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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/17909

Introduction: the image between presence and absence by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Altered states Dream Hallucination Filmic representation Immersive media Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Introduction: the image between 1 presence and absence Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Altered states Hallucination Immersive media Filmic representation Dream A visual history of alteration Dream images, anticipations of the future, memories of the past, perceptual distortions, delusional hallucinations, cognitions intoxicated by alcohol and drugs have always inhabited the visual representations of paint- ings, comics, films, television series, videogames and, more recently, virtual reality installations. We call them “altered states of consciousness”, meaning any perceptual state other than ordinary human perception.2 When they are expressed in a visual form, we see a material picture which represents a mental image.3 While a picture is completely experienced by the senses, mental imagery is ordinarily conceived of as a quasi-perceptual To quote this essay: G. Grossi and A. Pinotti, “Introduction: the image between presence and absence”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 4-16 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 into the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2018-2022” attributed by Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca (MIUR). 2 For a rigorous psychological definition of the concept of “altered state of consciousness”, embracing mental states occurring in sleep, meditation, hypnosis or while using drugs, see Ch.T. Tart, Altered States of Consciousness (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1972). 3 The distinction between the materiality, objectivity and prevalent visual character of the image intended as picture and the immateriality, subjectivity and multisensorial aspect of the mental image is perfectly explained by W.J.T. Mitchell in “What is an Image?”, New Literary History 15, no. 3 (1984): 503-537. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 4 AN-ICON  experience that occurs in the absence of external stimuli.4 What makes these pictures recognizable to us as such? We cannot, in fact, compare them with the reality of the mental image, which we know only in the first person, trapped in the secret of individual experience. And yet, it seems that the visual has always elaborated strategies, codes, and arrangements to ensure that, within a visual narrative, an image is interpreted as absent, because it is present in a mental space or as a perception of an altered state of consciousness. These representations are historically and cul- turally determined, depending on the way a mental image is conceived in each era and geographical context. The French historian Yannick Ripa, for example, has distin- guished an “ancien régime du rêve”, in which the dream is thought of as an external and metaphysical entity from the modern conception that leads it back to the universe of an inner subjectivity.5 At the same time, the medium that delivers these mental visions also contributes to differentiating cul- tural codes and shared representations that shape them. In Füssli’s The Nightmare (1781) or in Goya’s El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (1797), the oneiric emerges from a juxtaposition of the sleeping body with its nightmares, co-present in the same visual box. Differently, comics such as Winsor McCay’s Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend (1904-1913) and Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905-1927), represent altered states and especially dreaming in a visual regime that combines simultaneity and succession.6 The result is a progressive escalation of bizarreness that can only be interrupted by the last vignette, when the dreamer usually falls off the bed. Cinema, ever since Méliès, has used particular fades such as cross-dissolves to signal the passage from physical to mental presence, be it in memory, imagination, 4 A. Richardson, Mental Imagery (London: Routledge, 1969). 5 Y. Ripa, Histoire du rêve. Regards sur l’imaginaire des Français au 19e siècle (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1988). 6 T. Gunning, “The art of succession: reading, writing, and watching comics”, Critical Inquiry 40, no. 3 (2014): 36-51. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 5 AN-ICON  or dream. Another peculiar case is given by the extreme instability of the camera with which the alterations caused by indigestion, drunkenness, and drug consumption are rendered since early movies. Jean Epstein’s comparison between alcohol and cinema is thus significant to define the multiform, fluid, and malleable perception of the universe introduced by the medium.7 However, none of these codes is fixed: cultural contexts and historical fractures introduce radical differ- ences within each mediascape, and the same happens if we consider processes such as hybridization, conver- gence, and remediation of the different media. Nevertheless, a dreamlike or hallucinatory image remains immediately recognizable to many viewers. It is a representation that indicates its absence rather than its presence. The altered states of film theory The way in which cinema not only records ob- jective reality but also visualizes mental processes has al- ways been one of the most hotly-debated questions in film theory. In 1916, Hugo Münsterberg’s important essay The Photoplay. A Psychological Study laid the foundations of the question: the cinematic image is never merely objective, since the movement and depth that the spectator perceives in the film do not exist in themselves, but are the product of the cooperation of the images with the spectator’s mental activity.8 Moreover, in the film a series of techniques ex- ternalizes and makes materially visible on the screen cer- tain mental processes: attention is recreated by the zoom and the close-up; memory is expressed through the use of flashbacks; imagination, conceived as the capacity to anticipate future events, is portrayed through what contem- porary film grammar would call flashforwards. The relation- ship between film and mind thus appears analogical, based 7 J. Epstein, “Alcool et cinéma” (1949), in S. Keller, J.N. Paul, eds., Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012): 395-404. 8 H. Münsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study (1916) (New York City: Dover Publications, 1970). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 6 AN-ICON  on the similarity of the respective cognitive processes.9 A further peculiarity recognized by Münsterberg is that of visualizing what the characters “see in their own minds”,10 images belonging to memory and dreams whose transi- tion is reported by “soft-focus images, lighting variations, superimpositions”.11 In the same wake, in his famous essay devoted to Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures (1934), also Erwin Panofsky remarked that “the movies have the power, entirely denied to the theater, to convey psychological ex- periences by directly projecting their content to the screen, substituting, as it were, the eye of the beholder for the consciousness of the character”.12 The metonymic and metaphoric relationship between film and mind – to use Christian Metz’s semio- logical terminology –13 are the basis of the aesthetic spec- ificity of cinema, which succeeds in materializing mental operations with greater effectiveness than the previous arts. Sergej Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, with its adherence to thought faculties such as analogies and oppositions, en- hances this hallucinatory and oneiric power of the movie. It is no accident that in his Non-indifferent Nature (1945-1947) the Soviet director and theorist analyzes mental visualiza- tion techniques such as those used in Loyola’s spiritual exercises being interested in the artistic achievement of ecstasy and pathos.14 In many theories cinema takes on the charac- teristics of a mind objectified in material images and sounds: a magical double of the self-produced by processes of 9 N. Carroll, “Film/mind analogies: The case of Hugo Münsterberg”, Journal for Aesthetics and Criticism 46, no. 4 (1988): 489-499. 10 J. Moure, “The cinema as art of the mind: Hugo Münsterberg, first theorist of subjectivity in film”, in D. Chateau, ed., Subjectivity: Filmic Representation and the Spectator’s Experience (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011): 23-40, 39. 11 Ibid. 12 E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures” (1934), in Three Essays on Style (Cambridge MA: The Mit Press, 1995): 98. 13 Ch. Metz, “Metaphor/metonymy, or the imaginary referent”, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 3, no. 1 (1981): 42-65. See also L. Williams, “Dream rhetoric and film rhetoric: metaphor and metonymy in Un chien andalou”, Semiotica 33, no. 1-2 (1981): 87-103. 14 S. Eisenstein, Non-indifferent Nature (1945-1947), trans. H. Marshall (Cambridge-New York City: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 171. See also M. Lefebvre, “Eisenstein, rhetoric and imaginicity: towards a revolutionary memoria”, Screen 41, no. 4 (2000): 349-368. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 7 AN-ICON  identification and projection for Edgar Morin among oth- ers;15 a brain endowed with perceptions, actions, and affec- tions according to Gilles Deleuze;16 a narcissistic regression analogous to dreaming in the perspective of Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz.17 Metz in particular underlines some radical differences between cinema and that partic- ular form of mental image constituted by the dream: the awareness of being at the cinema versus the unawareness of dreaming; the impression of reality of the film versus the illusion of reality of nocturnal visions; the real exteriority of images and sounds perceived in the cinema versus the inte- riority of the “hallucinatory psychosis of desire”; the logical consistency of the film versus the bizarre discontinuity of dream images. Yet a profound analogy remains in the half- way states of both cinema and dream: when spectators are so engrossed that they interact with the characters on the screen and gesticulate like sleepwalkers, or when, thanks to the activation of defensive attention, the dream becomes more lucid and conscious. Returning to the problem of the representation of altered states of consciousness, it is necessary to con- sider how this has a history that is linked to the evolution of the moving image. In Gilles Deleuze’s cine-philosophy, for example, it is clear that the emergence of an image capable of questioning the subjective/objective distinction is linked to the emergence of modern cinema. In this historical con- text, in fact, a radical disorganization of the action-image takes place, with a prevalence of a pure optic-auditory sen- sation over its motor extension and narrative actualization. In this way, recollection-images, mental visualizations, hal- lucinations, and dreams take on a new centrality, in the form of virtualities that remain suspended and non-actualized, 15 E. Morin, The cinema, or the Imaginary Man (1956), trans. L. Mortimer (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 16 G. Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image (1983), trans. H. Tomlinson, B. Habberjam (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Id., Cinema 2. The Time Image (1985), trans. H. Tomlinson, R. Galeta (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 17 J.-L. Baudry, “Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus” (1970), trans. A. Williams, Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974): 39-47; Id., “The Apparatus” (1975), trans. B. Augst, Camera Obscura, no. 1 (1976): 104-126; Ch. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (1977), trans. C. Britton et al. (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1982). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 8 AN-ICON  typical of a crystal-image in which temporalities are reflect- ed simultaneously.18 Thus the dream-image assumes a par- ticular centrality. Following Henri Bergson and his famous discussion on dreams, Deleuze refers to the panoramic character of dream-images, which is also typical of near- death experiences in which the whole of life suddenly ap- pears before one’s eyes.19 What is created is a weak link between the optical or auditory sensations and this pan- oramic view of the whole. There are in fact two procedures common to the dream-image of cinema: One proceeds by rich and overloaded means [...] dissolves, super- impositions, deframings, complex camera movements, special ef- fects, manipulations in the laboratory [...]. The other, on the contrary, is very restrained, working by clear cuts or montage-cut, making progress simply through a perpetual unhinging which “looks like” dream, but between objects that remain concrete.20 Both recollection-images (flashbacks) and dream- images are virtual, but in different forms. The recollection-im- ages are actualized past events, while the dream-images are rooted in an image that refers itself to another virtual time, thus activating an infinite path of references. The result is a motor process very different from the concreteness of action, which is described by Deleuze following a conceptual apparatus taken from Ludwig Binswanger, as a movement of the world, “the fact of being inhaled by the world”.21 This is a virtuality and immersivity of the image which cinema proposes in its repre- sentations, but which the new digital media we know today have the power to realize at a technical level, with the user’s perception absorbed and enveloped by the virtual image. The recollection-image and the flashback have also been the subject of further theoretical investigation 18 A. Powell, Deleuze, Altered States and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 19 Deleuze, Cinema 2: 55-67. 20 Ibid.: 58. 21 Ibid.: 291. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 9 AN-ICON  since Deleuze. One example is Maureen Turim’s work,22 in which the flashback is considered as a structural device of film that is fundamental for understanding the non-linear development of film history itself. This process is particular- ly visible in the comparison between the representation of memories in melodrama and that presented by modernist cinema. At the same time, in the flashback emerges the strategy through which cinema represents the intersection between the individual dimension of memory and the so- cio-political dimension of history. More recent approaches to the relationship be- tween cinema and altered states of consciousness see the medium as a technological extension of a mind-body plexus to be rediscovered, above all, starting from the media-ar- chaeological investigation of 19th century sciences of the mind. This is in fact the episteme that witnesses the emer- gence of the cinematic experience. Along these lines, we can quote the genetic relationship between hypnosis and cinema identified by Ruggero Eugeni,23 Stefan Andriopoulos,24 and Raymond Bellour;25 the investigation into the relationship between cinema and hysteria proposed by Rae Beth Gor- don,26 Emmanuelle André,27 and Mireille Berton;28 and the link between the psychological mapping of gesture and the rise of the cinematic apparatus theorized by Pasi Valiaho.29 22 M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (London: Routledge, 1989). For a discussion on the relationship between the time of new media devices and the time represented within them, see G. Stewart, Framed Time. Towards a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 23 R. Eugeni, La relazione d’incanto. Studi su cinema e ipnosi (Milan: Vita & Pensiero, 2002). 24 S. Andriopoulos, Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 25 R. Bellour, Les corps du cinéma: hypnose, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L., 2009). 26 R.B. Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 27 E. André, Le choc du sujet. De l’hystérie au cinéma (XIXe-XXIe siècle) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011). 28 M. Berton, Les corps nerveux des spectateurs. Cinéma et sciences du psychisme de 1900 (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 2015). 29 P. Valiaho, Mapping the Moving Image. Gesture, Thought, and Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 10 AN-ICON  From hallucination to virtual realities In all these theoretical perspectives it becomes evident how cinema, by representing altered states of con- sciousness, often reflects on its own affinity with dreams and hallucination. More precisely, on its identity as a ma- terialization of mental visualization processes. Ken Rus- sell’s film Altered States (1980), which also gives the title to this monographic issue of AN-ICON. Studies in Envi- ronmental Images, can be considered paradigmatic in this regard. In this film, the psychiatrist Edward Jessup (William Hurt), loosely based on the real-life figure of the neurosci- entist John Lilly, carries out a series of experiments with the help of an isolation tank and the ingestion of halluci- nogenic mushrooms. His aim is to understand at first hand the subjective experience of schizophrenic patients, achiev- ing a hallucinatory and dream-like perception that belongs to primitive mental states. The film echoes a number of ideas related to the redefinition of consciousness typical of 1970s-80s counterculture. Julian Jaynes’s essay The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) is an example of these theories.30 In this book, the subjective perception of schizophrenia is presented as an activation of an evolutionary state prior to the emergence of consciousness, the “bicameral mind”, in which the right hemisphere of the brain was allocated the function of com- municating through visual and verbal hallucinations, and the left hemisphere had the task of obeying and executing. The film plays on two visual registers: one in the third person, that of the scientific community observing the experiment, and one in the first person, where the subjec- tive hallucinations of the protagonist emerge in fragments. The hallucination is thus presented as a repeatable experi- ment, through the insertion of the body in a device suitable for the production and reproduction of altered states. But what kind of medium does this device really resemble? The 30 J. Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 11 AN-ICON  body is immersed in water which, being at the same tem- perature as the body, cancels all sensory perception and, with it, all distinctions between inside and outside, tactile and external input. In this radical absence of the world, the mental image takes full shape, enveloping the person and becoming the only sensory horizon that can be perceived. Not only that: the mental image presents itself as a real space, and the effects of the hallucination seem to modify the user’s own body (in the movie, transforming him into an Australopithecus). This hallucination represented in cinema takes us forward to another device, which, like a halluci- nation, does not allow any escape from the image, but a radical symbiosis with it. This is virtual reality. In virtual reality, unlike cinema, it is not so easy to distinguish between objective and subjective shots. Firstly, because the virtual frame is always in some way sub- jective, since its source depends on the movements of the viewer’s gaze to which it adheres, saturating the field of vision. Secondly, precisely because of the powerful sense of presence and feeling of being there produced by virtual reality, in immersive digital environments it becomes more difficult to represent the estrangement from actual percep- tion that a previous medium like cinema obtained through cross-dissolves and other visual strategies. Is it therefore possible to portray altered states in immersive media? Can the tyranny of the sense of presence eliminate the images of absence, or do we just have to investigate new strategies of representation? In fact, some virtual reality installations pres- ent themselves, directly, in the form of memories, dreams, hallucinations, mental visions. Examples are virtual reality experiences such as Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (Ar- naud Colinart, Amaury LaBurthe, Peter Middleton, James Spinney, 2016), in which the user can experience the in- ner perspective of the blind theologian John Hull; The Key (Céline Tricart, 2019), which portrays the dreams of an Iraqi migrant; Porton Down (Callum Cooper, 2019), in which the user becomes the guinea pig in hallucination tests per- formed using LSD; Cosmos within Us (Tupac Martir, 2019) GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 12 AN-ICON  dedicated to the temporally and spatially unregulated per- ception of an Alzheimer’s patient; finally, the mystical and lysergic journey of the Amazonian shamanic ritual repro- duced in Ayahuasca - Kosmik Journey (Jan Kounen, 2019). The present issue These are problems that the first issue of AN- ICON. Studies on Environmental Images aims to investigate. A peculiar attention is devoted to the comparison between two media systems: an analogue system, dominated by the altered states of cinema, and a virtual one, where new experiential possibilities of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality emerge. The problem that runs through this com- parison is essentially whether the possibility of presenting perceptively distorted states belongs more properly to the cinematic image, or whether it is still at the center of the new digital and immersive mediascape. Barbara Grespi’s and Giuseppe Previtali’s con- tributions are directly related in their common purpose to search for a status of the virtual image in cinema in some nodal moments of film theory that interrogate the repre- sentation of mental states. Grespi’s essay starts from Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World (1991) and from the capability of the imaginary device represented in the movie to exteriorize and prosthesize subjective experiences such as visions and dreams. The fictional medium, halfway be- tween cinema and virtual reality, allows Grespi to reflect on the filmic access to mental states. This issue is investigated through the recovery of the first, but lesser-known, of the two volumes of Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma (1963- 1965) by Jean Mitry. This is a pillar of film theory, analyzed by Grespi in its unacknowledged Husserlian roots. Thus, the technical and psychic concept of “projection”, under- stood as a specific form of actualization, “an effect in which the perception of physical image intersects with mental envisioning”, becomes especially central to introduce a GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 13 AN-ICON  possible comparison between the cinematic forms of the visible and those that emerge in virtual experiences. Cinematic altered states, however, undergo radical transformations in history: this is what Previtali’s arti- cle discusses, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of cinema and examining the differences between the movement-im- age of classical cinema, in which dreams and memories are also expressed as physical realities intertwined with the world, and the time-image of modern cinema, capable of adhering to the dynamics of thought. For Previtali, an example of this process is Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Straw- berries (1957), where recollection-images are not real flash- backs, but rather virtual mixtures of memory, imagination, and dream, as evidenced by the fact that the protagonist relives the past moments of his childhood and youth while remaining as old as he actually is in the present. Still anchored to Bergman’s cinema, Luca Ac- quarelli’s investigation into the emergence of hallucination within the cinematic diegesis is grounded in the semiotic analysis of a further incursion: that of the photographic still image within the equidistant flow of the film’s moving frames. This can be seen in Bergman’s Persona (1966), but also in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) and Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), the latter consisting almost entirely of still images. In these moments a new balance is established between dream-states and the testimonial power of the image, seen through André Bazin’s conception of photography as “true hallucination”. Enrico Terrone, in a different perspective, con- siders cinema in terms of a disembodied experience, or- ganized in a space that has our sight but not our body as its own center. Because of this condition, cinema is able to approximate to non-perceptual attitudes such as mem- ories and dreams, but not completely emulate them. On the contrary, this emulation would be a concrete possibility for virtual reality precisely thanks to its adherence to the gaze and body of the spectator coupled with a potential GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 14 AN-ICON  for manipulation and alteration that it is impossible to find in another embodied experience such as that of theater. But how are altered states expressed in the new immersive and digital mediascape? Is it possible in virtual reality to make a distinction between the representation of a real state from that of an exclusively mental state? First of all, we need to investigate how the digital radically trans- forms the very ideas of visual perception and image. This is evident in Antonio Somaini’s contribution, devoted to new artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning and machine vision. In fact, their non-human perceptual functions appear in some cases as altered states that pro- duce dreamlike images, similar to those found in computer programs such as the one called, significantly, Google Deep Dream. Thus, it becomes necessary for Somaini to study the artistic practices that exploit the productive potential of machine learning in a creative and revolutionary way, such as in the artworks of Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and Grégory Chatonsky. The perceptual dimension is also at the center of Claudio Paolucci’s contribution. From the point of view of cognitive semiotics, Paolucci investigates the hallucinatory character of ordinary perception, always shaped by the in- tervention of imagination, to analyze the way mental states are represented in virtual and augmented environments. If perception can be defined in terms of a hallucination controlled by the world, what changes in immersive envi- ronments is only the simulated character of the world itself. The states of imagination, memory, and hallucination are then reproduced in virtual and augmented reality following two possible strategies: either in a pan-perceptual modal- ity, exploiting the full sense of presence produced by the immersive devices, or following the audiovisual strategies inherited from previous audiovisual languages with which virtual and augmented reality share the same formal appa- ratus of enunciation. To exemplify this double expressive GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 15 AN-ICON  possibility, Paolucci analyzes the immersive videogame Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. At this point, it becomes necessary to under- stand what the specifically dreamlike and hallucinatory character of virtual reality consists of and how it differs from other established media. The joint paper written by film theorist Martine Beugnet and new media artist Lily Hibberd focuses on the role played by darkness, which in the new immersive media takes on a completely new po- tential compared to cinema. In fact, it becomes an intrinsic component of the environmentalized image of the former – coupled with the illusion of depth and the replication of motion. If the darkness of the traditional audiovisual dis- tinguishes states of self and otherness, in virtual reality it envelops the users depriving them of the sense of distance and leading them back to a state of radical loss, in which they are haunted by sporadic sounds and visions, faithful to the dynamics more proper to memory and dream. Pietro Montani’s essay then becomes the ef- fective conclusion and synthesis of all the questions raised by this issue. The dreamlike character of virtual reality con- sists for Montani in a precise work of oneiric imagination, capable of distancing itself from linguistic thought without getting trapped in a pure hallucination, but finding its proper status in what Freud defines as “Bilderschrift” (pictographic script), a syncretic relationship between images and writ- ing functions, both pre-linguistic and performative, which can also be read in the Kantian terms of a schematization without concept. An expressive condition which resurfaces in early cinema and especially in Eisenstein’s film theory of the 1920s and which today finds a specific declination in immersive virtual installations such as Carne y Arena (2017) by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and VR_I (2018) by choreographer Gilles Jobin, where different participants can share a collective lucid dream. In fact, new media do not merely represent altered states of consciousness: they take on their performative power. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 16 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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Introduction: the image between presence and absence by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Altered states Dream Hallucination Filmic representation Immersive media Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Introduction: the image between 1 presence and absence Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Altered states Hallucination Immersive media Filmic representation Dream A visual history of alteration Dream images, anticipations of the future, memories of the past, perceptual distortions, delusional hallucinations, cognitions intoxicated by alcohol and drugs have always inhabited the visual representations of paint- ings, comics, films, television series, videogames and, more recently, virtual reality installations. We call them “altered states of consciousness”, meaning any perceptual state other than ordinary human perception.2 When they are expressed in a visual form, we see a material picture which represents a mental image.3 While a picture is completely experienced by the senses, mental imagery is ordinarily conceived of as a quasi-perceptual To quote this essay: G. Grossi and A. Pinotti, “Introduction: the image between presence and absence”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 4-16 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 into the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2018-2022” attributed by Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca (MIUR). 2 For a rigorous psychological definition of the concept of “altered state of consciousness”, embracing mental states occurring in sleep, meditation, hypnosis or while using drugs, see Ch.T. Tart, Altered States of Consciousness (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1972). 3 The distinction between the materiality, objectivity and prevalent visual character of the image intended as picture and the immateriality, subjectivity and multisensorial aspect of the mental image is perfectly explained by W.J.T. Mitchell in “What is an Image?”, New Literary History 15, no. 3 (1984): 503-537. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 4 AN-ICON  experience that occurs in the absence of external stimuli.4 What makes these pictures recognizable to us as such? We cannot, in fact, compare them with the reality of the mental image, which we know only in the first person, trapped in the secret of individual experience. And yet, it seems that the visual has always elaborated strategies, codes, and arrangements to ensure that, within a visual narrative, an image is interpreted as absent, because it is present in a mental space or as a perception of an altered state of consciousness. These representations are historically and cul- turally determined, depending on the way a mental image is conceived in each era and geographical context. The French historian Yannick Ripa, for example, has distin- guished an “ancien régime du rêve”, in which the dream is thought of as an external and metaphysical entity from the modern conception that leads it back to the universe of an inner subjectivity.5 At the same time, the medium that delivers these mental visions also contributes to differentiating cul- tural codes and shared representations that shape them. In Füssli’s The Nightmare (1781) or in Goya’s El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (1797), the oneiric emerges from a juxtaposition of the sleeping body with its nightmares, co-present in the same visual box. Differently, comics such as Winsor McCay’s Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend (1904-1913) and Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905-1927), represent altered states and especially dreaming in a visual regime that combines simultaneity and succession.6 The result is a progressive escalation of bizarreness that can only be interrupted by the last vignette, when the dreamer usually falls off the bed. Cinema, ever since Méliès, has used particular fades such as cross-dissolves to signal the passage from physical to mental presence, be it in memory, imagination, 4 A. Richardson, Mental Imagery (London: Routledge, 1969). 5 Y. Ripa, Histoire du rêve. Regards sur l’imaginaire des Français au 19e siècle (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1988). 6 T. Gunning, “The art of succession: reading, writing, and watching comics”, Critical Inquiry 40, no. 3 (2014): 36-51. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 5 AN-ICON  or dream. Another peculiar case is given by the extreme instability of the camera with which the alterations caused by indigestion, drunkenness, and drug consumption are rendered since early movies. Jean Epstein’s comparison between alcohol and cinema is thus significant to define the multiform, fluid, and malleable perception of the universe introduced by the medium.7 However, none of these codes is fixed: cultural contexts and historical fractures introduce radical differ- ences within each mediascape, and the same happens if we consider processes such as hybridization, conver- gence, and remediation of the different media. Nevertheless, a dreamlike or hallucinatory image remains immediately recognizable to many viewers. It is a representation that indicates its absence rather than its presence. The altered states of film theory The way in which cinema not only records ob- jective reality but also visualizes mental processes has al- ways been one of the most hotly-debated questions in film theory. In 1916, Hugo Münsterberg’s important essay The Photoplay. A Psychological Study laid the foundations of the question: the cinematic image is never merely objective, since the movement and depth that the spectator perceives in the film do not exist in themselves, but are the product of the cooperation of the images with the spectator’s mental activity.8 Moreover, in the film a series of techniques ex- ternalizes and makes materially visible on the screen cer- tain mental processes: attention is recreated by the zoom and the close-up; memory is expressed through the use of flashbacks; imagination, conceived as the capacity to anticipate future events, is portrayed through what contem- porary film grammar would call flashforwards. The relation- ship between film and mind thus appears analogical, based 7 J. Epstein, “Alcool et cinéma” (1949), in S. Keller, J.N. Paul, eds., Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012): 395-404. 8 H. Münsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study (1916) (New York City: Dover Publications, 1970). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 6 AN-ICON  on the similarity of the respective cognitive processes.9 A further peculiarity recognized by Münsterberg is that of visualizing what the characters “see in their own minds”,10 images belonging to memory and dreams whose transi- tion is reported by “soft-focus images, lighting variations, superimpositions”.11 In the same wake, in his famous essay devoted to Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures (1934), also Erwin Panofsky remarked that “the movies have the power, entirely denied to the theater, to convey psychological ex- periences by directly projecting their content to the screen, substituting, as it were, the eye of the beholder for the consciousness of the character”.12 The metonymic and metaphoric relationship between film and mind – to use Christian Metz’s semio- logical terminology –13 are the basis of the aesthetic spec- ificity of cinema, which succeeds in materializing mental operations with greater effectiveness than the previous arts. Sergej Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, with its adherence to thought faculties such as analogies and oppositions, en- hances this hallucinatory and oneiric power of the movie. It is no accident that in his Non-indifferent Nature (1945-1947) the Soviet director and theorist analyzes mental visualiza- tion techniques such as those used in Loyola’s spiritual exercises being interested in the artistic achievement of ecstasy and pathos.14 In many theories cinema takes on the charac- teristics of a mind objectified in material images and sounds: a magical double of the self-produced by processes of 9 N. Carroll, “Film/mind analogies: The case of Hugo Münsterberg”, Journal for Aesthetics and Criticism 46, no. 4 (1988): 489-499. 10 J. Moure, “The cinema as art of the mind: Hugo Münsterberg, first theorist of subjectivity in film”, in D. Chateau, ed., Subjectivity: Filmic Representation and the Spectator’s Experience (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011): 23-40, 39. 11 Ibid. 12 E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures” (1934), in Three Essays on Style (Cambridge MA: The Mit Press, 1995): 98. 13 Ch. Metz, “Metaphor/metonymy, or the imaginary referent”, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 3, no. 1 (1981): 42-65. See also L. Williams, “Dream rhetoric and film rhetoric: metaphor and metonymy in Un chien andalou”, Semiotica 33, no. 1-2 (1981): 87-103. 14 S. Eisenstein, Non-indifferent Nature (1945-1947), trans. H. Marshall (Cambridge-New York City: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 171. See also M. Lefebvre, “Eisenstein, rhetoric and imaginicity: towards a revolutionary memoria”, Screen 41, no. 4 (2000): 349-368. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 7 AN-ICON  identification and projection for Edgar Morin among oth- ers;15 a brain endowed with perceptions, actions, and affec- tions according to Gilles Deleuze;16 a narcissistic regression analogous to dreaming in the perspective of Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz.17 Metz in particular underlines some radical differences between cinema and that partic- ular form of mental image constituted by the dream: the awareness of being at the cinema versus the unawareness of dreaming; the impression of reality of the film versus the illusion of reality of nocturnal visions; the real exteriority of images and sounds perceived in the cinema versus the inte- riority of the “hallucinatory psychosis of desire”; the logical consistency of the film versus the bizarre discontinuity of dream images. Yet a profound analogy remains in the half- way states of both cinema and dream: when spectators are so engrossed that they interact with the characters on the screen and gesticulate like sleepwalkers, or when, thanks to the activation of defensive attention, the dream becomes more lucid and conscious. Returning to the problem of the representation of altered states of consciousness, it is necessary to con- sider how this has a history that is linked to the evolution of the moving image. In Gilles Deleuze’s cine-philosophy, for example, it is clear that the emergence of an image capable of questioning the subjective/objective distinction is linked to the emergence of modern cinema. In this historical con- text, in fact, a radical disorganization of the action-image takes place, with a prevalence of a pure optic-auditory sen- sation over its motor extension and narrative actualization. In this way, recollection-images, mental visualizations, hal- lucinations, and dreams take on a new centrality, in the form of virtualities that remain suspended and non-actualized, 15 E. Morin, The cinema, or the Imaginary Man (1956), trans. L. Mortimer (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 16 G. Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image (1983), trans. H. Tomlinson, B. Habberjam (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Id., Cinema 2. The Time Image (1985), trans. H. Tomlinson, R. Galeta (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 17 J.-L. Baudry, “Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus” (1970), trans. A. Williams, Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974): 39-47; Id., “The Apparatus” (1975), trans. B. Augst, Camera Obscura, no. 1 (1976): 104-126; Ch. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (1977), trans. C. Britton et al. (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1982). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 8 AN-ICON  typical of a crystal-image in which temporalities are reflect- ed simultaneously.18 Thus the dream-image assumes a par- ticular centrality. Following Henri Bergson and his famous discussion on dreams, Deleuze refers to the panoramic character of dream-images, which is also typical of near- death experiences in which the whole of life suddenly ap- pears before one’s eyes.19 What is created is a weak link between the optical or auditory sensations and this pan- oramic view of the whole. There are in fact two procedures common to the dream-image of cinema: One proceeds by rich and overloaded means [...] dissolves, super- impositions, deframings, complex camera movements, special ef- fects, manipulations in the laboratory [...]. The other, on the contrary, is very restrained, working by clear cuts or montage-cut, making progress simply through a perpetual unhinging which “looks like” dream, but between objects that remain concrete.20 Both recollection-images (flashbacks) and dream- images are virtual, but in different forms. The recollection-im- ages are actualized past events, while the dream-images are rooted in an image that refers itself to another virtual time, thus activating an infinite path of references. The result is a motor process very different from the concreteness of action, which is described by Deleuze following a conceptual apparatus taken from Ludwig Binswanger, as a movement of the world, “the fact of being inhaled by the world”.21 This is a virtuality and immersivity of the image which cinema proposes in its repre- sentations, but which the new digital media we know today have the power to realize at a technical level, with the user’s perception absorbed and enveloped by the virtual image. The recollection-image and the flashback have also been the subject of further theoretical investigation 18 A. Powell, Deleuze, Altered States and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 19 Deleuze, Cinema 2: 55-67. 20 Ibid.: 58. 21 Ibid.: 291. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 9 AN-ICON  since Deleuze. One example is Maureen Turim’s work,22 in which the flashback is considered as a structural device of film that is fundamental for understanding the non-linear development of film history itself. This process is particular- ly visible in the comparison between the representation of memories in melodrama and that presented by modernist cinema. At the same time, in the flashback emerges the strategy through which cinema represents the intersection between the individual dimension of memory and the so- cio-political dimension of history. More recent approaches to the relationship be- tween cinema and altered states of consciousness see the medium as a technological extension of a mind-body plexus to be rediscovered, above all, starting from the media-ar- chaeological investigation of 19th century sciences of the mind. This is in fact the episteme that witnesses the emer- gence of the cinematic experience. Along these lines, we can quote the genetic relationship between hypnosis and cinema identified by Ruggero Eugeni,23 Stefan Andriopoulos,24 and Raymond Bellour;25 the investigation into the relationship between cinema and hysteria proposed by Rae Beth Gor- don,26 Emmanuelle André,27 and Mireille Berton;28 and the link between the psychological mapping of gesture and the rise of the cinematic apparatus theorized by Pasi Valiaho.29 22 M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (London: Routledge, 1989). For a discussion on the relationship between the time of new media devices and the time represented within them, see G. Stewart, Framed Time. Towards a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 23 R. Eugeni, La relazione d’incanto. Studi su cinema e ipnosi (Milan: Vita & Pensiero, 2002). 24 S. Andriopoulos, Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 25 R. Bellour, Les corps du cinéma: hypnose, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L., 2009). 26 R.B. Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 27 E. André, Le choc du sujet. De l’hystérie au cinéma (XIXe-XXIe siècle) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011). 28 M. Berton, Les corps nerveux des spectateurs. Cinéma et sciences du psychisme de 1900 (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 2015). 29 P. Valiaho, Mapping the Moving Image. Gesture, Thought, and Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 10 AN-ICON  From hallucination to virtual realities In all these theoretical perspectives it becomes evident how cinema, by representing altered states of con- sciousness, often reflects on its own affinity with dreams and hallucination. More precisely, on its identity as a ma- terialization of mental visualization processes. Ken Rus- sell’s film Altered States (1980), which also gives the title to this monographic issue of AN-ICON. Studies in Envi- ronmental Images, can be considered paradigmatic in this regard. In this film, the psychiatrist Edward Jessup (William Hurt), loosely based on the real-life figure of the neurosci- entist John Lilly, carries out a series of experiments with the help of an isolation tank and the ingestion of halluci- nogenic mushrooms. His aim is to understand at first hand the subjective experience of schizophrenic patients, achiev- ing a hallucinatory and dream-like perception that belongs to primitive mental states. The film echoes a number of ideas related to the redefinition of consciousness typical of 1970s-80s counterculture. Julian Jaynes’s essay The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) is an example of these theories.30 In this book, the subjective perception of schizophrenia is presented as an activation of an evolutionary state prior to the emergence of consciousness, the “bicameral mind”, in which the right hemisphere of the brain was allocated the function of com- municating through visual and verbal hallucinations, and the left hemisphere had the task of obeying and executing. The film plays on two visual registers: one in the third person, that of the scientific community observing the experiment, and one in the first person, where the subjec- tive hallucinations of the protagonist emerge in fragments. The hallucination is thus presented as a repeatable experi- ment, through the insertion of the body in a device suitable for the production and reproduction of altered states. But what kind of medium does this device really resemble? The 30 J. Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 11 AN-ICON  body is immersed in water which, being at the same tem- perature as the body, cancels all sensory perception and, with it, all distinctions between inside and outside, tactile and external input. In this radical absence of the world, the mental image takes full shape, enveloping the person and becoming the only sensory horizon that can be perceived. Not only that: the mental image presents itself as a real space, and the effects of the hallucination seem to modify the user’s own body (in the movie, transforming him into an Australopithecus). This hallucination represented in cinema takes us forward to another device, which, like a halluci- nation, does not allow any escape from the image, but a radical symbiosis with it. This is virtual reality. In virtual reality, unlike cinema, it is not so easy to distinguish between objective and subjective shots. Firstly, because the virtual frame is always in some way sub- jective, since its source depends on the movements of the viewer’s gaze to which it adheres, saturating the field of vision. Secondly, precisely because of the powerful sense of presence and feeling of being there produced by virtual reality, in immersive digital environments it becomes more difficult to represent the estrangement from actual percep- tion that a previous medium like cinema obtained through cross-dissolves and other visual strategies. Is it therefore possible to portray altered states in immersive media? Can the tyranny of the sense of presence eliminate the images of absence, or do we just have to investigate new strategies of representation? In fact, some virtual reality installations pres- ent themselves, directly, in the form of memories, dreams, hallucinations, mental visions. Examples are virtual reality experiences such as Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (Ar- naud Colinart, Amaury LaBurthe, Peter Middleton, James Spinney, 2016), in which the user can experience the in- ner perspective of the blind theologian John Hull; The Key (Céline Tricart, 2019), which portrays the dreams of an Iraqi migrant; Porton Down (Callum Cooper, 2019), in which the user becomes the guinea pig in hallucination tests per- formed using LSD; Cosmos within Us (Tupac Martir, 2019) GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 12 AN-ICON  dedicated to the temporally and spatially unregulated per- ception of an Alzheimer’s patient; finally, the mystical and lysergic journey of the Amazonian shamanic ritual repro- duced in Ayahuasca - Kosmik Journey (Jan Kounen, 2019). The present issue These are problems that the first issue of AN- ICON. Studies on Environmental Images aims to investigate. A peculiar attention is devoted to the comparison between two media systems: an analogue system, dominated by the altered states of cinema, and a virtual one, where new experiential possibilities of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality emerge. The problem that runs through this com- parison is essentially whether the possibility of presenting perceptively distorted states belongs more properly to the cinematic image, or whether it is still at the center of the new digital and immersive mediascape. Barbara Grespi’s and Giuseppe Previtali’s con- tributions are directly related in their common purpose to search for a status of the virtual image in cinema in some nodal moments of film theory that interrogate the repre- sentation of mental states. Grespi’s essay starts from Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World (1991) and from the capability of the imaginary device represented in the movie to exteriorize and prosthesize subjective experiences such as visions and dreams. The fictional medium, halfway be- tween cinema and virtual reality, allows Grespi to reflect on the filmic access to mental states. This issue is investigated through the recovery of the first, but lesser-known, of the two volumes of Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma (1963- 1965) by Jean Mitry. This is a pillar of film theory, analyzed by Grespi in its unacknowledged Husserlian roots. Thus, the technical and psychic concept of “projection”, under- stood as a specific form of actualization, “an effect in which the perception of physical image intersects with mental envisioning”, becomes especially central to introduce a GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 13 AN-ICON  possible comparison between the cinematic forms of the visible and those that emerge in virtual experiences. Cinematic altered states, however, undergo radical transformations in history: this is what Previtali’s arti- cle discusses, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of cinema and examining the differences between the movement-im- age of classical cinema, in which dreams and memories are also expressed as physical realities intertwined with the world, and the time-image of modern cinema, capable of adhering to the dynamics of thought. For Previtali, an example of this process is Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Straw- berries (1957), where recollection-images are not real flash- backs, but rather virtual mixtures of memory, imagination, and dream, as evidenced by the fact that the protagonist relives the past moments of his childhood and youth while remaining as old as he actually is in the present. Still anchored to Bergman’s cinema, Luca Ac- quarelli’s investigation into the emergence of hallucination within the cinematic diegesis is grounded in the semiotic analysis of a further incursion: that of the photographic still image within the equidistant flow of the film’s moving frames. This can be seen in Bergman’s Persona (1966), but also in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) and Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), the latter consisting almost entirely of still images. In these moments a new balance is established between dream-states and the testimonial power of the image, seen through André Bazin’s conception of photography as “true hallucination”. Enrico Terrone, in a different perspective, con- siders cinema in terms of a disembodied experience, or- ganized in a space that has our sight but not our body as its own center. Because of this condition, cinema is able to approximate to non-perceptual attitudes such as mem- ories and dreams, but not completely emulate them. On the contrary, this emulation would be a concrete possibility for virtual reality precisely thanks to its adherence to the gaze and body of the spectator coupled with a potential GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 14 AN-ICON  for manipulation and alteration that it is impossible to find in another embodied experience such as that of theater. But how are altered states expressed in the new immersive and digital mediascape? Is it possible in virtual reality to make a distinction between the representation of a real state from that of an exclusively mental state? First of all, we need to investigate how the digital radically trans- forms the very ideas of visual perception and image. This is evident in Antonio Somaini’s contribution, devoted to new artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning and machine vision. In fact, their non-human perceptual functions appear in some cases as altered states that pro- duce dreamlike images, similar to those found in computer programs such as the one called, significantly, Google Deep Dream. Thus, it becomes necessary for Somaini to study the artistic practices that exploit the productive potential of machine learning in a creative and revolutionary way, such as in the artworks of Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and Grégory Chatonsky. The perceptual dimension is also at the center of Claudio Paolucci’s contribution. From the point of view of cognitive semiotics, Paolucci investigates the hallucinatory character of ordinary perception, always shaped by the in- tervention of imagination, to analyze the way mental states are represented in virtual and augmented environments. If perception can be defined in terms of a hallucination controlled by the world, what changes in immersive envi- ronments is only the simulated character of the world itself. The states of imagination, memory, and hallucination are then reproduced in virtual and augmented reality following two possible strategies: either in a pan-perceptual modal- ity, exploiting the full sense of presence produced by the immersive devices, or following the audiovisual strategies inherited from previous audiovisual languages with which virtual and augmented reality share the same formal appa- ratus of enunciation. To exemplify this double expressive GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 15 AN-ICON  possibility, Paolucci analyzes the immersive videogame Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. At this point, it becomes necessary to under- stand what the specifically dreamlike and hallucinatory character of virtual reality consists of and how it differs from other established media. The joint paper written by film theorist Martine Beugnet and new media artist Lily Hibberd focuses on the role played by darkness, which in the new immersive media takes on a completely new po- tential compared to cinema. In fact, it becomes an intrinsic component of the environmentalized image of the former – coupled with the illusion of depth and the replication of motion. If the darkness of the traditional audiovisual dis- tinguishes states of self and otherness, in virtual reality it envelops the users depriving them of the sense of distance and leading them back to a state of radical loss, in which they are haunted by sporadic sounds and visions, faithful to the dynamics more proper to memory and dream. Pietro Montani’s essay then becomes the ef- fective conclusion and synthesis of all the questions raised by this issue. The dreamlike character of virtual reality con- sists for Montani in a precise work of oneiric imagination, capable of distancing itself from linguistic thought without getting trapped in a pure hallucination, but finding its proper status in what Freud defines as “Bilderschrift” (pictographic script), a syncretic relationship between images and writ- ing functions, both pre-linguistic and performative, which can also be read in the Kantian terms of a schematization without concept. An expressive condition which resurfaces in early cinema and especially in Eisenstein’s film theory of the 1920s and which today finds a specific declination in immersive virtual installations such as Carne y Arena (2017) by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and VR_I (2018) by choreographer Gilles Jobin, where different participants can share a collective lucid dream. In fact, new media do not merely represent altered states of consciousness: they take on their performative power. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 16 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/15446

Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema by Barbara Grespi Mitry (I) Husserl Mental state Projection Imagination Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the vi1 rtual image in the cinema (I) by Barbara Grespi Abstract Representing altered states of consciousness, even through the most phantasmal of technical images, is an inherent contradiction; once we attribute a physical body, i.e. objectivity, to mental images, we deny what Husserl considers their very essence. Jean Mitry draws from this assumption when discussing filmic access to mental states from a phenomenological perspective. The following essay reconsiders Mitry’s contribution with specific reference to the role of projection, technically and metaphorically speak- ing, in the cinematic technique and imagination; this, with the intention of suggesting some crucial questions for the comparison between the filmic forms of the visible and those inaugurated by the technology of the virtual. Mitry Husserl Mental state Projection Imagination To quote this essay: B. Grespi, “Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (I)”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 17-36 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 into the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2018-2022” attributed by Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca (MIUR). BARBARA GRESPI 17 AN-ICON Le cinéma transforme l’écran en une image d’image.2 A silver visor, you would say an ancestor of a VR headset were it not for the cap that wraps around the lower part of the skull. It causes a sharp pain in the eyes and its function is not to watch images, but to record them, like an ordinary video camera. Nevertheless, it has no lens but two satin panels, one for each eye. From the outside, you can see the signal of a scanner running; fr m the inside, the captured images appear on two side-by-side screens. It is the device invented by Wim Wenders for Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt, 1991) (Fig.1), in the story, a prototype which all the great world powers are hunting down in the fevered climate of the end of the millennium. Its camera captures the biochemical event of vision, that is, not only what you see but also how your brain reacts to the perceived images, collecting electrical stimuli directly from the nerves. The recorded “visual” impulses can thus be transmitted to the brain of another person, even a blind one, and this allows them to see without using the retina. Still, as the story progresses, the machine evolves into something even more complicated: a technique for extracting from the mind images which are completely independent of sight and correspond to pure imagination, dreams or memories. Sight translated into data gives birth to “artificial” images, segmented in a grid and the result of numbers; imagination, on the other hand, has pictorial qualities, strong colours and blurred borders. Sci-fi cinema provides a long list of vision machines, but Wenders’ possesses a special allure, balanced, as it is, between the old and the new. 2 Dr. Allendy [René Allendy], “La valeur psychologique de l’image”, in AA.VV., L’art cinématographique (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1926): 75-103, 77. BARBARA GRESPI 18 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Wim Wenders, Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt), 1991. Screen capture. Between cinema and VR: an exquisitely optical prosthesis, it creates abstract images, devoid of somatic and sensory traces, but at the same time it is a medium of intersubjectivity, which allows the exchange of visions at a neural level. It is a digital device, but also a truth machine: it records, documents, reflects even the unconscious, or the deepest levels of our psyche. It represents the cinema in its increasingly sharp juxtaposition to other technologies of the contemporary era, such as VR: the first in perpetual balance between body and mind, the second completely biased towards the sensory. The representation of mental acts in cinema is always, as in Wenders’ movie, a metafilmic moment in which the image consciousness is elaborated, together with the ways in which multiple factors, material and immaterial, contribute to it, including the gaze and its structure. In the following pages, by rediscovering Jean Mitry’s reading of Husserl’s thinking, we will discuss the role of projection, technically and metaphorically speaking, in filmic access to the mental; this with the intention of bringing out some crucial questions for the comparison between the cinematic forms of the visible and those inaugurated by the technol- ogy of the virtual. BARBARA GRESPI 19 AN-ICON  The mental image and the filmic image Beyond what they represent, filmic images are “situated” in a space halfway between the mental and the real: the iconic stream that the spectator sees flowing would not exist outside his or her mind, which integrates and merges the perception of the single frames thus creating the movie. Even before the birth of cinema, the paradoxi- cal nature of the moving image struck William James, who referred to it to describe consciousness in terms of a zoe- trope: just as that optical toy produces effects of continuity by making discontinuous fragments flow, so the conscious- ness merges its sequences of scattered and uninterrupted micro-perceptions into an illusory whole.3 The similarity between the film and the activity of the mind will be at the core of one of the first essays in film theory, The Photoplay by Hugo Münsterberg, a former student of medicine who converted to psychology under the influence of Wilhelm Wundt, and later became James’s colleague at Harvard.4 The reference to James’s metaphor of the zoetrope allows us to understand what Münsterberg meant by suggesting that photographic images had been estranged from physi- cal reality once they had achieved movement – contrary to what one might naturally think – and were brought closer to the reality of consciousness. The massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of our own consciousness. The mind has triumphed over matter, and the pictures roll on with the ease of musical tones.5 Münsterberg develops a precise parallel be- tween cinema and mind, seeing the main filmic techniques 3 “Is consciousness really discontinuous, incessantly interrupted and recommencing (from the psychologist’s point of view)? And does it only seem continuous to itself by an illusion analogous to that of the zoetrope? Or is it at most times as continuous outwardly as it inwardly seems?”. W. James, The Principles of Psychology (Create Space, 2017): 125. 4 M. Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg: His Life and Work (New York: Appleton & Co., 1922): 21-22. 5 H. Münsterberg, “The psychology of the photoplay” (1916), in A. Langdale, ed., The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings (New York-London: Routledge, 2002): 153-154. BARBARA GRESPI 20 AN-ICON  as reflecting the activities of consciousness, such as atten- tion (corresponding to the close-up and the shifting from in-focus to out-of-focus), memory (represented by flash- back as enclosure of the past in the present) and emotion (in its development, according to William James, from a kinesthetic sensation).6 This early conception of the mind as a movie justifies the most common visual rhetoric that complemented the representation of a character’s mental acts: fading, superimposition, soft focus. Becoming con- solidated precisely in the years in which Münsterberg wrote his essay, these optical effects aim at framing a segment of the visible within a zone which is not real and not certain, just as the discontinuous hyphens of the thinking bubbles in comics highlight the difference between a thought spoken out loud and one which remains unspoken in the charac- ter’s mind. Transitions in classical cinema in essence pro- duce the slow fading of the actual into the mental, evoking an idea of the mind as a place of weakening, intermingling and metamorphosing of sensory input. These narrative fragments which interrupt the flow of the film by jumping onto a different level and moving beyond the diegetic physical reality, are thus presented and interpreted as the “contents” of a fictional consciousness; this implies believing that the human mind operates by storing impressions derived from perception in the shape of ghostly pictures to be inspected, when needed, by the mind’s eye. We are familiar with this notion, its ancient roots and its points of junction with modern thinking,7 as well as its confutation by phenomenology, whose intake is crucial but still difficult to integrate into studies of the imagination.8 Even a thinker like Sartre who tries to get rid, precisely through Husserl, of the idea of the mind as a repository of images, was victim to the same “illusion of immanence” that 6 Münsterberg shares the Jamesian perspective (the famous: “we do not weep because we are sad, but we are sad because we weep”). H. Münsterberg, “The psychology of the photoplay”: 107-108. 7 See the ancient idea of the mind as a room furnished with images in F.A. Yates, The Art of Memory (New York-London: Routledge, 1966). 8 See for instance J. Jansen, “Imagination: phenomenological approaches”, in M. Kelly, ed., Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 430-434. BARBARA GRESPI 21 AN-ICON  he intended to criticize once he admitted the existence of a “psychic object” (the analogon) and presented it as the mediator of the imaginative process.9 Sartre is very much present in Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma by Jean Mitry, the massive trea- tise in two volumes written by the French critic, activist and director between 1963 and 1965,10 a work capable of bridging, as Dudley Andrew wrote, the formalism of clas- sical theory with emerging semiotics.11 The second volume, centered on form and cin- ematic language, is the best known and most appreciated, while volume one, particularly eclectic, has suffered from an evident removal, also highlighted by the significant cuts made in current French and English editions.12 Here we find the first remarkable confrontation of film theory with Husserl, an attempt recognized by the pioneers of the phe- nomenological approach to cinema, but never investigated, and even dismissed, in the numerous developments of this branch of study.13 Mitry discusses precisely the theme of mental images, which Husserl brought together under the umbrella term of Phantasie, to indicate both the ensem- ble of images devoid of physical support and the act of imagination through which they “appear” (erscheinen).14 It is an act of imagination that which gives shape to a physical image, deposited on a support and capable of 9 Casey recognized the error. See E.S. Casey, “Sartre on imagination”, in P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (La Salle: Open Court 1981): 16-27. 10 J. Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma (vol. I: Le structure, and vol. II: Les formes) (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1963, 1965). A useful rediscovery of Mitry’s contribution to film theory in: M. Lefebvre, “Revisiting Mitry’s Esthétique et Psychologie du Cinéma at Fifty”, Mise au point [online], no. 6 (2014), accessed February 20, 2021. 11 See D. Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1976): 181ff. 12 The current English edition The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) was translated from the abridged French edition of 1990. We will quote from this book, unless otherwise specified. 13 Vivian Sobchack recognizes his engagement in a Husserlian phenomenology of cinema – see her The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 29 – while A. Casebier, Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) prefers to lean upon Baudry. Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Julian Hanich dismiss Mitry’s idea of mental image as a distortion of the phenomenological arguments. See their stimulating introduction “What is film phenomenology?” to “Film and phenomenology”, Studia Phaenomenologica XVI (2016): 36. 14 E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). BARBARA GRESPI 22 AN-ICON  depicting an absent entity (Bildvorstellung), as well as that which creates mental images (Phantasievorstellung), which are by no means comparable to “iconic contents” of the consciousness, but rather to be understood as intuitions based on “sensorial phantasms”.15 Mitry does not refer to these precise pages of Husserl, whose essential theses are however echoed, but rather he remodels phenomenol- ogy under the influence of his experience of the cinema. Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma stems indeed from a general philosophical position – a unique case in film theory, if we exclude Deleuze’s two tomes – a thesis in which it is of primary importance to define the role of perception by mediating among Husserl’s theses, Sartre and psychology. In Mitry’s interpretation of intentionality, per- ception is an act based on sensory impressions but is not reduced to them; consciousness completes them, by extracting an object from the undifferentiated continuum that constitutes matter and hence giving form, by difference, also to the subject. Consciousness is based on mental images, which are not residues of ocular perception which have survived in the absence of the object, and nor are they entities existing in themselves and of which thought could avail itself; they are rather forms through which thought became aware of itself. With this idea, Mitry gets rid of the metaphor of consciousness as a receptacle of data and substitutes it with that of consciousness as a reflex of per- ception. With perception in the absence of the object, that is Phantasie, the glare of consciousness is, so to speak, one-way: “the mental image is the product of a wish di- rected toward the object which we know to be absent [...] it is the consciousness of that wish becoming ‘known’ in the object of its volition”.16 15 In Husserl called precisely “Phantasmen”. In the comment on Husserl’s theory of imagination, we follow C. Calì, “Husserl and the phenomenological description of imagery: some issues for the cognitive sciences?”, Arhe 4, no. 10 (2006): 25-36 and Husserl e l’immagine (Palermo: Aesthetica Preprint, 2002): 113-114. 16 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 35-36. BARBARA GRESPI 23 AN-ICON  The moving image consciousness Mitry’s starting point, therefore, is not the cin- ematic representation of consciousness, but the mental images that become part of the imaginative process; this process is extremely important in cinema, a medium which powerfully simulates the real but at the same time possess- es a deep-rooted ghostly nature. According to Mitry, this double character of cinema is reflected by the two kinds of signs of which it is composed: linguistic and psycholog- ical signs; linguistic signs give shape to the filmic images (through a grammar of the visible), psychological signs con- struct mental images (with the collaboration of the spectator). To understand how these two “signs” intersect in the beholder’s experience, it is necessary to come back to Husserl and his well-known tripartition regarding image consciousness, which is not clearly referenced in Esthétique et psychologie du cinema, but still recognisable in many lines. Husserl’s classification is based on three perceptive dimensions: the first is the “image-thing” (Bildding), that is, the concrete material of which the image is made, its support; the second is the “image-object” (Bildobje t), that is, the immaterial object which depicts something (the ide- al content of a series of perception);17 the last is the “im- age-subject” (Bildsujet), that is, the depicted subject (the referent in the real world).18 A subtle but substantial differ- ence separates the image-thing from the image-object: if the support were damaged or destroyed (for instance, if a canvas was torn), the image-object would not be affected, because it does not possess a real existence, neither inside nor outside of consciousness (only a complex of sensations experienced by the spectator in front of the pigments exists, as well as the way in which he invests it with intentionality, by creating image consciousness). This component is more easily understood in the case of the mental image, which 17 In Mitry’s words, see J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 27. 18 I use this expression, although I am aware that between the image and the subject there is not properly a semiotic relationship. See C. Rozzoni, Nell’immagine: Realtà, fantasia, esperienza estetica (Milan: Le Monnier, 2017): 9. BARBARA GRESPI 24 AN-ICON  lacks a material support, in contrast to the physical image. Still, there is a minor difference between the two, because what matters is their common capacity of actualizing absent objects (that is to say, making them present). The illusion of presence is based on the production of sensorial phan- tasms that allow us to guess how an object would be if it fell under the sphere of our senses, for instance touch or hear- ing, but first and foremost sight.19 An “optical” phantasm makes us intuit how a specific object would appear to our gaze within a particular environment, and this imaginative act covers our perception, albeit not totally. Indeed, the mental image as well as the physical image insert them- selves into the perception in a contrastive way, that is, not fully covering and substituting our reality, but allowing us to keep it alive. It is not a question of greater or lesser illu- sionistic power (some images could appear so real to be mistaken for reality), and neither of frames (a more or less marked discontinuity in the space where they are situated), rather it is a matter of time: Husserl points out that this is more the contrast between the time of the image-object and the actual present,20 to which our body belongs above all (but also the Bildding, if we are talking about physical images). Here below, the echo of these concepts in Mitry: We have seen that the mental image presents a reality both vi- sualized and recognized as absent. If, as I write these lines, I think of my car in the garage, I can see it perfectly well, mentally - or, at least, I can see a certain aspect of it - but I am seeing it as not present. It appears to my consciousness as an image certifying the absence of what I am thinking about - more especially since, 19 This is what was brightly called an “artificial presence”. See L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence: Philosophical Studies in Image Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 20 “[The image-thing] bears within itself the characteristic of unreality, of conflict with the actual present. The perception of the surroundings, the perception in which the actual present becomes constituted for us, continues on through the frame and then signifies ‘printed paper’ or ‘painted canvas’”. E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 51 (emphasis in the original). On this base, I suspect that we should abandon the optical idea of the frame when we face an environmental image (like VR), and rethink it in corporeal terms, considering the spectator’s real body as the border; indeed, you always have the possibility to leave the artificially present world not by seeing outside of the image, but certainly by touching the surrounding space and objects (or people), that is, paradoxically, becoming aware of the unreal in the very moment in which we get the chance to imagine the real through our body (thus in a perfect inversion of the cinematic relationship between reality and imagination). BARBARA GRESPI 25 AN-ICON in so doing, I do not stop perceiving the world impinging on me from all sides. The mental image is therefore a product of the will standing in opposition to our normal perception of the world and its objects and which, though coexisting with it, becomes more isolated the more directly in opposition it stands.21 Mitry realises that these ideas are of great im- portance for the analysis of cinematic images, which had also attracted Husserl’s attention, albeit fleetingly. The great philosopher’s reflections about the art of the twenty-century concern the repeatability of cinematic screenings such as to leave the image-object unaltered,22 and the intensity of the actualization produced by filmic images, so high as to reduce the perception of the image-thing to the minimum. “Deception and sensory illusion of the sort belonging to panorama images, cinematographic images, and the like”, he wrote, “depend on the fact that the appearing objects in their whole appearing state are slightly or imperceptibly different from the objects appearing in normal perception. One can know in these cases that these are mere image objects, though one cannot vitally sense this”.23 His ger- minal reflection on cinema has been taken up by some important contributions, mainly centered on the relation- ship between consciousness and true believing and on the interplay between actor and character;24 but the path indicated by Mitry is just as interesting and perhaps more in line with Husserl’s suggestions. Mitry wrote: Stuck to a cellulose base, projected onto a screen [...] the film image, in contrast with the mental image, is objectively present; but, like the mental image, it is the image of an absent reality, a past real- ity of which it is merely the image. Its concrete reality is that it is 21 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 82-83. 22 “If I let a cinematographic presentation run off repeatedly, then (in relation to the subject) the image object in the How of its modes of appearance and each of these modes of appearance itself is given as identically the same image object or as identically the same mode of appearance”. E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 646. 23 E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 146. 24 See C. Rozzoni, “Cinema Consciousness: Elements of a Husserlian Approach to Film Image”, Studia Phaenomenologica, XVI (2016): 294-324; J. Brough, “Showing and Seeing: Film as Phenomenology”, in J. D. Parry, ed., Art and Phenomenology (New York-London: Routledge, 2010): 192-214. BARBARA GRESPI 26 AN-ICON fixed to a support and is thus objectively present and analyzable. The reality recorded on the celluloid strip is at all times capable of being projected. In this sense, projection is a kind of “actualization” in the same way as the mental image.25 In these lines, a central question arises: in cin- ema, the act of making something present (“actualization”, he writes, alluding specifically to Husserl) takes place in the very moment of projection, because the strip of film is only a “latent movie”; according to Mitry, the celluloid is the main support (the image-thing), while the screen un- balances perception from the thing to the object, allowing movement to be seen. Neither the destruction of the film, nor even a scratch in the screen cancels the object-film, which, as we said, is that ideal content which, though cre- ated during the projection, survives it – as Orson Welles’ Don Quixote never ceases to teach us, a foolish spectator who stabs the white screen with his sword in an attempt to heroically oppose his enemies of light and shadow. Welles shows that the screen is not the canvas, is not one and the same with the image, which resists its destruction, both because it is anchored to another, more real support, and because it lives in the mind, paradigmatically in that of the visionary Don Quixote. The celluloid is more similar to the concrete materials of the painter, so much so that the di- rector selects carefully its size and sensitivity, while he can do nothing with the surface of the screen. But if we look back at the origins, we find the two supports imploded into each other: in pre-cinema, frame and screen coincide, because the illusion of movement, for instance in Muto- scope, depends on the flow of photographs bound one on top of the other, within the screen format created by their borders: the “book”. Do we have thus a double “thingness” in the filmic image? And if so, is it not a fundamental prop- erty of all technical images,26 even in the many variants 25 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 31, 83. 26 This is perhaps another way to interpret the idea of technical images as proposed by V. Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). BARBARA GRESPI 27 AN-ICON  of the analogue, but also digital system? The material cin- ematic film behaves like photosensitive paper in photogra- phy, or data code in the digital system, while the shadows projected on the screen correspond to the photographic positive, and to the extraction of the mpeg file on the dis- play. From photography onwards,27 to codify an image and to visualize it, that is to render it accessible to the human eye, became two different and not necessarily concurrent processes; obviously, with the transition to digital, the gap between the two moments widens, because there the ma- trix is no more a first, far-fetched or incomplete visualization of the subject, but its translation into a numerical language, not accessible to the senses, and thus potentially shared only by machines.28 But the point is: to develop a theory of cinematic image anchored to the process of visualization instead of that of encoding – focusing at the same time on the spectator because, as Münsterberg said, without him the image in motion simply does not exist – we have to work on the intersection between the physical and the mental. By a different route, Tom Gunning drew similar conclusions, when he re-launched the theory of realism moving from Metz’s brief incursion into phenomenologi- cal territory;29 Gunning is not a supporter of the deviation toward the mental, but certainly an adversary of Peirce’s indexicality when used to reduce the impression of reality in cinema to the sole photographic base. Thomas Elsaess- er, on the other hand, is not a phenomenologist but he rediscovered the “mental side” of cinema when he drew the distinction between the transmission of the image to the human senses and its recording through traces, rather than optical geometry. Indeed, he saw the model of this process in the human memory, as Freud had conceived it (that is like a Mystic Writing Pad), and proposed to re-start 27 But not in its daguerreotype version, which did not use the positive-negative reverse process: the metal film plate in the camera was developed as a positive and as a unique copy. 28 On this topic see: F. Casetti, A. Pinotti, “Post-cinema ecology”, in D. Chateau, J. Moure, eds., Post-cinema: Cinema in the Post Art Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 193-218. 29 C. Metz, “On the impression of reality in the cinema”, in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974): 3-28, discussed by T. Gunning, “Moving away from the index: cinema and the impression of reality”, differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 29-52. BARBARA GRESPI 28 AN-ICON  the theoretical discourse about cinema from its nature of interface between data and the human senses, in the key of an archaeology of the digital.30 These excellent contributions are perfectly in tune with Mitry’s emphasis on projection as a Husserlian moment of actualization, an effect in which the perception of physical image intersects with mental envisioning; in it “the film frame merely takes the place of the mental image with all the force of its credible reality”.31 Moreover, Metz quoted by Gunning builds on Mitry in his analysis of the “filmic mode”, which he defines “the mode of presence”,32 thinking not of a state of sensory overwhelming, but of an active consciousness made up of the mental reflexes of perception. Nevertheless, the mental, though it is a reflex and a logic of the images, is precisely what the film could never make visible. “It is completely impossible to repre- sent a mental image”, Mitry wrote, “since, having become visual, it ceases to be mental”.33 The filmic image is helpless in the face of what is not accessible to the sight or at least what no one has ever seen; for this reason, Mitry would probably have ap- preciated the frameless film by Douglas Gordon (Feature Film, 1999), a video installation that basically consists of an orchestra performing the full soundtrack written by com- poser Bernard Hermann for the film Vertigo (Alfred Hitch- cock,1958). On the two walls of the exhibition room, only the conductor appears in large mirror projections. However, the real images filling the room are not the physical ones on the walls, but those which flow in the viewer’s mind in correspondence with the musical notes: the sequence where Kim Novak jumps into the bay under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, or when she comes back in her green suit like a ghost. The spectator experiences a kind of vision 30 T. Elsaesser, “Freud as media theorist: mystic writing pads and the matter of memory”, Screen 50, no. 1 (2009): 100-113. Kuntzel already worked on the similarities between Freudian model of memory and the cinema, see: T. Kuntzel, “A note upon the filmic apparatus”, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, no. 1 (1976): 266-271. 31 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 86. 32 C. Metz, “On the impression of reality in the cinema”: 4. 33 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 209. BARBARA GRESPI 29 AN-ICON  not based on retina, as the director himself reports, refer- ring to interviews with spectators coming out of the gallery: Vertigo is projected through the ears into the mind of the person listening to Hermann’s notes. States of mind and self projection Are we to think, then, that only the absence of images triggers imagination? And if it is totally impossible to simulate the mental with the means of cinema, how shall we construe the numerous attempts, since the origins of the medium, to simulate altered states of consciousness? Mitry argues that dream sequences, hallucinations and premo- nitions are not the most mental but the most subjective,34 and in this he joins Wenders, whose machine will show that the mental could be translated into the visible only by sharing subjectivity. Therefore, the result of the cinematic simulation of altered states depends on the ways in which the movie makes the viewer slip into the consciousness of a character, articulating his or her seeing and feeling through the “subjective shot”. Film theory has always juxtaposed two forms of the cinematic gaze: the so-called objective shot, corre- sponding to the simulation of a world that is completely independent from every perception, be this human, animal or belonging to other living and non-living species, and the subjective shot, the simulation of a perceived world, thus filtered at a sensorial and cognitive level through a specific fictional identity. The analysis of these two modes, together with other more nuanced ones, are part of the glorious problem of the point of view in the cinema, a pro- tagonist of the semiotic-narratological debate of the Eight- ies and Nineties, also discussed towards the end of the season in Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology, which takes up precisely Mitry’s contribution. The chapters about the point of view in Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma are indeed the best known and most discussed, even if, before 34 Ibid. BARBARA GRESPI 30 AN-ICON  Sobchack, perhaps not fully understood. Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992), was published only a year after Metz’s Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (1991),35 and thus criticiz- es the positions of the great semiologist, especially Metz reading Mitry;36 but in reality, Impersonal Enunciation is a point of encounter between the two authors. Mitry is among the first to study in depth The Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1946), the film noir shot almost entirely in subjective mode. Here we spectators investigate in the shoes of the detective Philip Marlowe, who is framed frontally only at the beginning and at the end of the movie, while for the rest his eyes are our eyes and our body is disguised in his. Mitry knows how to wonderfully describe the way in which the spectators’ gaze follows the character’s gait from the inside, striving to consider his feet as their own, or the way in which they hold onto the railing with him, trying to see their own hands in Marlowe’s. But this attempt fails. They cannot recognize the image of their own body. Rather they imagine themselves accompanying the body of an Other, objectified, as all the rest is. It is obviously not me climbing the stairs and acting like this, even though I am feeling sensations similar to those I might feel if I were climbing the stairs. I am, therefore, walking with someone, sharing his impressions.37 Then when the famous sequence of the mir- ror arrives, during which the face of Marlowe is reflected (always from the character’s view), spectators are slight- ly disappointed, Mitry apparently suggests. They have to admit that the impressions that they tried to embody were not theirs. Or rather: this is true for all the viewers except for the director, because he, Robert Montgomery, played Marlowe; thus, for him, and for him only, the subjective shot 35 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 36 C. Metz, “Problèmes actuels de théorie du cinéma” (1967), in Essais sur la signification au cinéma, 2 vol. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972): 35-86. 37 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 210. BARBARA GRESPI 31 AN-ICON  works. Put another way, in the subjective shots, Montgom- ery would experience himself as another, by again embody- ing the sensorial phantasms of his previous experience; most of the time, he would live through an experience of partial mirroring: proprioceptive but not optical.38 Sobchack addresses this analysis on two lev- els. On one level, she expands Mitry’s critique by adding the argument of the difficulties of simulating a proprioceptive act. It is not just a matter of noticing the difference between the spectator’s hands and the actor’s, but also the fact of being forced to perceive differently from the way in which the character would probably do so in reality. Indeed, the subjective shots serve two simultaneous purposes: they show the clues necessary to solve the mystery and at the same time they show Marlowe’s perception in a believable fashion. However, the fictional Marlowe would be interested only in the inquiries, and not in his percipient self; for this reason, Sobchack speaks of a difference in the intentional focus that detaches the viewer from the character. In addi- tion, our way of directing attention consists in moving our eyes inside a visual field in which everything remains equally sharp, even what we are not focusing on; on the contrary, classical cinema deploys a marked in-focus and out-of- focus procedure, it constructs clear and blurred zones of visibility by regulating the focal point. So, the analogy be- tween cinema and mind in Münsterberg’s theory (movie techniques as metaphors of the processes of attention), becomes for Sobchack an element which unmasks the difference between man and machine. This is indeed the second and more radical level on which Sobchack’s line of argument is based, and it is so important that it overturns, at least formally, Mitry’s reasoning. Building on a Merleau-Pontyan version of phe- nomenology, Sobchack challenged the semiotic distinction between subjective and objective gaze and introduced the 38 I suggest something similar to the inspiring idea of the shot/counter-shot relationship in terms of specular reflection without a mirror, as proposed by A.C. Dalmasso, “Le plan subjectif réversible: Sur le point de vue au cinéma à partir des écrits de Merleau-Ponty”, Studia Phaenomenologica, XVI (2016): 135-162. BARBARA GRESPI 32 AN-ICON  concept of the film’s body, meaning “an intentional instru- ment able to perceive and express perception”.39 From this standpoint, the film’s materially nonhuman (but percipient) body presents the world subjectively to the spectator’s eye. Consequently, the movie camera sees a character and sees him/her seeing with the same degree of subjectivity (its own). It can disguise itself totally as them, by attributing to them a temporary responsibility for the visible percep- tion, but not without a great effort.40 This is indeed the true unbridgeable difference between bodies in the subjective structure of the gaze: not between the body of the spectator and the body of the character, but between the machine’s body (“the non-human embodied film”) and the actor’s, and even more so, the spectator’s body. On the surface, we are dealing with an inversion of perspective, but in reality, it is a convergence: the film’s gaze overwrites that of the character whether we define the machine as an object (but always from a phenomenological perspective: Mitry), or as a subject (a sentient body: Sobchack). In the years between Mitry’s volume and Sob- chack’s, the supporters of the subjective gaze proliferated, with some epochal contributions;41 but when Metz closes that chapter with his Impersonal Enunciation, we come back, in a sense, to the beginning. Metz comes from his book on cinema and psychoanalysis, where he differentiat- ed a form of primary identification (with the camera) from a secondary one (with the character), so he is already inclined to elaborate on the reflexive role of the apparatus. But Im- personal Enunciation starts by arguing, exactly as Sobchak does, that the “semi-subjective shot” discovered by Mitry – an over-the-shoulder shot directed along an axis which more or less aligns with the character’s point of view – is the best form of subjectivity; firstly, because it also shows, even if partially, the body of the perceiver, a necessary 39 V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: 247. 40 Ibid.: 231. 41 See the still indispensable F. Casetti, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator (1986) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). BARBARA GRESPI 33 AN-ICON  factor to encourage identification,42 and secondly, because it makes you sense the presence of a second gaze that perceives the percipient. In conclusion, even leaving phe- nomenology and remaining in the sphere of semiotics, the point is this: the subjective shot is not an empty mould for the spectator’s gaze and body, it is rather a place for redoubling: it “performs above all a double doubling of the enunciative moment […] it doubles at a stroke the site [foyer] that shows via him, and the spectator, who sees via him […] subjective image is reflexive but not a mirror. It does not reflect itself; rather, it reflects the source and the spectator”.43 From this standpoint, the subjective shot be- comes a reproduction en abyme of the projection: we could probably rethink also the idea of the first person shot in VR (and XR) along this line; there the beholder’s body-gaze, apparently implied at every level, is rather to be construed in its radical coincidence with the machine of visibility. In conclusion, when we talk about subjectivity in the image, we talk about a reflexive form in which the movie makes itself visible44 (through the character’s eye or through other stylistic strategies and non-human bodies, so-called “enunciating entities”). Still, exploiting a fictional identity not to access the physical world but some form of Phantasie, to re-use a Husserlian word, means to introduce a further enunciative level in which the character, unques- tionably, mediates the visible with its Self, that is to say, its own human and fictional subjectivity. This is what Mitry meant, probably, when he maintained that mental images plead the cause not so much of the mental but of subjectivity. However, movies about people with supernatu- ral faculties offer a range of fictional representations of men- tal states more in tune with this idea of “impersonal subjec- tivity”; in those cases, indeed, the character’s altered states 42 Mitry argued first that to adopt a gaze, one must have seen the body of this gaze; see the development of this idea in E. Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Amsterdam-New York-Berlin: Mouton, 1984). 43 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or The Place of Film: 106. 44 Unless you think of the distribution of knowledge and the positioning of the narrator towards the diegetic universe (Genette’s focalization). BARBARA GRESPI 34 AN-ICON  are not to be explained through psychology, but through their function as human machines of vision (symmetrical to Sobchack’s cinematic machine as non-human body). Fig. 2. David Cronenberg, The Dead Zone, 1983. Screen capture. In The Dead Zone (David Cronenberg, 1983) (Fig. 2), the visions of John, who awakens from a coma lasting nearly five years, traverse his body and materialize around him. There is a physical support (an image-thing) where the “data” of the events that John is able to “hallucinate” are stored, and it is the body of the person who experienced them: each vision is generated by the contact between John’s hand and that of the subject, whose past or future is in question; the handshake produces tremors, signals travelling through the clairvoyant’s body and reaching his eyes, which at this point “project”45 the images (images-ob- jects) into the environment, and not without pain (the same consumption suffered by the protagonists of Until the End of the World). John becomes a visitor to these virtual spac- es, which he experiences with his body, while the specta- tors experience his hallucination as their own not by vir- tue of an unconditioned adhesion of gazes (the subjective shot), but rather by virtue of a plurality of subjectivisations 45 See the idea of divination as projection in one of the figures who inspired Jean Mitry’s thinking, known as Dr. Allendy: “The fortune tellers […] do nothing but project on reality something which doesn’t possess in itself any determination, a latent image that is inscribed in it — and therefore we can understand all the techniques of divination as projection on reality of an inner and obscure sense” (our translation and emphasis). See Dr. Allendy [René Allendy], “La valeur psychologique de l’image”: 99-100. BARBARA GRESPI 35 AN-ICON  which renders the visible a place for the emergence of the gaze.46 In his first vision, John hallucinates the fire in which the daughter of his nurse could die: the hospital room is transformed into the child’s bedroom, including John’s bed, suddenly surrounded by toys, teddy bears and flames. The vision is subjectified in a complex and multiple fashion: a rightward gaze opens the imaginary field with a classic subjective shot, and a leftward gaze brings the field back to reality; however, between the two gestures, the camera starts to wander in a mental space-time until it includes John, whose eyes have ceased to bear the sight of the images, while his voice remained altered as it is in his state of hallucination. In the most memorable of the visions, which concerns the young victim of a serial killer, John’s subjective shot projects the imaginary gazebo in which the murder took place; but his close-up was already “subjectified” before his visions, because his face no longer immersed in the darkness of the night (the actual present), but surrounded by a diffused glow, the one that was there at the moment of the crime (the virtual past); this abrupt change of illumination intimates that John is already part of his hallucination. His entrance into the virtual world, his artificial presence on the scene of the crime, right behind the victim, but invisible, is a quintessential cinematic scene. John ends up in the image almost accidentally: a dolly starts moving slowly and brings into the frame his figure, almost by chance; it is thanks to a slightly excessive movement that we can see our vision together with its source. And it is precisely this ghostly, casual and plural presence that characterizes the cinematic experience; it is difficult to think that it could be replicated in immersive media, like VR, where there is, at least for the moment, no possibility of detaching the spectator’s gaze from the “projector”. 46 See the idea of “plan subjective réversible” and of the film as a “visible surface cracked by different gazes” from the Merleau-Pontyan perspective adopted by A.C. Dalmasso, “Le plan subjectif réversible”: 140 (our translation). BARBARA GRESPI 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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Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema by Barbara Grespi Mitry (I) Husserl Mental state Projection Imagination Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the vi1 rtual image in the cinema (I) by Barbara Grespi Abstract Representing altered states of consciousness, even through the most phantasmal of technical images, is an inherent contradiction; once we attribute a physical body, i.e. objectivity, to mental images, we deny what Husserl considers their very essence. Jean Mitry draws from this assumption when discussing filmic access to mental states from a phenomenological perspective. The following essay reconsiders Mitry’s contribution with specific reference to the role of projection, technically and metaphorically speak- ing, in the cinematic technique and imagination; this, with the intention of suggesting some crucial questions for the comparison between the filmic forms of the visible and those inaugurated by the technology of the virtual. Mitry Husserl Mental state Projection Imagination To quote this essay: B. Grespi, “Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (I)”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 17-36 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 into the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2018-2022” attributed by Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca (MIUR). BARBARA GRESPI 17 AN-ICON Le cinéma transforme l’écran en une image d’image.2 A silver visor, you would say an ancestor of a VR headset were it not for the cap that wraps around the lower part of the skull. It causes a sharp pain in the eyes and its function is not to watch images, but to record them, like an ordinary video camera. Nevertheless, it has no lens but two satin panels, one for each eye. From the outside, you can see the signal of a scanner running; fr m the inside, the captured images appear on two side-by-side screens. It is the device invented by Wim Wenders for Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt, 1991) (Fig.1), in the story, a prototype which all the great world powers are hunting down in the fevered climate of the end of the millennium. Its camera captures the biochemical event of vision, that is, not only what you see but also how your brain reacts to the perceived images, collecting electrical stimuli directly from the nerves. The recorded “visual” impulses can thus be transmitted to the brain of another person, even a blind one, and this allows them to see without using the retina. Still, as the story progresses, the machine evolves into something even more complicated: a technique for extracting from the mind images which are completely independent of sight and correspond to pure imagination, dreams or memories. Sight translated into data gives birth to “artificial” images, segmented in a grid and the result of numbers; imagination, on the other hand, has pictorial qualities, strong colours and blurred borders. Sci-fi cinema provides a long list of vision machines, but Wenders’ possesses a special allure, balanced, as it is, between the old and the new. 2 Dr. Allendy [René Allendy], “La valeur psychologique de l’image”, in AA.VV., L’art cinématographique (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1926): 75-103, 77. BARBARA GRESPI 18 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Wim Wenders, Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt), 1991. Screen capture. Between cinema and VR: an exquisitely optical prosthesis, it creates abstract images, devoid of somatic and sensory traces, but at the same time it is a medium of intersubjectivity, which allows the exchange of visions at a neural level. It is a digital device, but also a truth machine: it records, documents, reflects even the unconscious, or the deepest levels of our psyche. It represents the cinema in its increasingly sharp juxtaposition to other technologies of the contemporary era, such as VR: the first in perpetual balance between body and mind, the second completely biased towards the sensory. The representation of mental acts in cinema is always, as in Wenders’ movie, a metafilmic moment in which the image consciousness is elaborated, together with the ways in which multiple factors, material and immaterial, contribute to it, including the gaze and its structure. In the following pages, by rediscovering Jean Mitry’s reading of Husserl’s thinking, we will discuss the role of projection, technically and metaphorically speaking, in filmic access to the mental; this with the intention of bringing out some crucial questions for the comparison between the cinematic forms of the visible and those inaugurated by the technol- ogy of the virtual. BARBARA GRESPI 19 AN-ICON  The mental image and the filmic image Beyond what they represent, filmic images are “situated” in a space halfway between the mental and the real: the iconic stream that the spectator sees flowing would not exist outside his or her mind, which integrates and merges the perception of the single frames thus creating the movie. Even before the birth of cinema, the paradoxi- cal nature of the moving image struck William James, who referred to it to describe consciousness in terms of a zoe- trope: just as that optical toy produces effects of continuity by making discontinuous fragments flow, so the conscious- ness merges its sequences of scattered and uninterrupted micro-perceptions into an illusory whole.3 The similarity between the film and the activity of the mind will be at the core of one of the first essays in film theory, The Photoplay by Hugo Münsterberg, a former student of medicine who converted to psychology under the influence of Wilhelm Wundt, and later became James’s colleague at Harvard.4 The reference to James’s metaphor of the zoetrope allows us to understand what Münsterberg meant by suggesting that photographic images had been estranged from physi- cal reality once they had achieved movement – contrary to what one might naturally think – and were brought closer to the reality of consciousness. The massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of our own consciousness. The mind has triumphed over matter, and the pictures roll on with the ease of musical tones.5 Münsterberg develops a precise parallel be- tween cinema and mind, seeing the main filmic techniques 3 “Is consciousness really discontinuous, incessantly interrupted and recommencing (from the psychologist’s point of view)? And does it only seem continuous to itself by an illusion analogous to that of the zoetrope? Or is it at most times as continuous outwardly as it inwardly seems?”. W. James, The Principles of Psychology (Create Space, 2017): 125. 4 M. Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg: His Life and Work (New York: Appleton & Co., 1922): 21-22. 5 H. Münsterberg, “The psychology of the photoplay” (1916), in A. Langdale, ed., The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings (New York-London: Routledge, 2002): 153-154. BARBARA GRESPI 20 AN-ICON  as reflecting the activities of consciousness, such as atten- tion (corresponding to the close-up and the shifting from in-focus to out-of-focus), memory (represented by flash- back as enclosure of the past in the present) and emotion (in its development, according to William James, from a kinesthetic sensation).6 This early conception of the mind as a movie justifies the most common visual rhetoric that complemented the representation of a character’s mental acts: fading, superimposition, soft focus. Becoming con- solidated precisely in the years in which Münsterberg wrote his essay, these optical effects aim at framing a segment of the visible within a zone which is not real and not certain, just as the discontinuous hyphens of the thinking bubbles in comics highlight the difference between a thought spoken out loud and one which remains unspoken in the charac- ter’s mind. Transitions in classical cinema in essence pro- duce the slow fading of the actual into the mental, evoking an idea of the mind as a place of weakening, intermingling and metamorphosing of sensory input. These narrative fragments which interrupt the flow of the film by jumping onto a different level and moving beyond the diegetic physical reality, are thus presented and interpreted as the “contents” of a fictional consciousness; this implies believing that the human mind operates by storing impressions derived from perception in the shape of ghostly pictures to be inspected, when needed, by the mind’s eye. We are familiar with this notion, its ancient roots and its points of junction with modern thinking,7 as well as its confutation by phenomenology, whose intake is crucial but still difficult to integrate into studies of the imagination.8 Even a thinker like Sartre who tries to get rid, precisely through Husserl, of the idea of the mind as a repository of images, was victim to the same “illusion of immanence” that 6 Münsterberg shares the Jamesian perspective (the famous: “we do not weep because we are sad, but we are sad because we weep”). H. Münsterberg, “The psychology of the photoplay”: 107-108. 7 See the ancient idea of the mind as a room furnished with images in F.A. Yates, The Art of Memory (New York-London: Routledge, 1966). 8 See for instance J. Jansen, “Imagination: phenomenological approaches”, in M. Kelly, ed., Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 430-434. BARBARA GRESPI 21 AN-ICON  he intended to criticize once he admitted the existence of a “psychic object” (the analogon) and presented it as the mediator of the imaginative process.9 Sartre is very much present in Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma by Jean Mitry, the massive trea- tise in two volumes written by the French critic, activist and director between 1963 and 1965,10 a work capable of bridging, as Dudley Andrew wrote, the formalism of clas- sical theory with emerging semiotics.11 The second volume, centered on form and cin- ematic language, is the best known and most appreciated, while volume one, particularly eclectic, has suffered from an evident removal, also highlighted by the significant cuts made in current French and English editions.12 Here we find the first remarkable confrontation of film theory with Husserl, an attempt recognized by the pioneers of the phe- nomenological approach to cinema, but never investigated, and even dismissed, in the numerous developments of this branch of study.13 Mitry discusses precisely the theme of mental images, which Husserl brought together under the umbrella term of Phantasie, to indicate both the ensem- ble of images devoid of physical support and the act of imagination through which they “appear” (erscheinen).14 It is an act of imagination that which gives shape to a physical image, deposited on a support and capable of 9 Casey recognized the error. See E.S. Casey, “Sartre on imagination”, in P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (La Salle: Open Court 1981): 16-27. 10 J. Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma (vol. I: Le structure, and vol. II: Les formes) (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1963, 1965). A useful rediscovery of Mitry’s contribution to film theory in: M. Lefebvre, “Revisiting Mitry’s Esthétique et Psychologie du Cinéma at Fifty”, Mise au point [online], no. 6 (2014), accessed February 20, 2021. 11 See D. Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1976): 181ff. 12 The current English edition The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) was translated from the abridged French edition of 1990. We will quote from this book, unless otherwise specified. 13 Vivian Sobchack recognizes his engagement in a Husserlian phenomenology of cinema – see her The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 29 – while A. Casebier, Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) prefers to lean upon Baudry. Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Julian Hanich dismiss Mitry’s idea of mental image as a distortion of the phenomenological arguments. See their stimulating introduction “What is film phenomenology?” to “Film and phenomenology”, Studia Phaenomenologica XVI (2016): 36. 14 E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). BARBARA GRESPI 22 AN-ICON  depicting an absent entity (Bildvorstellung), as well as that which creates mental images (Phantasievorstellung), which are by no means comparable to “iconic contents” of the consciousness, but rather to be understood as intuitions based on “sensorial phantasms”.15 Mitry does not refer to these precise pages of Husserl, whose essential theses are however echoed, but rather he remodels phenomenol- ogy under the influence of his experience of the cinema. Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma stems indeed from a general philosophical position – a unique case in film theory, if we exclude Deleuze’s two tomes – a thesis in which it is of primary importance to define the role of perception by mediating among Husserl’s theses, Sartre and psychology. In Mitry’s interpretation of intentionality, per- ception is an act based on sensory impressions but is not reduced to them; consciousness completes them, by extracting an object from the undifferentiated continuum that constitutes matter and hence giving form, by difference, also to the subject. Consciousness is based on mental images, which are not residues of ocular perception which have survived in the absence of the object, and nor are they entities existing in themselves and of which thought could avail itself; they are rather forms through which thought became aware of itself. With this idea, Mitry gets rid of the metaphor of consciousness as a receptacle of data and substitutes it with that of consciousness as a reflex of per- ception. With perception in the absence of the object, that is Phantasie, the glare of consciousness is, so to speak, one-way: “the mental image is the product of a wish di- rected toward the object which we know to be absent [...] it is the consciousness of that wish becoming ‘known’ in the object of its volition”.16 15 In Husserl called precisely “Phantasmen”. In the comment on Husserl’s theory of imagination, we follow C. Calì, “Husserl and the phenomenological description of imagery: some issues for the cognitive sciences?”, Arhe 4, no. 10 (2006): 25-36 and Husserl e l’immagine (Palermo: Aesthetica Preprint, 2002): 113-114. 16 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 35-36. BARBARA GRESPI 23 AN-ICON  The moving image consciousness Mitry’s starting point, therefore, is not the cin- ematic representation of consciousness, but the mental images that become part of the imaginative process; this process is extremely important in cinema, a medium which powerfully simulates the real but at the same time possess- es a deep-rooted ghostly nature. According to Mitry, this double character of cinema is reflected by the two kinds of signs of which it is composed: linguistic and psycholog- ical signs; linguistic signs give shape to the filmic images (through a grammar of the visible), psychological signs con- struct mental images (with the collaboration of the spectator). To understand how these two “signs” intersect in the beholder’s experience, it is necessary to come back to Husserl and his well-known tripartition regarding image consciousness, which is not clearly referenced in Esthétique et psychologie du cinema, but still recognisable in many lines. Husserl’s classification is based on three perceptive dimensions: the first is the “image-thing” (Bildding), that is, the concrete material of which the image is made, its support; the second is the “image-object” (Bildobje t), that is, the immaterial object which depicts something (the ide- al content of a series of perception);17 the last is the “im- age-subject” (Bildsujet), that is, the depicted subject (the referent in the real world).18 A subtle but substantial differ- ence separates the image-thing from the image-object: if the support were damaged or destroyed (for instance, if a canvas was torn), the image-object would not be affected, because it does not possess a real existence, neither inside nor outside of consciousness (only a complex of sensations experienced by the spectator in front of the pigments exists, as well as the way in which he invests it with intentionality, by creating image consciousness). This component is more easily understood in the case of the mental image, which 17 In Mitry’s words, see J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 27. 18 I use this expression, although I am aware that between the image and the subject there is not properly a semiotic relationship. See C. Rozzoni, Nell’immagine: Realtà, fantasia, esperienza estetica (Milan: Le Monnier, 2017): 9. BARBARA GRESPI 24 AN-ICON  lacks a material support, in contrast to the physical image. Still, there is a minor difference between the two, because what matters is their common capacity of actualizing absent objects (that is to say, making them present). The illusion of presence is based on the production of sensorial phan- tasms that allow us to guess how an object would be if it fell under the sphere of our senses, for instance touch or hear- ing, but first and foremost sight.19 An “optical” phantasm makes us intuit how a specific object would appear to our gaze within a particular environment, and this imaginative act covers our perception, albeit not totally. Indeed, the mental image as well as the physical image insert them- selves into the perception in a contrastive way, that is, not fully covering and substituting our reality, but allowing us to keep it alive. It is not a question of greater or lesser illu- sionistic power (some images could appear so real to be mistaken for reality), and neither of frames (a more or less marked discontinuity in the space where they are situated), rather it is a matter of time: Husserl points out that this is more the contrast between the time of the image-object and the actual present,20 to which our body belongs above all (but also the Bildding, if we are talking about physical images). Here below, the echo of these concepts in Mitry: We have seen that the mental image presents a reality both vi- sualized and recognized as absent. If, as I write these lines, I think of my car in the garage, I can see it perfectly well, mentally - or, at least, I can see a certain aspect of it - but I am seeing it as not present. It appears to my consciousness as an image certifying the absence of what I am thinking about - more especially since, 19 This is what was brightly called an “artificial presence”. See L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence: Philosophical Studies in Image Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 20 “[The image-thing] bears within itself the characteristic of unreality, of conflict with the actual present. The perception of the surroundings, the perception in which the actual present becomes constituted for us, continues on through the frame and then signifies ‘printed paper’ or ‘painted canvas’”. E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 51 (emphasis in the original). On this base, I suspect that we should abandon the optical idea of the frame when we face an environmental image (like VR), and rethink it in corporeal terms, considering the spectator’s real body as the border; indeed, you always have the possibility to leave the artificially present world not by seeing outside of the image, but certainly by touching the surrounding space and objects (or people), that is, paradoxically, becoming aware of the unreal in the very moment in which we get the chance to imagine the real through our body (thus in a perfect inversion of the cinematic relationship between reality and imagination). BARBARA GRESPI 25 AN-ICON in so doing, I do not stop perceiving the world impinging on me from all sides. The mental image is therefore a product of the will standing in opposition to our normal perception of the world and its objects and which, though coexisting with it, becomes more isolated the more directly in opposition it stands.21 Mitry realises that these ideas are of great im- portance for the analysis of cinematic images, which had also attracted Husserl’s attention, albeit fleetingly. The great philosopher’s reflections about the art of the twenty-century concern the repeatability of cinematic screenings such as to leave the image-object unaltered,22 and the intensity of the actualization produced by filmic images, so high as to reduce the perception of the image-thing to the minimum. “Deception and sensory illusion of the sort belonging to panorama images, cinematographic images, and the like”, he wrote, “depend on the fact that the appearing objects in their whole appearing state are slightly or imperceptibly different from the objects appearing in normal perception. One can know in these cases that these are mere image objects, though one cannot vitally sense this”.23 His ger- minal reflection on cinema has been taken up by some important contributions, mainly centered on the relation- ship between consciousness and true believing and on the interplay between actor and character;24 but the path indicated by Mitry is just as interesting and perhaps more in line with Husserl’s suggestions. Mitry wrote: Stuck to a cellulose base, projected onto a screen [...] the film image, in contrast with the mental image, is objectively present; but, like the mental image, it is the image of an absent reality, a past real- ity of which it is merely the image. Its concrete reality is that it is 21 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 82-83. 22 “If I let a cinematographic presentation run off repeatedly, then (in relation to the subject) the image object in the How of its modes of appearance and each of these modes of appearance itself is given as identically the same image object or as identically the same mode of appearance”. E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 646. 23 E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 146. 24 See C. Rozzoni, “Cinema Consciousness: Elements of a Husserlian Approach to Film Image”, Studia Phaenomenologica, XVI (2016): 294-324; J. Brough, “Showing and Seeing: Film as Phenomenology”, in J. D. Parry, ed., Art and Phenomenology (New York-London: Routledge, 2010): 192-214. BARBARA GRESPI 26 AN-ICON fixed to a support and is thus objectively present and analyzable. The reality recorded on the celluloid strip is at all times capable of being projected. In this sense, projection is a kind of “actualization” in the same way as the mental image.25 In these lines, a central question arises: in cin- ema, the act of making something present (“actualization”, he writes, alluding specifically to Husserl) takes place in the very moment of projection, because the strip of film is only a “latent movie”; according to Mitry, the celluloid is the main support (the image-thing), while the screen un- balances perception from the thing to the object, allowing movement to be seen. Neither the destruction of the film, nor even a scratch in the screen cancels the object-film, which, as we said, is that ideal content which, though cre- ated during the projection, survives it – as Orson Welles’ Don Quixote never ceases to teach us, a foolish spectator who stabs the white screen with his sword in an attempt to heroically oppose his enemies of light and shadow. Welles shows that the screen is not the canvas, is not one and the same with the image, which resists its destruction, both because it is anchored to another, more real support, and because it lives in the mind, paradigmatically in that of the visionary Don Quixote. The celluloid is more similar to the concrete materials of the painter, so much so that the di- rector selects carefully its size and sensitivity, while he can do nothing with the surface of the screen. But if we look back at the origins, we find the two supports imploded into each other: in pre-cinema, frame and screen coincide, because the illusion of movement, for instance in Muto- scope, depends on the flow of photographs bound one on top of the other, within the screen format created by their borders: the “book”. Do we have thus a double “thingness” in the filmic image? And if so, is it not a fundamental prop- erty of all technical images,26 even in the many variants 25 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 31, 83. 26 This is perhaps another way to interpret the idea of technical images as proposed by V. Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). BARBARA GRESPI 27 AN-ICON  of the analogue, but also digital system? The material cin- ematic film behaves like photosensitive paper in photogra- phy, or data code in the digital system, while the shadows projected on the screen correspond to the photographic positive, and to the extraction of the mpeg file on the dis- play. From photography onwards,27 to codify an image and to visualize it, that is to render it accessible to the human eye, became two different and not necessarily concurrent processes; obviously, with the transition to digital, the gap between the two moments widens, because there the ma- trix is no more a first, far-fetched or incomplete visualization of the subject, but its translation into a numerical language, not accessible to the senses, and thus potentially shared only by machines.28 But the point is: to develop a theory of cinematic image anchored to the process of visualization instead of that of encoding – focusing at the same time on the spectator because, as Münsterberg said, without him the image in motion simply does not exist – we have to work on the intersection between the physical and the mental. By a different route, Tom Gunning drew similar conclusions, when he re-launched the theory of realism moving from Metz’s brief incursion into phenomenologi- cal territory;29 Gunning is not a supporter of the deviation toward the mental, but certainly an adversary of Peirce’s indexicality when used to reduce the impression of reality in cinema to the sole photographic base. Thomas Elsaess- er, on the other hand, is not a phenomenologist but he rediscovered the “mental side” of cinema when he drew the distinction between the transmission of the image to the human senses and its recording through traces, rather than optical geometry. Indeed, he saw the model of this process in the human memory, as Freud had conceived it (that is like a Mystic Writing Pad), and proposed to re-start 27 But not in its daguerreotype version, which did not use the positive-negative reverse process: the metal film plate in the camera was developed as a positive and as a unique copy. 28 On this topic see: F. Casetti, A. Pinotti, “Post-cinema ecology”, in D. Chateau, J. Moure, eds., Post-cinema: Cinema in the Post Art Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 193-218. 29 C. Metz, “On the impression of reality in the cinema”, in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974): 3-28, discussed by T. Gunning, “Moving away from the index: cinema and the impression of reality”, differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 29-52. BARBARA GRESPI 28 AN-ICON  the theoretical discourse about cinema from its nature of interface between data and the human senses, in the key of an archaeology of the digital.30 These excellent contributions are perfectly in tune with Mitry’s emphasis on projection as a Husserlian moment of actualization, an effect in which the perception of physical image intersects with mental envisioning; in it “the film frame merely takes the place of the mental image with all the force of its credible reality”.31 Moreover, Metz quoted by Gunning builds on Mitry in his analysis of the “filmic mode”, which he defines “the mode of presence”,32 thinking not of a state of sensory overwhelming, but of an active consciousness made up of the mental reflexes of perception. Nevertheless, the mental, though it is a reflex and a logic of the images, is precisely what the film could never make visible. “It is completely impossible to repre- sent a mental image”, Mitry wrote, “since, having become visual, it ceases to be mental”.33 The filmic image is helpless in the face of what is not accessible to the sight or at least what no one has ever seen; for this reason, Mitry would probably have ap- preciated the frameless film by Douglas Gordon (Feature Film, 1999), a video installation that basically consists of an orchestra performing the full soundtrack written by com- poser Bernard Hermann for the film Vertigo (Alfred Hitch- cock,1958). On the two walls of the exhibition room, only the conductor appears in large mirror projections. However, the real images filling the room are not the physical ones on the walls, but those which flow in the viewer’s mind in correspondence with the musical notes: the sequence where Kim Novak jumps into the bay under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, or when she comes back in her green suit like a ghost. The spectator experiences a kind of vision 30 T. Elsaesser, “Freud as media theorist: mystic writing pads and the matter of memory”, Screen 50, no. 1 (2009): 100-113. Kuntzel already worked on the similarities between Freudian model of memory and the cinema, see: T. Kuntzel, “A note upon the filmic apparatus”, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, no. 1 (1976): 266-271. 31 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 86. 32 C. Metz, “On the impression of reality in the cinema”: 4. 33 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 209. BARBARA GRESPI 29 AN-ICON  not based on retina, as the director himself reports, refer- ring to interviews with spectators coming out of the gallery: Vertigo is projected through the ears into the mind of the person listening to Hermann’s notes. States of mind and self projection Are we to think, then, that only the absence of images triggers imagination? And if it is totally impossible to simulate the mental with the means of cinema, how shall we construe the numerous attempts, since the origins of the medium, to simulate altered states of consciousness? Mitry argues that dream sequences, hallucinations and premo- nitions are not the most mental but the most subjective,34 and in this he joins Wenders, whose machine will show that the mental could be translated into the visible only by sharing subjectivity. Therefore, the result of the cinematic simulation of altered states depends on the ways in which the movie makes the viewer slip into the consciousness of a character, articulating his or her seeing and feeling through the “subjective shot”. Film theory has always juxtaposed two forms of the cinematic gaze: the so-called objective shot, corre- sponding to the simulation of a world that is completely independent from every perception, be this human, animal or belonging to other living and non-living species, and the subjective shot, the simulation of a perceived world, thus filtered at a sensorial and cognitive level through a specific fictional identity. The analysis of these two modes, together with other more nuanced ones, are part of the glorious problem of the point of view in the cinema, a pro- tagonist of the semiotic-narratological debate of the Eight- ies and Nineties, also discussed towards the end of the season in Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology, which takes up precisely Mitry’s contribution. The chapters about the point of view in Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma are indeed the best known and most discussed, even if, before 34 Ibid. BARBARA GRESPI 30 AN-ICON  Sobchack, perhaps not fully understood. Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992), was published only a year after Metz’s Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (1991),35 and thus criticiz- es the positions of the great semiologist, especially Metz reading Mitry;36 but in reality, Impersonal Enunciation is a point of encounter between the two authors. Mitry is among the first to study in depth The Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1946), the film noir shot almost entirely in subjective mode. Here we spectators investigate in the shoes of the detective Philip Marlowe, who is framed frontally only at the beginning and at the end of the movie, while for the rest his eyes are our eyes and our body is disguised in his. Mitry knows how to wonderfully describe the way in which the spectators’ gaze follows the character’s gait from the inside, striving to consider his feet as their own, or the way in which they hold onto the railing with him, trying to see their own hands in Marlowe’s. But this attempt fails. They cannot recognize the image of their own body. Rather they imagine themselves accompanying the body of an Other, objectified, as all the rest is. It is obviously not me climbing the stairs and acting like this, even though I am feeling sensations similar to those I might feel if I were climbing the stairs. I am, therefore, walking with someone, sharing his impressions.37 Then when the famous sequence of the mir- ror arrives, during which the face of Marlowe is reflected (always from the character’s view), spectators are slight- ly disappointed, Mitry apparently suggests. They have to admit that the impressions that they tried to embody were not theirs. Or rather: this is true for all the viewers except for the director, because he, Robert Montgomery, played Marlowe; thus, for him, and for him only, the subjective shot 35 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 36 C. Metz, “Problèmes actuels de théorie du cinéma” (1967), in Essais sur la signification au cinéma, 2 vol. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972): 35-86. 37 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 210. BARBARA GRESPI 31 AN-ICON  works. Put another way, in the subjective shots, Montgom- ery would experience himself as another, by again embody- ing the sensorial phantasms of his previous experience; most of the time, he would live through an experience of partial mirroring: proprioceptive but not optical.38 Sobchack addresses this analysis on two lev- els. On one level, she expands Mitry’s critique by adding the argument of the difficulties of simulating a proprioceptive act. It is not just a matter of noticing the difference between the spectator’s hands and the actor’s, but also the fact of being forced to perceive differently from the way in which the character would probably do so in reality. Indeed, the subjective shots serve two simultaneous purposes: they show the clues necessary to solve the mystery and at the same time they show Marlowe’s perception in a believable fashion. However, the fictional Marlowe would be interested only in the inquiries, and not in his percipient self; for this reason, Sobchack speaks of a difference in the intentional focus that detaches the viewer from the character. In addi- tion, our way of directing attention consists in moving our eyes inside a visual field in which everything remains equally sharp, even what we are not focusing on; on the contrary, classical cinema deploys a marked in-focus and out-of- focus procedure, it constructs clear and blurred zones of visibility by regulating the focal point. So, the analogy be- tween cinema and mind in Münsterberg’s theory (movie techniques as metaphors of the processes of attention), becomes for Sobchack an element which unmasks the difference between man and machine. This is indeed the second and more radical level on which Sobchack’s line of argument is based, and it is so important that it overturns, at least formally, Mitry’s reasoning. Building on a Merleau-Pontyan version of phe- nomenology, Sobchack challenged the semiotic distinction between subjective and objective gaze and introduced the 38 I suggest something similar to the inspiring idea of the shot/counter-shot relationship in terms of specular reflection without a mirror, as proposed by A.C. Dalmasso, “Le plan subjectif réversible: Sur le point de vue au cinéma à partir des écrits de Merleau-Ponty”, Studia Phaenomenologica, XVI (2016): 135-162. BARBARA GRESPI 32 AN-ICON  concept of the film’s body, meaning “an intentional instru- ment able to perceive and express perception”.39 From this standpoint, the film’s materially nonhuman (but percipient) body presents the world subjectively to the spectator’s eye. Consequently, the movie camera sees a character and sees him/her seeing with the same degree of subjectivity (its own). It can disguise itself totally as them, by attributing to them a temporary responsibility for the visible percep- tion, but not without a great effort.40 This is indeed the true unbridgeable difference between bodies in the subjective structure of the gaze: not between the body of the spectator and the body of the character, but between the machine’s body (“the non-human embodied film”) and the actor’s, and even more so, the spectator’s body. On the surface, we are dealing with an inversion of perspective, but in reality, it is a convergence: the film’s gaze overwrites that of the character whether we define the machine as an object (but always from a phenomenological perspective: Mitry), or as a subject (a sentient body: Sobchack). In the years between Mitry’s volume and Sob- chack’s, the supporters of the subjective gaze proliferated, with some epochal contributions;41 but when Metz closes that chapter with his Impersonal Enunciation, we come back, in a sense, to the beginning. Metz comes from his book on cinema and psychoanalysis, where he differentiat- ed a form of primary identification (with the camera) from a secondary one (with the character), so he is already inclined to elaborate on the reflexive role of the apparatus. But Im- personal Enunciation starts by arguing, exactly as Sobchak does, that the “semi-subjective shot” discovered by Mitry – an over-the-shoulder shot directed along an axis which more or less aligns with the character’s point of view – is the best form of subjectivity; firstly, because it also shows, even if partially, the body of the perceiver, a necessary 39 V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: 247. 40 Ibid.: 231. 41 See the still indispensable F. Casetti, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator (1986) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). BARBARA GRESPI 33 AN-ICON  factor to encourage identification,42 and secondly, because it makes you sense the presence of a second gaze that perceives the percipient. In conclusion, even leaving phe- nomenology and remaining in the sphere of semiotics, the point is this: the subjective shot is not an empty mould for the spectator’s gaze and body, it is rather a place for redoubling: it “performs above all a double doubling of the enunciative moment […] it doubles at a stroke the site [foyer] that shows via him, and the spectator, who sees via him […] subjective image is reflexive but not a mirror. It does not reflect itself; rather, it reflects the source and the spectator”.43 From this standpoint, the subjective shot be- comes a reproduction en abyme of the projection: we could probably rethink also the idea of the first person shot in VR (and XR) along this line; there the beholder’s body-gaze, apparently implied at every level, is rather to be construed in its radical coincidence with the machine of visibility. In conclusion, when we talk about subjectivity in the image, we talk about a reflexive form in which the movie makes itself visible44 (through the character’s eye or through other stylistic strategies and non-human bodies, so-called “enunciating entities”). Still, exploiting a fictional identity not to access the physical world but some form of Phantasie, to re-use a Husserlian word, means to introduce a further enunciative level in which the character, unques- tionably, mediates the visible with its Self, that is to say, its own human and fictional subjectivity. This is what Mitry meant, probably, when he maintained that mental images plead the cause not so much of the mental but of subjectivity. However, movies about people with supernatu- ral faculties offer a range of fictional representations of men- tal states more in tune with this idea of “impersonal subjec- tivity”; in those cases, indeed, the character’s altered states 42 Mitry argued first that to adopt a gaze, one must have seen the body of this gaze; see the development of this idea in E. Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Amsterdam-New York-Berlin: Mouton, 1984). 43 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or The Place of Film: 106. 44 Unless you think of the distribution of knowledge and the positioning of the narrator towards the diegetic universe (Genette’s focalization). BARBARA GRESPI 34 AN-ICON  are not to be explained through psychology, but through their function as human machines of vision (symmetrical to Sobchack’s cinematic machine as non-human body). Fig. 2. David Cronenberg, The Dead Zone, 1983. Screen capture. In The Dead Zone (David Cronenberg, 1983) (Fig. 2), the visions of John, who awakens from a coma lasting nearly five years, traverse his body and materialize around him. There is a physical support (an image-thing) where the “data” of the events that John is able to “hallucinate” are stored, and it is the body of the person who experienced them: each vision is generated by the contact between John’s hand and that of the subject, whose past or future is in question; the handshake produces tremors, signals travelling through the clairvoyant’s body and reaching his eyes, which at this point “project”45 the images (images-ob- jects) into the environment, and not without pain (the same consumption suffered by the protagonists of Until the End of the World). John becomes a visitor to these virtual spac- es, which he experiences with his body, while the specta- tors experience his hallucination as their own not by vir- tue of an unconditioned adhesion of gazes (the subjective shot), but rather by virtue of a plurality of subjectivisations 45 See the idea of divination as projection in one of the figures who inspired Jean Mitry’s thinking, known as Dr. Allendy: “The fortune tellers […] do nothing but project on reality something which doesn’t possess in itself any determination, a latent image that is inscribed in it — and therefore we can understand all the techniques of divination as projection on reality of an inner and obscure sense” (our translation and emphasis). See Dr. Allendy [René Allendy], “La valeur psychologique de l’image”: 99-100. BARBARA GRESPI 35 AN-ICON  which renders the visible a place for the emergence of the gaze.46 In his first vision, John hallucinates the fire in which the daughter of his nurse could die: the hospital room is transformed into the child’s bedroom, including John’s bed, suddenly surrounded by toys, teddy bears and flames. The vision is subjectified in a complex and multiple fashion: a rightward gaze opens the imaginary field with a classic subjective shot, and a leftward gaze brings the field back to reality; however, between the two gestures, the camera starts to wander in a mental space-time until it includes John, whose eyes have ceased to bear the sight of the images, while his voice remained altered as it is in his state of hallucination. In the most memorable of the visions, which concerns the young victim of a serial killer, John’s subjective shot projects the imaginary gazebo in which the murder took place; but his close-up was already “subjectified” before his visions, because his face no longer immersed in the darkness of the night (the actual present), but surrounded by a diffused glow, the one that was there at the moment of the crime (the virtual past); this abrupt change of illumination intimates that John is already part of his hallucination. His entrance into the virtual world, his artificial presence on the scene of the crime, right behind the victim, but invisible, is a quintessential cinematic scene. John ends up in the image almost accidentally: a dolly starts moving slowly and brings into the frame his figure, almost by chance; it is thanks to a slightly excessive movement that we can see our vision together with its source. And it is precisely this ghostly, casual and plural presence that characterizes the cinematic experience; it is difficult to think that it could be replicated in immersive media, like VR, where there is, at least for the moment, no possibility of detaching the spectator’s gaze from the “projector”. 46 See the idea of “plan subjective réversible” and of the film as a “visible surface cracked by different gazes” from the Merleau-Pontyan perspective adopted by A.C. Dalmasso, “Le plan subjectif réversible”: 140 (our translation). BARBARA GRESPI 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/15448

Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image in theDeleuze cinema (II) by Giuseppe Previtali Cinema Temporality Hallucination Bergman Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (II) by Giuseppe Previtali Abstract From its very origins, cinema has demonstrated a particular interest in the representation of altered states of consciousness: memories, visions, nightmares and dreams are a common feature of narrative films and usually inter- rupt a flow of events by inserting different temporalities in the present of the story. Following the arguments explored by Gilles Deleuze in his groundbreaking works on cinema, this essay will address the issue of how narrative cinema has represented altered states of consciousness. If in early cinema of attractions altered states were represented as physical realities intertwined with the world, classical Hol- lywood films progressively exorcised the disruptive poten- tial of such images by defining a visual grammar in order to normalize them within the narrative. It will be modern cinema which will focus on this issue in depth, given its new interest in the link between the moving image and the mechanisms of thought. In this regard, the essay will in conclusion address the hallucinations experienced by Isak Borg in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, a complex and highly illuminating case of various forms of altered mental states. Deleuze Cinema Temporality Hallucination Bergman To quote this essay: G. Previtali, “Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (II)”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 37-50 GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 37 AN-ICON  Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) begins with a shot of a young couple (Jonathan and Eve) in a car. We immediately understand that they are running from the police and they are heading towards a dock. The girl asks the man (who we will later recognize as her boyfriend) what happened and, when Jonathan starts to tell his story (“I was in my kitchen, it was about 5:00”) the close-up shot of the two begins to fade out. He explains that earlier in the morning he had received a visit from the singer and actress Charlotte Inwood, who showed up at his house with a dress covered in the blood of her husband. Jonathan managed to sneak into Charlotte’s house but was glimpsed by the housemaid and forced to run away. He later received a visit from two policemen, from whom he was able to escape only thanks to Eve. The description of this long sequence, which corresponds to the first fifteen minutes of the movie, would be incomplete without stressing the fact that Jona- than’s tale will prove to be a lie, despite the fact that visually it adopts those criteria of clarity, legibility and transparen- cy which were typical of classic Hollywood cinema and in which the spectator usually put his trust. The exceptionality of this sequence and its ex- emplarity in showing how the temporal dimension (the se- quence is a recollection of a supposed past) and the mental dimension (it is a false recollection of a certain character) are linked, is such that Deleuze identifies in it the first ap- pearance of the mental image in the history of cinema. This crucial analysis, programmatically located in the last pages of The Movement-Image, explicitly connects the distorted evocation of the past and an altered state of conscious- ness. It is precisely this relationship which, questioning the omniscience of the spectator, heralds the advent of a new kind of filmic image: GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 38 AN-ICON The mental image not only frames the others, but transforms them by penetrating them. For this reason, one might say that Hitchcock accomplishes and brings to completion the whole of the cinema by pursuing the movement-image to its limits.1 Altered states of consciousness in early and classical cinema Deleuze’s arguments, which will later be dis- cussed more extensively, attempt to address the excep- tionality of Hitchcock’s movies in the context of classical narrative cinema. However, it is important to recognize that from its origins, cinema has continuously sought to make visible altered states of consciousness. If film theory immediately stressed the role of visual media in preserv- ing the memory of what is absent (thus “presentifying” it),2 another of the great obsessions of cinema has to do with “the aspiration to visualize what dwells in the human mind, to represent thought, to exteriorize what is internal”.3 As Dagrada acutely pointed out, this urge was not limited to cinema itself, but was rather a common feature in the vi- sual culture of the 18th and 19th centuries. Theatre, magic lantern shows and optical toys were just some of the most common examples of this interest shown in the visual ex- ternalization of mental states. Cinema, nevertheless, played a crucial role in this sense, given its specific ability to visu- alize reality. Long before the institutionalization of classical filmic syntax, early cinema developed a specific way of visualizing mental states. What is peculiar to this historical 1 G. Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986): 204. The use of Deleuzean concepts in film studies is an established trend and this paper follows this tradition addressing a perhaps slightly different problem. For a general understanding of this theoretical link, see: P. Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture. Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); P. Maratti, Gilles Deleuze. Cinema and Philosophy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008); D. Angelucci, Deleuze e i concetti del cinema (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2012); D. Martin-Jones, W. Brown eds., Deleuze and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 2 I am referring to the fundamental remarks by theoreticians such as A. Bazin, “The ontology of photographic image”, in Id., What is Cinema? Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 204): 9-16 and R. Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981): 96. Moreover, see the relevant passages in A. Boschi, Teorie del cinema. Il periodo classico 1915-1945 (Rome: Carocci, 1998). 3 E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot (Brussels: Peter Lang,2014): 193. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 39 AN-ICON  period is that those states were not presented as individual and abstract perceptions, but rather as phantasmagorical apparitions, as forms of visual attraction.4 Hallucinations, forms of altered perceptions,5 apparitions of demons and other creatures were extremely common in early cinema, to such an extent that it is often difficult to differentiate clearly between these various types of altered conscious- ness. Besides the different ways in which these images are visually presented in early cinema,6 what needs to be stressed here is the fact that these forms of alteration pos- sessed a “physical nature”, a “potential interchangeability with the real”.7 Consider for instance the case of Histoire d’un crime (Ferdinand Zecca, 1901). The film begins with the killing of a bank employee by a burglar and is built on the juxtaposition of self-contained tableaux, in accordance with the stylistic conventions of the time. When the burglar is arrested and taken to prison, we see him sleep; here, thanks to an explicitly theatrical solution, Zecca is able to visualize what is at the same time both a dream and a rec- ollection of key events of the character’s life. This form of mise en abyme, which has more or less the same function as thought balloons in comics,8 is typical of the period. It confirms that, while the linguistic status of these “altered images” was still unclear, early cinema already stressed the problematic and still to be analyzed relationship between the mental and the temporal dimension. 4 I use the term in the sense outlined in the influential study by T. Gunning, “The cinema of attractions: early film, its spectator and the avant-garde”, in W. Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006): 381-388. 5 Consider for example the hallucinatory drunkenness represented in Rêve à la lune (1905) or the nightmarish consequences of the main character’s dinner in Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906). 6 For an inventory of these techniques, see E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot: 197-210. 7 E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot: 198. Later on, the concept is further emphasized as follows: “The objective physical quality forcefully inscribed into the continuity between subjective oneiric space and waking space characterizes all forms of representation of dreams developed by early cinema. It is not surprising, then, that in this context […] mixing the objective and the subjective, oneiric representation simultaneously assumes both the material characteristics of a physical apparition and the supernatural characteristics of a clairvoyance, as if it constituted a magical way of communicating with somewhere else, a place that is just as real, but also supernatural”, ibid.: 205. Even if here the author speaks explicitly of dreams, her argument seems to be applicable to all the types of altered consciousness explored by early cinema. 8 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema (Venice: Marsilio, 2004): 93. If not otherwise stated, the translations of Italian texts are always the author’s. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 40 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Ferdinand Zecca, Histoire d’un crime, 1901 With the institutionalization of the film industry and its language, the various manifestations of the mental in early cinema were progressively neutralized and reduced to figures of altered temporality.9 The variety of mental states encountered in the cinema of attractions, and the different stylistic devices used to present them, were replaced by recurrent and recognizable linguistic elements which neu- tralized the subversive potential of mental images in a con- text in which a clear and coherent narrative was required.10 The case of A Letter to Three Wives (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949) is emblematic in this sense. The protagonists of this sentimental drama are three women who receive, from a fourth woman, a letter stating that one of their husbands has run away with her. Haunted by doubt, each of the three gives rise to a flashback in which she remembers a specific episode of her life. The second flashback, which has as its protagonist Rita (a radio writer married to a mod- est but proudly intellectual teacher), is highly instructive 9 I am specifically referring to the flashback as a form of visualization of the past. On the various types of flashback, see at least: Y. Mouren, Le flash-back (Armand Colin: Paris, 2005); F. Centola, Il flashback nel cinema. Il tempo riavvolto nell’eterno presente cinematografico (Novara: UTET, 2019). For a theoretical and historical introduction to the topic, M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (London-New York: Routledge, 2013). On the role of flashback in literary theory see the quintessential study by G. Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972). 10 It should be noted that, according to many theoreticians such as Balázs and Bluestone, the only temporality of narrative cinema is the present. On this topic, S. Ghislotti, Film Time. Le dimensioni temporali della visione (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, 2012): 54-63. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 41 AN-ICON  of the way in which classical cinema connects the men- tal and the temporal dimensions. Rita is laid on the grass, and while the camera delicately zooms in on her face, we hear her thoughts in voiceover (she obsessively repeats a couple of troubling questions: “Why couldn’t George go fishing? Why the blue suit?”). Then, a crossfade marks the beginning of the flashback, a sequence that tells the story of a highly problematic and unhappy marriage. The long flashback will then be visually presented according to the conventions of classical narrative cinema: a set of objective shots connected through the use of linear and transparent montage. Beyond Classicism: from Hitchcock to Resnais When confronted with the ways in which clas- sical cinema elaborated the theme of mental images – re- ducing them to forms of altered temporality – Hitchcock’s exceptionality becomes even more apparent. As already mentioned, Deleuze identifies the false flashback of Stage Fright as a crucial moment for overcoming the move- ment-image. Indeed, the falseness of this sequence radi- cally challenges the idea that memories can be objective- ly visualized, without the deforming effect always implicit in subjectivity. Even more problematically, in the final se- quence of Marnie (1964), Hitchcock shows the emergence (or rather re-mergence) of a traumatic mental image of the protagonist, which she experiences not just optically but in a much more radically bodily sense. Influenced by the circumstances and as if hunted by a younger version of herself, Marnie actually re-experiences the dramatic events of her childhood. While being presented to the spectator through objective shots, these images – marked moreover by a chromatic alteration – have a material consistency for Marnie and she finds herself re-immersed in a past that she has already lived through. The discussion on the ways in which cinema reflected on the tension between the mental and the temporal dimension has shown that, while GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 42 AN-ICON  in early cinema a variety of altered states of consciousness was represented as hallucinatory but “physical” realities, classical narrative cinema progressively institutionalized figures of temporality11 within canonic filmic syntax.12 The link between mental and temporal will become crucial in the context of so-called modern cinema,13 specifically because – according to Deleuze – in this cultural context cinema will finally be able to assign a central place to thought and its mechanisms: “the essence of cinema […] has thought as its higher purpose, nothing but thought and its functioning”.14 This process will be made possible by the emergence of the category of mental image, which will on the one hand reassume and re-signify other kinds of images (such as the action-image) and on the other hand unleash the “modern- ist potential” inscribed in the flashback.15 The mental image is for Deleuze something profoundly related to the issue of time, but in an ex- tremely complex and problematizing way which implies 11 More specifically, classical narrative cinema tried to visualize almost exclusively the past and it is probably no coincidence that Hitchcock was one of the few directors who tried to imagine an image in the future. I am referring here to the sequence of Sabotage (1936) in which the protagonist sees the water of a fish tank in the city aquarium dissolving and acting as a sort of screen on which is prefigured the brutal outcome of a bombing. It is worth noticing that in this case the future is considered as a time of pure possibility, because the imagined event will take place in a completely different way. 12 Deleuze insists on the rhetorical function of the flashback in a poignant passage of The Time-Image: “We know very well that the flashback is a conventional, extrinsic device: it is generally indicated by a dissolve-link, and the images that it introduces are often superimposed or meshed. It is like a sign with the words: ‘watch out! recollection’. It can, therefore, indicate, by convention, a causality which is psychological, but still analogous to a sensory-motor determinism, and, despite its circuits, only confirms the progression of a linear narration”. G. Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989): 48. 13 For a critical definition of this concept, see the still relevant remarks by G. de Vincenti, Il concetto di modernità nel cinema (Parma: Pratiche, 2000): 11-24. 14 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 168. 15 M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History: 189. On the same issue, Ghislotti points out: “While in the classical flashback the scenes became part of the coherent narrative of the movie, that is of a set of knowledges that helped the public to have a trustworthy idea of the story, in the case of modernist flashback this aspect falls short: the flashback often becomes the subjective vision of a fact, and is consequently a possible version of the events, but not the definitive one […]. At the end of the film, the public is unable to have an idea of the story free of doubt and is forced to choose between this or that version of it”. S. Ghislotti, Film Time. Le dimensioni temporali della visione: 130-131. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 43 AN-ICON  the coexistence of different temporalities.16 In modern cin- ema, the visualization of mental states is made possible by the collision of /clash of /conflict of different temporal- ities that not only coexist, but can merge to the point of becoming indistinguishable: The images have to be present and past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time. [...] The past does not follow the present that it is no longer, it coexists with the present it was.17 Take for instance a movie such as Mirror (An- drei Tarkovsky, 1975), in which the continuous oscillation between various states of consciousness (from memory to dream and beyond) would be inconceivable in the context of classical narrative cinema, especially when we consider that in the movie “there is a constant retroactive reverber- ation of almost every scene”.18 The memorial act of the protagonist Aleksej generates a flux of memory and visions that will involve not just his own life but also the life of his son and even collective and historical memory (both in an allusive form and through the insertion of historical visual documents).19 In this sense, Mirror seems to fully resonate with the Deleuzian idea of time as a topological construct, a field composed of peaks and sheets which continuously involve each other and are freely explorable. This idea be- comes even more explicit when we consider the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which both the association between 16 “There is no present which is not haunted by a past and a future, by a past which is not reducible to a former present, by a future which does not consist of a present to come. Simple succession affects the present which passes, but each present coexists with a past and a future without which it would not itself pass on. It is characteristic of cinema to seize this past and this future that coexist with the present image”. G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 37 (emphasis added). The use of the term “haunted” is specifically interesting here and seems to foreshadow the arguments of J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London-New York: Routledge, 1994). 17 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 79 (emphasis added). Also, on this point: S. Shaw, Film Consciousness. From Phenomenology to Deleuze (Jefferson-London: McFarland&Company, 2008): 147. 18 S. Shaw, Film Consciousness. From Phenomenology to Deleuze : 94. 19 T. Masoni, P. Vecchi, Andrei Tarkovskij (Milan: Il Castoro, 1997): 72-74. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 44 AN-ICON  mental and temporal,20 and the conflict between various temporalities are quintessential. In his movies, the temporal oscillations do not involve issues of narrative clarity – as in classical cinema – but are rather used to visualize con- tradictory mental states that are always on the verge of undecidability. As pointed out by Deleuze, it is pointless to discuss Resnais’ cinema dissociating the issue of time from that of mental states: It is not difficult to show that dreams and nightmares, fantasies, hypotheses and anticipations, all forms of the imaginary, are more important than flashbacks.21 It is possible to identify a trend in Resnais’ cin- ema which, from Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) to Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968) through Last Year in Marienbad (1961) and Muriel (1963), questions and problematizes the mental dimensions of perception and their link with temporality. Consider for instance the emblematic case of Last Year in Marienbad: the claim of the man to have met a woman the year before could have easily offered the chance for a chain of illustrative flashbacks. On the contrary, the baroque setting of the hotel in which the two characters meet trig- gers a series of obsessive repetitions, uncertain memories (whose are these memories? Are these facts real or just imagined?), while the continuous and uncanny immobility of the bodies generates “a space-time in which there is no before or after, past or present, here and elsewhere, real and imaginary”.22 The film is structured by the connection between ambiguous and confusing mental states, altered forms of experience that continuously merge with halluci- nation. Deleuze sums up the issue as follows, underlining 20 According to Ishaghpour, the great issue of Resnais’ cinema is to understand “the way the mind functions”. Y. Ishaghpour, D’une image à l’autre (Paris: Gonthier, 1981): 182; quoted in G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 121. Shortly after, Deleuze comes back to this argument, stressing that “Resnais is always saying that he is interested only in what happens in the brain, in cerebral mechanisms – monstrous, chaotic or creative mechanisms”, Ibid.: 125. 21 Ibid.: 122. 22 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema: 113-114. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 45 AN-ICON  once again the inextricable interweaving of times and per- ceptions offered by the movie: In Last Year in Marienbad it is X who knew A (so A does not re- member or is lying), and it is A who does not know X (so X is mis- taken or playing a trick on her). Ultimately, all the three characters correspond to three different presents, but in such a way as to complicate the inexplicable instead of throwing light on it; in such a way as to bring about its existence instead of suppressing it: when X lives in a present of past, A lives in a present of future, so that the difference exudes or assumes a present of present (the third, the husband), all implicated in each other.23 The hallucination of Isak Borg Even if Deleuze never discussed Ingmar Berg- man directly in the pages of The Time-Image, his cinema seems to benefit from the aforementioned theorizations, especially if compared with the new possibilities provided by virtual reality in terms of immersivity. Indeed, the pres- ence of altered mental states is recurrent in his movies, which continuously address the link between temporality and perception. Consider for instance the hallucinatory visions of Persona (1966) or the nightmares that haunt the painter Johan in Hour of the Wolf (1968). The explicitly me- ta-filmic opening of this movie,24 as a matter of fact, seems to suggest that for Bergman cinema is defined precisely by its specific ability to visualize altered states of conscious- ness. This idea becomes even more explicit (especially in connection with time) in Wild Strawberries (1957), in which Bergman sets out what is probably his most acute reflec- tion on the topic. As is well-known, the protagonist is the elderly bacteriologist Isak Borg, who is about to receive his doctorate. The night before the celebration he has a terrible nightmare and decides to travel to the event by car, together with his daughter-in-law Marianne. During the trip, 23 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 101. 24 While the initial credits are running, we see voices that we can unmistakably associate to a film set: “Quiet all! Rolling! Take! Camera… and begin!”. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 46 AN-ICON  Isak will experience a whole set of daydreams, hallucina- tions and visions which will shed a new light on his former way of life. At the end of the day, after the celebration of his career, something will be changed in him, and he will start to approach life with more joy and respect for those around him. Wild Strawberries is a movie that reflects on memory and on the possible link between various tempo- ralities and forms of perception; thus, the fact that it has almost no flashbacks is even more striking.25 None of the sequences in which Isak experiences some altered form of consciousness can be considered flashbacks, since Isak physically takes part in them with his old man’s body “al- most as if he was observing the world to finally understand it”. 26 This is true for the oneiric scene that opens the film but also for the quintessential sequence in which Isak – taking a break from the trip near the house where he used to spend the summer during his youth – has a strange and highly interesting experience. We see him sitting under a tree, watching in close-up the old and now abandoned house, while we hear his thoughts in voiceover: Perhaps I got a little sentimental [...]. I don’t know how it happened, but the day’s clear reality dissolved into the even clearer images of memory, which appeared before my eyes with the strength of a true stream of events.27 Then we see him in counter-shot and, through a crossfade, we see the old house regaining its former ap- pearance. With a subsequent series of rapid crossfades we take part in what at first sight may be considered a flashback. Here, we see his beloved cousin Sara picking strawberries for her uncle. However, we immediately understand that what we are experiencing is not a flashback, for at least two different reasons. First of all, Isak takes part in this particular 25 The only real flashback in the film is in fact not experienced by Isak Borg but by his daughter-in-law, who confesses to the old professor an argument that she had with her husband about the child she is expecting. 26 P. Baldelli, Cinema dell’ambiguità. Bergman e Antonioni (Rome: Samonà e Savelli, 1969): 95. 27 Emphasis added. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 47 AN-ICON  “presentification” of the past with his elderly body and is able to move in this hallucinatory experience with a certain degree of freedom; secondly, the events that Isak is seeing are not his memories, because it is immediately clear that (as a young man) he never saw what he is experiencing now (Sara and Sigfrid flirting). Fig. 2. Ingmar Bergman, Wild Strawberries, 1957 Albano rightly argued that we cannot concep- tualize this important sequence in terms of a flashback: We may speak of rêverie éveillée, of daydream or — in German — of Tagtraum, of conscious fantasy. A reverie that shares with a dream [...] the sense of living [...] what is being dreamt.28 Isak knows very well that he is experiencing an impossible past, because he addresses his young and beautiful cousin in an unmistakable way: “Sara, it’s your cousin Isak. Well, I’ve become quite old, of course, so I don’t look the same. But you, you haven’t changed at all”. 28 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema: 76. On this point, see also: R. Campari, Film della memoria. Mondi perduti, ricordati e sognati (Venice: Marsilio, 2005):16, 22-28. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 48 AN-ICON  In this passage, we are confronted with a con- figuration of temporalities that is far more complex of those addressed above: it is a sort of double temporality because the present of the old Isak overlaps with a past that is – moreover – nonfactual, but rather seeped in the percep- tions, regrets and hopes of the young Isak. This conflictual combination of temporalities seems to resonate perfectly with a crucial passage by Metz: Memory is in effect the only vision [...] that posits its object as simultaneously real and imaginary, that is, real in the past and imaginary in the present.29 What Isak sees really happened, but the way in which he experiences it is hallucinatory and gives the spectator no reassurance about the fact that it happened in that way. It is worth noticing here that Deleuze actually theorized this kind of situation, even without referring to Bergman: “the present is the actual image and its contem- poraneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror”.30 Finally, it seems important to notice that, de- spite his being immersed in an altered perception in which he can more or less freely move, Isak has no possibility of interacting with it. He “stands before the theatre of his life as a spectator-voyeur, terribly attracted, morbidly intrigued, but never seen, in complete isolation”.31 Both the dialogue between Isak and Sara and the subsequent scene in which he hears her confessions after the family lunch are highly instructive in this regard. It is symptomatic, in this respect, that this long sequence ends precisely when Sara moves to the garden to meet with the Isak of the past. The percep- tion of the old Isak grants him the possibility to experience a time that he never lived and probably only imagined but 29 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016): 96 (emphasis added). 30 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 79 (emphasis added). It is worth noticing that the situation that Deleuze imagines (the simultaneous presence of past and present within a mirror image) is explicitly visualized in Wild Strawberries, during a subsequent passage in which the old Isak sees himself reflected in a mirror held by a young Sara. 31 L. Albano, “Il posto delle fragole”, in A. Costa ed., Ingmar Bergman (Venice: Marsilio, 2009): 77. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 49 AN-ICON  he is at the same time confronted with an insurmountable limit: he is precluded from every contact and any chance of interaction with this time that is not his own. Only in his present will he be given the chance to undo his mistakes, thanks to the apparition of a sort of double of the beloved Sara. The specific way in which Bergman approaches the representation of altered mental states, working on the dialectic between absence and presence, nostalgia and desire, seems to have more than one similarity with the contemporary form of immersivity promoted by various technological desire. In this sense, a wider archaeological account of the issue of virtuality should be developed, in order to establish a more complex theoretical framework to address this kind of images. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 50 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/15448

Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image in theDeleuze cinema (II) by Giuseppe Previtali Cinema Temporality Hallucination Bergman Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (II) by Giuseppe Previtali Abstract From its very origins, cinema has demonstrated a particular interest in the representation of altered states of consciousness: memories, visions, nightmares and dreams are a common feature of narrative films and usually inter- rupt a flow of events by inserting different temporalities in the present of the story. Following the arguments explored by Gilles Deleuze in his groundbreaking works on cinema, this essay will address the issue of how narrative cinema has represented altered states of consciousness. If in early cinema of attractions altered states were represented as physical realities intertwined with the world, classical Hol- lywood films progressively exorcised the disruptive poten- tial of such images by defining a visual grammar in order to normalize them within the narrative. It will be modern cinema which will focus on this issue in depth, given its new interest in the link between the moving image and the mechanisms of thought. In this regard, the essay will in conclusion address the hallucinations experienced by Isak Borg in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, a complex and highly illuminating case of various forms of altered mental states. Deleuze Cinema Temporality Hallucination Bergman To quote this essay: G. Previtali, “Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (II)”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 37-50 GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 37 AN-ICON  Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) begins with a shot of a young couple (Jonathan and Eve) in a car. We immediately understand that they are running from the police and they are heading towards a dock. The girl asks the man (who we will later recognize as her boyfriend) what happened and, when Jonathan starts to tell his story (“I was in my kitchen, it was about 5:00”) the close-up shot of the two begins to fade out. He explains that earlier in the morning he had received a visit from the singer and actress Charlotte Inwood, who showed up at his house with a dress covered in the blood of her husband. Jonathan managed to sneak into Charlotte’s house but was glimpsed by the housemaid and forced to run away. He later received a visit from two policemen, from whom he was able to escape only thanks to Eve. The description of this long sequence, which corresponds to the first fifteen minutes of the movie, would be incomplete without stressing the fact that Jona- than’s tale will prove to be a lie, despite the fact that visually it adopts those criteria of clarity, legibility and transparen- cy which were typical of classic Hollywood cinema and in which the spectator usually put his trust. The exceptionality of this sequence and its ex- emplarity in showing how the temporal dimension (the se- quence is a recollection of a supposed past) and the mental dimension (it is a false recollection of a certain character) are linked, is such that Deleuze identifies in it the first ap- pearance of the mental image in the history of cinema. This crucial analysis, programmatically located in the last pages of The Movement-Image, explicitly connects the distorted evocation of the past and an altered state of conscious- ness. It is precisely this relationship which, questioning the omniscience of the spectator, heralds the advent of a new kind of filmic image: GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 38 AN-ICON The mental image not only frames the others, but transforms them by penetrating them. For this reason, one might say that Hitchcock accomplishes and brings to completion the whole of the cinema by pursuing the movement-image to its limits.1 Altered states of consciousness in early and classical cinema Deleuze’s arguments, which will later be dis- cussed more extensively, attempt to address the excep- tionality of Hitchcock’s movies in the context of classical narrative cinema. However, it is important to recognize that from its origins, cinema has continuously sought to make visible altered states of consciousness. If film theory immediately stressed the role of visual media in preserv- ing the memory of what is absent (thus “presentifying” it),2 another of the great obsessions of cinema has to do with “the aspiration to visualize what dwells in the human mind, to represent thought, to exteriorize what is internal”.3 As Dagrada acutely pointed out, this urge was not limited to cinema itself, but was rather a common feature in the vi- sual culture of the 18th and 19th centuries. Theatre, magic lantern shows and optical toys were just some of the most common examples of this interest shown in the visual ex- ternalization of mental states. Cinema, nevertheless, played a crucial role in this sense, given its specific ability to visu- alize reality. Long before the institutionalization of classical filmic syntax, early cinema developed a specific way of visualizing mental states. What is peculiar to this historical 1 G. Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986): 204. The use of Deleuzean concepts in film studies is an established trend and this paper follows this tradition addressing a perhaps slightly different problem. For a general understanding of this theoretical link, see: P. Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture. Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); P. Maratti, Gilles Deleuze. Cinema and Philosophy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008); D. Angelucci, Deleuze e i concetti del cinema (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2012); D. Martin-Jones, W. Brown eds., Deleuze and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 2 I am referring to the fundamental remarks by theoreticians such as A. Bazin, “The ontology of photographic image”, in Id., What is Cinema? Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 204): 9-16 and R. Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981): 96. Moreover, see the relevant passages in A. Boschi, Teorie del cinema. Il periodo classico 1915-1945 (Rome: Carocci, 1998). 3 E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot (Brussels: Peter Lang,2014): 193. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 39 AN-ICON  period is that those states were not presented as individual and abstract perceptions, but rather as phantasmagorical apparitions, as forms of visual attraction.4 Hallucinations, forms of altered perceptions,5 apparitions of demons and other creatures were extremely common in early cinema, to such an extent that it is often difficult to differentiate clearly between these various types of altered conscious- ness. Besides the different ways in which these images are visually presented in early cinema,6 what needs to be stressed here is the fact that these forms of alteration pos- sessed a “physical nature”, a “potential interchangeability with the real”.7 Consider for instance the case of Histoire d’un crime (Ferdinand Zecca, 1901). The film begins with the killing of a bank employee by a burglar and is built on the juxtaposition of self-contained tableaux, in accordance with the stylistic conventions of the time. When the burglar is arrested and taken to prison, we see him sleep; here, thanks to an explicitly theatrical solution, Zecca is able to visualize what is at the same time both a dream and a rec- ollection of key events of the character’s life. This form of mise en abyme, which has more or less the same function as thought balloons in comics,8 is typical of the period. It confirms that, while the linguistic status of these “altered images” was still unclear, early cinema already stressed the problematic and still to be analyzed relationship between the mental and the temporal dimension. 4 I use the term in the sense outlined in the influential study by T. Gunning, “The cinema of attractions: early film, its spectator and the avant-garde”, in W. Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006): 381-388. 5 Consider for example the hallucinatory drunkenness represented in Rêve à la lune (1905) or the nightmarish consequences of the main character’s dinner in Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906). 6 For an inventory of these techniques, see E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot: 197-210. 7 E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot: 198. Later on, the concept is further emphasized as follows: “The objective physical quality forcefully inscribed into the continuity between subjective oneiric space and waking space characterizes all forms of representation of dreams developed by early cinema. It is not surprising, then, that in this context […] mixing the objective and the subjective, oneiric representation simultaneously assumes both the material characteristics of a physical apparition and the supernatural characteristics of a clairvoyance, as if it constituted a magical way of communicating with somewhere else, a place that is just as real, but also supernatural”, ibid.: 205. Even if here the author speaks explicitly of dreams, her argument seems to be applicable to all the types of altered consciousness explored by early cinema. 8 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema (Venice: Marsilio, 2004): 93. If not otherwise stated, the translations of Italian texts are always the author’s. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 40 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Ferdinand Zecca, Histoire d’un crime, 1901 With the institutionalization of the film industry and its language, the various manifestations of the mental in early cinema were progressively neutralized and reduced to figures of altered temporality.9 The variety of mental states encountered in the cinema of attractions, and the different stylistic devices used to present them, were replaced by recurrent and recognizable linguistic elements which neu- tralized the subversive potential of mental images in a con- text in which a clear and coherent narrative was required.10 The case of A Letter to Three Wives (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949) is emblematic in this sense. The protagonists of this sentimental drama are three women who receive, from a fourth woman, a letter stating that one of their husbands has run away with her. Haunted by doubt, each of the three gives rise to a flashback in which she remembers a specific episode of her life. The second flashback, which has as its protagonist Rita (a radio writer married to a mod- est but proudly intellectual teacher), is highly instructive 9 I am specifically referring to the flashback as a form of visualization of the past. On the various types of flashback, see at least: Y. Mouren, Le flash-back (Armand Colin: Paris, 2005); F. Centola, Il flashback nel cinema. Il tempo riavvolto nell’eterno presente cinematografico (Novara: UTET, 2019). For a theoretical and historical introduction to the topic, M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (London-New York: Routledge, 2013). On the role of flashback in literary theory see the quintessential study by G. Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972). 10 It should be noted that, according to many theoreticians such as Balázs and Bluestone, the only temporality of narrative cinema is the present. On this topic, S. Ghislotti, Film Time. Le dimensioni temporali della visione (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, 2012): 54-63. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 41 AN-ICON  of the way in which classical cinema connects the men- tal and the temporal dimensions. Rita is laid on the grass, and while the camera delicately zooms in on her face, we hear her thoughts in voiceover (she obsessively repeats a couple of troubling questions: “Why couldn’t George go fishing? Why the blue suit?”). Then, a crossfade marks the beginning of the flashback, a sequence that tells the story of a highly problematic and unhappy marriage. The long flashback will then be visually presented according to the conventions of classical narrative cinema: a set of objective shots connected through the use of linear and transparent montage. Beyond Classicism: from Hitchcock to Resnais When confronted with the ways in which clas- sical cinema elaborated the theme of mental images – re- ducing them to forms of altered temporality – Hitchcock’s exceptionality becomes even more apparent. As already mentioned, Deleuze identifies the false flashback of Stage Fright as a crucial moment for overcoming the move- ment-image. Indeed, the falseness of this sequence radi- cally challenges the idea that memories can be objective- ly visualized, without the deforming effect always implicit in subjectivity. Even more problematically, in the final se- quence of Marnie (1964), Hitchcock shows the emergence (or rather re-mergence) of a traumatic mental image of the protagonist, which she experiences not just optically but in a much more radically bodily sense. Influenced by the circumstances and as if hunted by a younger version of herself, Marnie actually re-experiences the dramatic events of her childhood. While being presented to the spectator through objective shots, these images – marked moreover by a chromatic alteration – have a material consistency for Marnie and she finds herself re-immersed in a past that she has already lived through. The discussion on the ways in which cinema reflected on the tension between the mental and the temporal dimension has shown that, while GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 42 AN-ICON  in early cinema a variety of altered states of consciousness was represented as hallucinatory but “physical” realities, classical narrative cinema progressively institutionalized figures of temporality11 within canonic filmic syntax.12 The link between mental and temporal will become crucial in the context of so-called modern cinema,13 specifically because – according to Deleuze – in this cultural context cinema will finally be able to assign a central place to thought and its mechanisms: “the essence of cinema […] has thought as its higher purpose, nothing but thought and its functioning”.14 This process will be made possible by the emergence of the category of mental image, which will on the one hand reassume and re-signify other kinds of images (such as the action-image) and on the other hand unleash the “modern- ist potential” inscribed in the flashback.15 The mental image is for Deleuze something profoundly related to the issue of time, but in an ex- tremely complex and problematizing way which implies 11 More specifically, classical narrative cinema tried to visualize almost exclusively the past and it is probably no coincidence that Hitchcock was one of the few directors who tried to imagine an image in the future. I am referring here to the sequence of Sabotage (1936) in which the protagonist sees the water of a fish tank in the city aquarium dissolving and acting as a sort of screen on which is prefigured the brutal outcome of a bombing. It is worth noticing that in this case the future is considered as a time of pure possibility, because the imagined event will take place in a completely different way. 12 Deleuze insists on the rhetorical function of the flashback in a poignant passage of The Time-Image: “We know very well that the flashback is a conventional, extrinsic device: it is generally indicated by a dissolve-link, and the images that it introduces are often superimposed or meshed. It is like a sign with the words: ‘watch out! recollection’. It can, therefore, indicate, by convention, a causality which is psychological, but still analogous to a sensory-motor determinism, and, despite its circuits, only confirms the progression of a linear narration”. G. Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989): 48. 13 For a critical definition of this concept, see the still relevant remarks by G. de Vincenti, Il concetto di modernità nel cinema (Parma: Pratiche, 2000): 11-24. 14 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 168. 15 M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History: 189. On the same issue, Ghislotti points out: “While in the classical flashback the scenes became part of the coherent narrative of the movie, that is of a set of knowledges that helped the public to have a trustworthy idea of the story, in the case of modernist flashback this aspect falls short: the flashback often becomes the subjective vision of a fact, and is consequently a possible version of the events, but not the definitive one […]. At the end of the film, the public is unable to have an idea of the story free of doubt and is forced to choose between this or that version of it”. S. Ghislotti, Film Time. Le dimensioni temporali della visione: 130-131. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 43 AN-ICON  the coexistence of different temporalities.16 In modern cin- ema, the visualization of mental states is made possible by the collision of /clash of /conflict of different temporal- ities that not only coexist, but can merge to the point of becoming indistinguishable: The images have to be present and past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time. [...] The past does not follow the present that it is no longer, it coexists with the present it was.17 Take for instance a movie such as Mirror (An- drei Tarkovsky, 1975), in which the continuous oscillation between various states of consciousness (from memory to dream and beyond) would be inconceivable in the context of classical narrative cinema, especially when we consider that in the movie “there is a constant retroactive reverber- ation of almost every scene”.18 The memorial act of the protagonist Aleksej generates a flux of memory and visions that will involve not just his own life but also the life of his son and even collective and historical memory (both in an allusive form and through the insertion of historical visual documents).19 In this sense, Mirror seems to fully resonate with the Deleuzian idea of time as a topological construct, a field composed of peaks and sheets which continuously involve each other and are freely explorable. This idea be- comes even more explicit when we consider the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which both the association between 16 “There is no present which is not haunted by a past and a future, by a past which is not reducible to a former present, by a future which does not consist of a present to come. Simple succession affects the present which passes, but each present coexists with a past and a future without which it would not itself pass on. It is characteristic of cinema to seize this past and this future that coexist with the present image”. G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 37 (emphasis added). The use of the term “haunted” is specifically interesting here and seems to foreshadow the arguments of J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London-New York: Routledge, 1994). 17 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 79 (emphasis added). Also, on this point: S. Shaw, Film Consciousness. From Phenomenology to Deleuze (Jefferson-London: McFarland&Company, 2008): 147. 18 S. Shaw, Film Consciousness. From Phenomenology to Deleuze : 94. 19 T. Masoni, P. Vecchi, Andrei Tarkovskij (Milan: Il Castoro, 1997): 72-74. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 44 AN-ICON  mental and temporal,20 and the conflict between various temporalities are quintessential. In his movies, the temporal oscillations do not involve issues of narrative clarity – as in classical cinema – but are rather used to visualize con- tradictory mental states that are always on the verge of undecidability. As pointed out by Deleuze, it is pointless to discuss Resnais’ cinema dissociating the issue of time from that of mental states: It is not difficult to show that dreams and nightmares, fantasies, hypotheses and anticipations, all forms of the imaginary, are more important than flashbacks.21 It is possible to identify a trend in Resnais’ cin- ema which, from Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) to Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968) through Last Year in Marienbad (1961) and Muriel (1963), questions and problematizes the mental dimensions of perception and their link with temporality. Consider for instance the emblematic case of Last Year in Marienbad: the claim of the man to have met a woman the year before could have easily offered the chance for a chain of illustrative flashbacks. On the contrary, the baroque setting of the hotel in which the two characters meet trig- gers a series of obsessive repetitions, uncertain memories (whose are these memories? Are these facts real or just imagined?), while the continuous and uncanny immobility of the bodies generates “a space-time in which there is no before or after, past or present, here and elsewhere, real and imaginary”.22 The film is structured by the connection between ambiguous and confusing mental states, altered forms of experience that continuously merge with halluci- nation. Deleuze sums up the issue as follows, underlining 20 According to Ishaghpour, the great issue of Resnais’ cinema is to understand “the way the mind functions”. Y. Ishaghpour, D’une image à l’autre (Paris: Gonthier, 1981): 182; quoted in G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 121. Shortly after, Deleuze comes back to this argument, stressing that “Resnais is always saying that he is interested only in what happens in the brain, in cerebral mechanisms – monstrous, chaotic or creative mechanisms”, Ibid.: 125. 21 Ibid.: 122. 22 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema: 113-114. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 45 AN-ICON  once again the inextricable interweaving of times and per- ceptions offered by the movie: In Last Year in Marienbad it is X who knew A (so A does not re- member or is lying), and it is A who does not know X (so X is mis- taken or playing a trick on her). Ultimately, all the three characters correspond to three different presents, but in such a way as to complicate the inexplicable instead of throwing light on it; in such a way as to bring about its existence instead of suppressing it: when X lives in a present of past, A lives in a present of future, so that the difference exudes or assumes a present of present (the third, the husband), all implicated in each other.23 The hallucination of Isak Borg Even if Deleuze never discussed Ingmar Berg- man directly in the pages of The Time-Image, his cinema seems to benefit from the aforementioned theorizations, especially if compared with the new possibilities provided by virtual reality in terms of immersivity. Indeed, the pres- ence of altered mental states is recurrent in his movies, which continuously address the link between temporality and perception. Consider for instance the hallucinatory visions of Persona (1966) or the nightmares that haunt the painter Johan in Hour of the Wolf (1968). The explicitly me- ta-filmic opening of this movie,24 as a matter of fact, seems to suggest that for Bergman cinema is defined precisely by its specific ability to visualize altered states of conscious- ness. This idea becomes even more explicit (especially in connection with time) in Wild Strawberries (1957), in which Bergman sets out what is probably his most acute reflec- tion on the topic. As is well-known, the protagonist is the elderly bacteriologist Isak Borg, who is about to receive his doctorate. The night before the celebration he has a terrible nightmare and decides to travel to the event by car, together with his daughter-in-law Marianne. During the trip, 23 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 101. 24 While the initial credits are running, we see voices that we can unmistakably associate to a film set: “Quiet all! Rolling! Take! Camera… and begin!”. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 46 AN-ICON  Isak will experience a whole set of daydreams, hallucina- tions and visions which will shed a new light on his former way of life. At the end of the day, after the celebration of his career, something will be changed in him, and he will start to approach life with more joy and respect for those around him. Wild Strawberries is a movie that reflects on memory and on the possible link between various tempo- ralities and forms of perception; thus, the fact that it has almost no flashbacks is even more striking.25 None of the sequences in which Isak experiences some altered form of consciousness can be considered flashbacks, since Isak physically takes part in them with his old man’s body “al- most as if he was observing the world to finally understand it”. 26 This is true for the oneiric scene that opens the film but also for the quintessential sequence in which Isak – taking a break from the trip near the house where he used to spend the summer during his youth – has a strange and highly interesting experience. We see him sitting under a tree, watching in close-up the old and now abandoned house, while we hear his thoughts in voiceover: Perhaps I got a little sentimental [...]. I don’t know how it happened, but the day’s clear reality dissolved into the even clearer images of memory, which appeared before my eyes with the strength of a true stream of events.27 Then we see him in counter-shot and, through a crossfade, we see the old house regaining its former ap- pearance. With a subsequent series of rapid crossfades we take part in what at first sight may be considered a flashback. Here, we see his beloved cousin Sara picking strawberries for her uncle. However, we immediately understand that what we are experiencing is not a flashback, for at least two different reasons. First of all, Isak takes part in this particular 25 The only real flashback in the film is in fact not experienced by Isak Borg but by his daughter-in-law, who confesses to the old professor an argument that she had with her husband about the child she is expecting. 26 P. Baldelli, Cinema dell’ambiguità. Bergman e Antonioni (Rome: Samonà e Savelli, 1969): 95. 27 Emphasis added. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 47 AN-ICON  “presentification” of the past with his elderly body and is able to move in this hallucinatory experience with a certain degree of freedom; secondly, the events that Isak is seeing are not his memories, because it is immediately clear that (as a young man) he never saw what he is experiencing now (Sara and Sigfrid flirting). Fig. 2. Ingmar Bergman, Wild Strawberries, 1957 Albano rightly argued that we cannot concep- tualize this important sequence in terms of a flashback: We may speak of rêverie éveillée, of daydream or — in German — of Tagtraum, of conscious fantasy. A reverie that shares with a dream [...] the sense of living [...] what is being dreamt.28 Isak knows very well that he is experiencing an impossible past, because he addresses his young and beautiful cousin in an unmistakable way: “Sara, it’s your cousin Isak. Well, I’ve become quite old, of course, so I don’t look the same. But you, you haven’t changed at all”. 28 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema: 76. On this point, see also: R. Campari, Film della memoria. Mondi perduti, ricordati e sognati (Venice: Marsilio, 2005):16, 22-28. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 48 AN-ICON  In this passage, we are confronted with a con- figuration of temporalities that is far more complex of those addressed above: it is a sort of double temporality because the present of the old Isak overlaps with a past that is – moreover – nonfactual, but rather seeped in the percep- tions, regrets and hopes of the young Isak. This conflictual combination of temporalities seems to resonate perfectly with a crucial passage by Metz: Memory is in effect the only vision [...] that posits its object as simultaneously real and imaginary, that is, real in the past and imaginary in the present.29 What Isak sees really happened, but the way in which he experiences it is hallucinatory and gives the spectator no reassurance about the fact that it happened in that way. It is worth noticing here that Deleuze actually theorized this kind of situation, even without referring to Bergman: “the present is the actual image and its contem- poraneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror”.30 Finally, it seems important to notice that, de- spite his being immersed in an altered perception in which he can more or less freely move, Isak has no possibility of interacting with it. He “stands before the theatre of his life as a spectator-voyeur, terribly attracted, morbidly intrigued, but never seen, in complete isolation”.31 Both the dialogue between Isak and Sara and the subsequent scene in which he hears her confessions after the family lunch are highly instructive in this regard. It is symptomatic, in this respect, that this long sequence ends precisely when Sara moves to the garden to meet with the Isak of the past. The percep- tion of the old Isak grants him the possibility to experience a time that he never lived and probably only imagined but 29 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016): 96 (emphasis added). 30 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 79 (emphasis added). It is worth noticing that the situation that Deleuze imagines (the simultaneous presence of past and present within a mirror image) is explicitly visualized in Wild Strawberries, during a subsequent passage in which the old Isak sees himself reflected in a mirror held by a young Sara. 31 L. Albano, “Il posto delle fragole”, in A. Costa ed., Ingmar Bergman (Venice: Marsilio, 2009): 77. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 49 AN-ICON  he is at the same time confronted with an insurmountable limit: he is precluded from every contact and any chance of interaction with this time that is not his own. Only in his present will he be given the chance to undo his mistakes, thanks to the apparition of a sort of double of the beloved Sara. The specific way in which Bergman approaches the representation of altered mental states, working on the dialectic between absence and presence, nostalgia and desire, seems to have more than one similarity with the contemporary form of immersivity promoted by various technological desire. In this sense, a wider archaeological account of the issue of virtuality should be developed, in order to establish a more complex theoretical framework to address this kind of images. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 50 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/15442

