276. SALVATORE TEDESCO 34 AN-ICON  invention will instead follow the intent of keeping in exercise [in Übung zu erhalten]22 the faculty of feeling. In the same days, another brief note23 completes the Mendelssohnian description, noting that this “faculty to entertain oneself” [Un- terhaltungsfähigkeit] (it is interesting how Mendelssohn tries to set the theoretical framework in motion even in proposing new names for a system of faculties perceived as in active transformation with respect to the Wolffian model) has an objective side (simplifying I would say the quantity and or- der of semiotic markers capable of “giving something to think about”) and a subjective side (the faculty itself and the ordering criteria it is able to set). The beauty will therefore reside in the harmony between the objective and subjective aspects of the new faculty, capable of arousing in us “in the contemplation of the object, the awareness of our strengths rather than our limits, and movement is pleasant.”24 Conversely, that disharmony that comes from the excess of the object over our faculties will cause dizzi- ness, and on a conceptual level it will give life to the sublime. The conclusive synthesis of the Morgenstunden, in 1785, will insert the considerations that we have followed up to now into a much broader theoretical framework, without however further introducing profound changes; confirming and reformulating again the tripartition between the faculty of knowing, that of desiring and the “aesthetic faculty,” now re- defined as the capacity of appreciation [Billigungsvermögen], Mendelssohn now distinguishes between two fundamental aspects of human knowledge, depending on whether one considers its material relevance or the formal configuration. From the material point of view, that is, a given notion can be true or false; considered from this point of view, knowledge knows no degrees, truth is an “indivisible unity.”25 It is quite another thing to consider knowledge as capable of arousing pleasure or displeasure, that is, as an object of 22 Ibid. 23 M. Mendelssohn, “Über objektive und subjektive Unterhaltungsfähigkeit,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol. 3, 1, 275. 24 Ibid. 25 M. Mendelssohn, “Morgenstunden,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog; 1974): vol. 3, 2, 62. SALVATORE TEDESCO 35 AN-ICON  the faculty of appreciation: precisely this can be defined as the formal aspect. And vice versa, this consists exclusively in evaluating, in comparison, in gradation, in plus and minus; moreover, every conceivable degree of this scale of values can be thought of “with the same truth,”26 which is evidently a truth of the formal aspect of knowledge, a peculiar truth of aesthetic illusion. Moses Mendelssohn’s thought, in its different phases and declinations, through the collaboration with Lessing and up to the final results of the Morgenstunden, constitutes the exemplary arrival point of an era of theo- retical research that we are interested in investigating not only in terms of the solutions that he found for his time, but also in relation to open problems, which continue to question our time. 26 Ibid.: 63. SALVATORE TEDESCO 36 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18189

Imagination and Körperzustand: illusion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflMendelssohn ection by Salvatore Tedesco Aesthetics Illusion Play Imagination Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Imagination and Körperzustand: il usion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflection SALVATORE TEDESCO, Università degli Studi di Palermo – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1584-5455 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18189 Abstract The aesthetic reflection in the eighteenth century is deeply traversed by an experience perceived as capable of disrupting the disciplinary and cognitive system of early moder- nity: To feel the “own body,” that is, to feel its state of well-being or discomfort means to somehow modify from the inside the anthropological project of the Century of Enlightenment and to create the space and the lexicon of a modality of relation- ship (play, aesthetic illusion) that redefines the relationship with oneself and the context of construction of a future community. Whereas “Knowledge” and “Will” articulate the same strategy based on the relationship between the spiritual activity of a subject and the semiotic properties of an object, the orientation towards the condition of one’s own body defines in the play and in the aesthetic illusion the space of an imag- inative reserve which is above all a reserve of time and mode of construction for a future sharing. Moses Mendelssohn’s thought constitutes the ex- emplary arrival point of an era of theoretical research that we are interested in investigating not only in terms of the solutions it has found for his time, but also in relation to the open prob- lems, which continue to question our time. Keywords Mendelssohn Aesthetics Illusion Play Imagination To quote this essay: S. Tedesco, “Imagination and Körperzustand: illusion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflection,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 22-36, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18189 SALVATORE TEDESCO 22 AN-ICON  The philosophical and aesthetic reflection in the eighteenth century is deeply traversed by an experience per- ceived as capable of disrupting the disciplinary and cognitive system of early modernity: Feeling the “own body,” that is, feeling its “state” of well-being or discomfort – before and in a way different from the cognitive approach of a subject with an object or from the desire that moves towards that object – means to somehow enter the anthropological proj- ect of the Century of Enlightenment and to create the space and the lexicon of a modality of relationship (play, aesthetic illusion) that redefines the relationship with oneself and the context of construction of a future community. In fact, where “Knowledge” and “Will” articu- late, albeit in different ways, the same strategy based on the relationship between the spiritual activity of a subject (typically, to formulate it according to the terminology of Moses Mendelssohn: geistige Bewegung der Seele and freie Entschließung des Willens) and semiotic properties [Merk- male] of an object, the orientation towards the condition of one’s own body (towards the Zustand des Körpers, as we will see, in the sign of Johann Georg Sulzer’s work) defines in play and in aesthetic illusion the space of an imaginative reserve which is above all a reserve of time and a mode of construction for a future sharing. In this dynamic, which for example the aforemen- tioned Sulzer tries to describe starting from the conceptual couple Empfinden/Erkennen (“feeling/knowing”), but which in fact would not be conceivable except as a Bewegung, that is, certainly, as a “theoretical dynamics,” but even before that as a movement of the body and soul, is profoundly inserted another decisive lexical graft, which acquires its most com- plete theoretical profile in the reflection of Johann Gottfried Herder: I mean the field of fühlen, of the tactile feeling, and therefore of its declination as hinein fühlen (“internal feeling”); Gefühl, which means a thousand things but here I would try to render it as a “tactile feeling;” Einfühlung, “empathy;” Mitgefühl, “to feel together,” “community feeling;” and finally SALVATORE TEDESCO 23 AN-ICON  Familiengefühl, in which this feeling of community undoubt- edly reveals a social dimension of identity. In this sense, decisively rethinking the Leibnizian and Baumgartenian tradition, Moses Mendelssohn speaks of a vis repraesentativa which is in and of itself indetermi- nate, but which through the reference to the state of the soul [Zustand der Seele] and of the own body is determined as Einbildungskraft facing the past, Empfindungsvermögen ad- hering to the present, Vorhersehungsvermögen of the future. But let’s look at the theoretical complex a little more closely at this point. Referring to the two short writ- ings De anima and De DEO, placed in the appendix to the famous Philosophiae naturalis Theoria by Roger Boscovi- ch,1 Moses Mendelssohn in the fifty-sixth of the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend2 proposes to take into account, together, the proximity and the difference between the laws of movement [Gesetze der Bewegung] of inorganic bodies and those brought about by the union of soul and body in the human organism, which causes from certain spatial movements [aus gewissen örtlichen Bewegun- gen] in the external limbs to derive certain spiritual movements [geis- tige Bewegungen] in the soul; some in a necessary way, like sensa- tions, others through a free choice, like the determinations of the wil . This is precisely the bipartition and parallelism be- tween geistige Bewegung der Seele and freie Entschließung 1 R.J. Boscovich, Philosophiae Naturalis Theoria (Vienna: Apud Augustinum Bernardi, 1758): 280-295. 2 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1844): vol. 4, 566. The secondary bibliography on Mendelssohn is very rich, and ranges from historical-critical questions, to aesthetics and the theory of art, to ethics and philosophy of religions, and so on. In these notes - which obviously take into account the overall developments of that critical debate, from the “classic” studies by Fr. Braitmaier, Geschichte der Poetischen Theorie und Kritik von den Diskursen der Malern bis auf Lessing (Frauenfeld: Huber, 1888-1889) and L. Goldstein, Moses Mendelssohn und die deutsche Ästhetik (Königsberg: Gräfe & Unzer, 1904), up to M. Albrecht, E.J. Engel, N. Hinske, eds., Moses Mendelssohn und die Kreise seiner Wirksamkeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), and M. Albrecht, E.J. Engel, eds., Moses Mendelssohn in Spannungsfeld der Aufklärung (Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2000), with particular reference to the large, still decisive monograph by J.P. Meier, L’Esthétique de Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) (Paris: Atelier Lille III, 1978), and for Italy refer in particular to the excellent work of L. Lattanzi, Linguaggio e poesia in Moses Mendelssohn (Pisa: ETS, 2002), and M. Mendelssohn, Scritti di Estetica, ed. L. Lattanzi (Palermo: Aesthetica, 2004) - we limit ourselves to refer from time to time to some texts by Mendelssohn himself, of which we will provide a quick theoretical framework for the purposes of our argument. SALVATORE TEDESCO 24 AN-ICON  des Willens mentioned at the beginning, according to a cog- nitive procedure that is exercised on a “semiotically config- ured” reality, in which the knowing subject captures certain Merkmale, notae characteristicae, in fact we could say se- miotic3 “representative marks” of the object, of the known reality. In this phase, therefore, Mendelssohn theorizes a perfect parallelism between the sphere of knowledge and the sphere of the will, thus inscribing himself perfectly in that theoretical tradition of the so-called “German rational- ism” which can be summarized in the positions of Christian Wolff’s Psychologia empirica or the psychological sections of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica – yet, in Mendelssohn’s par- ticular thematic declension, the salient term is certainly Be- wegung, that is the reference to a motility, of the body and of our representative faculty in relation to it, which in fact sets the whole system in motion. The theoretical framework thus “photographed” by Mendelssohn in 1759 will undergo a rapid evolution, of which we will try to retrace some passages below. At the moment, we limit ourselves to referring to that decisive turn- ing point entrusted by the author to a short private annota- tion in 1770,4 which Mendelssohn, critically returning to the path traveled by gnoseology in Germany in the eighteenth century, states that Pleasure should not have been compared with wil . That is an intimate awareness that representation “a” improves our state; the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to realize this representation. The Leibnizian affectus, Baumgarten’s sensi- tive knowledge “capable of driving force,” is now definitely 3 Obviously I am referring in this way to a very long-term semiotic strategy in the theoretical discourse that interests us here. See, limiting ourselves here of necessity to mentioning the immediate context of reference, the occurrence of the term in the fifty-fifth M. Mendelssohn, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol.1, 565. 4 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol.1, 225. SALVATORE TEDESCO 25 AN-ICON  characterized as pleasure, with the further clarification that this modality acts on (and therefore it is appropriate to say more precisely to the interior of) our state [Zustand] – we would perhaps say modernly on our “psycho-physical bal- ance” – and is therefore to be considered in reference to our intimate awareness of ourselves, rather than continuing to refer to the scope of a cognitive relationship with some external object. It is precisely here that we cross in a more articu- lated way the theories of Sulzer5 who, at the end of a long re- search path that we would define “psycho-physiological,” as well as at the start of a new season of German Enlightenment thought, definitively breaks the parallelism and the alliance between knowledge and will by contrasting, in the context of extensively understood “knowledge,” knowledge in the proper sense (i.e. the semiotic-representative relationship of a knowing subject with a known object) to a feeling devoid of an object, through which, in the strict sense, our sensory apparatus experiences itself, its own state of well-being or discomfort. But let’s take a closer look at Sulzer’s argument, in which the eye performs the function of a real paradigm of the human soul.6 Our cognitive faculty, says Sulzer develop- ing considerations that we can trace back to Christian Wolff, is structured in a way that is perfectly analogous to the sense of sight and that, in analogy to it, can be described on the basis of the laws of optics. Objects present themselves to our eye and to our cognitive faculty with a greater or lesser degree of clarity, the focus of our attention progressively focuses on every single element (imaginable as a physical point), leaving the rest of the representation in the twilight. Therefore the objects are known through a pro- cess that allows to obtain a clear knowledge of every single component of the object, so as to finally have a distinct vi- sion of the compound object; for this process to take place, 5 J.G. Sulzer, “Anmerkungen über den verschiedenen Zustand, worinn sich die Seele bey Ausübung ihrer Hauptvermögen, nämlich des Vermögens, sich etwas vorzustellen, und des Vermögens zu empfinden befindet” (1763), in Vermischte Philosophische Schriften (1773) (Hildesheim: Olms 1974): vol.1, 225-243. 6 Ibid.: 226. SALVATORE TEDESCO 26 AN-ICON  however, adequate light is required, which allows the eye to perceive the object. Conversely, when the light is so dazzling as to injure the eye, there is no longer any perception of the object, but the eye feels tactile, that is, in the manner of the darkest sense, itself, its own condition: “The luminous glow touches the ocular nerves in such a way that seeing is transformed into feeling;”7 this process represents in the best way for Sulzer the passage from the state of thinking [Nachdenken] to that of feeling [Empfinden]: the representation is no longer a representation of the object, but of my condition of plea- sure or displeasure: “We do not feel the object, but ourselves. When it reflects, the intellect takes care of something that it considers to be placed outside of it; when it feels, the soul only takes care of itself.”8 In this way, however, at the very moment in which a fundamental distinction of levels and functions of the soul is created, a very precise relationship is established between knowing and feeling, in the sense that there is a proportion- ality between the degree of darkness of our knowledge and the strength of our “sensations” and that the “sensations” are aroused, so as to give rise to the transition from the state of thinking to that of feeling, when a certain idea arouses a crowd of other obscure representations. The characteristic fact of Sulzer’s anthropolog- ical vision is that this obscurity of feeling is, in itself, an in- surmountable datum: “We feel desire or aversion without knowing why: We are moved by forces we do not know.”9 Precisely from this state of affairs – we observe here in pass- ing – the arts derive their origin and at the same time their function, destined to enter into a relationship with the darkest part of feeling and to turn it to the advantage of humanity. The caesura between knowing and feeling the- orized by Sulzer – it would be rather simple to argue – more than corresponding to a deepening of the eighteenth-century physiological discourse, more than opening a philosophical 7 Ibid.: 231. 8 Ibid.: 229-230. 9 Ibid.: 241. SALVATORE TEDESCO 27 AN-ICON  question destined to be very influential, is in a certain way the symptom, the surface effect, so to speak, of a deep landslide destined to cross the whole thinking of the second half of the eighteenth century, that of the so-called Popularphilosophie. In light of what has been seen in Mendelssohn’s Briefe, that is, in light of the attempt to describe the “mo- tions of the soul” along the lines of the laws of physical movement, it is striking that the distinction made by Sulzer undoubtedly places at the center of the analysis the opacity, the resistance of the body to the gnoseological strategies by which the body itself is crossed throughout the Leibniz- ian-Wolffian season, but the fact that this happens (and this precisely affects, and perhaps explains the intimate distrust towards Sulzer himself of many of the major protagonists of the Aufklärung), creating a static contrast between the state [Zustand] of the body and the faculty of knowledge. Conversely, it is precisely the relational dynamics that remain at the center of Moses Mendelssohn’s interests, as already exemplarily shown in his reference to Boscovich’s theses on motor skills in the investigation of the physical body and the living organism. And it is precisely here that the space for reflection opens up for the concept of illusion, destined to become central in Mendelssohn’s aesthetic re- flection. Mendelssohn’s aesthetic thought, as it is actu- ally quite well known, is very troubled and passes through different and sometimes quite intricate theoretical phases; all the more noteworthy is the fact that from the first theori- zations to the definitive results, the link between an attempt at a rational description, even a mathematization of the re- lationship between physical movements and “motions of the soul,” and the enucleation of the way to function of the aesthetic illusion. It is in fact in the correspondence on the tragic with Lessing, and therefore already in the years 1756-1757, that Mendelssohn starts his reflection on the “ästhetische” or even “poetische” Illusion, which is considered the instrument through which the dramatic poet can give space - against Aristotle and his modern followers – even to the most violent SALVATORE TEDESCO 28 AN-ICON  feelings, such as hatred or repugnance [Abscheu], on the condition that the reader and viewer are under the aesthetic effect of the illusion.10 Faced with the hesitations manifested by Less- ing in the correspondence, Mendelssohn tries to organize the theme in a more extended form by articulating a short essay Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen (About the dominion over inclinations),11 which starts from an attempt to mathematize the dynamics of motions of the soul, the- orizing a direct proportionality between the kinetic force of motivation and the expected good, as well as between the kinetic force itself and the clarity of the representation that one possesses of it, while this force would be expressed according to an inverse proportionality in relation to the time necessary for the representation itself to take shape: “Quan- tity of motivation = good × clarity ÷ time.”12 On this Platonic theoretical basis Mendelssohn also explains the effect of illusion, saying that: When an imitation bears so much resemblance to the original that our senses can be persuaded at least for a moment to see the original itself, I call this deception an aesthetic il usion. The poet must speak in a perfectly sensitive way; for this reason all his speeches must deceive us in an aesthetic way. For an imitation to be beautiful, he must deceive us aesthetically; at the same time the higher cognitive faculties must be aware that it is an imitation, and not nature itself.13 Mendelssohn therefore bases the anthropologi- cal effect of the aesthetic illusion on the discrepancy between sensitivity and intellect. The illusion is aesthetic and it is not a common deception when it is addressed directly to the sensitivity by involving the higher faculties only indirectly. This discrepancy is first of all a temporal hiatus in the effect of the aesthetic representation: 10 See K.W. Segreff, M. Mendelssohn und die Aufklärungsästhetik im 18. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Grundmann, 1984): 94. 11 M. Mendelssohn, “Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1931): vol. 2, 149-155. 12 Ibid.: 149. 13 Ibid.: 154. SALVATORE TEDESCO 29 AN-ICON It is easy to see that that judgment [that is, the aesthetic judgment] must precede, and that therefore the conviction about the similarity must be intuitive, that is, take place through il usion, while on the other hand, the conviction that it is not the original itself may come a little late, and therefore be dependent on symbolic knowledge.14 The argument itself is not fundamentally new, and to give a single example relating to a possible source, it is enough to recall Bernard de Fontenelle, who in the Ré- flexions sur la poétique of 1742 declares that our pleasure in following the painful events of a hero that we love, crying and consoling ourselves alternately for what we see, depends on our awareness that it is a fiction.15 What is new in Mendelssohn is the temporal scheme, and the theoretical framework in which it is inscribed, which is evidently influenced by the thought of Baumgarten, of which Mendelssohn becomes a continuer: While, so to speak, the awareness of the fictional character holds true in Fontenelle as an undoubtedly presupposed guarantee of “poetic” enjoyment, Mendelssohn is instead interested in the path that leads from the touched soul of the user to the aesthetic object, and in this path he discovers a double semiotic-cognitive modality, and precisely two different tem- poralities, which, however, are valid as the two necessarily coexisting stages for the realization of aesthetic pleasure. Sensitive knowledge intuitively grasps an iden- tity between original and copy where only the greater slow- ness of intellectual knowledge, due to its symbolic character, will be able to reformulate the relationship as a similarity of elements (intellectually) recognized as distinct. Only in the temporal interplay between the two cognitive stages is aesthetic pleasure realized for Mendels- sohn, which takes the form of the subsequent recognition of the similar in the imitative representation as identical and different. Identical for sensitivity and – with a short hiatus – different for the intellect. Aesthetic pleasure therefore allows 14 Ibid. 15 B.L.B. de Fontenelle, Réflexions sur la Poétique (Paris: M. Brunet, 1742): XXXVI. SALVATORE TEDESCO 30 AN-ICON  us to penetrate into the human soul, indeed to say more precisely within the motivational dynamic that governs the movements of the soul, so as to relate sensitivity and intel- lect not for the purpose of a progressive “unveiling” of re- ality that destroys illusion and error, but on the contrary for the purpose of an enjoyment that finds its root in imitation, capable of emerging with particular evidence right in the case of the imitation of passions that are violent and pain- ful,16 which would not only turn out to be such if they were experienced in reality, but which would be no less painful if we were simply faced with an “interpretative error” of our sensitivity destined to be rationally overcome. In the same year 1757, one of the decisive writ- ings of Mendelssohnian aesthetics, the Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften (Reflections on the Sources and Connec- tions of the Fine Arts and Sciences),17 added a further de- cisive element to this descriptive framework, clarifying that, from the semiotic point of view, intuitive knowledge concerns both the case in which the object is immediately present to our senses, and the case in which it is represented through signs [Zeichen] through which the ideas of the designated [Ideen des Bezeichneten] can be seen more distinctly than those of the sign. The beauty of the aesthetic relationship (but by now Mendelssohn’s discourse – precisely through the reference to the designation process – strongly gravitates towards artistic beauty) therefore offers the example of a peculiar transparency of the medium, and it is right through the transparency of the sign that the object appears with an evidence that captures and sets in motion the faculties of our soul. In the same years, in controversy with Reimarus, Mendelssohn will also return to the nature of the imagina- tion and to the overall relationship of the faculties of the 16 M. Mendelssohn, Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen: 155. 17 M. Mendelssohn, “Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie- Verlag, 1929): vol. I, 169. SALVATORE TEDESCO 31 AN-ICON  soul, saying that – far from being considered a faculty in its own right – the imagination is rather a modification of the unique, original and in principle completely indeterminate representative capacity of the soul which however “through the state of one’s own and of one’s body [durch ihren und ihres Körpers Zustand],”18 is addressed and configured in specific ways, articulating itself precisely as Einbildungsk- raft facing the past, Empfindungsvermögen adhering to the present, Vorhersehungsvermögen of the future. The famous statement of Baumgarten – accord- ing to which the individual soul represents the universe pro positu corporis –19 is therefore changed in a decisive way by redefining the position of the body as Zustand, a state or more precisely a condition of well-being or malaise. Let us pause for a moment to consider Men- delssohn’s path so far: The “aesthetic illusion” is clearly distinguished from mere “cognitive deception,” at the very moment in which the attention thus shifts one way in the direction of internal dynamics to our soul, that is towards the play, the balance of the faculties, present in our soul and set in motion by the aesthetic representations, and on the other hand it traces the dynamics of the relational movement between our soul and the aesthetic object, now more and more clearly distinguished from the cognitive one. The brief note of 1770 to which attention has already been drawn testifies to a deepening of the first question – that relating to the internal dynamics of our soul – which would not be imaginable and would probably not have assumed that configuration without the openings on one’s own body and on his condition made possible by the almost contemporary theories of Sulzer. Mendelssohn therefore writes: Pleasure should not have been compared with wil . That is an intimate awareness that representation “a” improves our state [Zustand]; 18 M. Mendelssohn, “Rezensionsartikel,” in Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend (1759- 1765), 20 nov. 1760: 300 in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Stuttgart: Frommann- Holzboog,1991): no. 5,1. 19 A.G. Baumgarten, Metaphysica (1779) (Halle: Hemmerde, 1939): § 512. SALVATORE TEDESCO 32 AN-ICON the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to realize this representation. Pleasure is, so to speak, a favorable judgment of the soul on her real state; the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to achieve this state.20 In this way, undoubtedly, Mendelssohn moves towards an overall redefinition of the “system of faculties” that distances him from the Wolffian tradition as well as from Baumgarten, his model, approaching that tripartite division between the cognitive sphere, the sphere of will and aesthet- ic pleasure that characterizes the second eighteenth cen- tury from the so-called Popularphilosophie to Kant. No less significant is that this occurs through a specific attention to one’s own body, and to the way in which the representative processes do not so much modify our relationship with reality on the objective side, as they redefine its internal resonance. However, whereas precisely on this point Sulzer chose an “extremist” reading, speaking of a “feeling devoid of an object,” through which our body senses itself and not the object, and therefore sacrificed the understanding of the dynamic relationship to highlight the question of the Zustand, of the state/condition of the organ (remember what Sulzer says about the eye and sight), of one’s own body, of the soul vitalistically considered coextensive with the body, Mendels- sohn never loses sight of the relationality, the dynamism of the framework of faculty. It is perhaps also for this reason that his is the most significant figure in the entire German debate from Baumgarten to Kant. Another short essay is dedicated to what has just been defined as the dynamics of the relational move- ment between our soul and the object, dating back to June 1776, in which, similarly to what we have just seen, Men- delssohn moves, so to speak, from “systematic reasons,” openly declared already from the title of the fragment: [Über 20 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol. 1, 225. SALVATORE TEDESCO 33 AN-ICON  das Erkenntnis-, das Empfindungs- und das Begehrungsver- mögen] On the faculty of knowing, of feeling and of appetite. What six years earlier had been entrusted to an almost incidental note here instead – even if the writing is destined not to leave the private workshop of Mendelssohn’s thought – acquires the characteristics of a system program: Between the faculty of knowing and the faculty to appetite there is the faculty of feeling [Empfindungsvermögen], by means of which we feel pleasure or displeasure about something, we appreciate it, approve it, find it pleasant, or we despise it, blame it and find it un- pleasant [.. ]. The end of the faculty of knowing is the truth; that is, as we possess a faculty of knowing, we strive to make the concepts in our soul accord with the qualities of their objects. The end of the faculty of hearing is the good; that is, insofar as we possess a faculty of feeling, we strive to make the objective qualities accord with our concepts of goodness, order and beauty.21 The truly innovative moment of this position lies in the clear distinction of areas between will and pleasure: The pleasure for a representation does not necessarily imply the desire for the object that underlies it. Mendelssohn is above all interested in distin- guishing two modalities of relationship with the object: In the cognitive relationship we modify our representations to adapt them to the truth of the object, in the case of the faculty of feeling we aim instead to harmonize the properties of the object with our own concepts of good, order, beauty, and the tool for this to happen is clearly identified in the aesthetic illusion. The peculiarity of the statute of aesthetic illusion is then the true core of Mendelssohn’s discourse, when it is distinguished both from cognitive truth and also from the concrete modification of reality which the will aims at. But there is more; Mendelssohn distinguishes two fundamental human attitudes, the first tending to truth, the second to poetic invention [Erdichtung]. If the first cor- responds to the work of the faculty of knowing, the poetic 21 Ibid.: vol. 3, 1, 276. SALVATORE TEDESCO 34 AN-ICON  invention will instead follow the intent of keeping in exercise [in Übung zu erhalten]22 the faculty of feeling. In the same days, another brief note23 completes the Mendelssohnian description, noting that this “faculty to entertain oneself” [Un- terhaltungsfähigkeit] (it is interesting how Mendelssohn tries to set the theoretical framework in motion even in proposing new names for a system of faculties perceived as in active transformation with respect to the Wolffian model) has an objective side (simplifying I would say the quantity and or- der of semiotic markers capable of “giving something to think about”) and a subjective side (the faculty itself and the ordering criteria it is able to set). The beauty will therefore reside in the harmony between the objective and subjective aspects of the new faculty, capable of arousing in us “in the contemplation of the object, the awareness of our strengths rather than our limits, and movement is pleasant.”24 Conversely, that disharmony that comes from the excess of the object over our faculties will cause dizzi- ness, and on a conceptual level it will give life to the sublime. The conclusive synthesis of the Morgenstunden, in 1785, will insert the considerations that we have followed up to now into a much broader theoretical framework, without however further introducing profound changes; confirming and reformulating again the tripartition between the faculty of knowing, that of desiring and the “aesthetic faculty,” now re- defined as the capacity of appreciation [Billigungsvermögen], Mendelssohn now distinguishes between two fundamental aspects of human knowledge, depending on whether one considers its material relevance or the formal configuration. From the material point of view, that is, a given notion can be true or false; considered from this point of view, knowledge knows no degrees, truth is an “indivisible unity.”25 It is quite another thing to consider knowledge as capable of arousing pleasure or displeasure, that is, as an object of 22 Ibid. 23 M. Mendelssohn, “Über objektive und subjektive Unterhaltungsfähigkeit,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol. 3, 1, 275. 24 Ibid. 25 M. Mendelssohn, “Morgenstunden,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog; 1974): vol. 3, 2, 62. SALVATORE TEDESCO 35 AN-ICON  the faculty of appreciation: precisely this can be defined as the formal aspect. And vice versa, this consists exclusively in evaluating, in comparison, in gradation, in plus and minus; moreover, every conceivable degree of this scale of values can be thought of “with the same truth,”26 which is evidently a truth of the formal aspect of knowledge, a peculiar truth of aesthetic illusion. Moses Mendelssohn’s thought, in its different phases and declinations, through the collaboration with Lessing and up to the final results of the Morgenstunden, constitutes the exemplary arrival point of an era of theo- retical research that we are interested in investigating not only in terms of the solutions that he found for his time, but also in relation to open problems, which continue to question our time. 26 Ibid.: 63. SALVATORE TEDESCO 36 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/17655