The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered by Luca Acquarelli Still image vision strategy Photography Hallucination Antonioni Bergman Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered vision strategy by Luca Acquarelli Abstract The article intends to propose some analyses of a possible formal occurrence of “altered states” in cine- ma: the stopping of the flow of the cinematographic image in a still image. Through some theoretical references (Metz, Bazin, Lyotard, Deleuze, Bellour, Barthes, Montani) I will try to understand if this kind of formal occurrence can be constituted as a figure of the altered state. The relationship between cinema and photography will be particularly ex- plored, starting with films such as Antonioni’s Blow Up and Bergman’s Persona. The hallucinatory effect will thus be discovered not as opposed to that of reality, but a dialectic will be constructed between the two. Still image Photography Hallucination Antonioni Bergman To quote this essay: L. Acquarelli, “The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered vision strategy”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 51-68 LUCA ACQUARELLI 51 AN-ICON  Dream as “authentic” absurdity, photography as “true” hallucination Like hallucinations, dreams are not the far end of the reality scale but rather share some of its features. Metz has argued that dream sequences are always barely credible in narrative films precisely because films struggle to represent the “authentic absurdity” of dreams. Indeed, dreams seem to combine the reality effect with a halluci- natory patina that film dynamics find hard to hold togeth- er. The most traditional enunciative shifts introducing the passage between “reality”’s diegesis and that of dreams, such as unfocused borders or images in black and white as opposed to colour, are indeed ineffective expedients for the purposes of rendering this “authentic absurdity”, this double binary between the authenticating effect, like perhaps realist photography, and the game of the absurd, that injection of perceptual intensity that undermines the reality principle. Weaving a somewhat daring theoretical thread, this oxymoronic terminology does not seem to me to be very far removed from that used by one of realism’s most famous theorists – and therefore a very long way away from Metz – André Bazin who, speaking of the use of pho- tography as a privileged surrealist technique, conceives of photography’s potential for creating “a true hallucination”. While the realist photography ontology has been widely criticised, less space has been given to this hallucinatory residue of photography, which occurs even when it seems to adhere to a realist aesthetic. It should be stressed that the dream hypothe- sis introduced with Metz is at the heart of one of cinema’s theoretical paradigms. Without dwelling on all aspects of this dimension, it will be useful here to digress into the dream-cinema relationship before introducing certain anal- yses of this article’s central theme, namely the presence of the fixed, especially photographic, image within film, which immobilises its movement, as a possible instant of altered vi- sion. Metz has thoroughly enquired into the epistemological LUCA ACQUARELLI 52 AN-ICON  potential of the oneiric vision, through the Freudian prism. In Psychoanalysis and Cinema. The Imaginary Signifier,1 condensation, displacement and secondary elaboration are the main processes of the oneiric “signifier” explored by this French theorist as tools for the interpretation of cinematographic language. For Metz, the image’s “affinity” with the unconscious and its oneiric imagination increases its exposure to these processes as compared to language, without the latter being immune to them. Elements of film grammar such as superimposition and cross-fading – the former being closer to displacement, the latter to conden- sation – are key examples of this affinity. These elements testify to a survival of the primary process that, for instance, tends to abolish the discontinuity between objects. These are emergencies, aberrations within a product of secondary elaboration, such as the narrative development of a film or the attempt to narrate a dream upon awakening, the latter being forced, at least partially, to favour narrative logic at the expense of the ambiguous and nebulous dimension of the primary process. Entstellung, the oneiric deformation caused by the power of unconscious impulses, has thus also become a theoretical paradigm for thinking in images of a sort of energy that is not played out in forms and ac- cumulates in fragments and temporary disfiguration. Although Freud wrote that “dreams hallucinate”,2 the kinship between dreams and hallucinations is anything but close, starting from the fact that the former occurs in a sleeping state and the latter in waking state. Moments of transition between wakefulness and sleep are often the scene of phenomena testifying to the kinship between the form the two experiences take: so-called hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations. This is not the place to go into this matter in depth, but we might say that these two dimensions, dreams and hallucinations, may be the two areas where the fixed image in cinema, as viewed in this article, tends to position itself in dialectical movement. 1 C. Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema. The Imaginary Signifier (London: Palgrave, 1982). 2 S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010): 79. LUCA ACQUARELLI 53 AN-ICON  A few case studies will give us a clearer understanding of the type of visual alterations we are talking about. Stopping the cinematic flow: intermediality and a-cinema The hypothesis discussed in this article is de- signed to examine whether there are other cinematic strat- egies capable of expressing visual alterity as regards nar- rating the flow of cinematic images – an alterity whose intensity borders on the hallucinatory – and, in particular, the alterity that is generated by the use of photography in cinema as a standstill in movement. The film theorist Ray- mond Bellour has, on several occasions, taken an interest in the interruption of movement in cinema, when it is, in various ways, inhabited by the photography hantise. In one short essay, in particular, his aim is to promote an, as yet hypothetical, study, in Bellour’s own words, whose interest is the “traitement de l’immobile dans cet art du mouvement qu’est le cinema”.3 Here this film theorist analyses these moments of arrested movement as privileged instants of fragmented time within a cine- matic time conceived of as unitary: “des points de tran- scendance, avérés, reconduits à travers les ellipses, les décompositions, les immobilisations qui les traversent”.4 Bellour’s insistence on privileged movement is also a way of questioning the view that sees cinema as a system of reproduction of “whatever movement”, of the “equidistant instant” chosen to give the effect of continuity. In Bellour’s analysis, this change of rhythm is also linked to a change in film’s narrative dimension. Following and taking up his analysis, this article’s aim is to examine cases in which this immobility interrupting the flow of images is, in its various forms, bound up with a hallucinatory state, of a dreamlike or other nature. 3 R. Bellour, “L’interruption, l’instant”, in R. Bellour, L’Entre-Images: Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo (Paris: Mimésis, 2020): 131. 4 Ibid.: 133. LUCA ACQUARELLI 54 AN-ICON  A fixed camera on a long take where move- ment is reduced to a minimum can restore this effect of immobility rendered by the emergence of a virtually still image in a 24 frames-per-second flow. But in actual fact, as Deleuze explains so well with regard to Ozu’s still lifes, this is a completely different frame of mind: At the point where the cinematographic image most directly con- fronts the photo, it also becomes most radically distinct from it. Ozu’s still lifes endure, have a duration, over ten seconds of the vase: this duration of the vase is precisely the representation of that which endures, through the succession of changing states.5 However, when photography’s fixity interrupts the cinematic flow, what we are left with is an alternative configuration. As Roland Barthes pointed out in his famous Camera Lucida: The cinema participates in this domestication of photography — at least the fictional cinema, precisely the one said to be the seventh art; a film can be mad by artifice, can present the cultural signs of madness, it is never mad by nature (by iconic status); it is always the very opposite of an hallucination; it is simply an illusion; its vi- sion is oneiric, not ecmnesic.6 If this opposition between photography and cinema where hallucination is concerned may indeed seem too general, it seems to me that the French theorist sees a certain specificity in the still image in relation to the moving image. In fact, this thought seems to be echoed in Bar- thes’ article on obtuse meaning theorised from a few frames of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (I) (1944). Barthes realises that the starting point in his analysis is the frame which, although all film originates from it, cinema itself seems 5 G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson, R. Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1989): 17. 6 R. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. R. Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). LUCA ACQUARELLI 55 AN-ICON  to forget in the amnesia of its 24 images-per-second flow. Paradoxically, frames seem very different in nature from the film they are part of: the possibility to observe a film frame offers a totally different epistemology as compared to when it is lost in the flow of the movement of animation.7 In the 1970s, Jean-François Lyotard theorised “a-cinema”, namely a cinema which goes beyond the nar- rative discourse of diegesis and the normalised image that follows on from it. A-cinema is not intended to be a negation of cinema, but a dimension in which it is the power of the image which takes precedence over its form, giving rise to image “pyrotechnics”.8 This French philosopher refers to two ways of complying with the pyrotechnical require- ment: immobility and excess movement. He examines John Avildsen’s film Joe (1970), comparing the only two scenes featuring this arrhythmia and bound up with the film’s deep- er narrative, namely the impossibility of the father’s incest with his daughter: Ces deux effets, l’un d’immobilisation, l’autre d’excès de mobilité, sont donc obtenus en dérogation des règles de représentation, qui exigent que le mouvement réel, imprimé à 24 images/seconde sur la pellicule, soit restitué à la projection à la même vitesse.9 One of the examples of immobilisation described by Lyotard – this paralysis in the image that provokes the most intense agitation – is most effectively embodied by the tableau vivant, linking this dispositif to the libidinal energy dimension that lies at the heart of his broader theory of the 7 Barthes adds: “For a long time, I have been intrigued by the phenomenon of being interested and even fascinated by photos from a film (outside a cinema, in the pages of Cahiers du cinema) and of then losing everything of those photos (not just the captivation but the memory of the image) when once inside the viewing room – a change which can even result in a complete reversal of values”. R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana Press, 1997): 65-66. 8 Lyotard takes the idea from Adorno who claimed that the only great art is that of the artificers: “la pyrotechnie simulerait à la perfection la consomption stérile des énergies de la jouissance” and then talking about currents that could meet pyrotechnic needs: “Ces deux pôles sont l’immobilité et l’excès de mouvement. En se laissant attirer vers ces antipodes, le cinéma cesse insensiblement d’être une force de l’ordre ; il produit de vrais, c’est-à-dire vains, simulacres, des intensités jouissives, au lieu d’objets consommables-productifs”. J.-F. Lyotard, Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Galilée, 1994): 60. 9 Ibid.: 63. LUCA ACQUARELLI 56 AN-ICON  figural.10 Immobilisation, immobility, stopping on a fixed image within the movement of the film: these are all effects that come close to the study hypotheses discussed here. But another aspect can usefully be underlined. When cinema mediates another kind of image, re-mediation and intermediality is generally talked of. This theoretical dimension has been approached from various points of view: Montani’s book speaks of intermedial aesthetics as places of “authentication” process activation.11 The term “intermedial” is used here as a philosophical option sum- marised in the first pages of the book: it is only by starting from an active comparison between different tech- nical formats of the image (optical and digital, for example) and between its different discursive forms (fictional and documentary, for example), that one can do justice to the irreducible otherness of the real world and the testimony of facts, (media and non-media facts), happening in it.12 If doubt is clearly cast on the problem of inter- mediality by the hypothesis of this article, let us try to focus on the specific case of the still image alone, disregarding authentication but rather proposing it as a case of visual alteration. That is to say, authentication as the result of a montage between different media can – as we shall see in one of the cases of still image cinema shown below – be understood as visual alteration, in accordance with the topic dealt with in this journal issue. 10 For an interdisciplinary study of the figural dimension of image analysis, allow me a reference to the collective volume, L. Acquarelli, ed., Au prisme du figural: Le sens des images entre forme et force (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015). 11 The term “authentication” can be problematic because it resonates semantically with authenticity and, therefore, truth. Montani immediately disambiguated the term, distancing it from this risk of confusion: “Authenticating, from this point of view, is akin to ‘rerealizing’, rehabilitating the image to the relationship with its irreducible other, with its radical and elusive off-screen”. P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2010): 14. My translation. 12 Ibid.: 13. My translation. LUCA ACQUARELLI 57 AN-ICON  The shifting fixity of photography in cinema and its hallucinatory effect. From Blow Up to Persona In one of the films most frequently cited in text- books on the photography-cinema relationship, Michelan- gelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966), it is the dialectic between the photographic medium as authenticating evidence and hallucinatory instrument which plays centre stage. The use of photography as evidence is apparently the main theme, but it is precisely photographic enlargements aimed at visualis- ing the evidence that leads our vision towards hallucination rather than authentication. The first scene is set in an anonymous park in which the main character Thomas is taking photographs of what seems to be the prudishly amorous games of a couple in the middle of the lawn, with a paparazzo’s curiosity and almost for fun. The whole scene is played back to viewers in a sequence in which Thomas, now back in his flat, is hunting out detail in the prints from the negatives he has just devel- oped. The spectator plays the same investigative game as Thomas, scrutinising the black and white images of the scene seen shortly before in the diegetic reality of the film. At a certain point, Thomas ceases to act as the viewer’s delegate, and the frame is entirely taken up by the images (Fig. 1 and 2). Fig. 1. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 2. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. LUCA ACQUARELLI 58 AN-ICON  We leave behind the narrative time frame of the film and move into a space-time otherness in which sound reproduces the background noise of the leaves blowing in the wind. A memory? The authentication of a memory? Or rather a hallucination? This exiting from the film, a sequence made up of 15 shots, lasting just under a minute in total, establishes a further space-time dimension. The succes- sion of shots apparently follows a “detective” logic, but the leaving behind of diegetic time and the photographic tex- ture, in the sense of figurative density – profoundly different from the cinematographic texture preceding and following on from it – and the immobility of the figuration, confer a different iconic nature on this sequence. Not only does it shift viewers into a space and time otherness, but it also seems to position itself within the film as a sequence whose diverse legibility gradually contaminates the rest of the film’s shots, suspending its already weak narrative currents. The photo designed to “indicate” the corpse, in its exaggerated enlargement, resembles an abstract paint- ing (Fig. 3), showing nothing but its support and its texture and, moreover, the film urges us to compare it with the paintings of Thomas’s friend Bill, an abstract figurative painter (Fig. 4).13 Fig. 3. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 4. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. 13 In Fig. 4, the female character in a dialogue with Thomas explicitly says that the photograph looks to her like one of Bill’s paintings. LUCA ACQUARELLI 59 AN-ICON  In an earlier scene, Bill tries to describe his paintings as follows: They don’t mean anything when I do them. Just a mess. Afterwards I find something to hang on to. Like that...like that leg. Then it sorts itself out...and adds up. It’s like finding a clue in a detective story. The abstract picture prefigures the search for evidence in the photo. But what if the picture itself is ab- stract? Thomas looks for fresh evidence of the murder seen in the photographs, first returning alone to the site of the alleged crime and finding the body. When he tries to convince another friend of his to look for proof of the existence of the corpse, he is not believed. No one seems to care about the possible referent of the photograph, as if the photograph itself was pushing for a return to Lacanian reality within a society hypnotised by fashionable images which no one wants to face up to. When Thomas returns to the park for a second time to photograph the corpse up close, it has disappeared. Initially examined as reassuring ontological realism, the photograph is actually the place where memory and hallucination break through into the reality effect generated by cinematic movement. Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona (1966), which Bellour himself included in the above-mentioned article, is an interesting still image in cinema case study. It takes various forms, first occupying the whole screen, then as an image displayed as a photograph within a diegetic action, then as a photograph explored by the camera, and then as a still image juxtaposing close-ups of the two women. The film focuses virtually in its entirety on the re- lationship between a patient, Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann) suffering from voluntary aphasia, and a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson). This caring relationship becomes increasingly intimate once the two women go to the beachfront house the clinic’s therapist has advised Elisabeth to recuperate in. The central theme of the film becomes the double, in the Freudian sense, as the two women’s relationship gets gradually more psychologically complex. While on one LUCA ACQUARELLI 60 AN-ICON  hand Elisabeth’s silence forces Alma to confide the secrets of her life, Alma herself, after secretly reading a letter from Elisabeth to the therapist which she feels ridicules her, be- comes increasingly irritable and begins to despise Elisabeth for what she sees as her selfish and corrupt nature. At the same time Alma begins to feel guilty for having an abortion and to identify with Elisabeth who seems unable to love her child, having rejected it from birth. Ingmar Bergman builds the film on this progressive identification, in a crescendo that culminates in something close to a mirror image be- tween the two figures before they are juxtaposed into a sort of hybrid face. The dizzying nature of the double is triggered even before the two characters come on the scene when, in a prologue in a morgue, a child gets up and moves towards a close-up of a woman’s photograph to examine it with his hand. The facial features of the two women – who we later discover to be Elisabeth and Alma – in this seemingly fixed photographic close-up gradually become less sharp until a subtle transition occurs between them (Fig. 5 and 6). Fig. 5. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 6. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. LUCA ACQUARELLI 61 AN-ICON  Although it is the pre-prologue that “disrupts” the linear- ity of the whole film’s narrative (a tight montage of fig- ures juxtaposed in disparate ways, sometimes following a meta-cinematic theme), the changing portrait sequence is charged with such great power as to expand its reach into the rest of the narrative. The photograph of Elisabeth’s son (Fig. 7) is a further key element, a sort of narrative ac- celerator, snatched from Elisabeth herself and then kept by her to be reassembled in the scene where the logic of the double between the two women reaches its climax. Fig. 7. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. But it is a historical snapshot, an emblem of Nazi violence and its humiliation of its victims, the photo of the so-called “Warsaw child” representing the greatest perceptive cae- sura. In the year Persona was released, although knowl- edge of Nazi atrocities was still generally not widespread, the photo had already been used a decade earlier in Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard (1956) and was already em- blematic of the Holocaust, after it was used as a post- er for a first exhibition on Nazism’s calculated ferocity in Berlin Die Vergangenheit mahnt. The photo as a di- egetic object (Fig. 8) casually found by Elisabeth inside a book, and placed under a bedside lamp to make it easier to see, absorbs the entire frame accompanied by a stri- dent note in a crescendo of intensity lasting 30 seconds in which the different shots blot out the photo’s details (Fig. 9). LUCA ACQUARELLI 62 AN-ICON  Fig. 8. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 9. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. A historical document which was already a symbol of Nazi violence (but also its unrepresentability), then, breaks into the psychological story of Elisabeth and Alma, isolated from the world and the rest of humanity, with its docu- mentary but also anthropological load: the gestures and glances associated with humiliation, the executioners’ and victims’ faces and expressions standing out around the child’s frightened eyes and his condition as a totally de- fenceless victim. Whilst the rightness of this choice might be questioned, if this intermedial treatment of the archive can more or less “authenticate” the photo itself,14 there is no doubt whatsoever that this half-minute in which photo- graphic fixity takes over from cinematic movement triggers a perceptive reaction. Not only is the spectator suddenly projected into traumatic memory of Nazism, but the film’s photographic standstill triggers a sort of perceptive shock, a dissonance between the flow of diegetic reality and the condensation of the photographic gaze and its details. 14 See P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale. LUCA ACQUARELLI 63 AN-ICON  Another case of intermediality brings the historical docu- mentary archive into the two women’s seemingly discon- nected-from-the-world narrative: a televised news extract about the Buddhist monk who committed suicide by setting himself on fire during the Vietnamese dictatorship supported by the American government. In contrast to the photo, this TV montage showing the excruciating image of his self-im- molating body remains diegetic, in a first shot because it is framed by the television set and, in a second one, in which it takes up the whole frame, because the television commenta- tor’s voice-off preserves the continuity of the film’s temporal rhythm. The turmoil in this sequence, both Elisabeth’s who, in alternating montage, brings her hand to her mouth and cries out in fright, and the viewer’s, who may identify with her feelings, is part of the continuity of filmic perception. The arrest scene in the photo, on the other hand, seems to be charged with excessive otherness, challenging the film’s narrative and rhythmic structure. Moreover, the scene following the photograph of the Warsaw ghetto marks an acceleration in the ambi- guity between reality and hallucination in which Elisabeth’s husband visits and mistakes Alma for his wife. The film’s last prolonged fixedness (Fig. 10) does not take the form of a photographic support but retains the very nature of the film, suggesting a pho- tographic standstill, first prefigured by a juxtaposition of the two halves of the two women’s respective faces. The hallucinatory feel of the exchange of personalities is com- plete and could only take the form of a final and more exper- imental freeze-frame. Fig. 10. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. LUCA ACQUARELLI 64 AN-ICON  A cinema made of photographs, the cine-photo-romance La Jetée These two analyses would seem to support my hypothesis that the presence of a photograph in a film – especially when it extends to the entire frame, breaking the rhythm of the moving image – provokes a visual alterity that generates a reality-hallucination ambiguity. It is difficult to generalise this hypothesis because each film has its own complexity and internal structure but it may, in any case, be a valid element of comparison for future analyses. I will bring this article to a close with an analysis of a film that brings us back to the dream considerations I made at the beginning of the article. Although it resembles a film, La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962) is, as the director declares in the opening credits, a photo-novel.15 The film is, in fact, constructed around the montage of photographic images only, often juxtaposed by means of a cross-fade, creating overlaps. Dream and memory interpenetrate in reminiscence: a survivor of the Third World War is taken prisoner and subjected to exper- iments, using his vivid imagination, to open up time gaps with the past and then with the future, in order to obtain the technologies needed to reactivate an uninhabitable world replete with destruction and radioactivity. This apocalyp- tic environment is the background to a psychoanalytical dimension of traumatic time. The beginning of the film is clear in this sense; the voice over reads: “Ceci est l’histoire d’un homme marqué par une image d’enfance”; later it will be spoken of as a “scène qui le troubla par sa violence”. 15 It is curious that Barthes, who wrote his text on the photogram and obtuse sense in 1970 (already quoted extensively at the beginning of this article), does not mention this film, especially if we consider a note in his text referring directly to the photo-novel, on popular culture magazines: “Here are other ‘arts’ which combine still (or at least drawing) and story, diegesis – namely the photo-novel and the comic-strip. I am convinced that these ‘arts’, born in the lower depths of high culture, possess theoretical qualifications and present a new signifier (related to the obtuse meaning). This is acknowledged as regards the comic strip but I myself experience this slight trauma of signifiance faced with certain photo-novels: ‘their stupidity touches me’ (which could be a certain definition of obtuse meaning)”. R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text: 66. If we are dealing here with an entirely different kind of photo-novel (surely not touching for its stupidity!), it seems to me that Barthes’ reflections on obtuse sense could also apply to La Jétée. LUCA ACQUARELLI 65 AN-ICON  The gap between image and scene explains the problem of the difficult figuration of childhood memories. An image affecting a child, then probably forgotten and stored away in the unconscious then emerging once again in a dream, in the film’s narration, in a memory of the past heterodirected by the executioners’ experiments. The key to the heterogeneity of the traumatic time grafted onto the images is once again present in the words recited by the voice-off: Rien ne distinguent le souvenir des autres moments. Ce n’est que plus tard qui se font reconnaître, à leurs cicatrices. Ce visage [Fig. 11] qui devait être la seule image du temps de paix à traverser le temps de guerre. Il se demanda longtemps s’il l’avait vraiment vu ou s’il avait créé ce moment de douceur pour étayer le moment de folie qu’allait venir. Fig. 11. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film Memory becomes image only après-coup, re-signifying certain moments, reabsorbing them around images. The La Jétée images indeed seem to have this pa- tina of après-coup re-signification. The sharpness of their black and white with vivid contrasts is only opacified by cross-fade transitions. In any case, even in their transpar- ency, all the images seem to be inhabited by this traumat- ic time, somewhere between memory, dream and hallu- cination. A very brief moving sequence suddenly breaks LUCA ACQUARELLI 66 AN-ICON  into the montage of still images when, in the intimacy of her bed, the woman in the memory wakes up, opens her eyes and directs her gaze into the camera (Fig. 12). Fig. 12. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film It is a sudden enunciative change that seems designed to awaken us from the torpor induced by this story told through salient points, fixed images where the forces of the image in movement converge, as if absorbed, in an oneiric iconology that barely opens up a gap in traumatic time. This douceur scene, immersed in a distant child- hood memory in the context of the children taken onto the jetée at Orly airport to watch the planes take off, is none other than the image preceding the trauma: the child who, on the jetée, sees the murder of his adult self, having been followed through time by one of his executioners to kill him (Figg. 13 and 14). Fig. 13. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film Fig. 14. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film LUCA ACQUARELLI 67 AN-ICON  While it is clear that the La Jetée theme lends itself to a hallucination rhetoric, it seems to me that the decision to use still images may make this film an extreme case corroborating this article’s thesis. Conclusions This short paper suggests that the boundary be- tween the transparency of the reality effect and the opacity of hallucination is labile and porous. We have seen that cin- ema, which immobilises 24-frames-per-second movement in favour of the fixed image, is one of the artistic strategies that seem to bring in the complexity of this boundary and this dialectic. As we have seen, this hypothesis is difficult to generalise, but it seems to me that it deserves further study in the broader field of intermediality and its effects. The three case studies analysed here bring in some addi- tional elements, differentiating in particular cases in which photos are inserted into the film’s diegesis (in Blow Up in the various scenes in Thomas’s studio, in Persona with the photo of the child but also, in a certain way, with the large portraits of the two women) and when they replace the film’s diegesis itself. The latter seem to highlight the hallucinatory power of the still image in cinema with greater intensity. LUCA ACQUARELLI 68 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/15442

The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered by Luca Acquarelli Still image vision strategy Photography Hallucination Antonioni Bergman Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered vision strategy by Luca Acquarelli Abstract The article intends to propose some analyses of a possible formal occurrence of “altered states” in cine- ma: the stopping of the flow of the cinematographic image in a still image. Through some theoretical references (Metz, Bazin, Lyotard, Deleuze, Bellour, Barthes, Montani) I will try to understand if this kind of formal occurrence can be constituted as a figure of the altered state. The relationship between cinema and photography will be particularly ex- plored, starting with films such as Antonioni’s Blow Up and Bergman’s Persona. The hallucinatory effect will thus be discovered not as opposed to that of reality, but a dialectic will be constructed between the two. Still image Photography Hallucination Antonioni Bergman To quote this essay: L. Acquarelli, “The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered vision strategy”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 51-68 LUCA ACQUARELLI 51 AN-ICON  Dream as “authentic” absurdity, photography as “true” hallucination Like hallucinations, dreams are not the far end of the reality scale but rather share some of its features. Metz has argued that dream sequences are always barely credible in narrative films precisely because films struggle to represent the “authentic absurdity” of dreams. Indeed, dreams seem to combine the reality effect with a halluci- natory patina that film dynamics find hard to hold togeth- er. The most traditional enunciative shifts introducing the passage between “reality”’s diegesis and that of dreams, such as unfocused borders or images in black and white as opposed to colour, are indeed ineffective expedients for the purposes of rendering this “authentic absurdity”, this double binary between the authenticating effect, like perhaps realist photography, and the game of the absurd, that injection of perceptual intensity that undermines the reality principle. Weaving a somewhat daring theoretical thread, this oxymoronic terminology does not seem to me to be very far removed from that used by one of realism’s most famous theorists – and therefore a very long way away from Metz – André Bazin who, speaking of the use of pho- tography as a privileged surrealist technique, conceives of photography’s potential for creating “a true hallucination”. While the realist photography ontology has been widely criticised, less space has been given to this hallucinatory residue of photography, which occurs even when it seems to adhere to a realist aesthetic. It should be stressed that the dream hypothe- sis introduced with Metz is at the heart of one of cinema’s theoretical paradigms. Without dwelling on all aspects of this dimension, it will be useful here to digress into the dream-cinema relationship before introducing certain anal- yses of this article’s central theme, namely the presence of the fixed, especially photographic, image within film, which immobilises its movement, as a possible instant of altered vi- sion. Metz has thoroughly enquired into the epistemological LUCA ACQUARELLI 52 AN-ICON  potential of the oneiric vision, through the Freudian prism. In Psychoanalysis and Cinema. The Imaginary Signifier,1 condensation, displacement and secondary elaboration are the main processes of the oneiric “signifier” explored by this French theorist as tools for the interpretation of cinematographic language. For Metz, the image’s “affinity” with the unconscious and its oneiric imagination increases its exposure to these processes as compared to language, without the latter being immune to them. Elements of film grammar such as superimposition and cross-fading – the former being closer to displacement, the latter to conden- sation – are key examples of this affinity. These elements testify to a survival of the primary process that, for instance, tends to abolish the discontinuity between objects. These are emergencies, aberrations within a product of secondary elaboration, such as the narrative development of a film or the attempt to narrate a dream upon awakening, the latter being forced, at least partially, to favour narrative logic at the expense of the ambiguous and nebulous dimension of the primary process. Entstellung, the oneiric deformation caused by the power of unconscious impulses, has thus also become a theoretical paradigm for thinking in images of a sort of energy that is not played out in forms and ac- cumulates in fragments and temporary disfiguration. Although Freud wrote that “dreams hallucinate”,2 the kinship between dreams and hallucinations is anything but close, starting from the fact that the former occurs in a sleeping state and the latter in waking state. Moments of transition between wakefulness and sleep are often the scene of phenomena testifying to the kinship between the form the two experiences take: so-called hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations. This is not the place to go into this matter in depth, but we might say that these two dimensions, dreams and hallucinations, may be the two areas where the fixed image in cinema, as viewed in this article, tends to position itself in dialectical movement. 1 C. Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema. The Imaginary Signifier (London: Palgrave, 1982). 2 S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010): 79. LUCA ACQUARELLI 53 AN-ICON  A few case studies will give us a clearer understanding of the type of visual alterations we are talking about. Stopping the cinematic flow: intermediality and a-cinema The hypothesis discussed in this article is de- signed to examine whether there are other cinematic strat- egies capable of expressing visual alterity as regards nar- rating the flow of cinematic images – an alterity whose intensity borders on the hallucinatory – and, in particular, the alterity that is generated by the use of photography in cinema as a standstill in movement. The film theorist Ray- mond Bellour has, on several occasions, taken an interest in the interruption of movement in cinema, when it is, in various ways, inhabited by the photography hantise. In one short essay, in particular, his aim is to promote an, as yet hypothetical, study, in Bellour’s own words, whose interest is the “traitement de l’immobile dans cet art du mouvement qu’est le cinema”.3 Here this film theorist analyses these moments of arrested movement as privileged instants of fragmented time within a cine- matic time conceived of as unitary: “des points de tran- scendance, avérés, reconduits à travers les ellipses, les décompositions, les immobilisations qui les traversent”.4 Bellour’s insistence on privileged movement is also a way of questioning the view that sees cinema as a system of reproduction of “whatever movement”, of the “equidistant instant” chosen to give the effect of continuity. In Bellour’s analysis, this change of rhythm is also linked to a change in film’s narrative dimension. Following and taking up his analysis, this article’s aim is to examine cases in which this immobility interrupting the flow of images is, in its various forms, bound up with a hallucinatory state, of a dreamlike or other nature. 3 R. Bellour, “L’interruption, l’instant”, in R. Bellour, L’Entre-Images: Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo (Paris: Mimésis, 2020): 131. 4 Ibid.: 133. LUCA ACQUARELLI 54 AN-ICON  A fixed camera on a long take where move- ment is reduced to a minimum can restore this effect of immobility rendered by the emergence of a virtually still image in a 24 frames-per-second flow. But in actual fact, as Deleuze explains so well with regard to Ozu’s still lifes, this is a completely different frame of mind: At the point where the cinematographic image most directly con- fronts the photo, it also becomes most radically distinct from it. Ozu’s still lifes endure, have a duration, over ten seconds of the vase: this duration of the vase is precisely the representation of that which endures, through the succession of changing states.5 However, when photography’s fixity interrupts the cinematic flow, what we are left with is an alternative configuration. As Roland Barthes pointed out in his famous Camera Lucida: The cinema participates in this domestication of photography — at least the fictional cinema, precisely the one said to be the seventh art; a film can be mad by artifice, can present the cultural signs of madness, it is never mad by nature (by iconic status); it is always the very opposite of an hallucination; it is simply an illusion; its vi- sion is oneiric, not ecmnesic.6 If this opposition between photography and cinema where hallucination is concerned may indeed seem too general, it seems to me that the French theorist sees a certain specificity in the still image in relation to the moving image. In fact, this thought seems to be echoed in Bar- thes’ article on obtuse meaning theorised from a few frames of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (I) (1944). Barthes realises that the starting point in his analysis is the frame which, although all film originates from it, cinema itself seems 5 G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson, R. Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1989): 17. 6 R. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. R. Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). LUCA ACQUARELLI 55 AN-ICON  to forget in the amnesia of its 24 images-per-second flow. Paradoxically, frames seem very different in nature from the film they are part of: the possibility to observe a film frame offers a totally different epistemology as compared to when it is lost in the flow of the movement of animation.7 In the 1970s, Jean-François Lyotard theorised “a-cinema”, namely a cinema which goes beyond the nar- rative discourse of diegesis and the normalised image that follows on from it. A-cinema is not intended to be a negation of cinema, but a dimension in which it is the power of the image which takes precedence over its form, giving rise to image “pyrotechnics”.8 This French philosopher refers to two ways of complying with the pyrotechnical require- ment: immobility and excess movement. He examines John Avildsen’s film Joe (1970), comparing the only two scenes featuring this arrhythmia and bound up with the film’s deep- er narrative, namely the impossibility of the father’s incest with his daughter: Ces deux effets, l’un d’immobilisation, l’autre d’excès de mobilité, sont donc obtenus en dérogation des règles de représentation, qui exigent que le mouvement réel, imprimé à 24 images/seconde sur la pellicule, soit restitué à la projection à la même vitesse.9 One of the examples of immobilisation described by Lyotard – this paralysis in the image that provokes the most intense agitation – is most effectively embodied by the tableau vivant, linking this dispositif to the libidinal energy dimension that lies at the heart of his broader theory of the 7 Barthes adds: “For a long time, I have been intrigued by the phenomenon of being interested and even fascinated by photos from a film (outside a cinema, in the pages of Cahiers du cinema) and of then losing everything of those photos (not just the captivation but the memory of the image) when once inside the viewing room – a change which can even result in a complete reversal of values”. R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana Press, 1997): 65-66. 8 Lyotard takes the idea from Adorno who claimed that the only great art is that of the artificers: “la pyrotechnie simulerait à la perfection la consomption stérile des énergies de la jouissance” and then talking about currents that could meet pyrotechnic needs: “Ces deux pôles sont l’immobilité et l’excès de mouvement. En se laissant attirer vers ces antipodes, le cinéma cesse insensiblement d’être une force de l’ordre ; il produit de vrais, c’est-à-dire vains, simulacres, des intensités jouissives, au lieu d’objets consommables-productifs”. J.-F. Lyotard, Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Galilée, 1994): 60. 9 Ibid.: 63. LUCA ACQUARELLI 56 AN-ICON  figural.10 Immobilisation, immobility, stopping on a fixed image within the movement of the film: these are all effects that come close to the study hypotheses discussed here. But another aspect can usefully be underlined. When cinema mediates another kind of image, re-mediation and intermediality is generally talked of. This theoretical dimension has been approached from various points of view: Montani’s book speaks of intermedial aesthetics as places of “authentication” process activation.11 The term “intermedial” is used here as a philosophical option sum- marised in the first pages of the book: it is only by starting from an active comparison between different tech- nical formats of the image (optical and digital, for example) and between its different discursive forms (fictional and documentary, for example), that one can do justice to the irreducible otherness of the real world and the testimony of facts, (media and non-media facts), happening in it.12 If doubt is clearly cast on the problem of inter- mediality by the hypothesis of this article, let us try to focus on the specific case of the still image alone, disregarding authentication but rather proposing it as a case of visual alteration. That is to say, authentication as the result of a montage between different media can – as we shall see in one of the cases of still image cinema shown below – be understood as visual alteration, in accordance with the topic dealt with in this journal issue. 10 For an interdisciplinary study of the figural dimension of image analysis, allow me a reference to the collective volume, L. Acquarelli, ed., Au prisme du figural: Le sens des images entre forme et force (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015). 11 The term “authentication” can be problematic because it resonates semantically with authenticity and, therefore, truth. Montani immediately disambiguated the term, distancing it from this risk of confusion: “Authenticating, from this point of view, is akin to ‘rerealizing’, rehabilitating the image to the relationship with its irreducible other, with its radical and elusive off-screen”. P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2010): 14. My translation. 12 Ibid.: 13. My translation. LUCA ACQUARELLI 57 AN-ICON  The shifting fixity of photography in cinema and its hallucinatory effect. From Blow Up to Persona In one of the films most frequently cited in text- books on the photography-cinema relationship, Michelan- gelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966), it is the dialectic between the photographic medium as authenticating evidence and hallucinatory instrument which plays centre stage. The use of photography as evidence is apparently the main theme, but it is precisely photographic enlargements aimed at visualis- ing the evidence that leads our vision towards hallucination rather than authentication. The first scene is set in an anonymous park in which the main character Thomas is taking photographs of what seems to be the prudishly amorous games of a couple in the middle of the lawn, with a paparazzo’s curiosity and almost for fun. The whole scene is played back to viewers in a sequence in which Thomas, now back in his flat, is hunting out detail in the prints from the negatives he has just devel- oped. The spectator plays the same investigative game as Thomas, scrutinising the black and white images of the scene seen shortly before in the diegetic reality of the film. At a certain point, Thomas ceases to act as the viewer’s delegate, and the frame is entirely taken up by the images (Fig. 1 and 2). Fig. 1. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 2. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. LUCA ACQUARELLI 58 AN-ICON  We leave behind the narrative time frame of the film and move into a space-time otherness in which sound reproduces the background noise of the leaves blowing in the wind. A memory? The authentication of a memory? Or rather a hallucination? This exiting from the film, a sequence made up of 15 shots, lasting just under a minute in total, establishes a further space-time dimension. The succes- sion of shots apparently follows a “detective” logic, but the leaving behind of diegetic time and the photographic tex- ture, in the sense of figurative density – profoundly different from the cinematographic texture preceding and following on from it – and the immobility of the figuration, confer a different iconic nature on this sequence. Not only does it shift viewers into a space and time otherness, but it also seems to position itself within the film as a sequence whose diverse legibility gradually contaminates the rest of the film’s shots, suspending its already weak narrative currents. The photo designed to “indicate” the corpse, in its exaggerated enlargement, resembles an abstract paint- ing (Fig. 3), showing nothing but its support and its texture and, moreover, the film urges us to compare it with the paintings of Thomas’s friend Bill, an abstract figurative painter (Fig. 4).13 Fig. 3. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 4. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. 13 In Fig. 4, the female character in a dialogue with Thomas explicitly says that the photograph looks to her like one of Bill’s paintings. LUCA ACQUARELLI 59 AN-ICON  In an earlier scene, Bill tries to describe his paintings as follows: They don’t mean anything when I do them. Just a mess. Afterwards I find something to hang on to. Like that...like that leg. Then it sorts itself out...and adds up. It’s like finding a clue in a detective story. The abstract picture prefigures the search for evidence in the photo. But what if the picture itself is ab- stract? Thomas looks for fresh evidence of the murder seen in the photographs, first returning alone to the site of the alleged crime and finding the body. When he tries to convince another friend of his to look for proof of the existence of the corpse, he is not believed. No one seems to care about the possible referent of the photograph, as if the photograph itself was pushing for a return to Lacanian reality within a society hypnotised by fashionable images which no one wants to face up to. When Thomas returns to the park for a second time to photograph the corpse up close, it has disappeared. Initially examined as reassuring ontological realism, the photograph is actually the place where memory and hallucination break through into the reality effect generated by cinematic movement. Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona (1966), which Bellour himself included in the above-mentioned article, is an interesting still image in cinema case study. It takes various forms, first occupying the whole screen, then as an image displayed as a photograph within a diegetic action, then as a photograph explored by the camera, and then as a still image juxtaposing close-ups of the two women. The film focuses virtually in its entirety on the re- lationship between a patient, Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann) suffering from voluntary aphasia, and a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson). This caring relationship becomes increasingly intimate once the two women go to the beachfront house the clinic’s therapist has advised Elisabeth to recuperate in. The central theme of the film becomes the double, in the Freudian sense, as the two women’s relationship gets gradually more psychologically complex. While on one LUCA ACQUARELLI 60 AN-ICON  hand Elisabeth’s silence forces Alma to confide the secrets of her life, Alma herself, after secretly reading a letter from Elisabeth to the therapist which she feels ridicules her, be- comes increasingly irritable and begins to despise Elisabeth for what she sees as her selfish and corrupt nature. At the same time Alma begins to feel guilty for having an abortion and to identify with Elisabeth who seems unable to love her child, having rejected it from birth. Ingmar Bergman builds the film on this progressive identification, in a crescendo that culminates in something close to a mirror image be- tween the two figures before they are juxtaposed into a sort of hybrid face. The dizzying nature of the double is triggered even before the two characters come on the scene when, in a prologue in a morgue, a child gets up and moves towards a close-up of a woman’s photograph to examine it with his hand. The facial features of the two women – who we later discover to be Elisabeth and Alma – in this seemingly fixed photographic close-up gradually become less sharp until a subtle transition occurs between them (Fig. 5 and 6). Fig. 5. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 6. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. LUCA ACQUARELLI 61 AN-ICON  Although it is the pre-prologue that “disrupts” the linear- ity of the whole film’s narrative (a tight montage of fig- ures juxtaposed in disparate ways, sometimes following a meta-cinematic theme), the changing portrait sequence is charged with such great power as to expand its reach into the rest of the narrative. The photograph of Elisabeth’s son (Fig. 7) is a further key element, a sort of narrative ac- celerator, snatched from Elisabeth herself and then kept by her to be reassembled in the scene where the logic of the double between the two women reaches its climax. Fig. 7. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. But it is a historical snapshot, an emblem of Nazi violence and its humiliation of its victims, the photo of the so-called “Warsaw child” representing the greatest perceptive cae- sura. In the year Persona was released, although knowl- edge of Nazi atrocities was still generally not widespread, the photo had already been used a decade earlier in Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard (1956) and was already em- blematic of the Holocaust, after it was used as a post- er for a first exhibition on Nazism’s calculated ferocity in Berlin Die Vergangenheit mahnt. The photo as a di- egetic object (Fig. 8) casually found by Elisabeth inside a book, and placed under a bedside lamp to make it easier to see, absorbs the entire frame accompanied by a stri- dent note in a crescendo of intensity lasting 30 seconds in which the different shots blot out the photo’s details (Fig. 9). LUCA ACQUARELLI 62 AN-ICON  Fig. 8. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 9. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. A historical document which was already a symbol of Nazi violence (but also its unrepresentability), then, breaks into the psychological story of Elisabeth and Alma, isolated from the world and the rest of humanity, with its docu- mentary but also anthropological load: the gestures and glances associated with humiliation, the executioners’ and victims’ faces and expressions standing out around the child’s frightened eyes and his condition as a totally de- fenceless victim. Whilst the rightness of this choice might be questioned, if this intermedial treatment of the archive can more or less “authenticate” the photo itself,14 there is no doubt whatsoever that this half-minute in which photo- graphic fixity takes over from cinematic movement triggers a perceptive reaction. Not only is the spectator suddenly projected into traumatic memory of Nazism, but the film’s photographic standstill triggers a sort of perceptive shock, a dissonance between the flow of diegetic reality and the condensation of the photographic gaze and its details. 14 See P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale. LUCA ACQUARELLI 63 AN-ICON  Another case of intermediality brings the historical docu- mentary archive into the two women’s seemingly discon- nected-from-the-world narrative: a televised news extract about the Buddhist monk who committed suicide by setting himself on fire during the Vietnamese dictatorship supported by the American government. In contrast to the photo, this TV montage showing the excruciating image of his self-im- molating body remains diegetic, in a first shot because it is framed by the television set and, in a second one, in which it takes up the whole frame, because the television commenta- tor’s voice-off preserves the continuity of the film’s temporal rhythm. The turmoil in this sequence, both Elisabeth’s who, in alternating montage, brings her hand to her mouth and cries out in fright, and the viewer’s, who may identify with her feelings, is part of the continuity of filmic perception. The arrest scene in the photo, on the other hand, seems to be charged with excessive otherness, challenging the film’s narrative and rhythmic structure. Moreover, the scene following the photograph of the Warsaw ghetto marks an acceleration in the ambi- guity between reality and hallucination in which Elisabeth’s husband visits and mistakes Alma for his wife. The film’s last prolonged fixedness (Fig. 10) does not take the form of a photographic support but retains the very nature of the film, suggesting a pho- tographic standstill, first prefigured by a juxtaposition of the two halves of the two women’s respective faces. The hallucinatory feel of the exchange of personalities is com- plete and could only take the form of a final and more exper- imental freeze-frame. Fig. 10. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. LUCA ACQUARELLI 64 AN-ICON  A cinema made of photographs, the cine-photo-romance La Jetée These two analyses would seem to support my hypothesis that the presence of a photograph in a film – especially when it extends to the entire frame, breaking the rhythm of the moving image – provokes a visual alterity that generates a reality-hallucination ambiguity. It is difficult to generalise this hypothesis because each film has its own complexity and internal structure but it may, in any case, be a valid element of comparison for future analyses. I will bring this article to a close with an analysis of a film that brings us back to the dream considerations I made at the beginning of the article. Although it resembles a film, La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962) is, as the director declares in the opening credits, a photo-novel.15 The film is, in fact, constructed around the montage of photographic images only, often juxtaposed by means of a cross-fade, creating overlaps. Dream and memory interpenetrate in reminiscence: a survivor of the Third World War is taken prisoner and subjected to exper- iments, using his vivid imagination, to open up time gaps with the past and then with the future, in order to obtain the technologies needed to reactivate an uninhabitable world replete with destruction and radioactivity. This apocalyp- tic environment is the background to a psychoanalytical dimension of traumatic time. The beginning of the film is clear in this sense; the voice over reads: “Ceci est l’histoire d’un homme marqué par une image d’enfance”; later it will be spoken of as a “scène qui le troubla par sa violence”. 15 It is curious that Barthes, who wrote his text on the photogram and obtuse sense in 1970 (already quoted extensively at the beginning of this article), does not mention this film, especially if we consider a note in his text referring directly to the photo-novel, on popular culture magazines: “Here are other ‘arts’ which combine still (or at least drawing) and story, diegesis – namely the photo-novel and the comic-strip. I am convinced that these ‘arts’, born in the lower depths of high culture, possess theoretical qualifications and present a new signifier (related to the obtuse meaning). This is acknowledged as regards the comic strip but I myself experience this slight trauma of signifiance faced with certain photo-novels: ‘their stupidity touches me’ (which could be a certain definition of obtuse meaning)”. R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text: 66. If we are dealing here with an entirely different kind of photo-novel (surely not touching for its stupidity!), it seems to me that Barthes’ reflections on obtuse sense could also apply to La Jétée. LUCA ACQUARELLI 65 AN-ICON  The gap between image and scene explains the problem of the difficult figuration of childhood memories. An image affecting a child, then probably forgotten and stored away in the unconscious then emerging once again in a dream, in the film’s narration, in a memory of the past heterodirected by the executioners’ experiments. The key to the heterogeneity of the traumatic time grafted onto the images is once again present in the words recited by the voice-off: Rien ne distinguent le souvenir des autres moments. Ce n’est que plus tard qui se font reconnaître, à leurs cicatrices. Ce visage [Fig. 11] qui devait être la seule image du temps de paix à traverser le temps de guerre. Il se demanda longtemps s’il l’avait vraiment vu ou s’il avait créé ce moment de douceur pour étayer le moment de folie qu’allait venir. Fig. 11. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film Memory becomes image only après-coup, re-signifying certain moments, reabsorbing them around images. The La Jétée images indeed seem to have this pa- tina of après-coup re-signification. The sharpness of their black and white with vivid contrasts is only opacified by cross-fade transitions. In any case, even in their transpar- ency, all the images seem to be inhabited by this traumat- ic time, somewhere between memory, dream and hallu- cination. A very brief moving sequence suddenly breaks LUCA ACQUARELLI 66 AN-ICON  into the montage of still images when, in the intimacy of her bed, the woman in the memory wakes up, opens her eyes and directs her gaze into the camera (Fig. 12). Fig. 12. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film It is a sudden enunciative change that seems designed to awaken us from the torpor induced by this story told through salient points, fixed images where the forces of the image in movement converge, as if absorbed, in an oneiric iconology that barely opens up a gap in traumatic time. This douceur scene, immersed in a distant child- hood memory in the context of the children taken onto the jetée at Orly airport to watch the planes take off, is none other than the image preceding the trauma: the child who, on the jetée, sees the murder of his adult self, having been followed through time by one of his executioners to kill him (Figg. 13 and 14). Fig. 13. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film Fig. 14. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film LUCA ACQUARELLI 67 AN-ICON  While it is clear that the La Jetée theme lends itself to a hallucination rhetoric, it seems to me that the decision to use still images may make this film an extreme case corroborating this article’s thesis. Conclusions This short paper suggests that the boundary be- tween the transparency of the reality effect and the opacity of hallucination is labile and porous. We have seen that cin- ema, which immobilises 24-frames-per-second movement in favour of the fixed image, is one of the artistic strategies that seem to bring in the complexity of this boundary and this dialectic. As we have seen, this hypothesis is difficult to generalise, but it seems to me that it deserves further study in the broader field of intermediality and its effects. The three case studies analysed here bring in some addi- tional elements, differentiating in particular cases in which photos are inserted into the film’s diegesis (in Blow Up in the various scenes in Thomas’s studio, in Persona with the photo of the child but also, in a certain way, with the large portraits of the two women) and when they replace the film’s diegesis itself. The latter seem to highlight the hallucinatory power of the still image in cinema with greater intensity. LUCA ACQUARELLI 68 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/15158

Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual Filmreality by Enrico Terrone Virtual Reality Perception Memory Imagination Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual reality by Enrico Terrone Abstract This paper casts film experience as a sort of disembodied perception. I will show how this experience can be manipulated and altered in order to approximate to mental states of fictional characters, in particular embodied perception, memory and imagination. I will acknowledge that film experience can approximate to non-perceptual at- titudes such as memory and imagination much better than the experience elicited by theater. Yet, I will contend, film experience cannot emulate the phenomenology of non-per- ceptual attitudes since it remains a sort of disembodied perception even when it is manipulated by filmmakers in order to approximate memory states or imaginative states of fictional characters. Finally, I will argue that virtual real- ity, in virtue of both its proximity to embodied perception and its potential for manipulation, is, in principle, in a bet- ter position than film when it comes to trying to emulate non-perceptual attitudes such as memory and imagination. Film Virtual Reality Perception Memory Imagination To quote this essay: E. Terrone, “Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual reality”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 69-90 ENRICO TERRONE 69 AN-ICON  Cloe sees a black cat, Jack remembers a black cat, Lisa imagines a black cat. According to representa- tionalist conceptions of the mind,1 Cloe’s, Jack’s and Li- sa’s mental states have the same representational content, namely a black cat, and yet they differ as regards their attitude, that is, the way that content is represented. Per- ceiving a black cat, remembering a black cat and imagin- ing a black cat are three different experiences in virtue of three different attitudes. Specifically, according to Uriah Kriegel’s “Sartrean account”,2 the perceptual attitude rep- resents-as-present its content, the memory attitude rep- resents-as-past its content, and the imaginative attitude represents-as-possible its content. All this raises an interesting issue about film experience. On the one hand, according to experiential theories of depiction,3 films provide us with experiences whose “pictorial attitude” somehow emulates the perceptual attitude. On the other hand, scholars such as Hugo Mün- sterberg or Erwin Panofsky have stated that films allow us to share not only the perceptual point of view of fictional characters but also their inner life, which involves states such as memory or imagination.4 These two statements are in tension: if the pictorial attitude which characterizes film experience is a sort of perceptual attitude, how can film spectators enjoy experiences based on memory attitudes or imaginative attitudes? I will argue that the spectator cannot enjoy the latter experiences. The spectator can only ascribe such experiences to characters by relying on the perceptual experience she is enjoying. Finally, I will argue that, quite 1 T. Crane, “The intentional structure of consciousness”, in A. Jokic, Q. Smith, eds., Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 33- 56; D. Chalmers. “The representational character of experience”, in B. Leiter, ed., The Future for Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 153-180. 2 U. Kriegel, “Perception and imagination. A Sartrean account”, in S. Miguens, G. Preyer, C. Bravo Morando, eds., Prereflective Consciousness: Early Sartre in the Context of Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (London: Routledge, 2015): 257-288. 3 R. Hopkins, “Depiction”, in P. Livingston, C. Plantinga, eds., The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (London: Routledge, 2009): 64-74. 4 H. Münsterberg, The Photoplay: a Psychological Study (New York: Appleton, 1916); E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures” (1934), in D. Talbot, ed., Film: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959): 15-32. ENRICO TERRONE 70 AN-ICON  surprisingly, virtual reality is in a better position than film as regards the emulation of non-perceptual attitudes. Film experience as disembodied perception Film experience is a perceptual experience. The audience perceives objects and events taking place in the world that the film portrays. The Lumière Brothers Sortie des Usines Lumière (1895) is paradigmatic in this respect: the audience sees workers leaving the factory in a way that is analogous to the way one would see those workers if one were in front the factory. Analogous, however, does not mean identical. While in ordinary perception we experience things as organized in an “egocentric space”, that is, a space that has our body as its own center,5 in cinematic perception we experience things as organized in a space that has only our sight, not our body, as its own center. The space depicted is experienced as “detached” from our body.6 The spectator of Sortie des Usines Lumière sees workers exiting the factory from a standpoint in front of the factory, but she does not occupy that standpoint and she does not have the impression of occupying it. Even spectators of the Lumière Brothers L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) normally do not have the impres- sion of occupying the standpoint in front of the train, in spite of the popular fable that suggests otherwise.7 Film experience, so understood, is a disembod- ied perception. We can perceive things from a viewpoint that our body is not forced to occupy. It is worth noting that by “disembodied perception” here is just meant the percep- tion of a space in which our body does not have any place. Hence, film experience is disembodied only with respect to the experienced relationship between the spectator and 5 G. Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 6 N. Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 7 M. Loiperdinger, “Lumière’s arrival of the train. Cinema’s founding myth”, The Moving Image 4, no. 1 (2004): 89-118. ENRICO TERRONE 71 AN-ICON  the space portrayed. The spectator’s body, however, keeps playing a crucial role in the whole film experience which, as a twofold experience, also includes the spectator’s re- lationship to the space in which the film is screened.8 Even a paradigmatic essay on the embodied character of film experience, namely Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992), acknowledges that the perspective of the spectator as an embodied subject is different from the perspective on the world depicted that the film provides us with. Yet, Sob- chack states that film experience is embodied all the way through because there is a further body at work, namely, the film’s body: We recognize the moving picture as the work of an anonymous and sign-producing body subject intentionally marking visible choices with the very behavior of its bodily being. However, these choices are not initiated by the movement of our bodies or our intending consciousness. They are seen and visible as the visual and phys- ical choices of some body other than ourselves [...]. That some body is the film’s body.9 What does it exactly mean that the film has a body? This seems to be a suggestive metaphor that should be unpacked for rigorous theorizing. Sobchack offers the following characterization of the film’s body: “The cam- era its perceptive organ, the projector its expressive organ, the screen its discrete and material occupation of worldly space”.10 If the film’s body is just that, it comes down to a suggestive characterization of the film’s screening. Still Sobchack also insists on the “choices” that the alleged film’s body makes thereby determining our point of view on the space portrayed. Precisely because that point of view does not depend on the position and the movement of our 8 R. Hopkins, “Depiction”. See also E. Terrone, “Imagination and perception in film experience”, Ergo, no. 5 (2020): 161-190. 9 V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 278. Thanks to a referee for pushing me to discuss Sobchack’s view. 10 Ibid.: 299. ENRICO TERRONE 72 AN-ICON  body, I find it worthwhile to cast the experience it provides as disembodied. While ordinary perception, as an embodied experience, depends on the position and movement of our body, film experience is disembodied since it depends on choices that are not up to us. Whom are those choices up to? To the filmmaker for sure, and yet scholars like George Wilson argue that, in our engagement with fiction films, we rather experience those choices as the outcome of the “min- imal narrating agency” of a fictional narrator.11 Perhaps what Sobchack calls the film’s body may be an interesting char- acterization of how we experience the actual agency of the filmmaker or, if Wilson is right, the fictional agency of the narrator. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the film’s body is not the spectator’s body and I reckon that this is enough to warrant the characterization of film experience as disem- bodied perception. Such a disembodied nature of film experience has an interesting consequence. Since film experience, as disembodied perception, involves a point of view that does not depend on our body, that point of view can change without the need of moving our body. Neither Sortie des Usines Lumière nor L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ci- otat exploit this option, but later films do so by means of camera movements and editing. The specificity of film experience In ordinary perception we experience things as taking place in a determinate place and time, namely, here, the place where our body is, and now, the time when our experience occurs. In cinematic perception, on the other hand, place and time remain indeterminate. Our perception, as such, does not tell us where and when the things per- ceived take place. Cinematic perception needs a cognitive supplementation in order to fix the spatial and temporal coordinates of what one is perceiving. Films can provide 11 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 129. ENRICO TERRONE 73 AN-ICON  such supplementation either explicitly, by means of devices such as voice over and inscriptions, or implicitly, by relying on clues embedded in the scenes portrayed. Furthermore, film perception is not up to us in the way ordinary perception is. In the latter, I can decide, at least to a certain extent, what I am going to perceive. In film experience, instead, I am completely deprived of au- tonomy. In other words, film experience is predetermined in a way ordinary experience is not. One might say that ordinary perception is a natural experience whereas cine- matic perception is rather an artificial experience whereby we perceive what filmmakers (or narrators) have established for us. In the specific case of fiction films, filmmakers (or narrators) guide us in the perceptual exploration of fictional worlds. That is arguably the most insightful way of unpack- ing Sobchack’s metaphor of the film’s body. Let me consider, as an example, David W. Grif- fith’s An Unseen Enemy (1912), which tells the story of two orphan sisters whose heritage is threatened by a treach- erous housekeeper and her accomplice. We discover this story through a series of disembodied perceptual expe- riences of the same kind as those elicited by Sortie des Usines Lumière and L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat. We see the two orphans, then the housekeeper, then the elder brother of the two girls who places the heritage in the safe, then the housekeeper who spies him, and so on and so forth. The filmmaker has designed this series of percep- tions in a way that provides us with a sort of “unrestricted epistemic access” to the relevant facts of the story.12 Unlike the two orphans, we are aware from the beginning of the threat coming from the housekeeper. Moreover, unlike the housekeeper, we are aware of the brother’s attempt to help his sisters and prevent theft. In sum, the spectator of An Unseen Enemy perceives more, and therefore knows more, than the characters in the story; the “enemy” is “unseen” only for the characters, not for the audience. 12 G.M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). ENRICO TERRONE 74 AN-ICON  This is the basic functioning of fiction films, which corresponds to the omniscient narrator in literature. However, other configurations are possible in which the audience’s knowledge of relevant facts is “restricted” to that available to characters or is even narrower than the latter.13 For example, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1948) the audience’s knowledge is as restricted as that of the character L.B. Jef- feries (with one important exception, however: we see the murderer leaving his apartment with his lover while Jefferies is sleeping). In Pablo Larrain’s Ema (2019), the audience’s knowledge is even narrower than that of the eponymous heroine; the latter has access from the beginning to the truth about the new adoptive parents of her son whereas the audience will discover this truth only at the end of the film. A further restriction that affects film experience concerns the mode of this experience, which is just dis- embodied perception. In ordinary experience, on the other hand, one can enjoy a variety of experiential attitudes: em- bodied perception, first of all, but also memory and imag- ination, and possibly perceptual illusion, hallucination and dream. Here is another sense in which the audience can find it hard to know what characters know. What is at stake here is phenomenal knowledge, that is, knowing what it is like for a subject to undergo a certain experience. For sure, empathy may enable the audience to acquire phenomenal knowledge concerning the affective and emotional dimension of a fictional character’s expe- rience.14 For instance, the audience can share the char- acter’s fear or the character’s surprise. Yet, affects and emotions are evaluative mental states that are grafted onto more basic cognitive states such as perceptions, memo- ries, and imaginings,15 whose distinctive attitude is sure- ly harder to access through empathy. The audience may deploy empathy to know what it is like to for a character to feel fear or joy but something more is required to grasp 13 Ibid. 14 J. Stadler, “Empathy and film”, in H.L. Maibom, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (London: Routledge, 2016): 317-326. Thanks to a referee for leading me to consider the role of empathy. 15 K. Mulligan, “From appropriate emotions to values”, The Monist 81, no. 1 (1998): 161-188. ENRICO TERRONE 75 AN-ICON  the phenomenal difference between an embodied percep- tual experience and a memory episode or an imagining. Filmmakers are thus challenged to design disembodied perceptual experiences that can approximate to the ba- sic cognitive experiences enjoyed by characters, thereby leading the audience to grasp what is going on in the char- acters’ minds. This is arguably one of the most fascinating challenges that cinema has addressed along its history. Approximating to embodied perception Although film experience and ordinary percep- tion are both perceptual experiences, they differ inasmuch the latter is embodied in a way the former is not. That is why, in ordinary experience, we can move towards the things we perceive and possibly touch them, but we cannot do so in film experience. The usual way in which filmmakers lead the audience to share the embodied perceptual experience of a character consists in providing the audience with a standpoint that corresponds to that of the character. This mode of representation, which is usually called “subjective shot”, enables us to share the visual perspective of the character in spite of the fact that our body does not occupy the corresponding standpoint, which is instead occupied by the character’s body. As Kendall Walton puts it, Following a shot of a character looking out a window, there is a shot of a scene outside. Watching the second shot, we imagine observing the scene, and we judge that the character looking out the window has an experience “like this”, like the one we imagine enjoying. We do not attribute to the character an experience (much) like our actual visual experience, a visual experience of a film shot, of a depiction of the scene outside the window. The experience we attribute to the character is like our actual one only insofar as imagining seeing is like actually seeing.16 16 K.L. Walton, “Fictionality and imagination – mind the gap”, in In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015): 17-35, 13. ENRICO TERRONE 76 AN-ICON  Let me assume that what Walton calls “imag- ining seeing”, here, matches what I call “disembodied per- ception”. Under this assumption, we can interpret Walton’s last sentence as stating that the experience elicited by the point-of-view remains a disembodied perception, which is not identical with, but only approximates to, the embodied perception of the character. Overlooking this limitation can lead to disastrous effects. Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947), for example, aims to turn the audience’s disembodied perception into the perceptual experience of the main character along the whole duration of the film, but the result is just that the audience has “the impression that there is a camera by the name of ‘Philip Marlowe’ stumbling around Los Angeles and passing itself off as the well-known human being of the same name”.17 In fact, more cautious and parsimonious uses of the subjective shot can have outstanding aesthetic ef- fects. Griffith’s An Unseen Enemy is exemplary in this re- spect. I pointed out earlier that the film is based on “ob- jective” shots from neutral standpoints that are aimed to elicit pure disembodied experiences from the audience. Yet, quite exceptionally, one subjective shot emphasizes the most dramatic passage of the story. This shot is a close- up of the gun that the housekeeper passes through a hole in the door of the room where the two sisters took refuge (Fig. 1). We see the gun from the standpoint of the young- er sister (Fig. 2), and this subjective shot emphasizes the centrality of that character in the narrative. Fig. 1. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. 17 G.M. Wilson, Narration in Light: 86. ENRICO TERRONE 77 AN-ICON  Fig. 2. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. She is the one who has a psychological and relational arc of transformation along the story: at the be- ginning she refuses reluctantly to kiss her boyfriend but in the last image of the film she finally accepts the kiss. It is tempting to see the film as a sort of bildungsroman of this girl; specifically, her initiation to sexuality. This hermeneutic temptation is encouraged by the subjective shot in which the gun passing through the hole evokes a sort of phallic figure. The next shot shows that the girl is horrified by the gun. Later in the story, however, she finds the courage to try to grasp the gun, and then slumps back (Fig. 3 and 4). Fig. 3. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. Fig. 4. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. ENRICO TERRONE 78 AN-ICON  Interestingly, the editing connects this image of the girl to the image of her boyfriend walking in the fields (Fig. 5). Fig. 5. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. This link does not seem to be motivated by the course of the narrative but rather by a sort of symbolic pattern. Approximating to memory The experience of the spectator who watches a film such as An Unseen Enemy consists in a series of per- ceptual perspectives on the fictional world. Many of them are from a neutral, unoccupied point of view but some of them can match the perceptual point of view of a charac- ter. Most films function in this way. Some films even try to make us share the perceptual point of view of non-human characters. For example, John McTiernan’s Predator (1987) makes us share the perceptual point of view of an alien creature, and Pietro Marcello’s Bella e perduta (2015) that of a buffalo. On the other hand, there are films that do not limit themselves to making us share the perceptions of certain fictional characters but also aim to make us share other basic cognitive states of them. Let me begin with the case of memory. At the turning point of Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), Rick remembers his love affair with Ilsa in Paris. The combination of the movement of the camera towards Rick’s face with the crescendo of the music and the white dissolve indicates that the following scenes are to be taken as memories of Rick (Figg. 6,7 and 8). Yet, the kind of experience whereby the spectator experiences this scene is perception, not memory. ENRICO TERRONE 79 AN-ICON  The flashback makes us perceive the events that Rick is remembering rather than his memory experience. We have not the impression of remembering those events, that is, we are not enjoying the peculiar phenomenology of memory. Rather, we keep perceiving those past events set in Paris in the same disembodied way in which we were perceiv- ing the present events set in Casablanca which have been portrayed before the flashback. Fig. 6. Michael Curtiz, Casablanca, 1942. Still from film. Fig. 7. Michael Curtiz, Casablanca, 1942. Still from film. Fig. 8. Michael Curtiz, Casablanca, 1942. Still from film. ENRICO TERRONE 80 AN-ICON  Memory experiences usually are fragmentary, in- complete and unstable whereas the Paris events portrayed in the film exhibit the typical accuracy, fluidity and stability of perception. Moreover, memory experiences typically in- volve a first-person perspective whereas most shots in the Casablanca flashback are taken from a neutral objective perspective, not from Rick’s perspective. Most importantly, memory experiences, as such, involve a feeling of pastness whatever their content, whereas our experience of these scenes of Casablanca lack that phenomenological hall- mark. Although Rick is represented as remembering, the flashback only makes us perceive what is remembered, the content of his memory. This is the standard way in which flashbacks encode memory in film. We do not think that Rick’s memory experience is like this. We just think that we are seeing (in a perceptual attitude) the events that Rick is remembering (in the memory attitude). At most, certain films can use stylistic device such as blurred images or shift from color to black and white in order to stress that the spectator’s perceptual experience is meant to encode another kind of mental state. Yet, the spectator experience remains perceptual in nature. Seeing blurry or seeing in black and white are still ways of seeing. Perhaps a better way of getting the spectator closer to the memory state of a character might consist in casting as a flashback a shot that was previously conjugat- ed in the present tense. For example, in François Truffaut’s L’amour en fuite (1979) flashbacks are made of shots of previous films of the Antoine Doinel series, so that the spec- tator shares Antoine’s experience of remembering those events. Yet, these cases are quite exceptional. In most films that use flashbacks, only the character is undergoing a memory experience while the spectator is rather enjoying a disembodied perception. Approximating to imagination Memory differs from imagination in that one remembers events that one previously perceived whereas ENRICO TERRONE 81 AN-ICON  the events imagined could not have been perceived. Imag- ination indeed, unlike memory, can represent events that did not take place. So, when in John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar (1963) Billy images himself to be the ruler of an imaginary country called Ambrosia, we cannot perceive the corre- sponding events in the story world of Billy Liar because there are no such events in that world. However, the way in which Billy Liar’s spectators are invited to consider Billy’s imaginings is analogous to that in which Casablanca’s spectators are invited to consider Rick’s memories. That is, the combination of a camera movement towards the character’s face with music and visual dissolve (Figg. 9, 10 and 11). In Billy Liar, the shift to imagination is also stressed by the inner voice of Billy himself who says: “It was a big day for us. We had won the war in Ambrosia. Democracy was back once more in our beloved country...”. Yet, the experience that this segment of Billy Liar elicits from its spectators remains a perceptual experience. We see Billy on a tank in the middle of the crowd which celebrates his triumph in the war. Just as Casablanca makes us perceive the events that Rick is re- membering, Billy Liar makes us perceive the events that Billy is imagining. The difference is just that the events remem- bered belongs to the story world of Casablanca, whereas the events imagined do not belong to the story world of Billy Liar. Rather, those events belong to a nested fictional world, which the filmmaker has built up within the main fiction in order to represent Billy’s imagining.18 Fig. 9. John Schlesinger, Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film. 18 On the notion of nested world, see K.L. Walton, “Fictionality and imagination”. ENRICO TERRONE 82 AN-ICON  Fig. 10. John Schlesinger, Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film. Fig. 11. John Schlesinger, Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film. Billy Liar does not make us share the imagina- tive experience of Billy, just as Casablanca did not make us share the memory experience of Rick. Imaginings, indeed, usually lack the kind of accuracy, fluidity, objectivity and stability that characterizes our perceptual experience of the events imagined by Billy. Moreover, imaginative experienc- es, as such, should involve a feeling of unreality whatever their content whereas our experience of these scenes of Billy Liar lacks such phenomenological hallmark. The con- tent of our perception, namely, Billy’s triumph, may look weird and non-realistic but we experience it in the same way in which we experience other scenes of the film that look much more realistic. Thus, films such as Billy Liar do not make us share the imaginative states of fictional char- acters but only approximate to such states by providing us with perceptual experiences of nested fictional worlds. Altering the epistemic status of film experience From a phenomenological perspective, there is just one basic experiential attitude that film spectators ENRICO TERRONE 83 AN-ICON  can take towards the fictional events portrayed. Wilson,19 following Walton,20 calls it “imagining seeing” while I prefer to dub it “disembodied perception”. That said, there are different ways in which spectators can relate this experi- ence to the fictional world they are exploring; this is what Wilson calls the “the epistemic status of the contents of their imagined seeing”.21 The default assumption about the epistemic status of film experience is that we are perceiving the fic- tional world as it is, from a neutral perspective that does not match the point of view of anybody. In other words, the basic epistemic status of film experience is pure perceptual knowledge. Yet, this basic epistemic status can be altered by cues coming from the content or the context of our per- ceptual experience. The main way of altering the epistemic status consists in a shift from the neutral viewpoint of the spectator as a detached observer to the subjective view- point of a character. In such cases, the spectator is invited to relate what she is perceiving in a disembodied way to the embodied perception or memory or imagination of a certain character. Yet, the spectator’s experience does not turn into an embodied perception or memory or imagina- tion. It remains a disembodied perception; only its epistemic status undergoes alteration. In the default case, we cast our disembodied experience merely as a source of perceptual knowledge about the objective facts of the fictional world. In the altered states, on the other hand, we cast our disem- bodied experience as a source of knowledge concerning also (in the case of embodied perception and memory) or only (in the case of imagination) the subjectivity of a character. Some films leave the epistemic status of cer- tain shots indeterminate. In Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Straw- berries (1957), for instance, it is not evident whether the protagonist Isak Borg is remembering or rather imagining certain episodes of his teenage. Spectators just perceive 19 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164. 20 K.L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 21 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164. ENRICO TERRONE 84 AN-ICON  such episodes in the usual disembodied way and acknowl- edge that something is going on in Isak’s mind rather than in the outer world. One might say that the spectator per- ceives a nested fictional world which is made of elements coming from both Isak’s memory and Isak’s imagination, but she cannot precisely tell the imaginative elements from the memory elements. The epistemic status of these shots thus remains indeterminate: suspended, as it were, between memory and imagination. Likewise, the scenes of Federico Fellini’s Otto e mezzo (1963) that portray the protagonist Guido Anselmi in his childhood (being bathed in wine lees and then put in bed; playing football in the schoolyard and then visiting Saraghina; being punished by the priests and then returning to Saraghina) have an inde- terminate epistemic status which lies between memory and imagination. The spectator has a perceptual disembodied experience of a nested fictional world which is made of elements arguably coming from both Guido’s imagination and Guido’s memory, but she finds it hard to precisely dis- tinguish what is coming from where. The phenomenological virtues of film compared to theater If film experience is just a kind of perceptual experience which can at most approximate to other mental states such as memory or imagination, why scholars like Münsterberg and Panofsky have stated that films can lead spectators to enjoy the latter mental states? I propose a historical explanation according to which statements such as Münsterberg’s or Panofsky’s are to be read as comparisons between film and theater. Both these forms of art invite the spectator to enjoy a per- ceptual experience of a fictional world. Yet, the experience that theater elicits from the spectator is ordinary embod- ied perception whereas film experience is a peculiar kind of disembodied perception. At the theater, the spectator sees the play from a standpoint that corresponds to the standpoint of her body, and that standpoint can change ENRICO TERRONE 85 AN-ICON  if the body moves. Slightly moving one’s head can be sufficient to change one’s perspective on the events por- trayed by a play; if one moved closer to the stage, one would even perceive those events from a closer standpoint. In this sense, theater experience works just as ordinary perception; it is as if fictional events had been magical- ly transported in our own environment, in our egocentric space. In film experience, on the other hand, it is the spec- tator’s viewpoint that seems to be magically transported in the middle of fictional events even though her body firmly remains in her seat. Film experience is thus independent from the spectator’s bodily movement in a way theater ex- perience is not. This is what motivates the characterization of film experience as a sort of disembodied perception. Thus, film experience is much more flexible than theater experience when it comes to approximating to other mental states such as memory or imagination, whose content also is quite independent from the position and the possible movements of one’s body. Panofsky nicely makes this point when he writes: In a theater, space is static, that is, the space represented on the stage, as well as the spatial relation of the beholder to the spectacle, is unalterably fixed. [.. ] With the movies the situation is reversed. Here, too, the spectator occupies a fixed seat, but only physically, not as the subject of an aesthetic experience. Aesthetically, he is in permanent motion as his eye identifies itself with the lens of the camera, which permanently shifts in distance and direction. [.. ] This opens up a world of possibilities of which the stage can never dream.22 Among the possibilities of film in comparison with theater, there is surely the capacity to lead the spec- tator in the proximity of the mental states of the characters. Yet, this does not mean that, in those cases, film experience turns into a memory experience or into an imaginative ex- perience; it remains a perceptual experience, though one aimed at approximating to other mental states. 22 E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures”: 18-19. ENRICO TERRONE 86 AN-ICON  Film experience, as a disembodied perceptual experience, reveals itself to be especially apt to emulate mental states such as perceptual illusion, hallucination and dream, whose attitude is not as distinct from that of per- ception as it is the attitude of memory or that of imagina- tion. One can cast perceptual illusions, hallucinations and dreams as perceptual experiences that, unlike standard perception, fail to represent things as they are. Specifical- ly, perceptual illusions lead the perceiver to cast things as having properties they do not actually have, while “partial hallucinations” lead her to perceive things that actually have not their place in her environment, and “total hallucinations”, just like dreams, leads the subject to experience a totally made up environment.23 Ordinary perception is somehow authoritative as for the reality of its content, and theater experience tends to inherit this epistemic authority, which it applies to the story world. Film experience, on the other hand, has a weaker epistemic authority despite its perceptual character. I contend that this depends on its peculiarly disembodied attitude. While watching a film, we have the impression of seeing characters who inhabit the story world, and events that occur in it, and we usually tend to endorse such im- pression thereby acquiring pieces of information about the story world. Yet, we do not perceive these events as occur- ring in the environment we inhabit with our body, and this somehow affect the degree of reliability of those pieces of information. Even though we tend to cast film experienc- es as a perception of events in the fictional world, we are disposed to acknowledge that this experience might mis- lead us as regards the way things are in that world. In this sense, film experience is a perceptual experience that can get closer than standard perception and theater experience to illusion, hallucination and dream. 23 For the distinction between partial and total hallucinations, see A.D. Smith, The Problem of Perception (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002): 193. Note that I am putting total hallucination and dreams on a par not because I think they are, but just because I reckon that discussing their difference goes beyond the scope of this paper. ENRICO TERRONE 87 AN-ICON  If the perceptual experience is a genus among whose species one can find not only standard perception but also illusion, hallucination, and dream, then film ex- perience can be cast as a peculiar further species of the genus, which can emulate all the other mental states of that genus. This fact is exploited by those films that lead the spectator to share the deceptive perceptual experi- ences of a character. In films such as David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001) we share the partial hallucination of the heroes by being in turn deceived by our perceptual experience of the events portrayed. Likewise, in films such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) or Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944), we share the total hallucinations or dreams of the characters by wrongly casting certain film experiences as perceptions of events that actually occur in the story world. In Wilson’s terms,24 spectators of such films enjoy the proper perceptual experiences but fail to endow them with the proper epistemic status, which is not the reliability of standard perception but rather the unreli- ability of illusion, hallucination or dream. In David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), at least according to a popular interpretation of the film,25 dream, memory and perception are combined in a way that can be grasped only after the fact. The first part of the film is presented from an allegedly neutral perceptual perspective but later reveals itself to be a dream of the protagonist Di- ane Selwyn. The material of that dream comes from Diane’s memories constituting the flashbacks that we find in the second part of the film, which also provides us with a neu- tral perceptual perspective on the last moments of Diane’s life, from her waking up from her dream to her suicide. 24 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164. 25 See for instance B. Wyman, M. Garrone, A. Klein, “Everything you were afraid to ask about Mulholland Drive”, Salon (October 24, 2001), https://www.salon.com/2001/10/24/ mulholland_drive_analysis/; P. Bertetto, “L’analisi interpretativa. Mulholland Drive”, in P. Bertetto, ed., Metodologie di analisi del film (Rome-Bari: Laterza: 2007): 223-255. ENRICO TERRONE 88 AN-ICON  The phenomenological virtues of virtual reality compared to film While film provides us with a disembodied per- ceptual experience, virtual reality makes us perceive an egocentric space, that is, a space which is centered in our body in the way the space of ordinary perception is. Both or- dinary perception and virtual-reality experience are such as that our bodily movements correspond to change in our viewpoint whereas the viewpoint of film experience is in- dependent from the viewer’s body. Virtual reality thus shares with theater a sig- nificant proximity to ordinary perception that film, instead, lacks. Should we conclude that virtual reality, just like the- ater, is less apt than film to approximate to non-perceptual mental states such as memory or imagination? Not so. Film experience, as disembodied perception, is already an altered state in comparison to ordinary per- ception. Nothing else remains to be altered at the phenom- enological level. The only possible alterations, as I have argued earlier, are alterations in the epistemic status of our perceptual experience: clues in the context or in the content of film experience may lead us to cast it as the memory or the imagining of a character, or even as a de- ceptive experience such as an illusion, an hallucination or a dream. Virtual-reality experience and theater experience, on the other hand, are not intrinsically altered; they work just as ordinary perception works. Yet, virtual-reality expe- rience can be altered in a way in which theater experience surely cannot be altered. Even though the default mode of virtual-reality experience is the emulation of ordinary perception, a virtual reality system might be designed so to provide users with experiences of completely different kinds. Whether and how such experience can effectively emulate memory episodes and imaginings remains an open question. Arguably the emulation of perception has been the main aim of virtual reality technology so far. Still, this technology has also a potential for altering its basic per- ceptual mode thereby getting the user’s experience closer ENRICO TERRONE 89 AN-ICON  to other kinds of mental states. Emulating memory and imagination through perception, the great challenge for filmmakers in the twentieth century, might become the great challenge for virtual-reality makers in the twenty-first. Para- phrasing Panofsky’s statement, virtual reality might open up a world of possibilities of which film can never dream. ENRICO TERRONE 90 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/15158

Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual Filmreality by Enrico Terrone Virtual Reality Perception Memory Imagination Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual reality by Enrico Terrone Abstract This paper casts film experience as a sort of disembodied perception. I will show how this experience can be manipulated and altered in order to approximate to mental states of fictional characters, in particular embodied perception, memory and imagination. I will acknowledge that film experience can approximate to non-perceptual at- titudes such as memory and imagination much better than the experience elicited by theater. Yet, I will contend, film experience cannot emulate the phenomenology of non-per- ceptual attitudes since it remains a sort of disembodied perception even when it is manipulated by filmmakers in order to approximate memory states or imaginative states of fictional characters. Finally, I will argue that virtual real- ity, in virtue of both its proximity to embodied perception and its potential for manipulation, is, in principle, in a bet- ter position than film when it comes to trying to emulate non-perceptual attitudes such as memory and imagination. Film Virtual Reality Perception Memory Imagination To quote this essay: E. Terrone, “Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual reality”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 69-90 ENRICO TERRONE 69 AN-ICON  Cloe sees a black cat, Jack remembers a black cat, Lisa imagines a black cat. According to representa- tionalist conceptions of the mind,1 Cloe’s, Jack’s and Li- sa’s mental states have the same representational content, namely a black cat, and yet they differ as regards their attitude, that is, the way that content is represented. Per- ceiving a black cat, remembering a black cat and imagin- ing a black cat are three different experiences in virtue of three different attitudes. Specifically, according to Uriah Kriegel’s “Sartrean account”,2 the perceptual attitude rep- resents-as-present its content, the memory attitude rep- resents-as-past its content, and the imaginative attitude represents-as-possible its content. All this raises an interesting issue about film experience. On the one hand, according to experiential theories of depiction,3 films provide us with experiences whose “pictorial attitude” somehow emulates the perceptual attitude. On the other hand, scholars such as Hugo Mün- sterberg or Erwin Panofsky have stated that films allow us to share not only the perceptual point of view of fictional characters but also their inner life, which involves states such as memory or imagination.4 These two statements are in tension: if the pictorial attitude which characterizes film experience is a sort of perceptual attitude, how can film spectators enjoy experiences based on memory attitudes or imaginative attitudes? I will argue that the spectator cannot enjoy the latter experiences. The spectator can only ascribe such experiences to characters by relying on the perceptual experience she is enjoying. Finally, I will argue that, quite 1 T. Crane, “The intentional structure of consciousness”, in A. Jokic, Q. Smith, eds., Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 33- 56; D. Chalmers. “The representational character of experience”, in B. Leiter, ed., The Future for Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 153-180. 2 U. Kriegel, “Perception and imagination. A Sartrean account”, in S. Miguens, G. Preyer, C. Bravo Morando, eds., Prereflective Consciousness: Early Sartre in the Context of Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (London: Routledge, 2015): 257-288. 3 R. Hopkins, “Depiction”, in P. Livingston, C. Plantinga, eds., The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (London: Routledge, 2009): 64-74. 4 H. Münsterberg, The Photoplay: a Psychological Study (New York: Appleton, 1916); E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures” (1934), in D. Talbot, ed., Film: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959): 15-32. ENRICO TERRONE 70 AN-ICON  surprisingly, virtual reality is in a better position than film as regards the emulation of non-perceptual attitudes. Film experience as disembodied perception Film experience is a perceptual experience. The audience perceives objects and events taking place in the world that the film portrays. The Lumière Brothers Sortie des Usines Lumière (1895) is paradigmatic in this respect: the audience sees workers leaving the factory in a way that is analogous to the way one would see those workers if one were in front the factory. Analogous, however, does not mean identical. While in ordinary perception we experience things as organized in an “egocentric space”, that is, a space that has our body as its own center,5 in cinematic perception we experience things as organized in a space that has only our sight, not our body, as its own center. The space depicted is experienced as “detached” from our body.6 The spectator of Sortie des Usines Lumière sees workers exiting the factory from a standpoint in front of the factory, but she does not occupy that standpoint and she does not have the impression of occupying it. Even spectators of the Lumière Brothers L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) normally do not have the impres- sion of occupying the standpoint in front of the train, in spite of the popular fable that suggests otherwise.7 Film experience, so understood, is a disembod- ied perception. We can perceive things from a viewpoint that our body is not forced to occupy. It is worth noting that by “disembodied perception” here is just meant the percep- tion of a space in which our body does not have any place. Hence, film experience is disembodied only with respect to the experienced relationship between the spectator and 5 G. Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 6 N. Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 7 M. Loiperdinger, “Lumière’s arrival of the train. Cinema’s founding myth”, The Moving Image 4, no. 1 (2004): 89-118. ENRICO TERRONE 71 AN-ICON  the space portrayed. The spectator’s body, however, keeps playing a crucial role in the whole film experience which, as a twofold experience, also includes the spectator’s re- lationship to the space in which the film is screened.8 Even a paradigmatic essay on the embodied character of film experience, namely Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992), acknowledges that the perspective of the spectator as an embodied subject is different from the perspective on the world depicted that the film provides us with. Yet, Sob- chack states that film experience is embodied all the way through because there is a further body at work, namely, the film’s body: We recognize the moving picture as the work of an anonymous and sign-producing body subject intentionally marking visible choices with the very behavior of its bodily being. However, these choices are not initiated by the movement of our bodies or our intending consciousness. They are seen and visible as the visual and phys- ical choices of some body other than ourselves [...]. That some body is the film’s body.9 What does it exactly mean that the film has a body? This seems to be a suggestive metaphor that should be unpacked for rigorous theorizing. Sobchack offers the following characterization of the film’s body: “The cam- era its perceptive organ, the projector its expressive organ, the screen its discrete and material occupation of worldly space”.10 If the film’s body is just that, it comes down to a suggestive characterization of the film’s screening. Still Sobchack also insists on the “choices” that the alleged film’s body makes thereby determining our point of view on the space portrayed. Precisely because that point of view does not depend on the position and the movement of our 8 R. Hopkins, “Depiction”. See also E. Terrone, “Imagination and perception in film experience”, Ergo, no. 5 (2020): 161-190. 9 V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 278. Thanks to a referee for pushing me to discuss Sobchack’s view. 10 Ibid.: 299. ENRICO TERRONE 72 AN-ICON  body, I find it worthwhile to cast the experience it provides as disembodied. While ordinary perception, as an embodied experience, depends on the position and movement of our body, film experience is disembodied since it depends on choices that are not up to us. Whom are those choices up to? To the filmmaker for sure, and yet scholars like George Wilson argue that, in our engagement with fiction films, we rather experience those choices as the outcome of the “min- imal narrating agency” of a fictional narrator.11 Perhaps what Sobchack calls the film’s body may be an interesting char- acterization of how we experience the actual agency of the filmmaker or, if Wilson is right, the fictional agency of the narrator. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the film’s body is not the spectator’s body and I reckon that this is enough to warrant the characterization of film experience as disem- bodied perception. Such a disembodied nature of film experience has an interesting consequence. Since film experience, as disembodied perception, involves a point of view that does not depend on our body, that point of view can change without the need of moving our body. Neither Sortie des Usines Lumière nor L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ci- otat exploit this option, but later films do so by means of camera movements and editing. The specificity of film experience In ordinary perception we experience things as taking place in a determinate place and time, namely, here, the place where our body is, and now, the time when our experience occurs. In cinematic perception, on the other hand, place and time remain indeterminate. Our perception, as such, does not tell us where and when the things per- ceived take place. Cinematic perception needs a cognitive supplementation in order to fix the spatial and temporal coordinates of what one is perceiving. Films can provide 11 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 129. ENRICO TERRONE 73 AN-ICON  such supplementation either explicitly, by means of devices such as voice over and inscriptions, or implicitly, by relying on clues embedded in the scenes portrayed. Furthermore, film perception is not up to us in the way ordinary perception is. In the latter, I can decide, at least to a certain extent, what I am going to perceive. In film experience, instead, I am completely deprived of au- tonomy. In other words, film experience is predetermined in a way ordinary experience is not. One might say that ordinary perception is a natural experience whereas cine- matic perception is rather an artificial experience whereby we perceive what filmmakers (or narrators) have established for us. In the specific case of fiction films, filmmakers (or narrators) guide us in the perceptual exploration of fictional worlds. That is arguably the most insightful way of unpack- ing Sobchack’s metaphor of the film’s body. Let me consider, as an example, David W. Grif- fith’s An Unseen Enemy (1912), which tells the story of two orphan sisters whose heritage is threatened by a treach- erous housekeeper and her accomplice. We discover this story through a series of disembodied perceptual expe- riences of the same kind as those elicited by Sortie des Usines Lumière and L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat. We see the two orphans, then the housekeeper, then the elder brother of the two girls who places the heritage in the safe, then the housekeeper who spies him, and so on and so forth. The filmmaker has designed this series of percep- tions in a way that provides us with a sort of “unrestricted epistemic access” to the relevant facts of the story.12 Unlike the two orphans, we are aware from the beginning of the threat coming from the housekeeper. Moreover, unlike the housekeeper, we are aware of the brother’s attempt to help his sisters and prevent theft. In sum, the spectator of An Unseen Enemy perceives more, and therefore knows more, than the characters in the story; the “enemy” is “unseen” only for the characters, not for the audience. 12 G.M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). ENRICO TERRONE 74 AN-ICON  This is the basic functioning of fiction films, which corresponds to the omniscient narrator in literature. However, other configurations are possible in which the audience’s knowledge of relevant facts is “restricted” to that available to characters or is even narrower than the latter.13 For example, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1948) the audience’s knowledge is as restricted as that of the character L.B. Jef- feries (with one important exception, however: we see the murderer leaving his apartment with his lover while Jefferies is sleeping). In Pablo Larrain’s Ema (2019), the audience’s knowledge is even narrower than that of the eponymous heroine; the latter has access from the beginning to the truth about the new adoptive parents of her son whereas the audience will discover this truth only at the end of the film. A further restriction that affects film experience concerns the mode of this experience, which is just dis- embodied perception. In ordinary experience, on the other hand, one can enjoy a variety of experiential attitudes: em- bodied perception, first of all, but also memory and imag- ination, and possibly perceptual illusion, hallucination and dream. Here is another sense in which the audience can find it hard to know what characters know. What is at stake here is phenomenal knowledge, that is, knowing what it is like for a subject to undergo a certain experience. For sure, empathy may enable the audience to acquire phenomenal knowledge concerning the affective and emotional dimension of a fictional character’s expe- rience.14 For instance, the audience can share the char- acter’s fear or the character’s surprise. Yet, affects and emotions are evaluative mental states that are grafted onto more basic cognitive states such as perceptions, memo- ries, and imaginings,15 whose distinctive attitude is sure- ly harder to access through empathy. The audience may deploy empathy to know what it is like to for a character to feel fear or joy but something more is required to grasp 13 Ibid. 14 J. Stadler, “Empathy and film”, in H.L. Maibom, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (London: Routledge, 2016): 317-326. Thanks to a referee for leading me to consider the role of empathy. 15 K. Mulligan, “From appropriate emotions to values”, The Monist 81, no. 1 (1998): 161-188. ENRICO TERRONE 75 AN-ICON  the phenomenal difference between an embodied percep- tual experience and a memory episode or an imagining. Filmmakers are thus challenged to design disembodied perceptual experiences that can approximate to the ba- sic cognitive experiences enjoyed by characters, thereby leading the audience to grasp what is going on in the char- acters’ minds. This is arguably one of the most fascinating challenges that cinema has addressed along its history. Approximating to embodied perception Although film experience and ordinary percep- tion are both perceptual experiences, they differ inasmuch the latter is embodied in a way the former is not. That is why, in ordinary experience, we can move towards the things we perceive and possibly touch them, but we cannot do so in film experience. The usual way in which filmmakers lead the audience to share the embodied perceptual experience of a character consists in providing the audience with a standpoint that corresponds to that of the character. This mode of representation, which is usually called “subjective shot”, enables us to share the visual perspective of the character in spite of the fact that our body does not occupy the corresponding standpoint, which is instead occupied by the character’s body. As Kendall Walton puts it, Following a shot of a character looking out a window, there is a shot of a scene outside. Watching the second shot, we imagine observing the scene, and we judge that the character looking out the window has an experience “like this”, like the one we imagine enjoying. We do not attribute to the character an experience (much) like our actual visual experience, a visual experience of a film shot, of a depiction of the scene outside the window. The experience we attribute to the character is like our actual one only insofar as imagining seeing is like actually seeing.16 16 K.L. Walton, “Fictionality and imagination – mind the gap”, in In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015): 17-35, 13. ENRICO TERRONE 76 AN-ICON  Let me assume that what Walton calls “imag- ining seeing”, here, matches what I call “disembodied per- ception”. Under this assumption, we can interpret Walton’s last sentence as stating that the experience elicited by the point-of-view remains a disembodied perception, which is not identical with, but only approximates to, the embodied perception of the character. Overlooking this limitation can lead to disastrous effects. Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947), for example, aims to turn the audience’s disembodied perception into the perceptual experience of the main character along the whole duration of the film, but the result is just that the audience has “the impression that there is a camera by the name of ‘Philip Marlowe’ stumbling around Los Angeles and passing itself off as the well-known human being of the same name”.17 In fact, more cautious and parsimonious uses of the subjective shot can have outstanding aesthetic ef- fects. Griffith’s An Unseen Enemy is exemplary in this re- spect. I pointed out earlier that the film is based on “ob- jective” shots from neutral standpoints that are aimed to elicit pure disembodied experiences from the audience. Yet, quite exceptionally, one subjective shot emphasizes the most dramatic passage of the story. This shot is a close- up of the gun that the housekeeper passes through a hole in the door of the room where the two sisters took refuge (Fig. 1). We see the gun from the standpoint of the young- er sister (Fig. 2), and this subjective shot emphasizes the centrality of that character in the narrative. Fig. 1. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. 17 G.M. Wilson, Narration in Light: 86. ENRICO TERRONE 77 AN-ICON  Fig. 2. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. She is the one who has a psychological and relational arc of transformation along the story: at the be- ginning she refuses reluctantly to kiss her boyfriend but in the last image of the film she finally accepts the kiss. It is tempting to see the film as a sort of bildungsroman of this girl; specifically, her initiation to sexuality. This hermeneutic temptation is encouraged by the subjective shot in which the gun passing through the hole evokes a sort of phallic figure. The next shot shows that the girl is horrified by the gun. Later in the story, however, she finds the courage to try to grasp the gun, and then slumps back (Fig. 3 and 4). Fig. 3. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. Fig. 4. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. ENRICO TERRONE 78 AN-ICON  Interestingly, the editing connects this image of the girl to the image of her boyfriend walking in the fields (Fig. 5). Fig. 5. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. This link does not seem to be motivated by the course of the narrative but rather by a sort of symbolic pattern. Approximating to memory The experience of the spectator who watches a film such as An Unseen Enemy consists in a series of per- ceptual perspectives on the fictional world. Many of them are from a neutral, unoccupied point of view but some of them can match the perceptual point of view of a charac- ter. Most films function in this way. Some films even try to make us share the perceptual point of view of non-human characters. For example, John McTiernan’s Predator (1987) makes us share the perceptual point of view of an alien creature, and Pietro Marcello’s Bella e perduta (2015) that of a buffalo. On the other hand, there are films that do not limit themselves to making us share the perceptions of certain fictional characters but also aim to make us share other basic cognitive states of them. Let me begin with the case of memory. At the turning point of Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), Rick remembers his love affair with Ilsa in Paris. The combination of the movement of the camera towards Rick’s face with the crescendo of the music and the white dissolve indicates that the following scenes are to be taken as memories of Rick (Figg. 6,7 and 8). Yet, the kind of experience whereby the spectator experiences this scene is perception, not memory. ENRICO TERRONE 79 AN-ICON  The flashback makes us perceive the events that Rick is remembering rather than his memory experience. We have not the impression of remembering those events, that is, we are not enjoying the peculiar phenomenology of memory. Rather, we keep perceiving those past events set in Paris in the same disembodied way in which we were perceiv- ing the present events set in Casablanca which have been portrayed before the flashback. Fig. 6. Michael Curtiz, Casablanca, 1942. Still from film. Fig. 7. Michael Curtiz, Casablanca, 1942. Still from film. Fig. 8. Michael Curtiz, Casablanca, 1942. Still from film. ENRICO TERRONE 80 AN-ICON  Memory experiences usually are fragmentary, in- complete and unstable whereas the Paris events portrayed in the film exhibit the typical accuracy, fluidity and stability of perception. Moreover, memory experiences typically in- volve a first-person perspective whereas most shots in the Casablanca flashback are taken from a neutral objective perspective, not from Rick’s perspective. Most importantly, memory experiences, as such, involve a feeling of pastness whatever their content, whereas our experience of these scenes of Casablanca lack that phenomenological hall- mark. Although Rick is represented as remembering, the flashback only makes us perceive what is remembered, the content of his memory. This is the standard way in which flashbacks encode memory in film. We do not think that Rick’s memory experience is like this. We just think that we are seeing (in a perceptual attitude) the events that Rick is remembering (in the memory attitude). At most, certain films can use stylistic device such as blurred images or shift from color to black and white in order to stress that the spectator’s perceptual experience is meant to encode another kind of mental state. Yet, the spectator experience remains perceptual in nature. Seeing blurry or seeing in black and white are still ways of seeing. Perhaps a better way of getting the spectator closer to the memory state of a character might consist in casting as a flashback a shot that was previously conjugat- ed in the present tense. For example, in François Truffaut’s L’amour en fuite (1979) flashbacks are made of shots of previous films of the Antoine Doinel series, so that the spec- tator shares Antoine’s experience of remembering those events. Yet, these cases are quite exceptional. In most films that use flashbacks, only the character is undergoing a memory experience while the spectator is rather enjoying a disembodied perception. Approximating to imagination Memory differs from imagination in that one remembers events that one previously perceived whereas ENRICO TERRONE 81 AN-ICON  the events imagined could not have been perceived. Imag- ination indeed, unlike memory, can represent events that did not take place. So, when in John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar (1963) Billy images himself to be the ruler of an imaginary country called Ambrosia, we cannot perceive the corre- sponding events in the story world of Billy Liar because there are no such events in that world. However, the way in which Billy Liar’s spectators are invited to consider Billy’s imaginings is analogous to that in which Casablanca’s spectators are invited to consider Rick’s memories. That is, the combination of a camera movement towards the character’s face with music and visual dissolve (Figg. 9, 10 and 11). In Billy Liar, the shift to imagination is also stressed by the inner voice of Billy himself who says: “It was a big day for us. We had won the war in Ambrosia. Democracy was back once more in our beloved country...”. Yet, the experience that this segment of Billy Liar elicits from its spectators remains a perceptual experience. We see Billy on a tank in the middle of the crowd which celebrates his triumph in the war. Just as Casablanca makes us perceive the events that Rick is re- membering, Billy Liar makes us perceive the events that Billy is imagining. The difference is just that the events remem- bered belongs to the story world of Casablanca, whereas the events imagined do not belong to the story world of Billy Liar. Rather, those events belong to a nested fictional world, which the filmmaker has built up within the main fiction in order to represent Billy’s imagining.18 Fig. 9. John Schlesinger, Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film. 18 On the notion of nested world, see K.L. Walton, “Fictionality and imagination”. ENRICO TERRONE 82 AN-ICON  Fig. 10. John Schlesinger, Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film. Fig. 11. John Schlesinger, Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film. Billy Liar does not make us share the imagina- tive experience of Billy, just as Casablanca did not make us share the memory experience of Rick. Imaginings, indeed, usually lack the kind of accuracy, fluidity, objectivity and stability that characterizes our perceptual experience of the events imagined by Billy. Moreover, imaginative experienc- es, as such, should involve a feeling of unreality whatever their content whereas our experience of these scenes of Billy Liar lacks such phenomenological hallmark. The con- tent of our perception, namely, Billy’s triumph, may look weird and non-realistic but we experience it in the same way in which we experience other scenes of the film that look much more realistic. Thus, films such as Billy Liar do not make us share the imaginative states of fictional char- acters but only approximate to such states by providing us with perceptual experiences of nested fictional worlds. Altering the epistemic status of film experience From a phenomenological perspective, there is just one basic experiential attitude that film spectators ENRICO TERRONE 83 AN-ICON  can take towards the fictional events portrayed. Wilson,19 following Walton,20 calls it “imagining seeing” while I prefer to dub it “disembodied perception”. That said, there are different ways in which spectators can relate this experi- ence to the fictional world they are exploring; this is what Wilson calls the “the epistemic status of the contents of their imagined seeing”.21 The default assumption about the epistemic status of film experience is that we are perceiving the fic- tional world as it is, from a neutral perspective that does not match the point of view of anybody. In other words, the basic epistemic status of film experience is pure perceptual knowledge. Yet, this basic epistemic status can be altered by cues coming from the content or the context of our per- ceptual experience. The main way of altering the epistemic status consists in a shift from the neutral viewpoint of the spectator as a detached observer to the subjective view- point of a character. In such cases, the spectator is invited to relate what she is perceiving in a disembodied way to the embodied perception or memory or imagination of a certain character. Yet, the spectator’s experience does not turn into an embodied perception or memory or imagina- tion. It remains a disembodied perception; only its epistemic status undergoes alteration. In the default case, we cast our disembodied experience merely as a source of perceptual knowledge about the objective facts of the fictional world. In the altered states, on the other hand, we cast our disem- bodied experience as a source of knowledge concerning also (in the case of embodied perception and memory) or only (in the case of imagination) the subjectivity of a character. Some films leave the epistemic status of cer- tain shots indeterminate. In Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Straw- berries (1957), for instance, it is not evident whether the protagonist Isak Borg is remembering or rather imagining certain episodes of his teenage. Spectators just perceive 19 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164. 20 K.L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 21 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164. ENRICO TERRONE 84 AN-ICON  such episodes in the usual disembodied way and acknowl- edge that something is going on in Isak’s mind rather than in the outer world. One might say that the spectator per- ceives a nested fictional world which is made of elements coming from both Isak’s memory and Isak’s imagination, but she cannot precisely tell the imaginative elements from the memory elements. The epistemic status of these shots thus remains indeterminate: suspended, as it were, between memory and imagination. Likewise, the scenes of Federico Fellini’s Otto e mezzo (1963) that portray the protagonist Guido Anselmi in his childhood (being bathed in wine lees and then put in bed; playing football in the schoolyard and then visiting Saraghina; being punished by the priests and then returning to Saraghina) have an inde- terminate epistemic status which lies between memory and imagination. The spectator has a perceptual disembodied experience of a nested fictional world which is made of elements arguably coming from both Guido’s imagination and Guido’s memory, but she finds it hard to precisely dis- tinguish what is coming from where. The phenomenological virtues of film compared to theater If film experience is just a kind of perceptual experience which can at most approximate to other mental states such as memory or imagination, why scholars like Münsterberg and Panofsky have stated that films can lead spectators to enjoy the latter mental states? I propose a historical explanation according to which statements such as Münsterberg’s or Panofsky’s are to be read as comparisons between film and theater. Both these forms of art invite the spectator to enjoy a per- ceptual experience of a fictional world. Yet, the experience that theater elicits from the spectator is ordinary embod- ied perception whereas film experience is a peculiar kind of disembodied perception. At the theater, the spectator sees the play from a standpoint that corresponds to the standpoint of her body, and that standpoint can change ENRICO TERRONE 85 AN-ICON  if the body moves. Slightly moving one’s head can be sufficient to change one’s perspective on the events por- trayed by a play; if one moved closer to the stage, one would even perceive those events from a closer standpoint. In this sense, theater experience works just as ordinary perception; it is as if fictional events had been magical- ly transported in our own environment, in our egocentric space. In film experience, on the other hand, it is the spec- tator’s viewpoint that seems to be magically transported in the middle of fictional events even though her body firmly remains in her seat. Film experience is thus independent from the spectator’s bodily movement in a way theater ex- perience is not. This is what motivates the characterization of film experience as a sort of disembodied perception. Thus, film experience is much more flexible than theater experience when it comes to approximating to other mental states such as memory or imagination, whose content also is quite independent from the position and the possible movements of one’s body. Panofsky nicely makes this point when he writes: In a theater, space is static, that is, the space represented on the stage, as well as the spatial relation of the beholder to the spectacle, is unalterably fixed. [.. ] With the movies the situation is reversed. Here, too, the spectator occupies a fixed seat, but only physically, not as the subject of an aesthetic experience. Aesthetically, he is in permanent motion as his eye identifies itself with the lens of the camera, which permanently shifts in distance and direction. [.. ] This opens up a world of possibilities of which the stage can never dream.22 Among the possibilities of film in comparison with theater, there is surely the capacity to lead the spec- tator in the proximity of the mental states of the characters. Yet, this does not mean that, in those cases, film experience turns into a memory experience or into an imaginative ex- perience; it remains a perceptual experience, though one aimed at approximating to other mental states. 22 E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures”: 18-19. ENRICO TERRONE 86 AN-ICON  Film experience, as a disembodied perceptual experience, reveals itself to be especially apt to emulate mental states such as perceptual illusion, hallucination and dream, whose attitude is not as distinct from that of per- ception as it is the attitude of memory or that of imagina- tion. One can cast perceptual illusions, hallucinations and dreams as perceptual experiences that, unlike standard perception, fail to represent things as they are. Specifical- ly, perceptual illusions lead the perceiver to cast things as having properties they do not actually have, while “partial hallucinations” lead her to perceive things that actually have not their place in her environment, and “total hallucinations”, just like dreams, leads the subject to experience a totally made up environment.23 Ordinary perception is somehow authoritative as for the reality of its content, and theater experience tends to inherit this epistemic authority, which it applies to the story world. Film experience, on the other hand, has a weaker epistemic authority despite its perceptual character. I contend that this depends on its peculiarly disembodied attitude. While watching a film, we have the impression of seeing characters who inhabit the story world, and events that occur in it, and we usually tend to endorse such im- pression thereby acquiring pieces of information about the story world. Yet, we do not perceive these events as occur- ring in the environment we inhabit with our body, and this somehow affect the degree of reliability of those pieces of information. Even though we tend to cast film experienc- es as a perception of events in the fictional world, we are disposed to acknowledge that this experience might mis- lead us as regards the way things are in that world. In this sense, film experience is a perceptual experience that can get closer than standard perception and theater experience to illusion, hallucination and dream. 23 For the distinction between partial and total hallucinations, see A.D. Smith, The Problem of Perception (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002): 193. Note that I am putting total hallucination and dreams on a par not because I think they are, but just because I reckon that discussing their difference goes beyond the scope of this paper. ENRICO TERRONE 87 AN-ICON  If the perceptual experience is a genus among whose species one can find not only standard perception but also illusion, hallucination, and dream, then film ex- perience can be cast as a peculiar further species of the genus, which can emulate all the other mental states of that genus. This fact is exploited by those films that lead the spectator to share the deceptive perceptual experi- ences of a character. In films such as David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001) we share the partial hallucination of the heroes by being in turn deceived by our perceptual experience of the events portrayed. Likewise, in films such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) or Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944), we share the total hallucinations or dreams of the characters by wrongly casting certain film experiences as perceptions of events that actually occur in the story world. In Wilson’s terms,24 spectators of such films enjoy the proper perceptual experiences but fail to endow them with the proper epistemic status, which is not the reliability of standard perception but rather the unreli- ability of illusion, hallucination or dream. In David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), at least according to a popular interpretation of the film,25 dream, memory and perception are combined in a way that can be grasped only after the fact. The first part of the film is presented from an allegedly neutral perceptual perspective but later reveals itself to be a dream of the protagonist Di- ane Selwyn. The material of that dream comes from Diane’s memories constituting the flashbacks that we find in the second part of the film, which also provides us with a neu- tral perceptual perspective on the last moments of Diane’s life, from her waking up from her dream to her suicide. 24 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164. 25 See for instance B. Wyman, M. Garrone, A. Klein, “Everything you were afraid to ask about Mulholland Drive”, Salon (October 24, 2001), https://www.salon.com/2001/10/24/ mulholland_drive_analysis/; P. Bertetto, “L’analisi interpretativa. Mulholland Drive”, in P. Bertetto, ed., Metodologie di analisi del film (Rome-Bari: Laterza: 2007): 223-255. ENRICO TERRONE 88 AN-ICON  The phenomenological virtues of virtual reality compared to film While film provides us with a disembodied per- ceptual experience, virtual reality makes us perceive an egocentric space, that is, a space which is centered in our body in the way the space of ordinary perception is. Both or- dinary perception and virtual-reality experience are such as that our bodily movements correspond to change in our viewpoint whereas the viewpoint of film experience is in- dependent from the viewer’s body. Virtual reality thus shares with theater a sig- nificant proximity to ordinary perception that film, instead, lacks. Should we conclude that virtual reality, just like the- ater, is less apt than film to approximate to non-perceptual mental states such as memory or imagination? Not so. Film experience, as disembodied perception, is already an altered state in comparison to ordinary per- ception. Nothing else remains to be altered at the phenom- enological level. The only possible alterations, as I have argued earlier, are alterations in the epistemic status of our perceptual experience: clues in the context or in the content of film experience may lead us to cast it as the memory or the imagining of a character, or even as a de- ceptive experience such as an illusion, an hallucination or a dream. Virtual-reality experience and theater experience, on the other hand, are not intrinsically altered; they work just as ordinary perception works. Yet, virtual-reality expe- rience can be altered in a way in which theater experience surely cannot be altered. Even though the default mode of virtual-reality experience is the emulation of ordinary perception, a virtual reality system might be designed so to provide users with experiences of completely different kinds. Whether and how such experience can effectively emulate memory episodes and imaginings remains an open question. Arguably the emulation of perception has been the main aim of virtual reality technology so far. Still, this technology has also a potential for altering its basic per- ceptual mode thereby getting the user’s experience closer ENRICO TERRONE 89 AN-ICON  to other kinds of mental states. Emulating memory and imagination through perception, the great challenge for filmmakers in the twentieth century, might become the great challenge for virtual-reality makers in the twenty-first. Para- phrasing Panofsky’s statement, virtual reality might open up a world of possibilities of which film can never dream. ENRICO TERRONE 90 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/15460

On the altered states of machine vision. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory by Antonio Somaini Chatonsky Machine learning Digital images Paglen Steyerl Chatonsky Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti On the altered states of machine vision. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory Chatonsky by Antonio Somaini Abstract The landscape of contemporary visual culture and contemporary artistic practices is currently undergo- ing profound transformations caused by the application of technologies of machine learning to the vast domain of networked digital images. The impact of such technologies is so profound that it leads us to raise the very question of what we mean by “vision” and “image” in the age of artifi- cial intelligence. This paper will focus on the work of three artists – Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory Chatonsky – who have recently employed technologies of machine learning in non-standard ways. Rather than using them to train systems of machine vision with their different op- erations (face and emotion recognition, object and move- ment detection, etc.) and their different fields of application (surveillance, policing, process control, driverless vehicle guidance, etc.), they have used them in order to produce entirely new images, never seen before, that they present as altered states of the machine itself. Machine learning Digital images Paglen Steyerl Chatonsky To quote this essay: A. Somaini, “On the altered states of machine vision. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory Chatonsky”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 91-111 ANTONIO SOMAINI 91 AN-ICON  The landscape of contemporary visual culture and contemporary artistic practices is currently undergo- ing profound transformations caused by the application of technologies of machine learning – one of the areas of so-called “artificial intelligence” – to the vast domain of networked digital images. Three strictly interrelated phe- nomena, in particular, are producing a real tectonic shift in the contemporary iconosphere, introducing new ways of “seeing” and new “images” – we’ll return later to the mean- ing of these quotation marks – that extend and reorganize the field of the visible, while redrawing the borders between what can and what cannot be seen. These three strictly interrelated phenomena are: ჸ the new technologies of machine vision fuelled by pro- cesses of machine learning such as the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN); ჸ the ever-growing presence on the internet of trillions of networked digital images that are machine-readable, in the sense that they can be seen and analyzed by such technologies of ma- chine vision; ჸ the entirely new images that the processes of machine learning may generate. Considered from the perspective of the longue durée of the history of images and visual media, the ap- pearance of these three phenomena raises a whole series of aesthetic, epistemological, ontological, historical and political questions. Their impact onto contemporary visu- al culture is so profound that it leads us to raise the very question of what we mean by “vision” and “image” in the age of artificial intelligence. What is “seeing” when the human psycho-phys- iological process of vision is reduced, in the case of machine vision technologies, to entirely automated operations of pat- tern recognition and labelling, and when the various appli- cations of such operations (face and emotion recognition, object and motion detection) may be deployed across an ex- tremely vast visual field (all the still and moving images acces- sible online) that no human eye could ever attain? In speak- ing of “machine vision”, are we using an anthropomorphic ANTONIO SOMAINI 92 AN-ICON  term that we should discard in favor of a different set of technical terms, specifically related to the field of computer science and data analysis, that bear no connection with the physiological and psychological dynamics of human vision? Artists-researchers such as Francis Hunger and scholars such as Andreas Broeckmann (with his notion of “optical calculus” as “an unthinking, mindless mechanism, a calcu- lation based on optically derived input data, abstracted into calculable values, which can become part of computational procedures and operations”),1 Adrian MacKenzie and Anna Munster (with their ideas of a “platform seeing” operating onto “image ensembles” through an “invisual perception”),2 Fabian Offert and Peter Bell (with their idea according to which the “perceptual topology” of machines is irreconcil- able with human perception)3 have argued for the necessity of moving beyond anthropocentric frameworks and terms, highlighting the fact that machine vision poses a real chal- lenge for the humanities. Can we still use the term “image” for a digital file, encoded in some image format,4 that is machine-read- able even when it is not visible by human eyes, or that be- comes visible on a screen as a pattern of pixels only for a small fraction of time, spending the rest of its indefinite lifespan circulating across invisible digital networks? Can concepts such as that of “iconic difference” [ikonische Dif- ferenz],5 which highlights the fundamental perceptual dif- ference between an image and its surroundings (its “hors champ”) be still applied to machine-readable images? And what is the status of the entirely new im- ages produced by processes of machine learning? These 1 A. Broeckmann, “Optical Calculus”, paper presented November 2020 at the conference Images Beyond Control, FAMU, Prague, video, 5:01, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=FnAgBbInMfA. 2 A. MacKenzie, A. Munster, “Platform Seeing: Image Ensembles and Their Invisualities”, Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 5 (2019): 3-22. 3 F. Offert, P. Bell, “Perceptual bias and technical metapictures: critical machine vision as a humanities challenge”, AI & Society (2020), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146- 020-01058-z. 4 On the theory of formats, see M. Jancovic, A. Schneider, A. Volmar, eds., Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media Cultures (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2019). 5 On the notion of “iconic difference”, see G. Boehm, “Ikonische Differenz”, Rheinsprung 11. Zeitschrift für Bildkritik 1 (2011): 170-176. ANTONIO SOMAINI 93 AN-ICON  are images that are not produced through some traditional form of lens-based analog or digital optical recording, nor through traditional computer-generated imagery (CGI) sys- tems, but rather through processes belonging to the wide realm of artificial intelligence that either transform existing images in ways that were impossible until a few years ago, or create entirely new images, never seen before. What do such images represent, what kind of agency do they have, how do they mediate our visual relation to the past, the present, and the future? And why have such new images generated by processes of machine learning been so of- ten considered, both in popular culture and in the work of contemporary artists, to be the product of some kind of altered state – a “dream”, a “hallucination”, a “vision”, an “artificial imagination” – of the machine itself? Before we analyse the way in which this last question is raised, in different ways, by popular computer programs such as Google’s DeepDream (whose initial name echoed Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film “Inception”), and by the recent work of contemporary artists and theorists such as Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl and Grégory Chatonsky, let us begin with a quick overview of the current state of ma- chine vision technologies, with their operations and appli- cations, and of the new images produced by processes of machine learning that are increasingly appearing through- out contemporary visual culture. The impact of machine learning technologies onto contemporary visual culture First tested in the late 1950s, with image rec- ognition machines such as the Perceptron (developed at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory by Frank Rosenblatt in 1957), and then developed during the 1960s and 1970s as a way of imitating the human visual system in order to endow robots with intelligent behavior, machine vision technologies have entered a new phase, in recent years, with the development of machine learning processes, ANTONIO SOMAINI 94 AN-ICON  and with the possibility of using immense image databases accessible online as both training sets and fields of appli- cation.6 If in the 1960s and 1970s the goal was mainly to extract three-dimensional structures from images through the localization of edges, the labelling of lines, the detection of shapes and the modelling of volumes through feature extraction techniques such as the Hough transform (invent- ed by Richard Duda and Peter Hart in 1972, on the basis of a 1962 patent by Paul Hough), the recent development of machine learning techniques and the use of vast image training sets organized according to precise taxonomies – such as ImageNet, in which 14 millions of images are organized according to 21,000 categories derived from the WordNet hierarchy (a large lexical database of English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs)7 – have allowed a rapid increase in the precision of all the operations of ma- chine vision. Among such operations, we find pixel counting; segmenting, sorting, and thresholding; feature, edge, and depth detection; pattern recognition and discrimination; object detection, tracking, and measurement; motion cap- ture; color analysis; optical character recognition (this last operation allowing for the reading of words and texts within images, extending the act of machine “seeing” to a form of machine “reading”). For a few years now, such operations have been applied to the immense field of machine-readable images. A field whose dimensions may be imagined only if we understand that any networked digital image – wheth- er produced through some kind of optical recording, or entirely computer-generated, or a mix of the two, as it is often the case – may be analysed by machine vision tech- nologies based on processes of machine learning such as the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN).8 Starting from vast training sets containing images similar to the 6 For a general overview of computer vision and computer imagery, with its historical developments, see S. Arcagni, L’occhio della macchina (Turin: Einaudi, 2018). 7 “ImageNet”, accessed November 3, 2021, http://www.image-net.org/. 8 I. Goodfellow et al., “Generative adversarial nets”, Advances in neural information processing systems (2014): 2672-2680. ANTONIO SOMAINI 95 AN-ICON  ones the system has to learn to identify, and feeding such training sets into an ensemble of two adversarial neural networks that act as a Generator and a Discriminator that are in competition against one another, the GAN-based machine vision systems have gradually become more and more precise in performing their tasks. All the main smart phone producers have equipped their devices with cam- eras and image processing technologies that turn every photo we take into a machine-readable image, and internet giants such as Google and Facebook, as well as a host of other companies, have developed machine vision and face recognition systems capable of analysing the immense quantity of fixed and moving images that exist on the in- ternet and that continue to be uploaded every day, raising all sorts of ethical and political issues and highlighting the need for a broader legal framework that for the moment is largely missing.9 Considered together, such machine vision sys- tems are turning the contemporary digital iconosphere and the entire array of contemporary screens, with their various dimensions and degrees of definition,10 into a vast field for data mining and data aggregation. A field in which faces, bodies, gestures, expressions, emotions, objects, move- ments, places, atmospheres and moods – but also voices and sounds, through technologies of machine hearing – may be identified, labelled, stored, organized, retrieved, and processed as data that can be quickly accessed and activated for a wide variety of purposes: from surveillance to policing, from marketing to advertising, from the mon- itoring of industrial processes to military operations, from the functioning of driverless vehicles to that of drones and robots, from the study of the inside of the human body through the analysis of medical imagining all the way up to 9 As I complete the final revisions of this essay, on 2 November 2021, Facebook just announced its decision to stop using facial-recognition software that could automatically recognize people in photos and videos posted on the social network: a massive shift for a company that is currently trying to reposition itself, also through the new company name Meta, adopted in October 2021. 10 On the aesthetic, epistemological, historical and political implications of the high and low definition of images, see F. Casetti, A. Somaini, eds., La haute et la basse définition des images. Photographie, cinéma, art contemporain, culture visuelle (Milan-Udine: Mimesis, 2021). ANTONIO SOMAINI 96 AN-ICON  the study of the surface of the Earth and of climate change through the analysis of satellite images. Even disciplines that might seem to be distant from the most common cur- rent applications of machine vision technologies, such as art history and film studies, are beginning to test the pos- sibilities introduced by such an automated gaze, capable of “seeing” and analyzing, according to different criteria, vast quantities of visual reproductions of artworks or vast corpuses of films and videos in an extremely short time.11 In order to fully understand the impact of ma- chine learning onto contemporary visual culture, we need to add, to the vast field of machine vision technologies that we just described, the new images produced by processes of machine learning – often, the same GAN that are used to train and apply machine vision systems – that either transform pre-existing images in ways that were impossible until a few years ago, or create entirely new images, never seen before. In the first case, we are referring to processes of machine learning capable of transforming existing imag- es that can have very different applications: producing 3D models of objects from 2D images; changing photographs of human faces in order to show how an individual’s ap- pearance might change with age (as with the app Face- App) or by merging a face with another face (Faceswap);12 animating in a highly realistic way the old photograph of a deceased person (Deep Nostalgia, developed by My- Heritage);13 creating street maps from satellite imagery;14 taking any given video, and “upscaling” it, by increasing its frame rate and its definition. An emblematic example 11 See for example the various experiments being developed at the Google Arts & Culture Lab: “Google Arts & Culture”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://artsandculture.google. com/, or the way in which the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam is testing new ways of accessing its collections through a program fuelled by machine vision systems: “Jan Bot”, accessed December 2, 2021, https://www.jan.bot/. 12 The website of Faceswap, which announces itself as “the leading free and OpenSource multiplatform Deepfakes software”: “Faceswap”, accessed November 3, 2021, https:// faceswap.dev/. 13 “Deep Nostalgia”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.myheritage.fr/deep-nostalgia. 14 R. Matheson, “Using artificial intelligence to enrich digital maps. Model tags road features based on satellite images, to improve GPS navigation in places with limited map data”, MIT News, January 23, 2020, https://news.mit.edu/2020/artificial-intelligence-digital-maps-0123. ANTONIO SOMAINI 97 AN-ICON  of this last application, which may alter significantly our experience of visual documents of the past, would be the videos realized by Denis Shiryaev15 in which, through a process of machine learning, a Lumière film such as L’Ar- rivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896) is transformed from the original 16 frames per second to 60 frames per second, from the original 1.33:1 format to a contemporary 16:9 format, and from the original, grainy 35mm analog film to a 4K digital resolution.16 In other examples of imag- es transformed by machine learning, the transformations are much more radical, as it happens with the so-called “deepfakes”: videos that use neural networks in order to ma- nipulate the images and the sounds of pre-existing videos – in some cases a single, pre-existing image – producing new videos that have a high potential to deceive. Among the many examples that can now be found across the in- ternet in different domains such as pornography, politics and social media, pornographic videos in which faces of celebrities are swapped onto the bodies of porn actors, a TikTok account with a whole series of odd videos by a “Deep Tom Cruise”,17 or speeches by public figures such as Barack Obama18 and Queen Elizabeth19 whose content has been completely altered in such a way that the movements of their mouths perfectly match the new, invented words they are uttering. And among the applications of deepfakes in the musical realm, the “new” songs by long deceased singers, whose style and voice are reproduced in a highly realistic way by applications of machine learning such as Jukebox, developed by OpenAI20: a “resurrecting” function 15 “Denis Shiryaev”, Youtube channel, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.youtube. com/c/DenisShiryaev/videos. For an online platform offering video enhancement powered by AI, see: “Neural Love”, accessed December 2, 2021, https://neural.love/. 16 The video of the upscaled version of L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896) can be found all across YouTube, in various black-and-white and colored version. For a version in color, see: Deoldify videos, “[DeOldified] Arrival on a Train at La Ciotat (The Lumière Brothers, 1896)”, Youtube video, February 4, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqbOhqXHL7E. 17 “Deep Tom Cruise”, TikTok account, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.tiktok. com/@deeptomcruise. 18 BuzzFeed Video, “You Won’t Believe What Obama Says in This Video!”, Youtube video, April 17, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0. 19 Channel 4, “Deepfake Queen: 2020 Alternative Christmas Message”, Youtube video, December 25, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvY-Abd2FfM. 20 “Jukebox”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 98 AN-ICON  that in the animated photographs of deceased persons of Deep Nostalgia. In the second case, the use of machine learning processes leads to the creation of entirely new images or sections of images: modelling patterns of motion (for ex- ample, crowd motion) in video, thereby leading computer generated imagery, in some cases fuelled by artificial intelli- gence, to produce new kinds of “contingent motion”;21 pro- ducing highly photorealistic images of objects and environ- ments for different kinds of advertising; inventing perfectly realistic faces of people that actually do not exist through open source softwares such as StyleGan and then make them accessible through projects such as Philip Wang’s This Person Does Not Exist.22 To these widespread applications of machine learning we may add the hybrid, unprecedented imagery produced by the software DeepDream, created in 2015 by the Google engineer and artist Alexander Mordvintsev: a program that uses Convolutional Neural Networks in order to enhance patterns in pre-existing images, creating a form of algorithmic pareidolia, the impression of seeing a figure where there is none, which is here generated by a process which repeatedly detects in a given image patterns and shapes that the machine vision system has been trained to see. 23 The result of such a recursive process, in which every new image is submitted again to the same kind of pattern and shape recognition, are images that recall an entire psychedelic iconography that spans through cinema, photography, the visual arts and even so-called art brut: images that are here presented as a sort of dream – a hal- lucinogenic, psychedelic dream – of the machine itself. 21 J. Schonig, “Contingent Motion: Rethinking the ‘Wind in the Trees’ in Early Cinema and CGI”, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 40, no. 1 (2018): 30-61. 22 “This Person does not exist”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/. 23 The program is now open source: see “Deep Dream Generator”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://deepdreamgenerator.com/. See also: “Alexander Mordvintsev”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://znah.net/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 99 AN-ICON  Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 The original image (Fig. 1) has been modified by applying ten (Fig. 2) and then fifty (Fig. 3) iterations of the software DeepDream, the network having been trained to perceive dogs. ANTONIO SOMAINI 100 AN-ICON  Exploring the “altered states” of machine vision through Generative Adversarial Networks The idea that lies at the basis of the DeepDream software – the idea that machine learning technologies, and in particular the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), may be used in order to explore and reveal the altered states of machine vision – can also be found in the recent works of artists (often active also as theorists) such as Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and Grégory Chatonsky.24 By insisting on the “creative”, image-producing potential of Generative Adversarial neural networks – rather than on their standard application for the training of machine vision systems – the three of them explore a vast field of images that they consider to be “hallucinations”, “visions of the future”, or the product of an “artificial imagination”, char- acterized by a new form of realism, a “disrealism”. Trevor Paglen’s entire work as an artist and the- orist, since 2016, has been dedicated to the attempt of un- derstanding and visualizing the principles that lie at the basis of machine vision technology. Through texts (sometimes written in collaboration with the researcher Kate Crawford),25 exhibitions, performances, and works made of still and mov- ing images, Paglen has tried to highlight not only the social and political biases that are inherent in the way machine vi- sion systems are structured, but also the way in which such systems diverge profoundly from human vision.26 In an article published in December 2016 in The New Inquiry with the title “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)”,27 Paglen discusses the new challeng- es that arise in a context in which “sight” itself has be- come machine-operated and separated by human eyes, 24 Among the first artists who started working with GANs, one should remember Helena Sarin and Mike Tyka. See “Helena Sarin”, AI Artist, accessed November 3, 2021 https://aiartists.org/ helena-sarin, and “Mike Tyka”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://miketyka.com/. 25 K. Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 26 See: “Trevor Paglen”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://paglen.studio/. 27 T. Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)”, The New Inquiry, December 8, 2016: https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 101 AN-ICON  participating in a vast field of image operations. Arguing that what we are currently experiencing is part of a vast transition from human-seeable to machine-readable imag- es – a new condition in which “the overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop” – Paglen writes that if we want to understand the invisible world of machine-machine vi- sual culture, we need to unlearn to see like humans. We need to learn how to see a parallel universe composed of activations, keypoints, eigenfaces, feature transforms, classifiers, training sets, and the like.28 We need to unlearn to see like humans. But how can we not see like humans, how can we step out of our human point of view? Accomplishing this apparently impos- sible task – a task which echoes the recurrent philosophical problem of how to step out of one’s own socio-historical position, of one’s own cognitive and emotional framework – has been the main goal of Trevor Paglen’s artistic practice during the last few years, as we can see in a body of works that was initially produced in 2017 through various col- laborations with computer vision and artificial intelligence researchers as an artist-in-residence at Stanford Univer- sity, and was first exhibited at the Metro Pictures Gallery in New York in an exhibition entitled A Study of Invisible Images (September 8 – October 21, 2017) 29, before being presented at various other galleries and museums such as the Osservatorio of the Fondazione Prada in Milan, or the Carnegie Museum of Art in Philadelphia, in an exhibition entitled Opposing Geometries (2020). The works in the exhibition at Metro Pictures present a possible response to the challenge of how to pen- etrate within systems of machine vision that tend to expel the human gaze from their processes. Among them, we find the attempt to master the machine learning techniques 28 Ibid. 29 A series of images of the works presented in the exhibition can be found at the following address: “Trevor Paglen. A study of Invisible Images”, Metro Pictures, accessed January 19, 2020, http://origin.www.metropictures.com/exhibitions/trevor-paglen4. ANTONIO SOMAINI 102 AN-ICON  that are commonly used for machine vision applications, in order to hack them and lead them to produce entirely new images, never seen before, that may be considered as a form of hallucination of machine vision. This is what happens in a series of still images entitled Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, which Paglen developed through a non-standard application, in three steps, of Generative Adversarial Networks.30 The first step consisted in establishing new, original training sets. Instead of using the usual corpuses of images that are used to train machine vision systems in recognizing faces, objects, places and even emotions – corpuses that are often derived by pre-existing and easily available image databases such as the already mentioned ImageNet – Paglen established new training sets composed by images derived from literature, psychoanalysis, political economy, military history, and poetry. Among the various taxonomies he used in order to compose his training sets we find “monsters that have been historically interpreted as allegories of capitalism”, such as vampires, zombies, etc.; “omens and portents”, such as comets, eclipses, etc.; “figures and places that appear in Sigmund Freud’s The In- terpretation of Dreams”, a corpus which includes various symbols from Freudian psychoanalysis; “Eye-Machines”, a series of images clearly inspired by Harun Farocki’s videoin- stallations Eye-Machine I, II, III (2001-2003) and containing images of surveillance cameras or of spaces under surveil- lance; “American Predators”, a corpus containing various predatory animals, plants, and humans indigenous to the United States, mixed with military hardware like predator drones and stealth bombers. The second step consisted in feeding these un- usual training sets into the two neural networks of the GAN system: the Discriminator and the Generator. These two networks begin interacting with one another in an adver- sarial, competitive way, in such a way that the Discriminator, 30 Information on the Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations can be found in Trevor Paglen’s website: T. Paglen, “Hallucinations”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://paglen. studio/2020/04/09/hallucinations/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 103 AN-ICON  after having received the initial training set, has to evaluate the images that it receives from the Generator, deciding whether they resemble or not to those of the training set. As the process unfolds through reiterated exchanges between the two neural networks, the Discriminator becomes more and more precise and effective in evaluating the images that are submitted to it. The third step consists in the artist intervening in the process and choosing to extract, at a given mo- ment, one of the images produced by the Generator: an image that emerges from the sequence of the adversarial exchanges, and that is the result of one of the countless attempts by the Generator to test the precision of the Dis- criminator, trying to fool it. In the case of the series of the Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, all the images selected by Paglen seem to bear some kind of resemblance to the ones contained in the original training sets – even though we cannot really assess the degree of this resemblance, because the training sets are not accessible to us – while displaying at the same time different forms of deviations and aberrations that recall a sort of psychedelic imaginary. Among Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hal- lucinations, we find images with titles such as Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), Comet (Corpus: Omens and Portents), The Great Hall (Corpus: The Interpreta- tion of Dreams), Venus Flytrap (Corpus: American Pred- ators), A Prison Without Gards (Corpus: Eye-Machines). In the case of Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), ANTONIO SOMAINI 104 AN-ICON  Fig. 4. Trevor Paglen, Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), dye sublimation metal print, 2017 the Discriminator was trained on thousands of images of zombies, vampires, Frankensteins, and other ghosts that have been at some point – be it in essays, liter- ary texts, or films – associated with capitalism. Paglen then set the Generator and Discriminator running until they had synthesized a series of images that corresponded at least in part to a specific class within the given corpus. From all of the even slightly acceptable options that the GAN gen- erated, Paglen then selected the one we see in the series exhibited at Metro Pictures as the “finished work”. There may be multiple reasons behind Trevor Paglen’s decision to call these images “hallucinations”. To begin with, such images recall a type of imagery that we might consider to be “psychedelic” or “surrealist”: in some of them, we definitely see echoes of Max Ernst, or Salvador Dalì. A second reason may lie in the attempt to emphasize the fact that the result of this non-standard application of the processes of machine learning – a process which un- folds within a closed machine-to-machine space, the in- visible space of the back-and-forth between the Generator and the Discriminator from which human eyes are excluded – produces images that, just like human hallucinations, have no footing in exterior reality, or may merge in unpredictable ANTONIO SOMAINI 105 AN-ICON  way with shapes and forms stemming from the perception of the outer world. Finally, the term “adversarially evolved hallucinations” may underline the fact that these images are the result of a machine learning process gone astray: a process which has been hacked and led to drift away from its original, standard applications. The reference to the term “hallucinations”, though, should not be misleading. What Trevor Paglen tries to show us with his Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations has really nothing to do with a disruption of the orderly functioning of human consciousness. What they highlight, rather, is the radical otherness of machine vision, if compared with human vision. A radical otherness based on operations that have nothing to do with human, embodied vision, which we may just try to grasp through the impossible attempt of “unlearn- ing to see like humans”. We find a different application of images pro- duced by machine learning in This is the Future, an instal- lation by Hito Steyerl which was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2019, and which was conceived as an expan- sion of the exhibition Power Plants at the Serpentine Gal- lery in London the previous year. In the Venice installation, Hito Steyerl arranged onto different platforms a series of nine videos in which one could see images resembling to some kind of “vegetal” time-lapse imagery: flowers quickly blossoming and spreading out, plants and bamboo shoots growing in height and width. Fig. 5a ANTONIO SOMAINI 106 AN-ICON  Fig. 5b Fig. 5c Figg. 5a, 5b and 5c. Hito Steyerl, This if the Future: A 100% Accurate Prediction, stills from the single channel HD video, color, sound, 16’, 2019 What interested Steyerl in the use of neural networks in this installation was the predictive nature of machine learning, and the status of “visions of the future” of its imagery: the fact that neural predictive algorithms op- erate through statistical models and predictions based on immense, “big data” databases, and are therefore related to the vast spectrum of predictive systems (be they finan- cial, political, meteorological, environmental, etc.) that are present in contemporary “control societies”, while at the same time being part of the longue durée of the history of prediction systems elaborated by human cultures. The main video presented in Hito Steyerl’s instal- lation, entitled This is the Future: A 100% Accurate Prediction, consists of images produced through a collaboration with the programmer Damien Henry, author of a series of videos entitled A Train Window31 in which a machine learning algo- rithm has been trained to predict the next frame of a video by analyzing samples from the previous image, in such a way that, as in a perfect feedback loop, each output image 31 The videos, programmed with Tensorflow, are available at: D. Henry, “A train window”, Magenta, October 3rd, 2018, https://magenta.tensorflow.org/nfp_p2p. I thank both Hito Steyerl and Damien Henry for useful information on the coding used in This is the Future. ANTONIO SOMAINI 107 AN-ICON  becomes the input for the next step in the calculation. In this way, after intentionally choosing or producing only the first image, all the following ones are generated by the algorithm, without any human intervention. In Hito Steyerl’s work, this idea of a video entirely made up of images “predicted” by neural networks and located, as the video says, “0.04 sec- onds in the future”, is presented as a new kind of documen- tary imagery: an imagery that can at the same time predict and document the future, as paradoxical as this may seem. The video begins with white text on a black background that reads: “These are documentary images of the future. Not about what it will bring, but about what it is made of”. The next five sections of the video – Heja’s Garden, The Future: A History, Bambusa Futuris, Power Plants and Heja’s Pre- diction – lead us to a psychedelic landscape of images that morph sample images stemming from categories such as “sea”, “fish”, “flower”, “rose” or “orchid”: each of them is produced by a neural network that, as the electronic voice accompanying the video tells us, “can see one fraction of a second into the future”. Second Earth (2019) by Grégory Chatonsky takes another route into the iconosphere produced by GAN-driven machine learning. What interests him is the idea of an “artificial imagination”, capable of visualizing, through the means of artificial intelligence, “the halluci- nation of a senseless machine, a monument dedicated to the memory of the extinct human species”.32 Himself in charge of the coding which lies at the base of the various elements and the various media mobilized in his work, Cha- tonsky works in particular on what he calls the “chaînage”, the “sequencing” of different artificial intelligence sys- tems that, taken all together, produce a whole cascade of new forms: among them, neural networks capable of generating new texts (read by synthetic voices) starting from some given text databases, or capable of generat- ing images from given texts, and texts from given images, 32 See the presentation of Second Earth: G. Chatonsky, “Second Earth / Terre Seconde”, accessed November 29, 2021, http://chatonsky.net/earth/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 108 AN-ICON  with a new kind of AI-powered ekphrasis. The metamor- phical universe that we see in the videos of Second Earth, Fig. 6a Fig. 6b Fig. 6c Fig. 6d Figg. 6a, 6b, 6c and 6d. Grégory Chatonsky, Second Earth, stills from one of the videos in the installation, 2019 a work that Chatonsky presents as an “evolving installation”, evokes the idea of a form-generating power that used to be rooted in nature and which is now taken over by machines which are incorporating and re-elaborating the trillions of ANTONIO SOMAINI 109 AN-ICON  images that humans have uploaded on the internet as a sort of hypertrophic memory. The text accompanying the work reads: “Accumulate data. Outsourcing our memories. Feed software with this data so that it produces similar data. Produce realism without reality, become possible. Disap- pear. Coming back in our absence, like somebody else”.33 As products of a “realism without reality”, what Chatonsky calls a “disrealism”,34 the images produced through Generative Adversarial Networks in Second Earth do have a hallucinatory, oneiric, “surrealistic” quality, that bears a strange kind of “family resemblance” to the ones that we find in Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, Steyerl’s This is the Future, and in the work of other artists who have recently explored the GAN-generated imagery, such as Pierre Huyghe in his installation Uumwelt (2018). In Chatonsky’s Second Earth, these images do refer to some kind of “outer reality”, but the status of this outer reality is highly unclear. On the one hand, they bear traces of the imag- es contained in the training sets that have been employed in order to activate the GANs: in the cases of the stills from one of the videos in the installation that are here reproduced, such training sets referred probably to categories such as “birds”, “faces”, “eyes”, etc., and the images contained in the training sets – be they actual photographs, or still from videos – do in most cases refer to some profilmic reality. On the other, extracted as they are from the “latent space” of a process of machine learning in motion from the pole of absolute noise to the pole of a perfect re- semblance to the images of the training set, the images of Second Earth refer to another kind of reality, one that does not exist yet. We are here in the domain of “anticipation”, rather than “prediction”,35 in the perspective of an explora- 33 G. Chatonsky, Second Earth, http://chatonsky.net/earth/. 34 Grégory Chatonsky has begun to use and theorize this term in recent lectures held at the Jeu de Paume and at Campus Condorcet in Paris, in the framework of the lecture cycle L’esthétique à l’heure du pixel (September 2021 – May 2022) and the seminar L’image à l’épreuve des machines. Reconfigurations du visible (25-26 October 2021). See for example “Le disréalisme (le pixel perdu de l’espace latent)”, Jeu de Paume, accessed november 29, 2021, https://jeudepaume.org/evenement/seminaire-esthetique-pixel-1/. 35 Unpublished conversation with Grégory Chatonsky, 2019, whom I thank for the useful information on the different software used in Second Earth. ANTONIO SOMAINI 110 AN-ICON  tion of a non-human “artificial imagination”, rather than in the denunciation of the pervasive presence of systems of control and surveillance, as it was the case in the work of Hito Steyerl. At the basis of Chatonsky’s “Second Earth”, we find the observation that the machine was becoming capable of automatically producing a phenomenal quantity of realistic images from the accumulation of data on the Web. This realism is similar to the world we know, but it is not an identical reproduction. Species metamorphose into each other, stones mutate into plants and the ocean shores into unseen organisms. The result: this “second” Earth, a reinvention of our world, produced by a machine that wonders about the nature of its production. Over fifty years ago, in his seminal Understand- ing Media. The Extensions of Man (1964), Marshall McLuhan formulated the idea that art could become, in some deci- sive historical moments, a form of “advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology”, and added that new art forms might become in these moments “social navigation charts”, help- ing us find some orientation across a sensorium entirely transformed by new media and new technologies. Today, while we witness the first signs of what promises to be a massive impact of artificial intelligence onto all areas of our psychic, social, and cultural life, the works of artists such as Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl and Grégory Chatonsky do appear like “navigation charts”: their exploration of the al- tered states of machine vision through the appropriation and the détournement of technologies such as the Gen- erative Adversarial Networks help us better understand the aesthetic, epistemological and political implications of the transformations that such technologies are producing within contemporary visual culture. Taken together, they highlight the fact that what is at stake is the very status of what we mean by “image” and by “vision” in the age of artificial intelligence. ANTONIO SOMAINI 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/15460

On the altered states of machine vision. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory by Antonio Somaini Chatonsky Machine learning Digital images Paglen Steyerl Chatonsky Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti On the altered states of machine vision. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory Chatonsky by Antonio Somaini Abstract The landscape of contemporary visual culture and contemporary artistic practices is currently undergo- ing profound transformations caused by the application of technologies of machine learning to the vast domain of networked digital images. The impact of such technologies is so profound that it leads us to raise the very question of what we mean by “vision” and “image” in the age of artifi- cial intelligence. This paper will focus on the work of three artists – Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory Chatonsky – who have recently employed technologies of machine learning in non-standard ways. Rather than using them to train systems of machine vision with their different op- erations (face and emotion recognition, object and move- ment detection, etc.) and their different fields of application (surveillance, policing, process control, driverless vehicle guidance, etc.), they have used them in order to produce entirely new images, never seen before, that they present as altered states of the machine itself. Machine learning Digital images Paglen Steyerl Chatonsky To quote this essay: A. Somaini, “On the altered states of machine vision. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory Chatonsky”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 91-111 ANTONIO SOMAINI 91 AN-ICON  The landscape of contemporary visual culture and contemporary artistic practices is currently undergo- ing profound transformations caused by the application of technologies of machine learning – one of the areas of so-called “artificial intelligence” – to the vast domain of networked digital images. Three strictly interrelated phe- nomena, in particular, are producing a real tectonic shift in the contemporary iconosphere, introducing new ways of “seeing” and new “images” – we’ll return later to the mean- ing of these quotation marks – that extend and reorganize the field of the visible, while redrawing the borders between what can and what cannot be seen. These three strictly interrelated phenomena are: ჸ the new technologies of machine vision fuelled by pro- cesses of machine learning such as the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN); ჸ the ever-growing presence on the internet of trillions of networked digital images that are machine-readable, in the sense that they can be seen and analyzed by such technologies of ma- chine vision; ჸ the entirely new images that the processes of machine learning may generate. Considered from the perspective of the longue durée of the history of images and visual media, the ap- pearance of these three phenomena raises a whole series of aesthetic, epistemological, ontological, historical and political questions. Their impact onto contemporary visu- al culture is so profound that it leads us to raise the very question of what we mean by “vision” and “image” in the age of artificial intelligence. What is “seeing” when the human psycho-phys- iological process of vision is reduced, in the case of machine vision technologies, to entirely automated operations of pat- tern recognition and labelling, and when the various appli- cations of such operations (face and emotion recognition, object and motion detection) may be deployed across an ex- tremely vast visual field (all the still and moving images acces- sible online) that no human eye could ever attain? In speak- ing of “machine vision”, are we using an anthropomorphic ANTONIO SOMAINI 92 AN-ICON  term that we should discard in favor of a different set of technical terms, specifically related to the field of computer science and data analysis, that bear no connection with the physiological and psychological dynamics of human vision? Artists-researchers such as Francis Hunger and scholars such as Andreas Broeckmann (with his notion of “optical calculus” as “an unthinking, mindless mechanism, a calcu- lation based on optically derived input data, abstracted into calculable values, which can become part of computational procedures and operations”),1 Adrian MacKenzie and Anna Munster (with their ideas of a “platform seeing” operating onto “image ensembles” through an “invisual perception”),2 Fabian Offert and Peter Bell (with their idea according to which the “perceptual topology” of machines is irreconcil- able with human perception)3 have argued for the necessity of moving beyond anthropocentric frameworks and terms, highlighting the fact that machine vision poses a real chal- lenge for the humanities. Can we still use the term “image” for a digital file, encoded in some image format,4 that is machine-read- able even when it is not visible by human eyes, or that be- comes visible on a screen as a pattern of pixels only for a small fraction of time, spending the rest of its indefinite lifespan circulating across invisible digital networks? Can concepts such as that of “iconic difference” [ikonische Dif- ferenz],5 which highlights the fundamental perceptual dif- ference between an image and its surroundings (its “hors champ”) be still applied to machine-readable images? And what is the status of the entirely new im- ages produced by processes of machine learning? These 1 A. Broeckmann, “Optical Calculus”, paper presented November 2020 at the conference Images Beyond Control, FAMU, Prague, video, 5:01, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=FnAgBbInMfA. 2 A. MacKenzie, A. Munster, “Platform Seeing: Image Ensembles and Their Invisualities”, Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 5 (2019): 3-22. 3 F. Offert, P. Bell, “Perceptual bias and technical metapictures: critical machine vision as a humanities challenge”, AI & Society (2020), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146- 020-01058-z. 4 On the theory of formats, see M. Jancovic, A. Schneider, A. Volmar, eds., Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media Cultures (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2019). 5 On the notion of “iconic difference”, see G. Boehm, “Ikonische Differenz”, Rheinsprung 11. Zeitschrift für Bildkritik 1 (2011): 170-176. ANTONIO SOMAINI 93 AN-ICON  are images that are not produced through some traditional form of lens-based analog or digital optical recording, nor through traditional computer-generated imagery (CGI) sys- tems, but rather through processes belonging to the wide realm of artificial intelligence that either transform existing images in ways that were impossible until a few years ago, or create entirely new images, never seen before. What do such images represent, what kind of agency do they have, how do they mediate our visual relation to the past, the present, and the future? And why have such new images generated by processes of machine learning been so of- ten considered, both in popular culture and in the work of contemporary artists, to be the product of some kind of altered state – a “dream”, a “hallucination”, a “vision”, an “artificial imagination” – of the machine itself? Before we analyse the way in which this last question is raised, in different ways, by popular computer programs such as Google’s DeepDream (whose initial name echoed Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film “Inception”), and by the recent work of contemporary artists and theorists such as Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl and Grégory Chatonsky, let us begin with a quick overview of the current state of ma- chine vision technologies, with their operations and appli- cations, and of the new images produced by processes of machine learning that are increasingly appearing through- out contemporary visual culture. The impact of machine learning technologies onto contemporary visual culture First tested in the late 1950s, with image rec- ognition machines such as the Perceptron (developed at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory by Frank Rosenblatt in 1957), and then developed during the 1960s and 1970s as a way of imitating the human visual system in order to endow robots with intelligent behavior, machine vision technologies have entered a new phase, in recent years, with the development of machine learning processes, ANTONIO SOMAINI 94 AN-ICON  and with the possibility of using immense image databases accessible online as both training sets and fields of appli- cation.6 If in the 1960s and 1970s the goal was mainly to extract three-dimensional structures from images through the localization of edges, the labelling of lines, the detection of shapes and the modelling of volumes through feature extraction techniques such as the Hough transform (invent- ed by Richard Duda and Peter Hart in 1972, on the basis of a 1962 patent by Paul Hough), the recent development of machine learning techniques and the use of vast image training sets organized according to precise taxonomies – such as ImageNet, in which 14 millions of images are organized according to 21,000 categories derived from the WordNet hierarchy (a large lexical database of English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs)7 – have allowed a rapid increase in the precision of all the operations of ma- chine vision. Among such operations, we find pixel counting; segmenting, sorting, and thresholding; feature, edge, and depth detection; pattern recognition and discrimination; object detection, tracking, and measurement; motion cap- ture; color analysis; optical character recognition (this last operation allowing for the reading of words and texts within images, extending the act of machine “seeing” to a form of machine “reading”). For a few years now, such operations have been applied to the immense field of machine-readable images. A field whose dimensions may be imagined only if we understand that any networked digital image – wheth- er produced through some kind of optical recording, or entirely computer-generated, or a mix of the two, as it is often the case – may be analysed by machine vision tech- nologies based on processes of machine learning such as the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN).8 Starting from vast training sets containing images similar to the 6 For a general overview of computer vision and computer imagery, with its historical developments, see S. Arcagni, L’occhio della macchina (Turin: Einaudi, 2018). 7 “ImageNet”, accessed November 3, 2021, http://www.image-net.org/. 8 I. Goodfellow et al., “Generative adversarial nets”, Advances in neural information processing systems (2014): 2672-2680. ANTONIO SOMAINI 95 AN-ICON  ones the system has to learn to identify, and feeding such training sets into an ensemble of two adversarial neural networks that act as a Generator and a Discriminator that are in competition against one another, the GAN-based machine vision systems have gradually become more and more precise in performing their tasks. All the main smart phone producers have equipped their devices with cam- eras and image processing technologies that turn every photo we take into a machine-readable image, and internet giants such as Google and Facebook, as well as a host of other companies, have developed machine vision and face recognition systems capable of analysing the immense quantity of fixed and moving images that exist on the in- ternet and that continue to be uploaded every day, raising all sorts of ethical and political issues and highlighting the need for a broader legal framework that for the moment is largely missing.9 Considered together, such machine vision sys- tems are turning the contemporary digital iconosphere and the entire array of contemporary screens, with their various dimensions and degrees of definition,10 into a vast field for data mining and data aggregation. A field in which faces, bodies, gestures, expressions, emotions, objects, move- ments, places, atmospheres and moods – but also voices and sounds, through technologies of machine hearing – may be identified, labelled, stored, organized, retrieved, and processed as data that can be quickly accessed and activated for a wide variety of purposes: from surveillance to policing, from marketing to advertising, from the mon- itoring of industrial processes to military operations, from the functioning of driverless vehicles to that of drones and robots, from the study of the inside of the human body through the analysis of medical imagining all the way up to 9 As I complete the final revisions of this essay, on 2 November 2021, Facebook just announced its decision to stop using facial-recognition software that could automatically recognize people in photos and videos posted on the social network: a massive shift for a company that is currently trying to reposition itself, also through the new company name Meta, adopted in October 2021. 10 On the aesthetic, epistemological, historical and political implications of the high and low definition of images, see F. Casetti, A. Somaini, eds., La haute et la basse définition des images. Photographie, cinéma, art contemporain, culture visuelle (Milan-Udine: Mimesis, 2021). ANTONIO SOMAINI 96 AN-ICON  the study of the surface of the Earth and of climate change through the analysis of satellite images. Even disciplines that might seem to be distant from the most common cur- rent applications of machine vision technologies, such as art history and film studies, are beginning to test the pos- sibilities introduced by such an automated gaze, capable of “seeing” and analyzing, according to different criteria, vast quantities of visual reproductions of artworks or vast corpuses of films and videos in an extremely short time.11 In order to fully understand the impact of ma- chine learning onto contemporary visual culture, we need to add, to the vast field of machine vision technologies that we just described, the new images produced by processes of machine learning – often, the same GAN that are used to train and apply machine vision systems – that either transform pre-existing images in ways that were impossible until a few years ago, or create entirely new images, never seen before. In the first case, we are referring to processes of machine learning capable of transforming existing imag- es that can have very different applications: producing 3D models of objects from 2D images; changing photographs of human faces in order to show how an individual’s ap- pearance might change with age (as with the app Face- App) or by merging a face with another face (Faceswap);12 animating in a highly realistic way the old photograph of a deceased person (Deep Nostalgia, developed by My- Heritage);13 creating street maps from satellite imagery;14 taking any given video, and “upscaling” it, by increasing its frame rate and its definition. An emblematic example 11 See for example the various experiments being developed at the Google Arts & Culture Lab: “Google Arts & Culture”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://artsandculture.google. com/, or the way in which the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam is testing new ways of accessing its collections through a program fuelled by machine vision systems: “Jan Bot”, accessed December 2, 2021, https://www.jan.bot/. 12 The website of Faceswap, which announces itself as “the leading free and OpenSource multiplatform Deepfakes software”: “Faceswap”, accessed November 3, 2021, https:// faceswap.dev/. 13 “Deep Nostalgia”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.myheritage.fr/deep-nostalgia. 14 R. Matheson, “Using artificial intelligence to enrich digital maps. Model tags road features based on satellite images, to improve GPS navigation in places with limited map data”, MIT News, January 23, 2020, https://news.mit.edu/2020/artificial-intelligence-digital-maps-0123. ANTONIO SOMAINI 97 AN-ICON  of this last application, which may alter significantly our experience of visual documents of the past, would be the videos realized by Denis Shiryaev15 in which, through a process of machine learning, a Lumière film such as L’Ar- rivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896) is transformed from the original 16 frames per second to 60 frames per second, from the original 1.33:1 format to a contemporary 16:9 format, and from the original, grainy 35mm analog film to a 4K digital resolution.16 In other examples of imag- es transformed by machine learning, the transformations are much more radical, as it happens with the so-called “deepfakes”: videos that use neural networks in order to ma- nipulate the images and the sounds of pre-existing videos – in some cases a single, pre-existing image – producing new videos that have a high potential to deceive. Among the many examples that can now be found across the in- ternet in different domains such as pornography, politics and social media, pornographic videos in which faces of celebrities are swapped onto the bodies of porn actors, a TikTok account with a whole series of odd videos by a “Deep Tom Cruise”,17 or speeches by public figures such as Barack Obama18 and Queen Elizabeth19 whose content has been completely altered in such a way that the movements of their mouths perfectly match the new, invented words they are uttering. And among the applications of deepfakes in the musical realm, the “new” songs by long deceased singers, whose style and voice are reproduced in a highly realistic way by applications of machine learning such as Jukebox, developed by OpenAI20: a “resurrecting” function 15 “Denis Shiryaev”, Youtube channel, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.youtube. com/c/DenisShiryaev/videos. For an online platform offering video enhancement powered by AI, see: “Neural Love”, accessed December 2, 2021, https://neural.love/. 16 The video of the upscaled version of L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896) can be found all across YouTube, in various black-and-white and colored version. For a version in color, see: Deoldify videos, “[DeOldified] Arrival on a Train at La Ciotat (The Lumière Brothers, 1896)”, Youtube video, February 4, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqbOhqXHL7E. 17 “Deep Tom Cruise”, TikTok account, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.tiktok. com/@deeptomcruise. 18 BuzzFeed Video, “You Won’t Believe What Obama Says in This Video!”, Youtube video, April 17, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0. 19 Channel 4, “Deepfake Queen: 2020 Alternative Christmas Message”, Youtube video, December 25, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvY-Abd2FfM. 20 “Jukebox”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 98 AN-ICON  that in the animated photographs of deceased persons of Deep Nostalgia. In the second case, the use of machine learning processes leads to the creation of entirely new images or sections of images: modelling patterns of motion (for ex- ample, crowd motion) in video, thereby leading computer generated imagery, in some cases fuelled by artificial intelli- gence, to produce new kinds of “contingent motion”;21 pro- ducing highly photorealistic images of objects and environ- ments for different kinds of advertising; inventing perfectly realistic faces of people that actually do not exist through open source softwares such as StyleGan and then make them accessible through projects such as Philip Wang’s This Person Does Not Exist.22 To these widespread applications of machine learning we may add the hybrid, unprecedented imagery produced by the software DeepDream, created in 2015 by the Google engineer and artist Alexander Mordvintsev: a program that uses Convolutional Neural Networks in order to enhance patterns in pre-existing images, creating a form of algorithmic pareidolia, the impression of seeing a figure where there is none, which is here generated by a process which repeatedly detects in a given image patterns and shapes that the machine vision system has been trained to see. 23 The result of such a recursive process, in which every new image is submitted again to the same kind of pattern and shape recognition, are images that recall an entire psychedelic iconography that spans through cinema, photography, the visual arts and even so-called art brut: images that are here presented as a sort of dream – a hal- lucinogenic, psychedelic dream – of the machine itself. 21 J. Schonig, “Contingent Motion: Rethinking the ‘Wind in the Trees’ in Early Cinema and CGI”, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 40, no. 1 (2018): 30-61. 22 “This Person does not exist”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/. 23 The program is now open source: see “Deep Dream Generator”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://deepdreamgenerator.com/. See also: “Alexander Mordvintsev”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://znah.net/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 99 AN-ICON  Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 The original image (Fig. 1) has been modified by applying ten (Fig. 2) and then fifty (Fig. 3) iterations of the software DeepDream, the network having been trained to perceive dogs. ANTONIO SOMAINI 100 AN-ICON  Exploring the “altered states” of machine vision through Generative Adversarial Networks The idea that lies at the basis of the DeepDream software – the idea that machine learning technologies, and in particular the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), may be used in order to explore and reveal the altered states of machine vision – can also be found in the recent works of artists (often active also as theorists) such as Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and Grégory Chatonsky.24 By insisting on the “creative”, image-producing potential of Generative Adversarial neural networks – rather than on their standard application for the training of machine vision systems – the three of them explore a vast field of images that they consider to be “hallucinations”, “visions of the future”, or the product of an “artificial imagination”, char- acterized by a new form of realism, a “disrealism”. Trevor Paglen’s entire work as an artist and the- orist, since 2016, has been dedicated to the attempt of un- derstanding and visualizing the principles that lie at the basis of machine vision technology. Through texts (sometimes written in collaboration with the researcher Kate Crawford),25 exhibitions, performances, and works made of still and mov- ing images, Paglen has tried to highlight not only the social and political biases that are inherent in the way machine vi- sion systems are structured, but also the way in which such systems diverge profoundly from human vision.26 In an article published in December 2016 in The New Inquiry with the title “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)”,27 Paglen discusses the new challeng- es that arise in a context in which “sight” itself has be- come machine-operated and separated by human eyes, 24 Among the first artists who started working with GANs, one should remember Helena Sarin and Mike Tyka. See “Helena Sarin”, AI Artist, accessed November 3, 2021 https://aiartists.org/ helena-sarin, and “Mike Tyka”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://miketyka.com/. 25 K. Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 26 See: “Trevor Paglen”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://paglen.studio/. 27 T. Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)”, The New Inquiry, December 8, 2016: https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 101 AN-ICON  participating in a vast field of image operations. Arguing that what we are currently experiencing is part of a vast transition from human-seeable to machine-readable imag- es – a new condition in which “the overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop” – Paglen writes that if we want to understand the invisible world of machine-machine vi- sual culture, we need to unlearn to see like humans. We need to learn how to see a parallel universe composed of activations, keypoints, eigenfaces, feature transforms, classifiers, training sets, and the like.28 We need to unlearn to see like humans. But how can we not see like humans, how can we step out of our human point of view? Accomplishing this apparently impos- sible task – a task which echoes the recurrent philosophical problem of how to step out of one’s own socio-historical position, of one’s own cognitive and emotional framework – has been the main goal of Trevor Paglen’s artistic practice during the last few years, as we can see in a body of works that was initially produced in 2017 through various col- laborations with computer vision and artificial intelligence researchers as an artist-in-residence at Stanford Univer- sity, and was first exhibited at the Metro Pictures Gallery in New York in an exhibition entitled A Study of Invisible Images (September 8 – October 21, 2017) 29, before being presented at various other galleries and museums such as the Osservatorio of the Fondazione Prada in Milan, or the Carnegie Museum of Art in Philadelphia, in an exhibition entitled Opposing Geometries (2020). The works in the exhibition at Metro Pictures present a possible response to the challenge of how to pen- etrate within systems of machine vision that tend to expel the human gaze from their processes. Among them, we find the attempt to master the machine learning techniques 28 Ibid. 29 A series of images of the works presented in the exhibition can be found at the following address: “Trevor Paglen. A study of Invisible Images”, Metro Pictures, accessed January 19, 2020, http://origin.www.metropictures.com/exhibitions/trevor-paglen4. ANTONIO SOMAINI 102 AN-ICON  that are commonly used for machine vision applications, in order to hack them and lead them to produce entirely new images, never seen before, that may be considered as a form of hallucination of machine vision. This is what happens in a series of still images entitled Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, which Paglen developed through a non-standard application, in three steps, of Generative Adversarial Networks.30 The first step consisted in establishing new, original training sets. Instead of using the usual corpuses of images that are used to train machine vision systems in recognizing faces, objects, places and even emotions – corpuses that are often derived by pre-existing and easily available image databases such as the already mentioned ImageNet – Paglen established new training sets composed by images derived from literature, psychoanalysis, political economy, military history, and poetry. Among the various taxonomies he used in order to compose his training sets we find “monsters that have been historically interpreted as allegories of capitalism”, such as vampires, zombies, etc.; “omens and portents”, such as comets, eclipses, etc.; “figures and places that appear in Sigmund Freud’s The In- terpretation of Dreams”, a corpus which includes various symbols from Freudian psychoanalysis; “Eye-Machines”, a series of images clearly inspired by Harun Farocki’s videoin- stallations Eye-Machine I, II, III (2001-2003) and containing images of surveillance cameras or of spaces under surveil- lance; “American Predators”, a corpus containing various predatory animals, plants, and humans indigenous to the United States, mixed with military hardware like predator drones and stealth bombers. The second step consisted in feeding these un- usual training sets into the two neural networks of the GAN system: the Discriminator and the Generator. These two networks begin interacting with one another in an adver- sarial, competitive way, in such a way that the Discriminator, 30 Information on the Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations can be found in Trevor Paglen’s website: T. Paglen, “Hallucinations”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://paglen. studio/2020/04/09/hallucinations/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 103 AN-ICON  after having received the initial training set, has to evaluate the images that it receives from the Generator, deciding whether they resemble or not to those of the training set. As the process unfolds through reiterated exchanges between the two neural networks, the Discriminator becomes more and more precise and effective in evaluating the images that are submitted to it. The third step consists in the artist intervening in the process and choosing to extract, at a given mo- ment, one of the images produced by the Generator: an image that emerges from the sequence of the adversarial exchanges, and that is the result of one of the countless attempts by the Generator to test the precision of the Dis- criminator, trying to fool it. In the case of the series of the Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, all the images selected by Paglen seem to bear some kind of resemblance to the ones contained in the original training sets – even though we cannot really assess the degree of this resemblance, because the training sets are not accessible to us – while displaying at the same time different forms of deviations and aberrations that recall a sort of psychedelic imaginary. Among Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hal- lucinations, we find images with titles such as Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), Comet (Corpus: Omens and Portents), The Great Hall (Corpus: The Interpreta- tion of Dreams), Venus Flytrap (Corpus: American Pred- ators), A Prison Without Gards (Corpus: Eye-Machines). In the case of Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), ANTONIO SOMAINI 104 AN-ICON  Fig. 4. Trevor Paglen, Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), dye sublimation metal print, 2017 the Discriminator was trained on thousands of images of zombies, vampires, Frankensteins, and other ghosts that have been at some point – be it in essays, liter- ary texts, or films – associated with capitalism. Paglen then set the Generator and Discriminator running until they had synthesized a series of images that corresponded at least in part to a specific class within the given corpus. From all of the even slightly acceptable options that the GAN gen- erated, Paglen then selected the one we see in the series exhibited at Metro Pictures as the “finished work”. There may be multiple reasons behind Trevor Paglen’s decision to call these images “hallucinations”. To begin with, such images recall a type of imagery that we might consider to be “psychedelic” or “surrealist”: in some of them, we definitely see echoes of Max Ernst, or Salvador Dalì. A second reason may lie in the attempt to emphasize the fact that the result of this non-standard application of the processes of machine learning – a process which un- folds within a closed machine-to-machine space, the in- visible space of the back-and-forth between the Generator and the Discriminator from which human eyes are excluded – produces images that, just like human hallucinations, have no footing in exterior reality, or may merge in unpredictable ANTONIO SOMAINI 105 AN-ICON  way with shapes and forms stemming from the perception of the outer world. Finally, the term “adversarially evolved hallucinations” may underline the fact that these images are the result of a machine learning process gone astray: a process which has been hacked and led to drift away from its original, standard applications. The reference to the term “hallucinations”, though, should not be misleading. What Trevor Paglen tries to show us with his Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations has really nothing to do with a disruption of the orderly functioning of human consciousness. What they highlight, rather, is the radical otherness of machine vision, if compared with human vision. A radical otherness based on operations that have nothing to do with human, embodied vision, which we may just try to grasp through the impossible attempt of “unlearn- ing to see like humans”. We find a different application of images pro- duced by machine learning in This is the Future, an instal- lation by Hito Steyerl which was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2019, and which was conceived as an expan- sion of the exhibition Power Plants at the Serpentine Gal- lery in London the previous year. In the Venice installation, Hito Steyerl arranged onto different platforms a series of nine videos in which one could see images resembling to some kind of “vegetal” time-lapse imagery: flowers quickly blossoming and spreading out, plants and bamboo shoots growing in height and width. Fig. 5a ANTONIO SOMAINI 106 AN-ICON  Fig. 5b Fig. 5c Figg. 5a, 5b and 5c. Hito Steyerl, This if the Future: A 100% Accurate Prediction, stills from the single channel HD video, color, sound, 16’, 2019 What interested Steyerl in the use of neural networks in this installation was the predictive nature of machine learning, and the status of “visions of the future” of its imagery: the fact that neural predictive algorithms op- erate through statistical models and predictions based on immense, “big data” databases, and are therefore related to the vast spectrum of predictive systems (be they finan- cial, political, meteorological, environmental, etc.) that are present in contemporary “control societies”, while at the same time being part of the longue durée of the history of prediction systems elaborated by human cultures. The main video presented in Hito Steyerl’s instal- lation, entitled This is the Future: A 100% Accurate Prediction, consists of images produced through a collaboration with the programmer Damien Henry, author of a series of videos entitled A Train Window31 in which a machine learning algo- rithm has been trained to predict the next frame of a video by analyzing samples from the previous image, in such a way that, as in a perfect feedback loop, each output image 31 The videos, programmed with Tensorflow, are available at: D. Henry, “A train window”, Magenta, October 3rd, 2018, https://magenta.tensorflow.org/nfp_p2p. I thank both Hito Steyerl and Damien Henry for useful information on the coding used in This is the Future. ANTONIO SOMAINI 107 AN-ICON  becomes the input for the next step in the calculation. In this way, after intentionally choosing or producing only the first image, all the following ones are generated by the algorithm, without any human intervention. In Hito Steyerl’s work, this idea of a video entirely made up of images “predicted” by neural networks and located, as the video says, “0.04 sec- onds in the future”, is presented as a new kind of documen- tary imagery: an imagery that can at the same time predict and document the future, as paradoxical as this may seem. The video begins with white text on a black background that reads: “These are documentary images of the future. Not about what it will bring, but about what it is made of”. The next five sections of the video – Heja’s Garden, The Future: A History, Bambusa Futuris, Power Plants and Heja’s Pre- diction – lead us to a psychedelic landscape of images that morph sample images stemming from categories such as “sea”, “fish”, “flower”, “rose” or “orchid”: each of them is produced by a neural network that, as the electronic voice accompanying the video tells us, “can see one fraction of a second into the future”. Second Earth (2019) by Grégory Chatonsky takes another route into the iconosphere produced by GAN-driven machine learning. What interests him is the idea of an “artificial imagination”, capable of visualizing, through the means of artificial intelligence, “the halluci- nation of a senseless machine, a monument dedicated to the memory of the extinct human species”.32 Himself in charge of the coding which lies at the base of the various elements and the various media mobilized in his work, Cha- tonsky works in particular on what he calls the “chaînage”, the “sequencing” of different artificial intelligence sys- tems that, taken all together, produce a whole cascade of new forms: among them, neural networks capable of generating new texts (read by synthetic voices) starting from some given text databases, or capable of generat- ing images from given texts, and texts from given images, 32 See the presentation of Second Earth: G. Chatonsky, “Second Earth / Terre Seconde”, accessed November 29, 2021, http://chatonsky.net/earth/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 108 AN-ICON  with a new kind of AI-powered ekphrasis. The metamor- phical universe that we see in the videos of Second Earth, Fig. 6a Fig. 6b Fig. 6c Fig. 6d Figg. 6a, 6b, 6c and 6d. Grégory Chatonsky, Second Earth, stills from one of the videos in the installation, 2019 a work that Chatonsky presents as an “evolving installation”, evokes the idea of a form-generating power that used to be rooted in nature and which is now taken over by machines which are incorporating and re-elaborating the trillions of ANTONIO SOMAINI 109 AN-ICON  images that humans have uploaded on the internet as a sort of hypertrophic memory. The text accompanying the work reads: “Accumulate data. Outsourcing our memories. Feed software with this data so that it produces similar data. Produce realism without reality, become possible. Disap- pear. Coming back in our absence, like somebody else”.33 As products of a “realism without reality”, what Chatonsky calls a “disrealism”,34 the images produced through Generative Adversarial Networks in Second Earth do have a hallucinatory, oneiric, “surrealistic” quality, that bears a strange kind of “family resemblance” to the ones that we find in Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, Steyerl’s This is the Future, and in the work of other artists who have recently explored the GAN-generated imagery, such as Pierre Huyghe in his installation Uumwelt (2018). In Chatonsky’s Second Earth, these images do refer to some kind of “outer reality”, but the status of this outer reality is highly unclear. On the one hand, they bear traces of the imag- es contained in the training sets that have been employed in order to activate the GANs: in the cases of the stills from one of the videos in the installation that are here reproduced, such training sets referred probably to categories such as “birds”, “faces”, “eyes”, etc., and the images contained in the training sets – be they actual photographs, or still from videos – do in most cases refer to some profilmic reality. On the other, extracted as they are from the “latent space” of a process of machine learning in motion from the pole of absolute noise to the pole of a perfect re- semblance to the images of the training set, the images of Second Earth refer to another kind of reality, one that does not exist yet. We are here in the domain of “anticipation”, rather than “prediction”,35 in the perspective of an explora- 33 G. Chatonsky, Second Earth, http://chatonsky.net/earth/. 34 Grégory Chatonsky has begun to use and theorize this term in recent lectures held at the Jeu de Paume and at Campus Condorcet in Paris, in the framework of the lecture cycle L’esthétique à l’heure du pixel (September 2021 – May 2022) and the seminar L’image à l’épreuve des machines. Reconfigurations du visible (25-26 October 2021). See for example “Le disréalisme (le pixel perdu de l’espace latent)”, Jeu de Paume, accessed november 29, 2021, https://jeudepaume.org/evenement/seminaire-esthetique-pixel-1/. 35 Unpublished conversation with Grégory Chatonsky, 2019, whom I thank for the useful information on the different software used in Second Earth. ANTONIO SOMAINI 110 AN-ICON  tion of a non-human “artificial imagination”, rather than in the denunciation of the pervasive presence of systems of control and surveillance, as it was the case in the work of Hito Steyerl. At the basis of Chatonsky’s “Second Earth”, we find the observation that the machine was becoming capable of automatically producing a phenomenal quantity of realistic images from the accumulation of data on the Web. This realism is similar to the world we know, but it is not an identical reproduction. Species metamorphose into each other, stones mutate into plants and the ocean shores into unseen organisms. The result: this “second” Earth, a reinvention of our world, produced by a machine that wonders about the nature of its production. Over fifty years ago, in his seminal Understand- ing Media. The Extensions of Man (1964), Marshall McLuhan formulated the idea that art could become, in some deci- sive historical moments, a form of “advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology”, and added that new art forms might become in these moments “social navigation charts”, help- ing us find some orientation across a sensorium entirely transformed by new media and new technologies. Today, while we witness the first signs of what promises to be a massive impact of artificial intelligence onto all areas of our psychic, social, and cultural life, the works of artists such as Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl and Grégory Chatonsky do appear like “navigation charts”: their exploration of the al- tered states of machine vision through the appropriation and the détournement of technologies such as the Gen- erative Adversarial Networks help us better understand the aesthetic, epistemological and political implications of the transformations that such technologies are producing within contemporary visual culture. Taken together, they highlight the fact that what is at stake is the very status of what we mean by “image” and by “vision” in the age of artificial intelligence. ANTONIO SOMAINI 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/15443

Perception, hallucination, virtual reality. From controlled hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard Perception by Claudio Paolucci Imagination Hallucination Enunciation Resident Evil Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Perception, hallucination, virtual reality. From controlled hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard by Claudio Paolucci Abstract In this paper, I will work on the relationship be- tween perception and imagination in Virtual Reality, claiming that “hallucination” is the ordinary motor also for online perception and not only a deviant form of it. First, I will deal with the problem of perception from the point of view of cognitive semiotics and I will try to underline the crucial role of imagination, claiming that perception is a form of “con- trolled hallucination”. Later, I will focus on the relationship between perception, hallucination, and memory in Virtual Reality. On the one hand, I will claim that Virtual Reality expresses the transition from actual perception to imagina- tion, memory or dream through another actual perception. On the other hand, I will claim that it can express it with- out any problems through the old techniques coming from cinema and other audiovisual languages, since they par- tially share the very same formal apparatus of enunciation. I will demonstrate all of this by analyzing Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Perception Imagination Hallucination Enunciation Resident Evil To quote this essay: 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 CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 112 AN-ICON  Perception, imagination, and the control of the reality First, I will deal with the problem of percep- tion from the point of view of cognitive semiotics.1 I will try to underline the crucial role of imagination, claiming that perception is a form of “controlled hallucination”,2 where, by “controlled hallucination”, I mean the product of the imagination controlled by the world. The main idea is that “hallucination” is the model of perception and not a devi- ant form of it. With “hallucination”, as defined in percep- tion studies and in the neurogeometry of vision,3 I mean the morphological activity of the production of forms by the imagination, which remains crucial both when it is not controlled by the world – as in the case of hallucination, imagination, or dream – and when it is controlled by the world, as in the case of online perception. In Virtual Reality, the world that controls perception is substituted by a tech- nology, a prosthesis capable of creating a strong effect of reality, a simulacrum with an effect of presence that no oth- er audiovisual has ever been able to build.4 In Augmented Reality, on the other side, the technology adds elements to the world that controls perception, without a full-blown substitution, as it happens with Virtual Reality. Maybe, the word “hallucination” can be mis- leading, since perceptual phenomena under the aegis of hallucination may seem to lose the concreteness that I want to characterize them as having. It is possible that 1 See C. Paolucci, Cognitive Semiotics. Integrating signs, minds, menaing and cognition (Berlin-New York: Springer, 2021). 2 See A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”, in L. Albertazzi et al., eds., Perception Beyond Inference: The Information Content of Visual Processes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010): 27-57. 3 See J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”; A. Sarti et al., “The symplectic structure of the primary visual cortex”, Biological Cybernetics 98 (2008): 33-48. 4 See C. Paolucci, “Una percezione macchinica: realtà virtuale e realtà aumentata tra simulacri e protesi dell’enunciazione”, in F. Biggio et al., eds., Meaning–Making in Extended Reality. Senso e Virtualità (Rome: Aracne, I Saggi di Lexia, 2020): 43-62. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 113 AN-ICON  “figuration” would fit better with the ideas I will develop here, since no Sartrean “derealization” is involved.5 However, since our brains try to guess what is out there, and to the extent that that guess matches the evolving sensory data, we perceive the world, in Surfing Uncertainty, Clark recalls the slogan coined by the vision scientist Ramesh Jain that perception is “controlled hallucination”. This is the direc- tion I am going to take. But, precisely because “this view of perception puts us in genuine cognitive contact with the salient aspects of our environment”, Clark suggests we consider hallucination as a form of “uncontrolled percep- tion”.6 However, Clark’s view – if it is put like that – is the classical one that thinks of perception as grounding both hallucination and imagination, which are supposed to be “deviant” or “uncontrolled” forms of perception. Since I want to claim the opposite, I will continue to use “hallucination”, and since there is a well-established tradition regarding this concept in the field of perception studies, I will do so with the caveat that “hallucination” does not imply any kind of “derealization” of perceptual phenomena from a phenom- enological point of view.7 Indeed, with “hallucination”, or “figuration”, I indicate a process of microgenesis8 that continuously pro- duces the next thread of perceptual experience while the current one fades, and does so without voluntary control.9 I claim that meaning guides this microgenesis, or hallucina- tion, and that imagination is the engine of this microgenesis guided by meaning. 5 See G. Matteucci, Estetica e natura umana. La mente estesa tra percezione, emozione ed espressione (Rome: Carocci, 2019). 6 A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: 326. See also paragraph 6.10. 7 See S. Gallagher, D. Zahavi, “Primal impression and enactive perception”, in V. Arstila, D. Lloyd, eds., Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014): 83-99. 8 See J.W. Brown, Self–Embodying Mind: Process, Brain Dynamics and the Conscious Present (Barytown, NY: Barytown Ltd, 2020) 9 See J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 114 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Kanizsa’s triangle. For instance, in Kanizsa’s triangle (Fig. 1), the triangle is totally a product of our hallucination, since it is the only thing that is not present in the stimuli. It is not by chance that, as Reddy and colleagues show, not only are online perception and imagination closely related in the brain, but perception, as it occurs in creatures like us, is co-emergent with imagination.10 What we perceive is literal- ly (not metaphorically) the future, not the present, because perception is the anticipation of the next thread of sensory information through previous knowledge. Indeed, in percep- tion we build through imagination the world that we expect. There is a beautiful experiment by Adams and colleagues that shows that, in some circumstances, we hear the presence of the absence, that is, we hallucinate something that is not there, but we expect to be there.11 When silence arrives, we literally do not hear it as we are supposed to do (i.e. as nothing playing). In its place, we hear the presence of the absent sound that we were 10 L. Reddy et al., “Reading the mindʼs eye: decoding category information during mental imagery”, NeuroImage 50, no. 2, (2010): 818-825; G. Ganis et al. “Brain areas underlying visual mental imagery and visual perception: An fMRI study”, in Cognitive Brain Research 20, no. 2 (2004): 226-241. 11 R.A. Adams et al., “Predictions not commands: active inference in the motor system”, Brain Structure and Function 218, no. 3 (2013): 611-643. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 115 AN-ICON  expecting. Adams and colleagues’ experiment runs as fol- lows. They used a simple computer simulation of birdsong. A multi-layer prediction machine processes sequences of simulated bird-chirps. The simulations were then repeated but omitting the last three chirps of the original signal. At the first missing chirp, the network responds with a strong precise moment where the first missing chirp should have occurred, the system generated a brief, transient illusory percept. This hallucinated percept was not strong, but the timing was correct with respect to the missing chirp. Thus, our perceptive system first dimly “perceived” (hallucinated) the missing chirp, before responding with a strong error signal when the actual absence of the anticipated sensory evidence became apparent. Of course, Kanizsa’s triangle is a visual correspondent of Adams and colleagues’ ex- periment. This is what I call perception as a “controlled hallucination”, which is the general functioning of our rich, world-revealing perception at any level, since it concerns an organism structurally coupled with its environment trying to minimize disorder and surprise.12 The Goethean account of perception I refer here to what Jan Koenderink, a cognitive scientist and mathematician who works on the connection between theory of singularities and perception, used to call the “Marrian” and the “Goethean” accounts of perception. ■ According to the Marrian account: perception is the result of standard computations on optical data. ■ According to the Goethean account: perception is con- trolled hallucination, or “controlled figuration”. The mainstream view in cognitive science and neuroscience, which is often also the commonsense view, 12 S. Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 116 AN-ICON  is that perception is all about a kind of passive imprinting of the world upon the sense organs and the brain. As Eg- ner and colleagues say, “on traditional accounts the visual system was seen as a passive analyzer of bottom-up sen- sory information”.13 This is a view of the perceiving brain as highly stimulus-driven, taking energetic inputs from the senses and turning them into a coherent percept by a kind of inwards flowing stream. The Predictive Processing account of percep- tion takes a different direction and includes a top-down predictive aspect in its account.14 However, Predictive Pro- cessing thinks of perception as a kind of new schematism between aesthetics (the sensory data) and the concepts (the priors). According to this view, our brains are proac- tive: they are constantly buzzing as they try to predict the sensory signals arriving across all modalities. When such proactive brains “match” the incoming sensory signal, we perceive the world, understand it, and are immediately posi- tioned to imagine it so as to act in it too. However, “halluci- nation” is different from the mainstream notion of “prior”. A prior – as used in Bayesian inference – is a generic, usually statistical, property.15 For example, light comes from above is such a prior (if put in suitable format). It applies, on the average, for terrestrial animals that live in open spaces. Such priors package ‘frozen’ prior experience as it were. ‘Hallucinations’ differ by not being frozen, applying to the actual situation. Hallucinations can be regarded as specific, necessar- ily tentative, instantiations of the observer’s present “situational awareness” instead of its average past.16 13 T. Egner et al., “Expectation and surprise determine neural population responses in the ventral visual stream”, Journal of Neuroscience 30, no. 49 (2010): 16601-16608. 14 See A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty. 15 D. Purves, “Why we see things the way we do: evidence for a wholly empirical strategy of vision”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 356 (2001): 285-297. 16 J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”: 32. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 117 AN-ICON  This is important, because we do not always update our perceptions according to our past experience and according to the changes in our priors. This is very well seen in the popular Muller-Layer illusion, where even when we learn that the two lines have the same length, we still keep on seeing them in the previous way. In per- ception, “data” are constructed through an attunement of the organism and the world, where the organism looks for elements that are worth for him to look for. For instance, as in Kanizsa’s triangle, we look for edges and we perceive edges even if edges are the only thing that are not present in the stimulus. This is because, given evolutionary pressure and experience driven plasticity, we are wired to the environment in order to produce states that track edges when exposed to discontinuities. The system is physically at- tuned to such things, ‘set up to be set off’ by such visual discontinuities.17 Exploring the world, the organism casts his questions to the environment through imagination and pre- dicts its answers until he encounters resistance. This very action turns optical or sound structure into “data”, which are not sent from the world to the organism through senses but are the actual product of the autopoietic structure of the system of perception. Perception occurs when the top down activity of the imagination succeeds at generating the sensory data for itself, building a coherent story that paves the way for efficacious action. When it can gener- ate the future sensory data, the agent perceives the world. When it cannot, encountering a resistance, it tries a new attunement or changes the world through action. Therefore, data are built up because we produce them in looking for what we need for action, in order to minimize our work in the environment. 17 S. Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: 120. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 118 AN-ICON  Moving towards virtual and augmented reality The difference between the mainstream view, where data are sent by the environment and processed through perception, and the view where they are the product of what we look for in a coupled environment, can be operationalized as follows: perception is sensorily guid- ed potential behavior.18 Potential is key here. Perception is grounded on imagination, as it concerns the potential behavior con- nected to a coherent “story” we are building in order to act in the world and minimize disorder.19 Perception as sensorily guided potential be- havior is meant to reveal a world of salient, meaningful, in- teracting causes selected in the light of human needs and possibilities, which is exactly what pragmatists had in mind when they were telling us that the meaning of something consists in its conceivable practical bearings. This also marks the difference between pragmatism and behaviorism, since perception is neither action nor behavior. This prag- matist idea is consistent with the Affordance Competition Hypothesis originally introduced by Cisek,20 which is also a key hypothesis for the Predictive Processing by Andy Clark.21 The brain processes sensory information to specify, in parallel, several potential actions that are currently avail- able. These potential actions compete against each other 18 J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”: 32. 19 C. Paolucci, “Social cognition, mindreading and narratives. A cognitive semiotics perspective on narrative practices from early mindreading to autism spectrum disorders”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18, no. 2 (2019): 375-400; and Cognitive Semiotics. Integrating Signs, Minds, Meaning and Cognition (Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer, 2021). 20 P. Cisek, “Cortical mechanisms of action selection: The affordance competition hypothesis”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 362 (2007): 1585-1599. 21 A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Chapter 6. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 119 AN-ICON  for further processing, while information is collected to bias this competition until a single response is selected.22 If we go beyond Cisek’s terminology of “pro- cessing information”, like I think we have to do in order to focus on the main problem of perception as controlled hallucination, we see that, at the moment, we are see- ing a good deal of confirmation regarding this “pragma- tist” approach from the neurosciences.23 The classic dis- tinction between perception, cognition and action simply fails to reflect not only the phenomenology of our expe- rience, but also the global functional architecture of the brain, where, for instance, motor systems are active and play a huge part also in perception, decision making, social cognition and problem solving.24 Increasing and highly suggestive evidence challenges the view of core cognitive capacities (such as planning and deciding) as neurophysiologically distinct from the circuitry of sensorimotor con- trol. For example, decisions concerning eye movements and the execution of eye movements recruit highly overlapping circuits in lateral intraparietal area (LIP), frontal eye fields (FEF), and the superior colliculus [...]. In the same vein, a perceptual decision task (one in which the decision is reported by an arm movement) re- vealed marked responses within premotor cortex corresponding to the process of deciding upon a response (Romo et al. 2004). Quite generally, wherever a decision is to be reported by (or oth- erwise invokes) some motor action, there looks to be an entwining 22 P. Cisek, “Cortical mechanisms of action selection”: 1585. 23 See C. Paolucci, “Per una concezione strutturale della cognizione: semiotica e scienze cognitive tra embodiment ed estensione della mente”, in M. Graziano, C. Luverà, eds., Bioestetica, bioetica, biopolitica. I linguaggi delle scienze cognitive (Messina: Corisco Edizioni, 2012): 245-276; V. Cuccio, F. Caruana, “Il corpo come icona. Abduzione, strumenti ed Embodied Simulation”, VS-Quaderni di Studi Semiotici 120 (2015): 93-103. 24 See V. Gallese, “Mirror neurons and the neural exploitation hypothesis: from embodied simulation to social cognition”, in J.A. Pineda, ed., Mirror Neuron Systems (New York: Humana Press, 2009): 163-190; A.M. Borghi, F. Caruana, “Embodied Cognition, una nuova psicologia”, Giornale Italiano di Psicologia 35, no. 1 (2013): 23-48; V. Gallese et al., “A unifying view of the basis of social cognition”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8, no. 9 (2004): 396-403; G. Rizzolatti, C. Sinigaglia, “Mirror neurons and motor intentionality”, Functional Neurology 22, no. 4 (2007): 205-221. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 120 AN-ICON of perceptuo-motor processing and decision-making, leading Cis- ek and Kalaska to suggest that ‘decisions, at least those reported through actions, are made within the same sensorimotor circuits that are responsible for planning and executing the associated action’ (Cisek and Kalaska 2011: 274). In cortical associative regions such as posterior parietal cortex (PPC), Cisek and Kalaska go on to argue, activity does not seem in any way to respect the tradi- tional divisions between perception, cognition, and action. Instead we find neuronal populations that trade in shifting and context-re- sponsive combinations of perceiving, deciding, and acting, and in which even single cells may participate in many such functions (Andersen and Buneo 2003).25 If perception is supposed to work as a process that is continuous with action, the Marrian casual chain is inverted. Instead of “data” arriving at the eye, being pro- cessed, being further processed and finally resulting in a “representation” of the scene in front of us, the agent ex- plores the world in any conceivable direction, casting his questions and producing data in relation to what he needs for action, until it encounters resistance. This is why imagination is the real engine for online perception. Since imagination is a faculty that allows us to move our consciousness from a proximal to a distal place, which can be in the past (memory), future (pros- pects) or in an invented reality, this “looking for the future” in online perception, trying to anticipate the next thread of the world, is grounded exactly on imagination. This places Virtual Reality and Augmented Real- ity (VAR) in radical continuity with online perception. Indeed, if, in phenomenological terms, hallucination is a “percep- tion in the absence of the external object”, and if the ob- jects that appear in virtual reality are artificial simulacra of presence that we perceive without them being anchored in 25 A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: 178. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 121 AN-ICON  our experience of the physical world, we shall understand immersive virtual experience as a form of voluntary and deliberate hallucination. But this does not imply any kind of derealization: it simply implies the substitution of the control of the world with the control of a technology. This is why VAR promises important scientific applications, which, in a few years, will radically change many of our laboratories of psychology, neuroscience and cognitive sciences. Indeed, on the one hand, we want a world in which reality is not so “real” as to modify the ex- perimental results and influence them, and VAR provides us with only a virtual reality, which can be controlled in detail and put into brackets at will. On the other hand, we also want a world that is not so unreal as to be indistinguish- able from the normal conditions of a laboratory, which at full capacity lives by cutting off every variable that cannot be controlled and ends up producing data that have the purpose of explaining our experience in a condition that we know to be a radical impoverishment of this very same experience. VARs allows us to create a very strong effect of presence within a world-environment,26 capable of sim- ulating a reality that remains only virtual and can therefore be controlled in its different parameters. At the same time, VAR allows us to increase the “gradient of reality” inside a laboratory, integrating those experiences and variables that a laboratory usually tends to cut away, in the name of the robustness of its measurements. Thus, the conditions of the laboratory are “augmented” with a reconstructed and simulated reality, which we can see and experience only thanks to the prostheses of VAR. In this respect, VAR is a prosthetic technology that is in its own way unprecedented, capable of generating a controllable world without losing at the same time the phenomenological richness of the world. 26 A. Pinotti, “Self–negating images: towards an-iconology”, Proceedings 2017, I, 856 (2017). CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 122 AN-ICON  Precisely because of its ability to make the world present through perception, without the world being in any way unamendable – since it can be controlled – it is completely normal that people who set up environments in VAR exploit this possibility, preferring online perception to other expressive possibilities and using online percep- tion in order to express dreams, hallucinations or memo- ries. However, this choice does not in any way reside in a technological, semiotic or enunciative limit of VAR and its language. On the contrary, it is only a “stylistic” choice, which can be suspended. As we will see, many of these suspensions, which result in the use of old cinematographic techniques within Virtual Reality, can be seen for example in an extraordinary game for Play Station VR such as Res- ident Evil 7: Biohazard. Elsewehere,27 I tried to show how, from a semi- otic point of view,28 VAR works by holding together a formal apparatus of the prosthetic type of enunciation, typical of audiovisuals, and a formal apparatus of enunciation of the simulacral type, which is instead typical of other se- miotic systems, such as verbal language.29 If this is true, as I believe it is, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are not incapable of effectively representing the modifications of perception that cinema has always expressed through its representative strategies, such as dissolve, shift from 27 C. Paolucci, “Una percezione macchinica”. 28 Some semiotic approaches to VR can be found in G. Bettetini, L’Ulisse semiotico e le sirene informatiche (Milano: Bompiani, 2006); and B.R. Barricelli et al., “Semiotic Framework for Virtual Reality Usability and UX Evaluation: a Pilot Study”, in M. De Marsico et al., eds., Games-Human Interaction (2018): 1-6. A nice take on the illusory cancellation of the distance that occurs during an immersive experience and the establishment of a critical distance in the user, linked to the emergence of a meta experiential competence, can be found in F. Biggio, “Semiotics of distances in virtual and augmented environments”, Img Journal 2, no. 3 (2020): 82-103. Some important remarks on virtuality and subjectivity can be found in a nice book by Ruggero Eugeni, La condizione postmediale (Brescia: La scuola, 2015) and in the reader edited by F. Biggio et al., Meaning-Making in Extended Reality. Senso e Virtualità (Rome: Aracne, 2020). However, the most comprehensive and original semiotic work on this topic is the PhD thesis by Gianmarco Giuliana, Meaningfulness and Experience in Virtual Realities. Semiotics of a Digital Pla(y)typus, University of Turin (2021). 29 See C. Paolucci, “Prothèses de la subjectivité. L’appareil formel de l’énonciation dans l’audiovisuel”, in M.G. Dondero et al., eds., Les plis du visuel. Réflexivité et énonciation dans l’image (Limoges: Éditions Lambert-Lucas, 2017): 53-68. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 123 AN-ICON  color to black-and-white, flou or blur, used to indicate, in a point-of-view shot, the transition from actual perception to memory, dream, daydream, fantasy, or hallucination. VAR can use all these techniques without any problems at all, since it shares with cinema and audiovisual languages the very same formal apparatus of enunciation. We can have a dissolve or a shift from color to black-and-white also in VAR. If this is not done, or it is not done so often, it is only because of a choice from the “authors” or the VAR, who clearly opt for a “pan-perceptive way” for stylistic or “aes- thetical” reasons. But this does not mean that VAR cannot ex- press non-perceptive conditions such as memory, dream, daydream, fantasy, or hallucination. On the contrary, it does that through perception, perfectly expressing the transi- tion from actual perception to memory, dream, daydream, fantasy, or hallucination in a “pan-perceptive” way. Indeed, Virtual Reality expresses the transition from the actual per- ception through the actual perception. And sometimes it in- corporates the old audiovisual techniques, embodying them inside this transition from perception through perception. A conclusion in the form of a case study. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard As a case study, I will work here on Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, a survival horror game for PS4 devel- oped by Capcom. The game, which can be played through Play Station VR, is full of shifts from actual perception to memories, dreams, and hallucinations. All these shifts are expressed through pure perception, while incorporating from time to time some techniques originating from cinema or audiovisual languages. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is set somewhere in the southern United States, after the murder of a three-man CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 124 AN-ICON  TV crew by the infected Baker family members Jack and Mia. Ethan Winters is the protagonist, who is searching for his missing wife, Mia, which leads him to a derelict plantation mansion, home of the Baker family. At the very beginning of the story, the player, in the role of Ethan, finds a video- tape containing a short video shot by the television crew and, in an adjacent room, he also finds a VCR and a TV where he can see it. Notice how the videotape is a “tech- nological quotation”: it is through an old audiovisual that we come to know what happened in the past,30 now that we are in VR. The player has some expectations at this point:31 we know that a TV crew has been there before us, because we have previously explored their abandoned van. However, the narration of this flashback, which also gives the player important information on the topography of the house, takes place by giving the player control of one or three crew members, not surprisingly the cameraman, who must film what happened previously and return it to the eyes of the player, who is controlling him through his joypad. Here the flashback and the memory, in a form that clearly identifies that they are flashbacks and memories, are obtained through the perception of a “machinic” eye that was there, watching for us. And who now identifies with us and our avatar.32 The very same thing happens when the player controls Mia Winters, in the central part of the plot. Mia hallucinates (we will understand later that she has been infected and her mind is controlled by Eveline) and sees a 10-year-old girl who tells her to watch another video- tape, “so they can be a family”. The videotape introduces 30 According to Kirkland, in the Resident Evil saga “old media technologies contribute a sense of the real perceived as lacking in digital media, yet central to a generically-significant impression of embodiment”. See E. Kirkland, “Resident Evil’s typewriter: horror videogames and their media”, Games and Culture 4, no. 2 (2009). 31 On the way the Resident Evil saga handles expectations of its players, see C. Reed, “Resident Evil’s rhetoric: the communication of corruption in survival horror video games”, Games and Culture 11, no. 6 (2016). 32 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBsOqYpx2ng&t=1550s CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 125 AN-ICON  a memory through which we learn that Mia was a scientist, taking care of a bioweapon under the form of a little girl, but something went wrong. Once again, it is through actual perception that memories and hallucinations are performed. It is through perception that Virtual Reality expresses the transition from actual perception. Controlling Mia Winters, playing through her and perceiving through her eyes and ears, we come to know the truth about the story that we are playing as Ethan Winters, to the point that one of our aims is to send Ethan (ourselves) the very same message we receive when Resident Evil 7: Biohazard starts.33 However, the main moments connected to the relationship between perception, memories and halluci- nation in Virtual Reality are still to come in Resident Evil 7. At a certain point of the plot, Ethan meets Jack Baker’s daughter, Zoe, who also wants to escape Baker’s house. Zoe tells Ethan that his wife Mia is still alive, even if Ethan (us) has already killed her, since Mia has been given the very same infection the Bakers have, and this infection gives her body powerful regenerative abilities and extreme mu- tations. Ethan is told that she and Mia would need to have their infections cured by a special serum first, before leav- ing Baker’s house. Ethan heads out to an old house to find the ingredients for the serum, where he is forced to battle and kill Marguerite Baker. Once he retrieves the ingredient, Ethan begins to have strange visions of a young girl. From this point on, hallucinations, memories and perceptions coexist and alternate in all the Resident Evil 7 gameplay and VAR has no problems at expressing their development throughout the whole story at all, using the very same tech- niques that audiovisual languages used to employ. For instance, in the final boss fight, Ethan per- ceives the world through a grayish film and sees Eveline 33 See a complete walkthrough of this part of the game here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Gh3CkPI0UpA CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 126 AN-ICON  in her 10-year old girl form, that we know being nothing else but a hallucination, since we are told thanks to the Nexbas document found in the salt mines that almost immediately after the infection, the subject begins to see images of Eveline (though she is not in fact there) and even hear her voice (which is inaudible to anyone else). Auditions with infected subjects throughout the stages of infection reveal that at first, the phantom Eveline appears to be a normal young girl, sometimes desiring companionship or assistance. However, after being able to approach her and inject the toxin that we have previously synthetized in the neck, we see an explosion of light flood the screen and then dissolve, indicating the transition from actual percep- tion, that is hallucination, to real online perception. Indeed, when dissolve and blur fade, the girl we are holding in our arms reveals herself to be an old monstrous lady whom we have already met (Baker’s “grandmother” in the wheelchair), that melts into the ground in a colorful scenario (not grey- ish as before), telling us “why does everybody hate me? I just wanted a family”.34 In her actual form she attacks the player, giving birth to the final boss fight. Memories make no exception and are ex- pressed perfectly fine (like hallucinations are) in Virtual Reality. For instance, immediately before, the player is told the true story through the reliving of a painful memory by Mia while he is exploring the house. While we are perceiv- ing the actual scene in the house and after we have found a doll on the ground close to a wheelchair (foreshadowing Eveline’s true identity), we hear a buzz sound that indicates a clear discontinuity and Mia shows up in our perceptive field without interacting with us nor seeing that we are there. 34 The whole sequence can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Rs8bkVhDuA0 CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 127 AN-ICON  What we see is a memory by Mia, while she was taking care of Eveline, the E-Series Biohazard weapon (E-001) built by the company she was working for (a common appearance was selected for the bioweapons; that of a roughly 10-year- old girl, to ensure ease blending in with urban population). It is through these memories perceived through Virtual Reality that we come to know that Eveline infected Mia because she wanted Mia to be her mother. Immediately later, we are inside that memory, we can interact with it and we are part of its compound: indeed, Eveline asks us to be her father (“and if he does not want to be my father, he can die”) and we ask ourselves “why am I seeing this?”.35 As we see, VAR has no problems at all at in us- ing all the classic audiovisual techniques in order to express the transition from online perception to memory, dream or hallucination. It simply prefers doing that the majority of the time through its pan-perceptive model. However, not only can VAR utilise the old audiovisual techniques, but it looks like that also the old audiovisual languages used to express hallucinations, memories and dreams through perception: they simply did not give the observer the sen- sation of “being there”. How could cinema express memory, dream or hallucination through dissolve, blur or flou if not through perception? Since both cinema and VAR share the very same prosthetic structure of their formal appara- tus of enunciation, they both use a prosthesis (a screen, a mounted display etc.) in order to make us see things that we could not have seen without the text.36 In this way, from a semiotic point of view, VAR confirms its mixed nature, keeping together a simulacral and a prosthetic structure of its language. 35 See the whole sequence at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7TZk2iYM-k 36 C. Paolucci, Persona. Soggettività nel linguaggio e semiotica dell’enunciazione (Milano: Bompiani, 2020): Chapter 6. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 128 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/15443

Perception, hallucination, virtual reality. From controlled hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard Perception by Claudio Paolucci Imagination Hallucination Enunciation Resident Evil Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Perception, hallucination, virtual reality. From controlled hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard by Claudio Paolucci Abstract In this paper, I will work on the relationship be- tween perception and imagination in Virtual Reality, claiming that “hallucination” is the ordinary motor also for online perception and not only a deviant form of it. First, I will deal with the problem of perception from the point of view of cognitive semiotics and I will try to underline the crucial role of imagination, claiming that perception is a form of “con- trolled hallucination”. Later, I will focus on the relationship between perception, hallucination, and memory in Virtual Reality. On the one hand, I will claim that Virtual Reality expresses the transition from actual perception to imagina- tion, memory or dream through another actual perception. On the other hand, I will claim that it can express it with- out any problems through the old techniques coming from cinema and other audiovisual languages, since they par- tially share the very same formal apparatus of enunciation. I will demonstrate all of this by analyzing Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Perception Imagination Hallucination Enunciation Resident Evil To quote this essay: 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 CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 112 AN-ICON  Perception, imagination, and the control of the reality First, I will deal with the problem of percep- tion from the point of view of cognitive semiotics.1 I will try to underline the crucial role of imagination, claiming that perception is a form of “controlled hallucination”,2 where, by “controlled hallucination”, I mean the product of the imagination controlled by the world. The main idea is that “hallucination” is the model of perception and not a devi- ant form of it. With “hallucination”, as defined in percep- tion studies and in the neurogeometry of vision,3 I mean the morphological activity of the production of forms by the imagination, which remains crucial both when it is not controlled by the world – as in the case of hallucination, imagination, or dream – and when it is controlled by the world, as in the case of online perception. In Virtual Reality, the world that controls perception is substituted by a tech- nology, a prosthesis capable of creating a strong effect of reality, a simulacrum with an effect of presence that no oth- er audiovisual has ever been able to build.4 In Augmented Reality, on the other side, the technology adds elements to the world that controls perception, without a full-blown substitution, as it happens with Virtual Reality. Maybe, the word “hallucination” can be mis- leading, since perceptual phenomena under the aegis of hallucination may seem to lose the concreteness that I want to characterize them as having. It is possible that 1 See C. Paolucci, Cognitive Semiotics. Integrating signs, minds, menaing and cognition (Berlin-New York: Springer, 2021). 2 See A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”, in L. Albertazzi et al., eds., Perception Beyond Inference: The Information Content of Visual Processes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010): 27-57. 3 See J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”; A. Sarti et al., “The symplectic structure of the primary visual cortex”, Biological Cybernetics 98 (2008): 33-48. 4 See C. Paolucci, “Una percezione macchinica: realtà virtuale e realtà aumentata tra simulacri e protesi dell’enunciazione”, in F. Biggio et al., eds., Meaning–Making in Extended Reality. Senso e Virtualità (Rome: Aracne, I Saggi di Lexia, 2020): 43-62. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 113 AN-ICON  “figuration” would fit better with the ideas I will develop here, since no Sartrean “derealization” is involved.5 However, since our brains try to guess what is out there, and to the extent that that guess matches the evolving sensory data, we perceive the world, in Surfing Uncertainty, Clark recalls the slogan coined by the vision scientist Ramesh Jain that perception is “controlled hallucination”. This is the direc- tion I am going to take. But, precisely because “this view of perception puts us in genuine cognitive contact with the salient aspects of our environment”, Clark suggests we consider hallucination as a form of “uncontrolled percep- tion”.6 However, Clark’s view – if it is put like that – is the classical one that thinks of perception as grounding both hallucination and imagination, which are supposed to be “deviant” or “uncontrolled” forms of perception. Since I want to claim the opposite, I will continue to use “hallucination”, and since there is a well-established tradition regarding this concept in the field of perception studies, I will do so with the caveat that “hallucination” does not imply any kind of “derealization” of perceptual phenomena from a phenom- enological point of view.7 Indeed, with “hallucination”, or “figuration”, I indicate a process of microgenesis8 that continuously pro- duces the next thread of perceptual experience while the current one fades, and does so without voluntary control.9 I claim that meaning guides this microgenesis, or hallucina- tion, and that imagination is the engine of this microgenesis guided by meaning. 5 See G. Matteucci, Estetica e natura umana. La mente estesa tra percezione, emozione ed espressione (Rome: Carocci, 2019). 6 A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: 326. See also paragraph 6.10. 7 See S. Gallagher, D. Zahavi, “Primal impression and enactive perception”, in V. Arstila, D. Lloyd, eds., Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014): 83-99. 8 See J.W. Brown, Self–Embodying Mind: Process, Brain Dynamics and the Conscious Present (Barytown, NY: Barytown Ltd, 2020) 9 See J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 114 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Kanizsa’s triangle. For instance, in Kanizsa’s triangle (Fig. 1), the triangle is totally a product of our hallucination, since it is the only thing that is not present in the stimuli. It is not by chance that, as Reddy and colleagues show, not only are online perception and imagination closely related in the brain, but perception, as it occurs in creatures like us, is co-emergent with imagination.10 What we perceive is literal- ly (not metaphorically) the future, not the present, because perception is the anticipation of the next thread of sensory information through previous knowledge. Indeed, in percep- tion we build through imagination the world that we expect. There is a beautiful experiment by Adams and colleagues that shows that, in some circumstances, we hear the presence of the absence, that is, we hallucinate something that is not there, but we expect to be there.11 When silence arrives, we literally do not hear it as we are supposed to do (i.e. as nothing playing). In its place, we hear the presence of the absent sound that we were 10 L. Reddy et al., “Reading the mindʼs eye: decoding category information during mental imagery”, NeuroImage 50, no. 2, (2010): 818-825; G. Ganis et al. “Brain areas underlying visual mental imagery and visual perception: An fMRI study”, in Cognitive Brain Research 20, no. 2 (2004): 226-241. 11 R.A. Adams et al., “Predictions not commands: active inference in the motor system”, Brain Structure and Function 218, no. 3 (2013): 611-643. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 115 AN-ICON  expecting. Adams and colleagues’ experiment runs as fol- lows. They used a simple computer simulation of birdsong. A multi-layer prediction machine processes sequences of simulated bird-chirps. The simulations were then repeated but omitting the last three chirps of the original signal. At the first missing chirp, the network responds with a strong precise moment where the first missing chirp should have occurred, the system generated a brief, transient illusory percept. This hallucinated percept was not strong, but the timing was correct with respect to the missing chirp. Thus, our perceptive system first dimly “perceived” (hallucinated) the missing chirp, before responding with a strong error signal when the actual absence of the anticipated sensory evidence became apparent. Of course, Kanizsa’s triangle is a visual correspondent of Adams and colleagues’ ex- periment. This is what I call perception as a “controlled hallucination”, which is the general functioning of our rich, world-revealing perception at any level, since it concerns an organism structurally coupled with its environment trying to minimize disorder and surprise.12 The Goethean account of perception I refer here to what Jan Koenderink, a cognitive scientist and mathematician who works on the connection between theory of singularities and perception, used to call the “Marrian” and the “Goethean” accounts of perception. ■ According to the Marrian account: perception is the result of standard computations on optical data. ■ According to the Goethean account: perception is con- trolled hallucination, or “controlled figuration”. The mainstream view in cognitive science and neuroscience, which is often also the commonsense view, 12 S. Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 116 AN-ICON  is that perception is all about a kind of passive imprinting of the world upon the sense organs and the brain. As Eg- ner and colleagues say, “on traditional accounts the visual system was seen as a passive analyzer of bottom-up sen- sory information”.13 This is a view of the perceiving brain as highly stimulus-driven, taking energetic inputs from the senses and turning them into a coherent percept by a kind of inwards flowing stream. The Predictive Processing account of percep- tion takes a different direction and includes a top-down predictive aspect in its account.14 However, Predictive Pro- cessing thinks of perception as a kind of new schematism between aesthetics (the sensory data) and the concepts (the priors). According to this view, our brains are proac- tive: they are constantly buzzing as they try to predict the sensory signals arriving across all modalities. When such proactive brains “match” the incoming sensory signal, we perceive the world, understand it, and are immediately posi- tioned to imagine it so as to act in it too. However, “halluci- nation” is different from the mainstream notion of “prior”. A prior – as used in Bayesian inference – is a generic, usually statistical, property.15 For example, light comes from above is such a prior (if put in suitable format). It applies, on the average, for terrestrial animals that live in open spaces. Such priors package ‘frozen’ prior experience as it were. ‘Hallucinations’ differ by not being frozen, applying to the actual situation. Hallucinations can be regarded as specific, necessar- ily tentative, instantiations of the observer’s present “situational awareness” instead of its average past.16 13 T. Egner et al., “Expectation and surprise determine neural population responses in the ventral visual stream”, Journal of Neuroscience 30, no. 49 (2010): 16601-16608. 14 See A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty. 15 D. Purves, “Why we see things the way we do: evidence for a wholly empirical strategy of vision”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 356 (2001): 285-297. 16 J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”: 32. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 117 AN-ICON  This is important, because we do not always update our perceptions according to our past experience and according to the changes in our priors. This is very well seen in the popular Muller-Layer illusion, where even when we learn that the two lines have the same length, we still keep on seeing them in the previous way. In per- ception, “data” are constructed through an attunement of the organism and the world, where the organism looks for elements that are worth for him to look for. For instance, as in Kanizsa’s triangle, we look for edges and we perceive edges even if edges are the only thing that are not present in the stimulus. This is because, given evolutionary pressure and experience driven plasticity, we are wired to the environment in order to produce states that track edges when exposed to discontinuities. The system is physically at- tuned to such things, ‘set up to be set off’ by such visual discontinuities.17 Exploring the world, the organism casts his questions to the environment through imagination and pre- dicts its answers until he encounters resistance. This very action turns optical or sound structure into “data”, which are not sent from the world to the organism through senses but are the actual product of the autopoietic structure of the system of perception. Perception occurs when the top down activity of the imagination succeeds at generating the sensory data for itself, building a coherent story that paves the way for efficacious action. When it can gener- ate the future sensory data, the agent perceives the world. When it cannot, encountering a resistance, it tries a new attunement or changes the world through action. Therefore, data are built up because we produce them in looking for what we need for action, in order to minimize our work in the environment. 17 S. Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: 120. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 118 AN-ICON  Moving towards virtual and augmented reality The difference between the mainstream view, where data are sent by the environment and processed through perception, and the view where they are the product of what we look for in a coupled environment, can be operationalized as follows: perception is sensorily guid- ed potential behavior.18 Potential is key here. Perception is grounded on imagination, as it concerns the potential behavior con- nected to a coherent “story” we are building in order to act in the world and minimize disorder.19 Perception as sensorily guided potential be- havior is meant to reveal a world of salient, meaningful, in- teracting causes selected in the light of human needs and possibilities, which is exactly what pragmatists had in mind when they were telling us that the meaning of something consists in its conceivable practical bearings. This also marks the difference between pragmatism and behaviorism, since perception is neither action nor behavior. This prag- matist idea is consistent with the Affordance Competition Hypothesis originally introduced by Cisek,20 which is also a key hypothesis for the Predictive Processing by Andy Clark.21 The brain processes sensory information to specify, in parallel, several potential actions that are currently avail- able. These potential actions compete against each other 18 J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”: 32. 19 C. Paolucci, “Social cognition, mindreading and narratives. A cognitive semiotics perspective on narrative practices from early mindreading to autism spectrum disorders”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18, no. 2 (2019): 375-400; and Cognitive Semiotics. Integrating Signs, Minds, Meaning and Cognition (Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer, 2021). 20 P. Cisek, “Cortical mechanisms of action selection: The affordance competition hypothesis”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 362 (2007): 1585-1599. 21 A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Chapter 6. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 119 AN-ICON  for further processing, while information is collected to bias this competition until a single response is selected.22 If we go beyond Cisek’s terminology of “pro- cessing information”, like I think we have to do in order to focus on the main problem of perception as controlled hallucination, we see that, at the moment, we are see- ing a good deal of confirmation regarding this “pragma- tist” approach from the neurosciences.23 The classic dis- tinction between perception, cognition and action simply fails to reflect not only the phenomenology of our expe- rience, but also the global functional architecture of the brain, where, for instance, motor systems are active and play a huge part also in perception, decision making, social cognition and problem solving.24 Increasing and highly suggestive evidence challenges the view of core cognitive capacities (such as planning and deciding) as neurophysiologically distinct from the circuitry of sensorimotor con- trol. For example, decisions concerning eye movements and the execution of eye movements recruit highly overlapping circuits in lateral intraparietal area (LIP), frontal eye fields (FEF), and the superior colliculus [...]. In the same vein, a perceptual decision task (one in which the decision is reported by an arm movement) re- vealed marked responses within premotor cortex corresponding to the process of deciding upon a response (Romo et al. 2004). Quite generally, wherever a decision is to be reported by (or oth- erwise invokes) some motor action, there looks to be an entwining 22 P. Cisek, “Cortical mechanisms of action selection”: 1585. 23 See C. Paolucci, “Per una concezione strutturale della cognizione: semiotica e scienze cognitive tra embodiment ed estensione della mente”, in M. Graziano, C. Luverà, eds., Bioestetica, bioetica, biopolitica. I linguaggi delle scienze cognitive (Messina: Corisco Edizioni, 2012): 245-276; V. Cuccio, F. Caruana, “Il corpo come icona. Abduzione, strumenti ed Embodied Simulation”, VS-Quaderni di Studi Semiotici 120 (2015): 93-103. 24 See V. Gallese, “Mirror neurons and the neural exploitation hypothesis: from embodied simulation to social cognition”, in J.A. Pineda, ed., Mirror Neuron Systems (New York: Humana Press, 2009): 163-190; A.M. Borghi, F. Caruana, “Embodied Cognition, una nuova psicologia”, Giornale Italiano di Psicologia 35, no. 1 (2013): 23-48; V. Gallese et al., “A unifying view of the basis of social cognition”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8, no. 9 (2004): 396-403; G. Rizzolatti, C. Sinigaglia, “Mirror neurons and motor intentionality”, Functional Neurology 22, no. 4 (2007): 205-221. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 120 AN-ICON of perceptuo-motor processing and decision-making, leading Cis- ek and Kalaska to suggest that ‘decisions, at least those reported through actions, are made within the same sensorimotor circuits that are responsible for planning and executing the associated action’ (Cisek and Kalaska 2011: 274). In cortical associative regions such as posterior parietal cortex (PPC), Cisek and Kalaska go on to argue, activity does not seem in any way to respect the tradi- tional divisions between perception, cognition, and action. Instead we find neuronal populations that trade in shifting and context-re- sponsive combinations of perceiving, deciding, and acting, and in which even single cells may participate in many such functions (Andersen and Buneo 2003).25 If perception is supposed to work as a process that is continuous with action, the Marrian casual chain is inverted. Instead of “data” arriving at the eye, being pro- cessed, being further processed and finally resulting in a “representation” of the scene in front of us, the agent ex- plores the world in any conceivable direction, casting his questions and producing data in relation to what he needs for action, until it encounters resistance. This is why imagination is the real engine for online perception. Since imagination is a faculty that allows us to move our consciousness from a proximal to a distal place, which can be in the past (memory), future (pros- pects) or in an invented reality, this “looking for the future” in online perception, trying to anticipate the next thread of the world, is grounded exactly on imagination. This places Virtual Reality and Augmented Real- ity (VAR) in radical continuity with online perception. Indeed, if, in phenomenological terms, hallucination is a “percep- tion in the absence of the external object”, and if the ob- jects that appear in virtual reality are artificial simulacra of presence that we perceive without them being anchored in 25 A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: 178. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 121 AN-ICON  our experience of the physical world, we shall understand immersive virtual experience as a form of voluntary and deliberate hallucination. But this does not imply any kind of derealization: it simply implies the substitution of the control of the world with the control of a technology. This is why VAR promises important scientific applications, which, in a few years, will radically change many of our laboratories of psychology, neuroscience and cognitive sciences. Indeed, on the one hand, we want a world in which reality is not so “real” as to modify the ex- perimental results and influence them, and VAR provides us with only a virtual reality, which can be controlled in detail and put into brackets at will. On the other hand, we also want a world that is not so unreal as to be indistinguish- able from the normal conditions of a laboratory, which at full capacity lives by cutting off every variable that cannot be controlled and ends up producing data that have the purpose of explaining our experience in a condition that we know to be a radical impoverishment of this very same experience. VARs allows us to create a very strong effect of presence within a world-environment,26 capable of sim- ulating a reality that remains only virtual and can therefore be controlled in its different parameters. At the same time, VAR allows us to increase the “gradient of reality” inside a laboratory, integrating those experiences and variables that a laboratory usually tends to cut away, in the name of the robustness of its measurements. Thus, the conditions of the laboratory are “augmented” with a reconstructed and simulated reality, which we can see and experience only thanks to the prostheses of VAR. In this respect, VAR is a prosthetic technology that is in its own way unprecedented, capable of generating a controllable world without losing at the same time the phenomenological richness of the world. 26 A. Pinotti, “Self–negating images: towards an-iconology”, Proceedings 2017, I, 856 (2017). CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 122 AN-ICON  Precisely because of its ability to make the world present through perception, without the world being in any way unamendable – since it can be controlled – it is completely normal that people who set up environments in VAR exploit this possibility, preferring online perception to other expressive possibilities and using online percep- tion in order to express dreams, hallucinations or memo- ries. However, this choice does not in any way reside in a technological, semiotic or enunciative limit of VAR and its language. On the contrary, it is only a “stylistic” choice, which can be suspended. As we will see, many of these suspensions, which result in the use of old cinematographic techniques within Virtual Reality, can be seen for example in an extraordinary game for Play Station VR such as Res- ident Evil 7: Biohazard. Elsewehere,27 I tried to show how, from a semi- otic point of view,28 VAR works by holding together a formal apparatus of the prosthetic type of enunciation, typical of audiovisuals, and a formal apparatus of enunciation of the simulacral type, which is instead typical of other se- miotic systems, such as verbal language.29 If this is true, as I believe it is, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are not incapable of effectively representing the modifications of perception that cinema has always expressed through its representative strategies, such as dissolve, shift from 27 C. Paolucci, “Una percezione macchinica”. 28 Some semiotic approaches to VR can be found in G. Bettetini, L’Ulisse semiotico e le sirene informatiche (Milano: Bompiani, 2006); and B.R. Barricelli et al., “Semiotic Framework for Virtual Reality Usability and UX Evaluation: a Pilot Study”, in M. De Marsico et al., eds., Games-Human Interaction (2018): 1-6. A nice take on the illusory cancellation of the distance that occurs during an immersive experience and the establishment of a critical distance in the user, linked to the emergence of a meta experiential competence, can be found in F. Biggio, “Semiotics of distances in virtual and augmented environments”, Img Journal 2, no. 3 (2020): 82-103. Some important remarks on virtuality and subjectivity can be found in a nice book by Ruggero Eugeni, La condizione postmediale (Brescia: La scuola, 2015) and in the reader edited by F. Biggio et al., Meaning-Making in Extended Reality. Senso e Virtualità (Rome: Aracne, 2020). However, the most comprehensive and original semiotic work on this topic is the PhD thesis by Gianmarco Giuliana, Meaningfulness and Experience in Virtual Realities. Semiotics of a Digital Pla(y)typus, University of Turin (2021). 29 See C. Paolucci, “Prothèses de la subjectivité. L’appareil formel de l’énonciation dans l’audiovisuel”, in M.G. Dondero et al., eds., Les plis du visuel. Réflexivité et énonciation dans l’image (Limoges: Éditions Lambert-Lucas, 2017): 53-68. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 123 AN-ICON  color to black-and-white, flou or blur, used to indicate, in a point-of-view shot, the transition from actual perception to memory, dream, daydream, fantasy, or hallucination. VAR can use all these techniques without any problems at all, since it shares with cinema and audiovisual languages the very same formal apparatus of enunciation. We can have a dissolve or a shift from color to black-and-white also in VAR. If this is not done, or it is not done so often, it is only because of a choice from the “authors” or the VAR, who clearly opt for a “pan-perceptive way” for stylistic or “aes- thetical” reasons. But this does not mean that VAR cannot ex- press non-perceptive conditions such as memory, dream, daydream, fantasy, or hallucination. On the contrary, it does that through perception, perfectly expressing the transi- tion from actual perception to memory, dream, daydream, fantasy, or hallucination in a “pan-perceptive” way. Indeed, Virtual Reality expresses the transition from the actual per- ception through the actual perception. And sometimes it in- corporates the old audiovisual techniques, embodying them inside this transition from perception through perception. A conclusion in the form of a case study. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard As a case study, I will work here on Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, a survival horror game for PS4 devel- oped by Capcom. The game, which can be played through Play Station VR, is full of shifts from actual perception to memories, dreams, and hallucinations. All these shifts are expressed through pure perception, while incorporating from time to time some techniques originating from cinema or audiovisual languages. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is set somewhere in the southern United States, after the murder of a three-man CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 124 AN-ICON  TV crew by the infected Baker family members Jack and Mia. Ethan Winters is the protagonist, who is searching for his missing wife, Mia, which leads him to a derelict plantation mansion, home of the Baker family. At the very beginning of the story, the player, in the role of Ethan, finds a video- tape containing a short video shot by the television crew and, in an adjacent room, he also finds a VCR and a TV where he can see it. Notice how the videotape is a “tech- nological quotation”: it is through an old audiovisual that we come to know what happened in the past,30 now that we are in VR. The player has some expectations at this point:31 we know that a TV crew has been there before us, because we have previously explored their abandoned van. However, the narration of this flashback, which also gives the player important information on the topography of the house, takes place by giving the player control of one or three crew members, not surprisingly the cameraman, who must film what happened previously and return it to the eyes of the player, who is controlling him through his joypad. Here the flashback and the memory, in a form that clearly identifies that they are flashbacks and memories, are obtained through the perception of a “machinic” eye that was there, watching for us. And who now identifies with us and our avatar.32 The very same thing happens when the player controls Mia Winters, in the central part of the plot. Mia hallucinates (we will understand later that she has been infected and her mind is controlled by Eveline) and sees a 10-year-old girl who tells her to watch another video- tape, “so they can be a family”. The videotape introduces 30 According to Kirkland, in the Resident Evil saga “old media technologies contribute a sense of the real perceived as lacking in digital media, yet central to a generically-significant impression of embodiment”. See E. Kirkland, “Resident Evil’s typewriter: horror videogames and their media”, Games and Culture 4, no. 2 (2009). 31 On the way the Resident Evil saga handles expectations of its players, see C. Reed, “Resident Evil’s rhetoric: the communication of corruption in survival horror video games”, Games and Culture 11, no. 6 (2016). 32 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBsOqYpx2ng&t=1550s CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 125 AN-ICON  a memory through which we learn that Mia was a scientist, taking care of a bioweapon under the form of a little girl, but something went wrong. Once again, it is through actual perception that memories and hallucinations are performed. It is through perception that Virtual Reality expresses the transition from actual perception. Controlling Mia Winters, playing through her and perceiving through her eyes and ears, we come to know the truth about the story that we are playing as Ethan Winters, to the point that one of our aims is to send Ethan (ourselves) the very same message we receive when Resident Evil 7: Biohazard starts.33 However, the main moments connected to the relationship between perception, memories and halluci- nation in Virtual Reality are still to come in Resident Evil 7. At a certain point of the plot, Ethan meets Jack Baker’s daughter, Zoe, who also wants to escape Baker’s house. Zoe tells Ethan that his wife Mia is still alive, even if Ethan (us) has already killed her, since Mia has been given the very same infection the Bakers have, and this infection gives her body powerful regenerative abilities and extreme mu- tations. Ethan is told that she and Mia would need to have their infections cured by a special serum first, before leav- ing Baker’s house. Ethan heads out to an old house to find the ingredients for the serum, where he is forced to battle and kill Marguerite Baker. Once he retrieves the ingredient, Ethan begins to have strange visions of a young girl. From this point on, hallucinations, memories and perceptions coexist and alternate in all the Resident Evil 7 gameplay and VAR has no problems at expressing their development throughout the whole story at all, using the very same tech- niques that audiovisual languages used to employ. For instance, in the final boss fight, Ethan per- ceives the world through a grayish film and sees Eveline 33 See a complete walkthrough of this part of the game here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Gh3CkPI0UpA CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 126 AN-ICON  in her 10-year old girl form, that we know being nothing else but a hallucination, since we are told thanks to the Nexbas document found in the salt mines that almost immediately after the infection, the subject begins to see images of Eveline (though she is not in fact there) and even hear her voice (which is inaudible to anyone else). Auditions with infected subjects throughout the stages of infection reveal that at first, the phantom Eveline appears to be a normal young girl, sometimes desiring companionship or assistance. However, after being able to approach her and inject the toxin that we have previously synthetized in the neck, we see an explosion of light flood the screen and then dissolve, indicating the transition from actual percep- tion, that is hallucination, to real online perception. Indeed, when dissolve and blur fade, the girl we are holding in our arms reveals herself to be an old monstrous lady whom we have already met (Baker’s “grandmother” in the wheelchair), that melts into the ground in a colorful scenario (not grey- ish as before), telling us “why does everybody hate me? I just wanted a family”.34 In her actual form she attacks the player, giving birth to the final boss fight. Memories make no exception and are ex- pressed perfectly fine (like hallucinations are) in Virtual Reality. For instance, immediately before, the player is told the true story through the reliving of a painful memory by Mia while he is exploring the house. While we are perceiv- ing the actual scene in the house and after we have found a doll on the ground close to a wheelchair (foreshadowing Eveline’s true identity), we hear a buzz sound that indicates a clear discontinuity and Mia shows up in our perceptive field without interacting with us nor seeing that we are there. 34 The whole sequence can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Rs8bkVhDuA0 CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 127 AN-ICON  What we see is a memory by Mia, while she was taking care of Eveline, the E-Series Biohazard weapon (E-001) built by the company she was working for (a common appearance was selected for the bioweapons; that of a roughly 10-year- old girl, to ensure ease blending in with urban population). It is through these memories perceived through Virtual Reality that we come to know that Eveline infected Mia because she wanted Mia to be her mother. Immediately later, we are inside that memory, we can interact with it and we are part of its compound: indeed, Eveline asks us to be her father (“and if he does not want to be my father, he can die”) and we ask ourselves “why am I seeing this?”.35 As we see, VAR has no problems at all at in us- ing all the classic audiovisual techniques in order to express the transition from online perception to memory, dream or hallucination. It simply prefers doing that the majority of the time through its pan-perceptive model. However, not only can VAR utilise the old audiovisual techniques, but it looks like that also the old audiovisual languages used to express hallucinations, memories and dreams through perception: they simply did not give the observer the sen- sation of “being there”. How could cinema express memory, dream or hallucination through dissolve, blur or flou if not through perception? Since both cinema and VAR share the very same prosthetic structure of their formal appara- tus of enunciation, they both use a prosthesis (a screen, a mounted display etc.) in order to make us see things that we could not have seen without the text.36 In this way, from a semiotic point of view, VAR confirms its mixed nature, keeping together a simulacral and a prosthetic structure of its language. 35 See the whole sequence at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7TZk2iYM-k 36 C. Paolucci, Persona. Soggettività nel linguaggio e semiotica dell’enunciazione (Milano: Bompiani, 2020): Chapter 6. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 128 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/15161

Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media by Martine Beugnet and Lily Hibberd Cinema Darkness Spectatorship Dream Consciousness Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media by Martine Beugnet and Lily Hibberd Abstract As with films previously, claims are being made today about the capacity of immersive environments, in- cluding virtual reality, to offer viewers or experiencers ef- fective simulations of altered states of consciousness. In this article, we look anew at the enduring question of time- based mechanical (lens based and digital) media’s ability not merely to take us outside of or besides ourselves, but to generate an imaginary realm of their own. Our analysis centres on the use of darkness. Often associated with the passage from one state of consciousness to another, dark- ness has become a prevalent aesthetic in cinematic immer- sive media. In some ways, as we will see, the latest tech- nologies of audio-vision appear less apt than conventional cinema to induce us to “cross the bridge” and venture into the land of phantoms. In others, they emerge as privileged entries into the dreamlike worlds of our contemporary, tech- nologized era. In spite of differences in viewing conditions, we find that between the older medium of 2D film and that of cinematic virtual reality, darkness, combined with the illusion of depth and visual replication of motion proves to be a particularly potent harbinger of altered states. Cinema Darkness Spectatorship Dream Consciousness To quote this essay: M. Beugnet & L. Hibberd, “Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 129-152 MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 129 AN-ICON (...) spectators at the exit, brutally rejected by the black belly of the theater into the glaring and mischievous light of the lobby, some- times have the bewildered expression (happy and unhappy) of people waking up. To leave the movies is a little like getting up: not always easy.1 Introduction: cine-obscurity Darkness is dream’s natural associate. It is no wonder audiovisual works that seek to transport us beyond the here and now of awakened reality continue to rely on the power of darkness to enfold us and to unravel our sense of place and time. Though there are structural differences between the aesthetics and spectatorship of cinema and that of virtual reality, darkness functions across many me- dia forms as both a metaphor and as a corporeal device for immersion, encouraging spectators and participants to submit to imaginary realms. The scope of this article is not to review the wider lineage of darkness across immersive forms of media, or indeed to revisit their origins going back to Plato’s cave. The media archaeology of moving images and obscurity has already been done by theorists such as Oliver Grau, and in groundwork of Siegfried Zielinski and Gloria Custance, who described the cinema as a dark “womb”.2 Other media theorists have delineated the parameters of interactive or immersive 3D viewing, most notably Maria Engberg and Jay Bolter on virtual reality aesthetics, as well as William 1 C. Metz, A. Guzzetti, “The fiction film and its spectator: A metapsychological study”, New Literary History 8, no. 1 (1976): 75-105, 86. 2 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, trans. G. Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): 151-152. S. Zielinski, G. Custance, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999): 92, 246. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 130 AN-ICON  Brown with the notion of “gaseous perception” in relation to stereoscopic cinema and darkness.3 In contrast with earlier theorizations, in what follows we focus on adaptations of cinematic immersive reality in the hands of artists and experimental filmmakers. To further account for the contemporary emergence of an aesthetic of darkness we firstly seek to establish a histori- cal backdrop. We then turn our attention to the works and, where available, the words of the creators’ themselves, as we consider four recent immersive media works imbibed in darkness: Anouk De Clercq’s Thing, Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang’s La camera insabbiata/Chalkroom, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness and Parragirls Past, Pres- ent: Unlocking Memories of Institutional “Care”. As immer- sion in darkness is closely related to dreamworlds and to dreams of outer space, these phenomena provide the un- derpinning rationale in the first half of this article and for our subsequent analysis of these four works. Enfolding darkness, from awakened dreaming to altered states Amongst the most memorable scenes of F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) is the imaginary screening in which a seductress from the city appears to lure a naïve country man into a fantasized vision of urban life. One evening, as they sit together on the shore of a lake, the woman launches into an eloquent description of nightlife in the city. To demonstrate the impression made by her tale, Murnau materializes it in the form of a projection that magically appears in front of the two characters. Thanks to an astute system of transparencies, the dream show of the modern city superimposes itself onto the nocturnal sky, under the halo of a fake moon that 3 M. Engberg, J.D. Bolter, “The aesthetics of reality media”, Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 81-95. W. Brown, “Avatar: stereoscopic cinema, gaseous perception and darkness”, Animation 7, no. 3 (2012): 259-271. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 131 AN-ICON  glows like the lamp of a projector.4 Stylized cityscapes al- ternate with kaleidoscopic, blurry visions of frenzied revelry: there is no attempt at harnessing this fantastic vision to a specific or stable point of view. The fantasy may originate in the female character’s mind, but it feeds on a collective imaginary, and the projection allows her to share it with her companion, as well as beyond the diegesis, with the audi- ence of Murnau’s film. The sequence is a celebration of the powers of the cinema not merely as a “factory of dreams”, but also as a sharing of the experience of dreaming itself. Dreams and daydreams, hallucinations and memories, as the products of the human psyche, fascinate not only because they elude our self control (we can no more prevent or design our nightmares at will than we can consciously erase a memory), but also because they con- found our capacity to communicate and share experiences. In every medium, from literature to the theatre, painting and photography, techniques have been developed to evoke altered states of consciousness. The gap, however, be- tween the viewer or reader and the subjective creations of the psyche mediated by objective, external sources, is not easily bridged. Key to Sunrise’s mise en abyme of a screen- ing is the choice of a nocturnal setting: in a film theatre the night on screen blends with the darkness that surrounds the cinema spectator like a connecting tissue. Because the visibility of the projected film im- age initially relied on a beam of light, darkness – also the companion of sleep and dreams – has been associated with the cinema from the start. With the shift from analogue to digital, the glow of the LCD monitor has increasingly complemented the light beam of the projector, alongside other self-illuminating screens found in the domestic en- vironment. Regardless of location, we still lower the lights while watching films whenever possible. More than a mere 4 M. Beugnet, L’attrait du flou (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2017): 33-34. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 132 AN-ICON  condition of visibility, obscurity facilitates the slipping in and out of total awakened awareness. Film was the first medium to offer the promise of more than the mere representation of our imaginings – to engender a form of awakened dreaming through spectacle and apparatus. The increasingly photorealistic quality of cinematic images and sounds set in motion guaranteed the “credibility of its fabulations”.5 A spectator could hope to become immersed in a film in a manner similar to the dreamer, who experiences even the most absurd world of mental images equally as “real” as daily life occurrences, or of a daydreamer who indulges in memories or fanciful imaginings to the point of forgetting their actual surround- ings. The conditions of reception in the cinema auditorium came to reflect and strengthen the analogy: cut off from the outer world, plunged in darkness and silence, with limited physical activity, at the end of a screening the spectator often emerges as if they were awakening. Yet in spite of the unequalled ability to blur the frontier between representation and perception,6 the fusion of image and reality never occurs fully.7 As Christian Metz reminds us, where in deep sleep the dreamer does not know that they are dreaming, film induces, at best, a semi-wakeful state: more than dream per se, the experience of watching a film (which can be emulated, though imperfectly, in indi- vidual situations of viewing) resembles that of reminiscing, 5 C. Metz, A. Guzzetti, “The fiction film and its spectator: A metapsychological study”, New Literary History 8, no. 1 (1976): 75-105. 6 S. Sharot, “Dreams in films and films as dreams: surrealism and popular American cinema”, Canadian Journal of Film Studies 24, no. 1 (2015): 66-89. Also, on the myth of the credulous audience, see T. Gunning, “An aesthetic of astonishment. Early film and the (in)credulous spectator”, Art and Text, no. 34 (1989): 31-45. 7 In contrast, “dreaming is subjectively indistinguishable from waking experience”. See T.K. Metzigner, “Why is virtual reality interesting for philosophers?”, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, no. 5 (2018). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 133 AN-ICON  fantasizing or slipping into reverie. For Raymond Bellour, it is better compared with a form of hypnosis.8 Nonetheless, fascination for the medium’s oneiric qualities has driven some of the most radical and creative practices and theorizing of the medium. The rep- resentation of dreams themselves has had little to do with this evolution: from Antonin Artaud and the surrealists to Jean Epstein, the earliest avant-gardes nurtured the belief that the medium’s aesthetic potential laid not in the repre- sentation of dreams or reminiscences, but in the possibil- ity to dream or reminisce with images.9 In classic cinema however, as in avant-garde or experimental filmmaking, darkness and immobility remain the spectator-dreamer’s first allies. In The Absent Body, Drew Leder observes that in normal situations of perception the awareness of our body diminishes: the reason we can focus on what we watch, or concentrate on what we touch, is that we do not pay attention to the actual process, nor to the eye or hand involved in it.10 A similar receding of bodily awareness occurs when we are absorbed in our own thoughts. Such “absenting” of the lived body is not however “equivalent to a mere void, a lack of being”.11 Rather, it testifies to the extent in which a sentient subject might be beside itself, “ecstatically caught-up in the world”: the very nature of the body is to project outwards from its place of standing. From the “here” arises a perceptual world of near and far distances. From the “now” we inhabit a meaningful past and a futural realm of projects and goals.12 8 R. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: POL / Trafic, 2009). 9 J. Epstein, Écrits sur le cinéma, vol. 2 (Paris: Cinéma Club/Seghers, 1975): 18-20. Also see, A. Artaud “Cinéma et réalité”, Œuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris : Gallimard, 1978): 19; and M. Beugnet, L’attrait du flou (Crisnée: Yellow Now: 2017): 82-83. 10 A. Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990): 70-71. 11 Ibid.: 22. 12 Ibid.: 23. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 134 AN-ICON  Leder’s description of this phenomenon recalls James Gibson’s theory of “affordance”, according to which individuals are entwined with their surroundings, their pro- spective actions informed by the constant collecting of information from their environment.13 This capacity to feel or to picture our bodies outside or alongside themselves in time and space is an equally fundamental feature of dream- ing, hallucination and reverie, as well as the fabrication of their similitude in movies. Indeed, it is often the altered sense in which our body appears to relate to its perceived environment (feeling one’s bodily affordance hindered, dis- torted or augmented in turns) that marks the difference between awakened and dreamlike states. In the cinema, the body’s capacity for ecstasis is simultaneously enhanced and directed away from the immediate environment, towards the virtual world that ap- pears on the screen. The film auditorium, as a space, has sometimes been compared to a womb.14 Darkness engulfs the barely moving spectators, allowing them to be together and alone at once, to ignore the borders of the screen as they recede in the obscurity. Within the secluded space of the theatre, the light originating from behind the audience trains spectators to project themselves on the screen, to sit- uate themselves within the perspectival view of the spaces offered to the eye, and the anthropomorphic quality of the camera’s gaze that explores them. From the 1950s onwards, anamorphic lenses widened the frame, and shortened the optical depth of field, with a corresponding increase in visual blur effects. Strengthening the sense of immersion and bringing the cinematic closer to the human field of vision, the blurring of the margins of the visual frame also subtly blended the projected image into the surrounding 13 J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). 14 T. Elsaesser, “Cinephilia or the uses of disenchantment”, in M. de Valck, M. Hagener, eds., Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005): 32. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 135 AN-ICON  darkness, heightening the feeling of being suspended in a virtual dimension without physical limits. In the cinema and at home, dimming the lights and turning up the volume amplifies the degree to which we forget about our own body so as to engage in watch- ing and listening to a movie, sometimes even touching or tasting through the synesthetic or haptic powers of certain images.15 Accordingly, in classic narrative cinema’s sub- jective point of view, a character’s body partly or wholly disappears from the frame. Such strategies allow us, as the spectator, not only to half-dream our way through a film, but also to engage with the expression of altered states of consciousness where images and sounds are supposedly the product of mental processes. Paradoxically, both of these experiences can involve audiovisual representations of extreme physicality (fighting, crying, flying…). Whether awake or dreaming,16 characters in films move, fall or take off in the air, as we ourselves sometimes do in our sleep. In all such cases, however, it is the incapacity to act on the film’s progression that grants the experience its onei- ric quality: as the dreamer with dreams, the film spectator does not control the flow of images: once triggered, they cannot be easily altered or fully erased at will.17 Nor can we always choose to retain a memory, or the trace of a dream, 15 L.U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). M. Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 16 Whereas a dream or a memory is a subjective reality emanating from the psyche, a film is an external product constructed according to a common idiom. In conventional filmmaking, transitions mark out the passage from woken to altered states of consciousness (fades in and out, blurredness, distorted perspectives, spiralling images amongst others). Film dreaming is thus reclaimed and repurposed as the representation of dreaming in film. 17 See T. Kuntzel, “Le defilement”, La revue d’esthétique (1972), reprinted in D. Noguez, ed., Cinéma: théorie, lectures (Paris, Klincksieck, 1978): 97-110. R. Bellour, L’entre-images: photo, cinéma, vidéo (Paris: La Différence, 2002): 86. M. Beugnet, Le Cinéma et ses doubles (Bordeaux: Bord de l’eau, 2021): 5-6. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 136 AN-ICON  any more that we can keep a precise recollection of all the images of a film whose course we can hardly change.18 As with films previously, claims are being made today about the capacity of immersive environments, in- cluding virtual reality, to offer viewers or experiencers ef- fective simulations of altered states of consciousness.19 In what follows, we look anew at the enduring question of time-based mechanical (lens based and digital) media’s ability not merely to take us outside of or besides ourselves, but also to generate an imaginary realm of their own. In doing so we consider the issue of aesthetics alongside the conditions of spectatorship and reception. In some ways, as we will see, the new technologies of audio-vision appear less apt than conventional cinema to induce us to “cross the bridge” and venture into the land of phantoms. In others, they emerge as privileged entries into dream-like worlds of our contemporary, technologized era. What inter- ests us most is not the lure of the “myth of total immersion” or the pursuit of the perfect conflation of perception and representation that would entail the erasure of the frontier between reality and fantasy.20 Rather, we concentrate on the way cinematic virtual reality (including built immersive environments and head-mounted displays) creates the illu- sion of presence while exploiting digital imaging to emulate 18 Remote control usage destroys the experience of time as co-presence, or of time slipping away (also an essential dimension of memories and dreams). Accordingly, Laura Mulvey associates the remote control with the emergence of a possessive spectator in Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 19 From David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) to Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) and Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018) amongst others, the association of immersive technology and altered states of consciousness is a favoured topic in mainstream cinema. For a VR example see Dream (2016) by Philippe Lambert, which is built on a custom audio-visual synthesizer coded by Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit. https://www.nfb.ca/interactive/dream/. 20 See M. Beugnet, L. Hibberd, “Absorbed in experience: new perspectives on immersive media”, Screen 61, no. 4 (2020). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 137 AN-ICON  the dreamlike state of cinematic reception and conjure up a specific, distinctive kind of imagining.21 In the cinema, the obscurity afforded by the auditorium creates the condition for a unique experience: that of a shared space where a collective dreamlike or light hypnotic state prevails. Contrastingly, when viewing a work in a head-mounted display, there is no “joint watching”. The solitude is inescapable, only faintly or temporarily relieved in encounters with others, as characters or actors in the shape of avatars. Darkness creates a connection nonethe- less, an evocation of an infinite space that, ultimately, we all have in common. Hence, in spite of differences in viewing conditions, we find that between the medium of 2D film and that of cinematic virtual reality, darkness combined with the visual replication of motion proves to be a potent harbinger of the dreamlike. It unsettles our grounded-ness in place and demands that we forge new connections with images, and with the world, ourselves and others. We further sug- gest that across VR and film, darkness inaugurates a shift from the collective experience of subjective states toward the individual experience of an unconscious shaped by the shared knowledge of our finitude. Though we are told we live in the age of the Anthropocene, we have an acute sense of the relativity of our existence, of being caught in perpetual movement, connected yet unanchored. Like the dot-size character who faces the starry vastness of the universe at the end of The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1957), the viewer who slides into the seem- ingly limitless night of contemporary films and immersive environments may experience a dreamlike state of radical groundlessness – a contemporary sense of solitary, yet shared, unmooring. 21 Virtual reality is assumed to be closely entwined with interactive gaming and simulated training. This article however focuses on the transmedial practices of narrative and immersion – across film, video art, and immersive installation art – where the spectator rarely drives the story or provokes events. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 138 AN-ICON  In “Of other spaces”, Michel Foucault notes how, from Galileo onwards, things could now only exist in their relative placement and movement: a thing’s place was no longer anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo in the 17th cen- tury, extension was substituted for localization.22 The site of an object, from then on came to be defined as “relations of proximity between points or ele- ments”, like “the dots in a constellation”.23 Foucault builds on the pre-modern analogy between body and universe, arguing that traditionally, space had been constructed as “a space of radiation. Man is surrounded by it on every side; but, inversely, he transmits these resemblances back into the world from which he receives them”.24 In other words, the body is conceived as the medium through which the world is organized as it is perceived. Perspectival art, with its stable construction of space and anchoring of the gaze to a specific position in space, emphasizes such a sense of place-ness and orientation. Though convention- al filmmaking adopted the continuity system in an effort to emulate this centralized condition, its mobile gaze and time-based structure always threatened to reveal the fra- gility of the model.25 Alternative uses of cinematography thus sought to explore the relativity of movement and place, showing the anthropomorphic gaze, with its safely located source, to be an artifice. This approach was not exclusive to ex- perimental cinema: in science fiction and documentary film 22 M. Foucault, “Of other spaces: utopias and heterotopias”, trans. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics 6, no.1 (1986): 22. 23 Ibid.: 23. 24 M. Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Random House, 1970): 23. 25 J. Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972): 18. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 139 AN-ICON  reconstitutions of outer space in particular have made us familiar with “impossible” viewpoints, where a virtual cam- era circles around planets and floats through constella- tions.26 Here again, darkness, like the sidereal night, is key – sucking the spectators into its awesome solitude even as they sit in a crowd. As we will see, immersive technologies have in turn proven to be remarkably able to produce a radi- cal sense of dis-anchoring. A 360-degree omnidirectional scape that moves independently from the viewer’s own movement implies a constant and uncontrollable fluctuation of one’s place within the image. With the dissolution of a stable single-point perspective the body of the observer ceases to be the sole reference and singular source of the gaze as an ordering principle of visible space. The most potent aspect however of these novel immersive environ- ments is the means to enter into the boundlessness of 3D constructed worlds, endless spaces that find in darkness their most compelling expression. In the fathomless black- ness of virtual spaces, furthermore, the solidity of repre- sented things is prone to slip away. The liminal threshold of immersive worlds is arguably always teetering on the brink of dreams – an aspect that the fanfare of virtual reality and the clumsiness of head-mounted displays paradoxi- cally diminishes. Even in 2D iterations construed from 3D renderings however, as is the case in the floating world of Thing, such an evocation of the universe offers itself as powerfully oneiric experience. Sidereal night: Anouk De Clercq’s Thing The first minute of Anouk De Clercq’s film Thing27 is entirely black. The sound track is also initially 26 Famously in the “Blue Danube” sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). 27 Video, b/w, 16:9, stereo, BE/IT/FR, 2013, 18’. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 140 AN-ICON  completely silent, though after a few seconds the faint noise of a light wind or breathing is heard, followed by a voice. The sound of the voice is slightly echoey, as if heard in a large, empty space. Then a crashing noise, followed by the appearance of thin, veil-like formations white dots that move into view from the right of the frame. But whose view? For the voice remains disembodied throughout, and its musings do not refer to the images with any specificity. Nor can we safely establish its location, as its stereophonic transcription varies in spatial orientation, switching from our right to our left ear. Equally impossible to determine is the origin of the movement that alters what we are given to see. Suggested by the changing size of the shapes and their moving in and out of frame, such spatial proximity or distance could equally mirror the trajectory of an invisible observer floating in the dark space, or that of the cloud formations themselves as they enter the former’s field of vision. Occasionally, a fade or a cut to black or a glitch- like effect (with a crackling sound emitted as all vanishes) plunges the screen back into utter darkness.28 Thing appears to be a journey through a virtual world, born out of the imagination of a fictional dreamer – given the nature of the images and the model-like appa- ritions of cities and buildings this dreamer could be the engineer of this world. De Clercq describes Thing as a journey through an architect’s “virtual memory”, “a bound- less, imaginary space” where fictional buildings and urban patterns emerge and disperse in the darkness, a series of ephemeral nebulas that manifest as a kind of “paradoxi- cal materiality” precisely because they are “virtual”.29 The film was made using LiDAR imaging of urbanscapes (an acronym for Light Detection and Ranging) a remote sensor 28 See R. Misek, “The black screen”, in M. Beugnet, A. Cameron, A. Fetveit, eds., Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017): 38-52. 29 See the video here: https://portapak.be/works/30/thing, accessed 18/12/2020. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 141 AN-ICON  technology that generates accurate 3D information about the shape of very large surfaces and their characteristics using pulsed laser emissions to measure ranges between the sensor and the surface. Developed for architectural, archaeological and engineering surveys, such visualiza- tions provide a way of seeing spatial information, which is augmented when viewed in a 3D stereoscopic environ- ment. Yet another digital program subsequently renders the LiDAR data as “point clouds”, the dots of light we see in Thing. Most of the shapes and forms conjured up in Thing are made of these unstable, constantly reshaping clouds of dots. Although the initial light point formations re- semble natural phenomena – cirrostratus, cirrocumulus or constellations – they later produce artificial patterns. An elongated, geometrical form floats in the dark like a space- ship, and the monumental entrance to a city materializes and dissolves. We then travel through the diaphanous out- lines of a district with a mesh of buildings with terraces and hanging gardens. The cross-cutting of a workshop appears and slowly glides in and out of view, its furnishings (stairs, hanging lamps, an easel, the semi-circular shape of what looks like part of a bull’s eye window) sketched in brilliant white against the surrounding night. Some of the point cloud renditions are reminis- cent of white charcoal drawings on black paper, while the buildings and the room resemble X-rays: ghostly, silvery shapes in a process of disintegration. While X-rays and 3D scanners are already used to document vestiges, as well as to augment the existing data of artefacts and archaeo- logical sites, film also holds a specific connection to ruins. Of the attraction exercised by ruins on the cinema, André Habib notes how they offer themselves as the poignant manifestation of the transience of all things human, includ- ing that of our own existence. The inexorability of the flow MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 142 AN-ICON  of 24 images or frames per second – of the ephemerality of its linear course from beginning to end that may be re- peated or looped but not halted – explains the “melancholy, quasi-ontological” relation that connects the medium to the temporality and spatiality of ruins.30 Drawing on tech- niques and visualizations that fuse the astrological and the architectural, De Clercq collapses human time and space (its material, located traces, its memories and dreams) in the infinity of the sidereal night. To craft its boundless post-Galilean dream of space as a universe where the individual body and the individual consciousness are free floating or diffuse, Thing uses the tools of 20th and 21st century imaging. This draw- ing together of film, architecture, and infinite space gives De Clercq’s film an affinity with so-called immersive envi- ronments: a 2D film with a 3D sensibility, best seen in the obscurity of a cinema, it makes full use of the darkened film-theatre as its immediate, continuous extension. “Dark, weird and shadowy”: Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang’s La camera insabbiata/Chalkroom Experimental multimedia artist Laurie Ander- son has produced a series of virtual reality works that elu- cidate some of the aesthetic traits of De Clercq’s Thing in a fully 3D format, also harnessing some of VR’s aptitude to create dreamlike and out-of-body experiences. Created in collaboration with media artist Hsin-Chien Huang in 2017, Chalkroom is an installation and an interactive VR experience, permanently installed at the MoCA in Massachusetts, USA.31 Seated viewers don a head-mounted display and take up two handheld controllers to enter into the VR 30 A. Habib, L’attrait de la ruine (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2011): 9. 31 Virtual reality 360 degree3D interactive video and installation, EN, 2017. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 143 AN-ICON  experience. In the first scene, a lone architectural structure sits on top of a mountain. Unlike the architecture in Thing, the building appears to be concrete. You are coaxed to fly over and enter it, navigating a series of narrow corridors toward a small portal at the end. The controller, which also acts as a torch, is the only source of light. The virtual walls are covered in chalk writing, like their physical counter- part outside the head-mounted display. Here, however, the torchlight illuminates a small orb, making the text all the more elusive – a curious and perverse effect given that the artists have designated us as “readers” instead of viewers. Words disintegrate into phenomes, and break apart again into letters, like swarms of flies. Yet, Laurie Anderson’s vel- vet intonations flow over this eerie place, making it homely. Claustrophobic passages open out into an infinite black space that contains a constellation of text. You’re free to fly around and explore the space, hidden sto- ries narrated by Anderson, which emerge as you approach certain zones. Objects, such as an illuminated, leafy tree, dissolve on closer inspection, and you see this too is made up of letters, as Anderson whispers to us: “You realise that things are made of words”. In interview, she explains being initially unsure about VR because it was too game-like, but that if she could make something “very homemade, dark, weird and shadowy, a different kind of space, a different kind of mental space” then she would be interested.32 Her aim, she adds, was to create an experience where you could fly “like in your dreams”. On the face of it, since immersive environments such as 3D films in 360 degree cinema projection and virtual reality experiences on head-mounted display or HMD, 33 32 “Laurie Anderson interview: A virtual reality of stories”, 2017, Louisiana Channel. Accessed 20/12/2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHT016FbR30. 33 It is important not to confuse VR with the HMD. In simplest terms, Virtual Reality is defined as being the coherence of technical means that enable a person to interact in real time with a virtual world. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 144 AN-ICON  effectively “environmentalize”34 the image, one could ex- pect the “womb” effect to be perfected and even emulated, as with Anderson’s installation. However, in contrast with conventional spectatorship, absorbed viewing is under- mined by the degree of physical activity involved in the experience.35 In addition to the heaviness and discomfort of the hardware – the headset and headphones – and the optical strain of stereoscopic vision, the attention and effort involved in interacting with the virtual environment para- doxically induce a sense of heightened physical awareness. Rather than projecting itself, the sentient subject engages with the task of controlling the effects of its own motricity in the here and now: a “presenting”, rather than an absent- ing of the body. These effects might be the result of VR’s relative novelty. Nonetheless, it seems that in the narrative context of cinematic VR – beyond gaming and therapeutic applications – interaction and causative acts tend to un- dermine immersion, contradicting widespread theories of “presence” in VR.36 After all, it can be very unnerving to feel your body split in two: an HMD effectively separates our head from the rest of our body. Not only can we not see our (real) selves but unless we are offered some form of avatar we also lack a visible body in the virtual world. Once we get used to this literal mode of “absenting” however, new forms of ecstasis become possible. As we become familiar with the process of virtual seeing, touching and moving, our experiencer or avatar body may recede into the background of our awareness, just like our lived body 34 A. Pinotti, “Environmentalising the image. Towards an-iconology”, in dossier M. Beugnet, L. Hibberd, eds., “Absorbed in experience: new perspectives on immersive media”, Screen 61, no. 4 (2020): 594-603. 35 Interestingly, in Sunrise the virtual screen vanishes when the woman starts dancing. 36 See C. Heeter, “Being there: the subjective experience of presence”, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 1, no. 2 (1992): 262-271. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 145 AN-ICON  does in a reverie, leaving us to be “ecstatically caught-up in the virtual world”.37 Distinct from many other VR interactive ex- periences, Chalkroom’s freedom to roam inhabits this liminal zone for two reasons: one, choices don’t lead to deterministic or sequential narratives, and thus, similar to a dream or hallucination, we feel that we are driven by compulsions and desires. Two, and even more compelling, is the sense that you cannot put your feet on the ground, that you are floating free. Anderson describes this in terms of disembodiment, stating that “losing your body” is one of her chief interests in producing these works.38 The inherent disembodiment felt when navigat- ing a 3D world in VR immersion is all the more estranging when it is set in the dark. The chiaroscuro effect is theatrical and exaggerates the sense of volume and depth as in a Ba- roque painting. And lower levels of light are also less visually straining in VR. In Chalkroom the upshot of floating through the dark signals our descent into the night; a diurnal cycle that we are bound to as circadian creatures. Anderson aptly remarks: “What are nights for? To fall through time into an- other world”; a world where, as Huang points out, “the words become a nebula” – chalk dust, atomised, diffuse matter disintegrating upon touch, evading our grasp. While not all HMD-supported VR relies on interactive interfaces, wearing a head-mounted display cuts us off from the surrounding reality more effectively than the dimness of our living room, or the darkness of the cinema auditorium (where exit signs, are by necessity always visible).39 Distinct from watching the audience at a film screening, to observe someone wearing an HMD feels 37 A. Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990): 22. 38 “Laurie Anderson Interview: A Virtual Reality of Stories”. In performance studies, such a transit state is called “liminoid performance”. See Alexandra G. Murphy, “Organizational politics of place and space: the perpetual liminoid performance of commercial flight”, Text and Performance Quarterly 22, no. 4 (2002): 297-316. 39 A. Pinotti, “Environmentalising the image. Towards an-iconology”. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 146 AN-ICON  a bit like trespassing. As when we look at someone who is sleeping, the experiencer is not aware of our gaze. At the same time, we have no access to what they are seeing. The duality of mind and eye as well as inner and outer worlds is a consistent theme in narrative VR experiences, one that is explicitly realised in works that manifest otherwise invisible or intangible traces, senses or information – or as in Notes on Blindness a lack of access thereof. Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness. The virtual reality film, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness40 was created as a counterpart to the feature documentary Notes on Blindness produced by Peter Mid- dleton and James Spinney in 2016. Both works arise from the first-person audio narration of John Hull, who describes in visceral and philosophical terms the process of losing his sight.41 Mired in darkness, as its title indicates, the VR version of the feature film has a wraith-like quality; of thin veils of light suspended in twilight. Its narrative is structured around six parts, each one being a memory, a moment, and a specific location recorded on John Hull’s tapes; each scene requiring a different level and form of interaction from the viewer in order to follow or progress through the narrative. Sound is central to the work, augmented through binaural audio (that spatializes sound as if it were bouncing around your ears), while the 3D rendering of objects and moving figures create a highly immersive experience. Sim- ilar to Thing, its most evocative aspect is the use of point 40 With narrator John Hull. Interactive virtual reality, 360-degree 3D video, colour, EN/FR, 7’, 2016. 41 Based on John Hull’s memoir, On Sight and Insight: A Journey Into the World of Blindness (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 147 AN-ICON  cloud to suspend firefly-like dots in a seemingly infinite deep indigo.42 The first two scenes in Notes on Blindness establish the parameters for acoustic seeing: in the obscure world evoked by John Hull we must learn anew how to look with our ears. Light signals how sound might feel and alerts us to the acoustic realm in three dimensions. It is, however, in the second and third scenes that we are subjected to something closer to liminal performance. As Hull begins to realise that he can no longer remember what things or loved ones look like, he descends into despair. His fear of being trapped alone in darkness culminates in a scene out in the snow, where he panics because he loses all sense of place. At the end of the narration however, the VR interaction invites us to dissolve his footprints in the snow by training our attention, with our head position tracked by the HMD, on their impression in the darkness. When the first set of footprints vanish another pair appear, leading us in Hull’s steps back to the safety of home. In the episode that features rain, Hull’s house is an almost silent place except for his gentle voice and the reverberation of raindrops falling on ordinary objects in the room. We are again invited to interact with our gaze, this time to give shape to otherwise hidden forms that the rain defines acoustically: pots, pans, glasses, dishes. This is a pivotal moment in Hull’s own life and the VR film; we too understand what it is to create the virtual shape of things by listening to them. There is also a specific, oneiric qual- ity to the space that the VR work creates whereby Hull’s experience becomes a shared one, rather than a voyeuris- tic observation of someone losing their sight.43 Everything we hear is echoed in its visual equivalent; renderings that 42 Point cloud started to appear in cinematic VR works at this time. See, for instance, “Coexistence” 2016, at the Venice Architecture Biennale: https://vimeo.com/183596023 43 For ethical issues related to the work, see D. Leblond, “Landscape Shaped by Blindness. Touching the Rock (1990) and Notes on Blindness (2016): Towards an ec(h)ology of vision”, Études britanniques contemporaines no. 55 (2018). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 148 AN-ICON  appear as point clouds: luminescent, 3D shapes of objects and moving bodies that create elusive, lace-like silhou- ettes in the darkened space. In the process of becoming fully recognizable, and as they unravel and disperse into thinning clouds of bright specks, these forms resemble constellations. Hence, in Notes on Blindness, as in Thing and Chalkroom, the darkness acts as a connecting mate- rial: boundless, it enfolds all of us (seeing and non-seeing individuals) in a cosmic infinity that is simultaneously inti- mate and terrifying. “Cold space, a dark place”: Parragirls Past, Present: unlocking memories of institutional “care” The immersive VR film Parragirls Past, Present44 is set in the grounds and buildings of Parramatta Girls Home – a punitive welfare institution for teenage girls sit- uated in Western Sydney, Australia, closed in 1974 and abandoned since the late 1990s. Its creation pivots on the memories of five former occupants, among the hundreds who have returned after many decades to confront this terrible place. As a labour of remembrance mired in trauma, the project required more than a year of collaboration with the aim of finding a form of testimony that might convey the survivors’ experiences to a wider public. In Parramatta Girls Home, children were not only deprived of freedom, but also cruelly disciplined and abused. Later, both Australian government inquiries and media reporting sensationalized and underscored their stigma and victimhood. The last thing Parragirls could abide was to provide viewers with prurient pleasures. Hence, a number of counter-visual strat- egies were developed, ruling out interactivity as a means 44 360-degree 3D stereoscopic video, ambisonic spatial sound, EN, 2017, 23’. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 149 AN-ICON  for viewers to progress through the virtual environment and its narratives. As with Thing, Chalkroom and Notes on Blind- ness, the point cloud photographic technique, materializing against the surrounding darkness, proved key. Among the varied ways that images can be “environmentalized” in 3D and 360 degrees, point cloud is distinct: it bears little resemblance to the synthetic imagery of game and CGI animation. Cartographic in origin, point cloud provides a means to project these as experienceable architectures – places we can fly through, as if in space. In addition to the sense of irrepressible movement, of being sucked into the institution’s spatio-temporal vortex, it is the transformation of photographs into points of light and colour that float in an abysmal 3D world that gives Parragirls Past, Present its wraithlike and enigmatic atmosphere. Accompanying the journey is the sound of the Parragirls’ voices, captured in ambisonic recordings. Wo- ven together, they offer a deeply personal yet collective ac- count of their experience as inmates. There is one location in particular in the Girls Home that former occupants find difficult to revisit: a basement solitary confinement cell, col- loquially known as the dungeon. In the film, Gypsie Hayes describes it thus: the only way you can survive in there is to curl up and go to sleep. That’s all you could do to survive that. It was nothingness. It was just a cold space, a dark place. In contrast to the exterior point cloud scenes, the cell is represented as a stereoscopic spherical panorama in 360 degrees. Moving between the differently rendered and spatially located spaces, presented yet another dilemma however, which was resolved using the point cloud aes- thetic as a form of transition in conjunction with moving MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 150 AN-ICON  tracking shots, to dissolve the image across one space or dimension into another. The most unusual impact of combining point cloud with mobile tracking shots in the 3D world of Parra- girls Past, Present is the feeling of being pulled through the experience, almost against our will. The data points seem to transcend and even pierce our body, so that we become part of the ghost-like substance of the Girls Home. Distinct from its head-mounted display viewing, in the 3D 360-de- gree film screenings of Parragirls Past, Present at UNSW EPICentre. Standing alongside 10 to 15 spectators wearing 3D glasses, you can see the points appear to emerge in 3D from the circular screen and pass through the bodies of the viewers beside you. The imagery may appear spectral as it floats through space, but so are the audience, whose bod- ies are traversed as if they had no consistency or solidity. Crucially, in conjunction with the nightmarish, endless darkness and the omnidirectional eye, point cloud effectively disassembles the centralized gaze of VR’s typi- cally first-person perspective: enfolded in swarms of float- ing pixels, we start to feel what it must have been like to be under constant disciplinary surveillance – to be watched at all times by invisible omniscient eyes. In the concluding shot, however, we fly out backwards, as if pulled up and out into the sky, discovering the vast emptiness that extends beyond the perimeter of the institution. On the one hand, what we are literally seeing are the limits of the photogrammetric images that could be recorded – black holes in both data and historical memory. On the other hand, as the sound of the multiple voices van- ishes, we grasp a sense of the collective unconscious that Parragirls still share with the other former occupants of the Home: the internalisation of a state of incarceration, being severed from the rest of the world, unable to imagine what lays beyond the space of incarceration other than a void. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 151 AN-ICON  Conclusion In moving image media, as in real life, darkness has always been a privileged channel towards alternate states of self or alterity. Black spaces encourage us to re- linquish control of sensing bodies, simultaneously fostering a sense of placeless-ness: in the dark, we lose our sense of orientation and lack the necessary landmarks to eval- uate distance and depth, and order the space according to the familiar rules of perspective and proprioception. In immersive environments, the feeling of being unmoored is heightened by the “environmentalizing” of the space: night enfolds us on all sides. Within this dis-anchored realm, the voices that appear to address us but remain devoid of a visible source seem to take possession of us, strength- ening the sense of losing one’s grip. But darkness is not the only precondition to our slipping into an altered state of consciousness. The experience of the scene unfold- ing independently from our will is equally important, which also occurs when watching 2D films. While spectators can look around in every direction in both the HMD and in a 360-degree 3D cinema, if you cannot control your propul- sion through a space or scene then the film acts on you. Only at this price – in accepting that I cannot change the “order” of the images and sounds – can a form of “dreamwork” take place.45 In the works described here, the unravelling of the images is inseparable from the relent- less, gliding movement that sucks us in, and, in the case of 360 degree 3D films, passes “through” us: to turn our head and look back is to experience the sense of memory disinte- grating, and history as ruins, that Walter Benjamin so vividly 45 As Thierry Kuntzel points out, such is the specificity of time-based media and its special link to the dream-like and to the unconscious: “the film and the story unravel outside of me, I cannot possibly intervene”. T. Kuntzel, “Le travail du film”, Communications, no. 19 (1972): 27. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 152 AN-ICON  evoked with the allegory of the angel of history.46 Lighting up in darkness, point clouds appear like the ultimate expression of transience. Though they are a mere effect of a particular imaging technology, they often look like constellations, or like particles that float in space, such as dust, petals or snowflakes; points that redefine deep space as a conduit to the dreamlike. A figuration of matter propagating, taking form and then dissolving, point clouds perfectly capture the melancholy awareness of the impermanence of the material world, and the all-too human, shared sense of finitude, loss, and awe experienced in reminiscing and day-dreaming. 46 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the philosophy of history”, trans. H. Zohn, in H. Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): 249. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 153 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/15161

Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media by Martine Beugnet and Lily Hibberd Cinema Darkness Spectatorship Dream Consciousness Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media by Martine Beugnet and Lily Hibberd Abstract As with films previously, claims are being made today about the capacity of immersive environments, in- cluding virtual reality, to offer viewers or experiencers ef- fective simulations of altered states of consciousness. In this article, we look anew at the enduring question of time- based mechanical (lens based and digital) media’s ability not merely to take us outside of or besides ourselves, but to generate an imaginary realm of their own. Our analysis centres on the use of darkness. Often associated with the passage from one state of consciousness to another, dark- ness has become a prevalent aesthetic in cinematic immer- sive media. In some ways, as we will see, the latest tech- nologies of audio-vision appear less apt than conventional cinema to induce us to “cross the bridge” and venture into the land of phantoms. In others, they emerge as privileged entries into the dreamlike worlds of our contemporary, tech- nologized era. In spite of differences in viewing conditions, we find that between the older medium of 2D film and that of cinematic virtual reality, darkness, combined with the illusion of depth and visual replication of motion proves to be a particularly potent harbinger of altered states. Cinema Darkness Spectatorship Dream Consciousness To quote this essay: M. Beugnet & L. Hibberd, “Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 129-152 MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 129 AN-ICON (...) spectators at the exit, brutally rejected by the black belly of the theater into the glaring and mischievous light of the lobby, some- times have the bewildered expression (happy and unhappy) of people waking up. To leave the movies is a little like getting up: not always easy.1 Introduction: cine-obscurity Darkness is dream’s natural associate. It is no wonder audiovisual works that seek to transport us beyond the here and now of awakened reality continue to rely on the power of darkness to enfold us and to unravel our sense of place and time. Though there are structural differences between the aesthetics and spectatorship of cinema and that of virtual reality, darkness functions across many me- dia forms as both a metaphor and as a corporeal device for immersion, encouraging spectators and participants to submit to imaginary realms. The scope of this article is not to review the wider lineage of darkness across immersive forms of media, or indeed to revisit their origins going back to Plato’s cave. The media archaeology of moving images and obscurity has already been done by theorists such as Oliver Grau, and in groundwork of Siegfried Zielinski and Gloria Custance, who described the cinema as a dark “womb”.2 Other media theorists have delineated the parameters of interactive or immersive 3D viewing, most notably Maria Engberg and Jay Bolter on virtual reality aesthetics, as well as William 1 C. Metz, A. Guzzetti, “The fiction film and its spectator: A metapsychological study”, New Literary History 8, no. 1 (1976): 75-105, 86. 2 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, trans. G. Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): 151-152. S. Zielinski, G. Custance, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999): 92, 246. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 130 AN-ICON  Brown with the notion of “gaseous perception” in relation to stereoscopic cinema and darkness.3 In contrast with earlier theorizations, in what follows we focus on adaptations of cinematic immersive reality in the hands of artists and experimental filmmakers. To further account for the contemporary emergence of an aesthetic of darkness we firstly seek to establish a histori- cal backdrop. We then turn our attention to the works and, where available, the words of the creators’ themselves, as we consider four recent immersive media works imbibed in darkness: Anouk De Clercq’s Thing, Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang’s La camera insabbiata/Chalkroom, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness and Parragirls Past, Pres- ent: Unlocking Memories of Institutional “Care”. As immer- sion in darkness is closely related to dreamworlds and to dreams of outer space, these phenomena provide the un- derpinning rationale in the first half of this article and for our subsequent analysis of these four works. Enfolding darkness, from awakened dreaming to altered states Amongst the most memorable scenes of F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) is the imaginary screening in which a seductress from the city appears to lure a naïve country man into a fantasized vision of urban life. One evening, as they sit together on the shore of a lake, the woman launches into an eloquent description of nightlife in the city. To demonstrate the impression made by her tale, Murnau materializes it in the form of a projection that magically appears in front of the two characters. Thanks to an astute system of transparencies, the dream show of the modern city superimposes itself onto the nocturnal sky, under the halo of a fake moon that 3 M. Engberg, J.D. Bolter, “The aesthetics of reality media”, Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 81-95. W. Brown, “Avatar: stereoscopic cinema, gaseous perception and darkness”, Animation 7, no. 3 (2012): 259-271. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 131 AN-ICON  glows like the lamp of a projector.4 Stylized cityscapes al- ternate with kaleidoscopic, blurry visions of frenzied revelry: there is no attempt at harnessing this fantastic vision to a specific or stable point of view. The fantasy may originate in the female character’s mind, but it feeds on a collective imaginary, and the projection allows her to share it with her companion, as well as beyond the diegesis, with the audi- ence of Murnau’s film. The sequence is a celebration of the powers of the cinema not merely as a “factory of dreams”, but also as a sharing of the experience of dreaming itself. Dreams and daydreams, hallucinations and memories, as the products of the human psyche, fascinate not only because they elude our self control (we can no more prevent or design our nightmares at will than we can consciously erase a memory), but also because they con- found our capacity to communicate and share experiences. In every medium, from literature to the theatre, painting and photography, techniques have been developed to evoke altered states of consciousness. The gap, however, be- tween the viewer or reader and the subjective creations of the psyche mediated by objective, external sources, is not easily bridged. Key to Sunrise’s mise en abyme of a screen- ing is the choice of a nocturnal setting: in a film theatre the night on screen blends with the darkness that surrounds the cinema spectator like a connecting tissue. Because the visibility of the projected film im- age initially relied on a beam of light, darkness – also the companion of sleep and dreams – has been associated with the cinema from the start. With the shift from analogue to digital, the glow of the LCD monitor has increasingly complemented the light beam of the projector, alongside other self-illuminating screens found in the domestic en- vironment. Regardless of location, we still lower the lights while watching films whenever possible. More than a mere 4 M. Beugnet, L’attrait du flou (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2017): 33-34. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 132 AN-ICON  condition of visibility, obscurity facilitates the slipping in and out of total awakened awareness. Film was the first medium to offer the promise of more than the mere representation of our imaginings – to engender a form of awakened dreaming through spectacle and apparatus. The increasingly photorealistic quality of cinematic images and sounds set in motion guaranteed the “credibility of its fabulations”.5 A spectator could hope to become immersed in a film in a manner similar to the dreamer, who experiences even the most absurd world of mental images equally as “real” as daily life occurrences, or of a daydreamer who indulges in memories or fanciful imaginings to the point of forgetting their actual surround- ings. The conditions of reception in the cinema auditorium came to reflect and strengthen the analogy: cut off from the outer world, plunged in darkness and silence, with limited physical activity, at the end of a screening the spectator often emerges as if they were awakening. Yet in spite of the unequalled ability to blur the frontier between representation and perception,6 the fusion of image and reality never occurs fully.7 As Christian Metz reminds us, where in deep sleep the dreamer does not know that they are dreaming, film induces, at best, a semi-wakeful state: more than dream per se, the experience of watching a film (which can be emulated, though imperfectly, in indi- vidual situations of viewing) resembles that of reminiscing, 5 C. Metz, A. Guzzetti, “The fiction film and its spectator: A metapsychological study”, New Literary History 8, no. 1 (1976): 75-105. 6 S. Sharot, “Dreams in films and films as dreams: surrealism and popular American cinema”, Canadian Journal of Film Studies 24, no. 1 (2015): 66-89. Also, on the myth of the credulous audience, see T. Gunning, “An aesthetic of astonishment. Early film and the (in)credulous spectator”, Art and Text, no. 34 (1989): 31-45. 7 In contrast, “dreaming is subjectively indistinguishable from waking experience”. See T.K. Metzigner, “Why is virtual reality interesting for philosophers?”, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, no. 5 (2018). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 133 AN-ICON  fantasizing or slipping into reverie. For Raymond Bellour, it is better compared with a form of hypnosis.8 Nonetheless, fascination for the medium’s oneiric qualities has driven some of the most radical and creative practices and theorizing of the medium. The rep- resentation of dreams themselves has had little to do with this evolution: from Antonin Artaud and the surrealists to Jean Epstein, the earliest avant-gardes nurtured the belief that the medium’s aesthetic potential laid not in the repre- sentation of dreams or reminiscences, but in the possibil- ity to dream or reminisce with images.9 In classic cinema however, as in avant-garde or experimental filmmaking, darkness and immobility remain the spectator-dreamer’s first allies. In The Absent Body, Drew Leder observes that in normal situations of perception the awareness of our body diminishes: the reason we can focus on what we watch, or concentrate on what we touch, is that we do not pay attention to the actual process, nor to the eye or hand involved in it.10 A similar receding of bodily awareness occurs when we are absorbed in our own thoughts. Such “absenting” of the lived body is not however “equivalent to a mere void, a lack of being”.11 Rather, it testifies to the extent in which a sentient subject might be beside itself, “ecstatically caught-up in the world”: the very nature of the body is to project outwards from its place of standing. From the “here” arises a perceptual world of near and far distances. From the “now” we inhabit a meaningful past and a futural realm of projects and goals.12 8 R. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: POL / Trafic, 2009). 9 J. Epstein, Écrits sur le cinéma, vol. 2 (Paris: Cinéma Club/Seghers, 1975): 18-20. Also see, A. Artaud “Cinéma et réalité”, Œuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris : Gallimard, 1978): 19; and M. Beugnet, L’attrait du flou (Crisnée: Yellow Now: 2017): 82-83. 10 A. Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990): 70-71. 11 Ibid.: 22. 12 Ibid.: 23. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 134 AN-ICON  Leder’s description of this phenomenon recalls James Gibson’s theory of “affordance”, according to which individuals are entwined with their surroundings, their pro- spective actions informed by the constant collecting of information from their environment.13 This capacity to feel or to picture our bodies outside or alongside themselves in time and space is an equally fundamental feature of dream- ing, hallucination and reverie, as well as the fabrication of their similitude in movies. Indeed, it is often the altered sense in which our body appears to relate to its perceived environment (feeling one’s bodily affordance hindered, dis- torted or augmented in turns) that marks the difference between awakened and dreamlike states. In the cinema, the body’s capacity for ecstasis is simultaneously enhanced and directed away from the immediate environment, towards the virtual world that ap- pears on the screen. The film auditorium, as a space, has sometimes been compared to a womb.14 Darkness engulfs the barely moving spectators, allowing them to be together and alone at once, to ignore the borders of the screen as they recede in the obscurity. Within the secluded space of the theatre, the light originating from behind the audience trains spectators to project themselves on the screen, to sit- uate themselves within the perspectival view of the spaces offered to the eye, and the anthropomorphic quality of the camera’s gaze that explores them. From the 1950s onwards, anamorphic lenses widened the frame, and shortened the optical depth of field, with a corresponding increase in visual blur effects. Strengthening the sense of immersion and bringing the cinematic closer to the human field of vision, the blurring of the margins of the visual frame also subtly blended the projected image into the surrounding 13 J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). 14 T. Elsaesser, “Cinephilia or the uses of disenchantment”, in M. de Valck, M. Hagener, eds., Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005): 32. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 135 AN-ICON  darkness, heightening the feeling of being suspended in a virtual dimension without physical limits. In the cinema and at home, dimming the lights and turning up the volume amplifies the degree to which we forget about our own body so as to engage in watch- ing and listening to a movie, sometimes even touching or tasting through the synesthetic or haptic powers of certain images.15 Accordingly, in classic narrative cinema’s sub- jective point of view, a character’s body partly or wholly disappears from the frame. Such strategies allow us, as the spectator, not only to half-dream our way through a film, but also to engage with the expression of altered states of consciousness where images and sounds are supposedly the product of mental processes. Paradoxically, both of these experiences can involve audiovisual representations of extreme physicality (fighting, crying, flying…). Whether awake or dreaming,16 characters in films move, fall or take off in the air, as we ourselves sometimes do in our sleep. In all such cases, however, it is the incapacity to act on the film’s progression that grants the experience its onei- ric quality: as the dreamer with dreams, the film spectator does not control the flow of images: once triggered, they cannot be easily altered or fully erased at will.17 Nor can we always choose to retain a memory, or the trace of a dream, 15 L.U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). M. Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 16 Whereas a dream or a memory is a subjective reality emanating from the psyche, a film is an external product constructed according to a common idiom. In conventional filmmaking, transitions mark out the passage from woken to altered states of consciousness (fades in and out, blurredness, distorted perspectives, spiralling images amongst others). Film dreaming is thus reclaimed and repurposed as the representation of dreaming in film. 17 See T. Kuntzel, “Le defilement”, La revue d’esthétique (1972), reprinted in D. Noguez, ed., Cinéma: théorie, lectures (Paris, Klincksieck, 1978): 97-110. R. Bellour, L’entre-images: photo, cinéma, vidéo (Paris: La Différence, 2002): 86. M. Beugnet, Le Cinéma et ses doubles (Bordeaux: Bord de l’eau, 2021): 5-6. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 136 AN-ICON  any more that we can keep a precise recollection of all the images of a film whose course we can hardly change.18 As with films previously, claims are being made today about the capacity of immersive environments, in- cluding virtual reality, to offer viewers or experiencers ef- fective simulations of altered states of consciousness.19 In what follows, we look anew at the enduring question of time-based mechanical (lens based and digital) media’s ability not merely to take us outside of or besides ourselves, but also to generate an imaginary realm of their own. In doing so we consider the issue of aesthetics alongside the conditions of spectatorship and reception. In some ways, as we will see, the new technologies of audio-vision appear less apt than conventional cinema to induce us to “cross the bridge” and venture into the land of phantoms. In others, they emerge as privileged entries into dream-like worlds of our contemporary, technologized era. What inter- ests us most is not the lure of the “myth of total immersion” or the pursuit of the perfect conflation of perception and representation that would entail the erasure of the frontier between reality and fantasy.20 Rather, we concentrate on the way cinematic virtual reality (including built immersive environments and head-mounted displays) creates the illu- sion of presence while exploiting digital imaging to emulate 18 Remote control usage destroys the experience of time as co-presence, or of time slipping away (also an essential dimension of memories and dreams). Accordingly, Laura Mulvey associates the remote control with the emergence of a possessive spectator in Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 19 From David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) to Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) and Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018) amongst others, the association of immersive technology and altered states of consciousness is a favoured topic in mainstream cinema. For a VR example see Dream (2016) by Philippe Lambert, which is built on a custom audio-visual synthesizer coded by Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit. https://www.nfb.ca/interactive/dream/. 20 See M. Beugnet, L. Hibberd, “Absorbed in experience: new perspectives on immersive media”, Screen 61, no. 4 (2020). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 137 AN-ICON  the dreamlike state of cinematic reception and conjure up a specific, distinctive kind of imagining.21 In the cinema, the obscurity afforded by the auditorium creates the condition for a unique experience: that of a shared space where a collective dreamlike or light hypnotic state prevails. Contrastingly, when viewing a work in a head-mounted display, there is no “joint watching”. The solitude is inescapable, only faintly or temporarily relieved in encounters with others, as characters or actors in the shape of avatars. Darkness creates a connection nonethe- less, an evocation of an infinite space that, ultimately, we all have in common. Hence, in spite of differences in viewing conditions, we find that between the medium of 2D film and that of cinematic virtual reality, darkness combined with the visual replication of motion proves to be a potent harbinger of the dreamlike. It unsettles our grounded-ness in place and demands that we forge new connections with images, and with the world, ourselves and others. We further sug- gest that across VR and film, darkness inaugurates a shift from the collective experience of subjective states toward the individual experience of an unconscious shaped by the shared knowledge of our finitude. Though we are told we live in the age of the Anthropocene, we have an acute sense of the relativity of our existence, of being caught in perpetual movement, connected yet unanchored. Like the dot-size character who faces the starry vastness of the universe at the end of The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1957), the viewer who slides into the seem- ingly limitless night of contemporary films and immersive environments may experience a dreamlike state of radical groundlessness – a contemporary sense of solitary, yet shared, unmooring. 21 Virtual reality is assumed to be closely entwined with interactive gaming and simulated training. This article however focuses on the transmedial practices of narrative and immersion – across film, video art, and immersive installation art – where the spectator rarely drives the story or provokes events. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 138 AN-ICON  In “Of other spaces”, Michel Foucault notes how, from Galileo onwards, things could now only exist in their relative placement and movement: a thing’s place was no longer anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo in the 17th cen- tury, extension was substituted for localization.22 The site of an object, from then on came to be defined as “relations of proximity between points or ele- ments”, like “the dots in a constellation”.23 Foucault builds on the pre-modern analogy between body and universe, arguing that traditionally, space had been constructed as “a space of radiation. Man is surrounded by it on every side; but, inversely, he transmits these resemblances back into the world from which he receives them”.24 In other words, the body is conceived as the medium through which the world is organized as it is perceived. Perspectival art, with its stable construction of space and anchoring of the gaze to a specific position in space, emphasizes such a sense of place-ness and orientation. Though convention- al filmmaking adopted the continuity system in an effort to emulate this centralized condition, its mobile gaze and time-based structure always threatened to reveal the fra- gility of the model.25 Alternative uses of cinematography thus sought to explore the relativity of movement and place, showing the anthropomorphic gaze, with its safely located source, to be an artifice. This approach was not exclusive to ex- perimental cinema: in science fiction and documentary film 22 M. Foucault, “Of other spaces: utopias and heterotopias”, trans. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics 6, no.1 (1986): 22. 23 Ibid.: 23. 24 M. Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Random House, 1970): 23. 25 J. Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972): 18. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 139 AN-ICON  reconstitutions of outer space in particular have made us familiar with “impossible” viewpoints, where a virtual cam- era circles around planets and floats through constella- tions.26 Here again, darkness, like the sidereal night, is key – sucking the spectators into its awesome solitude even as they sit in a crowd. As we will see, immersive technologies have in turn proven to be remarkably able to produce a radi- cal sense of dis-anchoring. A 360-degree omnidirectional scape that moves independently from the viewer’s own movement implies a constant and uncontrollable fluctuation of one’s place within the image. With the dissolution of a stable single-point perspective the body of the observer ceases to be the sole reference and singular source of the gaze as an ordering principle of visible space. The most potent aspect however of these novel immersive environ- ments is the means to enter into the boundlessness of 3D constructed worlds, endless spaces that find in darkness their most compelling expression. In the fathomless black- ness of virtual spaces, furthermore, the solidity of repre- sented things is prone to slip away. The liminal threshold of immersive worlds is arguably always teetering on the brink of dreams – an aspect that the fanfare of virtual reality and the clumsiness of head-mounted displays paradoxi- cally diminishes. Even in 2D iterations construed from 3D renderings however, as is the case in the floating world of Thing, such an evocation of the universe offers itself as powerfully oneiric experience. Sidereal night: Anouk De Clercq’s Thing The first minute of Anouk De Clercq’s film Thing27 is entirely black. The sound track is also initially 26 Famously in the “Blue Danube” sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). 27 Video, b/w, 16:9, stereo, BE/IT/FR, 2013, 18’. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 140 AN-ICON  completely silent, though after a few seconds the faint noise of a light wind or breathing is heard, followed by a voice. The sound of the voice is slightly echoey, as if heard in a large, empty space. Then a crashing noise, followed by the appearance of thin, veil-like formations white dots that move into view from the right of the frame. But whose view? For the voice remains disembodied throughout, and its musings do not refer to the images with any specificity. Nor can we safely establish its location, as its stereophonic transcription varies in spatial orientation, switching from our right to our left ear. Equally impossible to determine is the origin of the movement that alters what we are given to see. Suggested by the changing size of the shapes and their moving in and out of frame, such spatial proximity or distance could equally mirror the trajectory of an invisible observer floating in the dark space, or that of the cloud formations themselves as they enter the former’s field of vision. Occasionally, a fade or a cut to black or a glitch- like effect (with a crackling sound emitted as all vanishes) plunges the screen back into utter darkness.28 Thing appears to be a journey through a virtual world, born out of the imagination of a fictional dreamer – given the nature of the images and the model-like appa- ritions of cities and buildings this dreamer could be the engineer of this world. De Clercq describes Thing as a journey through an architect’s “virtual memory”, “a bound- less, imaginary space” where fictional buildings and urban patterns emerge and disperse in the darkness, a series of ephemeral nebulas that manifest as a kind of “paradoxi- cal materiality” precisely because they are “virtual”.29 The film was made using LiDAR imaging of urbanscapes (an acronym for Light Detection and Ranging) a remote sensor 28 See R. Misek, “The black screen”, in M. Beugnet, A. Cameron, A. Fetveit, eds., Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017): 38-52. 29 See the video here: https://portapak.be/works/30/thing, accessed 18/12/2020. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 141 AN-ICON  technology that generates accurate 3D information about the shape of very large surfaces and their characteristics using pulsed laser emissions to measure ranges between the sensor and the surface. Developed for architectural, archaeological and engineering surveys, such visualiza- tions provide a way of seeing spatial information, which is augmented when viewed in a 3D stereoscopic environ- ment. Yet another digital program subsequently renders the LiDAR data as “point clouds”, the dots of light we see in Thing. Most of the shapes and forms conjured up in Thing are made of these unstable, constantly reshaping clouds of dots. Although the initial light point formations re- semble natural phenomena – cirrostratus, cirrocumulus or constellations – they later produce artificial patterns. An elongated, geometrical form floats in the dark like a space- ship, and the monumental entrance to a city materializes and dissolves. We then travel through the diaphanous out- lines of a district with a mesh of buildings with terraces and hanging gardens. The cross-cutting of a workshop appears and slowly glides in and out of view, its furnishings (stairs, hanging lamps, an easel, the semi-circular shape of what looks like part of a bull’s eye window) sketched in brilliant white against the surrounding night. Some of the point cloud renditions are reminis- cent of white charcoal drawings on black paper, while the buildings and the room resemble X-rays: ghostly, silvery shapes in a process of disintegration. While X-rays and 3D scanners are already used to document vestiges, as well as to augment the existing data of artefacts and archaeo- logical sites, film also holds a specific connection to ruins. Of the attraction exercised by ruins on the cinema, André Habib notes how they offer themselves as the poignant manifestation of the transience of all things human, includ- ing that of our own existence. The inexorability of the flow MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 142 AN-ICON  of 24 images or frames per second – of the ephemerality of its linear course from beginning to end that may be re- peated or looped but not halted – explains the “melancholy, quasi-ontological” relation that connects the medium to the temporality and spatiality of ruins.30 Drawing on tech- niques and visualizations that fuse the astrological and the architectural, De Clercq collapses human time and space (its material, located traces, its memories and dreams) in the infinity of the sidereal night. To craft its boundless post-Galilean dream of space as a universe where the individual body and the individual consciousness are free floating or diffuse, Thing uses the tools of 20th and 21st century imaging. This draw- ing together of film, architecture, and infinite space gives De Clercq’s film an affinity with so-called immersive envi- ronments: a 2D film with a 3D sensibility, best seen in the obscurity of a cinema, it makes full use of the darkened film-theatre as its immediate, continuous extension. “Dark, weird and shadowy”: Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang’s La camera insabbiata/Chalkroom Experimental multimedia artist Laurie Ander- son has produced a series of virtual reality works that elu- cidate some of the aesthetic traits of De Clercq’s Thing in a fully 3D format, also harnessing some of VR’s aptitude to create dreamlike and out-of-body experiences. Created in collaboration with media artist Hsin-Chien Huang in 2017, Chalkroom is an installation and an interactive VR experience, permanently installed at the MoCA in Massachusetts, USA.31 Seated viewers don a head-mounted display and take up two handheld controllers to enter into the VR 30 A. Habib, L’attrait de la ruine (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2011): 9. 31 Virtual reality 360 degree3D interactive video and installation, EN, 2017. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 143 AN-ICON  experience. In the first scene, a lone architectural structure sits on top of a mountain. Unlike the architecture in Thing, the building appears to be concrete. You are coaxed to fly over and enter it, navigating a series of narrow corridors toward a small portal at the end. The controller, which also acts as a torch, is the only source of light. The virtual walls are covered in chalk writing, like their physical counter- part outside the head-mounted display. Here, however, the torchlight illuminates a small orb, making the text all the more elusive – a curious and perverse effect given that the artists have designated us as “readers” instead of viewers. Words disintegrate into phenomes, and break apart again into letters, like swarms of flies. Yet, Laurie Anderson’s vel- vet intonations flow over this eerie place, making it homely. Claustrophobic passages open out into an infinite black space that contains a constellation of text. You’re free to fly around and explore the space, hidden sto- ries narrated by Anderson, which emerge as you approach certain zones. Objects, such as an illuminated, leafy tree, dissolve on closer inspection, and you see this too is made up of letters, as Anderson whispers to us: “You realise that things are made of words”. In interview, she explains being initially unsure about VR because it was too game-like, but that if she could make something “very homemade, dark, weird and shadowy, a different kind of space, a different kind of mental space” then she would be interested.32 Her aim, she adds, was to create an experience where you could fly “like in your dreams”. On the face of it, since immersive environments such as 3D films in 360 degree cinema projection and virtual reality experiences on head-mounted display or HMD, 33 32 “Laurie Anderson interview: A virtual reality of stories”, 2017, Louisiana Channel. Accessed 20/12/2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHT016FbR30. 33 It is important not to confuse VR with the HMD. In simplest terms, Virtual Reality is defined as being the coherence of technical means that enable a person to interact in real time with a virtual world. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 144 AN-ICON  effectively “environmentalize”34 the image, one could ex- pect the “womb” effect to be perfected and even emulated, as with Anderson’s installation. However, in contrast with conventional spectatorship, absorbed viewing is under- mined by the degree of physical activity involved in the experience.35 In addition to the heaviness and discomfort of the hardware – the headset and headphones – and the optical strain of stereoscopic vision, the attention and effort involved in interacting with the virtual environment para- doxically induce a sense of heightened physical awareness. Rather than projecting itself, the sentient subject engages with the task of controlling the effects of its own motricity in the here and now: a “presenting”, rather than an absent- ing of the body. These effects might be the result of VR’s relative novelty. Nonetheless, it seems that in the narrative context of cinematic VR – beyond gaming and therapeutic applications – interaction and causative acts tend to un- dermine immersion, contradicting widespread theories of “presence” in VR.36 After all, it can be very unnerving to feel your body split in two: an HMD effectively separates our head from the rest of our body. Not only can we not see our (real) selves but unless we are offered some form of avatar we also lack a visible body in the virtual world. Once we get used to this literal mode of “absenting” however, new forms of ecstasis become possible. As we become familiar with the process of virtual seeing, touching and moving, our experiencer or avatar body may recede into the background of our awareness, just like our lived body 34 A. Pinotti, “Environmentalising the image. Towards an-iconology”, in dossier M. Beugnet, L. Hibberd, eds., “Absorbed in experience: new perspectives on immersive media”, Screen 61, no. 4 (2020): 594-603. 35 Interestingly, in Sunrise the virtual screen vanishes when the woman starts dancing. 36 See C. Heeter, “Being there: the subjective experience of presence”, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 1, no. 2 (1992): 262-271. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 145 AN-ICON  does in a reverie, leaving us to be “ecstatically caught-up in the virtual world”.37 Distinct from many other VR interactive ex- periences, Chalkroom’s freedom to roam inhabits this liminal zone for two reasons: one, choices don’t lead to deterministic or sequential narratives, and thus, similar to a dream or hallucination, we feel that we are driven by compulsions and desires. Two, and even more compelling, is the sense that you cannot put your feet on the ground, that you are floating free. Anderson describes this in terms of disembodiment, stating that “losing your body” is one of her chief interests in producing these works.38 The inherent disembodiment felt when navigat- ing a 3D world in VR immersion is all the more estranging when it is set in the dark. The chiaroscuro effect is theatrical and exaggerates the sense of volume and depth as in a Ba- roque painting. And lower levels of light are also less visually straining in VR. In Chalkroom the upshot of floating through the dark signals our descent into the night; a diurnal cycle that we are bound to as circadian creatures. Anderson aptly remarks: “What are nights for? To fall through time into an- other world”; a world where, as Huang points out, “the words become a nebula” – chalk dust, atomised, diffuse matter disintegrating upon touch, evading our grasp. While not all HMD-supported VR relies on interactive interfaces, wearing a head-mounted display cuts us off from the surrounding reality more effectively than the dimness of our living room, or the darkness of the cinema auditorium (where exit signs, are by necessity always visible).39 Distinct from watching the audience at a film screening, to observe someone wearing an HMD feels 37 A. Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990): 22. 38 “Laurie Anderson Interview: A Virtual Reality of Stories”. In performance studies, such a transit state is called “liminoid performance”. See Alexandra G. Murphy, “Organizational politics of place and space: the perpetual liminoid performance of commercial flight”, Text and Performance Quarterly 22, no. 4 (2002): 297-316. 39 A. Pinotti, “Environmentalising the image. Towards an-iconology”. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 146 AN-ICON  a bit like trespassing. As when we look at someone who is sleeping, the experiencer is not aware of our gaze. At the same time, we have no access to what they are seeing. The duality of mind and eye as well as inner and outer worlds is a consistent theme in narrative VR experiences, one that is explicitly realised in works that manifest otherwise invisible or intangible traces, senses or information – or as in Notes on Blindness a lack of access thereof. Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness. The virtual reality film, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness40 was created as a counterpart to the feature documentary Notes on Blindness produced by Peter Mid- dleton and James Spinney in 2016. Both works arise from the first-person audio narration of John Hull, who describes in visceral and philosophical terms the process of losing his sight.41 Mired in darkness, as its title indicates, the VR version of the feature film has a wraith-like quality; of thin veils of light suspended in twilight. Its narrative is structured around six parts, each one being a memory, a moment, and a specific location recorded on John Hull’s tapes; each scene requiring a different level and form of interaction from the viewer in order to follow or progress through the narrative. Sound is central to the work, augmented through binaural audio (that spatializes sound as if it were bouncing around your ears), while the 3D rendering of objects and moving figures create a highly immersive experience. Sim- ilar to Thing, its most evocative aspect is the use of point 40 With narrator John Hull. Interactive virtual reality, 360-degree 3D video, colour, EN/FR, 7’, 2016. 41 Based on John Hull’s memoir, On Sight and Insight: A Journey Into the World of Blindness (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 147 AN-ICON  cloud to suspend firefly-like dots in a seemingly infinite deep indigo.42 The first two scenes in Notes on Blindness establish the parameters for acoustic seeing: in the obscure world evoked by John Hull we must learn anew how to look with our ears. Light signals how sound might feel and alerts us to the acoustic realm in three dimensions. It is, however, in the second and third scenes that we are subjected to something closer to liminal performance. As Hull begins to realise that he can no longer remember what things or loved ones look like, he descends into despair. His fear of being trapped alone in darkness culminates in a scene out in the snow, where he panics because he loses all sense of place. At the end of the narration however, the VR interaction invites us to dissolve his footprints in the snow by training our attention, with our head position tracked by the HMD, on their impression in the darkness. When the first set of footprints vanish another pair appear, leading us in Hull’s steps back to the safety of home. In the episode that features rain, Hull’s house is an almost silent place except for his gentle voice and the reverberation of raindrops falling on ordinary objects in the room. We are again invited to interact with our gaze, this time to give shape to otherwise hidden forms that the rain defines acoustically: pots, pans, glasses, dishes. This is a pivotal moment in Hull’s own life and the VR film; we too understand what it is to create the virtual shape of things by listening to them. There is also a specific, oneiric qual- ity to the space that the VR work creates whereby Hull’s experience becomes a shared one, rather than a voyeuris- tic observation of someone losing their sight.43 Everything we hear is echoed in its visual equivalent; renderings that 42 Point cloud started to appear in cinematic VR works at this time. See, for instance, “Coexistence” 2016, at the Venice Architecture Biennale: https://vimeo.com/183596023 43 For ethical issues related to the work, see D. Leblond, “Landscape Shaped by Blindness. Touching the Rock (1990) and Notes on Blindness (2016): Towards an ec(h)ology of vision”, Études britanniques contemporaines no. 55 (2018). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 148 AN-ICON  appear as point clouds: luminescent, 3D shapes of objects and moving bodies that create elusive, lace-like silhou- ettes in the darkened space. In the process of becoming fully recognizable, and as they unravel and disperse into thinning clouds of bright specks, these forms resemble constellations. Hence, in Notes on Blindness, as in Thing and Chalkroom, the darkness acts as a connecting mate- rial: boundless, it enfolds all of us (seeing and non-seeing individuals) in a cosmic infinity that is simultaneously inti- mate and terrifying. “Cold space, a dark place”: Parragirls Past, Present: unlocking memories of institutional “care” The immersive VR film Parragirls Past, Present44 is set in the grounds and buildings of Parramatta Girls Home – a punitive welfare institution for teenage girls sit- uated in Western Sydney, Australia, closed in 1974 and abandoned since the late 1990s. Its creation pivots on the memories of five former occupants, among the hundreds who have returned after many decades to confront this terrible place. As a labour of remembrance mired in trauma, the project required more than a year of collaboration with the aim of finding a form of testimony that might convey the survivors’ experiences to a wider public. In Parramatta Girls Home, children were not only deprived of freedom, but also cruelly disciplined and abused. Later, both Australian government inquiries and media reporting sensationalized and underscored their stigma and victimhood. The last thing Parragirls could abide was to provide viewers with prurient pleasures. Hence, a number of counter-visual strat- egies were developed, ruling out interactivity as a means 44 360-degree 3D stereoscopic video, ambisonic spatial sound, EN, 2017, 23’. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 149 AN-ICON  for viewers to progress through the virtual environment and its narratives. As with Thing, Chalkroom and Notes on Blind- ness, the point cloud photographic technique, materializing against the surrounding darkness, proved key. Among the varied ways that images can be “environmentalized” in 3D and 360 degrees, point cloud is distinct: it bears little resemblance to the synthetic imagery of game and CGI animation. Cartographic in origin, point cloud provides a means to project these as experienceable architectures – places we can fly through, as if in space. In addition to the sense of irrepressible movement, of being sucked into the institution’s spatio-temporal vortex, it is the transformation of photographs into points of light and colour that float in an abysmal 3D world that gives Parragirls Past, Present its wraithlike and enigmatic atmosphere. Accompanying the journey is the sound of the Parragirls’ voices, captured in ambisonic recordings. Wo- ven together, they offer a deeply personal yet collective ac- count of their experience as inmates. There is one location in particular in the Girls Home that former occupants find difficult to revisit: a basement solitary confinement cell, col- loquially known as the dungeon. In the film, Gypsie Hayes describes it thus: the only way you can survive in there is to curl up and go to sleep. That’s all you could do to survive that. It was nothingness. It was just a cold space, a dark place. In contrast to the exterior point cloud scenes, the cell is represented as a stereoscopic spherical panorama in 360 degrees. Moving between the differently rendered and spatially located spaces, presented yet another dilemma however, which was resolved using the point cloud aes- thetic as a form of transition in conjunction with moving MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 150 AN-ICON  tracking shots, to dissolve the image across one space or dimension into another. The most unusual impact of combining point cloud with mobile tracking shots in the 3D world of Parra- girls Past, Present is the feeling of being pulled through the experience, almost against our will. The data points seem to transcend and even pierce our body, so that we become part of the ghost-like substance of the Girls Home. Distinct from its head-mounted display viewing, in the 3D 360-de- gree film screenings of Parragirls Past, Present at UNSW EPICentre. Standing alongside 10 to 15 spectators wearing 3D glasses, you can see the points appear to emerge in 3D from the circular screen and pass through the bodies of the viewers beside you. The imagery may appear spectral as it floats through space, but so are the audience, whose bod- ies are traversed as if they had no consistency or solidity. Crucially, in conjunction with the nightmarish, endless darkness and the omnidirectional eye, point cloud effectively disassembles the centralized gaze of VR’s typi- cally first-person perspective: enfolded in swarms of float- ing pixels, we start to feel what it must have been like to be under constant disciplinary surveillance – to be watched at all times by invisible omniscient eyes. In the concluding shot, however, we fly out backwards, as if pulled up and out into the sky, discovering the vast emptiness that extends beyond the perimeter of the institution. On the one hand, what we are literally seeing are the limits of the photogrammetric images that could be recorded – black holes in both data and historical memory. On the other hand, as the sound of the multiple voices van- ishes, we grasp a sense of the collective unconscious that Parragirls still share with the other former occupants of the Home: the internalisation of a state of incarceration, being severed from the rest of the world, unable to imagine what lays beyond the space of incarceration other than a void. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 151 AN-ICON  Conclusion In moving image media, as in real life, darkness has always been a privileged channel towards alternate states of self or alterity. Black spaces encourage us to re- linquish control of sensing bodies, simultaneously fostering a sense of placeless-ness: in the dark, we lose our sense of orientation and lack the necessary landmarks to eval- uate distance and depth, and order the space according to the familiar rules of perspective and proprioception. In immersive environments, the feeling of being unmoored is heightened by the “environmentalizing” of the space: night enfolds us on all sides. Within this dis-anchored realm, the voices that appear to address us but remain devoid of a visible source seem to take possession of us, strength- ening the sense of losing one’s grip. But darkness is not the only precondition to our slipping into an altered state of consciousness. The experience of the scene unfold- ing independently from our will is equally important, which also occurs when watching 2D films. While spectators can look around in every direction in both the HMD and in a 360-degree 3D cinema, if you cannot control your propul- sion through a space or scene then the film acts on you. Only at this price – in accepting that I cannot change the “order” of the images and sounds – can a form of “dreamwork” take place.45 In the works described here, the unravelling of the images is inseparable from the relent- less, gliding movement that sucks us in, and, in the case of 360 degree 3D films, passes “through” us: to turn our head and look back is to experience the sense of memory disinte- grating, and history as ruins, that Walter Benjamin so vividly 45 As Thierry Kuntzel points out, such is the specificity of time-based media and its special link to the dream-like and to the unconscious: “the film and the story unravel outside of me, I cannot possibly intervene”. T. Kuntzel, “Le travail du film”, Communications, no. 19 (1972): 27. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 152 AN-ICON  evoked with the allegory of the angel of history.46 Lighting up in darkness, point clouds appear like the ultimate expression of transience. Though they are a mere effect of a particular imaging technology, they often look like constellations, or like particles that float in space, such as dust, petals or snowflakes; points that redefine deep space as a conduit to the dreamlike. A figuration of matter propagating, taking form and then dissolving, point clouds perfectly capture the melancholy awareness of the impermanence of the material world, and the all-too human, shared sense of finitude, loss, and awe experienced in reminiscing and day-dreaming. 46 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the philosophy of history”, trans. H. Zohn, in H. Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): 249. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 153 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/15441

The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the Image as a Bilderschrift by Pietro Montani Virtual Reality Imagination Hallucination Dream Regression Intermediality Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the 1 Image as a Bilderschrift by Pietro Montani Abstract This article discusses the following points: ■ The analogies which can be identified between Virtual Reali- ty (VR) and the hallucinatory aspects of dream activity make sense within a network of relations characterised by certain important cognitive performances (in particular inferential performances) which can be attributed to the work of the imagination; ■ To assure the plasticity of these performances, the imagi- nation seems to have to distance itself somewhat from linguistic thought and in dreams this is achieved regressively via the hallu- cinatory state. Various authoritative neuroscientific approaches to dreams significantly substantiate this theory. ■ At the time when its correlation with linguistic thought is deactivated, the imagination does not, however, surrender it- self to the hallucinatory event but elaborates it with recourse to practices similar to those of syncretic writing – a Bilderschrift or “pictographic script” as defined by Freud; ■ It is significant that very early cinema also addressed the quasi-hallucinatory aspects of films, practising an “intermedial” Bilderschrift, i.e. a treatment of the images that is attentive to the comparison and integration of the different levels of expression which work together in the composition of a film; ■ Digital images seem to revive this production model in sev- eral ways and I will offer two examples highlighting their affinity with syncretic and intermedial writing. Virtual Reality Imagination Hallucination Dream Regression Intermediality To quote this essay: P. Montani, “The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the image as a Bilderschrift”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 153-171 PIETRO MONTANI 154 AN-ICON  Virtual reality, hallucination and the dream-imagination The hallucinatory aspect of VR is obvious to those who have experienced or wish to study it. However, not everyone hallucinates and so the hallucinatory nature of dreams offers the most immediate and comprehensible parallel – an experience we undergo during sleep with a frequency and regularity familiar to all.2 VR and dreams cannot be treated as entirely identical phenomena, indeed there are many and signifi- cant differences as we shall see shortly. However we can immediately highlight at least two essential parallels. The first is the compelling illusion of reality that differentiates hallucinatory dreams and VR images from other types of internal and external images processed by the imagination. This leads to the second parallel, regarding the unalterable nature of what is perceived. Apart from some exception- al cases (e.g. “lucid dreaming”), we cannot intervene in dream images, the realism of which is experienced as both convincingly plausible and undeniably objective. The same applies to the fundamentally hallucinatory nature of VR images (although there are clearly many potential excep- tions, to which I shall return in the final section). I would happily add a further property in the presence of sufficient evidence and that is how easily we forget dreams, which corresponds – although this is a totally subjective obser- vation – to the ease with which we discard large portions of our VR experiences. I must stress that the two aforementioned prop- erties are linked to the particular realism of dream and VR 1 This article refers to the European research project “The Future of Humanity: New Scenarios of Imagination” (Vilnius University). This research is funded by the European Social Fund (project no. 09.3.3-LMTK-712-01-0078). 2 The analogy between VR and dreaming has already been explored. See for example R. Diodato, Estetica del virtuale (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2005), which, however, chooses a different approach from the one I will propose here. PIETRO MONTANI 155 AN-ICON  images. So, although the latter come in several interactive forms (e.g. immersive installations) that can alter the per- ceived environment, this does not impact on the funda- mentally hallucinatory state of the images delivered. On the contrary, the degree of interactivity in dreams is limited to the activation of cognitive processes internal to the dream event such as the linguistic formulation of judgements and inferences, and an evaluation of the emotions experienced. But here, too, these processes are dependent on the objec- tivity of the images experienced. I shall provide a personal example: the night before starting this article I dreamt that I encountered a stranger in the street and sensed with great pity and concern that he clearly felt ashamed, although there was no indication as to why. Without entering into more detailed analysis, what I have described was clearly a hallucinatory event accompanied by a congruent judge- ment explicitly formulated in the dreamer’s inner discourse, and which included the word “ashamed”. But it was not a “lucid dream”. A Freudian analyst would say that the dream was mine so the pity and concern were directed at a part of me. This may be so, but this split within the dreamer reinforces rather than diminishes the objectivity of the sentiment I felt and the congruence of the judgement I associated with it (i.e. that the human condition is truly compassionate – and mysterious – if someone can show shame for no apparent reason). Ultimately, it is the radically immersive state of the two traits shared by VR and dreams that should be underscored:3 we become caught up in a 3 For a helpful classification of all the VR forms 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. Tyerry Giuliana, eds., Meaning- Making in Extended Reality (Rome: Aracne, 2020): 63-90. According to the accurate schema divided into four categories discussed in the article, the type on which these considerations focus occupies the second level of the third type (“Advanced cinematic VR”). However, the authors describe “radical immersive media” as a broad category of devices (which can be further divided into two subgroups) designed to interact in different ways with the real world. For reasons that will become clear later, I shall limit my considerations to a very general analogy between VR and dreams. PIETRO MONTANI 156 AN-ICON  simulated environment featuring images that coercively force their presence on us. And now for the equally significant differences. What I have described – and why I was able to describe it – was clearly a dream occurring in a REM sleep phase. It was one of those dreams availing of closer integration with Freud’s “secondary process” and the ones we remember (or reorganise) with greater satisfaction. The neurophys- iological processes at work in all sleep phases are fairly well known today, although the scientific community has reached no full agreement on the functional meaning to attribute to the incoherence and transience of their dream products. We do not know exactly what purpose is served by the low structural level of dreams but there appears to be good support for the theory – adopted here – accord- ing to which their principal function is to increase the “fit- ness” of some processes of the imagination conducted in a wakeful state (particularly inferential ones) by reducing their redundancy and complexity in several ways.4 What does this strange neural work look like? Some have likened it to the wandering undertaken by our vigilant imagination5. Dreams (REM and NREM) also seem- ingly implement a momentary state of generally indeter- minate, organised and specialised cognitive function (e.g. intentionality and attention) to maintain the brain-mind for periods of varying length in the purely virtual phase effec- tively described as the “default mode network”. This is a typically “experimental” phase as both the dream and the wandering explore numerous potential configurations of 4 Here and elsewhere I refer in particular to an important essay by J.A. Hobson et al., “Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming”, Frontiers in Psychology 5, no. 1133 (2014) https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01133. Hobson is an undisputed authority on dream studies and shares the theory (see in particular the works by G. Tononi) that dreams optimise some wakeful cognitive processes by alleviating and “pruning” the synapses in excess. 5 See M. Corballis, The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You’re Not Looking (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2014). Corballis is a psychologist who mainly studies language but his book is up-to-date on the most accredited developments of the neurosciences regarding the dream phenomenon. PIETRO MONTANI 157 AN-ICON  well-defined or simply hypothetical situations and problems, often varied or even disparate. In this sense, the “default mode network” active in dreams in the hallucinatory form familiar to us prompts the entire neuronal apparatus to enter into free flow with no fixed objectives, allowing the “innate generator of virtual reality” in our brains to behave as a “free-running inference machine”.6 This machine – and we shall return to this – benefits from a “synaptic regression”7, a temporary reinstatement of extremely primitive neural circuits not used in the wakeful state. In other words, our brain seemingly needs to suspend dealings with the real world (and its complexity) at regular intervals and start dialoguing with itself, gener- ating simplified and incoherent simulacra of a world so as to optimise, on reawakening, the performances that will enable it to cope once again with the complex (and harsh) reality. The autopoietic and virtualising nature of this work8 offers a simple explanation for the fact that the foetus falls into full REM sleep in the thirtieth week of life.9 This is pure cognitive and proprioceptive training in VR as, at that stage, its only experience of the world is intrauterine. Hobson, Hong and Friston astutely likened this surprising evolution- al phase to an insurgence and initial coordination of the a 6 J.A. Hobson et al., “Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming”: 22. As better clarified below, I shall here intend the concept or “regression” also in the specifically Freudian sense. 7 Ibid.: 15. 8 I discuss this point in P. Montani, Tre forme di creatività. Tecnica, arte, politica (Napoli: Cronopio, 2017). 9 See J.A. Hobson, “REM sleep and dreaming: towards a theory of protoconsciousness”, Nature Review Neurosciences 10 (2020): 803-813 10.1038/nrn2716. PIETRO MONTANI 158 AN-ICON  priori (intuitive and intellectual) forms discussed by Kant10 (to whom we shall return). What temporary conclusions can we draw from the parallel between the dream hallucination and VR? A cru- cial point regarding both the analogies and the differences seems to require critical attention. The neurophysiological study of dreams shows that a significant relationship can form between the sometimes hallucinatory and incoher- ent nature of images and the emergence of our cognitive strategies in the broad sense (e.g. the inferential activity attributable to the imagination).11 The emphasis should fall on both requisites – the incoherence and the hallucinatory nature – although, for obvious reasons, VR seems keen to focus primarily on the latter. To address this problem prop- erly, we should refer to Freud’s great work on the mental significance of dreams12, starting from a fairly solid point of contact between the neurophysiological model with which he worked and the very different ones we work with today. This point of contact consists in the specific importance of regression in hallucinatory and incoherent processes managed by the dream-imagination. Regression and “Bilderschrift” in dreams When referring to Freud I shall totally disre- gard the aspect dearest to his heart, that dreams are in- terpretable and that this very interpretability defines their 10 J.A. Hobson et al., “Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming”: 19. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1787), trans. P. Guyer, A. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). In a very important book, Before Tomorrow. Epigenesis and Rationality (Polity Press: Cambridge, 2016), Catherine Malabou argued in favor of an “epigenetic” interpretation of the development of Kantian a priori forms. I have developed a similar approach to Kant’s critical philosophy in P. Montani, “Imagination and its technological destiny”, Open Philosophy 3 (2020): 187-201. 11 The “judgement” I formulated during the described dream is typically inferential in form. For the Kant of the third Critique, it is the Urteilskraft, i.e. the “power of judgement”, that is essentially inferential and abductive in nature. See I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), trans. P. Guyer, E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 12 See S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), trans. J. Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vols. 4-5, (London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955). PIETRO MONTANI 159 AN-ICON  immensely important metapsychological condition. Is this approach justifiable? Yes if we refer to the last chapter of Traumdeutung, “The psychology of Dream Processes”. A footnote added in 1925 at the end of the previous chapter (VI, “Dream-work”) introduces its objectives significantly, saying that the particular nature of the dream-work should be studied as such, over and above the fact that this form of working is used by the unconscious in a hallucinatory and disguised mode to achieve its drives. Freud writes At bottom dreams are nothing other than a particular form of think- ing, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dream-work which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming - the explanation of its peculiar nature.13 The peculiarities of the dream-work – brilliantly studied by Freud in Chapter VI – are well known: conden- sation, displacement and considerations of representability. But the common trait is regression, intended by the author in a strictly topical sense. Explained as simply as possible (and in non-Freudian language), during dreams our mind- brain reconnects with a very primitive prelinguistic and preconceptual stage of its memory store. Or rather, it is a phase in which a profoundly embodied imagination (think of a baby just a few months old) has also had to perform the work (e.g. inferential) that would subsequently be del- egated to linguistic thought.14 The phenomenon of regression does not only belong to dreams, observes Freud, although in dreams it produces a particular “vividness”, a hallucinatory Belebung. That this is, in other respects, a somewhat paradoxical process emerges from the fact that “a particular form of 13 Ibid.: 510. My italics. 14 Using the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari, we could say that here the imagination adopts a predominately “striated” manner of proceeding. See G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), trans. B. Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988). PIETRO MONTANI 160 AN-ICON  thinking” is entrusted to the process of regression in which “the fabric of the dream-thoughts is resolved [aufgelöst: dis- rupted] into its raw material”.15 But, we must add, it is dis- rupted as far as is possible for, although the archaic zone of the memory store in question dates from an evolutionary phase when linguistic thought did not yet exist, the latter will leave a trace in the regressive path implemented by the dream state in adulthood.16 As demonstrated, for example, by perhaps the most surprising requisite of the dream- work: the ability to treat words as if they were objects and play with their signifying matter. Further on, with regard to dream-hallucinations, Freud speaks of a “transvalua- tion” of thought into images; thought is drawn towards the most archaic memory store, to be seen specifically as a disabling of its logical and linguistic relations in favour of the earliest work of a totally embodied imagination. But these remain transvaluated thoughts and are by no means a reinstatement of a prelinguistic condition. Rather, it is a new reorganisation of the relationship between image and word, a radical renegotiation of their “normal” bond (I shall return to this key point later). This brings fresh relevance to the factor of dream-work that Freud called “regard for representability” What we have described, in our analysis of dream-work, as ‘re- gard for representability’ might be brought into connection with the selective attraction exercised by the visually recollected scenes touched upon by the dream-thoughts (...) [So that] dreaming is on the whole an example of regression to the dreamer’s earliest condition, a revival (ein Wiederbeleben) of his childhood, of the 15 Ibid.: 545. My italics. 16 This is the theory developed by J. Derrida in Writing and Difference (1967), trans. A. Bass (London: Routledge, 2001). PIETRO MONTANI 161 AN-ICON instinctual impulses which dominated it and of the methods of expression which were then available to him.17 Freud appears to refer to non-elaborated (or semi-elaborated) nuclei linked to powerful emotional in- vestments, such as the “internal objects” Melanie Klein and her followers later discussed when re-elaborating Freudian dream theory in broader and more flexible terms, and today considered widely reliable and compatible with neurosci- entific findings.18 The last lines of the citation (from a 1919 addition) allow us to conclude that the regressive move- ment Freud attributed to the physiology of dreams can be acquired as a structural requisite of the dream-imagination without necessarily attributing it to instinctual motivation. In other words, if dream-work is rooted in the condition of very early infancy – the condition of being “in-fans” i.e. not yet capable of speech – this means that the regressive movement of the dream reaches and revives not only the desiring aspects but the concomitant inferential process- es too. Thus, these processes take place in the absence of language and make predominant use of prelinguistic images and schema. We could call it an imagination that “schematises without any concept” as Kant said regarding “reflective judgement”, highlighting its exceptional episte- mological significance.19 This further Kantian indication is by no means casual20 and should be paralleled with the “free-running inference machine” discussed by Hobson, Hong and Friston. Preliminary and free imaginative train- ing is required, hypothetical and exempted from defined 17 Ibid.: 549-550. My italics. 18 This is the theory persuasively argued by M. Mancia, Il sogno e la sua storia. (Venice: Marsilio, 2004); and Sonno & sogno. (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2006). 19 See E. Garroni, Estetica ed epistemologia (Milan: Unicopli 2003); P. Montani, “The Imagination and Its Technological Destiny”: 3; L. Palmer, “Schematizzare senza concetti e senso comune”, in D. Cecchi, M. Feyles, P. Montani (eds.), Ambienti mediali (Milan: Meltemi 2018): 39-56. Significantly, Palmer accompanies his rethinking of the Kantian concept with experimental evidence. 20 See Montani, Tre forme di creatività; and “The Imagination and Its Technological Destiny”. PIETRO MONTANI 162 AN-ICON  tasks, simplified and experimental, not only (as is obvious) before cognition can start to be deployed but also so that it can function constantly – e.g. (Tononi’s proposal largely endorsed by Hobson) in terms of synaptic pruning, simpli- fication and resetting of the inferential device.21 Before leaving Freud we must adopt another of his valuable indications. Above, I linked dreams to a particular way of reorganising the image-word relationship. I will specify that Freud clearly sees them, ultimately, as a relationship guided by a principle of reversibility. Not only are words used as if things, images also display a key trait of discursive convention. This trait is also fully comprehensible in intuitive terms: both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, the human imagination must have performed a major work of segmentation, classification and organisation (e.g. in- ferential) on the experience, valorising a certain intelligible profile of the images – precisely that which language will later formalise. Freud calls this property, reactivated by the dream-imagination, a Bilderschrift, a picture writing: The dream-content (...) is expressed as it were in a pictographic script [Bilderschrift], the characters of which have to be trans- posed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts. If we attempted to read these characters according to their pictorial value instead of according to their symbolic relation [Zeichenbezie- hung], we should clearly be led into error.22 Freud speaks here from the standpoint of inter- pretability (not relevant for us) but the observation can of course be generalised. Products of the dream-imagination 21 See G. Tononi, C. Cirelli, Sleep function and synaptic homeostasis, Sleep Medicine Reviews 10 (2006): 49-62. In this sense and precisely because of its hallucinatory “resuscitation”, the dream-work restores not so much the contents of the oldest inferences but the earliest manner of that performance (i.e. “schematises without any concept”) which conduct precious selective functions for pruning purposes. 22 Ibid.: 296. The translation of Bilderschrift as “pictographic script” is highly questionable; and that of Zeichenbeziehung as “symbolic relation” is frankly erroneous as the “symbolism” of dreams is not involved here but only the more general sign profile of dream-images. PIETRO MONTANI 163 AN-ICON  should above all be observed in terms of their Zeichen- beziehung, their singular and archaic relationship with the semiotic order. In other words, despite being hallucinatory, dream-images should also be appreciated for their ability to reactivate a condition in which the imagination has also processed them as the signs of a particular Bilderschrift.23 Our Freudian journey has taken us another major step forward: the relational aspect –stressed in the conclusions of the first section – can now avail of a specif- ic and significant reference to a scriptural element within the work of the imagination. This element can be linked to the radical regressive condition in which the imagination behaves literally as a VR generator. We can now try to better understand how this correlation works. Bilderschrift in very early cinema and in the digital age: the syncretism and intermediality of images Interestingly, in its very early days, and roughly when Freud was developing his Traumdeutung and subse- quent metapsychological additions, the cinema was seen (or conceived) by some film-makers and theoreticians as closely resembling the device of image-word reversibility highlighted at the end of the previous section. This means that the birth of the cinema also featured a major focus on the network of relationships which the powerful illusion of reality produced by the cinematographic image was clearly keen to unite. In some cases, in particular, that image was seen as a syncretic form of expression: a space of compar- ison and integration between different levels of expression. This section dwells briefly on two significant examples of 23 On the image-word connection and its meaning for an appropriate understanding of a “history” of the arts, C. Brandi’s observations in Segno e immagine (Palermo: Aesthetica, 2002) are valuable, not coincidentally introduced by a discussion on Kant’s schematism, PIETRO MONTANI 164 AN-ICON  this understanding of the image – which I call “intermedi- al”24: a reflection on the cinema of the “Russian Formalists” and Sergei M. Eisenstein’s first cinematographic theory centred on the project of an “intellectual cinema”.25 I shall conclude with some comments on VR installations and their inclusion in the intermedial paradigm of the image. The Formalists felt strongly that the emergence of the cinema gave their era the privilege of observing a form of art in its nascent state. Cinema brought a brand-new addition to the technically reproduced image – the ability to move in time. Boris Eikhenbaum, for instance, argued that with cinema “for the first time in history, an art which was ‘depictive’ by its very nature became capable of evolving in time and proved to be beyond any comparison, classi- fication or analogy”.26 He was struck in particular by the fact that, in cinema, the image medium adopted an original condition because the reception of the film has to develop with a time sequence typical of other media (e.g. writing). To better use these peculiarities, thought Eikhen- baum, the structural principles of the cinematographic text would have to comply with two preferential options, one paradigmatic and the other syntagmatic. The paradig- matic option consisted in asserting the conventionality of the image (its Zeichenbeziehung as Freud would say) in a head-on contrast with the naturalistic values of photograph- ic reproduction; the syntagmatic option consisted in em- phasising the discrete (or potentially discrete) nature of the formal unities placed in a reciprocal relationship following a short, markedly divided montage. These two requisites are therefore totally comparable to Freud’s Bilderschrift. But Eikhenbaum underscored another aspect concerning 24 On this concept, see P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2010). 25 See R. Taylor, ed., Russian Poetics in Translation, vol. 9: The Poetics of Cinema. (Department of Language & Linguistics: University of Essex, 1982); S.M. Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage (London-New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2010). 26 B. Eikhenbaum, “Problems of cine-stylistics”, trans. R. Sherwood, in R. Taylor, ed., The Poetics of Cinema (Oxford: RTP, 1982): 10-21. My italics. PIETRO MONTANI 165 AN-ICON  not the construction options but the structural conditions of understanding a film, arguing that the image plane in the cinema is always accompanied by the articulation of “inner speech” in the spectator’s mind. So, the cinematic experi- ence has to proceed via a constant integration of image and language planes, more akin to a process of reading than a prolonged and guided form of contemplation.27 Returning to the parallel with Freud’s reflection on the figures of the dream-work, we could say that, in films, the autonomous expressive and pathemic resources of the image come to- gether in a constant relationship with the broader cognitive resources accessed by linguistic thought. Remaining largely on the wavelength of Eikhen- baum’s theories, Sergei Eisenstein pushed himself even further forward in the same 1920s’ time-frame, especially from a design perspective. In short, he believed that the discursiveness of cinema could function as a device that takes the spectator into close contact with the semiotic op- erations that enable the imagination to give sensible content to concepts. That is, it could explore the key imaginative performance that Kant called “schematism”. A performance that, unsurprisingly, we have already referred to regard- ing its relationship with dream-work. Eisenstein called this cinema “intellectual” because, from the political perspec- tive that excited him at the time, the cinematic experience promised to considerably alter the spectators’ “power of judgment” (to use another Kantian term), training them, for instance, in dialectical thinking, as we read in one of his notes for the planned film adaptation of Marx’s Capital.28 Although Eikhenbaum and Eisenstein’s the- ories cannot be generalised, we can agree on the fact 27 On the complex intermedial nature of reading, see S.B. Trasmundi, S.C. Cowley, “Reading: how readers beget imagining”, Frontiers in Psychology 11: 531682 (2020), doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.531682. 28 On this subject, see an important work by E. Vogman, Dance of Values. Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital project (Zurich-Berlin: Diaphanes, 2019). PIETRO MONTANI 166 AN-ICON  that, throughout the silent film period, the treatment of cinematographic images largely adhered to the general Bilderschrift principles discussed here, and often invented new figures of them. We can also agree that, whatever its strengths and weaknesses, this trend was destined to un- dergo a marked shift after the introduction of sound, which could inevitably be expected to produce – and Eisenstein was one of the first to denounce this29 – a strengthening of the reproductive and illusionistic effects of the film image and an ensuing increase in the naturalistic understanding of the film. From that moment on, the cinema pursued different paths which we cannot follow here although it may be interesting to ask what transformations would have been seen in the “scriptural” direction I discussed briefly at the start of this section.30 We must instead ask ourselves, and I shall do so rapidly below, whether the fundamental principle embraced by this direction, namely the activation of a critical countermovement physiologically correlated to the regressive nature of the image, reappeared elsewhere. And how it could also concern VR where the regressive movement, as mentioned at the beginning, reaches the extreme condition of a hallucinatory event. Before proceeding we should again stress the relational, and more precisely intermedial, nature of the critical countermovement which accompanies the regres- sive process of the imagination – and thus also presumably its extreme outcomes in the hallucinatory version of VR. Against this backdrop, I shall conclude by touching on two different spheres of exemplification. The first concerns the spontaneous practices of syncretic writing in use on the Web for about 20 years now and which are increasingly widespread among its users. In the second, I shall pres- ent some brief comments on how the intermedial device 29 See S.M. Eisenstein, “Buduščee zvukovoj fil’my. Zajavka”, in Id., Izbrannye Proizvedenija v šesti tomach. II (Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1963-1979): 15-16. 30 I have done so partially in P. Montani, Emozioni dell’intelligenza (Milan: Meltemi, 2020). PIETRO MONTANI 167 AN-ICON  has been managed in two remarkable recent installations: Carne y arena by Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu (2017) and VR_I by Jilles Jobin (2018).31 It is a fact that the birth of the interactive Web supported the emergence of a form of syncretic writing that does not merely combine image, word and sound but also very frequently exploits their reciprocal relations to obtain significant effects of meaning from this interme- dial confrontation – for the moment predominantly tuned into a playful, ironic and paradoxical register (I am thinking of all the “meme” forms). As well as not excluding signifi- cant evolutions and further differentiations, this aspect in itself already guarantees great (and spontaneous) reflexive control of the semiotic material manipulated.32 I have sug- gested calling this practice “extended writing”, adding that significant innovation might develop in the technologies of human expression. Indeed, the first thing to do is to study the internalisation processes and feedback on the imag- inative and cognitive conduct of those using it (but it is a mass phenomenon).33 I am keen to stress here that the regressive values linked to the image in extended writing are placed in a constant, systematic and plastic relationship with several critical and intellectual distancing practices, often of a distinctly intermedial nature. That is to say, they are conceived to exploit the effects of meaning ensuing from the re-mediation and comparison of different media. The two installations mentioned above are im- portant not only for their uncommon design complexity but also and primarily for their intermedial tone (i.e. distanced and reflexive), albeit diversely interpreted in the two cases. In 31 The two installations could be visited at the Fondazione Prada in Milan (2017) and the Istituto Svizzero di Roma (2018), respectively. 32 See P. Montani, “Materialità del virtuale”, Agalma. Rivista di studi culturali e di estetica 40, no. 2 (2020): 11-18; and “Apology for technical distancing. But beware the feedback!”, IMG: Interdisciplinary journal on image, imagery and imagination 3 (2020): 264-281. 33 The issue of “extended writing” should be included in an extensive case study of technological aesthetics, as well illustrated recently by V. Gallese, “The aesthetic world in the digital era. A call to arms for experimental aesthetics”, Reti, saperi, linguaggi 9, no. 17 (2020): 55-84. PIETRO MONTANI 168 AN-ICON  both, visitors realise that the VR is simply a part of a broader experience that can internally implement in various ways what I have just described as a critical countermovement. I shall conclude by indicating the essential coordinates below. Carne y arena is a journey in four stages, the second of which contains a VR installation. Here, the visitor – alone and free to move around – finds him/herself spend- ing six minutes in a desert zone with a group of Mexican refugees trying to cross the US border but being violently driven back by an American army patrol.34 In the first space, visitors are asked to remove their shoes and socks and place them in a locker from which they will collect them later. This is a key strategic move because during their mobile permanence in the virtual environment their bare feet will make them constantly proprioceptively aware of an essen- tial split (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible is the instal- lation’s astute subtitle). A walkway awaits when they exit the “arena”, after retrieving shoes and socks, from where the visitors can catch a glimpse of what is happening in the semi-dark space of the virtual simulation by looking, if they so wish, through the gaps between the wooden planks of a wall. This is a further distancing from the powerful en- gagement just experienced. The walkway leads to a final room where, free to decide how long to stop at each one, they can watch video clips of the migrants narrating details of the episode to which the visitors have been invisible witnesses and what happened to them afterwards. Their 34 I dwelled more analytically on the Iñarritu installation in P. Montani, Tre forme di creatività. See also F. Casetti, A. Pinotti, “Post–cinema ecology”, in D. Chateau, J. Moure, eds., Post– cinema. Cinema in the Post-Art Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 193- 217; A. D’Aloia “Virtually present, physically invisible: virtual reality immersion and emersion in Alejandro González Iñarritu’s Carne y Arena”, Senses of Cinema 87 (2018) http://www. sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/virtually-present-physically-invisible-virtual-reality- immersion-and-emersion-in-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritus-carne-y-arena/. For an important discussion of the “empathic” effects attributable to experiences in VR see A. Pinotti, “Autopsia in 360°. Il rigor mortis dell’empatia nel fuori-cornice del virtuale”, Fata Morgana 39 (2019): 17-32. On the aesthetics of’ “unframed” images see P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan- London: Mimesis International, 2020). PIETRO MONTANI 169 AN-ICON  faces appear in high definition on small screens placed in niches around the walls of the room. The important point here is that the VR is just one of the many elements in the installation and the overall experience stimulates visitors to engage in an intermedial reflection that invests them literally from head (equipped with visor and headphones) to toe (bare). The truly striking and forceful realism of the simulation thus finds its meaning within a complex narrative device. I shall add that even the patchy recollection of the six-minute VR simulation men- tioned at the start of this article finds interesting justification within the context of this complex cognitive and pathemic experience. VR_I is an all-VR installation and far more playful than Carne y arena. The artist is primarily a choreographer and paid particular attention to the fluidity of movement of the five dancers who inhabit the virtual space and define it with their performance. They take on very different sizes in the various phases of the event: gigantic and objectively threatening at the start but miniaturised and observable later on, almost as if in a lab experiment on a small quadrangular platform, and finally life-size. Five people enter the virtual space and each visitor’s avatar can interact with the other four, not only on a haptic and sensorimotorial level (the hands have sensors) but also linguistically thanks to phono-acoustic equipment. The visitors find themselves in a metamorphic space resembling that of dreams: sometimes a boundless desert, at other times an urban landscape or a mountain-top loft with sweeping views down over a wide valley. The envi- ronments are always clearly identifiable and their subsequent development follows the rhythm of the dancers and the spa- tial harmony created by their movements. It is also significant that famous paintings (Matisse, Bacon) are hung on the walls of the loft interiors. Basically, the whole encourages visitors to let themselves go in an experience constantly tuned to a free PIETRO MONTANI 170 AN-ICON  reflexive register and they quickly realise that the rhythmic play between the different spatial dimensions is one of the core themes of the choreographic flow they are engaged in, as too is the doubling of the performance (the dancers giant or miniaturised, the paintings), the comparison between the dimensions and the free exchange of dialogue about what is seen and happening. We could perhaps describe VR_I as a lucid intermedial dream which can be realised without any forcing by an embodied imagination fundamentally recon- ciled with its less docile partner: language. Conclusions ■ The hallucinatory immersiveness of VR must, just like that of dreams, be understood and studied against the backdrop of the network of significant relations it can entertain with other per- formances, for example inferential, of an embodied imagination. It seems inadvisable to isolate it from this broader context.35 ■ The regressive aspect characterising the specific halluci- natory immersiveness of dreams must be understood primarily in terms of the neurophysiological functions (synaptic pruning, plas- ticity, resetting of inferential devices) attributable to the movement which allows the brain-mind to return to the situation in which the work of the imagination autonomously conducted cognitive performances that would, in a subsequent phase, be guided by linguistic thought. ■ It is in this regressive sphere36 that, remaining with Freud, we see the particular resources of a significant link between im- age and writing (a Bilderschrift). It is a link that very early cinema 35 A critical-genealogical investigation into the life of media conducted in terms of the assemblages or true ecosystems, in which each time they assume a structural positioning and a cultural meaning, characterises the work of Francesco Casetti. See lastly and also for some significant analogies with the issue of immersiveness, “The Phantasmagoria: an enclosure and three worlds” (forthcoming). 36 A “regression in the service of the ego” we could say, using a fine expression introduced by E. Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), but the issue should also be addressed from a broader disciplinary perspective in terms of the adaptive and evolutionary advantages ascribable to the work of the dream imagination. PIETRO MONTANI 171 AN-ICON  interpreted predominantly as an intermedial comparison, i.e. a comparison-integration of different media (starting with image and verbal discourse) such as to combine a critical and reflexive countermovement constantly and systematically with the natu- ralistic and quasi-hallucinatory reception of the film. ■ This same countermovement is perceived today in the spontaneous phenomenon of extended writing which can be re- corded on the Web and in the design of some major installations in which VR features, in various ways, as a component of a more complex and “scriptural” narrative device in the broadest sense. PIETRO MONTANI 172 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/15441