The polysemy of Vilém Flusser’s concept of illusi o by Francesco Restuccia Flusser n Illusion Fiction Fontcuberta Idolatry Self-deception Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing The polysemy of Vilém Flusser’s concept of il usion FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA, Sapienza - Università di Roma – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8900-642X https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17655 Abstract Vilém Flusser uses the concept of illusion in a non-systematic way, resulting in two ostensible contra- dictions. First of all, he often uses the term illusion, while criticizing the metaphysic assumptions that it implies; sec- ondly, he seems to both dispraise and value the illusionary nature of technical images. This article aims at clarifying Flusser’s thoughts on illusion in the belief that they are not as conflicting as they might seem at first. In fact, when Flusser deplores the risk of de- ception associated with technical images, he refers to the illusion of transparency. He does not oppose the concept of illusion to a supposed objective truth, on the contrary, he opposes the illusion of the objective nature of images to the awareness of their constructed and mediated character. However, a rational demystification of illu- sions is not a viable option, since, according to Flusser, they are the result of a voluntary self-deception: we suppress our critical thinking because we cannot bear its complexity, we want images to “release us from the necessity for conceptual, explanatory thought.” This is why Flusser thinks that aware illusion – in other words: fiction – can help us overcome our “inertia of happiness” and develop a critical imagination. Keywords Flusser Illusion Fiction Fontcuberta Idolatry Self-deception To quote this essay: F. Restuccia, “The polysemy of Vilém Flusser’s concept of illusion,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 52-66, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17655 FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 52 AN-ICON  Leafing through the pages of Herbarium (1982- 1985) by Joan Fontcuberta one is immediately seduced by the beauty of these black and white analog photographs of exotic plants, whose geometric details remind one of Karl Blossfeldt’s work. The whole series is presented as scientific documentation, including the botanical nomencla- ture of these newly discovered species. Only at a second glance one might notice that something is wrong: some details in the image, the strange pseudo-Latin names. What appeared to be plants are actually small assemblages of pieces of plastic, fragments and parts of animals found by the artist in the industrial outskirts of Barcelona. We have been victims of an illusion. These images, both hyper-re- alistic and extremely unlikely, aim to deceive us and at the same time to reveal the deception. Without any digital ma- nipulation, Fontcuberta’s work on the one hand invites us to reflect upon the supposed immediate and documentary character of photography, on the other hand it allows us to experience unprecedented and surprising configurations. Fontcuberta had an important intellectual col- laboration with a philosopher and media theorist who ded- icated many of his writings to discussing the illusionary character of technical images: Vilém Flusser.1 Although the term “illusion” appears only rarely in his writings and in a non-systematic way, Flusser was definitely fascinated by the ambiguity of this concept, which, as it emerges in Herbarium, can be conceived both as a form of deception, with dangerous and deplorable effects, and as a precious artistic and epistemic tool.2 Often Flusser refers to illusive phenomena in a pejorative way; sometimes he tends to re- ject the metaphysical assumption – implied by the concept of illusion – that an objective truth can be found beyond 1 Flusser also wrote the introduction to the German edition of Herbarium: V. Flusser, “Einführung ‘Herbarium’ von Joan Fontcuberta,” in Standpunkte: Texte zur Fotografie (Göttingen: European Photography, 1998): 113-116. 2 As Carrillo Canán wrote, “Flusser has no explicit theory on deception but as with many critical thinkers, his theory is to a great extent a theory of deception.” A.J.L. Carrillo Canán, “Deception and the ‘magic’ of ‘technical images’ according to Flusser,” Flusser Studies, no. 4 (2008): 1-12, 1. Significantly, neither “illusion,” “deception,” nor “fiction” was chosen as one of the 235 entries that make up the glossary of Flusseriana. S. Zielinski, P. Weibel, D. Irrgang, eds., Flusseriana: An Intellectual Toolbox (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2015). FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 53 AN-ICON  appearance; on other occasions he seems convinced that the art of illusion is the best tool for the creative training of our imagination. Therefore, it could be useful to try to put an order, as far as this is possible, to Flusser’s thoughts on illusion, in the belief that they are not as conflicting as they might initially seem. First we will analyze the contexts where he deplores the risk of deception associated with any mediation, and with new media and technical images in particular; then we will consider his critiques of the con- cepts of illusion and especially of disillusion, focusing on his theory of a voluntary self-deception; finally we will see how Flusser approves of illusion when it is understood as a form of fiction. Illusion as deception The German word that Flusser uses the most when referring to the negative sense of illusion is “Täu- schung,” which could be translated as “deception.” The verb “täuschen” literally means to exchange, to swap: by exchanging two different things, one mistakes one for an- other one. Being deceived is, first of all, taking something for something else, or conferring to one thing the value that we should only confer to something else. What are the two things that, according to Flusser, might dangerously be confused? The model and its copy, the signified and the signifier, the thing and the image. Deception is “a reversal [Umkehrung] of the vectors of significance,”3 or a “reversal of the function of the image:”4 images should represent the world and help us “to orientate” ourselves within it, but we end up forgetting about the world and living in function of the images we have created.5 Images “are supposed to be 3 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), trans. A. Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000): 37, 68. 4 Ibid.: 10. 5 On the concept of reversal as the key to understanding Flusser’s conception of technical images see D. Irrgang, Vom Umkehren der Bedeutungsvektoren: Prototypen des Technischen Bildes bei Vilém Flusser (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2017). FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 54 AN-ICON  maps but they turn into screens: Instead of representing [vorstellen] the world, they obscure [verstellen] it.”6 Flusser is not concerned by the deceptions that occur when we take an image of A for an image of B. As long as we truly know that something is an image, we also know that it is a human construction, that it needs to be interpreted and that this interpretation might be wrong. The real problem arises when images conceal their own nature. Flusser’s main models for his (implicit) theory of deception are Plato’s concept of eidolon and the Jewish and early Christian conception of idolatry.7 In his interpre- tation, both Plato’s eidola and religious idols are images that should mediate and represent something else (ideas for Plato, God in the Jewish and Christian tradition), but instead of presenting themselves as such, they end up being taken for what they should refer to. Flusser rethinks the concept of idolatry in a secular way, conceiving it as that particular form of deception which occurs when we do not recognize the symbolic and cultural nature of an image. In Towards a Philosophy of Photography idolatry is defined as “the inability to read off ideas from the elements of the image, despite the ability to read these elements themselves; hence: worship of images.”8 It is important to notice that idolatry is not only a perceptual deception, but has effects on human behavior: Flusser writes, metaphor- ically, that images are “worshiped” when they “have a hold over people as objects.”9 Sometimes, in order to identify this particular form of deception Flusser uses, instead of “idolatry,” the term “hallucination.” 6 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10. 7 Ibid.: 11; V. Flusser, “The codified world” (1978), in Writings, trans. E. Eisel (Minneapolis- London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002): 35-41, 39. See also F. Restuccia, “Flusser against idolatry,” Flusser Studies, no. 26 (2018): 1-15 and F. Restuccia, Il contrattacco delle immagini. Tecnica, media e idolatria a partire da Vilém Flusser (Milan: Meltemi, 2021). 8 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 83. A similar “semiotic” definition of idolatry was proposed by Augustine: “Now, he is in bondage to a sign who uses, or pays homage to, any significant object without knowing what it signifies,” S. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson jr. (London: Pearson, 1958): III, IX, 13. 9 V. Flusser, “Design: obstacle for/to the removal of obstacles” (1993), in The Shape of Things. A Philosophy of Design (London: Reaktion Books, 1999): 58-61, 60. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 55 AN-ICON Imagination can dialectically reverse and become hallucination. Images resulting from this reversed imagination stop working as mediation and become opaque surfaces hiding the world. The se- mantic vectors invert and point towards their producer instead of pointing towards the world.10 It is important to notice that this sort of reversal can happen with any kind of mediation and not only with images. When we stop using texts and conceptual thinking to help us understand the world, and we start using the world in order to understand our texts, or forcing data to fit into our conceptual grid, then we are victims of another form of deception. In this case Flusser talks about texto- latry, as opposed to idolatry, or paranoia, as opposed to hallucination.11 This dangerous reversal of imagination hap- pens when we do not recognize a medium, especially a visual one, as such. Therefore, the most illusionary images are those that appear transparent, concealing their status of images and presenting themselves as objective reality. According to Flusser, technical images – all images pro- duced by apparatuses, starting with photography – are the most deceiving, in this sense, because their mechanical production seems to grant an automatic and almost natural process that avoids any human and cultural interference.12 “But this ‘objectivity’ of the photograph is deceptive [täus- chend],”13 because technology is a human product and is also culturally biased. The program that apparatuses use to code images was written by human beings and is an externalization of the visual schemata that they would use if they were drawing an image themselves. When we see 10 V. Flusser, “Iconoclastia,” Cavalo azul, no. 8 (1979): 78-84, 79, my translation; see also V. Flusser Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10. 11 The choice of the last couple of words is due to their etymology: “hallucination,” which might be related to the Latin word lux (light), refers to visual thinking, whereas “paranoia,” which comes from the Greek word nous (intellect), refers to conceptual thinking. See V. Flusser, “Iconoclastia:” 79, and V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10. 12 H. Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1844) was one of the first to assert such a natural character of photography. See K. Walton, “Transparent pictures: on the nature of photographic realism,” Critical Inquiry, no. 11 (1984): 246-277, https://www.doi.org/10.1086/448287. 13 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 51. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 56 AN-ICON  a drawing or any other traditional image, though, we are aware that what we are looking at is someone’s interpre- tation of the world, and not the world itself; but when we see a photograph, or a video, we assume that what we are looking at is a direct emanation of reality. “This lack of criticism of technical images is potentially dangerous […] for the reason that the ‘objectivity’ of technical images is an illusion [Täuschung].”14 The elements of a photograph appear to be “symptoms” of the world, instead of “symbols” that need to be “decoded.”15 The only way to avoid idolatry, hallucination and deception is to recognize the symbols contained in an image and decode them, discovering the “programmed concepts” they represent, “so as to identify the true significance of the photograph.”16 Based on what has been discussed so far, Flusser seems to maintain a sort of platonic dualism: im- ages are just symbols and should not be confused with the real world. However, Flusser refuses this approach as “‘metaphysical’ […] in the worst sense of the word.”17 The reason why he deplores the illusion of transparency of tech- nical images is because, according to him, no such thing as an immediate reality can be found, not even beyond images. Even “the amorphous stew of phenomena (‘the material world’) is an illusion [Täuschung],”18 since it is only accessible through our nervous system and is therefore also a construction. In an interview with Florian Rötzer he declared: The concept of simulation disturbs me. When something is simulated, that is, when it looks like something else, there must be something being simulated. In the term simulation or simulacrum lies a deep metaphysical belief that something can be simulated. I do not share 14 Ibid.: 15. 15 Ibid.; V. Flusser, “Für eine Theorie der Techno-Imagination, 1980 in Standpunkte: Texte zur Fotografie: 8-16, 8. 16 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 44. 17 Ibid.: 62. 18 V. Flusser, “Form and material,” in Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design: 22-29, 22. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 57 AN-ICON this belief [...]. In my opinion in the word simulation hides what is left of a belief in the absolute.19 Flusser is not afraid that the real world could be replaced with a simulation: on the one hand because our technologies do not allow us to build virtual worlds as defined as the experience of the world built by our nervous system, on the other hand because if this ever happened, then it would not make sense to distinguish these experi- ences as belonging to different levels of reality.20 Moreover our lifeworld and our simulations are already intertwined, since the experiences we have in the former affect those we have in the latter and vice versa. The real illusion is the possibility of accessing a pure, immediate reality. If all is construction, then why is Flusser con- cerned? Because if we assumed that images – and gener- ally our whole experience of the world – are immediate and pure, then we would accept them acritically. We would start unconsciously absorbing interpretations of reality without questioning them, and our imagination would slowly be- come lethargic. We should then try to avoid surrendering to the illusion of transparency, train our imagination and learn to decode the images we are surrounded by. But how can we do this? Is a rationalistic debunking the only way out of deception? Illusion as self-deception In the essay Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch Flusser rethinks the movie theater as a modern version of21 Plato’s cave. People sit in a dark space looking at images 19 V. Flusser, Zwiegespräche (Göttingen: European Photography, 1996): 230-231, my translation. See J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), trans. S. Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Flusser considered Baudrillard a friend and often quotes him in his final years, although mostly polemically. 20 V. Flusser, “Vom Virtuellen,” in F. Rötzer, P. Weibel, eds., Cyberspace. Zum medialen Gesamtkunstwerk (München: Boer, 2002): 65-71; V. Flusser, Kommunikologie weiter denken (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008): 75-77. 21 V. Flusser, “Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch,” in Lob der Oberflächigkeit. Für eine Phänomenologie der Medien (Bensheim-Düsseldorf: Bollman Verlag, 1993): 153-166. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 58 AN-ICON  projected on the wall in front of them, ignoring the world outside the “cave.” What does Flusser’s interpretation of the myth teach us? That people want to stay in the cave, they are not chained, they do not desire to be freed. Their illusion is voluntary. According to Flusser commercial cinema still has some degree of idolatry: people contemplate those images acritically, as pure entertainment, without question- ing the message that is being passed. Therefore they are “programmed” by the technical images to think and act in a certain way: the same people who leave the movie theater, writes Flusser, will form a line to enter the supermarket. They are victims of a double illusion: on the one hand they see the lights projected on the screen as a world taking shape in front of their eyes, on the other hand they end up believing that the people, the feelings, the values they perceived somehow exist and have a life of their own, that they are not the creation of a team of artists and technicians. However, neither of the two forms of illusion is a complete deception. Any film spectator knows how a film is made: they know the impression of movement is produced by the rapid sequence of the frames, they know the events por- trayed have been written, designed and reproduced, but they choose to believe in them. “Moviegoers are believers not in good faith, but in bad faith [böse Glaubens]: they know better, but don’t want to know. This is not magic, but something new.”22 In Towards a Philosophy of Photography, writ- ten around three years later, Flusser further develops his conception of a voluntary illusion, or belief in bad faith. Even though people nowadays act as if they were under the magic spell of technical images – they see a commer- cial and buy the product, they watch a video and change their political opinion – yet they do not believe in those images in the same way as people belonging to traditional magic cultures believed in their images. While the latter did not develop their critical consciousness (their conceptual 22 Ibid.: 163, my translation. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 59 AN-ICON  thinking), which can only be trained through literacy,23 the former do have it, but end up suppressing it. Both Native Americans and functionaries believe in the reality of images, but functionaries do this out of bad faith. After all, they have learned to write at school and consequently should know better. Functionaries have a historical consciousness and critical awareness but they suppress these. They know that the war in Lebanon is not a clash between good and evil but that specific causes have specific consequences there. They know that the toothbrush is not a sacred object but a product of Western history. But they have to suppress their superior knowledge of this.24 The main sources for Flusser’s conception of a belief in bad faith might be Johan Huizinga and Marcel Mauss.25 However, these authors developed the idea of a voluntary belief, or a partially aware illusion, in order to describe traditional magical thinking and not only the con- temporary experience of technical images.26 By trying to prove that any magic ritual has a playful dimension, just as any game has a ritual dimension, Huizinga affirms that no illusion is ever a complete deception: it is always combined with some degree of simulation. As far as I know, ethnologists and anthropologists concur in the opinion that the mental attitude in which the great religious feasts of savages are celebrated and witnessed is not one of complete illusion. There is an underlying consciousness of things “not be- ing real.” [...] A certain element of “makebelieve” is operative in all 23 V. Flusser, “Line and surface” (1973), in Writings: 21-34; V. Flusser, Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft? (Göttingen: Immatrix, 1987). 24 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 63. 25 V. Flusser, Post-History (1983), trans. R. Maltez Novaes (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013): 99- 106; V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 27; Kommunikologie weiter denken: 245. 26 The notion of “voluntary illusion” [illusion volontaire] can already be found in Paul Souriau, L’imagination de l’artiste (Paris: Librairie Hachette et cie, 1901), while the concept of aware illusion [bewußte Selbsttäuschung] was first developed by Konrad Lange, Die Bewußte Selbsttäuschung als Kern des künstlerischen Genusses (Leipzig: Verlag von Veit & Comp., 1895). FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 60 AN-ICON primitive religions. Whether one is sorcerer or sorcerized one is al- ways knower and dupe at once. But one chooses to be the dupe.27 In a similar way, a few years before, Mauss wrote that any magical performance reveals the collective will to believe in it, both on the part of the spectators and the magician: We are in no doubt that magical facts need constant encourage- ment and that even the sincerest delusions of the magician have always been self-imposed to some degree.28 Yet, one should be able to distinguish between this sort of sincere self-delusion that we can find in the ex- perience of traditional magic, from the “belief in bad faith” that Flusser identifies in the experience of technical images. On the one hand the “underlying consciousness of things ‘not being real’” is still a blurry intuition, on the other hand the critical consciousness reached by educated people is fully developed and can only coexist with illusion if it is partially suppressed. Why do we systematically suppress our critical and conceptual thinking and choose to be deluded? Flusser thinks that this human behavior is not only a result of our tendency to conform. The reason why we need to partially suppress our critical consciousness in order to function within society is that, at this level of complexity, conceptual thinking is no longer efficient. The point is not that people do not understand rational explanations; it is that they do not want to hear them. Commenting on how, during the 1982 Lebanon War, people formed their opinions based on videos and photos, rather than on theoretical analyses, Flusser writes: 27 J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938), trans. R.F.C. Hull (London-Boston-Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949): 22-23. 28 M. Mauss, General Theory of Magic (1902), trans. R. Brain (London-New York: Routledge, 2001): 118. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 61 AN-ICON We are by now sick and tired of explanations and prefer to stick to the photograph that releases us from the necessity for con- ceptual, explanatory thought and absolves us from the bother of going into the causes and consequences of the war in Lebanon: In the image we see with our own eyes what the war looks like. The text simply consists of instructions as to how we are to see.29 We suppress our conceptual thinking because of the cognitive comfort provided by technical apparatus- es that calculate and build images for us. Flusser calls the state of numbness generated by this comfort the inertia of happiness: “It is this inertia of happiness that stands in the way of a changeover.”30 This theory forces us to reconsider the rational- istic approach that one could at first read into Flusser’s cri- tique of deception. If our illusion is somehow self-imposed and the suppression of our critical consciousness is a re- action to the heaviness, the complexity and the abstract- ness of conceptual thinking, which expresses the need to expand the visual, sensory and emotional dimension of existence, we cannot simply debunk our self-delusion by rational means. The only way to overcome the negative aspects of deception is within the image world, therefore through a creative use of illusion. Illusion as fiction When the term “illusion” is used by Flusser with a positive connotation it has the meaning of construction or fiction. In the posthumous book The Surprising Phe- nomenon of Human Communication, where he defines the structure of communication as the infrastructure of human reality, Flusser writes that the act of communicating produc- es the illusion of immortality. We know, due to the suffering of our bodies, that it is an illusion: “Despite our individual and collective memories, we remain mortals. Nevertheless, 29 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 62. 30 V. Flusser, Kommunikologie weiter denken: 210. “Es ist diese Trägheit des Glücks, die einer Umschaltung entgegensteht.” FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 62 AN-ICON  this illusion is, still, our own reality, our ontological dignity.”31 In this case illusion is a different name for sense-making, the attribution of meaning, which according to Flusser is what makes us humans. When illusion is conceived in this constructive way, Flusser replaces the term “täuschen” (deceive) with the term “vortäuschen,” which could be translated as “sim- ulate,” “feign.”32 In Shape of Things he defines the verb “to design” as “to concoct something, to simulate [vortäus- chen], to draft, to sketch, to fashion, to have designs on something.”33 A simulation – this constructive form of illu- sion – is not about producing a copy [Abbild], it is about shaping a model [Vorbild].34 In “Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch” Flusser affirms that not only does the sequence of frames produce the illusion of movement, but the very frames are illusions, as they recreate the impression of three dimensional spaces through the two-dimensional disposition of colors. In this context “illusion” is not meant in a negative sense: Flusser is fascinated by the capacity of technical images to evoke meaningful and visual experiences from non-meaningful and often non-visual elements, such as the bits of infor- mation for digital photography.35 Technical images have an illusionistic effect in that they evoke an impression by means of calculation. The point-projection perspective designed by renaissance painters, the trompe-l’œil designed by baroque architects, the tricks designed by stage magicians produce emotional effects using rational techniques. Experimental photographers and programmers work in the same way, but 31 V. Flusser, The Surprising Phenomenon of Human Communication (1975), trans. R. Maltez Novaes, D. Naves (Metaflux, 2016): 154. 32 V. Flusser, “Gärten,” in Dinge und Undinge. Phänomenologische Skizzen (München-Wien: Carl Hanser, 1993): 46-52, 51. 33 V. Flusser, “About the word design,” in Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design: 17. 34 V. Flusser, “Abbild – Vorbild oder: was heißt darstellen?,” in Lob der Oberflächlichkeit (Düsseldorf: Bollmann, 1993): 293-317. 35 Even in the case of analog photography, according to Flusser, the image could be reduced to computable elements, such as the exposure time, the focal aperture, and the ISO setting. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 63 AN-ICON  with more efficient tools: they can program an apparatus that will translate an alphanumeric input into a visual output. According to Flusser, this allows for the first time for an experimental approach to image making and therefore an element of control over the visual world: a synthesis between conceptual-critical thinking and visu- al-emotional thinking. The word “experimental” is used in a literal sense: technical images can be used for experiments. One can insert a certain input, see what the outcome is, and consequently change the input in order to achieve a different result. If one writes the equation of a Mandelbrot frac- tal in a computer in order to visualize it on the screen, one may be surprised by the outcome and therefore learn from it. The complexity of that geometrical figure where the to- tality is infinitely repeated in the parts could not be perfectly foreseen. One sits in front of a keyboard, taking one dot element after another out of the memory, to fit it into an image on the screen, to compute it. This step-by-step process of extraction can be automated so that it can proceed very quickly. The images appear on the screen one after another in breathtaking speed. One can follow this sequence of images, just as if the imagination had become self-sufficient; or as if it had traveled from inside (let’s say from the cranium) to outside (into the computer); or as if one could observe one’s own dreams from the outside. In fact, some of the appearing images can be surprising: they are unexpected images.36 The idea of an experimental character of tech- nical images could be better understood by taking into consideration Flusser’s notion of science fiction, where he further develops the relationship between conceptual and emotional thinking. With this expression Flusser not only refers to the literary genre, to which, moreover, he 36 V. Flusser, “A new imagination,” in Writings: 110-116, 114. For a closer analysis of this essay and for a discussion about the idea of surprising images and the externalization of imagination, see L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence (2005), trans. N.F. Schott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010): 98-101. See also V. Flusser, “Ein neuer Platonismus?,” kulturRRevolution, no. 19 (1988): 6. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 64 AN-ICON  contributed with many charming short stories,37 but also reflects about the deep inner connection between science as fiction and fiction as science: something that has been called a “speculative fiction.”38 Any scientific knowledge is based on the development of models and simulations that are, strictly speaking, illusions. When fiction is enhanced with the experimental exactness provided by technical im- ages, it becomes a powerful tool to create surprising mod- els that will allow us to think of what we are not yet able to conceive. This is, according to Flusser, the greatest po- tentiality of virtual simulations: they allow us to experience – emotionally, visually, haptically – what until now we were only able to calculate; and at the same time they allow us to calculate and control experiences that until now we could only vaguely imagine. Flusser believes that virtual environ- ments, and in general all technical images, should not be used to reproduce what already exists for recreational pur- poses,39 but should “bring to virtuality” alternative worlds. Thanks to simulated environments, for example, we could be able to experience a world where all living creatures are sulfur-based instead of carbon-based – a world that, 37 Most of Flusser’s philosophical science fiction short stories can be found in the following publications: V. Flusser, Ficções Filosóficas (São Paulo: Edusp, 1998); V. Flusser, Angenommen: Eine Szenenfolge (Göttingen: European Photography, 2000); V. Flusser, L. Bec, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A treatise with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste (1987), trans. V.A. Pakis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). See also Flusser’s essays on fiction: V. Flusser, “Da ficção,” O diário (August 26, 1966); V. Flusser, “Science fiction” (1988), trans. W. Hanff, Flusser Studies, no. 20 (2015): 1-3, where Flusser writes about a fantasia essata (exacting fantasy), which he attributes to Leonardo da Vinci. 38 J. Torres, “Homo Fictor: em busca de uma ficção filosófica,” Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies 2, no. 4 (2020): 1-12, 7. Much has been published on Flusser’s theory of fiction, and science fiction in particular. See G. Salvi Philipson, “Flusser para além do ensaio: de outros modos possíveis de habitar a intersecção entre ficção e filosofia,” Flusser Studies, no. 25 (2018): 1-17; the sixth chapter of A. Finger, R. Guldin, G. Bernardo Krause, Vilém Flusser. An Introduction (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011): 109-129; P. Bozzi, “Rhapsody in blue: Vilém Flusser und der vampyroteuthis infernalis,” Flusser Studies, no. 1 (2005): 1-20; G. Bernardo Krause, “On philosophical fiction,” in R. Guldin, ed., Das Spiel mit der Übersetzung. Figuren der Mehrsprachigkeit im Werk Vilém Flussers (Tübingen-Basel: Francke, 2004): 119- 128. 39 Flusser is extremely skeptical about the documentary function of technical images, not only because of their illusionary character (technical images can be easily manipulated), but because he questions the neutrality of any sort of documentation. Any document presents a point of view, with a system of ethical and political implications, as it were objective. See F. Restuccia, “La realtà sta nella fotografia. Autenticazioni delle immagini della guerra del Libano,” Carte semiotiche, no. 4 (2016): 160-170. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 65 AN-ICON  without any technical help, we can anticipate, but not fully conceive.40 Rethinking illusion as an aware and voluntary simulation allows Flusser to avoid the rationalistic approach to debunking. He realizes that visual interfaces (and even more, haptic and immersive ones) allow for experiencers to overcome their inertia of happiness and take part in the model making process. However, this is only possible if technical images and virtual environments are open to a strong interactive participation.41 This way, by turning the coding process into a playful interaction, it will be possible to bridge the gap between critical and visual thinking, be- tween the elite of programmers and the mass of consumers. 40 V. Flusser, “Vom Virtuellen:” 70-71; V. Flusser, Kommunikologie weiter denken: 78. Recently Andrea Pinotti identified this approach as part of a post-human trend in VR (try to experience the world beyond the limits of the human body and mind, for example by flying as an eagle) as opposed to a humanitarian trend (VR as an empathy machine meant to move the experiencer about social issues). The main limit of the post-human approach is that it will only allow perceiving a non-human world as a human being would perceive it. A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine (Torino: Einaudi, 2021): 201; see also A. Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk? Inter-specific empathy in the age of immersive virtual environments,” in Y. Hadjinicolaou, ed., Visual Engagements. Image Practices and Falconry (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2020): 30-47. The best example of this post-human approach in Flusser is definitely his Vampyrotheutis infernalis. 41 On the (post-)political implications of Flusser’s theory of participation, see M. Menon, Vilém Flusser e la “Rivoluzione dell’Informazione”: Comunicazione, Etica, Politica (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2022): 172-178. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 66 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/17655

The polysemy of Vilém Flusser’s concept of illusi o by Francesco Restuccia Flusser n Illusion Fiction Fontcuberta Idolatry Self-deception Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing The polysemy of Vilém Flusser’s concept of il usion FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA, Sapienza - Università di Roma – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8900-642X https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17655 Abstract Vilém Flusser uses the concept of illusion in a non-systematic way, resulting in two ostensible contra- dictions. First of all, he often uses the term illusion, while criticizing the metaphysic assumptions that it implies; sec- ondly, he seems to both dispraise and value the illusionary nature of technical images. This article aims at clarifying Flusser’s thoughts on illusion in the belief that they are not as conflicting as they might seem at first. In fact, when Flusser deplores the risk of de- ception associated with technical images, he refers to the illusion of transparency. He does not oppose the concept of illusion to a supposed objective truth, on the contrary, he opposes the illusion of the objective nature of images to the awareness of their constructed and mediated character. However, a rational demystification of illu- sions is not a viable option, since, according to Flusser, they are the result of a voluntary self-deception: we suppress our critical thinking because we cannot bear its complexity, we want images to “release us from the necessity for conceptual, explanatory thought.” This is why Flusser thinks that aware illusion – in other words: fiction – can help us overcome our “inertia of happiness” and develop a critical imagination. Keywords Flusser Illusion Fiction Fontcuberta Idolatry Self-deception To quote this essay: F. Restuccia, “The polysemy of Vilém Flusser’s concept of illusion,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 52-66, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17655 FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 52 AN-ICON  Leafing through the pages of Herbarium (1982- 1985) by Joan Fontcuberta one is immediately seduced by the beauty of these black and white analog photographs of exotic plants, whose geometric details remind one of Karl Blossfeldt’s work. The whole series is presented as scientific documentation, including the botanical nomencla- ture of these newly discovered species. Only at a second glance one might notice that something is wrong: some details in the image, the strange pseudo-Latin names. What appeared to be plants are actually small assemblages of pieces of plastic, fragments and parts of animals found by the artist in the industrial outskirts of Barcelona. We have been victims of an illusion. These images, both hyper-re- alistic and extremely unlikely, aim to deceive us and at the same time to reveal the deception. Without any digital ma- nipulation, Fontcuberta’s work on the one hand invites us to reflect upon the supposed immediate and documentary character of photography, on the other hand it allows us to experience unprecedented and surprising configurations. Fontcuberta had an important intellectual col- laboration with a philosopher and media theorist who ded- icated many of his writings to discussing the illusionary character of technical images: Vilém Flusser.1 Although the term “illusion” appears only rarely in his writings and in a non-systematic way, Flusser was definitely fascinated by the ambiguity of this concept, which, as it emerges in Herbarium, can be conceived both as a form of deception, with dangerous and deplorable effects, and as a precious artistic and epistemic tool.2 Often Flusser refers to illusive phenomena in a pejorative way; sometimes he tends to re- ject the metaphysical assumption – implied by the concept of illusion – that an objective truth can be found beyond 1 Flusser also wrote the introduction to the German edition of Herbarium: V. Flusser, “Einführung ‘Herbarium’ von Joan Fontcuberta,” in Standpunkte: Texte zur Fotografie (Göttingen: European Photography, 1998): 113-116. 2 As Carrillo Canán wrote, “Flusser has no explicit theory on deception but as with many critical thinkers, his theory is to a great extent a theory of deception.” A.J.L. Carrillo Canán, “Deception and the ‘magic’ of ‘technical images’ according to Flusser,” Flusser Studies, no. 4 (2008): 1-12, 1. Significantly, neither “illusion,” “deception,” nor “fiction” was chosen as one of the 235 entries that make up the glossary of Flusseriana. S. Zielinski, P. Weibel, D. Irrgang, eds., Flusseriana: An Intellectual Toolbox (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2015). FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 53 AN-ICON  appearance; on other occasions he seems convinced that the art of illusion is the best tool for the creative training of our imagination. Therefore, it could be useful to try to put an order, as far as this is possible, to Flusser’s thoughts on illusion, in the belief that they are not as conflicting as they might initially seem. First we will analyze the contexts where he deplores the risk of deception associated with any mediation, and with new media and technical images in particular; then we will consider his critiques of the con- cepts of illusion and especially of disillusion, focusing on his theory of a voluntary self-deception; finally we will see how Flusser approves of illusion when it is understood as a form of fiction. Illusion as deception The German word that Flusser uses the most when referring to the negative sense of illusion is “Täu- schung,” which could be translated as “deception.” The verb “täuschen” literally means to exchange, to swap: by exchanging two different things, one mistakes one for an- other one. Being deceived is, first of all, taking something for something else, or conferring to one thing the value that we should only confer to something else. What are the two things that, according to Flusser, might dangerously be confused? The model and its copy, the signified and the signifier, the thing and the image. Deception is “a reversal [Umkehrung] of the vectors of significance,”3 or a “reversal of the function of the image:”4 images should represent the world and help us “to orientate” ourselves within it, but we end up forgetting about the world and living in function of the images we have created.5 Images “are supposed to be 3 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), trans. A. Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000): 37, 68. 4 Ibid.: 10. 5 On the concept of reversal as the key to understanding Flusser’s conception of technical images see D. Irrgang, Vom Umkehren der Bedeutungsvektoren: Prototypen des Technischen Bildes bei Vilém Flusser (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2017). FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 54 AN-ICON  maps but they turn into screens: Instead of representing [vorstellen] the world, they obscure [verstellen] it.”6 Flusser is not concerned by the deceptions that occur when we take an image of A for an image of B. As long as we truly know that something is an image, we also know that it is a human construction, that it needs to be interpreted and that this interpretation might be wrong. The real problem arises when images conceal their own nature. Flusser’s main models for his (implicit) theory of deception are Plato’s concept of eidolon and the Jewish and early Christian conception of idolatry.7 In his interpre- tation, both Plato’s eidola and religious idols are images that should mediate and represent something else (ideas for Plato, God in the Jewish and Christian tradition), but instead of presenting themselves as such, they end up being taken for what they should refer to. Flusser rethinks the concept of idolatry in a secular way, conceiving it as that particular form of deception which occurs when we do not recognize the symbolic and cultural nature of an image. In Towards a Philosophy of Photography idolatry is defined as “the inability to read off ideas from the elements of the image, despite the ability to read these elements themselves; hence: worship of images.”8 It is important to notice that idolatry is not only a perceptual deception, but has effects on human behavior: Flusser writes, metaphor- ically, that images are “worshiped” when they “have a hold over people as objects.”9 Sometimes, in order to identify this particular form of deception Flusser uses, instead of “idolatry,” the term “hallucination.” 6 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10. 7 Ibid.: 11; V. Flusser, “The codified world” (1978), in Writings, trans. E. Eisel (Minneapolis- London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002): 35-41, 39. See also F. Restuccia, “Flusser against idolatry,” Flusser Studies, no. 26 (2018): 1-15 and F. Restuccia, Il contrattacco delle immagini. Tecnica, media e idolatria a partire da Vilém Flusser (Milan: Meltemi, 2021). 8 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 83. A similar “semiotic” definition of idolatry was proposed by Augustine: “Now, he is in bondage to a sign who uses, or pays homage to, any significant object without knowing what it signifies,” S. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson jr. (London: Pearson, 1958): III, IX, 13. 9 V. Flusser, “Design: obstacle for/to the removal of obstacles” (1993), in The Shape of Things. A Philosophy of Design (London: Reaktion Books, 1999): 58-61, 60. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 55 AN-ICON Imagination can dialectically reverse and become hallucination. Images resulting from this reversed imagination stop working as mediation and become opaque surfaces hiding the world. The se- mantic vectors invert and point towards their producer instead of pointing towards the world.10 It is important to notice that this sort of reversal can happen with any kind of mediation and not only with images. When we stop using texts and conceptual thinking to help us understand the world, and we start using the world in order to understand our texts, or forcing data to fit into our conceptual grid, then we are victims of another form of deception. In this case Flusser talks about texto- latry, as opposed to idolatry, or paranoia, as opposed to hallucination.11 This dangerous reversal of imagination hap- pens when we do not recognize a medium, especially a visual one, as such. Therefore, the most illusionary images are those that appear transparent, concealing their status of images and presenting themselves as objective reality. According to Flusser, technical images – all images pro- duced by apparatuses, starting with photography – are the most deceiving, in this sense, because their mechanical production seems to grant an automatic and almost natural process that avoids any human and cultural interference.12 “But this ‘objectivity’ of the photograph is deceptive [täus- chend],”13 because technology is a human product and is also culturally biased. The program that apparatuses use to code images was written by human beings and is an externalization of the visual schemata that they would use if they were drawing an image themselves. When we see 10 V. Flusser, “Iconoclastia,” Cavalo azul, no. 8 (1979): 78-84, 79, my translation; see also V. Flusser Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10. 11 The choice of the last couple of words is due to their etymology: “hallucination,” which might be related to the Latin word lux (light), refers to visual thinking, whereas “paranoia,” which comes from the Greek word nous (intellect), refers to conceptual thinking. See V. Flusser, “Iconoclastia:” 79, and V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 10. 12 H. Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1844) was one of the first to assert such a natural character of photography. See K. Walton, “Transparent pictures: on the nature of photographic realism,” Critical Inquiry, no. 11 (1984): 246-277, https://www.doi.org/10.1086/448287. 13 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 51. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 56 AN-ICON  a drawing or any other traditional image, though, we are aware that what we are looking at is someone’s interpre- tation of the world, and not the world itself; but when we see a photograph, or a video, we assume that what we are looking at is a direct emanation of reality. “This lack of criticism of technical images is potentially dangerous […] for the reason that the ‘objectivity’ of technical images is an illusion [Täuschung].”14 The elements of a photograph appear to be “symptoms” of the world, instead of “symbols” that need to be “decoded.”15 The only way to avoid idolatry, hallucination and deception is to recognize the symbols contained in an image and decode them, discovering the “programmed concepts” they represent, “so as to identify the true significance of the photograph.”16 Based on what has been discussed so far, Flusser seems to maintain a sort of platonic dualism: im- ages are just symbols and should not be confused with the real world. However, Flusser refuses this approach as “‘metaphysical’ […] in the worst sense of the word.”17 The reason why he deplores the illusion of transparency of tech- nical images is because, according to him, no such thing as an immediate reality can be found, not even beyond images. Even “the amorphous stew of phenomena (‘the material world’) is an illusion [Täuschung],”18 since it is only accessible through our nervous system and is therefore also a construction. In an interview with Florian Rötzer he declared: The concept of simulation disturbs me. When something is simulated, that is, when it looks like something else, there must be something being simulated. In the term simulation or simulacrum lies a deep metaphysical belief that something can be simulated. I do not share 14 Ibid.: 15. 15 Ibid.; V. Flusser, “Für eine Theorie der Techno-Imagination, 1980 in Standpunkte: Texte zur Fotografie: 8-16, 8. 16 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 44. 17 Ibid.: 62. 18 V. Flusser, “Form and material,” in Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design: 22-29, 22. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 57 AN-ICON this belief [...]. In my opinion in the word simulation hides what is left of a belief in the absolute.19 Flusser is not afraid that the real world could be replaced with a simulation: on the one hand because our technologies do not allow us to build virtual worlds as defined as the experience of the world built by our nervous system, on the other hand because if this ever happened, then it would not make sense to distinguish these experi- ences as belonging to different levels of reality.20 Moreover our lifeworld and our simulations are already intertwined, since the experiences we have in the former affect those we have in the latter and vice versa. The real illusion is the possibility of accessing a pure, immediate reality. If all is construction, then why is Flusser con- cerned? Because if we assumed that images – and gener- ally our whole experience of the world – are immediate and pure, then we would accept them acritically. We would start unconsciously absorbing interpretations of reality without questioning them, and our imagination would slowly be- come lethargic. We should then try to avoid surrendering to the illusion of transparency, train our imagination and learn to decode the images we are surrounded by. But how can we do this? Is a rationalistic debunking the only way out of deception? Illusion as self-deception In the essay Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch Flusser rethinks the movie theater as a modern version of21 Plato’s cave. People sit in a dark space looking at images 19 V. Flusser, Zwiegespräche (Göttingen: European Photography, 1996): 230-231, my translation. See J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), trans. S. Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Flusser considered Baudrillard a friend and often quotes him in his final years, although mostly polemically. 20 V. Flusser, “Vom Virtuellen,” in F. Rötzer, P. Weibel, eds., Cyberspace. Zum medialen Gesamtkunstwerk (München: Boer, 2002): 65-71; V. Flusser, Kommunikologie weiter denken (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008): 75-77. 21 V. Flusser, “Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch,” in Lob der Oberflächigkeit. Für eine Phänomenologie der Medien (Bensheim-Düsseldorf: Bollman Verlag, 1993): 153-166. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 58 AN-ICON  projected on the wall in front of them, ignoring the world outside the “cave.” What does Flusser’s interpretation of the myth teach us? That people want to stay in the cave, they are not chained, they do not desire to be freed. Their illusion is voluntary. According to Flusser commercial cinema still has some degree of idolatry: people contemplate those images acritically, as pure entertainment, without question- ing the message that is being passed. Therefore they are “programmed” by the technical images to think and act in a certain way: the same people who leave the movie theater, writes Flusser, will form a line to enter the supermarket. They are victims of a double illusion: on the one hand they see the lights projected on the screen as a world taking shape in front of their eyes, on the other hand they end up believing that the people, the feelings, the values they perceived somehow exist and have a life of their own, that they are not the creation of a team of artists and technicians. However, neither of the two forms of illusion is a complete deception. Any film spectator knows how a film is made: they know the impression of movement is produced by the rapid sequence of the frames, they know the events por- trayed have been written, designed and reproduced, but they choose to believe in them. “Moviegoers are believers not in good faith, but in bad faith [böse Glaubens]: they know better, but don’t want to know. This is not magic, but something new.”22 In Towards a Philosophy of Photography, writ- ten around three years later, Flusser further develops his conception of a voluntary illusion, or belief in bad faith. Even though people nowadays act as if they were under the magic spell of technical images – they see a commer- cial and buy the product, they watch a video and change their political opinion – yet they do not believe in those images in the same way as people belonging to traditional magic cultures believed in their images. While the latter did not develop their critical consciousness (their conceptual 22 Ibid.: 163, my translation. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 59 AN-ICON  thinking), which can only be trained through literacy,23 the former do have it, but end up suppressing it. Both Native Americans and functionaries believe in the reality of images, but functionaries do this out of bad faith. After all, they have learned to write at school and consequently should know better. Functionaries have a historical consciousness and critical awareness but they suppress these. They know that the war in Lebanon is not a clash between good and evil but that specific causes have specific consequences there. They know that the toothbrush is not a sacred object but a product of Western history. But they have to suppress their superior knowledge of this.24 The main sources for Flusser’s conception of a belief in bad faith might be Johan Huizinga and Marcel Mauss.25 However, these authors developed the idea of a voluntary belief, or a partially aware illusion, in order to describe traditional magical thinking and not only the con- temporary experience of technical images.26 By trying to prove that any magic ritual has a playful dimension, just as any game has a ritual dimension, Huizinga affirms that no illusion is ever a complete deception: it is always combined with some degree of simulation. As far as I know, ethnologists and anthropologists concur in the opinion that the mental attitude in which the great religious feasts of savages are celebrated and witnessed is not one of complete illusion. There is an underlying consciousness of things “not be- ing real.” [...] A certain element of “makebelieve” is operative in all 23 V. Flusser, “Line and surface” (1973), in Writings: 21-34; V. Flusser, Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft? (Göttingen: Immatrix, 1987). 24 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 63. 25 V. Flusser, Post-History (1983), trans. R. Maltez Novaes (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013): 99- 106; V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 27; Kommunikologie weiter denken: 245. 26 The notion of “voluntary illusion” [illusion volontaire] can already be found in Paul Souriau, L’imagination de l’artiste (Paris: Librairie Hachette et cie, 1901), while the concept of aware illusion [bewußte Selbsttäuschung] was first developed by Konrad Lange, Die Bewußte Selbsttäuschung als Kern des künstlerischen Genusses (Leipzig: Verlag von Veit & Comp., 1895). FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 60 AN-ICON primitive religions. Whether one is sorcerer or sorcerized one is al- ways knower and dupe at once. But one chooses to be the dupe.27 In a similar way, a few years before, Mauss wrote that any magical performance reveals the collective will to believe in it, both on the part of the spectators and the magician: We are in no doubt that magical facts need constant encourage- ment and that even the sincerest delusions of the magician have always been self-imposed to some degree.28 Yet, one should be able to distinguish between this sort of sincere self-delusion that we can find in the ex- perience of traditional magic, from the “belief in bad faith” that Flusser identifies in the experience of technical images. On the one hand the “underlying consciousness of things ‘not being real’” is still a blurry intuition, on the other hand the critical consciousness reached by educated people is fully developed and can only coexist with illusion if it is partially suppressed. Why do we systematically suppress our critical and conceptual thinking and choose to be deluded? Flusser thinks that this human behavior is not only a result of our tendency to conform. The reason why we need to partially suppress our critical consciousness in order to function within society is that, at this level of complexity, conceptual thinking is no longer efficient. The point is not that people do not understand rational explanations; it is that they do not want to hear them. Commenting on how, during the 1982 Lebanon War, people formed their opinions based on videos and photos, rather than on theoretical analyses, Flusser writes: 27 J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938), trans. R.F.C. Hull (London-Boston-Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949): 22-23. 28 M. Mauss, General Theory of Magic (1902), trans. R. Brain (London-New York: Routledge, 2001): 118. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 61 AN-ICON We are by now sick and tired of explanations and prefer to stick to the photograph that releases us from the necessity for con- ceptual, explanatory thought and absolves us from the bother of going into the causes and consequences of the war in Lebanon: In the image we see with our own eyes what the war looks like. The text simply consists of instructions as to how we are to see.29 We suppress our conceptual thinking because of the cognitive comfort provided by technical apparatus- es that calculate and build images for us. Flusser calls the state of numbness generated by this comfort the inertia of happiness: “It is this inertia of happiness that stands in the way of a changeover.”30 This theory forces us to reconsider the rational- istic approach that one could at first read into Flusser’s cri- tique of deception. If our illusion is somehow self-imposed and the suppression of our critical consciousness is a re- action to the heaviness, the complexity and the abstract- ness of conceptual thinking, which expresses the need to expand the visual, sensory and emotional dimension of existence, we cannot simply debunk our self-delusion by rational means. The only way to overcome the negative aspects of deception is within the image world, therefore through a creative use of illusion. Illusion as fiction When the term “illusion” is used by Flusser with a positive connotation it has the meaning of construction or fiction. In the posthumous book The Surprising Phe- nomenon of Human Communication, where he defines the structure of communication as the infrastructure of human reality, Flusser writes that the act of communicating produc- es the illusion of immortality. We know, due to the suffering of our bodies, that it is an illusion: “Despite our individual and collective memories, we remain mortals. Nevertheless, 29 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography: 62. 30 V. Flusser, Kommunikologie weiter denken: 210. “Es ist diese Trägheit des Glücks, die einer Umschaltung entgegensteht.” FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 62 AN-ICON  this illusion is, still, our own reality, our ontological dignity.”31 In this case illusion is a different name for sense-making, the attribution of meaning, which according to Flusser is what makes us humans. When illusion is conceived in this constructive way, Flusser replaces the term “täuschen” (deceive) with the term “vortäuschen,” which could be translated as “sim- ulate,” “feign.”32 In Shape of Things he defines the verb “to design” as “to concoct something, to simulate [vortäus- chen], to draft, to sketch, to fashion, to have designs on something.”33 A simulation – this constructive form of illu- sion – is not about producing a copy [Abbild], it is about shaping a model [Vorbild].34 In “Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch” Flusser affirms that not only does the sequence of frames produce the illusion of movement, but the very frames are illusions, as they recreate the impression of three dimensional spaces through the two-dimensional disposition of colors. In this context “illusion” is not meant in a negative sense: Flusser is fascinated by the capacity of technical images to evoke meaningful and visual experiences from non-meaningful and often non-visual elements, such as the bits of infor- mation for digital photography.35 Technical images have an illusionistic effect in that they evoke an impression by means of calculation. The point-projection perspective designed by renaissance painters, the trompe-l’œil designed by baroque architects, the tricks designed by stage magicians produce emotional effects using rational techniques. Experimental photographers and programmers work in the same way, but 31 V. Flusser, The Surprising Phenomenon of Human Communication (1975), trans. R. Maltez Novaes, D. Naves (Metaflux, 2016): 154. 32 V. Flusser, “Gärten,” in Dinge und Undinge. Phänomenologische Skizzen (München-Wien: Carl Hanser, 1993): 46-52, 51. 33 V. Flusser, “About the word design,” in Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design: 17. 34 V. Flusser, “Abbild – Vorbild oder: was heißt darstellen?,” in Lob der Oberflächlichkeit (Düsseldorf: Bollmann, 1993): 293-317. 35 Even in the case of analog photography, according to Flusser, the image could be reduced to computable elements, such as the exposure time, the focal aperture, and the ISO setting. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 63 AN-ICON  with more efficient tools: they can program an apparatus that will translate an alphanumeric input into a visual output. According to Flusser, this allows for the first time for an experimental approach to image making and therefore an element of control over the visual world: a synthesis between conceptual-critical thinking and visu- al-emotional thinking. The word “experimental” is used in a literal sense: technical images can be used for experiments. One can insert a certain input, see what the outcome is, and consequently change the input in order to achieve a different result. If one writes the equation of a Mandelbrot frac- tal in a computer in order to visualize it on the screen, one may be surprised by the outcome and therefore learn from it. The complexity of that geometrical figure where the to- tality is infinitely repeated in the parts could not be perfectly foreseen. One sits in front of a keyboard, taking one dot element after another out of the memory, to fit it into an image on the screen, to compute it. This step-by-step process of extraction can be automated so that it can proceed very quickly. The images appear on the screen one after another in breathtaking speed. One can follow this sequence of images, just as if the imagination had become self-sufficient; or as if it had traveled from inside (let’s say from the cranium) to outside (into the computer); or as if one could observe one’s own dreams from the outside. In fact, some of the appearing images can be surprising: they are unexpected images.36 The idea of an experimental character of tech- nical images could be better understood by taking into consideration Flusser’s notion of science fiction, where he further develops the relationship between conceptual and emotional thinking. With this expression Flusser not only refers to the literary genre, to which, moreover, he 36 V. Flusser, “A new imagination,” in Writings: 110-116, 114. For a closer analysis of this essay and for a discussion about the idea of surprising images and the externalization of imagination, see L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence (2005), trans. N.F. Schott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010): 98-101. See also V. Flusser, “Ein neuer Platonismus?,” kulturRRevolution, no. 19 (1988): 6. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 64 AN-ICON  contributed with many charming short stories,37 but also reflects about the deep inner connection between science as fiction and fiction as science: something that has been called a “speculative fiction.”38 Any scientific knowledge is based on the development of models and simulations that are, strictly speaking, illusions. When fiction is enhanced with the experimental exactness provided by technical im- ages, it becomes a powerful tool to create surprising mod- els that will allow us to think of what we are not yet able to conceive. This is, according to Flusser, the greatest po- tentiality of virtual simulations: they allow us to experience – emotionally, visually, haptically – what until now we were only able to calculate; and at the same time they allow us to calculate and control experiences that until now we could only vaguely imagine. Flusser believes that virtual environ- ments, and in general all technical images, should not be used to reproduce what already exists for recreational pur- poses,39 but should “bring to virtuality” alternative worlds. Thanks to simulated environments, for example, we could be able to experience a world where all living creatures are sulfur-based instead of carbon-based – a world that, 37 Most of Flusser’s philosophical science fiction short stories can be found in the following publications: V. Flusser, Ficções Filosóficas (São Paulo: Edusp, 1998); V. Flusser, Angenommen: Eine Szenenfolge (Göttingen: European Photography, 2000); V. Flusser, L. Bec, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A treatise with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste (1987), trans. V.A. Pakis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). See also Flusser’s essays on fiction: V. Flusser, “Da ficção,” O diário (August 26, 1966); V. Flusser, “Science fiction” (1988), trans. W. Hanff, Flusser Studies, no. 20 (2015): 1-3, where Flusser writes about a fantasia essata (exacting fantasy), which he attributes to Leonardo da Vinci. 38 J. Torres, “Homo Fictor: em busca de uma ficção filosófica,” Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies 2, no. 4 (2020): 1-12, 7. Much has been published on Flusser’s theory of fiction, and science fiction in particular. See G. Salvi Philipson, “Flusser para além do ensaio: de outros modos possíveis de habitar a intersecção entre ficção e filosofia,” Flusser Studies, no. 25 (2018): 1-17; the sixth chapter of A. Finger, R. Guldin, G. Bernardo Krause, Vilém Flusser. An Introduction (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011): 109-129; P. Bozzi, “Rhapsody in blue: Vilém Flusser und der vampyroteuthis infernalis,” Flusser Studies, no. 1 (2005): 1-20; G. Bernardo Krause, “On philosophical fiction,” in R. Guldin, ed., Das Spiel mit der Übersetzung. Figuren der Mehrsprachigkeit im Werk Vilém Flussers (Tübingen-Basel: Francke, 2004): 119- 128. 39 Flusser is extremely skeptical about the documentary function of technical images, not only because of their illusionary character (technical images can be easily manipulated), but because he questions the neutrality of any sort of documentation. Any document presents a point of view, with a system of ethical and political implications, as it were objective. See F. Restuccia, “La realtà sta nella fotografia. Autenticazioni delle immagini della guerra del Libano,” Carte semiotiche, no. 4 (2016): 160-170. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 65 AN-ICON  without any technical help, we can anticipate, but not fully conceive.40 Rethinking illusion as an aware and voluntary simulation allows Flusser to avoid the rationalistic approach to debunking. He realizes that visual interfaces (and even more, haptic and immersive ones) allow for experiencers to overcome their inertia of happiness and take part in the model making process. However, this is only possible if technical images and virtual environments are open to a strong interactive participation.41 This way, by turning the coding process into a playful interaction, it will be possible to bridge the gap between critical and visual thinking, be- tween the elite of programmers and the mass of consumers. 40 V. Flusser, “Vom Virtuellen:” 70-71; V. Flusser, Kommunikologie weiter denken: 78. Recently Andrea Pinotti identified this approach as part of a post-human trend in VR (try to experience the world beyond the limits of the human body and mind, for example by flying as an eagle) as opposed to a humanitarian trend (VR as an empathy machine meant to move the experiencer about social issues). The main limit of the post-human approach is that it will only allow perceiving a non-human world as a human being would perceive it. A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine (Torino: Einaudi, 2021): 201; see also A. Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk? Inter-specific empathy in the age of immersive virtual environments,” in Y. Hadjinicolaou, ed., Visual Engagements. Image Practices and Falconry (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2020): 30-47. The best example of this post-human approach in Flusser is definitely his Vampyrotheutis infernalis. 41 On the (post-)political implications of Flusser’s theory of participation, see M. Menon, Vilém Flusser e la “Rivoluzione dell’Informazione”: Comunicazione, Etica, Politica (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2022): 172-178. FRANCESCO RESTUCCIA 66 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18191

Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two “moments” of the virtualCaravaggio experience by Francesco Zucconi Frank Stella Michael Fried Immersion and Specularity Virtual Reality Cinema Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two “moments” of the virtual experience FRANCESCO ZUCCONI, Università IUAV di Venezia – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9580-1000 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18191 Abstract In the first of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that he gave at Harvard in 1984, Frank Stella focused on “The necessity of creating pictorial space that is capable of dissolving its own perimeter and surface plane,” and claimed that “No one helped lighten this burden more than Caravaggio.” At a certain point in his talk, the American artist went so far as to say that Caravaggio anticipated the invention of the gyroscope, the technological device which makes the virtual experience possible. Stella’s lecture is the starting point for developing an anachronistic path through pictorial and digital media, in light of their ability to produce illusionistic effects on viewers. In particular, building on Mi- chael Fried’s theory of art and image, this paper investigates virtual experience with reference to two different moments: the “immersive” moment, in which one has the impression of stepping into the frame, and the “specular” one, where the illusionistic effects are revealed; the attraction, when sinking into an image that has become an environment, and the distancing, when the image itself beckons to us and we are invited to reflect on our position as viewers. Keywords Caravaggio Frank Stella Michael Fried Immersion and Specularity Virtual Reality Cinema To quote this essay: F. Zucconi, “Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two ‘moments’ of the virtual experience,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 67-88, https://doi. org/10.54103/ai/18191 FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 67 AN-ICON  Introduction I put on the headset and immerse myself in another world – in a theme park or in a refugee camp, in a disaster-stricken village or perhaps in the city of Hiroshi- ma immediately after the launch of the atomic bomb.1 In some cases I am a mere sightseer, while in other cases I am the “witness” to significant events. I have to enter into an empathetic relationship with those who dwell very far from me, I am expected to “put myself in their shoes” and to experience their condition “directly.”2 Yet I cannot help but realize, sooner or later, that I find myself physically in the safe spaces of a museum or a gallery, in the section dedicated to VR cinema at the Venice International Film Festival, or perhaps in the pavilion of an NGO that uses virtual reality as a form for raising public awareness on sensitive topics. No matter how effectively illusionistic this virtual environment is. Always, in the media experiences of VR cinema, something pushes me inward, draws me into the virtual environment, while, at the same time, something else pushes me out, reminding me that I am just facing an image, and bringing me back to the spatial and temporal coordinates of our physical world.3 This article does not intend to analyse immer- sive videos by trying to deconstruct the nonchalant use of the notion of “empathy” and the ideology of “transparency” that has characterized their promotion, which has already 1 As an example of a virtual theme park experience, see “Disneyland Paris - 360 VR - Main Street,” Disneyland Paris, YouTube video, 1.19, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RNly6mSF0-o, accessed January 10, 2023. Regarding the applications of such technology to the field of humanitarian communication, see http://unvr.sdgactioncampaign.org, accessed January 10, 2023. As for the fourth example, please refer to the official web page of the project https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/new-virtual-reality-experience-drops- you-hiroshima-right-after-its-been-bombed-180968903, accessed January 10, 2023. 2 As an emblematic example of the promotional use of a term such as “empathy” and on the idea of putting oneself in another’s place through VR cinema, see https://youtu.be/ vAEjX9S8o2k. 3 These issues can be conceived with reference to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological lesson and the relationship among the notions of Bildding (the physical thing), Bildobjekt (image-object) and Bildsujet (image-subject). See E. Husserl, “Phantasy and Image Consciousness,” in Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898-1925). Edmund Husserl Collected Works, vol 11 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). On the illusionistic forms of virtual reality, examined through a rereading of Husserl, see P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan: Mimesis International, 2020): 46-52. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 68 AN-ICON  been the subject of several studies.4 Rather, I would like to take up and further develop some issues present in my previous works, with the aim of opening a space for reflec- tion on immersive technology following an anachronistic path through pictorial and digital media by referring to some concepts of art history and theory.5 The main objective is to focus, in analytical and theoretical terms, on the double effect of attraction and distancing described above, as structuring the experience of VR cinema. While the impossibility of fully capturing and keeping the viewers within the virtual environment has mostly been conceived as a negative limitation of such technology, in this paper I try to argue otherwise. Through the reference to a repertoire of images from the past, the aim is to describe the paradoxical character of an experi- ence that is made up as much of attraction as of distancing. But before this can be sustained there are some interme- diate steps. After this introduction, in the second section, taking up a hypothesis advanced by Frank Stella, I explain the idea that gives the title to this paper: that Caravaggio, anticipated the invention of gyroscope technology and therefore made possible the first immersive experience in the history of Western painting. In the third, fourth and fifth sections, building on Michael Fried, I try to emphasize the two moments that characterize Caravaggio’s paintings: immersion, the formal device that attracts within the image, and specularity, understood as the set of figurative and compositional elements that produce an effect of aware- ness on the viewer.6 In the conclusion, I reconsider Fried’s analysis and the concepts that characterize his theoretical 4 The literature on the notion of empathy is vast and constantly evolving with reference to new technological and expressive forms. For an early critical reflection on the facile use of this concept in relation to VR cinema, see W. Uricchio, S. Ding, S. Wolozin, and B. Boyacioglu, Virtually There: Documentary Meets Virtual Reality Conference Report (The MIT Open Documentary Laboratory, 2016): 17-18, http://opendoclab.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/ uploads/2016/11/MIT_OpenDocLab_VirtuallyThereConference.pdf, accessed January 10, 2023. 5 I refer to F. Zucconi, Displacing Caravaggio: Art, Media, and Humanitarian Visual Culture (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 6 On these two notions, which will also be referred to in the following pages, see M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 69 AN-ICON  work in relation to contemporary media. What emerges is an opportunity for developing an ethic of VR: to what extent, can immersive technology facilitate the assumption of a testimonial gaze? Under what conditions can the gesture of wearing a virtual reality headset assume a critical value? Frank Stella’s hypothesis The American artist Frank Stella is, without a doubt, someone who understands visual surfaces and me- dia frames, their ability to offer illusionistic effects. One only has to think of his works in the 1960s, where a series of frames relentlessly squeeze against each other, leaving a small coloured square in the centre. Taking inspiration from Louis Marin’s analysis of Gran Cairo (1962), it is fair to ask whether these squares-frames are a well or a pyramid (Fig. 1). As the French historian and theorist notes, they are “a well and a pyramid, but never at the same time. The eye cannot predict the necessary and the arbitrary moment of conversion in which all the serious play of the frame and its modern and contemporary figures seem to be concen- trated: the play of the rhythm of presentation and repre- sentation, the play of the subject of the art of seeing and the art of describing.”7 If we compare them to the famous example of the rabbit/duck illustration investigated by Ludwig Wittgen- stein and Ernst Gombrich, Stella’s paintings do not merely work on the viewers’ perceptual and cognitive limits in the recognition of the figures depicted. Rather, the represen- tational undecidability and instability of image produce a spatial effect, by modulating the relation between the ob- serving subject and the observed object. In other words, when confronted with the rabbit/duck illustration, the viewer does not have the illusion of being confronted with a duck or rabbit coming off the page; rather, the graphic representa- tion produces an illusionistic effect that makes it impossible to visualize the two animals at the same time. In contrast 7 L. Marin, On Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002): 372. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 70 AN-ICON  to that, Stella’s paintings produce an illusionistic effect to the extent that they alternately draw the viewer inward – as in a well – or push him or her out, as if the surface had a pyramidal shape. Those who observe Stella’s paintings are thus subjected to the rhythmic redundancy of the “opac- ity” of the painted frame that becomes recognizable – we might say that makes itself “transparent” – in the metaphors of the pyramid and the well.8 In more general terms than those used by Marin, we might speak of Stella’s work as a gestalt effect capable of inducing, alternately, in the viewer both the impression of attraction and that of rejection or distancing. In fact, beyond the series of concentric squares, Stella’s artistic research would continue in the 1970s and 1980s by focusing on the relationship between the space Fig. 1. Frank Stella, Gran Cairo, 1962, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, purchase with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art; © Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 8 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (London: Pearson, 1973); E. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 71 AN-ICON  of the canvas and the pictorial space, between the surface and depth (Fig. 2). Fig. 2. Frank Stella, Eccentric Polygon, 1974, Jane Kahan Gallery, New York; purchased by Walter and Joan Wolf, Indianapolis, Indiana; ©Frank Stella/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Beyond the theory of art that is implied in Stel- la’s works, it behoves us to pay particular attention, then, to what he had to say in the first of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that he gave at Harvard in 1984. In developing a line of thought that sweeps from Leonardo da Vinci to Seurat, and from Vermeer to Velázquez, Stella focused on a theoretical problem that is crucial in the history of arts and images; a problem that equally concerns both “old” and “new” media. “The necessity of creating pictorial space that is capable of dissolving its own perimeter and surface plane,” he says, “is the burden that modern painting was born with.”9 And immediately afterwards he goes on to state that “No one helped lighten this burden more than Caravaggio.”10 As often happens, when artists are willing to share their theory, their tone tends to be assertive: Stella’s remarks are full of ideas for creative practice but possibly a font of perplexity for art historians. Still, how can one not ap- preciate his attempt to concisely express the transformation 9 F. Stella, Working Space (Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 1986): 10. 10 Ibid. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 72 AN-ICON  that Caravaggio’s painting forced on the regimes of pictorial representation of space and bodies? Stella’s observations aptly describe Caravaggio’s propensity for experimenting with the phenomenological limits of the idea of “realism,” by creating environments in which the viewer’s gaze must grope its way around, wrapped up in the composition but equally attracted by the vivid emphasis on colour, and by the chromatic nuances seen in some of the details. Stella’s reflections did not stop here. He de- veloped his argument by examining Caravaggio’s entire body of works and focuses on a few paintings. He used anachronistic terminology to highlight several aspects that prefigure artistic and technological developments that took place in the following decades as well as to identify their potentialities: To be able to carry in our minds the space of Caravaggio’s large commanding works, such as the Vatican Deposition and the Seven Acts of Mercy from Naples, we need some kind of image to help form an idea about the design and purpose of Caravaggio’s pictorial space. The image that comes to mind is that of the gyroscope—a spinning sphere, capable of accommodating movement and tilt. We have to imagine ourselves caught up within this sphere, experienc- ing the movement and motion of painting’s action. [...] The space that Caravaggio created is something that twentieth-century painting could use: an alternative both to the space of conventional realism and to the space of what has come to be conventional painterliness. The sense of a shaped spatial presence enveloping the action of the painting and the location of the creator and spectator is a by-product of the success of Caravaggio’s realistic illusionism.11 Within a reflection on VR cinema and immersive media, it is the idea of “realistic illusionism” and even more the metaphor of the gyroscope that attracts attention. The gyroscope, invented in the 19th century by French physi- cist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault is still the basis of virtual reality devices. It is also thanks to it that the visors worn 11 Ibid.: p. 11. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 73 AN-ICON  by viewers can track head movements and thus accurately detect movement along one, two or three axes, thus mak- ing the virtual experience possible. Without the gyroscope, there is no possible balance between the viewer’s gestures and movements in the virtual environment, nor any possi- bility of orientation within it. It is time to give a chance to Stella and his hypothesis that Caravaggio invented the gyroscope and with it virtual reality helmets. But I would like to develop this suggestion in a key that is not merely “technological,” by investigating the forms of composition that character- ize the pictorial medium and the effects they produce. To do so, it is necessary to re-conceive the American artist’s hypothesis into a series of operational questions: what is or would be, exactly, in Caravaggio’s painting capable of prefiguring the conditions of illusionism made possible by contemporary technologies? How do his paintings help us understand the dual effect – hitherto described as one of attraction and distancing – that we experience within immersive environments like those of VR cinema? The two moments of Narcissus To my knowledge, no contemporary photogra- pher or artist has yet investigated in detail the instant when viewers put on or take off their virtual reality helmets. This is really a pity, because the image of that precise instant could make us think a lot about the potentialities of such technology. We must therefore be content with the myths of the past and their survival in our contemporary practices. About to plunge into a virtual world, we find the figure of Narcissus. As noted by Andrea Pinotti – who has identified in Narcissus a kind of “conceptual character” of the an-iconic tradition in Western visual culture – there are two versions of the myth: the first aimed at producing a “naïve” image of the young boy who falls into the illusionistic trap of the image (recurring in Plotinus, Pausanias, Marsilio Ficino, etc.); the second coinciding with a “conscious” Nar- cissus (Ovidian variant), who is aware of the, so to speak, FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 74 AN-ICON  media environment with which he is confronted and with which he is about to make one body.12 It matters little that the Narcissus painted at the end of the Sixteenth century is not a signed work by Caravaggio but only an attribution, widely discussed by art historians (Fig. 3). For the purposes of the reasoning proposed in this paper, it should be noted that the young man is already fully rapt and about to plunge into the world of image. Yet, the figure of the double reflection still reveals a gap between two representational and sensible worlds or regimes. Fig. 3. Caravaggio (attribution), Narcissus, 1597-1599, Rome, Palazzo Barberini. Explicitly taking up the terms proposed by Mi- chael Fried, Narcissus constitutes an explication of the two “moments” that Caravaggio’s painting produces on view- ers. According to Fried – let it be said in passing: a friend 12 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine. Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Torino: Einaudi, 2021): 3-6. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 75 AN-ICON  and one of the most important interpreter of Stella’s work – Caravaggio’s pictorial corpus involve a moment defined as “immersive, imagining the painter as so caught up, so immersed, in this phase of his work on the painting as to be less than fully aware of any sharp distinction between the painting and himself.”13 The second “‘moment,’ notionally instantaneous, of separating or indeed recoiling from the painting, of becoming detached from it, which is to say of no longer being immersed in work on it but rather of see- ing it, taking it in, as if for the first time; I call that ‘moment’ specular, meaning thereby to emphasize the strictly visual or optical relation between the artist - viewer and the image, or image - artefact, that has just brought into being.”14 Reading these pages on Caravaggio, thoughts evidently run to the dialectic between “absorption” and “theatricality”15 identified by Fried himself in the painting of the eighteenth century, or to that between “art” and “ob- jecthood”16 as a key to theoretical and critical interpreta- tion of the relationship between media, art and spatiality in the second half of the twentieth century. Even before the eighteenth century, well before the twentieth-century and, we might add, contemporary media experience, Caravag- gio would have had the ability to reflect in an original way on the tension between the painter and his work (through the use of self-portraiture), between the canvas and the pictorial space (the composition of volumes, the relation- ship between light and shadow) producing unprecedented effects on viewers, now driving them inward, now pushing them outward. Hovering between the classicism of the myth and the technological actuality of the present, Narcissus is a virtual allegory of the ‘moment’ of immersion, or perhaps I should say of absorption becoming immersion, conjoined with the strongest 13 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 39. 14 Ibid. 15 M. Fried, Theatricality and Absorption: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 16 M. Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 76 AN-ICON possible statement of the specular separation of the viewer — orig- inally the painter-viewer — from the painting. There is in it also the strongest imaginable thematization of mirroring as distinct from painting, another of the basic polarities that, in varying ratios and combinations, structure much of Caravaggio’s art. And of course, it is a scene of hyperbolic self-portraiture, the core practice of his lifelong endeavor.17 Narcissus is in a sense, for the purposes of the anachronistic reasoning I am proposing here, a portrait of the exact moment when the viewer is about to put on the headset to access the virtual experience: it is in the middle, between plunging and retreating. Within Caravaggio: immersion and reflection Beyond the myth, the comparison between contemporary media and the tradition of western art can be developed through other Caravaggio masterpieces, in which the effect of spatial encompassment is strong. Even better, it is possible to argue that some of Caravaggio’s paintings represent the virtual experience as viewed from the outside but not without investigating the effects it pro- duces in those inside. Let us focus on the Taking of Christ (1602) and The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610). In the first of these two paintings (Fig. 4), the centre of attention is located on the left, at the point of Judas’s dramatic gesture of betrayal, toward which all eyes converge, except for those of the disciple, who flees terrified toward the edge of the frame. In the second painting, considered to be the last that Car- avaggio completed before his death, what is represented is the exact moment when Saint Ursula is wounded by Attila after she refuses his advances. What connects the two works, in addition to the horizontal composition and the precise staging of a dramatic event, is the presence of 17 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 139. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 77 AN-ICON  a figure located on the right side of each painting. This is a man shown in profile: he has a black beard and bushy eyebrows. His head is stretched up, as if he were standing on tiptoe so as to better observe the violent scene unfold- ing just a few steps in front of him. In the 1602 painting the man is attempting to lighten the darkness of the night and illuminate Judas’s kiss by means of a lantern, which he holds in front of himself with his right hand. This figure is of particular interest for at least two reasons. The first, which Roberto Longhi divined earlier, is that the man on the right side of the image is Caravaggio himself. This is a self-portrait, one of the many in his picto- rial corpus, confirmed moreover by its reproduction – like a Fig. 4. Caravaggio, Taking of Christ, 1602, Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland. Fig. 5. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610, Naples, Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 78 AN-ICON  signature – in the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (Fig. 5).18 The second reason concerns the role that this figure plays in both works. The art historian Sergio Benedetti – who has the merit of having rediscovered the original Taking of Christ, after years of investigation into various copies – noted that the figure of Caravaggio “is well defined and holds up a lantern, the function of which is purely compositional as it appears to throw no light, the true light source being high on the left, beyond the scene depicted.”19 In a similar way, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit noted how, in this work, “Caravaggio puts himself within the painting not in order to get closer to his historical subject but rather in order to see himself both illuminating and experiencing congested spaces.”20 Even more explicitly, Giovanni Careri identified in this self-portrait a kind of declaration of intent of the artist that invites us to reflect on our position as spectators: “I paint with light, with light I show a scene that belongs to the past, but also to the present, the armour testifies to this. I am here to see the arrest of Christ but I cannot in- tervene, as you spectators, witnesses safe from a violence that outrages and fascinates.”21 By re-conceiving such analytical insights in Fried’s terms, the artist’s self-portrait with lantern can therefore be conceived of both as being in the process of becoming immersed in the pictorial environment and as becoming “expelled from it in a ‘moment’ of specularity which was to all intents and purposes the aim and purpose of that work (the establishment of the painting as a painting, as an artifact to be looked at.)”22 Retracing our steps to the theoretical notions structuring this paper, with these paintings we are confront- ed with two different and apparently contradictory effects. At first, like Caravaggio trying to observe the scene, with 18 R. Longhi, “Un originale di Caravaggio a Rouen e il problema delle copie caravaggesche,” Paragone 121 (1960): 23-36. 19 S. Benedetti, “Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ, a masterpiece rediscovered,” The Burlington Magazine 135, no. 1088 (1993): 731-741, 738. 20 L. Bersani, U. Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge-London: MIT Press, 1998): 57. 21 G. Careri, Caravaggio. La Fabbrica dello Spettatore (Milano: Jaca Book, 2017): 234. 22 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 217. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 79 AN-ICON  or without his lantern, we are pushed into the painting as a medial environment made of light and shadow. Then lat- er, once we have searched the environment and once we have recognized the figure of the painter-witness, we are pushed outward, that is to say that we begin to reflect on the pictorial composition and on our position as viewers: in front of an image, with our feet planted on the museum’s floor, in Dublin, Naples or in another city. Putting it in anachronistic terms, one could first argue that the contemporary experiences offered by VR cinema are also characterized by an “immersive” moment: here the field of view itself coincides with a “portable lan- tern” located on the forehead of the spectator; a wearable lantern that illuminates a spherical space that coincides with full darkness, except for the frontal portion framed from time to time. Darkness that the VR cinema viewer will never have occasion to see or feel, except when it is diegetized in the production of a given narrative effect. At the same time, a “specular” moment, always persists: pri- marily in the glitches of the digital environment; in the very fact that lowering my gaze to look for my body I tend to find nothing or at least the scarcely credible simulation of arms and legs; in the presence of extradiegetic music, in all those compositional effects – whether intended or not by the video-makers – that invite us to see the image behind the simulation of a virtual environment and in so doing to “reflect” on our position as viewers.23 Regarding the image of the pain of others As in many VR cinema projects, the two paint- ings described above are about situations of suffering or violence, scenes which invite the viewer to assume the position of a witness but in which, at the same time, it is impossible to immerse oneself completely. One painting by Caravaggio seems capable of interrogating, more than 23 On the limits of VR cinema, through some concrete examples, see F. Zucconi, “Sulla tendenza utopica nel VR cinema,” Carte Semiotiche 7 (2021): 118-126. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 80 AN-ICON  any other, the paradoxical character of virtual experience, as well as the idea of being able to experience a world and a living condition that are profoundly different from those characterizing the viewer’s everyday life. At the centre of Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St. Matthew (1600) is the half-naked, fully lit body of the assas- sin (Fig. 6). On the left, a group of men in seventeenth-cen- tury clothing recoil, trying to shield themselves from the violence. While an angel hands St. Matthew the palm of martyrdom, on the right we see the gesture of a novice walking away. In the foreground, some catechumens lying on the ground observe the scene. The composition is cen- trifugal: the viewer’s gaze gradually moves away from the centre as it moves from one body to another. In the back- ground, one meets a figure characterized by a particularly intense gaze who seems to stare at the act of violence be- fore his eyes. This is the bearded man leaning out from the black background behind the assassin. Again, that man is Caravaggio. Also in this large painting, the painter portrays himself in the role of a witness to a violent act. Those who would try to go even further in their analysis might go so far as to argue that what Caravaggio painted in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew is not simply a self-portrait, but a “self-portrait as painter.” To support this hypothesis, I would like to emphasize the inclination of the figure’s head to the side to observe the scene as if he had a canvas in front of him (Fig. 7). One could also conceive of the left hand reaching forward as a transfiguration of the palette, while the right hand holds the brush. The artist’s sad gaze might then be re-conceived as a concentrated, absorbed gaze. If this were the case, it would be an antic- ipation of some of the traits that characterize the extraor- dinary visual dispositif that is Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez, notoriously and masterfully analysed by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things: Now he [the painter] can be seen, caught in a moment of stillness, at the neutral centre of this oscillation. His dark torso and bright face are half-way between the visible and the invisible: emerging from FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 81 AN-ICON  Fig. 6. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, 1600, San Luigi dei Francesi Church, Rome. Fig. 7. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, 1600, Rome, San Luigi dei Francesi Church. Detail. that canvas beyond our view, he moves into our gaze; but when, in a moment, he makes a step to the right, removing himself from our gaze, he will be standing exactly in front of the canvas he is painting; he will enter that region where his painting, neglected for an instant, will, for him, become visible once more, free of shadow and free of reticence.24 24 M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) (London- New York: Routledge, 2002): 4. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 82 AN-ICON  In both Velazquez’s and Caravaggio’s master- piece, the self-portrait takes on a theoretical and critical function; they are within the painting and, at the same time, they explicitly invite the viewer to reflect on visual repre- sentation, on the point of view that structures it and on the limits of the composition.25 This may seem a bold interpretation. Yet, look- ing closely at the figure of Caravaggio, it can be argued that the image presented in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew is not only an image of self “regarding the pain of others” but also and at the same time – turning Susan Sontag’s famous expression – an image of self “regarding the image of the pain of others.”26 If in the Taking of Christ and The Martyrdom of St. Ursula the self-portrait is first and fore- most functional in expressing an idea of immersion of the painter-witness in the pictorial event – a closure and full autonomy of the pictorial as an “immersive environment” – in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew there is a shift that calls into question the composition of the image and the effect of immediacy of representation. Reading Fried again, this is a work “in which a Caravaggio semblable at once rush- es to leave the painting and looks back in evident distress, thereby enabling the viewer to recognize his characteristic features on the far threshold of the depicted space.”27 It is not so much or simply that the figure depicting the painter seems about to leave the scene but, as the art historian and theorist writes with great acumen, “rushes to leave the painting” and pushes the viewer’s gaze to the threshold of the image. If the self-portraits of 1602 and 1610 tend to provoke an identification between painter and viewer and reinforce the effect of immersion, that of The Martyrdom 25 For a more in-depth reflection on this painting and on the modernity of Caravaggio’s self- portrait, capable of activating paths of critical reflection on contemporary media and visual culture, see F. Zucconi, “Regarding the image of the pain of others: Caravaggio, Sontag, Leogrande,” Humanities 11 (2022), 44. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11020044. 26 The reference is to the title and thoughts developed in the famous book by S. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003). 27 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 209. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 83 AN-ICON  of St. Matthew traces the effect of immediacy back to the pictorial composition that produces it. As Sontag herself points out in the above-men- tioned book, from the seventeenth century to the tradition of twentieth-century reportage, a self-portrait of the painter, photographer, or director is certainly not enough to vali- date the authenticity and effectiveness of the testimony or its ethical value. The risk of a self-referential drift, even a “narcissistic” tendency, is also discernible behind this trend: why represent ourselves when we are faced with the pain of others? Rather than glibly promote all self-reflexive ten- dencies, the self-portrait of Caravaggio in The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew is useful and interesting to the extent that it is a manifestation of the fact that, despite its illusionistic realism, it remains an image among many other possible images of this event and does not claim to coincide with it and reproduce it through the media for the viewer’s benefit. The self-portrait on the threshold thus becomes a way to intensify the “specular moment” or, in other terms, to underline the fact that even during the more immersive virtual experience, we are just facing an image, a very well structured one. On the one hand, with his gaze, Caravaggio invites the viewer to immerse himself in an encompassing pictorial image; on the other hand, with his positioning and posture, he leads the viewer to observe the theatricality of the scene from another point of view, to analyse it as seen from the outside. Attraction and distancing Picking up the thread, Stella’s hypothesis was taken up and developed in this paper as a theoretical and analytical metaphor, certainly not in mere technological terms. If the gyroscope fitted in virtual reality helmets makes possible the stable connection between the movements we actually make in the physical world and those in the world of images, talking about Caravaggio’s gyroscope meant reflecting on the strategies of producing illusionistic and counter-illusionistic effects, on the balance between the FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 84 AN-ICON  “immersive” and “specular” moments. Reference to the the- oretical and methodological notions proposed by Michael Fried thus made it possible to observe the co-presence of such moments or, rather, such spectatorial effects that per- sist, by transforming, from the history of Western painting to contemporary immersive devices. Through reference to Susan Sontag’s critical theory of photography, it was thus possible to propose a hypothesis for an ethical and political approach to VR. In particular, what has emerged is that the co-presence of illusionistic and counter-illusionistic effects does not constitute a weakening of the experien- tial and testimonial value of immersive experience. On the contrary, a conscious ethical and political approach to VR seems to be able to develop precisely by making viewers feel the threshold between the environment in which they are physically situated and the virtual one. This is why it is not necessary to rely on technological implementations devoted to perfecting, once and for all, the immersive char- acter of VR cinema and other technological devices. While the slogans that accompanied the launch of many virtual reality projects relied on the simplistic use of the notions of “empathy,” “compassion,” and “immersion” in a geo- graphical elsewhere, the most interesting aspect of such technology seems to involve its capacity to produce both identification and estrangement. Like Caravaggio observing the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, even the gap between the physical world, in which the viewer is placed, and the virtual one can be re-conceived in positive terms within artistic experimen- tations capable of reflecting critically on the asymmetrical relations between the observer and the observed, between the here in which we find ourselves and the elsewhere of which we claim to have “direct” experience. In fact, the very ideas of virtual “presence” must be conceived as a media effect, resulting from specific compositional and FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 85 AN-ICON  technological determinations capable of modulating the relationship between subject and environment.28 Examples of artistic projects aimed at inves- tigating such limits are few, but their number is certainly growing. The survey and in-depth study of such exper- iments exceeds the specific objectives of this paper. To name but one – the most important, and often-addressed29 – the installation Carne y arena (2017) by Alejandro González Iñárritu seems precisely to spur spectators into experienc- ing their own awkward extraneousness and powerlessness toward a group of refugees from Mexico who are trying to cross over the border to the United States (Fig. 8). Iñárritu’s subtitle for the installation – “Virtually present, physically invisible” – expresses, perhaps, the urgent need to tackle the paradoxical character of virtual experience. Beyond Caravaggio, building on the analysis and concepts elicited by his painting, the field of experi- mentations of VR cinema and, more generally, virtual reality seems to be able to develop only by taking into account the co-presence of the different moments or effects that define our relationship with such media. Of course, in con- temporary virtual experiences, the viewer never has the opportunity to mirror himself or herself, that is, to see his or her own image reflected inside the media environment. The notion of “specularity” as understood in Narcissus and Caravaggio’s self-portraits seems in this sense to lose rel- evance. But at this point it should be clear that this notion 28 On this point, see V. Catricalà, R. Eugeni, “Technologically modified self–centred worlds. Modes of presence as effects of sense in virtual, augmented, mixed and extended reality,” in F. Biggio, V. Dos Santos, G.T. Giuliana, eds., Meaning-Making in Extended Reality (Roma: Aracne, 2020): 63-90. For reflection in the different forms of exposure, interactivity and modes of presence, see R. Eugeni, Capitale algoritmico. Cinque dispositivi postmediali (Più Uno) (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2021): 127-174. 29 For an analysis of Iñárritu’s installation, see P. Montani, Tre Forme di Creatività: Tecnica, Arte, Politica (Napoli: Cronopio, 2017): 132-138; A. D’Aloia, “Virtually present, physically invisible: virtual reality immersion and emersion in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena,” in Senses of Cinema (June 2018), http://sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/ virtually-present-physically-invisible-virtual-reality-immersion-and-emersion-in-alejandro- gonzalez-inarritus-carne-y-arena/, accessed January 10, 2022; A.C. Dalmasso, “The body as virtual frame. Performativity of the image in immersive environments,” Cinéma & Cie 19, no. 23 (2019): 101-119; L. Acquarelli, “The spectacle of re-enactment and the critical time of the testimony in Inarritu’s Carne y Arena,” in F. Aldama, A. Rafele, eds., Cultural Studies in the Digital Age (San Diego: San Diego University Press, 2020): 103-118; R. Diodato, Image, Art, and Virtuality: Towards an Aesthetics of Relation (Cham: Springer, 2021): 72-74. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 86 AN-ICON  expresses not so much or only the mirroring of one’s own image, but the possibility of observing and reflecting on the relationship between subject and environment, between what separates us and what binds us to the image. Fig. 8. Alejandro González Iñárritu, Carne y arena, 2017. ©Emmanuel Lubezki/Alejandro González Iñárritu To avoid any misunderstanding, let me propose, in conclusion, to call these moments by two very simple terms that I also used in the introduction: attraction and distancing, where – as in the case of the oppositions pro- posed by Fried – the second term encompasses the first, constituting a form of meta-reflection on the forms of artis- tic and media experience.30 In this sense, attraction defines the concave side of images, the one capable of becoming environment and drawing the viewer to show solidarity with them. On the other hand, distancing expresses the convex side or the modular spatiality of images, the one pointing at the viewer as such and forcing him or her to reflect on his or her own position, on the complex character of ev- ery experience. Whether such terms are convincing or not, the articulation of the two “moments” seems to define the ethical and political limits of both old and new immersive 30 For a reflection on the notion of “distance” in the field of media studies, I refer to the introduction and the various contributions in M. Treleani, F. Zucconi, eds., “Remediating Distances,” IMG Journal 3 (2020). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 87 AN-ICON  technologies. Hence the need to keep the door of art history open, imagining an anachronistic approach and aiming for artistic experimentations poised between different media, between two different moments. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 88 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18191

Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two “moments” of the virtualCaravaggio experience by Francesco Zucconi Frank Stella Michael Fried Immersion and Specularity Virtual Reality Cinema Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two “moments” of the virtual experience FRANCESCO ZUCCONI, Università IUAV di Venezia – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9580-1000 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18191 Abstract In the first of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that he gave at Harvard in 1984, Frank Stella focused on “The necessity of creating pictorial space that is capable of dissolving its own perimeter and surface plane,” and claimed that “No one helped lighten this burden more than Caravaggio.” At a certain point in his talk, the American artist went so far as to say that Caravaggio anticipated the invention of the gyroscope, the technological device which makes the virtual experience possible. Stella’s lecture is the starting point for developing an anachronistic path through pictorial and digital media, in light of their ability to produce illusionistic effects on viewers. In particular, building on Mi- chael Fried’s theory of art and image, this paper investigates virtual experience with reference to two different moments: the “immersive” moment, in which one has the impression of stepping into the frame, and the “specular” one, where the illusionistic effects are revealed; the attraction, when sinking into an image that has become an environment, and the distancing, when the image itself beckons to us and we are invited to reflect on our position as viewers. Keywords Caravaggio Frank Stella Michael Fried Immersion and Specularity Virtual Reality Cinema To quote this essay: F. Zucconi, “Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two ‘moments’ of the virtual experience,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 67-88, https://doi. org/10.54103/ai/18191 FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 67 AN-ICON  Introduction I put on the headset and immerse myself in another world – in a theme park or in a refugee camp, in a disaster-stricken village or perhaps in the city of Hiroshi- ma immediately after the launch of the atomic bomb.1 In some cases I am a mere sightseer, while in other cases I am the “witness” to significant events. I have to enter into an empathetic relationship with those who dwell very far from me, I am expected to “put myself in their shoes” and to experience their condition “directly.”2 Yet I cannot help but realize, sooner or later, that I find myself physically in the safe spaces of a museum or a gallery, in the section dedicated to VR cinema at the Venice International Film Festival, or perhaps in the pavilion of an NGO that uses virtual reality as a form for raising public awareness on sensitive topics. No matter how effectively illusionistic this virtual environment is. Always, in the media experiences of VR cinema, something pushes me inward, draws me into the virtual environment, while, at the same time, something else pushes me out, reminding me that I am just facing an image, and bringing me back to the spatial and temporal coordinates of our physical world.3 This article does not intend to analyse immer- sive videos by trying to deconstruct the nonchalant use of the notion of “empathy” and the ideology of “transparency” that has characterized their promotion, which has already 1 As an example of a virtual theme park experience, see “Disneyland Paris - 360 VR - Main Street,” Disneyland Paris, YouTube video, 1.19, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RNly6mSF0-o, accessed January 10, 2023. Regarding the applications of such technology to the field of humanitarian communication, see http://unvr.sdgactioncampaign.org, accessed January 10, 2023. As for the fourth example, please refer to the official web page of the project https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/new-virtual-reality-experience-drops- you-hiroshima-right-after-its-been-bombed-180968903, accessed January 10, 2023. 2 As an emblematic example of the promotional use of a term such as “empathy” and on the idea of putting oneself in another’s place through VR cinema, see https://youtu.be/ vAEjX9S8o2k. 3 These issues can be conceived with reference to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological lesson and the relationship among the notions of Bildding (the physical thing), Bildobjekt (image-object) and Bildsujet (image-subject). See E. Husserl, “Phantasy and Image Consciousness,” in Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898-1925). Edmund Husserl Collected Works, vol 11 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). On the illusionistic forms of virtual reality, examined through a rereading of Husserl, see P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan: Mimesis International, 2020): 46-52. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 68 AN-ICON  been the subject of several studies.4 Rather, I would like to take up and further develop some issues present in my previous works, with the aim of opening a space for reflec- tion on immersive technology following an anachronistic path through pictorial and digital media by referring to some concepts of art history and theory.5 The main objective is to focus, in analytical and theoretical terms, on the double effect of attraction and distancing described above, as structuring the experience of VR cinema. While the impossibility of fully capturing and keeping the viewers within the virtual environment has mostly been conceived as a negative limitation of such technology, in this paper I try to argue otherwise. Through the reference to a repertoire of images from the past, the aim is to describe the paradoxical character of an experi- ence that is made up as much of attraction as of distancing. But before this can be sustained there are some interme- diate steps. After this introduction, in the second section, taking up a hypothesis advanced by Frank Stella, I explain the idea that gives the title to this paper: that Caravaggio, anticipated the invention of gyroscope technology and therefore made possible the first immersive experience in the history of Western painting. In the third, fourth and fifth sections, building on Michael Fried, I try to emphasize the two moments that characterize Caravaggio’s paintings: immersion, the formal device that attracts within the image, and specularity, understood as the set of figurative and compositional elements that produce an effect of aware- ness on the viewer.6 In the conclusion, I reconsider Fried’s analysis and the concepts that characterize his theoretical 4 The literature on the notion of empathy is vast and constantly evolving with reference to new technological and expressive forms. For an early critical reflection on the facile use of this concept in relation to VR cinema, see W. Uricchio, S. Ding, S. Wolozin, and B. Boyacioglu, Virtually There: Documentary Meets Virtual Reality Conference Report (The MIT Open Documentary Laboratory, 2016): 17-18, http://opendoclab.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/ uploads/2016/11/MIT_OpenDocLab_VirtuallyThereConference.pdf, accessed January 10, 2023. 5 I refer to F. Zucconi, Displacing Caravaggio: Art, Media, and Humanitarian Visual Culture (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 6 On these two notions, which will also be referred to in the following pages, see M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 69 AN-ICON  work in relation to contemporary media. What emerges is an opportunity for developing an ethic of VR: to what extent, can immersive technology facilitate the assumption of a testimonial gaze? Under what conditions can the gesture of wearing a virtual reality headset assume a critical value? Frank Stella’s hypothesis The American artist Frank Stella is, without a doubt, someone who understands visual surfaces and me- dia frames, their ability to offer illusionistic effects. One only has to think of his works in the 1960s, where a series of frames relentlessly squeeze against each other, leaving a small coloured square in the centre. Taking inspiration from Louis Marin’s analysis of Gran Cairo (1962), it is fair to ask whether these squares-frames are a well or a pyramid (Fig. 1). As the French historian and theorist notes, they are “a well and a pyramid, but never at the same time. The eye cannot predict the necessary and the arbitrary moment of conversion in which all the serious play of the frame and its modern and contemporary figures seem to be concen- trated: the play of the rhythm of presentation and repre- sentation, the play of the subject of the art of seeing and the art of describing.”7 If we compare them to the famous example of the rabbit/duck illustration investigated by Ludwig Wittgen- stein and Ernst Gombrich, Stella’s paintings do not merely work on the viewers’ perceptual and cognitive limits in the recognition of the figures depicted. Rather, the represen- tational undecidability and instability of image produce a spatial effect, by modulating the relation between the ob- serving subject and the observed object. In other words, when confronted with the rabbit/duck illustration, the viewer does not have the illusion of being confronted with a duck or rabbit coming off the page; rather, the graphic representa- tion produces an illusionistic effect that makes it impossible to visualize the two animals at the same time. In contrast 7 L. Marin, On Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002): 372. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 70 AN-ICON  to that, Stella’s paintings produce an illusionistic effect to the extent that they alternately draw the viewer inward – as in a well – or push him or her out, as if the surface had a pyramidal shape. Those who observe Stella’s paintings are thus subjected to the rhythmic redundancy of the “opac- ity” of the painted frame that becomes recognizable – we might say that makes itself “transparent” – in the metaphors of the pyramid and the well.8 In more general terms than those used by Marin, we might speak of Stella’s work as a gestalt effect capable of inducing, alternately, in the viewer both the impression of attraction and that of rejection or distancing. In fact, beyond the series of concentric squares, Stella’s artistic research would continue in the 1970s and 1980s by focusing on the relationship between the space Fig. 1. Frank Stella, Gran Cairo, 1962, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, purchase with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art; © Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 8 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (London: Pearson, 1973); E. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 71 AN-ICON  of the canvas and the pictorial space, between the surface and depth (Fig. 2). Fig. 2. Frank Stella, Eccentric Polygon, 1974, Jane Kahan Gallery, New York; purchased by Walter and Joan Wolf, Indianapolis, Indiana; ©Frank Stella/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Beyond the theory of art that is implied in Stel- la’s works, it behoves us to pay particular attention, then, to what he had to say in the first of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that he gave at Harvard in 1984. In developing a line of thought that sweeps from Leonardo da Vinci to Seurat, and from Vermeer to Velázquez, Stella focused on a theoretical problem that is crucial in the history of arts and images; a problem that equally concerns both “old” and “new” media. “The necessity of creating pictorial space that is capable of dissolving its own perimeter and surface plane,” he says, “is the burden that modern painting was born with.”9 And immediately afterwards he goes on to state that “No one helped lighten this burden more than Caravaggio.”10 As often happens, when artists are willing to share their theory, their tone tends to be assertive: Stella’s remarks are full of ideas for creative practice but possibly a font of perplexity for art historians. Still, how can one not ap- preciate his attempt to concisely express the transformation 9 F. Stella, Working Space (Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 1986): 10. 10 Ibid. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 72 AN-ICON  that Caravaggio’s painting forced on the regimes of pictorial representation of space and bodies? Stella’s observations aptly describe Caravaggio’s propensity for experimenting with the phenomenological limits of the idea of “realism,” by creating environments in which the viewer’s gaze must grope its way around, wrapped up in the composition but equally attracted by the vivid emphasis on colour, and by the chromatic nuances seen in some of the details. Stella’s reflections did not stop here. He de- veloped his argument by examining Caravaggio’s entire body of works and focuses on a few paintings. He used anachronistic terminology to highlight several aspects that prefigure artistic and technological developments that took place in the following decades as well as to identify their potentialities: To be able to carry in our minds the space of Caravaggio’s large commanding works, such as the Vatican Deposition and the Seven Acts of Mercy from Naples, we need some kind of image to help form an idea about the design and purpose of Caravaggio’s pictorial space. The image that comes to mind is that of the gyroscope—a spinning sphere, capable of accommodating movement and tilt. We have to imagine ourselves caught up within this sphere, experienc- ing the movement and motion of painting’s action. [...] The space that Caravaggio created is something that twentieth-century painting could use: an alternative both to the space of conventional realism and to the space of what has come to be conventional painterliness. The sense of a shaped spatial presence enveloping the action of the painting and the location of the creator and spectator is a by-product of the success of Caravaggio’s realistic illusionism.11 Within a reflection on VR cinema and immersive media, it is the idea of “realistic illusionism” and even more the metaphor of the gyroscope that attracts attention. The gyroscope, invented in the 19th century by French physi- cist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault is still the basis of virtual reality devices. It is also thanks to it that the visors worn 11 Ibid.: p. 11. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 73 AN-ICON  by viewers can track head movements and thus accurately detect movement along one, two or three axes, thus mak- ing the virtual experience possible. Without the gyroscope, there is no possible balance between the viewer’s gestures and movements in the virtual environment, nor any possi- bility of orientation within it. It is time to give a chance to Stella and his hypothesis that Caravaggio invented the gyroscope and with it virtual reality helmets. But I would like to develop this suggestion in a key that is not merely “technological,” by investigating the forms of composition that character- ize the pictorial medium and the effects they produce. To do so, it is necessary to re-conceive the American artist’s hypothesis into a series of operational questions: what is or would be, exactly, in Caravaggio’s painting capable of prefiguring the conditions of illusionism made possible by contemporary technologies? How do his paintings help us understand the dual effect – hitherto described as one of attraction and distancing – that we experience within immersive environments like those of VR cinema? The two moments of Narcissus To my knowledge, no contemporary photogra- pher or artist has yet investigated in detail the instant when viewers put on or take off their virtual reality helmets. This is really a pity, because the image of that precise instant could make us think a lot about the potentialities of such technology. We must therefore be content with the myths of the past and their survival in our contemporary practices. About to plunge into a virtual world, we find the figure of Narcissus. As noted by Andrea Pinotti – who has identified in Narcissus a kind of “conceptual character” of the an-iconic tradition in Western visual culture – there are two versions of the myth: the first aimed at producing a “naïve” image of the young boy who falls into the illusionistic trap of the image (recurring in Plotinus, Pausanias, Marsilio Ficino, etc.); the second coinciding with a “conscious” Nar- cissus (Ovidian variant), who is aware of the, so to speak, FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 74 AN-ICON  media environment with which he is confronted and with which he is about to make one body.12 It matters little that the Narcissus painted at the end of the Sixteenth century is not a signed work by Caravaggio but only an attribution, widely discussed by art historians (Fig. 3). For the purposes of the reasoning proposed in this paper, it should be noted that the young man is already fully rapt and about to plunge into the world of image. Yet, the figure of the double reflection still reveals a gap between two representational and sensible worlds or regimes. Fig. 3. Caravaggio (attribution), Narcissus, 1597-1599, Rome, Palazzo Barberini. Explicitly taking up the terms proposed by Mi- chael Fried, Narcissus constitutes an explication of the two “moments” that Caravaggio’s painting produces on view- ers. According to Fried – let it be said in passing: a friend 12 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine. Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Torino: Einaudi, 2021): 3-6. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 75 AN-ICON  and one of the most important interpreter of Stella’s work – Caravaggio’s pictorial corpus involve a moment defined as “immersive, imagining the painter as so caught up, so immersed, in this phase of his work on the painting as to be less than fully aware of any sharp distinction between the painting and himself.”13 The second “‘moment,’ notionally instantaneous, of separating or indeed recoiling from the painting, of becoming detached from it, which is to say of no longer being immersed in work on it but rather of see- ing it, taking it in, as if for the first time; I call that ‘moment’ specular, meaning thereby to emphasize the strictly visual or optical relation between the artist - viewer and the image, or image - artefact, that has just brought into being.”14 Reading these pages on Caravaggio, thoughts evidently run to the dialectic between “absorption” and “theatricality”15 identified by Fried himself in the painting of the eighteenth century, or to that between “art” and “ob- jecthood”16 as a key to theoretical and critical interpreta- tion of the relationship between media, art and spatiality in the second half of the twentieth century. Even before the eighteenth century, well before the twentieth-century and, we might add, contemporary media experience, Caravag- gio would have had the ability to reflect in an original way on the tension between the painter and his work (through the use of self-portraiture), between the canvas and the pictorial space (the composition of volumes, the relation- ship between light and shadow) producing unprecedented effects on viewers, now driving them inward, now pushing them outward. Hovering between the classicism of the myth and the technological actuality of the present, Narcissus is a virtual allegory of the ‘moment’ of immersion, or perhaps I should say of absorption becoming immersion, conjoined with the strongest 13 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 39. 14 Ibid. 15 M. Fried, Theatricality and Absorption: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 16 M. Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 76 AN-ICON possible statement of the specular separation of the viewer — orig- inally the painter-viewer — from the painting. There is in it also the strongest imaginable thematization of mirroring as distinct from painting, another of the basic polarities that, in varying ratios and combinations, structure much of Caravaggio’s art. And of course, it is a scene of hyperbolic self-portraiture, the core practice of his lifelong endeavor.17 Narcissus is in a sense, for the purposes of the anachronistic reasoning I am proposing here, a portrait of the exact moment when the viewer is about to put on the headset to access the virtual experience: it is in the middle, between plunging and retreating. Within Caravaggio: immersion and reflection Beyond the myth, the comparison between contemporary media and the tradition of western art can be developed through other Caravaggio masterpieces, in which the effect of spatial encompassment is strong. Even better, it is possible to argue that some of Caravaggio’s paintings represent the virtual experience as viewed from the outside but not without investigating the effects it pro- duces in those inside. Let us focus on the Taking of Christ (1602) and The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610). In the first of these two paintings (Fig. 4), the centre of attention is located on the left, at the point of Judas’s dramatic gesture of betrayal, toward which all eyes converge, except for those of the disciple, who flees terrified toward the edge of the frame. In the second painting, considered to be the last that Car- avaggio completed before his death, what is represented is the exact moment when Saint Ursula is wounded by Attila after she refuses his advances. What connects the two works, in addition to the horizontal composition and the precise staging of a dramatic event, is the presence of 17 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 139. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 77 AN-ICON  a figure located on the right side of each painting. This is a man shown in profile: he has a black beard and bushy eyebrows. His head is stretched up, as if he were standing on tiptoe so as to better observe the violent scene unfold- ing just a few steps in front of him. In the 1602 painting the man is attempting to lighten the darkness of the night and illuminate Judas’s kiss by means of a lantern, which he holds in front of himself with his right hand. This figure is of particular interest for at least two reasons. The first, which Roberto Longhi divined earlier, is that the man on the right side of the image is Caravaggio himself. This is a self-portrait, one of the many in his picto- rial corpus, confirmed moreover by its reproduction – like a Fig. 4. Caravaggio, Taking of Christ, 1602, Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland. Fig. 5. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610, Naples, Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 78 AN-ICON  signature – in the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (Fig. 5).18 The second reason concerns the role that this figure plays in both works. The art historian Sergio Benedetti – who has the merit of having rediscovered the original Taking of Christ, after years of investigation into various copies – noted that the figure of Caravaggio “is well defined and holds up a lantern, the function of which is purely compositional as it appears to throw no light, the true light source being high on the left, beyond the scene depicted.”19 In a similar way, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit noted how, in this work, “Caravaggio puts himself within the painting not in order to get closer to his historical subject but rather in order to see himself both illuminating and experiencing congested spaces.”20 Even more explicitly, Giovanni Careri identified in this self-portrait a kind of declaration of intent of the artist that invites us to reflect on our position as spectators: “I paint with light, with light I show a scene that belongs to the past, but also to the present, the armour testifies to this. I am here to see the arrest of Christ but I cannot in- tervene, as you spectators, witnesses safe from a violence that outrages and fascinates.”21 By re-conceiving such analytical insights in Fried’s terms, the artist’s self-portrait with lantern can therefore be conceived of both as being in the process of becoming immersed in the pictorial environment and as becoming “expelled from it in a ‘moment’ of specularity which was to all intents and purposes the aim and purpose of that work (the establishment of the painting as a painting, as an artifact to be looked at.)”22 Retracing our steps to the theoretical notions structuring this paper, with these paintings we are confront- ed with two different and apparently contradictory effects. At first, like Caravaggio trying to observe the scene, with 18 R. Longhi, “Un originale di Caravaggio a Rouen e il problema delle copie caravaggesche,” Paragone 121 (1960): 23-36. 19 S. Benedetti, “Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ, a masterpiece rediscovered,” The Burlington Magazine 135, no. 1088 (1993): 731-741, 738. 20 L. Bersani, U. Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge-London: MIT Press, 1998): 57. 21 G. Careri, Caravaggio. La Fabbrica dello Spettatore (Milano: Jaca Book, 2017): 234. 22 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 217. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 79 AN-ICON  or without his lantern, we are pushed into the painting as a medial environment made of light and shadow. Then lat- er, once we have searched the environment and once we have recognized the figure of the painter-witness, we are pushed outward, that is to say that we begin to reflect on the pictorial composition and on our position as viewers: in front of an image, with our feet planted on the museum’s floor, in Dublin, Naples or in another city. Putting it in anachronistic terms, one could first argue that the contemporary experiences offered by VR cinema are also characterized by an “immersive” moment: here the field of view itself coincides with a “portable lan- tern” located on the forehead of the spectator; a wearable lantern that illuminates a spherical space that coincides with full darkness, except for the frontal portion framed from time to time. Darkness that the VR cinema viewer will never have occasion to see or feel, except when it is diegetized in the production of a given narrative effect. At the same time, a “specular” moment, always persists: pri- marily in the glitches of the digital environment; in the very fact that lowering my gaze to look for my body I tend to find nothing or at least the scarcely credible simulation of arms and legs; in the presence of extradiegetic music, in all those compositional effects – whether intended or not by the video-makers – that invite us to see the image behind the simulation of a virtual environment and in so doing to “reflect” on our position as viewers.23 Regarding the image of the pain of others As in many VR cinema projects, the two paint- ings described above are about situations of suffering or violence, scenes which invite the viewer to assume the position of a witness but in which, at the same time, it is impossible to immerse oneself completely. One painting by Caravaggio seems capable of interrogating, more than 23 On the limits of VR cinema, through some concrete examples, see F. Zucconi, “Sulla tendenza utopica nel VR cinema,” Carte Semiotiche 7 (2021): 118-126. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 80 AN-ICON  any other, the paradoxical character of virtual experience, as well as the idea of being able to experience a world and a living condition that are profoundly different from those characterizing the viewer’s everyday life. At the centre of Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St. Matthew (1600) is the half-naked, fully lit body of the assas- sin (Fig. 6). On the left, a group of men in seventeenth-cen- tury clothing recoil, trying to shield themselves from the violence. While an angel hands St. Matthew the palm of martyrdom, on the right we see the gesture of a novice walking away. In the foreground, some catechumens lying on the ground observe the scene. The composition is cen- trifugal: the viewer’s gaze gradually moves away from the centre as it moves from one body to another. In the back- ground, one meets a figure characterized by a particularly intense gaze who seems to stare at the act of violence be- fore his eyes. This is the bearded man leaning out from the black background behind the assassin. Again, that man is Caravaggio. Also in this large painting, the painter portrays himself in the role of a witness to a violent act. Those who would try to go even further in their analysis might go so far as to argue that what Caravaggio painted in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew is not simply a self-portrait, but a “self-portrait as painter.” To support this hypothesis, I would like to emphasize the inclination of the figure’s head to the side to observe the scene as if he had a canvas in front of him (Fig. 7). One could also conceive of the left hand reaching forward as a transfiguration of the palette, while the right hand holds the brush. The artist’s sad gaze might then be re-conceived as a concentrated, absorbed gaze. If this were the case, it would be an antic- ipation of some of the traits that characterize the extraor- dinary visual dispositif that is Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez, notoriously and masterfully analysed by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things: Now he [the painter] can be seen, caught in a moment of stillness, at the neutral centre of this oscillation. His dark torso and bright face are half-way between the visible and the invisible: emerging from FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 81 AN-ICON  Fig. 6. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, 1600, San Luigi dei Francesi Church, Rome. Fig. 7. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, 1600, Rome, San Luigi dei Francesi Church. Detail. that canvas beyond our view, he moves into our gaze; but when, in a moment, he makes a step to the right, removing himself from our gaze, he will be standing exactly in front of the canvas he is painting; he will enter that region where his painting, neglected for an instant, will, for him, become visible once more, free of shadow and free of reticence.24 24 M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) (London- New York: Routledge, 2002): 4. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 82 AN-ICON  In both Velazquez’s and Caravaggio’s master- piece, the self-portrait takes on a theoretical and critical function; they are within the painting and, at the same time, they explicitly invite the viewer to reflect on visual repre- sentation, on the point of view that structures it and on the limits of the composition.25 This may seem a bold interpretation. Yet, look- ing closely at the figure of Caravaggio, it can be argued that the image presented in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew is not only an image of self “regarding the pain of others” but also and at the same time – turning Susan Sontag’s famous expression – an image of self “regarding the image of the pain of others.”26 If in the Taking of Christ and The Martyrdom of St. Ursula the self-portrait is first and fore- most functional in expressing an idea of immersion of the painter-witness in the pictorial event – a closure and full autonomy of the pictorial as an “immersive environment” – in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew there is a shift that calls into question the composition of the image and the effect of immediacy of representation. Reading Fried again, this is a work “in which a Caravaggio semblable at once rush- es to leave the painting and looks back in evident distress, thereby enabling the viewer to recognize his characteristic features on the far threshold of the depicted space.”27 It is not so much or simply that the figure depicting the painter seems about to leave the scene but, as the art historian and theorist writes with great acumen, “rushes to leave the painting” and pushes the viewer’s gaze to the threshold of the image. If the self-portraits of 1602 and 1610 tend to provoke an identification between painter and viewer and reinforce the effect of immersion, that of The Martyrdom 25 For a more in-depth reflection on this painting and on the modernity of Caravaggio’s self- portrait, capable of activating paths of critical reflection on contemporary media and visual culture, see F. Zucconi, “Regarding the image of the pain of others: Caravaggio, Sontag, Leogrande,” Humanities 11 (2022), 44. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11020044. 26 The reference is to the title and thoughts developed in the famous book by S. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003). 27 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 209. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 83 AN-ICON  of St. Matthew traces the effect of immediacy back to the pictorial composition that produces it. As Sontag herself points out in the above-men- tioned book, from the seventeenth century to the tradition of twentieth-century reportage, a self-portrait of the painter, photographer, or director is certainly not enough to vali- date the authenticity and effectiveness of the testimony or its ethical value. The risk of a self-referential drift, even a “narcissistic” tendency, is also discernible behind this trend: why represent ourselves when we are faced with the pain of others? Rather than glibly promote all self-reflexive ten- dencies, the self-portrait of Caravaggio in The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew is useful and interesting to the extent that it is a manifestation of the fact that, despite its illusionistic realism, it remains an image among many other possible images of this event and does not claim to coincide with it and reproduce it through the media for the viewer’s benefit. The self-portrait on the threshold thus becomes a way to intensify the “specular moment” or, in other terms, to underline the fact that even during the more immersive virtual experience, we are just facing an image, a very well structured one. On the one hand, with his gaze, Caravaggio invites the viewer to immerse himself in an encompassing pictorial image; on the other hand, with his positioning and posture, he leads the viewer to observe the theatricality of the scene from another point of view, to analyse it as seen from the outside. Attraction and distancing Picking up the thread, Stella’s hypothesis was taken up and developed in this paper as a theoretical and analytical metaphor, certainly not in mere technological terms. If the gyroscope fitted in virtual reality helmets makes possible the stable connection between the movements we actually make in the physical world and those in the world of images, talking about Caravaggio’s gyroscope meant reflecting on the strategies of producing illusionistic and counter-illusionistic effects, on the balance between the FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 84 AN-ICON  “immersive” and “specular” moments. Reference to the the- oretical and methodological notions proposed by Michael Fried thus made it possible to observe the co-presence of such moments or, rather, such spectatorial effects that per- sist, by transforming, from the history of Western painting to contemporary immersive devices. Through reference to Susan Sontag’s critical theory of photography, it was thus possible to propose a hypothesis for an ethical and political approach to VR. In particular, what has emerged is that the co-presence of illusionistic and counter-illusionistic effects does not constitute a weakening of the experien- tial and testimonial value of immersive experience. On the contrary, a conscious ethical and political approach to VR seems to be able to develop precisely by making viewers feel the threshold between the environment in which they are physically situated and the virtual one. This is why it is not necessary to rely on technological implementations devoted to perfecting, once and for all, the immersive char- acter of VR cinema and other technological devices. While the slogans that accompanied the launch of many virtual reality projects relied on the simplistic use of the notions of “empathy,” “compassion,” and “immersion” in a geo- graphical elsewhere, the most interesting aspect of such technology seems to involve its capacity to produce both identification and estrangement. Like Caravaggio observing the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, even the gap between the physical world, in which the viewer is placed, and the virtual one can be re-conceived in positive terms within artistic experimen- tations capable of reflecting critically on the asymmetrical relations between the observer and the observed, between the here in which we find ourselves and the elsewhere of which we claim to have “direct” experience. In fact, the very ideas of virtual “presence” must be conceived as a media effect, resulting from specific compositional and FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 85 AN-ICON  technological determinations capable of modulating the relationship between subject and environment.28 Examples of artistic projects aimed at inves- tigating such limits are few, but their number is certainly growing. The survey and in-depth study of such exper- iments exceeds the specific objectives of this paper. To name but one – the most important, and often-addressed29 – the installation Carne y arena (2017) by Alejandro González Iñárritu seems precisely to spur spectators into experienc- ing their own awkward extraneousness and powerlessness toward a group of refugees from Mexico who are trying to cross over the border to the United States (Fig. 8). Iñárritu’s subtitle for the installation – “Virtually present, physically invisible” – expresses, perhaps, the urgent need to tackle the paradoxical character of virtual experience. Beyond Caravaggio, building on the analysis and concepts elicited by his painting, the field of experi- mentations of VR cinema and, more generally, virtual reality seems to be able to develop only by taking into account the co-presence of the different moments or effects that define our relationship with such media. Of course, in con- temporary virtual experiences, the viewer never has the opportunity to mirror himself or herself, that is, to see his or her own image reflected inside the media environment. The notion of “specularity” as understood in Narcissus and Caravaggio’s self-portraits seems in this sense to lose rel- evance. But at this point it should be clear that this notion 28 On this point, see V. Catricalà, R. Eugeni, “Technologically modified self–centred worlds. Modes of presence as effects of sense in virtual, augmented, mixed and extended reality,” in F. Biggio, V. Dos Santos, G.T. Giuliana, eds., Meaning-Making in Extended Reality (Roma: Aracne, 2020): 63-90. For reflection in the different forms of exposure, interactivity and modes of presence, see R. Eugeni, Capitale algoritmico. Cinque dispositivi postmediali (Più Uno) (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2021): 127-174. 29 For an analysis of Iñárritu’s installation, see P. Montani, Tre Forme di Creatività: Tecnica, Arte, Politica (Napoli: Cronopio, 2017): 132-138; A. D’Aloia, “Virtually present, physically invisible: virtual reality immersion and emersion in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena,” in Senses of Cinema (June 2018), http://sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/ virtually-present-physically-invisible-virtual-reality-immersion-and-emersion-in-alejandro- gonzalez-inarritus-carne-y-arena/, accessed January 10, 2022; A.C. Dalmasso, “The body as virtual frame. Performativity of the image in immersive environments,” Cinéma & Cie 19, no. 23 (2019): 101-119; L. Acquarelli, “The spectacle of re-enactment and the critical time of the testimony in Inarritu’s Carne y Arena,” in F. Aldama, A. Rafele, eds., Cultural Studies in the Digital Age (San Diego: San Diego University Press, 2020): 103-118; R. Diodato, Image, Art, and Virtuality: Towards an Aesthetics of Relation (Cham: Springer, 2021): 72-74. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 86 AN-ICON  expresses not so much or only the mirroring of one’s own image, but the possibility of observing and reflecting on the relationship between subject and environment, between what separates us and what binds us to the image. Fig. 8. Alejandro González Iñárritu, Carne y arena, 2017. ©Emmanuel Lubezki/Alejandro González Iñárritu To avoid any misunderstanding, let me propose, in conclusion, to call these moments by two very simple terms that I also used in the introduction: attraction and distancing, where – as in the case of the oppositions pro- posed by Fried – the second term encompasses the first, constituting a form of meta-reflection on the forms of artis- tic and media experience.30 In this sense, attraction defines the concave side of images, the one capable of becoming environment and drawing the viewer to show solidarity with them. On the other hand, distancing expresses the convex side or the modular spatiality of images, the one pointing at the viewer as such and forcing him or her to reflect on his or her own position, on the complex character of ev- ery experience. Whether such terms are convincing or not, the articulation of the two “moments” seems to define the ethical and political limits of both old and new immersive 30 For a reflection on the notion of “distance” in the field of media studies, I refer to the introduction and the various contributions in M. Treleani, F. Zucconi, eds., “Remediating Distances,” IMG Journal 3 (2020). FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 87 AN-ICON  technologies. Hence the need to keep the door of art history open, imagining an anachronistic approach and aiming for artistic experimentations poised between different media, between two different moments. FRANCESCO ZUCCONI 88 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/view/18458

Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality by Philippe Bédard art Virtual Reality Illusion Anthropocentrism Umwelt Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality art PHILIPPE BÉDARD, McGill University – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4100-5249 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18458 “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unpreju- diced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception”1 Abstract In the following essay, I consider if and how VR’s uncanny ability to create an illusion of presence and generate a sense of body ownership might be used to go beyond our anthropocentric perspective, towards non-hu- man experiences. By adventuring outside the domain of human experience, my goal is to address the affordances and limitations of VR’s illusionistic potential. Knowing full well that certain economic pressures preclude artists from pursuing the kinds of provocations I describe in this essay, I nevertheless invite readers to follow along as I explore alternative potentialities of contemporary VR. Specifically, I approach VR here in the hopes of finding ways of engaging with different bodies, spaces, and realities, even if illusorily. Keywords Virtual reality Illusion Anthropocentrism Umwelt To quote this essay: P. Bédard, “Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality art,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 89-112, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18458 1 S. Brakhage, “From Metaphors on Vision,” in P.A. Sitney, ed., The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1978): 120. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 89 AN-ICON  Introduction Many things have changed between the origi- nal heyday of virtual reality (VR) in the 1980–1990s and the current revival of the technology since the early 2010s. But while today VR might benefit from the leaps and bounds computers and graphic technologies have witnessed in the intervening decades, and while it might enjoy greater commercial success than ever before, I often feel our imag- ination around the kinds of experiences enabled by VR has suffered somewhat. We are far removed today from Mere- dith Bricken’s suggestion that in VR: “You can be the mad hatter or you can be the teapot; you can move back and forth to the rhythm of a song. You can be a tiny droplet in the rain or in the river.”2 Likewise, we seem to have strayed from Jaron Lanier’s proposition that in virtual reality, “you can visit the world of the dinosaur, then become a Tyran- nosaurus. Not only can you see DNA, you can experience what it’s like to be a molecule.”3 While Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin use these two quotes to highlight the illusion of “perceptual immediacy”4 of immersive virtual reality experiences, I see in these statements something else entirely more interesting: the idea that VR might give us experiences that far exceed the limits of human under- standing. In the following essay, I consider if and how VR’s uncanny ability to create an illusion of presence and generate a sense of body ownership might be used to go beyond our anthropocentric perspective, towards non-hu- man experiences. By adventuring outside the domain of human experience, my goal is to address the affordances 2 M. Bricken, “Virtual worlds: no interface to design,” in M. Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1991): 363-382, 372. 3 S. Ditlea, “False starts aside, virtual reality finds new roles,” New York Times (March 23, 1998): 97. 4 J. Bolter, R. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2000): 22. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 90 AN-ICON  and limitations of VR’s illusionistic potential. In so doing, I also aim to explore how VR might be thought of as more than a means to foster empathy for other human beings, whatever the purpose for that endeavour might be.5 This allows me to discuss immersive technologies and experi- ences in a context devoid of the problems typically asso- ciated with discourses around the concept of “empathy machine.” I begin this essay by addressing the illusion of presence in VR, specifically as it relates to our experience of body-space relations in physical reality. I start by address- ing what I argue to be the fundamental anthropocentrism of VR’s dominant mode of experience. This crucial detour has me discussing whether VR is capable of representing non-human modes of being in the world. Necessarily, this also means addressing earlier thought experiments in the field of psychology, biology, and philosophy that sought to question “what it is like to be” something other than human. Having done so, I then consider whether VR might have the ability to give us access to non-human realities, or whether it is limited by a fundamental anthropocentrism. Finally, I 5 On the issue of empathy in VR, see J.H. Murray, “Not a film and not an empathy machine,” Immerse (October 6, 2016): https://immerse.news/not-a-film-and-not-an-empathy-machine- 48b63b0eda93, accessed January 10, 2023; S. Gregory, “Immersive witnessing: from empathy and outrage to action,” WITNESS blog (2016), https://blog.witness.org/2016/08/ immersive-witnessing-from-empathy-and-outrage-to-action/, accessed January 10, 2023; G. Bollmer, “Empathy machines,” Media International Australia 165, no. 1 (2017): 63-76, https:// doi.org/10.1177/1329878X17726794; R. Yang, “If you walk in someone else’s shoes, then you’ve taken their shoes: empathy machines as appropriation machines,” Radiator Blog (April 5, 2017), https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2017/04/if-you-walk-in-someone-elses-shoes- then.html, accessed January 10, 2023; H. Farmer, “A broken empathy machine,” Immerse (September 30, 2019), https://immerse.news/a-broken-empathy-machine-can-virtual-reality- increase-pro-social-behaviour-and-reduce-prejudice-cbcefb30525b, accessed January 10, 2023; P. Roquet, “Empathy for the game master: how virtual reality creates empathy for those seen to be creating VR,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 65-80, https://doi. org/10.1177/1470412920906260; L. Nakamura, “Feeling good about feeling bad: virtuous virtual reality and the automation of racial empathy,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 47-64, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906259; G. Bollmer and K. Guinness, “Empathy and nausea: virtual reality and Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 28-46, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906261. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 91 AN-ICON  look at experiments relating to illusions of body ownership in VR, specifically as they relate to non-human bodies. As will become abundantly clear over the course of this essay, my goal is speculative—perhaps even provocative—rather than earnest. I write this text as an exercise in exploring what I perceive to be a bias towards anthropocentrism in VR, a medium which has so often been lauded for its ability to simulate otherwise impossible real- ities.6 Readers may also see this as a call to action to VR designers and consumers to open their minds to the pos- sibilities offered by contemporary immersive technologies beyond those practices that currently dominate the market. Knowing full well that certain economic pressures preclude artists from pursuing the kinds of provocations I describe in this essay, I nevertheless invite readers to follow along as I explore alternative potentialities of contemporary VR.7 Specifically, I approach VR here in the hopes of finding ways of engaging with different bodies, spaces, and real- ities, even if illusorily. Virtual reality environments: immediacy and presence It has become something of a truism to recog- nize that VR is able to foster a sense of presence, that is, the impression of “being there” in a virtual environment dis- tinct from the physical environment that one’s body is also occupying. Or, as Mathew Lombard et al. put it, presence 6 I maintain that VR is currently driven by profoundly anthropocentric forces, despite the “anti-anthropocentric drive which,” according to Andrea Pinotti, “currently characterises not only the VR world but contemporary visual culture, in various mediums, more generally.” A. Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?,” in Y. Hadjinicolaou, ed., Visual Engagements: Image Practices and Falconry (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020): 30-47, 44, https:// doi.org/10.1515/9783110618587-003. See also R. Grusin, The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 7 I also want to recognize that there are the effects of VR are not currently fully known and that much more work must be done to ensure current VR technologies are accessible and ethical. These pressing issues certainly deserve more attention before we can move towards more elaborate explorations of the outer limits of VR. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 92 AN-ICON  describes, “the perceptual illusion of non-mediation.”8 In this context, the perceived lack of mediation is predicated on VR’s ability to foster a convincing illusion of a space that reproduces the way we see the world in our daily lives: as a three-dimensional volume in which our bodies can move and act. And while on their own the affordances of head-mounted displays (HMD) could be used to create any number of effects and illusions, the dominant practice of contemporary immersive media has been to reproduce our habitual modes of (visual) perception: looking ahead from an upright position through a pair of eyes which we can move around (either in their orbits, by moving our head, or our body) to see the surrounding environment. In an earlier essay, I described VR as inherently subjective, following Jonathan Crary’s incisive discussion of “subjective vision.”9 By extension, I would also argue its default mode of experience–that for which it was designed and that which is dominant to this day–is also intrinsically anthropocentric. This is because “subjective,” in this con- text, refers to the idiosyncrasies of human vision.10 By the same token, I describe an apparatus which relies on these unique and fallible qualities of perception as subjective. In the case of VR, the HMD hinges upon the following sub- jective qualities of human vision: its binocularity, its “ego- centric” perspective, and the individual’s ability to move their point of view on the world through six degrees of freedom of movement along three dimensions. Here, ego- centrism describes an approach to body-space relations 8 M. Lombard, T. Ditton, “At the heart of it all: the concept of presence,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3, no. 2 (1997), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997. tb00072.x. 9 P. Bédard, “La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 28, no. 1 (2019): 66-92, 74, https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs.28.1.2019-0012; J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992). 10 See again J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 93 AN-ICON  which take the individual as a point of reference.11 In other words, the egocentric perspective considers the human body as a “pivot around which the three dimensions of spatial extension arrange themselves and from which they ultimately proceed.”12 This could just as easily be called anthropocentric. I continue to subscribe to the idea that VR’s apparatus and the default mode of experience it proposes are subjective, egocentric, and anthropocentric. That is because in most cases, the illusion of presence fostered by immersive virtual environments plays off this charac- teristic centrality of our body in our perception of space. Head-mounted displays become viewports into different and often completely fantastical realities, but these spaces are still explored from an egocentric perspective, with the body as invariable centre of gravity. If we assume the goal of most virtual reality experiences is to create a satisfying illusion of presence in a virtual environment–whatever the purpose for that may be–it makes perfect sense why this strategy has remained so dominant. However, this is not the only avenue. As an example, a slew of recent (flat) vid- eo games have embraced the affordances of their medi- um’s monocular perspective to create fascinating optical illusions and truly impossible body-space relations. The worlds explored in Antichamber (Demruth, 2013), Superlim- inal (Pillow Castle Games, 2019), Manifold Garden (William Chyr, 2019), Spaceflux (Colin Ardelean, 2020), Hyperbolica (CodeParade, 2022), and Parallelia (SincArt Studio, 2022) exceed our natural conception of space by presenting all manner of physically impossible environments: non-Euclid- ean, hyperbolic, fractal, etc. In so doing, they draw more inspiration from M.C. Escher’s depictions of space than 11 W.R. Sherman, A.B. Craig, Understanding Virtual Reality: Interface, Application, and Design (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman Publishers, 2003): 296. 12 E.S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): 208. Emphasis added. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 94 AN-ICON  from what we find in Leon Battista Alberti’s theorization of renaissance perspective. What if VR were to also stray from the beaten path and indulge in such perspectival fancies? In the contemporary immersive media land- scape, precious few experiments with non-anthropocen- tric spaces have surfaced–at least to my knowledge.13 In mid-2020, Diego Montoya shared Spacetime, which he described as a “special relativity VR simulation.” The ex- periment allows users to explore a room where the speed of light is much slower than usual: “You can experience space contraction, time dilation and light Doppler effects as you move”14 (Fig. 1a and 1b). Among various physical distortions the experience enables–all of which are impos- sible to encapsulate in written form–the designer explains that “[t]he world feels very ‘wobbly’ when moving very close to the speed of light, almost liquid.” While space remains Fig. 1a 13 I discuss the limits of any analysis of contemporary virtual reality in P. Bédard, “La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains.” 14 D. Montoya (@diego_montoya _), “I built a special #relativity VR simulation for @oculus Quest, where the speed of light c is much lower than usual. You can experience space contraction, time dilation and light Doppler effect as you move. 1/n,” Tweet, August 7, 2020, https://twitter.com/diego_montoya_/status/1291745102700765184, accessed January 10, 2023. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 95 AN-ICON  Fig. 1a and 1b. Diego Montoya, Fig. 1b Spacetime, 2020 three-dimensional in Spacetime, the user’s relations to that space far exceed the limits of our habitual modes of per- ception. With that said, I would hesitate to say that they exceed anthropocentrism, since the transformations that space undergoes throughout the experiment result from the user’s movements. Space is not transformed. Our per- ception of it is. As with the earlier quoted videogames, Mon- toya’s project is the exception rather than the norm. Indeed, I still believe that as long as VR remains tied to the three or six degrees of freedom model of spatial engagement which takes the body as its centre, there is little it can do to avoid this egocentric mode of experience. With that said, nothing is keeping VR designers from creating virtual environments which are abstract rather than representa- tional.15 In other words, perhaps the solution to exceeding anthropocentric perspectives in VR might be to reject the notion of “perspective” altogether. However, doing so might 15 An example I recently encountered would merit further attention in this regard. In Lockdown Dreamscape (Nicolas Gebbe, 2022), an innovative visual process was used to distort the image such that objects seemed to meld into one another. A slow movement through the distorted space led me to discover novel spatial relations. The experience was at once nauseating and thrilling. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 96 AN-ICON  require more nuanced explorations of the affordances of virtual bodies. It might also ask that we question “what it is like to be” non-human, and whether VR is at all capable to furnish an answer to that question. What it is like to be [ ] Whether it has been asked about animals, in- sects, or “things” in general, the question of “what it is like to be” this or that–whatever it may be–recognizes that our perspective as human animals is limited and distinct enough from other forms of being to preclude us from knowing or even understanding them.16 The reality behind this seem- ingly impassable chasm between ourselves and others is made clear through the concept of Umwelt, as theorized by Jakob von Uexküll. While it is true that all things (living or otherwise) occupy the same physical reality, Von Uexküll introduces the notion of Umwelt to suggest that all beings do not necessarily share the same environment or world.17 The sensorial attunement of different animals varies to such a degree that the very meaning of “world” differs from one creature to another. The word Umwelt can be translated as “self-cen- tred world.” This suggests the inherently subjective or egocentric nature of a given entity’s particular version of, and relation to, a world. This interpretation of Umwelt as “self-centred” or “subjectively-perceived” world is made even more evident when looking at the notion of subjectivity itself, understood here as that which is exclusive to a given 16 This has far-reaching implications within debates on the notion of empathy in virtual reality. 17 J. von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning (1934), trans. J.D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). The ties between von Uexküll’s Umwelt and VR have been highlighted by Andrea Pinotti in an illuminating chapter. See Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?” PHILIPPE BÉDARD 97 AN-ICON  individual (i.e., subject).18 Indeed, as Maike Sarah Reinerth and Jan-Noël Thon define it, “subjectivity” designates that to which an individual has privileged access. While this definition of subjectivity does satisfyingly describe the ex- clusive character of Umwelt, the parallel breaks down when we realize subjectivity is most often discussed in terms of the unique way in which a given subject “sees” things. The reason for this breakdown has far-reaching implications, specifically when it comes to the non-anthropocentric aims of this essay. Where the concept of Umwelt shines and where the questions of “what it is like to be” something other than human come into play is precisely when the human sen- sorium–of which sight is often taken to be the most privi- leged example–is no longer sufficient. Von Uexküll with his famous study of the tick, Thomas Nagel with his example of the bat, and Ian Bogost in his Alien Phenomenology all focus on the worldly experience of insects, animals and things that are commonly understood as blind–that is, when sight is understood from an anthropocentric perspective.19 What drives these thinkers, then, is precisely to understand how these creatures sense, navigate and exist in a version of the world that is completely different from that of hu- mans, even though we might inhabit the same spaces at any given time. How does the world of the bat differ from ours when its primary mode of experience is defined by its use of echolocation? How is the tick’s experience of the world influenced by its reliance on sensing the heat, fur, and butyric acid that signify the presence of its main prey, namely mammals? How different is the world for things 18 M.S. Reinerth, J.N. Thon, eds., Subjectivity Across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2017). For a more sustained discussion of subjectivity in VR, see P. Bédard, “La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains.” 19 T. Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?,” The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435-450, https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914; I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). PHILIPPE BÉDARD 98 AN-ICON  whose very mode of existence would even preclude us from describing them has “experiencing” the world? “When we ask what it means to be something,” Bogost summarizes, “we pose a question that exceeds our own grasp of the being of the world.”20 In brief, these ask that we set aside our privileged modes of experience for a moment and engage–even if imaginatively–with other realities parallel and equal to our own. My interest in ask- ing these questions in the context of an essay on virtual reality, then, comes from the fact that I see it as a tool for exploring and perhaps even exceeding the limits of anthro- pocentric perspectives.21 Indeed, while Reinerth and Thon remark upon the impossibility of accessing the subjectivity of others per se, the editors also suggest that media of all kinds (from literature, to movies, to games, etc.) can succeed in fostering a sense of intersubjectivity. This pro- cess could also be called empathy, namely “the ability to share and understand the experiences of others,” or, as Kate Nash defines it, “an affective response grounded in an imaginative engagement with the experience of the other.”22 Whether we call it intersubjectivity or empathy, the belief behind these concepts is that different media can make use of their unique affordances to suggest to users how a given character might subjectively perceive a given event or experience. Can VR overcome its fundamental anthropo- centrism and help users imaginatively project themselves in the experiences of others, precisely when these exceed their habitual range of possible experiences? 20 I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to be a Thing: 30. Original emphasis. 21 Pinotti might say that this desire to exceed anthropocentrism is itself anthropocentric, as it posits humans as having an exceptional capacity to access other modes of being in the world, which other creatures do not possess. See Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?”. 22 H. Farmer, “A broken empathy machine,” K. Nash, “Virtual reality witness: exploring the ethics of mediated presence,” Studies in Documentary Film 12, no. 2 (2018): 119-131, 124, https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2017.1340796. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 99 AN-ICON  Accessing non-human realities through technology An initial response to this last question might be that it cannot. Because VR HMDs are (predominantly) audiovisual devices and because they are tuned to the hu- man sensorium, they cannot, by definition, make us see and hear more than what our eyes and ears can perceive nor- mally.23 As Andrea Pinotti adroitly explains, such attempts to represent non-human realities through technology: [...] cannot patently hope to escape Nagel’s caveat. Since they are visually rendered on a screen, a compound-eye vision, a left-right- eye independent vision or an infrared vision will always be visions processed by a human eye-brain system. Human species-specific organisation operates as a physiological and phenomenological a priori that cannot simply be bypassed. This is, of course, true also for any sort of VR simulation of non-human ways of experiencing the world: they all ultimately have to be processed by such human a priori.24 This makes it seemingly impossible for HMDs to exceed our typical senses of sight and hearing, to say nothing of being able to use it to go beyond our ordinary perceptual habitus and perceive the world as a bat, tick, or other creature might. But does it mean VR cannot help us imagine what the world might look like to a different being? The fact is that we already use tools in our dai- ly lives that make visible to us phenomena to which our eyes and ears are not sensitive. The clock makes visible 23 To that effect, “[David] Eagleman has noted that the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to humans is less than a ten-trillionth of the electromagnetic field, and therefore much goes undetected in our lives apart from a ‘shockingly small fraction of the surrounding reality.” L. Jarvis, “Body-swapping: self-attribution and body transfer illusions (BTIs),” in Immersive Embodiment: Theatres of Mislocalized Sensation (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019): 99-154, 113. See also D. Eagleman, “The Umwelt,” in J. Brockman, ed., This Will Make You Smarter (London: Doubleday, 2012): 143-145. 24 A. Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?:” 46. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 100 AN-ICON  the passage of time, while other instruments transform a range of different extrasensory stimuli into visible data (e.g., spectrometer, barometer, Geiger counter, Magnetic Res- onance Imaging scanner, etc.). Through these tools, we can gain access to phenomena that are strictly speaking “invisible,” yet which become visible all the same thanks to the appropriate apparatus. Having been made visible, these phenomena are not necessarily legible to all. As Don Ihde explains, the relation with the world in which we enter when using such tools is hermeneutic, meaning it requires that we possess the knowledge and skills necessary to interpret the data presented to us through these instruments; one must know how to speak the machine’s language, and to read the world through it.25 Thinking of VR as a tool to engage hermeneu- tically with aspects of the world which we cannot natural- ly perceive is one possible avenue for thinking of it as a way to exceed the anthropocentric perspectives to which it has generally been relegated. We can see traces of this approach at play in several projects by the artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF), notably in In the Eyes of the Animal (2015), Treehugger: Wawona (2016), and We live in an Ocean of Air (2018). In each of these projects, the artists use “terrestrial laser scanners” to create what are commonly known as “point clouds.” The density and colour of these clouds can be changed to create more or less detailed pointillist representations of physical spaces. MLF uses these to translate ways of “seeing” or being in the world that are in excess of human understanding. The 25 “Hermeneutic relations,” Evan Selinger explains, “do not amplify or replicate the body’s sensory abilities; instead, they engage our linguistic and interpretative aptitudes. In this context, technologies that facilitate hermeneutic relations are best understood as being ‘text- like’; their effective utilization requires interpretation through the activity of reading.” E. Selinger, Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde (New York: SUNY Press, 2012): 5. An example that is closer to art and illusion might be anamorphosis. To see the anamorphosis hidden in an image, viewers must know how to position themselves in such a way as to reveal the image. See D.L. Collins, “Anamorphosis and the eccentric observer: inverted perspective and construction of the gaze,” Leonardo (1992): 73-82, https://www.jstor.org/stable/i270958. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 101 AN-ICON  effect lies halfway between scientific imagery and impres- sionism, as sparse arrays of point clouds leave much to the viewer’s imagination. In the Eyes of the Animal, for example, puts its viewers in the eyes of four different animals and insects (owl, frog, dragonfly, and mosquito), each with its Fig. 2a Fig. 2b Fig. 2a and 2b. Marshmallow Laser Feast, In the Eyes of the Animal, 2015 own way of perceiving a forest (Fig. 2a and 2b). Meanwhile, Treehugger and Ocean of Air each focus on trees and on the scope and time frame of their biological processes. Al- though all the creatures represented in these projects share the same environments (i.e., the forest), they each have PHILIPPE BÉDARD 102 AN-ICON  their own Umwelt, which MLF represents through different densities of point clouds and different colour filters. Some critics may point to the fact that what MLF does in their project may not be called hermeneutical, in that the tools they use do not translate the actual, literal perception of these insects and animals.26 It would also be fair to note that users would not be adequately equipped to interpret the world as perceived through these tools, even if their scientific accuracy was beyond reproach. This would be missing the point. It would be more appropriate to say that what MLF creates are artistic renditions of what the authors imagine the world might look like to different non-human animals. Their projects are best understood, then, as invitations to imaginatively explore what the Um- welt of a mosquito, dragonfly, frog, owl, or even a tree might be made of. Recall that for Reinerth and Thon, different me- dia can effectively seek to simulate certain aspects of a sub- jective experience as perceived by a particular individual by appealing to different aesthetic or narrative strategies, as well as the imagination of the user (viewer, reader, player, etc.).27 What we have yet to explore, however, is whether VR is capable of simulating experiences that exceed the boundaries of the human body. And since, as Maurice Mer- leau-Ponty writes, “I am conscious of the world through the medium of my body,”28 how the body appears and functions in VR has far-reaching implications. So while what MLF (among other artists) creates might look different than how we see the world, the question still stands as to if and 26 MLF typically collaborates with scientists in relevant fields to help them translate the data recorded. With that said, Pinotti’s reminder that data represented onscreen for human consumption is not equivalent to the source stimuli still holds true, lessening any claim these artistic experiences might want to make as to their accuracy. See Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?” 27 M.S. Reinerth, J.N. Thon, “Introduction,” in M.S. Reinerth, J.N. Thon, eds., Subjectivity Across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives: 1-25, 3. Original emphasis. 28 M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2010): 94-95. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 103 AN-ICON  how might VR allow users to act differently than they can in their own human bodies. Embodying the non-human While the illusion of presence is often acknowl- edged in discussions of VR, the various kinds of embod- ied illusions the medium offers are just as relevant, readily achievable, and arguably even more fundamental.29 It is not surprising, then, that the body, its representations, and our perception thereof have received much attention from the fields of psychology and neuroscience, especially in recent years. For instance, in their work on the so-called “Proteus effect,” Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson have demonstrat- ed how “an individual’s behaviour conforms to their digital self-representation independent of how others perceive them.”30 While most scholarship that invokes this effect focuses on the behavioural aftereffects of inhabiting other kinds of human bodies (e.g., in terms of gender, age, race, ability, etc.), some have explored the effects derived from inhabiting non-human bodies.31 These lay the groundwork for the explorations to which this essay aspires, but it is possible to go further still. A great many studies have been conducted on the topic of the “body ownership illusion,” or the so-called “body transfer illusion.” These illustrate how our body sche- ma is amenable to change when presented with sufficiently 29 I use the term “medium” loosely here, as contemporary VR is more appropriately described as an apparatus which pre-existing media are attempting to adopt. For more on that debate, see my forthcoming “Many births of VR.” 30 N. Yee, J.N. Bailenson, “The Proteus effect: the effect of transformed self-representation on behavior,” Human Communication Research 33, no. 3 (2007): 271-290, https://doi. org/10.1177/0093650208330254. 31 See S.J. Ahn et al., “Experiencing nature. Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 21, no. 6 (2016): 399-419, https://doi.org/10.1111/ jcc4.12173. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 104 AN-ICON  convincing data.32 Importantly, this adaptation also works in cases of illusion, when the brain is tricked into adopting external elements. This process can also be triggered in virtual reality applications. Starting from the now famous rubber hand illusion, studies have detailed different ways in which users can feel ownership of an artificial limb, such that they are deluded into thinking that this foreign object is part of their own body.33 Others have focussed on body transfer illusions, suggesting that even full-body stand-ins such as mannequins and digital avatars can be absorbed into a user’s body schema. VR is a particularly powerful tool for fostering this illusion since, as one notable paper suggests, “in VR, there are near-infinite opportunities for both extending and radically altering our virtual (and hence perceptually real) bodies.”34 The notion of “homuncular flexibility” further supports the idea that the mind can adapt to “exotic mor- phologies, distortions, extensions and reductions” of body 32 See M.R. Lesur et al., “The plasticity of the bodily self: head movements in bodily illusions and their relation to Gallagher’s body image and body schema,” Constructivist Foundations 14, no. 1 (2018): 94-105, https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-162795; S. Seinfeld et al., “User representations in human-computer interaction,” Human–Computer Interaction 36, no. 5-6 (2021): 400-438, https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2020.1724790; A. Maselli, M. Slater, “The building blocks of the full body ownership illusion,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2013): 1-15, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00083; M. Botvinick, J. Cohen, “Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see,” Nature 391, no. 6669 (1998): 756, https://doi.org/10.1038/35784; S. J. Ahn et al., “Experiencing nature. Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature;” N. Yee, J.N. Bailenson, “The difference between being and seeing: the relative contribution of self-perception and priming to behavioral changes via digital self-representation,” Media Psychology 12, no. 2 (2009): 195-209, https://doi.org/10.1080/15213260902849943; H. Farmer, A. Tajadura-Jiménez, M. Tsakiris, “Beyond the colour of my skin: how skin colour affects the sense of body-ownership,” Consciousness and Cognition 21, no. 3 (2012): 1242-1256, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. concog.2012.04.011; H. Farmer, L. Maister, M. Tsakiris, “Change my body, change my mind: the effects of illusory ownership of an outgroup hand on implicit attitudes toward that outgroup,” Frontiers in Psychology 4, no. 13 (2014), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.01016; H. Farmer, L. Maister, “Putting ourselves in another’s skin: using the plasticity of self- perception to enhance empathy and decrease prejudice,” Social Justice Research 30, no. 4 (2017): 323-354, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-017-0294-1. 33 M. Botvinick, J. Cohen, “Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see:” 756. 34 W. Steptoe, A. Steed, M. Slater, “Human tails: ownership and control of extended humanoid avatars,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 19, no. 4 (2013): 583-590, https://doi.org/10.1109/tvcg.2013.32. Notably, the authors also suggest that: “Our instinctive ability to rapidly and dexterously incorporate such objects and learn how to use such tools provides a clue to the remarkable plasticity of how the human brain represents the body and encodes space.” PHILIPPE BÉDARD 105 AN-ICON  configurations.35 It is interesting to note that already be- tween 1989 and 1991, ad hoc experiments were being conducted by VR pioneer Jaron Lanier and his team at VPL on an individual’s ability to take ownership of “weird ava- tars that were still usable.”36 Avatars with unusual point of view placements (e.g., eyes at hip level), extremely long ex- tremities, and even non-human avatars were experimented with.37 In the latter case, Lanier reminisces about a lobster avatar which was designed by Ann Lasko-Harvill, then Director of Product Design at VPL Research.38 Some of these informal experiments have since been proven by more robust studies. Notably, Andrea Stevenson Won and Jeremy Bailenson teamed up with and Jaron Lanier to test the ability of users to incorporate supernumerary limbs by mapping their controls to “the rotation of a wrist, the flex of an ankle, or some combination of the two.”39 This came as a response to the limitation of the human body in re- gard to the fact that, “[a]s the lobster body includes more limbs than a person, there were not enough parameters measured by the body suit to drive the lobster avatar in a one-to-one map.”40 An important limitation to the illusion of body ownership or transfer which studies on the topic often 35 Ibid. See also A.S. Won et al., “Homuncular flexibility in virtual reality,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 20, no. 3 (2015): 241-259, https://doi.org/10.1111/ jcc4.12107; A.S. Won, J. Bailenson, J. Lanier, “Homuncular flexibility: the human ability to inhabit nonhuman avatars,” Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource (2015): 1-16. 36 Ibid.: 2. 37 K. Kilteni et al., “Extending body space in immersive virtual reality: a very long arm illusion,” PloS one 7, no. 7 (2012): 1-15, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0040867; S.J. Ahn et al., “Experiencing nature. Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature;” T. Feuchtner, J. Müller, “Extending the body for interaction with reality,” Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2017), https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025689. 38 J. Lanier, “Homuncular flexibility,” in 2006: What is your Dangerous Idea? Edge: The World Question Center (2006), https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11182, accessed January 10, 2023. 39 A.S. Won et al., “Homuncular flexibility in virtual reality:” 242. Interestingly, the authors gesture towards our earlier discussion of “what it is like to be [ ]” when, in the very first line of their article, they ask: “What if you could become a bat.” Ibid.: 241. 40 A.S. Won, J. Bailenson, J. Lanier, “Homuncular flexibility: the human ability to inhabit nonhuman avatars:” 2-3. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 106 AN-ICON  highlight is the required “realism” of the external object. That is, “the need for an object to preserve precise, informa- tive corporeal structural features in order to be integrable as one’s own body part.”41 In other words, anthropomorphism is often presented as an important–if not essential–factor in the illusion of body ownership. Does this mean the move beyond human perspectives for which I am advocating in this essay is a nonstarter? Redemption for this idea might yet be found in more recent approaches to the illusion of body own- ership which point to a crucial element that is otherwise overlooked in the earlier quoted studies. Namely, in their meta-analysis of “user representations,” Sofía Seinfeld and colleagues have shown that while “[u]nrealistic visual ap- pearance, such as the visual discontinuity of the artificial body, also reduces the feeling of body ownership,” it is also true that “[b]ody ownership illusions are effectively in- duced through congruent multisensory stimulation.”42 Earli- er studies focussed on illusions generated by visual stimuli supplemented with synchronous tactile feedback (e.g., the rubber hand is stroked at the same time as the physical hand). Meanwhile, active engagement with the illusory body augmentation has been shown to play an important role in the success of this illusion. For instance, Marte Roel Lesur et al. suggest that while “the literature shows that not just any fake body or object can elicit illusory owner- ship,” at the same time, “in the presence of sensorimotor coherence, there are some examples of illusory ownership over implausible virtual bodies.”43 The redeeming quality of contemporary VR technologies in this regard is precisely their ability to afford their users agency, interactivity, and 41 A. Maselli, M. Slater, “The building blocks of the full body ownership illusion:” 12. 42 S. Seinfeld et al., “User representations in human-computer interaction:” 416-417. Emphasis added. 43 M.R. Lesur et al., “The plasticity of the bodily self: head movements in bodily illusions and their relation to Gallagher’s body image and body schema:” 101 PHILIPPE BÉDARD 107 AN-ICON  multisensory feedback which work in concert to create many of the contingencies that are known to facilitate such body ownership illusions. Fig. 3a Fig. 3b Fig. 3a and 3b. Non-human bodies in Plastisapiens (Miri Chekhanovich and Édith Jorisch, 2022). Credit: National Film Board of Canada (2022) True as it might be that most recent VR ex- periences remain tied to humanoid avatars, some have pushed the boundaries of what counts as realistic body, while others have experimented with bodies that are alto- gether non-human. One such notable example is the VR experience Plastisapiens (Miri Chekhanovich and Édith Jorisch, 2022), a piece of “surrealist ecofiction” which asks viewers to imagine a future where human evolution has been shaped by our exposure to microplastics in the air we PHILIPPE BÉDARD 108 AN-ICON  breathe, the water we drink, and the food we ingest; the An- thropocene has here been replaced by what we might call the Plasticene. Throughout its 15–minutes runtime, Plasti- sapiens asks its viewers to adopt a number of new bodies, from a prehistoric betentacled creature to the eponymous human-plastic hybrid, whose hands seem to be made of thin plastic (Fig. 3a and 3b). In both cases, “hands” are the only part of their body users can see, leaving the rest up to their imagination. Meanwhile, hand tracking is used to manip- ulate these new alien-looking appendages. The player’s agency is made evident in their ability to move their hands in predictable ways. Here, part of the success for the body ownership illusion is ensured by the synchronous move- ment of the hand in physical reality and the appearance of the corresponding movement of the alien limb, as seen in the HMD. In my own experience of Plastisapiens, I had no issue whatsoever knowing how to manipulate my tentacles to successfully reach the objects in my vicinity, adapting to their limits and affordances within a matter of seconds. Fur- thermore, the experience employs haptic feedback through the controllers to add a sense of multisensory correspon- dence between what the eye registers the tentacle having touched, and what the physical (i.e., human) hand feels having touched as well. Agency, interactivity, and multi- sensory feedback therefore join forces to foster a sense of sensorimotor coherence, thereby facilitating the illusion of body ownership despite the lack of realism of the bodies on offer.44 44 See also the oft-cited experience Birdly (Somniacs AG, 2015), another good example of agency and synchronous multisensory feedback contributing to successful illusory ownership of non-human animal bodies. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 109 AN-ICON  Conclusion Fascinated as I am by the possibilities opened up by the idea of inhabiting non-human bodies, I can- not help but see the limitations of this kind of temporary foray into the world of non-human animals. If VR as it exists today struggles to make us see things from the perspective of another human being, as so many have already demonstrated, can it truly show us what it is like to be an animal, or any other non-human creature for that matter? Further limitations come up when we begin to question VR’s efficacy as an illusion. In a recent essay on the myth of total illusion in virtual reality, Janet Murray insists that, more than any medium before: Interactive environments demand more explicit partnership than just the willing suspension of disbelief; they become real through the “active creation of belief” by inducing and satis- fying specific intentional gestures of engagement. As soon as we stop participating, because we are confused or bored or uncomfortably stimulated, the illusion vanishes.45 Indeed, Murray is careful to remind us of a fact that is rarely highlighted in studies on illusions in VR, namely that effects such as the body ownership illusion are difficult to achieve and more difficult still to maintain.46 On one hand, I want to join Murray in insist- ing on the important role played by individual users in fostering the kinds of illusions for which I am advocat- ing in this essay. In an earlier paper on empathy in VR, I came to a conclusion that applies just as well to the idea 45 J.H. Murray, “Virtual/reality: how to tell the difference,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 11-27 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1470412920906253. Emphasis added. See also J.H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1997) (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2017): 136-139. 46 “The rubber/virtual hand experiment is truly delusional, but it is important to note that it is a fragile and momentary delusion.” Ibid.: 17. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 110 AN-ICON  of imaginatively projecting oneself in the experience of non-human or non-living beings: “users must know how and want to use this tool.”47 The non-anthropocentric ef- fects which I describe in this essay are difficult to achieve for users who do not know how–or much less care–to use VR as a tool to explore spaces and bodies which exceed their natural capabilities. On the other hand, I also want to recognize that the very idea of optical illu- sion hinges upon the illusory nature of the phenomenon. This assumes the automatic and involuntary process by which we can succumb to illusions; optical or otherwise. When the necessary conditions are met, we cannot help but fall victim to illusions. Could VR’s affordances be used to such effect? I am also keen on suggesting a fruitful ave- nue might lie in effects that are not quite illusions, but rather something we might call “games of perception,” or even hallucinations.48 Further research could be done in this regard to echo Crary’s work on subjective vision as it was utilized in the creation on optical toys in the 18th and 19th centuries. To that effect, we should also consider the scholarship that has been produced on the revelatory potentials of optical technologies used in ways that defy anthropocentric concerns. I am thinking here of Stan Brakhage’s call for a radical exploration of cinema’s visual capabilities, as well as of William Wees’ study of experimental cinema’s ability to “exceed” the limitations of human vision.49 In both cases, nonnormative uses of a technology lead to drastic effects, as heretofore dom- inant modes of representation are swept aside in favour 47 This essay is forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. 48 For more on illusions and hallucinations in VR, see C. Paolucci, “Perception, hallucination, virtual reality. From controlled hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 112-128, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/15443; P. Montani, “The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the image as a ‘bilderschrift’,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 154-172, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/15441. 49 W.C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). PHILIPPE BÉDARD 111 AN-ICON  of more eccentric–or even excessive–ways of engaging with worldly phenomena. And while both examples re- late to cinema, there is no reason why VR should not be amenable to such experimental fancies. Where is VR’s Brakhage? Its surrealist or Dadaist movement? Its fear- less pioneers? PHILIPPE BÉDARD 112 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON 

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Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality by Philippe Bédard art Virtual Reality Illusion Anthropocentrism Umwelt Issue №2 Year 2022 → Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality art PHILIPPE BÉDARD, McGill University – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4100-5249 https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18458 “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unpreju- diced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception”1 Abstract In the following essay, I consider if and how VR’s uncanny ability to create an illusion of presence and generate a sense of body ownership might be used to go beyond our anthropocentric perspective, towards non-hu- man experiences. By adventuring outside the domain of human experience, my goal is to address the affordances and limitations of VR’s illusionistic potential. Knowing full well that certain economic pressures preclude artists from pursuing the kinds of provocations I describe in this essay, I nevertheless invite readers to follow along as I explore alternative potentialities of contemporary VR. Specifically, I approach VR here in the hopes of finding ways of engaging with different bodies, spaces, and realities, even if illusorily. Keywords Virtual reality Illusion Anthropocentrism Umwelt To quote this essay: P. Bédard, “Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality art,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 89-112, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18458 1 S. Brakhage, “From Metaphors on Vision,” in P.A. Sitney, ed., The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1978): 120. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 89 AN-ICON  Introduction Many things have changed between the origi- nal heyday of virtual reality (VR) in the 1980–1990s and the current revival of the technology since the early 2010s. But while today VR might benefit from the leaps and bounds computers and graphic technologies have witnessed in the intervening decades, and while it might enjoy greater commercial success than ever before, I often feel our imag- ination around the kinds of experiences enabled by VR has suffered somewhat. We are far removed today from Mere- dith Bricken’s suggestion that in VR: “You can be the mad hatter or you can be the teapot; you can move back and forth to the rhythm of a song. You can be a tiny droplet in the rain or in the river.”2 Likewise, we seem to have strayed from Jaron Lanier’s proposition that in virtual reality, “you can visit the world of the dinosaur, then become a Tyran- nosaurus. Not only can you see DNA, you can experience what it’s like to be a molecule.”3 While Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin use these two quotes to highlight the illusion of “perceptual immediacy”4 of immersive virtual reality experiences, I see in these statements something else entirely more interesting: the idea that VR might give us experiences that far exceed the limits of human under- standing. In the following essay, I consider if and how VR’s uncanny ability to create an illusion of presence and generate a sense of body ownership might be used to go beyond our anthropocentric perspective, towards non-hu- man experiences. By adventuring outside the domain of human experience, my goal is to address the affordances 2 M. Bricken, “Virtual worlds: no interface to design,” in M. Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1991): 363-382, 372. 3 S. Ditlea, “False starts aside, virtual reality finds new roles,” New York Times (March 23, 1998): 97. 4 J. Bolter, R. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2000): 22. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 90 AN-ICON  and limitations of VR’s illusionistic potential. In so doing, I also aim to explore how VR might be thought of as more than a means to foster empathy for other human beings, whatever the purpose for that endeavour might be.5 This allows me to discuss immersive technologies and experi- ences in a context devoid of the problems typically asso- ciated with discourses around the concept of “empathy machine.” I begin this essay by addressing the illusion of presence in VR, specifically as it relates to our experience of body-space relations in physical reality. I start by address- ing what I argue to be the fundamental anthropocentrism of VR’s dominant mode of experience. This crucial detour has me discussing whether VR is capable of representing non-human modes of being in the world. Necessarily, this also means addressing earlier thought experiments in the field of psychology, biology, and philosophy that sought to question “what it is like to be” something other than human. Having done so, I then consider whether VR might have the ability to give us access to non-human realities, or whether it is limited by a fundamental anthropocentrism. Finally, I 5 On the issue of empathy in VR, see J.H. Murray, “Not a film and not an empathy machine,” Immerse (October 6, 2016): https://immerse.news/not-a-film-and-not-an-empathy-machine- 48b63b0eda93, accessed January 10, 2023; S. Gregory, “Immersive witnessing: from empathy and outrage to action,” WITNESS blog (2016), https://blog.witness.org/2016/08/ immersive-witnessing-from-empathy-and-outrage-to-action/, accessed January 10, 2023; G. Bollmer, “Empathy machines,” Media International Australia 165, no. 1 (2017): 63-76, https:// doi.org/10.1177/1329878X17726794; R. Yang, “If you walk in someone else’s shoes, then you’ve taken their shoes: empathy machines as appropriation machines,” Radiator Blog (April 5, 2017), https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2017/04/if-you-walk-in-someone-elses-shoes- then.html, accessed January 10, 2023; H. Farmer, “A broken empathy machine,” Immerse (September 30, 2019), https://immerse.news/a-broken-empathy-machine-can-virtual-reality- increase-pro-social-behaviour-and-reduce-prejudice-cbcefb30525b, accessed January 10, 2023; P. Roquet, “Empathy for the game master: how virtual reality creates empathy for those seen to be creating VR,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 65-80, https://doi. org/10.1177/1470412920906260; L. Nakamura, “Feeling good about feeling bad: virtuous virtual reality and the automation of racial empathy,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 47-64, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906259; G. Bollmer and K. Guinness, “Empathy and nausea: virtual reality and Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 28-46, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906261. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 91 AN-ICON  look at experiments relating to illusions of body ownership in VR, specifically as they relate to non-human bodies. As will become abundantly clear over the course of this essay, my goal is speculative—perhaps even provocative—rather than earnest. I write this text as an exercise in exploring what I perceive to be a bias towards anthropocentrism in VR, a medium which has so often been lauded for its ability to simulate otherwise impossible real- ities.6 Readers may also see this as a call to action to VR designers and consumers to open their minds to the pos- sibilities offered by contemporary immersive technologies beyond those practices that currently dominate the market. Knowing full well that certain economic pressures preclude artists from pursuing the kinds of provocations I describe in this essay, I nevertheless invite readers to follow along as I explore alternative potentialities of contemporary VR.7 Specifically, I approach VR here in the hopes of finding ways of engaging with different bodies, spaces, and real- ities, even if illusorily. Virtual reality environments: immediacy and presence It has become something of a truism to recog- nize that VR is able to foster a sense of presence, that is, the impression of “being there” in a virtual environment dis- tinct from the physical environment that one’s body is also occupying. Or, as Mathew Lombard et al. put it, presence 6 I maintain that VR is currently driven by profoundly anthropocentric forces, despite the “anti-anthropocentric drive which,” according to Andrea Pinotti, “currently characterises not only the VR world but contemporary visual culture, in various mediums, more generally.” A. Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?,” in Y. Hadjinicolaou, ed., Visual Engagements: Image Practices and Falconry (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020): 30-47, 44, https:// doi.org/10.1515/9783110618587-003. See also R. Grusin, The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 7 I also want to recognize that there are the effects of VR are not currently fully known and that much more work must be done to ensure current VR technologies are accessible and ethical. These pressing issues certainly deserve more attention before we can move towards more elaborate explorations of the outer limits of VR. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 92 AN-ICON  describes, “the perceptual illusion of non-mediation.”8 In this context, the perceived lack of mediation is predicated on VR’s ability to foster a convincing illusion of a space that reproduces the way we see the world in our daily lives: as a three-dimensional volume in which our bodies can move and act. And while on their own the affordances of head-mounted displays (HMD) could be used to create any number of effects and illusions, the dominant practice of contemporary immersive media has been to reproduce our habitual modes of (visual) perception: looking ahead from an upright position through a pair of eyes which we can move around (either in their orbits, by moving our head, or our body) to see the surrounding environment. In an earlier essay, I described VR as inherently subjective, following Jonathan Crary’s incisive discussion of “subjective vision.”9 By extension, I would also argue its default mode of experience–that for which it was designed and that which is dominant to this day–is also intrinsically anthropocentric. This is because “subjective,” in this con- text, refers to the idiosyncrasies of human vision.10 By the same token, I describe an apparatus which relies on these unique and fallible qualities of perception as subjective. In the case of VR, the HMD hinges upon the following sub- jective qualities of human vision: its binocularity, its “ego- centric” perspective, and the individual’s ability to move their point of view on the world through six degrees of freedom of movement along three dimensions. Here, ego- centrism describes an approach to body-space relations 8 M. Lombard, T. Ditton, “At the heart of it all: the concept of presence,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3, no. 2 (1997), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997. tb00072.x. 9 P. Bédard, “La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 28, no. 1 (2019): 66-92, 74, https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs.28.1.2019-0012; J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992). 10 See again J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 93 AN-ICON  which take the individual as a point of reference.11 In other words, the egocentric perspective considers the human body as a “pivot around which the three dimensions of spatial extension arrange themselves and from which they ultimately proceed.”12 This could just as easily be called anthropocentric. I continue to subscribe to the idea that VR’s apparatus and the default mode of experience it proposes are subjective, egocentric, and anthropocentric. That is because in most cases, the illusion of presence fostered by immersive virtual environments plays off this charac- teristic centrality of our body in our perception of space. Head-mounted displays become viewports into different and often completely fantastical realities, but these spaces are still explored from an egocentric perspective, with the body as invariable centre of gravity. If we assume the goal of most virtual reality experiences is to create a satisfying illusion of presence in a virtual environment–whatever the purpose for that may be–it makes perfect sense why this strategy has remained so dominant. However, this is not the only avenue. As an example, a slew of recent (flat) vid- eo games have embraced the affordances of their medi- um’s monocular perspective to create fascinating optical illusions and truly impossible body-space relations. The worlds explored in Antichamber (Demruth, 2013), Superlim- inal (Pillow Castle Games, 2019), Manifold Garden (William Chyr, 2019), Spaceflux (Colin Ardelean, 2020), Hyperbolica (CodeParade, 2022), and Parallelia (SincArt Studio, 2022) exceed our natural conception of space by presenting all manner of physically impossible environments: non-Euclid- ean, hyperbolic, fractal, etc. In so doing, they draw more inspiration from M.C. Escher’s depictions of space than 11 W.R. Sherman, A.B. Craig, Understanding Virtual Reality: Interface, Application, and Design (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman Publishers, 2003): 296. 12 E.S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): 208. Emphasis added. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 94 AN-ICON  from what we find in Leon Battista Alberti’s theorization of renaissance perspective. What if VR were to also stray from the beaten path and indulge in such perspectival fancies? In the contemporary immersive media land- scape, precious few experiments with non-anthropocen- tric spaces have surfaced–at least to my knowledge.13 In mid-2020, Diego Montoya shared Spacetime, which he described as a “special relativity VR simulation.” The ex- periment allows users to explore a room where the speed of light is much slower than usual: “You can experience space contraction, time dilation and light Doppler effects as you move”14 (Fig. 1a and 1b). Among various physical distortions the experience enables–all of which are impos- sible to encapsulate in written form–the designer explains that “[t]he world feels very ‘wobbly’ when moving very close to the speed of light, almost liquid.” While space remains Fig. 1a 13 I discuss the limits of any analysis of contemporary virtual reality in P. Bédard, “La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains.” 14 D. Montoya (@diego_montoya _), “I built a special #relativity VR simulation for @oculus Quest, where the speed of light c is much lower than usual. You can experience space contraction, time dilation and light Doppler effect as you move. 1/n,” Tweet, August 7, 2020, https://twitter.com/diego_montoya_/status/1291745102700765184, accessed January 10, 2023. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 95 AN-ICON  Fig. 1a and 1b. Diego Montoya, Fig. 1b Spacetime, 2020 three-dimensional in Spacetime, the user’s relations to that space far exceed the limits of our habitual modes of per- ception. With that said, I would hesitate to say that they exceed anthropocentrism, since the transformations that space undergoes throughout the experiment result from the user’s movements. Space is not transformed. Our per- ception of it is. As with the earlier quoted videogames, Mon- toya’s project is the exception rather than the norm. Indeed, I still believe that as long as VR remains tied to the three or six degrees of freedom model of spatial engagement which takes the body as its centre, there is little it can do to avoid this egocentric mode of experience. With that said, nothing is keeping VR designers from creating virtual environments which are abstract rather than representa- tional.15 In other words, perhaps the solution to exceeding anthropocentric perspectives in VR might be to reject the notion of “perspective” altogether. However, doing so might 15 An example I recently encountered would merit further attention in this regard. In Lockdown Dreamscape (Nicolas Gebbe, 2022), an innovative visual process was used to distort the image such that objects seemed to meld into one another. A slow movement through the distorted space led me to discover novel spatial relations. The experience was at once nauseating and thrilling. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 96 AN-ICON  require more nuanced explorations of the affordances of virtual bodies. It might also ask that we question “what it is like to be” non-human, and whether VR is at all capable to furnish an answer to that question. What it is like to be [ ] Whether it has been asked about animals, in- sects, or “things” in general, the question of “what it is like to be” this or that–whatever it may be–recognizes that our perspective as human animals is limited and distinct enough from other forms of being to preclude us from knowing or even understanding them.16 The reality behind this seem- ingly impassable chasm between ourselves and others is made clear through the concept of Umwelt, as theorized by Jakob von Uexküll. While it is true that all things (living or otherwise) occupy the same physical reality, Von Uexküll introduces the notion of Umwelt to suggest that all beings do not necessarily share the same environment or world.17 The sensorial attunement of different animals varies to such a degree that the very meaning of “world” differs from one creature to another. The word Umwelt can be translated as “self-cen- tred world.” This suggests the inherently subjective or egocentric nature of a given entity’s particular version of, and relation to, a world. This interpretation of Umwelt as “self-centred” or “subjectively-perceived” world is made even more evident when looking at the notion of subjectivity itself, understood here as that which is exclusive to a given 16 This has far-reaching implications within debates on the notion of empathy in virtual reality. 17 J. von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning (1934), trans. J.D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). The ties between von Uexküll’s Umwelt and VR have been highlighted by Andrea Pinotti in an illuminating chapter. See Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?” PHILIPPE BÉDARD 97 AN-ICON  individual (i.e., subject).18 Indeed, as Maike Sarah Reinerth and Jan-Noël Thon define it, “subjectivity” designates that to which an individual has privileged access. While this definition of subjectivity does satisfyingly describe the ex- clusive character of Umwelt, the parallel breaks down when we realize subjectivity is most often discussed in terms of the unique way in which a given subject “sees” things. The reason for this breakdown has far-reaching implications, specifically when it comes to the non-anthropocentric aims of this essay. Where the concept of Umwelt shines and where the questions of “what it is like to be” something other than human come into play is precisely when the human sen- sorium–of which sight is often taken to be the most privi- leged example–is no longer sufficient. Von Uexküll with his famous study of the tick, Thomas Nagel with his example of the bat, and Ian Bogost in his Alien Phenomenology all focus on the worldly experience of insects, animals and things that are commonly understood as blind–that is, when sight is understood from an anthropocentric perspective.19 What drives these thinkers, then, is precisely to understand how these creatures sense, navigate and exist in a version of the world that is completely different from that of hu- mans, even though we might inhabit the same spaces at any given time. How does the world of the bat differ from ours when its primary mode of experience is defined by its use of echolocation? How is the tick’s experience of the world influenced by its reliance on sensing the heat, fur, and butyric acid that signify the presence of its main prey, namely mammals? How different is the world for things 18 M.S. Reinerth, J.N. Thon, eds., Subjectivity Across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2017). For a more sustained discussion of subjectivity in VR, see P. Bédard, “La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains.” 19 T. Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?,” The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435-450, https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914; I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). PHILIPPE BÉDARD 98 AN-ICON  whose very mode of existence would even preclude us from describing them has “experiencing” the world? “When we ask what it means to be something,” Bogost summarizes, “we pose a question that exceeds our own grasp of the being of the world.”20 In brief, these ask that we set aside our privileged modes of experience for a moment and engage–even if imaginatively–with other realities parallel and equal to our own. My interest in ask- ing these questions in the context of an essay on virtual reality, then, comes from the fact that I see it as a tool for exploring and perhaps even exceeding the limits of anthro- pocentric perspectives.21 Indeed, while Reinerth and Thon remark upon the impossibility of accessing the subjectivity of others per se, the editors also suggest that media of all kinds (from literature, to movies, to games, etc.) can succeed in fostering a sense of intersubjectivity. This pro- cess could also be called empathy, namely “the ability to share and understand the experiences of others,” or, as Kate Nash defines it, “an affective response grounded in an imaginative engagement with the experience of the other.”22 Whether we call it intersubjectivity or empathy, the belief behind these concepts is that different media can make use of their unique affordances to suggest to users how a given character might subjectively perceive a given event or experience. Can VR overcome its fundamental anthropo- centrism and help users imaginatively project themselves in the experiences of others, precisely when these exceed their habitual range of possible experiences? 20 I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to be a Thing: 30. Original emphasis. 21 Pinotti might say that this desire to exceed anthropocentrism is itself anthropocentric, as it posits humans as having an exceptional capacity to access other modes of being in the world, which other creatures do not possess. See Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?”. 22 H. Farmer, “A broken empathy machine,” K. Nash, “Virtual reality witness: exploring the ethics of mediated presence,” Studies in Documentary Film 12, no. 2 (2018): 119-131, 124, https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2017.1340796. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 99 AN-ICON  Accessing non-human realities through technology An initial response to this last question might be that it cannot. Because VR HMDs are (predominantly) audiovisual devices and because they are tuned to the hu- man sensorium, they cannot, by definition, make us see and hear more than what our eyes and ears can perceive nor- mally.23 As Andrea Pinotti adroitly explains, such attempts to represent non-human realities through technology: [...] cannot patently hope to escape Nagel’s caveat. Since they are visually rendered on a screen, a compound-eye vision, a left-right- eye independent vision or an infrared vision will always be visions processed by a human eye-brain system. Human species-specific organisation operates as a physiological and phenomenological a priori that cannot simply be bypassed. This is, of course, true also for any sort of VR simulation of non-human ways of experiencing the world: they all ultimately have to be processed by such human a priori.24 This makes it seemingly impossible for HMDs to exceed our typical senses of sight and hearing, to say nothing of being able to use it to go beyond our ordinary perceptual habitus and perceive the world as a bat, tick, or other creature might. But does it mean VR cannot help us imagine what the world might look like to a different being? The fact is that we already use tools in our dai- ly lives that make visible to us phenomena to which our eyes and ears are not sensitive. The clock makes visible 23 To that effect, “[David] Eagleman has noted that the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to humans is less than a ten-trillionth of the electromagnetic field, and therefore much goes undetected in our lives apart from a ‘shockingly small fraction of the surrounding reality.” L. Jarvis, “Body-swapping: self-attribution and body transfer illusions (BTIs),” in Immersive Embodiment: Theatres of Mislocalized Sensation (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019): 99-154, 113. See also D. Eagleman, “The Umwelt,” in J. Brockman, ed., This Will Make You Smarter (London: Doubleday, 2012): 143-145. 24 A. Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?:” 46. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 100 AN-ICON  the passage of time, while other instruments transform a range of different extrasensory stimuli into visible data (e.g., spectrometer, barometer, Geiger counter, Magnetic Res- onance Imaging scanner, etc.). Through these tools, we can gain access to phenomena that are strictly speaking “invisible,” yet which become visible all the same thanks to the appropriate apparatus. Having been made visible, these phenomena are not necessarily legible to all. As Don Ihde explains, the relation with the world in which we enter when using such tools is hermeneutic, meaning it requires that we possess the knowledge and skills necessary to interpret the data presented to us through these instruments; one must know how to speak the machine’s language, and to read the world through it.25 Thinking of VR as a tool to engage hermeneu- tically with aspects of the world which we cannot natural- ly perceive is one possible avenue for thinking of it as a way to exceed the anthropocentric perspectives to which it has generally been relegated. We can see traces of this approach at play in several projects by the artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF), notably in In the Eyes of the Animal (2015), Treehugger: Wawona (2016), and We live in an Ocean of Air (2018). In each of these projects, the artists use “terrestrial laser scanners” to create what are commonly known as “point clouds.” The density and colour of these clouds can be changed to create more or less detailed pointillist representations of physical spaces. MLF uses these to translate ways of “seeing” or being in the world that are in excess of human understanding. The 25 “Hermeneutic relations,” Evan Selinger explains, “do not amplify or replicate the body’s sensory abilities; instead, they engage our linguistic and interpretative aptitudes. In this context, technologies that facilitate hermeneutic relations are best understood as being ‘text- like’; their effective utilization requires interpretation through the activity of reading.” E. Selinger, Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde (New York: SUNY Press, 2012): 5. An example that is closer to art and illusion might be anamorphosis. To see the anamorphosis hidden in an image, viewers must know how to position themselves in such a way as to reveal the image. See D.L. Collins, “Anamorphosis and the eccentric observer: inverted perspective and construction of the gaze,” Leonardo (1992): 73-82, https://www.jstor.org/stable/i270958. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 101 AN-ICON  effect lies halfway between scientific imagery and impres- sionism, as sparse arrays of point clouds leave much to the viewer’s imagination. In the Eyes of the Animal, for example, puts its viewers in the eyes of four different animals and insects (owl, frog, dragonfly, and mosquito), each with its Fig. 2a Fig. 2b Fig. 2a and 2b. Marshmallow Laser Feast, In the Eyes of the Animal, 2015 own way of perceiving a forest (Fig. 2a and 2b). Meanwhile, Treehugger and Ocean of Air each focus on trees and on the scope and time frame of their biological processes. Al- though all the creatures represented in these projects share the same environments (i.e., the forest), they each have PHILIPPE BÉDARD 102 AN-ICON  their own Umwelt, which MLF represents through different densities of point clouds and different colour filters. Some critics may point to the fact that what MLF does in their project may not be called hermeneutical, in that the tools they use do not translate the actual, literal perception of these insects and animals.26 It would also be fair to note that users would not be adequately equipped to interpret the world as perceived through these tools, even if their scientific accuracy was beyond reproach. This would be missing the point. It would be more appropriate to say that what MLF creates are artistic renditions of what the authors imagine the world might look like to different non-human animals. Their projects are best understood, then, as invitations to imaginatively explore what the Um- welt of a mosquito, dragonfly, frog, owl, or even a tree might be made of. Recall that for Reinerth and Thon, different me- dia can effectively seek to simulate certain aspects of a sub- jective experience as perceived by a particular individual by appealing to different aesthetic or narrative strategies, as well as the imagination of the user (viewer, reader, player, etc.).27 What we have yet to explore, however, is whether VR is capable of simulating experiences that exceed the boundaries of the human body. And since, as Maurice Mer- leau-Ponty writes, “I am conscious of the world through the medium of my body,”28 how the body appears and functions in VR has far-reaching implications. So while what MLF (among other artists) creates might look different than how we see the world, the question still stands as to if and 26 MLF typically collaborates with scientists in relevant fields to help them translate the data recorded. With that said, Pinotti’s reminder that data represented onscreen for human consumption is not equivalent to the source stimuli still holds true, lessening any claim these artistic experiences might want to make as to their accuracy. See Pinotti, “What is it like to be a hawk?” 27 M.S. Reinerth, J.N. Thon, “Introduction,” in M.S. Reinerth, J.N. Thon, eds., Subjectivity Across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives: 1-25, 3. Original emphasis. 28 M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2010): 94-95. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 103 AN-ICON  how might VR allow users to act differently than they can in their own human bodies. Embodying the non-human While the illusion of presence is often acknowl- edged in discussions of VR, the various kinds of embod- ied illusions the medium offers are just as relevant, readily achievable, and arguably even more fundamental.29 It is not surprising, then, that the body, its representations, and our perception thereof have received much attention from the fields of psychology and neuroscience, especially in recent years. For instance, in their work on the so-called “Proteus effect,” Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson have demonstrat- ed how “an individual’s behaviour conforms to their digital self-representation independent of how others perceive them.”30 While most scholarship that invokes this effect focuses on the behavioural aftereffects of inhabiting other kinds of human bodies (e.g., in terms of gender, age, race, ability, etc.), some have explored the effects derived from inhabiting non-human bodies.31 These lay the groundwork for the explorations to which this essay aspires, but it is possible to go further still. A great many studies have been conducted on the topic of the “body ownership illusion,” or the so-called “body transfer illusion.” These illustrate how our body sche- ma is amenable to change when presented with sufficiently 29 I use the term “medium” loosely here, as contemporary VR is more appropriately described as an apparatus which pre-existing media are attempting to adopt. For more on that debate, see my forthcoming “Many births of VR.” 30 N. Yee, J.N. Bailenson, “The Proteus effect: the effect of transformed self-representation on behavior,” Human Communication Research 33, no. 3 (2007): 271-290, https://doi. org/10.1177/0093650208330254. 31 See S.J. Ahn et al., “Experiencing nature. Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 21, no. 6 (2016): 399-419, https://doi.org/10.1111/ jcc4.12173. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 104 AN-ICON  convincing data.32 Importantly, this adaptation also works in cases of illusion, when the brain is tricked into adopting external elements. This process can also be triggered in virtual reality applications. Starting from the now famous rubber hand illusion, studies have detailed different ways in which users can feel ownership of an artificial limb, such that they are deluded into thinking that this foreign object is part of their own body.33 Others have focussed on body transfer illusions, suggesting that even full-body stand-ins such as mannequins and digital avatars can be absorbed into a user’s body schema. VR is a particularly powerful tool for fostering this illusion since, as one notable paper suggests, “in VR, there are near-infinite opportunities for both extending and radically altering our virtual (and hence perceptually real) bodies.”34 The notion of “homuncular flexibility” further supports the idea that the mind can adapt to “exotic mor- phologies, distortions, extensions and reductions” of body 32 See M.R. Lesur et al., “The plasticity of the bodily self: head movements in bodily illusions and their relation to Gallagher’s body image and body schema,” Constructivist Foundations 14, no. 1 (2018): 94-105, https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-162795; S. Seinfeld et al., “User representations in human-computer interaction,” Human–Computer Interaction 36, no. 5-6 (2021): 400-438, https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2020.1724790; A. Maselli, M. Slater, “The building blocks of the full body ownership illusion,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2013): 1-15, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00083; M. Botvinick, J. Cohen, “Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see,” Nature 391, no. 6669 (1998): 756, https://doi.org/10.1038/35784; S. J. Ahn et al., “Experiencing nature. Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature;” N. Yee, J.N. Bailenson, “The difference between being and seeing: the relative contribution of self-perception and priming to behavioral changes via digital self-representation,” Media Psychology 12, no. 2 (2009): 195-209, https://doi.org/10.1080/15213260902849943; H. Farmer, A. Tajadura-Jiménez, M. Tsakiris, “Beyond the colour of my skin: how skin colour affects the sense of body-ownership,” Consciousness and Cognition 21, no. 3 (2012): 1242-1256, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. concog.2012.04.011; H. Farmer, L. Maister, M. Tsakiris, “Change my body, change my mind: the effects of illusory ownership of an outgroup hand on implicit attitudes toward that outgroup,” Frontiers in Psychology 4, no. 13 (2014), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.01016; H. Farmer, L. Maister, “Putting ourselves in another’s skin: using the plasticity of self- perception to enhance empathy and decrease prejudice,” Social Justice Research 30, no. 4 (2017): 323-354, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-017-0294-1. 33 M. Botvinick, J. Cohen, “Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see:” 756. 34 W. Steptoe, A. Steed, M. Slater, “Human tails: ownership and control of extended humanoid avatars,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 19, no. 4 (2013): 583-590, https://doi.org/10.1109/tvcg.2013.32. Notably, the authors also suggest that: “Our instinctive ability to rapidly and dexterously incorporate such objects and learn how to use such tools provides a clue to the remarkable plasticity of how the human brain represents the body and encodes space.” PHILIPPE BÉDARD 105 AN-ICON  configurations.35 It is interesting to note that already be- tween 1989 and 1991, ad hoc experiments were being conducted by VR pioneer Jaron Lanier and his team at VPL on an individual’s ability to take ownership of “weird ava- tars that were still usable.”36 Avatars with unusual point of view placements (e.g., eyes at hip level), extremely long ex- tremities, and even non-human avatars were experimented with.37 In the latter case, Lanier reminisces about a lobster avatar which was designed by Ann Lasko-Harvill, then Director of Product Design at VPL Research.38 Some of these informal experiments have since been proven by more robust studies. Notably, Andrea Stevenson Won and Jeremy Bailenson teamed up with and Jaron Lanier to test the ability of users to incorporate supernumerary limbs by mapping their controls to “the rotation of a wrist, the flex of an ankle, or some combination of the two.”39 This came as a response to the limitation of the human body in re- gard to the fact that, “[a]s the lobster body includes more limbs than a person, there were not enough parameters measured by the body suit to drive the lobster avatar in a one-to-one map.”40 An important limitation to the illusion of body ownership or transfer which studies on the topic often 35 Ibid. See also A.S. Won et al., “Homuncular flexibility in virtual reality,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 20, no. 3 (2015): 241-259, https://doi.org/10.1111/ jcc4.12107; A.S. Won, J. Bailenson, J. Lanier, “Homuncular flexibility: the human ability to inhabit nonhuman avatars,” Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource (2015): 1-16. 36 Ibid.: 2. 37 K. Kilteni et al., “Extending body space in immersive virtual reality: a very long arm illusion,” PloS one 7, no. 7 (2012): 1-15, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0040867; S.J. Ahn et al., “Experiencing nature. Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature;” T. Feuchtner, J. Müller, “Extending the body for interaction with reality,” Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2017), https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025689. 38 J. Lanier, “Homuncular flexibility,” in 2006: What is your Dangerous Idea? Edge: The World Question Center (2006), https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11182, accessed January 10, 2023. 39 A.S. Won et al., “Homuncular flexibility in virtual reality:” 242. Interestingly, the authors gesture towards our earlier discussion of “what it is like to be [ ]” when, in the very first line of their article, they ask: “What if you could become a bat.” Ibid.: 241. 40 A.S. Won, J. Bailenson, J. Lanier, “Homuncular flexibility: the human ability to inhabit nonhuman avatars:” 2-3. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 106 AN-ICON  highlight is the required “realism” of the external object. That is, “the need for an object to preserve precise, informa- tive corporeal structural features in order to be integrable as one’s own body part.”41 In other words, anthropomorphism is often presented as an important–if not essential–factor in the illusion of body ownership. Does this mean the move beyond human perspectives for which I am advocating in this essay is a nonstarter? Redemption for this idea might yet be found in more recent approaches to the illusion of body own- ership which point to a crucial element that is otherwise overlooked in the earlier quoted studies. Namely, in their meta-analysis of “user representations,” Sofía Seinfeld and colleagues have shown that while “[u]nrealistic visual ap- pearance, such as the visual discontinuity of the artificial body, also reduces the feeling of body ownership,” it is also true that “[b]ody ownership illusions are effectively in- duced through congruent multisensory stimulation.”42 Earli- er studies focussed on illusions generated by visual stimuli supplemented with synchronous tactile feedback (e.g., the rubber hand is stroked at the same time as the physical hand). Meanwhile, active engagement with the illusory body augmentation has been shown to play an important role in the success of this illusion. For instance, Marte Roel Lesur et al. suggest that while “the literature shows that not just any fake body or object can elicit illusory owner- ship,” at the same time, “in the presence of sensorimotor coherence, there are some examples of illusory ownership over implausible virtual bodies.”43 The redeeming quality of contemporary VR technologies in this regard is precisely their ability to afford their users agency, interactivity, and 41 A. Maselli, M. Slater, “The building blocks of the full body ownership illusion:” 12. 42 S. Seinfeld et al., “User representations in human-computer interaction:” 416-417. Emphasis added. 43 M.R. Lesur et al., “The plasticity of the bodily self: head movements in bodily illusions and their relation to Gallagher’s body image and body schema:” 101 PHILIPPE BÉDARD 107 AN-ICON  multisensory feedback which work in concert to create many of the contingencies that are known to facilitate such body ownership illusions. Fig. 3a Fig. 3b Fig. 3a and 3b. Non-human bodies in Plastisapiens (Miri Chekhanovich and Édith Jorisch, 2022). Credit: National Film Board of Canada (2022) True as it might be that most recent VR ex- periences remain tied to humanoid avatars, some have pushed the boundaries of what counts as realistic body, while others have experimented with bodies that are alto- gether non-human. One such notable example is the VR experience Plastisapiens (Miri Chekhanovich and Édith Jorisch, 2022), a piece of “surrealist ecofiction” which asks viewers to imagine a future where human evolution has been shaped by our exposure to microplastics in the air we PHILIPPE BÉDARD 108 AN-ICON  breathe, the water we drink, and the food we ingest; the An- thropocene has here been replaced by what we might call the Plasticene. Throughout its 15–minutes runtime, Plasti- sapiens asks its viewers to adopt a number of new bodies, from a prehistoric betentacled creature to the eponymous human-plastic hybrid, whose hands seem to be made of thin plastic (Fig. 3a and 3b). In both cases, “hands” are the only part of their body users can see, leaving the rest up to their imagination. Meanwhile, hand tracking is used to manip- ulate these new alien-looking appendages. The player’s agency is made evident in their ability to move their hands in predictable ways. Here, part of the success for the body ownership illusion is ensured by the synchronous move- ment of the hand in physical reality and the appearance of the corresponding movement of the alien limb, as seen in the HMD. In my own experience of Plastisapiens, I had no issue whatsoever knowing how to manipulate my tentacles to successfully reach the objects in my vicinity, adapting to their limits and affordances within a matter of seconds. Fur- thermore, the experience employs haptic feedback through the controllers to add a sense of multisensory correspon- dence between what the eye registers the tentacle having touched, and what the physical (i.e., human) hand feels having touched as well. Agency, interactivity, and multi- sensory feedback therefore join forces to foster a sense of sensorimotor coherence, thereby facilitating the illusion of body ownership despite the lack of realism of the bodies on offer.44 44 See also the oft-cited experience Birdly (Somniacs AG, 2015), another good example of agency and synchronous multisensory feedback contributing to successful illusory ownership of non-human animal bodies. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 109 AN-ICON  Conclusion Fascinated as I am by the possibilities opened up by the idea of inhabiting non-human bodies, I can- not help but see the limitations of this kind of temporary foray into the world of non-human animals. If VR as it exists today struggles to make us see things from the perspective of another human being, as so many have already demonstrated, can it truly show us what it is like to be an animal, or any other non-human creature for that matter? Further limitations come up when we begin to question VR’s efficacy as an illusion. In a recent essay on the myth of total illusion in virtual reality, Janet Murray insists that, more than any medium before: Interactive environments demand more explicit partnership than just the willing suspension of disbelief; they become real through the “active creation of belief” by inducing and satis- fying specific intentional gestures of engagement. As soon as we stop participating, because we are confused or bored or uncomfortably stimulated, the illusion vanishes.45 Indeed, Murray is careful to remind us of a fact that is rarely highlighted in studies on illusions in VR, namely that effects such as the body ownership illusion are difficult to achieve and more difficult still to maintain.46 On one hand, I want to join Murray in insist- ing on the important role played by individual users in fostering the kinds of illusions for which I am advocat- ing in this essay. In an earlier paper on empathy in VR, I came to a conclusion that applies just as well to the idea 45 J.H. Murray, “Virtual/reality: how to tell the difference,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 11-27 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1470412920906253. Emphasis added. See also J.H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1997) (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2017): 136-139. 46 “The rubber/virtual hand experiment is truly delusional, but it is important to note that it is a fragile and momentary delusion.” Ibid.: 17. PHILIPPE BÉDARD 110 AN-ICON  of imaginatively projecting oneself in the experience of non-human or non-living beings: “users must know how and want to use this tool.”47 The non-anthropocentric ef- fects which I describe in this essay are difficult to achieve for users who do not know how–or much less care–to use VR as a tool to explore spaces and bodies which exceed their natural capabilities. On the other hand, I also want to recognize that the very idea of optical illu- sion hinges upon the illusory nature of the phenomenon. This assumes the automatic and involuntary process by which we can succumb to illusions; optical or otherwise. When the necessary conditions are met, we cannot help but fall victim to illusions. Could VR’s affordances be used to such effect? I am also keen on suggesting a fruitful ave- nue might lie in effects that are not quite illusions, but rather something we might call “games of perception,” or even hallucinations.48 Further research could be done in this regard to echo Crary’s work on subjective vision as it was utilized in the creation on optical toys in the 18th and 19th centuries. To that effect, we should also consider the scholarship that has been produced on the revelatory potentials of optical technologies used in ways that defy anthropocentric concerns. I am thinking here of Stan Brakhage’s call for a radical exploration of cinema’s visual capabilities, as well as of William Wees’ study of experimental cinema’s ability to “exceed” the limitations of human vision.49 In both cases, nonnormative uses of a technology lead to drastic effects, as heretofore dom- inant modes of representation are swept aside in favour 47 This essay is forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. 48 For more on illusions and hallucinations in VR, see C. Paolucci, “Perception, hallucination, virtual reality. From controlled hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 112-128, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/15443; P. Montani, “The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the image as a ‘bilderschrift’,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 154-172, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/15441. 49 W.C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). PHILIPPE BÉDARD 111 AN-ICON  of more eccentric–or even excessive–ways of engaging with worldly phenomena. And while both examples re- late to cinema, there is no reason why VR should not be amenable to such experimental fancies. Where is VR’s Brakhage? Its surrealist or Dadaist movement? Its fear- less pioneers? PHILIPPE BÉDARD 112 AN-ICON AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON. The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan. 1 / I AN-ICON