The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the Image as a Bilderschrift by Pietro Montani Virtual Reality Imagination Hallucination Dream Regression Intermediality Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the 1 Image as a Bilderschrift by Pietro Montani Abstract This article discusses the following points: ■ The analogies which can be identified between Virtual Reali- ty (VR) and the hallucinatory aspects of dream activity make sense within a network of relations characterised by certain important cognitive performances (in particular inferential performances) which can be attributed to the work of the imagination; ■ To assure the plasticity of these performances, the imagi- nation seems to have to distance itself somewhat from linguistic thought and in dreams this is achieved regressively via the hallu- cinatory state. Various authoritative neuroscientific approaches to dreams significantly substantiate this theory. ■ At the time when its correlation with linguistic thought is deactivated, the imagination does not, however, surrender it- self to the hallucinatory event but elaborates it with recourse to practices similar to those of syncretic writing – a Bilderschrift or “pictographic script” as defined by Freud; ■ It is significant that very early cinema also addressed the quasi-hallucinatory aspects of films, practising an “intermedial” Bilderschrift, i.e. a treatment of the images that is attentive to the comparison and integration of the different levels of expression which work together in the composition of a film; ■ Digital images seem to revive this production model in sev- eral ways and I will offer two examples highlighting their affinity with syncretic and intermedial writing. Virtual Reality Imagination Hallucination Dream Regression Intermediality To quote this essay: P. Montani, “The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the image as a Bilderschrift”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 153-171 PIETRO MONTANI 154 AN-ICON  Virtual reality, hallucination and the dream-imagination The hallucinatory aspect of VR is obvious to those who have experienced or wish to study it. However, not everyone hallucinates and so the hallucinatory nature of dreams offers the most immediate and comprehensible parallel – an experience we undergo during sleep with a frequency and regularity familiar to all.2 VR and dreams cannot be treated as entirely identical phenomena, indeed there are many and signifi- cant differences as we shall see shortly. However we can immediately highlight at least two essential parallels. The first is the compelling illusion of reality that differentiates hallucinatory dreams and VR images from other types of internal and external images processed by the imagination. This leads to the second parallel, regarding the unalterable nature of what is perceived. Apart from some exception- al cases (e.g. “lucid dreaming”), we cannot intervene in dream images, the realism of which is experienced as both convincingly plausible and undeniably objective. The same applies to the fundamentally hallucinatory nature of VR images (although there are clearly many potential excep- tions, to which I shall return in the final section). I would happily add a further property in the presence of sufficient evidence and that is how easily we forget dreams, which corresponds – although this is a totally subjective obser- vation – to the ease with which we discard large portions of our VR experiences. I must stress that the two aforementioned prop- erties are linked to the particular realism of dream and VR 1 This article refers to the European research project “The Future of Humanity: New Scenarios of Imagination” (Vilnius University). This research is funded by the European Social Fund (project no. 09.3.3-LMTK-712-01-0078). 2 The analogy between VR and dreaming has already been explored. See for example R. Diodato, Estetica del virtuale (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2005), which, however, chooses a different approach from the one I will propose here. PIETRO MONTANI 155 AN-ICON  images. So, although the latter come in several interactive forms (e.g. immersive installations) that can alter the per- ceived environment, this does not impact on the funda- mentally hallucinatory state of the images delivered. On the contrary, the degree of interactivity in dreams is limited to the activation of cognitive processes internal to the dream event such as the linguistic formulation of judgements and inferences, and an evaluation of the emotions experienced. But here, too, these processes are dependent on the objec- tivity of the images experienced. I shall provide a personal example: the night before starting this article I dreamt that I encountered a stranger in the street and sensed with great pity and concern that he clearly felt ashamed, although there was no indication as to why. Without entering into more detailed analysis, what I have described was clearly a hallucinatory event accompanied by a congruent judge- ment explicitly formulated in the dreamer’s inner discourse, and which included the word “ashamed”. But it was not a “lucid dream”. A Freudian analyst would say that the dream was mine so the pity and concern were directed at a part of me. This may be so, but this split within the dreamer reinforces rather than diminishes the objectivity of the sentiment I felt and the congruence of the judgement I associated with it (i.e. that the human condition is truly compassionate – and mysterious – if someone can show shame for no apparent reason). Ultimately, it is the radically immersive state of the two traits shared by VR and dreams that should be underscored:3 we become caught up in a 3 For a helpful classification of all the VR forms 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. Tyerry Giuliana, eds., Meaning- Making in Extended Reality (Rome: Aracne, 2020): 63-90. According to the accurate schema divided into four categories discussed in the article, the type on which these considerations focus occupies the second level of the third type (“Advanced cinematic VR”). However, the authors describe “radical immersive media” as a broad category of devices (which can be further divided into two subgroups) designed to interact in different ways with the real world. For reasons that will become clear later, I shall limit my considerations to a very general analogy between VR and dreams. PIETRO MONTANI 156 AN-ICON  simulated environment featuring images that coercively force their presence on us. And now for the equally significant differences. What I have described – and why I was able to describe it – was clearly a dream occurring in a REM sleep phase. It was one of those dreams availing of closer integration with Freud’s “secondary process” and the ones we remember (or reorganise) with greater satisfaction. The neurophys- iological processes at work in all sleep phases are fairly well known today, although the scientific community has reached no full agreement on the functional meaning to attribute to the incoherence and transience of their dream products. We do not know exactly what purpose is served by the low structural level of dreams but there appears to be good support for the theory – adopted here – accord- ing to which their principal function is to increase the “fit- ness” of some processes of the imagination conducted in a wakeful state (particularly inferential ones) by reducing their redundancy and complexity in several ways.4 What does this strange neural work look like? Some have likened it to the wandering undertaken by our vigilant imagination5. Dreams (REM and NREM) also seem- ingly implement a momentary state of generally indeter- minate, organised and specialised cognitive function (e.g. intentionality and attention) to maintain the brain-mind for periods of varying length in the purely virtual phase effec- tively described as the “default mode network”. This is a typically “experimental” phase as both the dream and the wandering explore numerous potential configurations of 4 Here and elsewhere I refer in particular to an important essay by J.A. Hobson et al., “Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming”, Frontiers in Psychology 5, no. 1133 (2014) https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01133. Hobson is an undisputed authority on dream studies and shares the theory (see in particular the works by G. Tononi) that dreams optimise some wakeful cognitive processes by alleviating and “pruning” the synapses in excess. 5 See M. Corballis, The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You’re Not Looking (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2014). Corballis is a psychologist who mainly studies language but his book is up-to-date on the most accredited developments of the neurosciences regarding the dream phenomenon. PIETRO MONTANI 157 AN-ICON  well-defined or simply hypothetical situations and problems, often varied or even disparate. In this sense, the “default mode network” active in dreams in the hallucinatory form familiar to us prompts the entire neuronal apparatus to enter into free flow with no fixed objectives, allowing the “innate generator of virtual reality” in our brains to behave as a “free-running inference machine”.6 This machine – and we shall return to this – benefits from a “synaptic regression”7, a temporary reinstatement of extremely primitive neural circuits not used in the wakeful state. In other words, our brain seemingly needs to suspend dealings with the real world (and its complexity) at regular intervals and start dialoguing with itself, gener- ating simplified and incoherent simulacra of a world so as to optimise, on reawakening, the performances that will enable it to cope once again with the complex (and harsh) reality. The autopoietic and virtualising nature of this work8 offers a simple explanation for the fact that the foetus falls into full REM sleep in the thirtieth week of life.9 This is pure cognitive and proprioceptive training in VR as, at that stage, its only experience of the world is intrauterine. Hobson, Hong and Friston astutely likened this surprising evolution- al phase to an insurgence and initial coordination of the a 6 J.A. Hobson et al., “Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming”: 22. As better clarified below, I shall here intend the concept or “regression” also in the specifically Freudian sense. 7 Ibid.: 15. 8 I discuss this point in P. Montani, Tre forme di creatività. Tecnica, arte, politica (Napoli: Cronopio, 2017). 9 See J.A. Hobson, “REM sleep and dreaming: towards a theory of protoconsciousness”, Nature Review Neurosciences 10 (2020): 803-813 10.1038/nrn2716. PIETRO MONTANI 158 AN-ICON  priori (intuitive and intellectual) forms discussed by Kant10 (to whom we shall return). What temporary conclusions can we draw from the parallel between the dream hallucination and VR? A cru- cial point regarding both the analogies and the differences seems to require critical attention. The neurophysiological study of dreams shows that a significant relationship can form between the sometimes hallucinatory and incoher- ent nature of images and the emergence of our cognitive strategies in the broad sense (e.g. the inferential activity attributable to the imagination).11 The emphasis should fall on both requisites – the incoherence and the hallucinatory nature – although, for obvious reasons, VR seems keen to focus primarily on the latter. To address this problem prop- erly, we should refer to Freud’s great work on the mental significance of dreams12, starting from a fairly solid point of contact between the neurophysiological model with which he worked and the very different ones we work with today. This point of contact consists in the specific importance of regression in hallucinatory and incoherent processes managed by the dream-imagination. Regression and “Bilderschrift” in dreams When referring to Freud I shall totally disre- gard the aspect dearest to his heart, that dreams are in- terpretable and that this very interpretability defines their 10 J.A. Hobson et al., “Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming”: 19. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1787), trans. P. Guyer, A. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). In a very important book, Before Tomorrow. Epigenesis and Rationality (Polity Press: Cambridge, 2016), Catherine Malabou argued in favor of an “epigenetic” interpretation of the development of Kantian a priori forms. I have developed a similar approach to Kant’s critical philosophy in P. Montani, “Imagination and its technological destiny”, Open Philosophy 3 (2020): 187-201. 11 The “judgement” I formulated during the described dream is typically inferential in form. For the Kant of the third Critique, it is the Urteilskraft, i.e. the “power of judgement”, that is essentially inferential and abductive in nature. See I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), trans. P. Guyer, E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 12 See S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), trans. J. Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vols. 4-5, (London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955). PIETRO MONTANI 159 AN-ICON  immensely important metapsychological condition. Is this approach justifiable? Yes if we refer to the last chapter of Traumdeutung, “The psychology of Dream Processes”. A footnote added in 1925 at the end of the previous chapter (VI, “Dream-work”) introduces its objectives significantly, saying that the particular nature of the dream-work should be studied as such, over and above the fact that this form of working is used by the unconscious in a hallucinatory and disguised mode to achieve its drives. Freud writes At bottom dreams are nothing other than a particular form of think- ing, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dream-work which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming - the explanation of its peculiar nature.13 The peculiarities of the dream-work – brilliantly studied by Freud in Chapter VI – are well known: conden- sation, displacement and considerations of representability. But the common trait is regression, intended by the author in a strictly topical sense. Explained as simply as possible (and in non-Freudian language), during dreams our mind- brain reconnects with a very primitive prelinguistic and preconceptual stage of its memory store. Or rather, it is a phase in which a profoundly embodied imagination (think of a baby just a few months old) has also had to perform the work (e.g. inferential) that would subsequently be del- egated to linguistic thought.14 The phenomenon of regression does not only belong to dreams, observes Freud, although in dreams it produces a particular “vividness”, a hallucinatory Belebung. That this is, in other respects, a somewhat paradoxical process emerges from the fact that “a particular form of 13 Ibid.: 510. My italics. 14 Using the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari, we could say that here the imagination adopts a predominately “striated” manner of proceeding. See G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), trans. B. Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988). PIETRO MONTANI 160 AN-ICON  thinking” is entrusted to the process of regression in which “the fabric of the dream-thoughts is resolved [aufgelöst: dis- rupted] into its raw material”.15 But, we must add, it is dis- rupted as far as is possible for, although the archaic zone of the memory store in question dates from an evolutionary phase when linguistic thought did not yet exist, the latter will leave a trace in the regressive path implemented by the dream state in adulthood.16 As demonstrated, for example, by perhaps the most surprising requisite of the dream- work: the ability to treat words as if they were objects and play with their signifying matter. Further on, with regard to dream-hallucinations, Freud speaks of a “transvalua- tion” of thought into images; thought is drawn towards the most archaic memory store, to be seen specifically as a disabling of its logical and linguistic relations in favour of the earliest work of a totally embodied imagination. But these remain transvaluated thoughts and are by no means a reinstatement of a prelinguistic condition. Rather, it is a new reorganisation of the relationship between image and word, a radical renegotiation of their “normal” bond (I shall return to this key point later). This brings fresh relevance to the factor of dream-work that Freud called “regard for representability” What we have described, in our analysis of dream-work, as ‘re- gard for representability’ might be brought into connection with the selective attraction exercised by the visually recollected scenes touched upon by the dream-thoughts (...) [So that] dreaming is on the whole an example of regression to the dreamer’s earliest condition, a revival (ein Wiederbeleben) of his childhood, of the 15 Ibid.: 545. My italics. 16 This is the theory developed by J. Derrida in Writing and Difference (1967), trans. A. Bass (London: Routledge, 2001). PIETRO MONTANI 161 AN-ICON instinctual impulses which dominated it and of the methods of expression which were then available to him.17 Freud appears to refer to non-elaborated (or semi-elaborated) nuclei linked to powerful emotional in- vestments, such as the “internal objects” Melanie Klein and her followers later discussed when re-elaborating Freudian dream theory in broader and more flexible terms, and today considered widely reliable and compatible with neurosci- entific findings.18 The last lines of the citation (from a 1919 addition) allow us to conclude that the regressive move- ment Freud attributed to the physiology of dreams can be acquired as a structural requisite of the dream-imagination without necessarily attributing it to instinctual motivation. In other words, if dream-work is rooted in the condition of very early infancy – the condition of being “in-fans” i.e. not yet capable of speech – this means that the regressive movement of the dream reaches and revives not only the desiring aspects but the concomitant inferential process- es too. Thus, these processes take place in the absence of language and make predominant use of prelinguistic images and schema. We could call it an imagination that “schematises without any concept” as Kant said regarding “reflective judgement”, highlighting its exceptional episte- mological significance.19 This further Kantian indication is by no means casual20 and should be paralleled with the “free-running inference machine” discussed by Hobson, Hong and Friston. Preliminary and free imaginative train- ing is required, hypothetical and exempted from defined 17 Ibid.: 549-550. My italics. 18 This is the theory persuasively argued by M. Mancia, Il sogno e la sua storia. (Venice: Marsilio, 2004); and Sonno & sogno. (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2006). 19 See E. Garroni, Estetica ed epistemologia (Milan: Unicopli 2003); P. Montani, “The Imagination and Its Technological Destiny”: 3; L. Palmer, “Schematizzare senza concetti e senso comune”, in D. Cecchi, M. Feyles, P. Montani (eds.), Ambienti mediali (Milan: Meltemi 2018): 39-56. Significantly, Palmer accompanies his rethinking of the Kantian concept with experimental evidence. 20 See Montani, Tre forme di creatività; and “The Imagination and Its Technological Destiny”. PIETRO MONTANI 162 AN-ICON  tasks, simplified and experimental, not only (as is obvious) before cognition can start to be deployed but also so that it can function constantly – e.g. (Tononi’s proposal largely endorsed by Hobson) in terms of synaptic pruning, simpli- fication and resetting of the inferential device.21 Before leaving Freud we must adopt another of his valuable indications. Above, I linked dreams to a particular way of reorganising the image-word relationship. I will specify that Freud clearly sees them, ultimately, as a relationship guided by a principle of reversibility. Not only are words used as if things, images also display a key trait of discursive convention. This trait is also fully comprehensible in intuitive terms: both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, the human imagination must have performed a major work of segmentation, classification and organisation (e.g. in- ferential) on the experience, valorising a certain intelligible profile of the images – precisely that which language will later formalise. Freud calls this property, reactivated by the dream-imagination, a Bilderschrift, a picture writing: The dream-content (...) is expressed as it were in a pictographic script [Bilderschrift], the characters of which have to be trans- posed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts. If we attempted to read these characters according to their pictorial value instead of according to their symbolic relation [Zeichenbezie- hung], we should clearly be led into error.22 Freud speaks here from the standpoint of inter- pretability (not relevant for us) but the observation can of course be generalised. Products of the dream-imagination 21 See G. Tononi, C. Cirelli, Sleep function and synaptic homeostasis, Sleep Medicine Reviews 10 (2006): 49-62. In this sense and precisely because of its hallucinatory “resuscitation”, the dream-work restores not so much the contents of the oldest inferences but the earliest manner of that performance (i.e. “schematises without any concept”) which conduct precious selective functions for pruning purposes. 22 Ibid.: 296. The translation of Bilderschrift as “pictographic script” is highly questionable; and that of Zeichenbeziehung as “symbolic relation” is frankly erroneous as the “symbolism” of dreams is not involved here but only the more general sign profile of dream-images. PIETRO MONTANI 163 AN-ICON  should above all be observed in terms of their Zeichen- beziehung, their singular and archaic relationship with the semiotic order. In other words, despite being hallucinatory, dream-images should also be appreciated for their ability to reactivate a condition in which the imagination has also processed them as the signs of a particular Bilderschrift.23 Our Freudian journey has taken us another major step forward: the relational aspect –stressed in the conclusions of the first section – can now avail of a specif- ic and significant reference to a scriptural element within the work of the imagination. This element can be linked to the radical regressive condition in which the imagination behaves literally as a VR generator. We can now try to better understand how this correlation works. Bilderschrift in very early cinema and in the digital age: the syncretism and intermediality of images Interestingly, in its very early days, and roughly when Freud was developing his Traumdeutung and subse- quent metapsychological additions, the cinema was seen (or conceived) by some film-makers and theoreticians as closely resembling the device of image-word reversibility highlighted at the end of the previous section. This means that the birth of the cinema also featured a major focus on the network of relationships which the powerful illusion of reality produced by the cinematographic image was clearly keen to unite. In some cases, in particular, that image was seen as a syncretic form of expression: a space of compar- ison and integration between different levels of expression. This section dwells briefly on two significant examples of 23 On the image-word connection and its meaning for an appropriate understanding of a “history” of the arts, C. Brandi’s observations in Segno e immagine (Palermo: Aesthetica, 2002) are valuable, not coincidentally introduced by a discussion on Kant’s schematism, PIETRO MONTANI 164 AN-ICON  this understanding of the image – which I call “intermedi- al”24: a reflection on the cinema of the “Russian Formalists” and Sergei M. Eisenstein’s first cinematographic theory centred on the project of an “intellectual cinema”.25 I shall conclude with some comments on VR installations and their inclusion in the intermedial paradigm of the image. The Formalists felt strongly that the emergence of the cinema gave their era the privilege of observing a form of art in its nascent state. Cinema brought a brand-new addition to the technically reproduced image – the ability to move in time. Boris Eikhenbaum, for instance, argued that with cinema “for the first time in history, an art which was ‘depictive’ by its very nature became capable of evolving in time and proved to be beyond any comparison, classi- fication or analogy”.26 He was struck in particular by the fact that, in cinema, the image medium adopted an original condition because the reception of the film has to develop with a time sequence typical of other media (e.g. writing). To better use these peculiarities, thought Eikhen- baum, the structural principles of the cinematographic text would have to comply with two preferential options, one paradigmatic and the other syntagmatic. The paradig- matic option consisted in asserting the conventionality of the image (its Zeichenbeziehung as Freud would say) in a head-on contrast with the naturalistic values of photograph- ic reproduction; the syntagmatic option consisted in em- phasising the discrete (or potentially discrete) nature of the formal unities placed in a reciprocal relationship following a short, markedly divided montage. These two requisites are therefore totally comparable to Freud’s Bilderschrift. But Eikhenbaum underscored another aspect concerning 24 On this concept, see P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2010). 25 See R. Taylor, ed., Russian Poetics in Translation, vol. 9: The Poetics of Cinema. (Department of Language & Linguistics: University of Essex, 1982); S.M. Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage (London-New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2010). 26 B. Eikhenbaum, “Problems of cine-stylistics”, trans. R. Sherwood, in R. Taylor, ed., The Poetics of Cinema (Oxford: RTP, 1982): 10-21. My italics. PIETRO MONTANI 165 AN-ICON  not the construction options but the structural conditions of understanding a film, arguing that the image plane in the cinema is always accompanied by the articulation of “inner speech” in the spectator’s mind. So, the cinematic experi- ence has to proceed via a constant integration of image and language planes, more akin to a process of reading than a prolonged and guided form of contemplation.27 Returning to the parallel with Freud’s reflection on the figures of the dream-work, we could say that, in films, the autonomous expressive and pathemic resources of the image come to- gether in a constant relationship with the broader cognitive resources accessed by linguistic thought. Remaining largely on the wavelength of Eikhen- baum’s theories, Sergei Eisenstein pushed himself even further forward in the same 1920s’ time-frame, especially from a design perspective. In short, he believed that the discursiveness of cinema could function as a device that takes the spectator into close contact with the semiotic op- erations that enable the imagination to give sensible content to concepts. That is, it could explore the key imaginative performance that Kant called “schematism”. A performance that, unsurprisingly, we have already referred to regard- ing its relationship with dream-work. Eisenstein called this cinema “intellectual” because, from the political perspec- tive that excited him at the time, the cinematic experience promised to considerably alter the spectators’ “power of judgment” (to use another Kantian term), training them, for instance, in dialectical thinking, as we read in one of his notes for the planned film adaptation of Marx’s Capital.28 Although Eikhenbaum and Eisenstein’s the- ories cannot be generalised, we can agree on the fact 27 On the complex intermedial nature of reading, see S.B. Trasmundi, S.C. Cowley, “Reading: how readers beget imagining”, Frontiers in Psychology 11: 531682 (2020), doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.531682. 28 On this subject, see an important work by E. Vogman, Dance of Values. Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital project (Zurich-Berlin: Diaphanes, 2019). PIETRO MONTANI 166 AN-ICON  that, throughout the silent film period, the treatment of cinematographic images largely adhered to the general Bilderschrift principles discussed here, and often invented new figures of them. We can also agree that, whatever its strengths and weaknesses, this trend was destined to un- dergo a marked shift after the introduction of sound, which could inevitably be expected to produce – and Eisenstein was one of the first to denounce this29 – a strengthening of the reproductive and illusionistic effects of the film image and an ensuing increase in the naturalistic understanding of the film. From that moment on, the cinema pursued different paths which we cannot follow here although it may be interesting to ask what transformations would have been seen in the “scriptural” direction I discussed briefly at the start of this section.30 We must instead ask ourselves, and I shall do so rapidly below, whether the fundamental principle embraced by this direction, namely the activation of a critical countermovement physiologically correlated to the regressive nature of the image, reappeared elsewhere. And how it could also concern VR where the regressive movement, as mentioned at the beginning, reaches the extreme condition of a hallucinatory event. Before proceeding we should again stress the relational, and more precisely intermedial, nature of the critical countermovement which accompanies the regres- sive process of the imagination – and thus also presumably its extreme outcomes in the hallucinatory version of VR. Against this backdrop, I shall conclude by touching on two different spheres of exemplification. The first concerns the spontaneous practices of syncretic writing in use on the Web for about 20 years now and which are increasingly widespread among its users. In the second, I shall pres- ent some brief comments on how the intermedial device 29 See S.M. Eisenstein, “Buduščee zvukovoj fil’my. Zajavka”, in Id., Izbrannye Proizvedenija v šesti tomach. II (Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1963-1979): 15-16. 30 I have done so partially in P. Montani, Emozioni dell’intelligenza (Milan: Meltemi, 2020). PIETRO MONTANI 167 AN-ICON  has been managed in two remarkable recent installations: Carne y arena by Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu (2017) and VR_I by Jilles Jobin (2018).31 It is a fact that the birth of the interactive Web supported the emergence of a form of syncretic writing that does not merely combine image, word and sound but also very frequently exploits their reciprocal relations to obtain significant effects of meaning from this interme- dial confrontation – for the moment predominantly tuned into a playful, ironic and paradoxical register (I am thinking of all the “meme” forms). As well as not excluding signifi- cant evolutions and further differentiations, this aspect in itself already guarantees great (and spontaneous) reflexive control of the semiotic material manipulated.32 I have sug- gested calling this practice “extended writing”, adding that significant innovation might develop in the technologies of human expression. Indeed, the first thing to do is to study the internalisation processes and feedback on the imag- inative and cognitive conduct of those using it (but it is a mass phenomenon).33 I am keen to stress here that the regressive values linked to the image in extended writing are placed in a constant, systematic and plastic relationship with several critical and intellectual distancing practices, often of a distinctly intermedial nature. That is to say, they are conceived to exploit the effects of meaning ensuing from the re-mediation and comparison of different media. The two installations mentioned above are im- portant not only for their uncommon design complexity but also and primarily for their intermedial tone (i.e. distanced and reflexive), albeit diversely interpreted in the two cases. In 31 The two installations could be visited at the Fondazione Prada in Milan (2017) and the Istituto Svizzero di Roma (2018), respectively. 32 See P. Montani, “Materialità del virtuale”, Agalma. Rivista di studi culturali e di estetica 40, no. 2 (2020): 11-18; and “Apology for technical distancing. But beware the feedback!”, IMG: Interdisciplinary journal on image, imagery and imagination 3 (2020): 264-281. 33 The issue of “extended writing” should be included in an extensive case study of technological aesthetics, as well illustrated recently by V. Gallese, “The aesthetic world in the digital era. A call to arms for experimental aesthetics”, Reti, saperi, linguaggi 9, no. 17 (2020): 55-84. PIETRO MONTANI 168 AN-ICON  both, visitors realise that the VR is simply a part of a broader experience that can internally implement in various ways what I have just described as a critical countermovement. I shall conclude by indicating the essential coordinates below. Carne y arena is a journey in four stages, the second of which contains a VR installation. Here, the visitor – alone and free to move around – finds him/herself spend- ing six minutes in a desert zone with a group of Mexican refugees trying to cross the US border but being violently driven back by an American army patrol.34 In the first space, visitors are asked to remove their shoes and socks and place them in a locker from which they will collect them later. This is a key strategic move because during their mobile permanence in the virtual environment their bare feet will make them constantly proprioceptively aware of an essen- tial split (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible is the instal- lation’s astute subtitle). A walkway awaits when they exit the “arena”, after retrieving shoes and socks, from where the visitors can catch a glimpse of what is happening in the semi-dark space of the virtual simulation by looking, if they so wish, through the gaps between the wooden planks of a wall. This is a further distancing from the powerful en- gagement just experienced. The walkway leads to a final room where, free to decide how long to stop at each one, they can watch video clips of the migrants narrating details of the episode to which the visitors have been invisible witnesses and what happened to them afterwards. Their 34 I dwelled more analytically on the Iñarritu installation in P. Montani, Tre forme di creatività. See also F. Casetti, A. Pinotti, “Post–cinema ecology”, in D. Chateau, J. Moure, eds., Post– cinema. Cinema in the Post-Art Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 193- 217; A. D’Aloia “Virtually present, physically invisible: virtual reality immersion and emersion in Alejandro González Iñarritu’s Carne y Arena”, Senses of Cinema 87 (2018) http://www. sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/virtually-present-physically-invisible-virtual-reality- immersion-and-emersion-in-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritus-carne-y-arena/. For an important discussion of the “empathic” effects attributable to experiences in VR see A. Pinotti, “Autopsia in 360°. Il rigor mortis dell’empatia nel fuori-cornice del virtuale”, Fata Morgana 39 (2019): 17-32. On the aesthetics of’ “unframed” images see P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan- London: Mimesis International, 2020). PIETRO MONTANI 169 AN-ICON  faces appear in high definition on small screens placed in niches around the walls of the room. The important point here is that the VR is just one of the many elements in the installation and the overall experience stimulates visitors to engage in an intermedial reflection that invests them literally from head (equipped with visor and headphones) to toe (bare). The truly striking and forceful realism of the simulation thus finds its meaning within a complex narrative device. I shall add that even the patchy recollection of the six-minute VR simulation men- tioned at the start of this article finds interesting justification within the context of this complex cognitive and pathemic experience. VR_I is an all-VR installation and far more playful than Carne y arena. The artist is primarily a choreographer and paid particular attention to the fluidity of movement of the five dancers who inhabit the virtual space and define it with their performance. They take on very different sizes in the various phases of the event: gigantic and objectively threatening at the start but miniaturised and observable later on, almost as if in a lab experiment on a small quadrangular platform, and finally life-size. Five people enter the virtual space and each visitor’s avatar can interact with the other four, not only on a haptic and sensorimotorial level (the hands have sensors) but also linguistically thanks to phono-acoustic equipment. The visitors find themselves in a metamorphic space resembling that of dreams: sometimes a boundless desert, at other times an urban landscape or a mountain-top loft with sweeping views down over a wide valley. The envi- ronments are always clearly identifiable and their subsequent development follows the rhythm of the dancers and the spa- tial harmony created by their movements. It is also significant that famous paintings (Matisse, Bacon) are hung on the walls of the loft interiors. Basically, the whole encourages visitors to let themselves go in an experience constantly tuned to a free PIETRO MONTANI 170 AN-ICON  reflexive register and they quickly realise that the rhythmic play between the different spatial dimensions is one of the core themes of the choreographic flow they are engaged in, as too is the doubling of the performance (the dancers giant or miniaturised, the paintings), the comparison between the dimensions and the free exchange of dialogue about what is seen and happening. We could perhaps describe VR_I as a lucid intermedial dream which can be realised without any forcing by an embodied imagination fundamentally recon- ciled with its less docile partner: language. Conclusions ■ The hallucinatory immersiveness of VR must, just like that of dreams, be understood and studied against the backdrop of the network of significant relations it can entertain with other per- formances, for example inferential, of an embodied imagination. It seems inadvisable to isolate it from this broader context.35 ■ The regressive aspect characterising the specific halluci- natory immersiveness of dreams must be understood primarily in terms of the neurophysiological functions (synaptic pruning, plas- ticity, resetting of inferential devices) attributable to the movement which allows the brain-mind to return to the situation in which the work of the imagination autonomously conducted cognitive performances that would, in a subsequent phase, be guided by linguistic thought. ■ It is in this regressive sphere36 that, remaining with Freud, we see the particular resources of a significant link between im- age and writing (a Bilderschrift). It is a link that very early cinema 35 A critical-genealogical investigation into the life of media conducted in terms of the assemblages or true ecosystems, in which each time they assume a structural positioning and a cultural meaning, characterises the work of Francesco Casetti. See lastly and also for some significant analogies with the issue of immersiveness, “The Phantasmagoria: an enclosure and three worlds” (forthcoming). 36 A “regression in the service of the ego” we could say, using a fine expression introduced by E. Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), but the issue should also be addressed from a broader disciplinary perspective in terms of the adaptive and evolutionary advantages ascribable to the work of the dream imagination. PIETRO MONTANI 171 AN-ICON  interpreted predominantly as an intermedial comparison, i.e. a comparison-integration of different media (starting with image and verbal discourse) such as to combine a critical and reflexive countermovement constantly and systematically with the natu- ralistic and quasi-hallucinatory reception of the film. ■ This same countermovement is perceived today in the spontaneous phenomenon of extended writing which can be re- corded on the Web and in the design of some major installations in which VR features, in various ways, as a component of a more complex and “scriptural” narrative device in the broadest sense. PIETRO MONTANI 172 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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Introduction: the image between presence and absence by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Altered states Dream Hallucination Filmic representation Immersive media Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Introduction: the image between 1 presence and absence Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Altered states Hallucination Immersive media Filmic representation Dream A visual history of alteration Dream images, anticipations of the future, memories of the past, perceptual distortions, delusional hallucinations, cognitions intoxicated by alcohol and drugs have always inhabited the visual representations of paint- ings, comics, films, television series, videogames and, more recently, virtual reality installations. We call them “altered states of consciousness”, meaning any perceptual state other than ordinary human perception.2 When they are expressed in a visual form, we see a material picture which represents a mental image.3 While a picture is completely experienced by the senses, mental imagery is ordinarily conceived of as a quasi-perceptual To quote this essay: G. Grossi and A. Pinotti, “Introduction: the image between presence and absence”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 4-16 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 into the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2018-2022” attributed by Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca (MIUR). 2 For a rigorous psychological definition of the concept of “altered state of consciousness”, embracing mental states occurring in sleep, meditation, hypnosis or while using drugs, see Ch.T. Tart, Altered States of Consciousness (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1972). 3 The distinction between the materiality, objectivity and prevalent visual character of the image intended as picture and the immateriality, subjectivity and multisensorial aspect of the mental image is perfectly explained by W.J.T. Mitchell in “What is an Image?”, New Literary History 15, no. 3 (1984): 503-537. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 4 AN-ICON  experience that occurs in the absence of external stimuli.4 What makes these pictures recognizable to us as such? We cannot, in fact, compare them with the reality of the mental image, which we know only in the first person, trapped in the secret of individual experience. And yet, it seems that the visual has always elaborated strategies, codes, and arrangements to ensure that, within a visual narrative, an image is interpreted as absent, because it is present in a mental space or as a perception of an altered state of consciousness. These representations are historically and cul- turally determined, depending on the way a mental image is conceived in each era and geographical context. The French historian Yannick Ripa, for example, has distin- guished an “ancien régime du rêve”, in which the dream is thought of as an external and metaphysical entity from the modern conception that leads it back to the universe of an inner subjectivity.5 At the same time, the medium that delivers these mental visions also contributes to differentiating cul- tural codes and shared representations that shape them. In Füssli’s The Nightmare (1781) or in Goya’s El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (1797), the oneiric emerges from a juxtaposition of the sleeping body with its nightmares, co-present in the same visual box. Differently, comics such as Winsor McCay’s Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend (1904-1913) and Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905-1927), represent altered states and especially dreaming in a visual regime that combines simultaneity and succession.6 The result is a progressive escalation of bizarreness that can only be interrupted by the last vignette, when the dreamer usually falls off the bed. Cinema, ever since Méliès, has used particular fades such as cross-dissolves to signal the passage from physical to mental presence, be it in memory, imagination, 4 A. Richardson, Mental Imagery (London: Routledge, 1969). 5 Y. Ripa, Histoire du rêve. Regards sur l’imaginaire des Français au 19e siècle (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1988). 6 T. Gunning, “The art of succession: reading, writing, and watching comics”, Critical Inquiry 40, no. 3 (2014): 36-51. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 5 AN-ICON  or dream. Another peculiar case is given by the extreme instability of the camera with which the alterations caused by indigestion, drunkenness, and drug consumption are rendered since early movies. Jean Epstein’s comparison between alcohol and cinema is thus significant to define the multiform, fluid, and malleable perception of the universe introduced by the medium.7 However, none of these codes is fixed: cultural contexts and historical fractures introduce radical differ- ences within each mediascape, and the same happens if we consider processes such as hybridization, conver- gence, and remediation of the different media. Nevertheless, a dreamlike or hallucinatory image remains immediately recognizable to many viewers. It is a representation that indicates its absence rather than its presence. The altered states of film theory The way in which cinema not only records ob- jective reality but also visualizes mental processes has al- ways been one of the most hotly-debated questions in film theory. In 1916, Hugo Münsterberg’s important essay The Photoplay. A Psychological Study laid the foundations of the question: the cinematic image is never merely objective, since the movement and depth that the spectator perceives in the film do not exist in themselves, but are the product of the cooperation of the images with the spectator’s mental activity.8 Moreover, in the film a series of techniques ex- ternalizes and makes materially visible on the screen cer- tain mental processes: attention is recreated by the zoom and the close-up; memory is expressed through the use of flashbacks; imagination, conceived as the capacity to anticipate future events, is portrayed through what contem- porary film grammar would call flashforwards. The relation- ship between film and mind thus appears analogical, based 7 J. Epstein, “Alcool et cinéma” (1949), in S. Keller, J.N. Paul, eds., Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012): 395-404. 8 H. Münsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study (1916) (New York City: Dover Publications, 1970). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 6 AN-ICON  on the similarity of the respective cognitive processes.9 A further peculiarity recognized by Münsterberg is that of visualizing what the characters “see in their own minds”,10 images belonging to memory and dreams whose transi- tion is reported by “soft-focus images, lighting variations, superimpositions”.11 In the same wake, in his famous essay devoted to Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures (1934), also Erwin Panofsky remarked that “the movies have the power, entirely denied to the theater, to convey psychological ex- periences by directly projecting their content to the screen, substituting, as it were, the eye of the beholder for the consciousness of the character”.12 The metonymic and metaphoric relationship between film and mind – to use Christian Metz’s semio- logical terminology –13 are the basis of the aesthetic spec- ificity of cinema, which succeeds in materializing mental operations with greater effectiveness than the previous arts. Sergej Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, with its adherence to thought faculties such as analogies and oppositions, en- hances this hallucinatory and oneiric power of the movie. It is no accident that in his Non-indifferent Nature (1945-1947) the Soviet director and theorist analyzes mental visualiza- tion techniques such as those used in Loyola’s spiritual exercises being interested in the artistic achievement of ecstasy and pathos.14 In many theories cinema takes on the charac- teristics of a mind objectified in material images and sounds: a magical double of the self-produced by processes of 9 N. Carroll, “Film/mind analogies: The case of Hugo Münsterberg”, Journal for Aesthetics and Criticism 46, no. 4 (1988): 489-499. 10 J. Moure, “The cinema as art of the mind: Hugo Münsterberg, first theorist of subjectivity in film”, in D. Chateau, ed., Subjectivity: Filmic Representation and the Spectator’s Experience (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011): 23-40, 39. 11 Ibid. 12 E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures” (1934), in Three Essays on Style (Cambridge MA: The Mit Press, 1995): 98. 13 Ch. Metz, “Metaphor/metonymy, or the imaginary referent”, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 3, no. 1 (1981): 42-65. See also L. Williams, “Dream rhetoric and film rhetoric: metaphor and metonymy in Un chien andalou”, Semiotica 33, no. 1-2 (1981): 87-103. 14 S. Eisenstein, Non-indifferent Nature (1945-1947), trans. H. Marshall (Cambridge-New York City: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 171. See also M. Lefebvre, “Eisenstein, rhetoric and imaginicity: towards a revolutionary memoria”, Screen 41, no. 4 (2000): 349-368. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 7 AN-ICON  identification and projection for Edgar Morin among oth- ers;15 a brain endowed with perceptions, actions, and affec- tions according to Gilles Deleuze;16 a narcissistic regression analogous to dreaming in the perspective of Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz.17 Metz in particular underlines some radical differences between cinema and that partic- ular form of mental image constituted by the dream: the awareness of being at the cinema versus the unawareness of dreaming; the impression of reality of the film versus the illusion of reality of nocturnal visions; the real exteriority of images and sounds perceived in the cinema versus the inte- riority of the “hallucinatory psychosis of desire”; the logical consistency of the film versus the bizarre discontinuity of dream images. Yet a profound analogy remains in the half- way states of both cinema and dream: when spectators are so engrossed that they interact with the characters on the screen and gesticulate like sleepwalkers, or when, thanks to the activation of defensive attention, the dream becomes more lucid and conscious. Returning to the problem of the representation of altered states of consciousness, it is necessary to con- sider how this has a history that is linked to the evolution of the moving image. In Gilles Deleuze’s cine-philosophy, for example, it is clear that the emergence of an image capable of questioning the subjective/objective distinction is linked to the emergence of modern cinema. In this historical con- text, in fact, a radical disorganization of the action-image takes place, with a prevalence of a pure optic-auditory sen- sation over its motor extension and narrative actualization. In this way, recollection-images, mental visualizations, hal- lucinations, and dreams take on a new centrality, in the form of virtualities that remain suspended and non-actualized, 15 E. Morin, The cinema, or the Imaginary Man (1956), trans. L. Mortimer (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 16 G. Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image (1983), trans. H. Tomlinson, B. Habberjam (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Id., Cinema 2. The Time Image (1985), trans. H. Tomlinson, R. Galeta (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 17 J.-L. Baudry, “Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus” (1970), trans. A. Williams, Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974): 39-47; Id., “The Apparatus” (1975), trans. B. Augst, Camera Obscura, no. 1 (1976): 104-126; Ch. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (1977), trans. C. Britton et al. (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1982). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 8 AN-ICON  typical of a crystal-image in which temporalities are reflect- ed simultaneously.18 Thus the dream-image assumes a par- ticular centrality. Following Henri Bergson and his famous discussion on dreams, Deleuze refers to the panoramic character of dream-images, which is also typical of near- death experiences in which the whole of life suddenly ap- pears before one’s eyes.19 What is created is a weak link between the optical or auditory sensations and this pan- oramic view of the whole. There are in fact two procedures common to the dream-image of cinema: One proceeds by rich and overloaded means [...] dissolves, super- impositions, deframings, complex camera movements, special ef- fects, manipulations in the laboratory [...]. The other, on the contrary, is very restrained, working by clear cuts or montage-cut, making progress simply through a perpetual unhinging which “looks like” dream, but between objects that remain concrete.20 Both recollection-images (flashbacks) and dream- images are virtual, but in different forms. The recollection-im- ages are actualized past events, while the dream-images are rooted in an image that refers itself to another virtual time, thus activating an infinite path of references. The result is a motor process very different from the concreteness of action, which is described by Deleuze following a conceptual apparatus taken from Ludwig Binswanger, as a movement of the world, “the fact of being inhaled by the world”.21 This is a virtuality and immersivity of the image which cinema proposes in its repre- sentations, but which the new digital media we know today have the power to realize at a technical level, with the user’s perception absorbed and enveloped by the virtual image. The recollection-image and the flashback have also been the subject of further theoretical investigation 18 A. Powell, Deleuze, Altered States and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 19 Deleuze, Cinema 2: 55-67. 20 Ibid.: 58. 21 Ibid.: 291. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 9 AN-ICON  since Deleuze. One example is Maureen Turim’s work,22 in which the flashback is considered as a structural device of film that is fundamental for understanding the non-linear development of film history itself. This process is particular- ly visible in the comparison between the representation of memories in melodrama and that presented by modernist cinema. At the same time, in the flashback emerges the strategy through which cinema represents the intersection between the individual dimension of memory and the so- cio-political dimension of history. More recent approaches to the relationship be- tween cinema and altered states of consciousness see the medium as a technological extension of a mind-body plexus to be rediscovered, above all, starting from the media-ar- chaeological investigation of 19th century sciences of the mind. This is in fact the episteme that witnesses the emer- gence of the cinematic experience. Along these lines, we can quote the genetic relationship between hypnosis and cinema identified by Ruggero Eugeni,23 Stefan Andriopoulos,24 and Raymond Bellour;25 the investigation into the relationship between cinema and hysteria proposed by Rae Beth Gor- don,26 Emmanuelle André,27 and Mireille Berton;28 and the link between the psychological mapping of gesture and the rise of the cinematic apparatus theorized by Pasi Valiaho.29 22 M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (London: Routledge, 1989). For a discussion on the relationship between the time of new media devices and the time represented within them, see G. Stewart, Framed Time. Towards a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 23 R. Eugeni, La relazione d’incanto. Studi su cinema e ipnosi (Milan: Vita & Pensiero, 2002). 24 S. Andriopoulos, Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 25 R. Bellour, Les corps du cinéma: hypnose, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L., 2009). 26 R.B. Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 27 E. André, Le choc du sujet. De l’hystérie au cinéma (XIXe-XXIe siècle) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011). 28 M. Berton, Les corps nerveux des spectateurs. Cinéma et sciences du psychisme de 1900 (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 2015). 29 P. Valiaho, Mapping the Moving Image. Gesture, Thought, and Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 10 AN-ICON  From hallucination to virtual realities In all these theoretical perspectives it becomes evident how cinema, by representing altered states of con- sciousness, often reflects on its own affinity with dreams and hallucination. More precisely, on its identity as a ma- terialization of mental visualization processes. Ken Rus- sell’s film Altered States (1980), which also gives the title to this monographic issue of AN-ICON. Studies in Envi- ronmental Images, can be considered paradigmatic in this regard. In this film, the psychiatrist Edward Jessup (William Hurt), loosely based on the real-life figure of the neurosci- entist John Lilly, carries out a series of experiments with the help of an isolation tank and the ingestion of halluci- nogenic mushrooms. His aim is to understand at first hand the subjective experience of schizophrenic patients, achiev- ing a hallucinatory and dream-like perception that belongs to primitive mental states. The film echoes a number of ideas related to the redefinition of consciousness typical of 1970s-80s counterculture. Julian Jaynes’s essay The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) is an example of these theories.30 In this book, the subjective perception of schizophrenia is presented as an activation of an evolutionary state prior to the emergence of consciousness, the “bicameral mind”, in which the right hemisphere of the brain was allocated the function of com- municating through visual and verbal hallucinations, and the left hemisphere had the task of obeying and executing. The film plays on two visual registers: one in the third person, that of the scientific community observing the experiment, and one in the first person, where the subjec- tive hallucinations of the protagonist emerge in fragments. The hallucination is thus presented as a repeatable experi- ment, through the insertion of the body in a device suitable for the production and reproduction of altered states. But what kind of medium does this device really resemble? The 30 J. Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 11 AN-ICON  body is immersed in water which, being at the same tem- perature as the body, cancels all sensory perception and, with it, all distinctions between inside and outside, tactile and external input. In this radical absence of the world, the mental image takes full shape, enveloping the person and becoming the only sensory horizon that can be perceived. Not only that: the mental image presents itself as a real space, and the effects of the hallucination seem to modify the user’s own body (in the movie, transforming him into an Australopithecus). This hallucination represented in cinema takes us forward to another device, which, like a halluci- nation, does not allow any escape from the image, but a radical symbiosis with it. This is virtual reality. In virtual reality, unlike cinema, it is not so easy to distinguish between objective and subjective shots. Firstly, because the virtual frame is always in some way sub- jective, since its source depends on the movements of the viewer’s gaze to which it adheres, saturating the field of vision. Secondly, precisely because of the powerful sense of presence and feeling of being there produced by virtual reality, in immersive digital environments it becomes more difficult to represent the estrangement from actual percep- tion that a previous medium like cinema obtained through cross-dissolves and other visual strategies. Is it therefore possible to portray altered states in immersive media? Can the tyranny of the sense of presence eliminate the images of absence, or do we just have to investigate new strategies of representation? In fact, some virtual reality installations pres- ent themselves, directly, in the form of memories, dreams, hallucinations, mental visions. Examples are virtual reality experiences such as Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (Ar- naud Colinart, Amaury LaBurthe, Peter Middleton, James Spinney, 2016), in which the user can experience the in- ner perspective of the blind theologian John Hull; The Key (Céline Tricart, 2019), which portrays the dreams of an Iraqi migrant; Porton Down (Callum Cooper, 2019), in which the user becomes the guinea pig in hallucination tests per- formed using LSD; Cosmos within Us (Tupac Martir, 2019) GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 12 AN-ICON  dedicated to the temporally and spatially unregulated per- ception of an Alzheimer’s patient; finally, the mystical and lysergic journey of the Amazonian shamanic ritual repro- duced in Ayahuasca - Kosmik Journey (Jan Kounen, 2019). The present issue These are problems that the first issue of AN- ICON. Studies on Environmental Images aims to investigate. A peculiar attention is devoted to the comparison between two media systems: an analogue system, dominated by the altered states of cinema, and a virtual one, where new experiential possibilities of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality emerge. The problem that runs through this com- parison is essentially whether the possibility of presenting perceptively distorted states belongs more properly to the cinematic image, or whether it is still at the center of the new digital and immersive mediascape. Barbara Grespi’s and Giuseppe Previtali’s con- tributions are directly related in their common purpose to search for a status of the virtual image in cinema in some nodal moments of film theory that interrogate the repre- sentation of mental states. Grespi’s essay starts from Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World (1991) and from the capability of the imaginary device represented in the movie to exteriorize and prosthesize subjective experiences such as visions and dreams. The fictional medium, halfway be- tween cinema and virtual reality, allows Grespi to reflect on the filmic access to mental states. This issue is investigated through the recovery of the first, but lesser-known, of the two volumes of Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma (1963- 1965) by Jean Mitry. This is a pillar of film theory, analyzed by Grespi in its unacknowledged Husserlian roots. Thus, the technical and psychic concept of “projection”, under- stood as a specific form of actualization, “an effect in which the perception of physical image intersects with mental envisioning”, becomes especially central to introduce a GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 13 AN-ICON  possible comparison between the cinematic forms of the visible and those that emerge in virtual experiences. Cinematic altered states, however, undergo radical transformations in history: this is what Previtali’s arti- cle discusses, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of cinema and examining the differences between the movement-im- age of classical cinema, in which dreams and memories are also expressed as physical realities intertwined with the world, and the time-image of modern cinema, capable of adhering to the dynamics of thought. For Previtali, an example of this process is Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Straw- berries (1957), where recollection-images are not real flash- backs, but rather virtual mixtures of memory, imagination, and dream, as evidenced by the fact that the protagonist relives the past moments of his childhood and youth while remaining as old as he actually is in the present. Still anchored to Bergman’s cinema, Luca Ac- quarelli’s investigation into the emergence of hallucination within the cinematic diegesis is grounded in the semiotic analysis of a further incursion: that of the photographic still image within the equidistant flow of the film’s moving frames. This can be seen in Bergman’s Persona (1966), but also in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) and Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), the latter consisting almost entirely of still images. In these moments a new balance is established between dream-states and the testimonial power of the image, seen through André Bazin’s conception of photography as “true hallucination”. Enrico Terrone, in a different perspective, con- siders cinema in terms of a disembodied experience, or- ganized in a space that has our sight but not our body as its own center. Because of this condition, cinema is able to approximate to non-perceptual attitudes such as mem- ories and dreams, but not completely emulate them. On the contrary, this emulation would be a concrete possibility for virtual reality precisely thanks to its adherence to the gaze and body of the spectator coupled with a potential GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 14 AN-ICON  for manipulation and alteration that it is impossible to find in another embodied experience such as that of theater. But how are altered states expressed in the new immersive and digital mediascape? Is it possible in virtual reality to make a distinction between the representation of a real state from that of an exclusively mental state? First of all, we need to investigate how the digital radically trans- forms the very ideas of visual perception and image. This is evident in Antonio Somaini’s contribution, devoted to new artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning and machine vision. In fact, their non-human perceptual functions appear in some cases as altered states that pro- duce dreamlike images, similar to those found in computer programs such as the one called, significantly, Google Deep Dream. Thus, it becomes necessary for Somaini to study the artistic practices that exploit the productive potential of machine learning in a creative and revolutionary way, such as in the artworks of Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and Grégory Chatonsky. The perceptual dimension is also at the center of Claudio Paolucci’s contribution. From the point of view of cognitive semiotics, Paolucci investigates the hallucinatory character of ordinary perception, always shaped by the in- tervention of imagination, to analyze the way mental states are represented in virtual and augmented environments. If perception can be defined in terms of a hallucination controlled by the world, what changes in immersive envi- ronments is only the simulated character of the world itself. The states of imagination, memory, and hallucination are then reproduced in virtual and augmented reality following two possible strategies: either in a pan-perceptual modal- ity, exploiting the full sense of presence produced by the immersive devices, or following the audiovisual strategies inherited from previous audiovisual languages with which virtual and augmented reality share the same formal appa- ratus of enunciation. To exemplify this double expressive GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 15 AN-ICON  possibility, Paolucci analyzes the immersive videogame Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. At this point, it becomes necessary to under- stand what the specifically dreamlike and hallucinatory character of virtual reality consists of and how it differs from other established media. The joint paper written by film theorist Martine Beugnet and new media artist Lily Hibberd focuses on the role played by darkness, which in the new immersive media takes on a completely new po- tential compared to cinema. In fact, it becomes an intrinsic component of the environmentalized image of the former – coupled with the illusion of depth and the replication of motion. If the darkness of the traditional audiovisual dis- tinguishes states of self and otherness, in virtual reality it envelops the users depriving them of the sense of distance and leading them back to a state of radical loss, in which they are haunted by sporadic sounds and visions, faithful to the dynamics more proper to memory and dream. Pietro Montani’s essay then becomes the ef- fective conclusion and synthesis of all the questions raised by this issue. The dreamlike character of virtual reality con- sists for Montani in a precise work of oneiric imagination, capable of distancing itself from linguistic thought without getting trapped in a pure hallucination, but finding its proper status in what Freud defines as “Bilderschrift” (pictographic script), a syncretic relationship between images and writ- ing functions, both pre-linguistic and performative, which can also be read in the Kantian terms of a schematization without concept. An expressive condition which resurfaces in early cinema and especially in Eisenstein’s film theory of the 1920s and which today finds a specific declination in immersive virtual installations such as Carne y Arena (2017) by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and VR_I (2018) by choreographer Gilles Jobin, where different participants can share a collective lucid dream. In fact, new media do not merely represent altered states of consciousness: they take on their performative power. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 16 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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Introduction: the image between presence and absence by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Altered states Dream Hallucination Filmic representation Immersive media Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Introduction: the image between 1 presence and absence Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Altered states Hallucination Immersive media Filmic representation Dream A visual history of alteration Dream images, anticipations of the future, memories of the past, perceptual distortions, delusional hallucinations, cognitions intoxicated by alcohol and drugs have always inhabited the visual representations of paint- ings, comics, films, television series, videogames and, more recently, virtual reality installations. We call them “altered states of consciousness”, meaning any perceptual state other than ordinary human perception.2 When they are expressed in a visual form, we see a material picture which represents a mental image.3 While a picture is completely experienced by the senses, mental imagery is ordinarily conceived of as a quasi-perceptual To quote this essay: G. Grossi and A. Pinotti, “Introduction: the image between presence and absence”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 4-16 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 into the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2018-2022” attributed by Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca (MIUR). 2 For a rigorous psychological definition of the concept of “altered state of consciousness”, embracing mental states occurring in sleep, meditation, hypnosis or while using drugs, see Ch.T. Tart, Altered States of Consciousness (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1972). 3 The distinction between the materiality, objectivity and prevalent visual character of the image intended as picture and the immateriality, subjectivity and multisensorial aspect of the mental image is perfectly explained by W.J.T. Mitchell in “What is an Image?”, New Literary History 15, no. 3 (1984): 503-537. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 4 AN-ICON  experience that occurs in the absence of external stimuli.4 What makes these pictures recognizable to us as such? We cannot, in fact, compare them with the reality of the mental image, which we know only in the first person, trapped in the secret of individual experience. And yet, it seems that the visual has always elaborated strategies, codes, and arrangements to ensure that, within a visual narrative, an image is interpreted as absent, because it is present in a mental space or as a perception of an altered state of consciousness. These representations are historically and cul- turally determined, depending on the way a mental image is conceived in each era and geographical context. The French historian Yannick Ripa, for example, has distin- guished an “ancien régime du rêve”, in which the dream is thought of as an external and metaphysical entity from the modern conception that leads it back to the universe of an inner subjectivity.5 At the same time, the medium that delivers these mental visions also contributes to differentiating cul- tural codes and shared representations that shape them. In Füssli’s The Nightmare (1781) or in Goya’s El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (1797), the oneiric emerges from a juxtaposition of the sleeping body with its nightmares, co-present in the same visual box. Differently, comics such as Winsor McCay’s Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend (1904-1913) and Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905-1927), represent altered states and especially dreaming in a visual regime that combines simultaneity and succession.6 The result is a progressive escalation of bizarreness that can only be interrupted by the last vignette, when the dreamer usually falls off the bed. Cinema, ever since Méliès, has used particular fades such as cross-dissolves to signal the passage from physical to mental presence, be it in memory, imagination, 4 A. Richardson, Mental Imagery (London: Routledge, 1969). 5 Y. Ripa, Histoire du rêve. Regards sur l’imaginaire des Français au 19e siècle (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1988). 6 T. Gunning, “The art of succession: reading, writing, and watching comics”, Critical Inquiry 40, no. 3 (2014): 36-51. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 5 AN-ICON  or dream. Another peculiar case is given by the extreme instability of the camera with which the alterations caused by indigestion, drunkenness, and drug consumption are rendered since early movies. Jean Epstein’s comparison between alcohol and cinema is thus significant to define the multiform, fluid, and malleable perception of the universe introduced by the medium.7 However, none of these codes is fixed: cultural contexts and historical fractures introduce radical differ- ences within each mediascape, and the same happens if we consider processes such as hybridization, conver- gence, and remediation of the different media. Nevertheless, a dreamlike or hallucinatory image remains immediately recognizable to many viewers. It is a representation that indicates its absence rather than its presence. The altered states of film theory The way in which cinema not only records ob- jective reality but also visualizes mental processes has al- ways been one of the most hotly-debated questions in film theory. In 1916, Hugo Münsterberg’s important essay The Photoplay. A Psychological Study laid the foundations of the question: the cinematic image is never merely objective, since the movement and depth that the spectator perceives in the film do not exist in themselves, but are the product of the cooperation of the images with the spectator’s mental activity.8 Moreover, in the film a series of techniques ex- ternalizes and makes materially visible on the screen cer- tain mental processes: attention is recreated by the zoom and the close-up; memory is expressed through the use of flashbacks; imagination, conceived as the capacity to anticipate future events, is portrayed through what contem- porary film grammar would call flashforwards. The relation- ship between film and mind thus appears analogical, based 7 J. Epstein, “Alcool et cinéma” (1949), in S. Keller, J.N. Paul, eds., Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012): 395-404. 8 H. Münsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study (1916) (New York City: Dover Publications, 1970). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 6 AN-ICON  on the similarity of the respective cognitive processes.9 A further peculiarity recognized by Münsterberg is that of visualizing what the characters “see in their own minds”,10 images belonging to memory and dreams whose transi- tion is reported by “soft-focus images, lighting variations, superimpositions”.11 In the same wake, in his famous essay devoted to Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures (1934), also Erwin Panofsky remarked that “the movies have the power, entirely denied to the theater, to convey psychological ex- periences by directly projecting their content to the screen, substituting, as it were, the eye of the beholder for the consciousness of the character”.12 The metonymic and metaphoric relationship between film and mind – to use Christian Metz’s semio- logical terminology –13 are the basis of the aesthetic spec- ificity of cinema, which succeeds in materializing mental operations with greater effectiveness than the previous arts. Sergej Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, with its adherence to thought faculties such as analogies and oppositions, en- hances this hallucinatory and oneiric power of the movie. It is no accident that in his Non-indifferent Nature (1945-1947) the Soviet director and theorist analyzes mental visualiza- tion techniques such as those used in Loyola’s spiritual exercises being interested in the artistic achievement of ecstasy and pathos.14 In many theories cinema takes on the charac- teristics of a mind objectified in material images and sounds: a magical double of the self-produced by processes of 9 N. Carroll, “Film/mind analogies: The case of Hugo Münsterberg”, Journal for Aesthetics and Criticism 46, no. 4 (1988): 489-499. 10 J. Moure, “The cinema as art of the mind: Hugo Münsterberg, first theorist of subjectivity in film”, in D. Chateau, ed., Subjectivity: Filmic Representation and the Spectator’s Experience (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011): 23-40, 39. 11 Ibid. 12 E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures” (1934), in Three Essays on Style (Cambridge MA: The Mit Press, 1995): 98. 13 Ch. Metz, “Metaphor/metonymy, or the imaginary referent”, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 3, no. 1 (1981): 42-65. See also L. Williams, “Dream rhetoric and film rhetoric: metaphor and metonymy in Un chien andalou”, Semiotica 33, no. 1-2 (1981): 87-103. 14 S. Eisenstein, Non-indifferent Nature (1945-1947), trans. H. Marshall (Cambridge-New York City: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 171. See also M. Lefebvre, “Eisenstein, rhetoric and imaginicity: towards a revolutionary memoria”, Screen 41, no. 4 (2000): 349-368. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 7 AN-ICON  identification and projection for Edgar Morin among oth- ers;15 a brain endowed with perceptions, actions, and affec- tions according to Gilles Deleuze;16 a narcissistic regression analogous to dreaming in the perspective of Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz.17 Metz in particular underlines some radical differences between cinema and that partic- ular form of mental image constituted by the dream: the awareness of being at the cinema versus the unawareness of dreaming; the impression of reality of the film versus the illusion of reality of nocturnal visions; the real exteriority of images and sounds perceived in the cinema versus the inte- riority of the “hallucinatory psychosis of desire”; the logical consistency of the film versus the bizarre discontinuity of dream images. Yet a profound analogy remains in the half- way states of both cinema and dream: when spectators are so engrossed that they interact with the characters on the screen and gesticulate like sleepwalkers, or when, thanks to the activation of defensive attention, the dream becomes more lucid and conscious. Returning to the problem of the representation of altered states of consciousness, it is necessary to con- sider how this has a history that is linked to the evolution of the moving image. In Gilles Deleuze’s cine-philosophy, for example, it is clear that the emergence of an image capable of questioning the subjective/objective distinction is linked to the emergence of modern cinema. In this historical con- text, in fact, a radical disorganization of the action-image takes place, with a prevalence of a pure optic-auditory sen- sation over its motor extension and narrative actualization. In this way, recollection-images, mental visualizations, hal- lucinations, and dreams take on a new centrality, in the form of virtualities that remain suspended and non-actualized, 15 E. Morin, The cinema, or the Imaginary Man (1956), trans. L. Mortimer (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 16 G. Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image (1983), trans. H. Tomlinson, B. Habberjam (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Id., Cinema 2. The Time Image (1985), trans. H. Tomlinson, R. Galeta (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 17 J.-L. Baudry, “Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus” (1970), trans. A. Williams, Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974): 39-47; Id., “The Apparatus” (1975), trans. B. Augst, Camera Obscura, no. 1 (1976): 104-126; Ch. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (1977), trans. C. Britton et al. (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1982). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 8 AN-ICON  typical of a crystal-image in which temporalities are reflect- ed simultaneously.18 Thus the dream-image assumes a par- ticular centrality. Following Henri Bergson and his famous discussion on dreams, Deleuze refers to the panoramic character of dream-images, which is also typical of near- death experiences in which the whole of life suddenly ap- pears before one’s eyes.19 What is created is a weak link between the optical or auditory sensations and this pan- oramic view of the whole. There are in fact two procedures common to the dream-image of cinema: One proceeds by rich and overloaded means [...] dissolves, super- impositions, deframings, complex camera movements, special ef- fects, manipulations in the laboratory [...]. The other, on the contrary, is very restrained, working by clear cuts or montage-cut, making progress simply through a perpetual unhinging which “looks like” dream, but between objects that remain concrete.20 Both recollection-images (flashbacks) and dream- images are virtual, but in different forms. The recollection-im- ages are actualized past events, while the dream-images are rooted in an image that refers itself to another virtual time, thus activating an infinite path of references. The result is a motor process very different from the concreteness of action, which is described by Deleuze following a conceptual apparatus taken from Ludwig Binswanger, as a movement of the world, “the fact of being inhaled by the world”.21 This is a virtuality and immersivity of the image which cinema proposes in its repre- sentations, but which the new digital media we know today have the power to realize at a technical level, with the user’s perception absorbed and enveloped by the virtual image. The recollection-image and the flashback have also been the subject of further theoretical investigation 18 A. Powell, Deleuze, Altered States and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 19 Deleuze, Cinema 2: 55-67. 20 Ibid.: 58. 21 Ibid.: 291. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 9 AN-ICON  since Deleuze. One example is Maureen Turim’s work,22 in which the flashback is considered as a structural device of film that is fundamental for understanding the non-linear development of film history itself. This process is particular- ly visible in the comparison between the representation of memories in melodrama and that presented by modernist cinema. At the same time, in the flashback emerges the strategy through which cinema represents the intersection between the individual dimension of memory and the so- cio-political dimension of history. More recent approaches to the relationship be- tween cinema and altered states of consciousness see the medium as a technological extension of a mind-body plexus to be rediscovered, above all, starting from the media-ar- chaeological investigation of 19th century sciences of the mind. This is in fact the episteme that witnesses the emer- gence of the cinematic experience. Along these lines, we can quote the genetic relationship between hypnosis and cinema identified by Ruggero Eugeni,23 Stefan Andriopoulos,24 and Raymond Bellour;25 the investigation into the relationship between cinema and hysteria proposed by Rae Beth Gor- don,26 Emmanuelle André,27 and Mireille Berton;28 and the link between the psychological mapping of gesture and the rise of the cinematic apparatus theorized by Pasi Valiaho.29 22 M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (London: Routledge, 1989). For a discussion on the relationship between the time of new media devices and the time represented within them, see G. Stewart, Framed Time. Towards a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 23 R. Eugeni, La relazione d’incanto. Studi su cinema e ipnosi (Milan: Vita & Pensiero, 2002). 24 S. Andriopoulos, Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 25 R. Bellour, Les corps du cinéma: hypnose, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L., 2009). 26 R.B. Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 27 E. André, Le choc du sujet. De l’hystérie au cinéma (XIXe-XXIe siècle) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011). 28 M. Berton, Les corps nerveux des spectateurs. Cinéma et sciences du psychisme de 1900 (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 2015). 29 P. Valiaho, Mapping the Moving Image. Gesture, Thought, and Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 10 AN-ICON  From hallucination to virtual realities In all these theoretical perspectives it becomes evident how cinema, by representing altered states of con- sciousness, often reflects on its own affinity with dreams and hallucination. More precisely, on its identity as a ma- terialization of mental visualization processes. Ken Rus- sell’s film Altered States (1980), which also gives the title to this monographic issue of AN-ICON. Studies in Envi- ronmental Images, can be considered paradigmatic in this regard. In this film, the psychiatrist Edward Jessup (William Hurt), loosely based on the real-life figure of the neurosci- entist John Lilly, carries out a series of experiments with the help of an isolation tank and the ingestion of halluci- nogenic mushrooms. His aim is to understand at first hand the subjective experience of schizophrenic patients, achiev- ing a hallucinatory and dream-like perception that belongs to primitive mental states. The film echoes a number of ideas related to the redefinition of consciousness typical of 1970s-80s counterculture. Julian Jaynes’s essay The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) is an example of these theories.30 In this book, the subjective perception of schizophrenia is presented as an activation of an evolutionary state prior to the emergence of consciousness, the “bicameral mind”, in which the right hemisphere of the brain was allocated the function of com- municating through visual and verbal hallucinations, and the left hemisphere had the task of obeying and executing. The film plays on two visual registers: one in the third person, that of the scientific community observing the experiment, and one in the first person, where the subjec- tive hallucinations of the protagonist emerge in fragments. The hallucination is thus presented as a repeatable experi- ment, through the insertion of the body in a device suitable for the production and reproduction of altered states. But what kind of medium does this device really resemble? The 30 J. Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 11 AN-ICON  body is immersed in water which, being at the same tem- perature as the body, cancels all sensory perception and, with it, all distinctions between inside and outside, tactile and external input. In this radical absence of the world, the mental image takes full shape, enveloping the person and becoming the only sensory horizon that can be perceived. Not only that: the mental image presents itself as a real space, and the effects of the hallucination seem to modify the user’s own body (in the movie, transforming him into an Australopithecus). This hallucination represented in cinema takes us forward to another device, which, like a halluci- nation, does not allow any escape from the image, but a radical symbiosis with it. This is virtual reality. In virtual reality, unlike cinema, it is not so easy to distinguish between objective and subjective shots. Firstly, because the virtual frame is always in some way sub- jective, since its source depends on the movements of the viewer’s gaze to which it adheres, saturating the field of vision. Secondly, precisely because of the powerful sense of presence and feeling of being there produced by virtual reality, in immersive digital environments it becomes more difficult to represent the estrangement from actual percep- tion that a previous medium like cinema obtained through cross-dissolves and other visual strategies. Is it therefore possible to portray altered states in immersive media? Can the tyranny of the sense of presence eliminate the images of absence, or do we just have to investigate new strategies of representation? In fact, some virtual reality installations pres- ent themselves, directly, in the form of memories, dreams, hallucinations, mental visions. Examples are virtual reality experiences such as Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (Ar- naud Colinart, Amaury LaBurthe, Peter Middleton, James Spinney, 2016), in which the user can experience the in- ner perspective of the blind theologian John Hull; The Key (Céline Tricart, 2019), which portrays the dreams of an Iraqi migrant; Porton Down (Callum Cooper, 2019), in which the user becomes the guinea pig in hallucination tests per- formed using LSD; Cosmos within Us (Tupac Martir, 2019) GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 12 AN-ICON  dedicated to the temporally and spatially unregulated per- ception of an Alzheimer’s patient; finally, the mystical and lysergic journey of the Amazonian shamanic ritual repro- duced in Ayahuasca - Kosmik Journey (Jan Kounen, 2019). The present issue These are problems that the first issue of AN- ICON. Studies on Environmental Images aims to investigate. A peculiar attention is devoted to the comparison between two media systems: an analogue system, dominated by the altered states of cinema, and a virtual one, where new experiential possibilities of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality emerge. The problem that runs through this com- parison is essentially whether the possibility of presenting perceptively distorted states belongs more properly to the cinematic image, or whether it is still at the center of the new digital and immersive mediascape. Barbara Grespi’s and Giuseppe Previtali’s con- tributions are directly related in their common purpose to search for a status of the virtual image in cinema in some nodal moments of film theory that interrogate the repre- sentation of mental states. Grespi’s essay starts from Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World (1991) and from the capability of the imaginary device represented in the movie to exteriorize and prosthesize subjective experiences such as visions and dreams. The fictional medium, halfway be- tween cinema and virtual reality, allows Grespi to reflect on the filmic access to mental states. This issue is investigated through the recovery of the first, but lesser-known, of the two volumes of Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma (1963- 1965) by Jean Mitry. This is a pillar of film theory, analyzed by Grespi in its unacknowledged Husserlian roots. Thus, the technical and psychic concept of “projection”, under- stood as a specific form of actualization, “an effect in which the perception of physical image intersects with mental envisioning”, becomes especially central to introduce a GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 13 AN-ICON  possible comparison between the cinematic forms of the visible and those that emerge in virtual experiences. Cinematic altered states, however, undergo radical transformations in history: this is what Previtali’s arti- cle discusses, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of cinema and examining the differences between the movement-im- age of classical cinema, in which dreams and memories are also expressed as physical realities intertwined with the world, and the time-image of modern cinema, capable of adhering to the dynamics of thought. For Previtali, an example of this process is Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Straw- berries (1957), where recollection-images are not real flash- backs, but rather virtual mixtures of memory, imagination, and dream, as evidenced by the fact that the protagonist relives the past moments of his childhood and youth while remaining as old as he actually is in the present. Still anchored to Bergman’s cinema, Luca Ac- quarelli’s investigation into the emergence of hallucination within the cinematic diegesis is grounded in the semiotic analysis of a further incursion: that of the photographic still image within the equidistant flow of the film’s moving frames. This can be seen in Bergman’s Persona (1966), but also in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) and Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), the latter consisting almost entirely of still images. In these moments a new balance is established between dream-states and the testimonial power of the image, seen through André Bazin’s conception of photography as “true hallucination”. Enrico Terrone, in a different perspective, con- siders cinema in terms of a disembodied experience, or- ganized in a space that has our sight but not our body as its own center. Because of this condition, cinema is able to approximate to non-perceptual attitudes such as mem- ories and dreams, but not completely emulate them. On the contrary, this emulation would be a concrete possibility for virtual reality precisely thanks to its adherence to the gaze and body of the spectator coupled with a potential GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 14 AN-ICON  for manipulation and alteration that it is impossible to find in another embodied experience such as that of theater. But how are altered states expressed in the new immersive and digital mediascape? Is it possible in virtual reality to make a distinction between the representation of a real state from that of an exclusively mental state? First of all, we need to investigate how the digital radically trans- forms the very ideas of visual perception and image. This is evident in Antonio Somaini’s contribution, devoted to new artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning and machine vision. In fact, their non-human perceptual functions appear in some cases as altered states that pro- duce dreamlike images, similar to those found in computer programs such as the one called, significantly, Google Deep Dream. Thus, it becomes necessary for Somaini to study the artistic practices that exploit the productive potential of machine learning in a creative and revolutionary way, such as in the artworks of Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and Grégory Chatonsky. The perceptual dimension is also at the center of Claudio Paolucci’s contribution. From the point of view of cognitive semiotics, Paolucci investigates the hallucinatory character of ordinary perception, always shaped by the in- tervention of imagination, to analyze the way mental states are represented in virtual and augmented environments. If perception can be defined in terms of a hallucination controlled by the world, what changes in immersive envi- ronments is only the simulated character of the world itself. The states of imagination, memory, and hallucination are then reproduced in virtual and augmented reality following two possible strategies: either in a pan-perceptual modal- ity, exploiting the full sense of presence produced by the immersive devices, or following the audiovisual strategies inherited from previous audiovisual languages with which virtual and augmented reality share the same formal appa- ratus of enunciation. To exemplify this double expressive GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 15 AN-ICON  possibility, Paolucci analyzes the immersive videogame Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. At this point, it becomes necessary to under- stand what the specifically dreamlike and hallucinatory character of virtual reality consists of and how it differs from other established media. The joint paper written by film theorist Martine Beugnet and new media artist Lily Hibberd focuses on the role played by darkness, which in the new immersive media takes on a completely new po- tential compared to cinema. In fact, it becomes an intrinsic component of the environmentalized image of the former – coupled with the illusion of depth and the replication of motion. If the darkness of the traditional audiovisual dis- tinguishes states of self and otherness, in virtual reality it envelops the users depriving them of the sense of distance and leading them back to a state of radical loss, in which they are haunted by sporadic sounds and visions, faithful to the dynamics more proper to memory and dream. Pietro Montani’s essay then becomes the ef- fective conclusion and synthesis of all the questions raised by this issue. The dreamlike character of virtual reality con- sists for Montani in a precise work of oneiric imagination, capable of distancing itself from linguistic thought without getting trapped in a pure hallucination, but finding its proper status in what Freud defines as “Bilderschrift” (pictographic script), a syncretic relationship between images and writ- ing functions, both pre-linguistic and performative, which can also be read in the Kantian terms of a schematization without concept. An expressive condition which resurfaces in early cinema and especially in Eisenstein’s film theory of the 1920s and which today finds a specific declination in immersive virtual installations such as Carne y Arena (2017) by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and VR_I (2018) by choreographer Gilles Jobin, where different participants can share a collective lucid dream. In fact, new media do not merely represent altered states of consciousness: they take on their performative power. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 16 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/15446

Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema by Barbara Grespi Mitry (I) Husserl Mental state Projection Imagination Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the vi1 rtual image in the cinema (I) by Barbara Grespi Abstract Representing altered states of consciousness, even through the most phantasmal of technical images, is an inherent contradiction; once we attribute a physical body, i.e. objectivity, to mental images, we deny what Husserl considers their very essence. Jean Mitry draws from this assumption when discussing filmic access to mental states from a phenomenological perspective. The following essay reconsiders Mitry’s contribution with specific reference to the role of projection, technically and metaphorically speak- ing, in the cinematic technique and imagination; this, with the intention of suggesting some crucial questions for the comparison between the filmic forms of the visible and those inaugurated by the technology of the virtual. Mitry Husserl Mental state Projection Imagination To quote this essay: B. Grespi, “Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (I)”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 17-36 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 into the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2018-2022” attributed by Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca (MIUR). BARBARA GRESPI 17 AN-ICON Le cinéma transforme l’écran en une image d’image.2 A silver visor, you would say an ancestor of a VR headset were it not for the cap that wraps around the lower part of the skull. It causes a sharp pain in the eyes and its function is not to watch images, but to record them, like an ordinary video camera. Nevertheless, it has no lens but two satin panels, one for each eye. From the outside, you can see the signal of a scanner running; fr m the inside, the captured images appear on two side-by-side screens. It is the device invented by Wim Wenders for Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt, 1991) (Fig.1), in the story, a prototype which all the great world powers are hunting down in the fevered climate of the end of the millennium. Its camera captures the biochemical event of vision, that is, not only what you see but also how your brain reacts to the perceived images, collecting electrical stimuli directly from the nerves. The recorded “visual” impulses can thus be transmitted to the brain of another person, even a blind one, and this allows them to see without using the retina. Still, as the story progresses, the machine evolves into something even more complicated: a technique for extracting from the mind images which are completely independent of sight and correspond to pure imagination, dreams or memories. Sight translated into data gives birth to “artificial” images, segmented in a grid and the result of numbers; imagination, on the other hand, has pictorial qualities, strong colours and blurred borders. Sci-fi cinema provides a long list of vision machines, but Wenders’ possesses a special allure, balanced, as it is, between the old and the new. 2 Dr. Allendy [René Allendy], “La valeur psychologique de l’image”, in AA.VV., L’art cinématographique (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1926): 75-103, 77. BARBARA GRESPI 18 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Wim Wenders, Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt), 1991. Screen capture. Between cinema and VR: an exquisitely optical prosthesis, it creates abstract images, devoid of somatic and sensory traces, but at the same time it is a medium of intersubjectivity, which allows the exchange of visions at a neural level. It is a digital device, but also a truth machine: it records, documents, reflects even the unconscious, or the deepest levels of our psyche. It represents the cinema in its increasingly sharp juxtaposition to other technologies of the contemporary era, such as VR: the first in perpetual balance between body and mind, the second completely biased towards the sensory. The representation of mental acts in cinema is always, as in Wenders’ movie, a metafilmic moment in which the image consciousness is elaborated, together with the ways in which multiple factors, material and immaterial, contribute to it, including the gaze and its structure. In the following pages, by rediscovering Jean Mitry’s reading of Husserl’s thinking, we will discuss the role of projection, technically and metaphorically speaking, in filmic access to the mental; this with the intention of bringing out some crucial questions for the comparison between the cinematic forms of the visible and those inaugurated by the technol- ogy of the virtual. BARBARA GRESPI 19 AN-ICON  The mental image and the filmic image Beyond what they represent, filmic images are “situated” in a space halfway between the mental and the real: the iconic stream that the spectator sees flowing would not exist outside his or her mind, which integrates and merges the perception of the single frames thus creating the movie. Even before the birth of cinema, the paradoxi- cal nature of the moving image struck William James, who referred to it to describe consciousness in terms of a zoe- trope: just as that optical toy produces effects of continuity by making discontinuous fragments flow, so the conscious- ness merges its sequences of scattered and uninterrupted micro-perceptions into an illusory whole.3 The similarity between the film and the activity of the mind will be at the core of one of the first essays in film theory, The Photoplay by Hugo Münsterberg, a former student of medicine who converted to psychology under the influence of Wilhelm Wundt, and later became James’s colleague at Harvard.4 The reference to James’s metaphor of the zoetrope allows us to understand what Münsterberg meant by suggesting that photographic images had been estranged from physi- cal reality once they had achieved movement – contrary to what one might naturally think – and were brought closer to the reality of consciousness. The massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of our own consciousness. The mind has triumphed over matter, and the pictures roll on with the ease of musical tones.5 Münsterberg develops a precise parallel be- tween cinema and mind, seeing the main filmic techniques 3 “Is consciousness really discontinuous, incessantly interrupted and recommencing (from the psychologist’s point of view)? And does it only seem continuous to itself by an illusion analogous to that of the zoetrope? Or is it at most times as continuous outwardly as it inwardly seems?”. W. James, The Principles of Psychology (Create Space, 2017): 125. 4 M. Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg: His Life and Work (New York: Appleton & Co., 1922): 21-22. 5 H. Münsterberg, “The psychology of the photoplay” (1916), in A. Langdale, ed., The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings (New York-London: Routledge, 2002): 153-154. BARBARA GRESPI 20 AN-ICON  as reflecting the activities of consciousness, such as atten- tion (corresponding to the close-up and the shifting from in-focus to out-of-focus), memory (represented by flash- back as enclosure of the past in the present) and emotion (in its development, according to William James, from a kinesthetic sensation).6 This early conception of the mind as a movie justifies the most common visual rhetoric that complemented the representation of a character’s mental acts: fading, superimposition, soft focus. Becoming con- solidated precisely in the years in which Münsterberg wrote his essay, these optical effects aim at framing a segment of the visible within a zone which is not real and not certain, just as the discontinuous hyphens of the thinking bubbles in comics highlight the difference between a thought spoken out loud and one which remains unspoken in the charac- ter’s mind. Transitions in classical cinema in essence pro- duce the slow fading of the actual into the mental, evoking an idea of the mind as a place of weakening, intermingling and metamorphosing of sensory input. These narrative fragments which interrupt the flow of the film by jumping onto a different level and moving beyond the diegetic physical reality, are thus presented and interpreted as the “contents” of a fictional consciousness; this implies believing that the human mind operates by storing impressions derived from perception in the shape of ghostly pictures to be inspected, when needed, by the mind’s eye. We are familiar with this notion, its ancient roots and its points of junction with modern thinking,7 as well as its confutation by phenomenology, whose intake is crucial but still difficult to integrate into studies of the imagination.8 Even a thinker like Sartre who tries to get rid, precisely through Husserl, of the idea of the mind as a repository of images, was victim to the same “illusion of immanence” that 6 Münsterberg shares the Jamesian perspective (the famous: “we do not weep because we are sad, but we are sad because we weep”). H. Münsterberg, “The psychology of the photoplay”: 107-108. 7 See the ancient idea of the mind as a room furnished with images in F.A. Yates, The Art of Memory (New York-London: Routledge, 1966). 8 See for instance J. Jansen, “Imagination: phenomenological approaches”, in M. Kelly, ed., Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 430-434. BARBARA GRESPI 21 AN-ICON  he intended to criticize once he admitted the existence of a “psychic object” (the analogon) and presented it as the mediator of the imaginative process.9 Sartre is very much present in Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma by Jean Mitry, the massive trea- tise in two volumes written by the French critic, activist and director between 1963 and 1965,10 a work capable of bridging, as Dudley Andrew wrote, the formalism of clas- sical theory with emerging semiotics.11 The second volume, centered on form and cin- ematic language, is the best known and most appreciated, while volume one, particularly eclectic, has suffered from an evident removal, also highlighted by the significant cuts made in current French and English editions.12 Here we find the first remarkable confrontation of film theory with Husserl, an attempt recognized by the pioneers of the phe- nomenological approach to cinema, but never investigated, and even dismissed, in the numerous developments of this branch of study.13 Mitry discusses precisely the theme of mental images, which Husserl brought together under the umbrella term of Phantasie, to indicate both the ensem- ble of images devoid of physical support and the act of imagination through which they “appear” (erscheinen).14 It is an act of imagination that which gives shape to a physical image, deposited on a support and capable of 9 Casey recognized the error. See E.S. Casey, “Sartre on imagination”, in P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (La Salle: Open Court 1981): 16-27. 10 J. Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma (vol. I: Le structure, and vol. II: Les formes) (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1963, 1965). A useful rediscovery of Mitry’s contribution to film theory in: M. Lefebvre, “Revisiting Mitry’s Esthétique et Psychologie du Cinéma at Fifty”, Mise au point [online], no. 6 (2014), accessed February 20, 2021. 11 See D. Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1976): 181ff. 12 The current English edition The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) was translated from the abridged French edition of 1990. We will quote from this book, unless otherwise specified. 13 Vivian Sobchack recognizes his engagement in a Husserlian phenomenology of cinema – see her The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 29 – while A. Casebier, Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) prefers to lean upon Baudry. Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Julian Hanich dismiss Mitry’s idea of mental image as a distortion of the phenomenological arguments. See their stimulating introduction “What is film phenomenology?” to “Film and phenomenology”, Studia Phaenomenologica XVI (2016): 36. 14 E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). BARBARA GRESPI 22 AN-ICON  depicting an absent entity (Bildvorstellung), as well as that which creates mental images (Phantasievorstellung), which are by no means comparable to “iconic contents” of the consciousness, but rather to be understood as intuitions based on “sensorial phantasms”.15 Mitry does not refer to these precise pages of Husserl, whose essential theses are however echoed, but rather he remodels phenomenol- ogy under the influence of his experience of the cinema. Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma stems indeed from a general philosophical position – a unique case in film theory, if we exclude Deleuze’s two tomes – a thesis in which it is of primary importance to define the role of perception by mediating among Husserl’s theses, Sartre and psychology. In Mitry’s interpretation of intentionality, per- ception is an act based on sensory impressions but is not reduced to them; consciousness completes them, by extracting an object from the undifferentiated continuum that constitutes matter and hence giving form, by difference, also to the subject. Consciousness is based on mental images, which are not residues of ocular perception which have survived in the absence of the object, and nor are they entities existing in themselves and of which thought could avail itself; they are rather forms through which thought became aware of itself. With this idea, Mitry gets rid of the metaphor of consciousness as a receptacle of data and substitutes it with that of consciousness as a reflex of per- ception. With perception in the absence of the object, that is Phantasie, the glare of consciousness is, so to speak, one-way: “the mental image is the product of a wish di- rected toward the object which we know to be absent [...] it is the consciousness of that wish becoming ‘known’ in the object of its volition”.16 15 In Husserl called precisely “Phantasmen”. In the comment on Husserl’s theory of imagination, we follow C. Calì, “Husserl and the phenomenological description of imagery: some issues for the cognitive sciences?”, Arhe 4, no. 10 (2006): 25-36 and Husserl e l’immagine (Palermo: Aesthetica Preprint, 2002): 113-114. 16 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 35-36. BARBARA GRESPI 23 AN-ICON  The moving image consciousness Mitry’s starting point, therefore, is not the cin- ematic representation of consciousness, but the mental images that become part of the imaginative process; this process is extremely important in cinema, a medium which powerfully simulates the real but at the same time possess- es a deep-rooted ghostly nature. According to Mitry, this double character of cinema is reflected by the two kinds of signs of which it is composed: linguistic and psycholog- ical signs; linguistic signs give shape to the filmic images (through a grammar of the visible), psychological signs con- struct mental images (with the collaboration of the spectator). To understand how these two “signs” intersect in the beholder’s experience, it is necessary to come back to Husserl and his well-known tripartition regarding image consciousness, which is not clearly referenced in Esthétique et psychologie du cinema, but still recognisable in many lines. Husserl’s classification is based on three perceptive dimensions: the first is the “image-thing” (Bildding), that is, the concrete material of which the image is made, its support; the second is the “image-object” (Bildobje t), that is, the immaterial object which depicts something (the ide- al content of a series of perception);17 the last is the “im- age-subject” (Bildsujet), that is, the depicted subject (the referent in the real world).18 A subtle but substantial differ- ence separates the image-thing from the image-object: if the support were damaged or destroyed (for instance, if a canvas was torn), the image-object would not be affected, because it does not possess a real existence, neither inside nor outside of consciousness (only a complex of sensations experienced by the spectator in front of the pigments exists, as well as the way in which he invests it with intentionality, by creating image consciousness). This component is more easily understood in the case of the mental image, which 17 In Mitry’s words, see J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 27. 18 I use this expression, although I am aware that between the image and the subject there is not properly a semiotic relationship. See C. Rozzoni, Nell’immagine: Realtà, fantasia, esperienza estetica (Milan: Le Monnier, 2017): 9. BARBARA GRESPI 24 AN-ICON  lacks a material support, in contrast to the physical image. Still, there is a minor difference between the two, because what matters is their common capacity of actualizing absent objects (that is to say, making them present). The illusion of presence is based on the production of sensorial phan- tasms that allow us to guess how an object would be if it fell under the sphere of our senses, for instance touch or hear- ing, but first and foremost sight.19 An “optical” phantasm makes us intuit how a specific object would appear to our gaze within a particular environment, and this imaginative act covers our perception, albeit not totally. Indeed, the mental image as well as the physical image insert them- selves into the perception in a contrastive way, that is, not fully covering and substituting our reality, but allowing us to keep it alive. It is not a question of greater or lesser illu- sionistic power (some images could appear so real to be mistaken for reality), and neither of frames (a more or less marked discontinuity in the space where they are situated), rather it is a matter of time: Husserl points out that this is more the contrast between the time of the image-object and the actual present,20 to which our body belongs above all (but also the Bildding, if we are talking about physical images). Here below, the echo of these concepts in Mitry: We have seen that the mental image presents a reality both vi- sualized and recognized as absent. If, as I write these lines, I think of my car in the garage, I can see it perfectly well, mentally - or, at least, I can see a certain aspect of it - but I am seeing it as not present. It appears to my consciousness as an image certifying the absence of what I am thinking about - more especially since, 19 This is what was brightly called an “artificial presence”. See L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence: Philosophical Studies in Image Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 20 “[The image-thing] bears within itself the characteristic of unreality, of conflict with the actual present. The perception of the surroundings, the perception in which the actual present becomes constituted for us, continues on through the frame and then signifies ‘printed paper’ or ‘painted canvas’”. E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 51 (emphasis in the original). On this base, I suspect that we should abandon the optical idea of the frame when we face an environmental image (like VR), and rethink it in corporeal terms, considering the spectator’s real body as the border; indeed, you always have the possibility to leave the artificially present world not by seeing outside of the image, but certainly by touching the surrounding space and objects (or people), that is, paradoxically, becoming aware of the unreal in the very moment in which we get the chance to imagine the real through our body (thus in a perfect inversion of the cinematic relationship between reality and imagination). BARBARA GRESPI 25 AN-ICON in so doing, I do not stop perceiving the world impinging on me from all sides. The mental image is therefore a product of the will standing in opposition to our normal perception of the world and its objects and which, though coexisting with it, becomes more isolated the more directly in opposition it stands.21 Mitry realises that these ideas are of great im- portance for the analysis of cinematic images, which had also attracted Husserl’s attention, albeit fleetingly. The great philosopher’s reflections about the art of the twenty-century concern the repeatability of cinematic screenings such as to leave the image-object unaltered,22 and the intensity of the actualization produced by filmic images, so high as to reduce the perception of the image-thing to the minimum. “Deception and sensory illusion of the sort belonging to panorama images, cinematographic images, and the like”, he wrote, “depend on the fact that the appearing objects in their whole appearing state are slightly or imperceptibly different from the objects appearing in normal perception. One can know in these cases that these are mere image objects, though one cannot vitally sense this”.23 His ger- minal reflection on cinema has been taken up by some important contributions, mainly centered on the relation- ship between consciousness and true believing and on the interplay between actor and character;24 but the path indicated by Mitry is just as interesting and perhaps more in line with Husserl’s suggestions. Mitry wrote: Stuck to a cellulose base, projected onto a screen [...] the film image, in contrast with the mental image, is objectively present; but, like the mental image, it is the image of an absent reality, a past real- ity of which it is merely the image. Its concrete reality is that it is 21 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 82-83. 22 “If I let a cinematographic presentation run off repeatedly, then (in relation to the subject) the image object in the How of its modes of appearance and each of these modes of appearance itself is given as identically the same image object or as identically the same mode of appearance”. E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 646. 23 E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 146. 24 See C. Rozzoni, “Cinema Consciousness: Elements of a Husserlian Approach to Film Image”, Studia Phaenomenologica, XVI (2016): 294-324; J. Brough, “Showing and Seeing: Film as Phenomenology”, in J. D. Parry, ed., Art and Phenomenology (New York-London: Routledge, 2010): 192-214. BARBARA GRESPI 26 AN-ICON fixed to a support and is thus objectively present and analyzable. The reality recorded on the celluloid strip is at all times capable of being projected. In this sense, projection is a kind of “actualization” in the same way as the mental image.25 In these lines, a central question arises: in cin- ema, the act of making something present (“actualization”, he writes, alluding specifically to Husserl) takes place in the very moment of projection, because the strip of film is only a “latent movie”; according to Mitry, the celluloid is the main support (the image-thing), while the screen un- balances perception from the thing to the object, allowing movement to be seen. Neither the destruction of the film, nor even a scratch in the screen cancels the object-film, which, as we said, is that ideal content which, though cre- ated during the projection, survives it – as Orson Welles’ Don Quixote never ceases to teach us, a foolish spectator who stabs the white screen with his sword in an attempt to heroically oppose his enemies of light and shadow. Welles shows that the screen is not the canvas, is not one and the same with the image, which resists its destruction, both because it is anchored to another, more real support, and because it lives in the mind, paradigmatically in that of the visionary Don Quixote. The celluloid is more similar to the concrete materials of the painter, so much so that the di- rector selects carefully its size and sensitivity, while he can do nothing with the surface of the screen. But if we look back at the origins, we find the two supports imploded into each other: in pre-cinema, frame and screen coincide, because the illusion of movement, for instance in Muto- scope, depends on the flow of photographs bound one on top of the other, within the screen format created by their borders: the “book”. Do we have thus a double “thingness” in the filmic image? And if so, is it not a fundamental prop- erty of all technical images,26 even in the many variants 25 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 31, 83. 26 This is perhaps another way to interpret the idea of technical images as proposed by V. Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). BARBARA GRESPI 27 AN-ICON  of the analogue, but also digital system? The material cin- ematic film behaves like photosensitive paper in photogra- phy, or data code in the digital system, while the shadows projected on the screen correspond to the photographic positive, and to the extraction of the mpeg file on the dis- play. From photography onwards,27 to codify an image and to visualize it, that is to render it accessible to the human eye, became two different and not necessarily concurrent processes; obviously, with the transition to digital, the gap between the two moments widens, because there the ma- trix is no more a first, far-fetched or incomplete visualization of the subject, but its translation into a numerical language, not accessible to the senses, and thus potentially shared only by machines.28 But the point is: to develop a theory of cinematic image anchored to the process of visualization instead of that of encoding – focusing at the same time on the spectator because, as Münsterberg said, without him the image in motion simply does not exist – we have to work on the intersection between the physical and the mental. By a different route, Tom Gunning drew similar conclusions, when he re-launched the theory of realism moving from Metz’s brief incursion into phenomenologi- cal territory;29 Gunning is not a supporter of the deviation toward the mental, but certainly an adversary of Peirce’s indexicality when used to reduce the impression of reality in cinema to the sole photographic base. Thomas Elsaess- er, on the other hand, is not a phenomenologist but he rediscovered the “mental side” of cinema when he drew the distinction between the transmission of the image to the human senses and its recording through traces, rather than optical geometry. Indeed, he saw the model of this process in the human memory, as Freud had conceived it (that is like a Mystic Writing Pad), and proposed to re-start 27 But not in its daguerreotype version, which did not use the positive-negative reverse process: the metal film plate in the camera was developed as a positive and as a unique copy. 28 On this topic see: F. Casetti, A. Pinotti, “Post-cinema ecology”, in D. Chateau, J. Moure, eds., Post-cinema: Cinema in the Post Art Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 193-218. 29 C. Metz, “On the impression of reality in the cinema”, in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974): 3-28, discussed by T. Gunning, “Moving away from the index: cinema and the impression of reality”, differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 29-52. BARBARA GRESPI 28 AN-ICON  the theoretical discourse about cinema from its nature of interface between data and the human senses, in the key of an archaeology of the digital.30 These excellent contributions are perfectly in tune with Mitry’s emphasis on projection as a Husserlian moment of actualization, an effect in which the perception of physical image intersects with mental envisioning; in it “the film frame merely takes the place of the mental image with all the force of its credible reality”.31 Moreover, Metz quoted by Gunning builds on Mitry in his analysis of the “filmic mode”, which he defines “the mode of presence”,32 thinking not of a state of sensory overwhelming, but of an active consciousness made up of the mental reflexes of perception. Nevertheless, the mental, though it is a reflex and a logic of the images, is precisely what the film could never make visible. “It is completely impossible to repre- sent a mental image”, Mitry wrote, “since, having become visual, it ceases to be mental”.33 The filmic image is helpless in the face of what is not accessible to the sight or at least what no one has ever seen; for this reason, Mitry would probably have ap- preciated the frameless film by Douglas Gordon (Feature Film, 1999), a video installation that basically consists of an orchestra performing the full soundtrack written by com- poser Bernard Hermann for the film Vertigo (Alfred Hitch- cock,1958). On the two walls of the exhibition room, only the conductor appears in large mirror projections. However, the real images filling the room are not the physical ones on the walls, but those which flow in the viewer’s mind in correspondence with the musical notes: the sequence where Kim Novak jumps into the bay under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, or when she comes back in her green suit like a ghost. The spectator experiences a kind of vision 30 T. Elsaesser, “Freud as media theorist: mystic writing pads and the matter of memory”, Screen 50, no. 1 (2009): 100-113. Kuntzel already worked on the similarities between Freudian model of memory and the cinema, see: T. Kuntzel, “A note upon the filmic apparatus”, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, no. 1 (1976): 266-271. 31 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 86. 32 C. Metz, “On the impression of reality in the cinema”: 4. 33 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 209. BARBARA GRESPI 29 AN-ICON  not based on retina, as the director himself reports, refer- ring to interviews with spectators coming out of the gallery: Vertigo is projected through the ears into the mind of the person listening to Hermann’s notes. States of mind and self projection Are we to think, then, that only the absence of images triggers imagination? And if it is totally impossible to simulate the mental with the means of cinema, how shall we construe the numerous attempts, since the origins of the medium, to simulate altered states of consciousness? Mitry argues that dream sequences, hallucinations and premo- nitions are not the most mental but the most subjective,34 and in this he joins Wenders, whose machine will show that the mental could be translated into the visible only by sharing subjectivity. Therefore, the result of the cinematic simulation of altered states depends on the ways in which the movie makes the viewer slip into the consciousness of a character, articulating his or her seeing and feeling through the “subjective shot”. Film theory has always juxtaposed two forms of the cinematic gaze: the so-called objective shot, corre- sponding to the simulation of a world that is completely independent from every perception, be this human, animal or belonging to other living and non-living species, and the subjective shot, the simulation of a perceived world, thus filtered at a sensorial and cognitive level through a specific fictional identity. The analysis of these two modes, together with other more nuanced ones, are part of the glorious problem of the point of view in the cinema, a pro- tagonist of the semiotic-narratological debate of the Eight- ies and Nineties, also discussed towards the end of the season in Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology, which takes up precisely Mitry’s contribution. The chapters about the point of view in Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma are indeed the best known and most discussed, even if, before 34 Ibid. BARBARA GRESPI 30 AN-ICON  Sobchack, perhaps not fully understood. Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992), was published only a year after Metz’s Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (1991),35 and thus criticiz- es the positions of the great semiologist, especially Metz reading Mitry;36 but in reality, Impersonal Enunciation is a point of encounter between the two authors. Mitry is among the first to study in depth The Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1946), the film noir shot almost entirely in subjective mode. Here we spectators investigate in the shoes of the detective Philip Marlowe, who is framed frontally only at the beginning and at the end of the movie, while for the rest his eyes are our eyes and our body is disguised in his. Mitry knows how to wonderfully describe the way in which the spectators’ gaze follows the character’s gait from the inside, striving to consider his feet as their own, or the way in which they hold onto the railing with him, trying to see their own hands in Marlowe’s. But this attempt fails. They cannot recognize the image of their own body. Rather they imagine themselves accompanying the body of an Other, objectified, as all the rest is. It is obviously not me climbing the stairs and acting like this, even though I am feeling sensations similar to those I might feel if I were climbing the stairs. I am, therefore, walking with someone, sharing his impressions.37 Then when the famous sequence of the mir- ror arrives, during which the face of Marlowe is reflected (always from the character’s view), spectators are slight- ly disappointed, Mitry apparently suggests. They have to admit that the impressions that they tried to embody were not theirs. Or rather: this is true for all the viewers except for the director, because he, Robert Montgomery, played Marlowe; thus, for him, and for him only, the subjective shot 35 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 36 C. Metz, “Problèmes actuels de théorie du cinéma” (1967), in Essais sur la signification au cinéma, 2 vol. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972): 35-86. 37 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 210. BARBARA GRESPI 31 AN-ICON  works. Put another way, in the subjective shots, Montgom- ery would experience himself as another, by again embody- ing the sensorial phantasms of his previous experience; most of the time, he would live through an experience of partial mirroring: proprioceptive but not optical.38 Sobchack addresses this analysis on two lev- els. On one level, she expands Mitry’s critique by adding the argument of the difficulties of simulating a proprioceptive act. It is not just a matter of noticing the difference between the spectator’s hands and the actor’s, but also the fact of being forced to perceive differently from the way in which the character would probably do so in reality. Indeed, the subjective shots serve two simultaneous purposes: they show the clues necessary to solve the mystery and at the same time they show Marlowe’s perception in a believable fashion. However, the fictional Marlowe would be interested only in the inquiries, and not in his percipient self; for this reason, Sobchack speaks of a difference in the intentional focus that detaches the viewer from the character. In addi- tion, our way of directing attention consists in moving our eyes inside a visual field in which everything remains equally sharp, even what we are not focusing on; on the contrary, classical cinema deploys a marked in-focus and out-of- focus procedure, it constructs clear and blurred zones of visibility by regulating the focal point. So, the analogy be- tween cinema and mind in Münsterberg’s theory (movie techniques as metaphors of the processes of attention), becomes for Sobchack an element which unmasks the difference between man and machine. This is indeed the second and more radical level on which Sobchack’s line of argument is based, and it is so important that it overturns, at least formally, Mitry’s reasoning. Building on a Merleau-Pontyan version of phe- nomenology, Sobchack challenged the semiotic distinction between subjective and objective gaze and introduced the 38 I suggest something similar to the inspiring idea of the shot/counter-shot relationship in terms of specular reflection without a mirror, as proposed by A.C. Dalmasso, “Le plan subjectif réversible: Sur le point de vue au cinéma à partir des écrits de Merleau-Ponty”, Studia Phaenomenologica, XVI (2016): 135-162. BARBARA GRESPI 32 AN-ICON  concept of the film’s body, meaning “an intentional instru- ment able to perceive and express perception”.39 From this standpoint, the film’s materially nonhuman (but percipient) body presents the world subjectively to the spectator’s eye. Consequently, the movie camera sees a character and sees him/her seeing with the same degree of subjectivity (its own). It can disguise itself totally as them, by attributing to them a temporary responsibility for the visible percep- tion, but not without a great effort.40 This is indeed the true unbridgeable difference between bodies in the subjective structure of the gaze: not between the body of the spectator and the body of the character, but between the machine’s body (“the non-human embodied film”) and the actor’s, and even more so, the spectator’s body. On the surface, we are dealing with an inversion of perspective, but in reality, it is a convergence: the film’s gaze overwrites that of the character whether we define the machine as an object (but always from a phenomenological perspective: Mitry), or as a subject (a sentient body: Sobchack). In the years between Mitry’s volume and Sob- chack’s, the supporters of the subjective gaze proliferated, with some epochal contributions;41 but when Metz closes that chapter with his Impersonal Enunciation, we come back, in a sense, to the beginning. Metz comes from his book on cinema and psychoanalysis, where he differentiat- ed a form of primary identification (with the camera) from a secondary one (with the character), so he is already inclined to elaborate on the reflexive role of the apparatus. But Im- personal Enunciation starts by arguing, exactly as Sobchak does, that the “semi-subjective shot” discovered by Mitry – an over-the-shoulder shot directed along an axis which more or less aligns with the character’s point of view – is the best form of subjectivity; firstly, because it also shows, even if partially, the body of the perceiver, a necessary 39 V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: 247. 40 Ibid.: 231. 41 See the still indispensable F. Casetti, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator (1986) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). BARBARA GRESPI 33 AN-ICON  factor to encourage identification,42 and secondly, because it makes you sense the presence of a second gaze that perceives the percipient. In conclusion, even leaving phe- nomenology and remaining in the sphere of semiotics, the point is this: the subjective shot is not an empty mould for the spectator’s gaze and body, it is rather a place for redoubling: it “performs above all a double doubling of the enunciative moment […] it doubles at a stroke the site [foyer] that shows via him, and the spectator, who sees via him […] subjective image is reflexive but not a mirror. It does not reflect itself; rather, it reflects the source and the spectator”.43 From this standpoint, the subjective shot be- comes a reproduction en abyme of the projection: we could probably rethink also the idea of the first person shot in VR (and XR) along this line; there the beholder’s body-gaze, apparently implied at every level, is rather to be construed in its radical coincidence with the machine of visibility. In conclusion, when we talk about subjectivity in the image, we talk about a reflexive form in which the movie makes itself visible44 (through the character’s eye or through other stylistic strategies and non-human bodies, so-called “enunciating entities”). Still, exploiting a fictional identity not to access the physical world but some form of Phantasie, to re-use a Husserlian word, means to introduce a further enunciative level in which the character, unques- tionably, mediates the visible with its Self, that is to say, its own human and fictional subjectivity. This is what Mitry meant, probably, when he maintained that mental images plead the cause not so much of the mental but of subjectivity. However, movies about people with supernatu- ral faculties offer a range of fictional representations of men- tal states more in tune with this idea of “impersonal subjec- tivity”; in those cases, indeed, the character’s altered states 42 Mitry argued first that to adopt a gaze, one must have seen the body of this gaze; see the development of this idea in E. Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Amsterdam-New York-Berlin: Mouton, 1984). 43 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or The Place of Film: 106. 44 Unless you think of the distribution of knowledge and the positioning of the narrator towards the diegetic universe (Genette’s focalization). BARBARA GRESPI 34 AN-ICON  are not to be explained through psychology, but through their function as human machines of vision (symmetrical to Sobchack’s cinematic machine as non-human body). Fig. 2. David Cronenberg, The Dead Zone, 1983. Screen capture. In The Dead Zone (David Cronenberg, 1983) (Fig. 2), the visions of John, who awakens from a coma lasting nearly five years, traverse his body and materialize around him. There is a physical support (an image-thing) where the “data” of the events that John is able to “hallucinate” are stored, and it is the body of the person who experienced them: each vision is generated by the contact between John’s hand and that of the subject, whose past or future is in question; the handshake produces tremors, signals travelling through the clairvoyant’s body and reaching his eyes, which at this point “project”45 the images (images-ob- jects) into the environment, and not without pain (the same consumption suffered by the protagonists of Until the End of the World). John becomes a visitor to these virtual spac- es, which he experiences with his body, while the specta- tors experience his hallucination as their own not by vir- tue of an unconditioned adhesion of gazes (the subjective shot), but rather by virtue of a plurality of subjectivisations 45 See the idea of divination as projection in one of the figures who inspired Jean Mitry’s thinking, known as Dr. Allendy: “The fortune tellers […] do nothing but project on reality something which doesn’t possess in itself any determination, a latent image that is inscribed in it — and therefore we can understand all the techniques of divination as projection on reality of an inner and obscure sense” (our translation and emphasis). See Dr. Allendy [René Allendy], “La valeur psychologique de l’image”: 99-100. BARBARA GRESPI 35 AN-ICON  which renders the visible a place for the emergence of the gaze.46 In his first vision, John hallucinates the fire in which the daughter of his nurse could die: the hospital room is transformed into the child’s bedroom, including John’s bed, suddenly surrounded by toys, teddy bears and flames. The vision is subjectified in a complex and multiple fashion: a rightward gaze opens the imaginary field with a classic subjective shot, and a leftward gaze brings the field back to reality; however, between the two gestures, the camera starts to wander in a mental space-time until it includes John, whose eyes have ceased to bear the sight of the images, while his voice remained altered as it is in his state of hallucination. In the most memorable of the visions, which concerns the young victim of a serial killer, John’s subjective shot projects the imaginary gazebo in which the murder took place; but his close-up was already “subjectified” before his visions, because his face no longer immersed in the darkness of the night (the actual present), but surrounded by a diffused glow, the one that was there at the moment of the crime (the virtual past); this abrupt change of illumination intimates that John is already part of his hallucination. His entrance into the virtual world, his artificial presence on the scene of the crime, right behind the victim, but invisible, is a quintessential cinematic scene. John ends up in the image almost accidentally: a dolly starts moving slowly and brings into the frame his figure, almost by chance; it is thanks to a slightly excessive movement that we can see our vision together with its source. And it is precisely this ghostly, casual and plural presence that characterizes the cinematic experience; it is difficult to think that it could be replicated in immersive media, like VR, where there is, at least for the moment, no possibility of detaching the spectator’s gaze from the “projector”. 46 See the idea of “plan subjective réversible” and of the film as a “visible surface cracked by different gazes” from the Merleau-Pontyan perspective adopted by A.C. Dalmasso, “Le plan subjectif réversible”: 140 (our translation). BARBARA GRESPI 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/15446

Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema by Barbara Grespi Mitry (I) Husserl Mental state Projection Imagination Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the vi1 rtual image in the cinema (I) by Barbara Grespi Abstract Representing altered states of consciousness, even through the most phantasmal of technical images, is an inherent contradiction; once we attribute a physical body, i.e. objectivity, to mental images, we deny what Husserl considers their very essence. Jean Mitry draws from this assumption when discussing filmic access to mental states from a phenomenological perspective. The following essay reconsiders Mitry’s contribution with specific reference to the role of projection, technically and metaphorically speak- ing, in the cinematic technique and imagination; this, with the intention of suggesting some crucial questions for the comparison between the filmic forms of the visible and those inaugurated by the technology of the virtual. Mitry Husserl Mental state Projection Imagination To quote this essay: B. Grespi, “Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (I)”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 17-36 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 into the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2018-2022” attributed by Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca (MIUR). BARBARA GRESPI 17 AN-ICON Le cinéma transforme l’écran en une image d’image.2 A silver visor, you would say an ancestor of a VR headset were it not for the cap that wraps around the lower part of the skull. It causes a sharp pain in the eyes and its function is not to watch images, but to record them, like an ordinary video camera. Nevertheless, it has no lens but two satin panels, one for each eye. From the outside, you can see the signal of a scanner running; fr m the inside, the captured images appear on two side-by-side screens. It is the device invented by Wim Wenders for Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt, 1991) (Fig.1), in the story, a prototype which all the great world powers are hunting down in the fevered climate of the end of the millennium. Its camera captures the biochemical event of vision, that is, not only what you see but also how your brain reacts to the perceived images, collecting electrical stimuli directly from the nerves. The recorded “visual” impulses can thus be transmitted to the brain of another person, even a blind one, and this allows them to see without using the retina. Still, as the story progresses, the machine evolves into something even more complicated: a technique for extracting from the mind images which are completely independent of sight and correspond to pure imagination, dreams or memories. Sight translated into data gives birth to “artificial” images, segmented in a grid and the result of numbers; imagination, on the other hand, has pictorial qualities, strong colours and blurred borders. Sci-fi cinema provides a long list of vision machines, but Wenders’ possesses a special allure, balanced, as it is, between the old and the new. 2 Dr. Allendy [René Allendy], “La valeur psychologique de l’image”, in AA.VV., L’art cinématographique (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1926): 75-103, 77. BARBARA GRESPI 18 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Wim Wenders, Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt), 1991. Screen capture. Between cinema and VR: an exquisitely optical prosthesis, it creates abstract images, devoid of somatic and sensory traces, but at the same time it is a medium of intersubjectivity, which allows the exchange of visions at a neural level. It is a digital device, but also a truth machine: it records, documents, reflects even the unconscious, or the deepest levels of our psyche. It represents the cinema in its increasingly sharp juxtaposition to other technologies of the contemporary era, such as VR: the first in perpetual balance between body and mind, the second completely biased towards the sensory. The representation of mental acts in cinema is always, as in Wenders’ movie, a metafilmic moment in which the image consciousness is elaborated, together with the ways in which multiple factors, material and immaterial, contribute to it, including the gaze and its structure. In the following pages, by rediscovering Jean Mitry’s reading of Husserl’s thinking, we will discuss the role of projection, technically and metaphorically speaking, in filmic access to the mental; this with the intention of bringing out some crucial questions for the comparison between the cinematic forms of the visible and those inaugurated by the technol- ogy of the virtual. BARBARA GRESPI 19 AN-ICON  The mental image and the filmic image Beyond what they represent, filmic images are “situated” in a space halfway between the mental and the real: the iconic stream that the spectator sees flowing would not exist outside his or her mind, which integrates and merges the perception of the single frames thus creating the movie. Even before the birth of cinema, the paradoxi- cal nature of the moving image struck William James, who referred to it to describe consciousness in terms of a zoe- trope: just as that optical toy produces effects of continuity by making discontinuous fragments flow, so the conscious- ness merges its sequences of scattered and uninterrupted micro-perceptions into an illusory whole.3 The similarity between the film and the activity of the mind will be at the core of one of the first essays in film theory, The Photoplay by Hugo Münsterberg, a former student of medicine who converted to psychology under the influence of Wilhelm Wundt, and later became James’s colleague at Harvard.4 The reference to James’s metaphor of the zoetrope allows us to understand what Münsterberg meant by suggesting that photographic images had been estranged from physi- cal reality once they had achieved movement – contrary to what one might naturally think – and were brought closer to the reality of consciousness. The massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of our own consciousness. The mind has triumphed over matter, and the pictures roll on with the ease of musical tones.5 Münsterberg develops a precise parallel be- tween cinema and mind, seeing the main filmic techniques 3 “Is consciousness really discontinuous, incessantly interrupted and recommencing (from the psychologist’s point of view)? And does it only seem continuous to itself by an illusion analogous to that of the zoetrope? Or is it at most times as continuous outwardly as it inwardly seems?”. W. James, The Principles of Psychology (Create Space, 2017): 125. 4 M. Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg: His Life and Work (New York: Appleton & Co., 1922): 21-22. 5 H. Münsterberg, “The psychology of the photoplay” (1916), in A. Langdale, ed., The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings (New York-London: Routledge, 2002): 153-154. BARBARA GRESPI 20 AN-ICON  as reflecting the activities of consciousness, such as atten- tion (corresponding to the close-up and the shifting from in-focus to out-of-focus), memory (represented by flash- back as enclosure of the past in the present) and emotion (in its development, according to William James, from a kinesthetic sensation).6 This early conception of the mind as a movie justifies the most common visual rhetoric that complemented the representation of a character’s mental acts: fading, superimposition, soft focus. Becoming con- solidated precisely in the years in which Münsterberg wrote his essay, these optical effects aim at framing a segment of the visible within a zone which is not real and not certain, just as the discontinuous hyphens of the thinking bubbles in comics highlight the difference between a thought spoken out loud and one which remains unspoken in the charac- ter’s mind. Transitions in classical cinema in essence pro- duce the slow fading of the actual into the mental, evoking an idea of the mind as a place of weakening, intermingling and metamorphosing of sensory input. These narrative fragments which interrupt the flow of the film by jumping onto a different level and moving beyond the diegetic physical reality, are thus presented and interpreted as the “contents” of a fictional consciousness; this implies believing that the human mind operates by storing impressions derived from perception in the shape of ghostly pictures to be inspected, when needed, by the mind’s eye. We are familiar with this notion, its ancient roots and its points of junction with modern thinking,7 as well as its confutation by phenomenology, whose intake is crucial but still difficult to integrate into studies of the imagination.8 Even a thinker like Sartre who tries to get rid, precisely through Husserl, of the idea of the mind as a repository of images, was victim to the same “illusion of immanence” that 6 Münsterberg shares the Jamesian perspective (the famous: “we do not weep because we are sad, but we are sad because we weep”). H. Münsterberg, “The psychology of the photoplay”: 107-108. 7 See the ancient idea of the mind as a room furnished with images in F.A. Yates, The Art of Memory (New York-London: Routledge, 1966). 8 See for instance J. Jansen, “Imagination: phenomenological approaches”, in M. Kelly, ed., Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 430-434. BARBARA GRESPI 21 AN-ICON  he intended to criticize once he admitted the existence of a “psychic object” (the analogon) and presented it as the mediator of the imaginative process.9 Sartre is very much present in Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma by Jean Mitry, the massive trea- tise in two volumes written by the French critic, activist and director between 1963 and 1965,10 a work capable of bridging, as Dudley Andrew wrote, the formalism of clas- sical theory with emerging semiotics.11 The second volume, centered on form and cin- ematic language, is the best known and most appreciated, while volume one, particularly eclectic, has suffered from an evident removal, also highlighted by the significant cuts made in current French and English editions.12 Here we find the first remarkable confrontation of film theory with Husserl, an attempt recognized by the pioneers of the phe- nomenological approach to cinema, but never investigated, and even dismissed, in the numerous developments of this branch of study.13 Mitry discusses precisely the theme of mental images, which Husserl brought together under the umbrella term of Phantasie, to indicate both the ensem- ble of images devoid of physical support and the act of imagination through which they “appear” (erscheinen).14 It is an act of imagination that which gives shape to a physical image, deposited on a support and capable of 9 Casey recognized the error. See E.S. Casey, “Sartre on imagination”, in P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (La Salle: Open Court 1981): 16-27. 10 J. Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma (vol. I: Le structure, and vol. II: Les formes) (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1963, 1965). A useful rediscovery of Mitry’s contribution to film theory in: M. Lefebvre, “Revisiting Mitry’s Esthétique et Psychologie du Cinéma at Fifty”, Mise au point [online], no. 6 (2014), accessed February 20, 2021. 11 See D. Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1976): 181ff. 12 The current English edition The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) was translated from the abridged French edition of 1990. We will quote from this book, unless otherwise specified. 13 Vivian Sobchack recognizes his engagement in a Husserlian phenomenology of cinema – see her The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 29 – while A. Casebier, Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) prefers to lean upon Baudry. Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Julian Hanich dismiss Mitry’s idea of mental image as a distortion of the phenomenological arguments. See their stimulating introduction “What is film phenomenology?” to “Film and phenomenology”, Studia Phaenomenologica XVI (2016): 36. 14 E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). BARBARA GRESPI 22 AN-ICON  depicting an absent entity (Bildvorstellung), as well as that which creates mental images (Phantasievorstellung), which are by no means comparable to “iconic contents” of the consciousness, but rather to be understood as intuitions based on “sensorial phantasms”.15 Mitry does not refer to these precise pages of Husserl, whose essential theses are however echoed, but rather he remodels phenomenol- ogy under the influence of his experience of the cinema. Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma stems indeed from a general philosophical position – a unique case in film theory, if we exclude Deleuze’s two tomes – a thesis in which it is of primary importance to define the role of perception by mediating among Husserl’s theses, Sartre and psychology. In Mitry’s interpretation of intentionality, per- ception is an act based on sensory impressions but is not reduced to them; consciousness completes them, by extracting an object from the undifferentiated continuum that constitutes matter and hence giving form, by difference, also to the subject. Consciousness is based on mental images, which are not residues of ocular perception which have survived in the absence of the object, and nor are they entities existing in themselves and of which thought could avail itself; they are rather forms through which thought became aware of itself. With this idea, Mitry gets rid of the metaphor of consciousness as a receptacle of data and substitutes it with that of consciousness as a reflex of per- ception. With perception in the absence of the object, that is Phantasie, the glare of consciousness is, so to speak, one-way: “the mental image is the product of a wish di- rected toward the object which we know to be absent [...] it is the consciousness of that wish becoming ‘known’ in the object of its volition”.16 15 In Husserl called precisely “Phantasmen”. In the comment on Husserl’s theory of imagination, we follow C. Calì, “Husserl and the phenomenological description of imagery: some issues for the cognitive sciences?”, Arhe 4, no. 10 (2006): 25-36 and Husserl e l’immagine (Palermo: Aesthetica Preprint, 2002): 113-114. 16 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 35-36. BARBARA GRESPI 23 AN-ICON  The moving image consciousness Mitry’s starting point, therefore, is not the cin- ematic representation of consciousness, but the mental images that become part of the imaginative process; this process is extremely important in cinema, a medium which powerfully simulates the real but at the same time possess- es a deep-rooted ghostly nature. According to Mitry, this double character of cinema is reflected by the two kinds of signs of which it is composed: linguistic and psycholog- ical signs; linguistic signs give shape to the filmic images (through a grammar of the visible), psychological signs con- struct mental images (with the collaboration of the spectator). To understand how these two “signs” intersect in the beholder’s experience, it is necessary to come back to Husserl and his well-known tripartition regarding image consciousness, which is not clearly referenced in Esthétique et psychologie du cinema, but still recognisable in many lines. Husserl’s classification is based on three perceptive dimensions: the first is the “image-thing” (Bildding), that is, the concrete material of which the image is made, its support; the second is the “image-object” (Bildobje t), that is, the immaterial object which depicts something (the ide- al content of a series of perception);17 the last is the “im- age-subject” (Bildsujet), that is, the depicted subject (the referent in the real world).18 A subtle but substantial differ- ence separates the image-thing from the image-object: if the support were damaged or destroyed (for instance, if a canvas was torn), the image-object would not be affected, because it does not possess a real existence, neither inside nor outside of consciousness (only a complex of sensations experienced by the spectator in front of the pigments exists, as well as the way in which he invests it with intentionality, by creating image consciousness). This component is more easily understood in the case of the mental image, which 17 In Mitry’s words, see J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 27. 18 I use this expression, although I am aware that between the image and the subject there is not properly a semiotic relationship. See C. Rozzoni, Nell’immagine: Realtà, fantasia, esperienza estetica (Milan: Le Monnier, 2017): 9. BARBARA GRESPI 24 AN-ICON  lacks a material support, in contrast to the physical image. Still, there is a minor difference between the two, because what matters is their common capacity of actualizing absent objects (that is to say, making them present). The illusion of presence is based on the production of sensorial phan- tasms that allow us to guess how an object would be if it fell under the sphere of our senses, for instance touch or hear- ing, but first and foremost sight.19 An “optical” phantasm makes us intuit how a specific object would appear to our gaze within a particular environment, and this imaginative act covers our perception, albeit not totally. Indeed, the mental image as well as the physical image insert them- selves into the perception in a contrastive way, that is, not fully covering and substituting our reality, but allowing us to keep it alive. It is not a question of greater or lesser illu- sionistic power (some images could appear so real to be mistaken for reality), and neither of frames (a more or less marked discontinuity in the space where they are situated), rather it is a matter of time: Husserl points out that this is more the contrast between the time of the image-object and the actual present,20 to which our body belongs above all (but also the Bildding, if we are talking about physical images). Here below, the echo of these concepts in Mitry: We have seen that the mental image presents a reality both vi- sualized and recognized as absent. If, as I write these lines, I think of my car in the garage, I can see it perfectly well, mentally - or, at least, I can see a certain aspect of it - but I am seeing it as not present. It appears to my consciousness as an image certifying the absence of what I am thinking about - more especially since, 19 This is what was brightly called an “artificial presence”. See L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence: Philosophical Studies in Image Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 20 “[The image-thing] bears within itself the characteristic of unreality, of conflict with the actual present. The perception of the surroundings, the perception in which the actual present becomes constituted for us, continues on through the frame and then signifies ‘printed paper’ or ‘painted canvas’”. E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 51 (emphasis in the original). On this base, I suspect that we should abandon the optical idea of the frame when we face an environmental image (like VR), and rethink it in corporeal terms, considering the spectator’s real body as the border; indeed, you always have the possibility to leave the artificially present world not by seeing outside of the image, but certainly by touching the surrounding space and objects (or people), that is, paradoxically, becoming aware of the unreal in the very moment in which we get the chance to imagine the real through our body (thus in a perfect inversion of the cinematic relationship between reality and imagination). BARBARA GRESPI 25 AN-ICON in so doing, I do not stop perceiving the world impinging on me from all sides. The mental image is therefore a product of the will standing in opposition to our normal perception of the world and its objects and which, though coexisting with it, becomes more isolated the more directly in opposition it stands.21 Mitry realises that these ideas are of great im- portance for the analysis of cinematic images, which had also attracted Husserl’s attention, albeit fleetingly. The great philosopher’s reflections about the art of the twenty-century concern the repeatability of cinematic screenings such as to leave the image-object unaltered,22 and the intensity of the actualization produced by filmic images, so high as to reduce the perception of the image-thing to the minimum. “Deception and sensory illusion of the sort belonging to panorama images, cinematographic images, and the like”, he wrote, “depend on the fact that the appearing objects in their whole appearing state are slightly or imperceptibly different from the objects appearing in normal perception. One can know in these cases that these are mere image objects, though one cannot vitally sense this”.23 His ger- minal reflection on cinema has been taken up by some important contributions, mainly centered on the relation- ship between consciousness and true believing and on the interplay between actor and character;24 but the path indicated by Mitry is just as interesting and perhaps more in line with Husserl’s suggestions. Mitry wrote: Stuck to a cellulose base, projected onto a screen [...] the film image, in contrast with the mental image, is objectively present; but, like the mental image, it is the image of an absent reality, a past real- ity of which it is merely the image. Its concrete reality is that it is 21 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 82-83. 22 “If I let a cinematographic presentation run off repeatedly, then (in relation to the subject) the image object in the How of its modes of appearance and each of these modes of appearance itself is given as identically the same image object or as identically the same mode of appearance”. E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 646. 23 E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 146. 24 See C. Rozzoni, “Cinema Consciousness: Elements of a Husserlian Approach to Film Image”, Studia Phaenomenologica, XVI (2016): 294-324; J. Brough, “Showing and Seeing: Film as Phenomenology”, in J. D. Parry, ed., Art and Phenomenology (New York-London: Routledge, 2010): 192-214. BARBARA GRESPI 26 AN-ICON fixed to a support and is thus objectively present and analyzable. The reality recorded on the celluloid strip is at all times capable of being projected. In this sense, projection is a kind of “actualization” in the same way as the mental image.25 In these lines, a central question arises: in cin- ema, the act of making something present (“actualization”, he writes, alluding specifically to Husserl) takes place in the very moment of projection, because the strip of film is only a “latent movie”; according to Mitry, the celluloid is the main support (the image-thing), while the screen un- balances perception from the thing to the object, allowing movement to be seen. Neither the destruction of the film, nor even a scratch in the screen cancels the object-film, which, as we said, is that ideal content which, though cre- ated during the projection, survives it – as Orson Welles’ Don Quixote never ceases to teach us, a foolish spectator who stabs the white screen with his sword in an attempt to heroically oppose his enemies of light and shadow. Welles shows that the screen is not the canvas, is not one and the same with the image, which resists its destruction, both because it is anchored to another, more real support, and because it lives in the mind, paradigmatically in that of the visionary Don Quixote. The celluloid is more similar to the concrete materials of the painter, so much so that the di- rector selects carefully its size and sensitivity, while he can do nothing with the surface of the screen. But if we look back at the origins, we find the two supports imploded into each other: in pre-cinema, frame and screen coincide, because the illusion of movement, for instance in Muto- scope, depends on the flow of photographs bound one on top of the other, within the screen format created by their borders: the “book”. Do we have thus a double “thingness” in the filmic image? And if so, is it not a fundamental prop- erty of all technical images,26 even in the many variants 25 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 31, 83. 26 This is perhaps another way to interpret the idea of technical images as proposed by V. Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). BARBARA GRESPI 27 AN-ICON  of the analogue, but also digital system? The material cin- ematic film behaves like photosensitive paper in photogra- phy, or data code in the digital system, while the shadows projected on the screen correspond to the photographic positive, and to the extraction of the mpeg file on the dis- play. From photography onwards,27 to codify an image and to visualize it, that is to render it accessible to the human eye, became two different and not necessarily concurrent processes; obviously, with the transition to digital, the gap between the two moments widens, because there the ma- trix is no more a first, far-fetched or incomplete visualization of the subject, but its translation into a numerical language, not accessible to the senses, and thus potentially shared only by machines.28 But the point is: to develop a theory of cinematic image anchored to the process of visualization instead of that of encoding – focusing at the same time on the spectator because, as Münsterberg said, without him the image in motion simply does not exist – we have to work on the intersection between the physical and the mental. By a different route, Tom Gunning drew similar conclusions, when he re-launched the theory of realism moving from Metz’s brief incursion into phenomenologi- cal territory;29 Gunning is not a supporter of the deviation toward the mental, but certainly an adversary of Peirce’s indexicality when used to reduce the impression of reality in cinema to the sole photographic base. Thomas Elsaess- er, on the other hand, is not a phenomenologist but he rediscovered the “mental side” of cinema when he drew the distinction between the transmission of the image to the human senses and its recording through traces, rather than optical geometry. Indeed, he saw the model of this process in the human memory, as Freud had conceived it (that is like a Mystic Writing Pad), and proposed to re-start 27 But not in its daguerreotype version, which did not use the positive-negative reverse process: the metal film plate in the camera was developed as a positive and as a unique copy. 28 On this topic see: F. Casetti, A. Pinotti, “Post-cinema ecology”, in D. Chateau, J. Moure, eds., Post-cinema: Cinema in the Post Art Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 193-218. 29 C. Metz, “On the impression of reality in the cinema”, in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974): 3-28, discussed by T. Gunning, “Moving away from the index: cinema and the impression of reality”, differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 29-52. BARBARA GRESPI 28 AN-ICON  the theoretical discourse about cinema from its nature of interface between data and the human senses, in the key of an archaeology of the digital.30 These excellent contributions are perfectly in tune with Mitry’s emphasis on projection as a Husserlian moment of actualization, an effect in which the perception of physical image intersects with mental envisioning; in it “the film frame merely takes the place of the mental image with all the force of its credible reality”.31 Moreover, Metz quoted by Gunning builds on Mitry in his analysis of the “filmic mode”, which he defines “the mode of presence”,32 thinking not of a state of sensory overwhelming, but of an active consciousness made up of the mental reflexes of perception. Nevertheless, the mental, though it is a reflex and a logic of the images, is precisely what the film could never make visible. “It is completely impossible to repre- sent a mental image”, Mitry wrote, “since, having become visual, it ceases to be mental”.33 The filmic image is helpless in the face of what is not accessible to the sight or at least what no one has ever seen; for this reason, Mitry would probably have ap- preciated the frameless film by Douglas Gordon (Feature Film, 1999), a video installation that basically consists of an orchestra performing the full soundtrack written by com- poser Bernard Hermann for the film Vertigo (Alfred Hitch- cock,1958). On the two walls of the exhibition room, only the conductor appears in large mirror projections. However, the real images filling the room are not the physical ones on the walls, but those which flow in the viewer’s mind in correspondence with the musical notes: the sequence where Kim Novak jumps into the bay under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, or when she comes back in her green suit like a ghost. The spectator experiences a kind of vision 30 T. Elsaesser, “Freud as media theorist: mystic writing pads and the matter of memory”, Screen 50, no. 1 (2009): 100-113. Kuntzel already worked on the similarities between Freudian model of memory and the cinema, see: T. Kuntzel, “A note upon the filmic apparatus”, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, no. 1 (1976): 266-271. 31 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 86. 32 C. Metz, “On the impression of reality in the cinema”: 4. 33 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 209. BARBARA GRESPI 29 AN-ICON  not based on retina, as the director himself reports, refer- ring to interviews with spectators coming out of the gallery: Vertigo is projected through the ears into the mind of the person listening to Hermann’s notes. States of mind and self projection Are we to think, then, that only the absence of images triggers imagination? And if it is totally impossible to simulate the mental with the means of cinema, how shall we construe the numerous attempts, since the origins of the medium, to simulate altered states of consciousness? Mitry argues that dream sequences, hallucinations and premo- nitions are not the most mental but the most subjective,34 and in this he joins Wenders, whose machine will show that the mental could be translated into the visible only by sharing subjectivity. Therefore, the result of the cinematic simulation of altered states depends on the ways in which the movie makes the viewer slip into the consciousness of a character, articulating his or her seeing and feeling through the “subjective shot”. Film theory has always juxtaposed two forms of the cinematic gaze: the so-called objective shot, corre- sponding to the simulation of a world that is completely independent from every perception, be this human, animal or belonging to other living and non-living species, and the subjective shot, the simulation of a perceived world, thus filtered at a sensorial and cognitive level through a specific fictional identity. The analysis of these two modes, together with other more nuanced ones, are part of the glorious problem of the point of view in the cinema, a pro- tagonist of the semiotic-narratological debate of the Eight- ies and Nineties, also discussed towards the end of the season in Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology, which takes up precisely Mitry’s contribution. The chapters about the point of view in Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma are indeed the best known and most discussed, even if, before 34 Ibid. BARBARA GRESPI 30 AN-ICON  Sobchack, perhaps not fully understood. Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992), was published only a year after Metz’s Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (1991),35 and thus criticiz- es the positions of the great semiologist, especially Metz reading Mitry;36 but in reality, Impersonal Enunciation is a point of encounter between the two authors. Mitry is among the first to study in depth The Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1946), the film noir shot almost entirely in subjective mode. Here we spectators investigate in the shoes of the detective Philip Marlowe, who is framed frontally only at the beginning and at the end of the movie, while for the rest his eyes are our eyes and our body is disguised in his. Mitry knows how to wonderfully describe the way in which the spectators’ gaze follows the character’s gait from the inside, striving to consider his feet as their own, or the way in which they hold onto the railing with him, trying to see their own hands in Marlowe’s. But this attempt fails. They cannot recognize the image of their own body. Rather they imagine themselves accompanying the body of an Other, objectified, as all the rest is. It is obviously not me climbing the stairs and acting like this, even though I am feeling sensations similar to those I might feel if I were climbing the stairs. I am, therefore, walking with someone, sharing his impressions.37 Then when the famous sequence of the mir- ror arrives, during which the face of Marlowe is reflected (always from the character’s view), spectators are slight- ly disappointed, Mitry apparently suggests. They have to admit that the impressions that they tried to embody were not theirs. Or rather: this is true for all the viewers except for the director, because he, Robert Montgomery, played Marlowe; thus, for him, and for him only, the subjective shot 35 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 36 C. Metz, “Problèmes actuels de théorie du cinéma” (1967), in Essais sur la signification au cinéma, 2 vol. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972): 35-86. 37 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 210. BARBARA GRESPI 31 AN-ICON  works. Put another way, in the subjective shots, Montgom- ery would experience himself as another, by again embody- ing the sensorial phantasms of his previous experience; most of the time, he would live through an experience of partial mirroring: proprioceptive but not optical.38 Sobchack addresses this analysis on two lev- els. On one level, she expands Mitry’s critique by adding the argument of the difficulties of simulating a proprioceptive act. It is not just a matter of noticing the difference between the spectator’s hands and the actor’s, but also the fact of being forced to perceive differently from the way in which the character would probably do so in reality. Indeed, the subjective shots serve two simultaneous purposes: they show the clues necessary to solve the mystery and at the same time they show Marlowe’s perception in a believable fashion. However, the fictional Marlowe would be interested only in the inquiries, and not in his percipient self; for this reason, Sobchack speaks of a difference in the intentional focus that detaches the viewer from the character. In addi- tion, our way of directing attention consists in moving our eyes inside a visual field in which everything remains equally sharp, even what we are not focusing on; on the contrary, classical cinema deploys a marked in-focus and out-of- focus procedure, it constructs clear and blurred zones of visibility by regulating the focal point. So, the analogy be- tween cinema and mind in Münsterberg’s theory (movie techniques as metaphors of the processes of attention), becomes for Sobchack an element which unmasks the difference between man and machine. This is indeed the second and more radical level on which Sobchack’s line of argument is based, and it is so important that it overturns, at least formally, Mitry’s reasoning. Building on a Merleau-Pontyan version of phe- nomenology, Sobchack challenged the semiotic distinction between subjective and objective gaze and introduced the 38 I suggest something similar to the inspiring idea of the shot/counter-shot relationship in terms of specular reflection without a mirror, as proposed by A.C. Dalmasso, “Le plan subjectif réversible: Sur le point de vue au cinéma à partir des écrits de Merleau-Ponty”, Studia Phaenomenologica, XVI (2016): 135-162. BARBARA GRESPI 32 AN-ICON  concept of the film’s body, meaning “an intentional instru- ment able to perceive and express perception”.39 From this standpoint, the film’s materially nonhuman (but percipient) body presents the world subjectively to the spectator’s eye. Consequently, the movie camera sees a character and sees him/her seeing with the same degree of subjectivity (its own). It can disguise itself totally as them, by attributing to them a temporary responsibility for the visible percep- tion, but not without a great effort.40 This is indeed the true unbridgeable difference between bodies in the subjective structure of the gaze: not between the body of the spectator and the body of the character, but between the machine’s body (“the non-human embodied film”) and the actor’s, and even more so, the spectator’s body. On the surface, we are dealing with an inversion of perspective, but in reality, it is a convergence: the film’s gaze overwrites that of the character whether we define the machine as an object (but always from a phenomenological perspective: Mitry), or as a subject (a sentient body: Sobchack). In the years between Mitry’s volume and Sob- chack’s, the supporters of the subjective gaze proliferated, with some epochal contributions;41 but when Metz closes that chapter with his Impersonal Enunciation, we come back, in a sense, to the beginning. Metz comes from his book on cinema and psychoanalysis, where he differentiat- ed a form of primary identification (with the camera) from a secondary one (with the character), so he is already inclined to elaborate on the reflexive role of the apparatus. But Im- personal Enunciation starts by arguing, exactly as Sobchak does, that the “semi-subjective shot” discovered by Mitry – an over-the-shoulder shot directed along an axis which more or less aligns with the character’s point of view – is the best form of subjectivity; firstly, because it also shows, even if partially, the body of the perceiver, a necessary 39 V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: 247. 40 Ibid.: 231. 41 See the still indispensable F. Casetti, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator (1986) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). BARBARA GRESPI 33 AN-ICON  factor to encourage identification,42 and secondly, because it makes you sense the presence of a second gaze that perceives the percipient. In conclusion, even leaving phe- nomenology and remaining in the sphere of semiotics, the point is this: the subjective shot is not an empty mould for the spectator’s gaze and body, it is rather a place for redoubling: it “performs above all a double doubling of the enunciative moment […] it doubles at a stroke the site [foyer] that shows via him, and the spectator, who sees via him […] subjective image is reflexive but not a mirror. It does not reflect itself; rather, it reflects the source and the spectator”.43 From this standpoint, the subjective shot be- comes a reproduction en abyme of the projection: we could probably rethink also the idea of the first person shot in VR (and XR) along this line; there the beholder’s body-gaze, apparently implied at every level, is rather to be construed in its radical coincidence with the machine of visibility. In conclusion, when we talk about subjectivity in the image, we talk about a reflexive form in which the movie makes itself visible44 (through the character’s eye or through other stylistic strategies and non-human bodies, so-called “enunciating entities”). Still, exploiting a fictional identity not to access the physical world but some form of Phantasie, to re-use a Husserlian word, means to introduce a further enunciative level in which the character, unques- tionably, mediates the visible with its Self, that is to say, its own human and fictional subjectivity. This is what Mitry meant, probably, when he maintained that mental images plead the cause not so much of the mental but of subjectivity. However, movies about people with supernatu- ral faculties offer a range of fictional representations of men- tal states more in tune with this idea of “impersonal subjec- tivity”; in those cases, indeed, the character’s altered states 42 Mitry argued first that to adopt a gaze, one must have seen the body of this gaze; see the development of this idea in E. Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Amsterdam-New York-Berlin: Mouton, 1984). 43 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or The Place of Film: 106. 44 Unless you think of the distribution of knowledge and the positioning of the narrator towards the diegetic universe (Genette’s focalization). BARBARA GRESPI 34 AN-ICON  are not to be explained through psychology, but through their function as human machines of vision (symmetrical to Sobchack’s cinematic machine as non-human body). Fig. 2. David Cronenberg, The Dead Zone, 1983. Screen capture. In The Dead Zone (David Cronenberg, 1983) (Fig. 2), the visions of John, who awakens from a coma lasting nearly five years, traverse his body and materialize around him. There is a physical support (an image-thing) where the “data” of the events that John is able to “hallucinate” are stored, and it is the body of the person who experienced them: each vision is generated by the contact between John’s hand and that of the subject, whose past or future is in question; the handshake produces tremors, signals travelling through the clairvoyant’s body and reaching his eyes, which at this point “project”45 the images (images-ob- jects) into the environment, and not without pain (the same consumption suffered by the protagonists of Until the End of the World). John becomes a visitor to these virtual spac- es, which he experiences with his body, while the specta- tors experience his hallucination as their own not by vir- tue of an unconditioned adhesion of gazes (the subjective shot), but rather by virtue of a plurality of subjectivisations 45 See the idea of divination as projection in one of the figures who inspired Jean Mitry’s thinking, known as Dr. Allendy: “The fortune tellers […] do nothing but project on reality something which doesn’t possess in itself any determination, a latent image that is inscribed in it — and therefore we can understand all the techniques of divination as projection on reality of an inner and obscure sense” (our translation and emphasis). See Dr. Allendy [René Allendy], “La valeur psychologique de l’image”: 99-100. BARBARA GRESPI 35 AN-ICON  which renders the visible a place for the emergence of the gaze.46 In his first vision, John hallucinates the fire in which the daughter of his nurse could die: the hospital room is transformed into the child’s bedroom, including John’s bed, suddenly surrounded by toys, teddy bears and flames. The vision is subjectified in a complex and multiple fashion: a rightward gaze opens the imaginary field with a classic subjective shot, and a leftward gaze brings the field back to reality; however, between the two gestures, the camera starts to wander in a mental space-time until it includes John, whose eyes have ceased to bear the sight of the images, while his voice remained altered as it is in his state of hallucination. In the most memorable of the visions, which concerns the young victim of a serial killer, John’s subjective shot projects the imaginary gazebo in which the murder took place; but his close-up was already “subjectified” before his visions, because his face no longer immersed in the darkness of the night (the actual present), but surrounded by a diffused glow, the one that was there at the moment of the crime (the virtual past); this abrupt change of illumination intimates that John is already part of his hallucination. His entrance into the virtual world, his artificial presence on the scene of the crime, right behind the victim, but invisible, is a quintessential cinematic scene. John ends up in the image almost accidentally: a dolly starts moving slowly and brings into the frame his figure, almost by chance; it is thanks to a slightly excessive movement that we can see our vision together with its source. And it is precisely this ghostly, casual and plural presence that characterizes the cinematic experience; it is difficult to think that it could be replicated in immersive media, like VR, where there is, at least for the moment, no possibility of detaching the spectator’s gaze from the “projector”. 46 See the idea of “plan subjective réversible” and of the film as a “visible surface cracked by different gazes” from the Merleau-Pontyan perspective adopted by A.C. Dalmasso, “Le plan subjectif réversible”: 140 (our translation). BARBARA GRESPI 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/15448

Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image in theDeleuze cinema (II) by Giuseppe Previtali Cinema Temporality Hallucination Bergman Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (II) by Giuseppe Previtali Abstract From its very origins, cinema has demonstrated a particular interest in the representation of altered states of consciousness: memories, visions, nightmares and dreams are a common feature of narrative films and usually inter- rupt a flow of events by inserting different temporalities in the present of the story. Following the arguments explored by Gilles Deleuze in his groundbreaking works on cinema, this essay will address the issue of how narrative cinema has represented altered states of consciousness. If in early cinema of attractions altered states were represented as physical realities intertwined with the world, classical Hol- lywood films progressively exorcised the disruptive poten- tial of such images by defining a visual grammar in order to normalize them within the narrative. It will be modern cinema which will focus on this issue in depth, given its new interest in the link between the moving image and the mechanisms of thought. In this regard, the essay will in conclusion address the hallucinations experienced by Isak Borg in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, a complex and highly illuminating case of various forms of altered mental states. Deleuze Cinema Temporality Hallucination Bergman To quote this essay: G. Previtali, “Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (II)”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 37-50 GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 37 AN-ICON  Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) begins with a shot of a young couple (Jonathan and Eve) in a car. We immediately understand that they are running from the police and they are heading towards a dock. The girl asks the man (who we will later recognize as her boyfriend) what happened and, when Jonathan starts to tell his story (“I was in my kitchen, it was about 5:00”) the close-up shot of the two begins to fade out. He explains that earlier in the morning he had received a visit from the singer and actress Charlotte Inwood, who showed up at his house with a dress covered in the blood of her husband. Jonathan managed to sneak into Charlotte’s house but was glimpsed by the housemaid and forced to run away. He later received a visit from two policemen, from whom he was able to escape only thanks to Eve. The description of this long sequence, which corresponds to the first fifteen minutes of the movie, would be incomplete without stressing the fact that Jona- than’s tale will prove to be a lie, despite the fact that visually it adopts those criteria of clarity, legibility and transparen- cy which were typical of classic Hollywood cinema and in which the spectator usually put his trust. The exceptionality of this sequence and its ex- emplarity in showing how the temporal dimension (the se- quence is a recollection of a supposed past) and the mental dimension (it is a false recollection of a certain character) are linked, is such that Deleuze identifies in it the first ap- pearance of the mental image in the history of cinema. This crucial analysis, programmatically located in the last pages of The Movement-Image, explicitly connects the distorted evocation of the past and an altered state of conscious- ness. It is precisely this relationship which, questioning the omniscience of the spectator, heralds the advent of a new kind of filmic image: GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 38 AN-ICON The mental image not only frames the others, but transforms them by penetrating them. For this reason, one might say that Hitchcock accomplishes and brings to completion the whole of the cinema by pursuing the movement-image to its limits.1 Altered states of consciousness in early and classical cinema Deleuze’s arguments, which will later be dis- cussed more extensively, attempt to address the excep- tionality of Hitchcock’s movies in the context of classical narrative cinema. However, it is important to recognize that from its origins, cinema has continuously sought to make visible altered states of consciousness. If film theory immediately stressed the role of visual media in preserv- ing the memory of what is absent (thus “presentifying” it),2 another of the great obsessions of cinema has to do with “the aspiration to visualize what dwells in the human mind, to represent thought, to exteriorize what is internal”.3 As Dagrada acutely pointed out, this urge was not limited to cinema itself, but was rather a common feature in the vi- sual culture of the 18th and 19th centuries. Theatre, magic lantern shows and optical toys were just some of the most common examples of this interest shown in the visual ex- ternalization of mental states. Cinema, nevertheless, played a crucial role in this sense, given its specific ability to visu- alize reality. Long before the institutionalization of classical filmic syntax, early cinema developed a specific way of visualizing mental states. What is peculiar to this historical 1 G. Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986): 204. The use of Deleuzean concepts in film studies is an established trend and this paper follows this tradition addressing a perhaps slightly different problem. For a general understanding of this theoretical link, see: P. Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture. Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); P. Maratti, Gilles Deleuze. Cinema and Philosophy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008); D. Angelucci, Deleuze e i concetti del cinema (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2012); D. Martin-Jones, W. Brown eds., Deleuze and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 2 I am referring to the fundamental remarks by theoreticians such as A. Bazin, “The ontology of photographic image”, in Id., What is Cinema? Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 204): 9-16 and R. Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981): 96. Moreover, see the relevant passages in A. Boschi, Teorie del cinema. Il periodo classico 1915-1945 (Rome: Carocci, 1998). 3 E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot (Brussels: Peter Lang,2014): 193. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 39 AN-ICON  period is that those states were not presented as individual and abstract perceptions, but rather as phantasmagorical apparitions, as forms of visual attraction.4 Hallucinations, forms of altered perceptions,5 apparitions of demons and other creatures were extremely common in early cinema, to such an extent that it is often difficult to differentiate clearly between these various types of altered conscious- ness. Besides the different ways in which these images are visually presented in early cinema,6 what needs to be stressed here is the fact that these forms of alteration pos- sessed a “physical nature”, a “potential interchangeability with the real”.7 Consider for instance the case of Histoire d’un crime (Ferdinand Zecca, 1901). The film begins with the killing of a bank employee by a burglar and is built on the juxtaposition of self-contained tableaux, in accordance with the stylistic conventions of the time. When the burglar is arrested and taken to prison, we see him sleep; here, thanks to an explicitly theatrical solution, Zecca is able to visualize what is at the same time both a dream and a rec- ollection of key events of the character’s life. This form of mise en abyme, which has more or less the same function as thought balloons in comics,8 is typical of the period. It confirms that, while the linguistic status of these “altered images” was still unclear, early cinema already stressed the problematic and still to be analyzed relationship between the mental and the temporal dimension. 4 I use the term in the sense outlined in the influential study by T. Gunning, “The cinema of attractions: early film, its spectator and the avant-garde”, in W. Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006): 381-388. 5 Consider for example the hallucinatory drunkenness represented in Rêve à la lune (1905) or the nightmarish consequences of the main character’s dinner in Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906). 6 For an inventory of these techniques, see E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot: 197-210. 7 E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot: 198. Later on, the concept is further emphasized as follows: “The objective physical quality forcefully inscribed into the continuity between subjective oneiric space and waking space characterizes all forms of representation of dreams developed by early cinema. It is not surprising, then, that in this context […] mixing the objective and the subjective, oneiric representation simultaneously assumes both the material characteristics of a physical apparition and the supernatural characteristics of a clairvoyance, as if it constituted a magical way of communicating with somewhere else, a place that is just as real, but also supernatural”, ibid.: 205. Even if here the author speaks explicitly of dreams, her argument seems to be applicable to all the types of altered consciousness explored by early cinema. 8 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema (Venice: Marsilio, 2004): 93. If not otherwise stated, the translations of Italian texts are always the author’s. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 40 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Ferdinand Zecca, Histoire d’un crime, 1901 With the institutionalization of the film industry and its language, the various manifestations of the mental in early cinema were progressively neutralized and reduced to figures of altered temporality.9 The variety of mental states encountered in the cinema of attractions, and the different stylistic devices used to present them, were replaced by recurrent and recognizable linguistic elements which neu- tralized the subversive potential of mental images in a con- text in which a clear and coherent narrative was required.10 The case of A Letter to Three Wives (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949) is emblematic in this sense. The protagonists of this sentimental drama are three women who receive, from a fourth woman, a letter stating that one of their husbands has run away with her. Haunted by doubt, each of the three gives rise to a flashback in which she remembers a specific episode of her life. The second flashback, which has as its protagonist Rita (a radio writer married to a mod- est but proudly intellectual teacher), is highly instructive 9 I am specifically referring to the flashback as a form of visualization of the past. On the various types of flashback, see at least: Y. Mouren, Le flash-back (Armand Colin: Paris, 2005); F. Centola, Il flashback nel cinema. Il tempo riavvolto nell’eterno presente cinematografico (Novara: UTET, 2019). For a theoretical and historical introduction to the topic, M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (London-New York: Routledge, 2013). On the role of flashback in literary theory see the quintessential study by G. Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972). 10 It should be noted that, according to many theoreticians such as Balázs and Bluestone, the only temporality of narrative cinema is the present. On this topic, S. Ghislotti, Film Time. Le dimensioni temporali della visione (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, 2012): 54-63. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 41 AN-ICON  of the way in which classical cinema connects the men- tal and the temporal dimensions. Rita is laid on the grass, and while the camera delicately zooms in on her face, we hear her thoughts in voiceover (she obsessively repeats a couple of troubling questions: “Why couldn’t George go fishing? Why the blue suit?”). Then, a crossfade marks the beginning of the flashback, a sequence that tells the story of a highly problematic and unhappy marriage. The long flashback will then be visually presented according to the conventions of classical narrative cinema: a set of objective shots connected through the use of linear and transparent montage. Beyond Classicism: from Hitchcock to Resnais When confronted with the ways in which clas- sical cinema elaborated the theme of mental images – re- ducing them to forms of altered temporality – Hitchcock’s exceptionality becomes even more apparent. As already mentioned, Deleuze identifies the false flashback of Stage Fright as a crucial moment for overcoming the move- ment-image. Indeed, the falseness of this sequence radi- cally challenges the idea that memories can be objective- ly visualized, without the deforming effect always implicit in subjectivity. Even more problematically, in the final se- quence of Marnie (1964), Hitchcock shows the emergence (or rather re-mergence) of a traumatic mental image of the protagonist, which she experiences not just optically but in a much more radically bodily sense. Influenced by the circumstances and as if hunted by a younger version of herself, Marnie actually re-experiences the dramatic events of her childhood. While being presented to the spectator through objective shots, these images – marked moreover by a chromatic alteration – have a material consistency for Marnie and she finds herself re-immersed in a past that she has already lived through. The discussion on the ways in which cinema reflected on the tension between the mental and the temporal dimension has shown that, while GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 42 AN-ICON  in early cinema a variety of altered states of consciousness was represented as hallucinatory but “physical” realities, classical narrative cinema progressively institutionalized figures of temporality11 within canonic filmic syntax.12 The link between mental and temporal will become crucial in the context of so-called modern cinema,13 specifically because – according to Deleuze – in this cultural context cinema will finally be able to assign a central place to thought and its mechanisms: “the essence of cinema […] has thought as its higher purpose, nothing but thought and its functioning”.14 This process will be made possible by the emergence of the category of mental image, which will on the one hand reassume and re-signify other kinds of images (such as the action-image) and on the other hand unleash the “modern- ist potential” inscribed in the flashback.15 The mental image is for Deleuze something profoundly related to the issue of time, but in an ex- tremely complex and problematizing way which implies 11 More specifically, classical narrative cinema tried to visualize almost exclusively the past and it is probably no coincidence that Hitchcock was one of the few directors who tried to imagine an image in the future. I am referring here to the sequence of Sabotage (1936) in which the protagonist sees the water of a fish tank in the city aquarium dissolving and acting as a sort of screen on which is prefigured the brutal outcome of a bombing. It is worth noticing that in this case the future is considered as a time of pure possibility, because the imagined event will take place in a completely different way. 12 Deleuze insists on the rhetorical function of the flashback in a poignant passage of The Time-Image: “We know very well that the flashback is a conventional, extrinsic device: it is generally indicated by a dissolve-link, and the images that it introduces are often superimposed or meshed. It is like a sign with the words: ‘watch out! recollection’. It can, therefore, indicate, by convention, a causality which is psychological, but still analogous to a sensory-motor determinism, and, despite its circuits, only confirms the progression of a linear narration”. G. Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989): 48. 13 For a critical definition of this concept, see the still relevant remarks by G. de Vincenti, Il concetto di modernità nel cinema (Parma: Pratiche, 2000): 11-24. 14 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 168. 15 M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History: 189. On the same issue, Ghislotti points out: “While in the classical flashback the scenes became part of the coherent narrative of the movie, that is of a set of knowledges that helped the public to have a trustworthy idea of the story, in the case of modernist flashback this aspect falls short: the flashback often becomes the subjective vision of a fact, and is consequently a possible version of the events, but not the definitive one […]. At the end of the film, the public is unable to have an idea of the story free of doubt and is forced to choose between this or that version of it”. S. Ghislotti, Film Time. Le dimensioni temporali della visione: 130-131. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 43 AN-ICON  the coexistence of different temporalities.16 In modern cin- ema, the visualization of mental states is made possible by the collision of /clash of /conflict of different temporal- ities that not only coexist, but can merge to the point of becoming indistinguishable: The images have to be present and past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time. [...] The past does not follow the present that it is no longer, it coexists with the present it was.17 Take for instance a movie such as Mirror (An- drei Tarkovsky, 1975), in which the continuous oscillation between various states of consciousness (from memory to dream and beyond) would be inconceivable in the context of classical narrative cinema, especially when we consider that in the movie “there is a constant retroactive reverber- ation of almost every scene”.18 The memorial act of the protagonist Aleksej generates a flux of memory and visions that will involve not just his own life but also the life of his son and even collective and historical memory (both in an allusive form and through the insertion of historical visual documents).19 In this sense, Mirror seems to fully resonate with the Deleuzian idea of time as a topological construct, a field composed of peaks and sheets which continuously involve each other and are freely explorable. This idea be- comes even more explicit when we consider the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which both the association between 16 “There is no present which is not haunted by a past and a future, by a past which is not reducible to a former present, by a future which does not consist of a present to come. Simple succession affects the present which passes, but each present coexists with a past and a future without which it would not itself pass on. It is characteristic of cinema to seize this past and this future that coexist with the present image”. G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 37 (emphasis added). The use of the term “haunted” is specifically interesting here and seems to foreshadow the arguments of J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London-New York: Routledge, 1994). 17 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 79 (emphasis added). Also, on this point: S. Shaw, Film Consciousness. From Phenomenology to Deleuze (Jefferson-London: McFarland&Company, 2008): 147. 18 S. Shaw, Film Consciousness. From Phenomenology to Deleuze : 94. 19 T. Masoni, P. Vecchi, Andrei Tarkovskij (Milan: Il Castoro, 1997): 72-74. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 44 AN-ICON  mental and temporal,20 and the conflict between various temporalities are quintessential. In his movies, the temporal oscillations do not involve issues of narrative clarity – as in classical cinema – but are rather used to visualize con- tradictory mental states that are always on the verge of undecidability. As pointed out by Deleuze, it is pointless to discuss Resnais’ cinema dissociating the issue of time from that of mental states: It is not difficult to show that dreams and nightmares, fantasies, hypotheses and anticipations, all forms of the imaginary, are more important than flashbacks.21 It is possible to identify a trend in Resnais’ cin- ema which, from Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) to Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968) through Last Year in Marienbad (1961) and Muriel (1963), questions and problematizes the mental dimensions of perception and their link with temporality. Consider for instance the emblematic case of Last Year in Marienbad: the claim of the man to have met a woman the year before could have easily offered the chance for a chain of illustrative flashbacks. On the contrary, the baroque setting of the hotel in which the two characters meet trig- gers a series of obsessive repetitions, uncertain memories (whose are these memories? Are these facts real or just imagined?), while the continuous and uncanny immobility of the bodies generates “a space-time in which there is no before or after, past or present, here and elsewhere, real and imaginary”.22 The film is structured by the connection between ambiguous and confusing mental states, altered forms of experience that continuously merge with halluci- nation. Deleuze sums up the issue as follows, underlining 20 According to Ishaghpour, the great issue of Resnais’ cinema is to understand “the way the mind functions”. Y. Ishaghpour, D’une image à l’autre (Paris: Gonthier, 1981): 182; quoted in G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 121. Shortly after, Deleuze comes back to this argument, stressing that “Resnais is always saying that he is interested only in what happens in the brain, in cerebral mechanisms – monstrous, chaotic or creative mechanisms”, Ibid.: 125. 21 Ibid.: 122. 22 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema: 113-114. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 45 AN-ICON  once again the inextricable interweaving of times and per- ceptions offered by the movie: In Last Year in Marienbad it is X who knew A (so A does not re- member or is lying), and it is A who does not know X (so X is mis- taken or playing a trick on her). Ultimately, all the three characters correspond to three different presents, but in such a way as to complicate the inexplicable instead of throwing light on it; in such a way as to bring about its existence instead of suppressing it: when X lives in a present of past, A lives in a present of future, so that the difference exudes or assumes a present of present (the third, the husband), all implicated in each other.23 The hallucination of Isak Borg Even if Deleuze never discussed Ingmar Berg- man directly in the pages of The Time-Image, his cinema seems to benefit from the aforementioned theorizations, especially if compared with the new possibilities provided by virtual reality in terms of immersivity. Indeed, the pres- ence of altered mental states is recurrent in his movies, which continuously address the link between temporality and perception. Consider for instance the hallucinatory visions of Persona (1966) or the nightmares that haunt the painter Johan in Hour of the Wolf (1968). The explicitly me- ta-filmic opening of this movie,24 as a matter of fact, seems to suggest that for Bergman cinema is defined precisely by its specific ability to visualize altered states of conscious- ness. This idea becomes even more explicit (especially in connection with time) in Wild Strawberries (1957), in which Bergman sets out what is probably his most acute reflec- tion on the topic. As is well-known, the protagonist is the elderly bacteriologist Isak Borg, who is about to receive his doctorate. The night before the celebration he has a terrible nightmare and decides to travel to the event by car, together with his daughter-in-law Marianne. During the trip, 23 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 101. 24 While the initial credits are running, we see voices that we can unmistakably associate to a film set: “Quiet all! Rolling! Take! Camera… and begin!”. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 46 AN-ICON  Isak will experience a whole set of daydreams, hallucina- tions and visions which will shed a new light on his former way of life. At the end of the day, after the celebration of his career, something will be changed in him, and he will start to approach life with more joy and respect for those around him. Wild Strawberries is a movie that reflects on memory and on the possible link between various tempo- ralities and forms of perception; thus, the fact that it has almost no flashbacks is even more striking.25 None of the sequences in which Isak experiences some altered form of consciousness can be considered flashbacks, since Isak physically takes part in them with his old man’s body “al- most as if he was observing the world to finally understand it”. 26 This is true for the oneiric scene that opens the film but also for the quintessential sequence in which Isak – taking a break from the trip near the house where he used to spend the summer during his youth – has a strange and highly interesting experience. We see him sitting under a tree, watching in close-up the old and now abandoned house, while we hear his thoughts in voiceover: Perhaps I got a little sentimental [...]. I don’t know how it happened, but the day’s clear reality dissolved into the even clearer images of memory, which appeared before my eyes with the strength of a true stream of events.27 Then we see him in counter-shot and, through a crossfade, we see the old house regaining its former ap- pearance. With a subsequent series of rapid crossfades we take part in what at first sight may be considered a flashback. Here, we see his beloved cousin Sara picking strawberries for her uncle. However, we immediately understand that what we are experiencing is not a flashback, for at least two different reasons. First of all, Isak takes part in this particular 25 The only real flashback in the film is in fact not experienced by Isak Borg but by his daughter-in-law, who confesses to the old professor an argument that she had with her husband about the child she is expecting. 26 P. Baldelli, Cinema dell’ambiguità. Bergman e Antonioni (Rome: Samonà e Savelli, 1969): 95. 27 Emphasis added. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 47 AN-ICON  “presentification” of the past with his elderly body and is able to move in this hallucinatory experience with a certain degree of freedom; secondly, the events that Isak is seeing are not his memories, because it is immediately clear that (as a young man) he never saw what he is experiencing now (Sara and Sigfrid flirting). Fig. 2. Ingmar Bergman, Wild Strawberries, 1957 Albano rightly argued that we cannot concep- tualize this important sequence in terms of a flashback: We may speak of rêverie éveillée, of daydream or — in German — of Tagtraum, of conscious fantasy. A reverie that shares with a dream [...] the sense of living [...] what is being dreamt.28 Isak knows very well that he is experiencing an impossible past, because he addresses his young and beautiful cousin in an unmistakable way: “Sara, it’s your cousin Isak. Well, I’ve become quite old, of course, so I don’t look the same. But you, you haven’t changed at all”. 28 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema: 76. On this point, see also: R. Campari, Film della memoria. Mondi perduti, ricordati e sognati (Venice: Marsilio, 2005):16, 22-28. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 48 AN-ICON  In this passage, we are confronted with a con- figuration of temporalities that is far more complex of those addressed above: it is a sort of double temporality because the present of the old Isak overlaps with a past that is – moreover – nonfactual, but rather seeped in the percep- tions, regrets and hopes of the young Isak. This conflictual combination of temporalities seems to resonate perfectly with a crucial passage by Metz: Memory is in effect the only vision [...] that posits its object as simultaneously real and imaginary, that is, real in the past and imaginary in the present.29 What Isak sees really happened, but the way in which he experiences it is hallucinatory and gives the spectator no reassurance about the fact that it happened in that way. It is worth noticing here that Deleuze actually theorized this kind of situation, even without referring to Bergman: “the present is the actual image and its contem- poraneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror”.30 Finally, it seems important to notice that, de- spite his being immersed in an altered perception in which he can more or less freely move, Isak has no possibility of interacting with it. He “stands before the theatre of his life as a spectator-voyeur, terribly attracted, morbidly intrigued, but never seen, in complete isolation”.31 Both the dialogue between Isak and Sara and the subsequent scene in which he hears her confessions after the family lunch are highly instructive in this regard. It is symptomatic, in this respect, that this long sequence ends precisely when Sara moves to the garden to meet with the Isak of the past. The percep- tion of the old Isak grants him the possibility to experience a time that he never lived and probably only imagined but 29 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016): 96 (emphasis added). 30 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 79 (emphasis added). It is worth noticing that the situation that Deleuze imagines (the simultaneous presence of past and present within a mirror image) is explicitly visualized in Wild Strawberries, during a subsequent passage in which the old Isak sees himself reflected in a mirror held by a young Sara. 31 L. Albano, “Il posto delle fragole”, in A. Costa ed., Ingmar Bergman (Venice: Marsilio, 2009): 77. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 49 AN-ICON  he is at the same time confronted with an insurmountable limit: he is precluded from every contact and any chance of interaction with this time that is not his own. Only in his present will he be given the chance to undo his mistakes, thanks to the apparition of a sort of double of the beloved Sara. The specific way in which Bergman approaches the representation of altered mental states, working on the dialectic between absence and presence, nostalgia and desire, seems to have more than one similarity with the contemporary form of immersivity promoted by various technological desire. In this sense, a wider archaeological account of the issue of virtuality should be developed, in order to establish a more complex theoretical framework to address this kind of images. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 50 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/15448

Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image in theDeleuze cinema (II) by Giuseppe Previtali Cinema Temporality Hallucination Bergman Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (II) by Giuseppe Previtali Abstract From its very origins, cinema has demonstrated a particular interest in the representation of altered states of consciousness: memories, visions, nightmares and dreams are a common feature of narrative films and usually inter- rupt a flow of events by inserting different temporalities in the present of the story. Following the arguments explored by Gilles Deleuze in his groundbreaking works on cinema, this essay will address the issue of how narrative cinema has represented altered states of consciousness. If in early cinema of attractions altered states were represented as physical realities intertwined with the world, classical Hol- lywood films progressively exorcised the disruptive poten- tial of such images by defining a visual grammar in order to normalize them within the narrative. It will be modern cinema which will focus on this issue in depth, given its new interest in the link between the moving image and the mechanisms of thought. In this regard, the essay will in conclusion address the hallucinations experienced by Isak Borg in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, a complex and highly illuminating case of various forms of altered mental states. Deleuze Cinema Temporality Hallucination Bergman To quote this essay: G. Previtali, “Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (II)”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 37-50 GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 37 AN-ICON  Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) begins with a shot of a young couple (Jonathan and Eve) in a car. We immediately understand that they are running from the police and they are heading towards a dock. The girl asks the man (who we will later recognize as her boyfriend) what happened and, when Jonathan starts to tell his story (“I was in my kitchen, it was about 5:00”) the close-up shot of the two begins to fade out. He explains that earlier in the morning he had received a visit from the singer and actress Charlotte Inwood, who showed up at his house with a dress covered in the blood of her husband. Jonathan managed to sneak into Charlotte’s house but was glimpsed by the housemaid and forced to run away. He later received a visit from two policemen, from whom he was able to escape only thanks to Eve. The description of this long sequence, which corresponds to the first fifteen minutes of the movie, would be incomplete without stressing the fact that Jona- than’s tale will prove to be a lie, despite the fact that visually it adopts those criteria of clarity, legibility and transparen- cy which were typical of classic Hollywood cinema and in which the spectator usually put his trust. The exceptionality of this sequence and its ex- emplarity in showing how the temporal dimension (the se- quence is a recollection of a supposed past) and the mental dimension (it is a false recollection of a certain character) are linked, is such that Deleuze identifies in it the first ap- pearance of the mental image in the history of cinema. This crucial analysis, programmatically located in the last pages of The Movement-Image, explicitly connects the distorted evocation of the past and an altered state of conscious- ness. It is precisely this relationship which, questioning the omniscience of the spectator, heralds the advent of a new kind of filmic image: GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 38 AN-ICON The mental image not only frames the others, but transforms them by penetrating them. For this reason, one might say that Hitchcock accomplishes and brings to completion the whole of the cinema by pursuing the movement-image to its limits.1 Altered states of consciousness in early and classical cinema Deleuze’s arguments, which will later be dis- cussed more extensively, attempt to address the excep- tionality of Hitchcock’s movies in the context of classical narrative cinema. However, it is important to recognize that from its origins, cinema has continuously sought to make visible altered states of consciousness. If film theory immediately stressed the role of visual media in preserv- ing the memory of what is absent (thus “presentifying” it),2 another of the great obsessions of cinema has to do with “the aspiration to visualize what dwells in the human mind, to represent thought, to exteriorize what is internal”.3 As Dagrada acutely pointed out, this urge was not limited to cinema itself, but was rather a common feature in the vi- sual culture of the 18th and 19th centuries. Theatre, magic lantern shows and optical toys were just some of the most common examples of this interest shown in the visual ex- ternalization of mental states. Cinema, nevertheless, played a crucial role in this sense, given its specific ability to visu- alize reality. Long before the institutionalization of classical filmic syntax, early cinema developed a specific way of visualizing mental states. What is peculiar to this historical 1 G. Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986): 204. The use of Deleuzean concepts in film studies is an established trend and this paper follows this tradition addressing a perhaps slightly different problem. For a general understanding of this theoretical link, see: P. Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture. Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); P. Maratti, Gilles Deleuze. Cinema and Philosophy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008); D. Angelucci, Deleuze e i concetti del cinema (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2012); D. Martin-Jones, W. Brown eds., Deleuze and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 2 I am referring to the fundamental remarks by theoreticians such as A. Bazin, “The ontology of photographic image”, in Id., What is Cinema? Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 204): 9-16 and R. Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981): 96. Moreover, see the relevant passages in A. Boschi, Teorie del cinema. Il periodo classico 1915-1945 (Rome: Carocci, 1998). 3 E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot (Brussels: Peter Lang,2014): 193. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 39 AN-ICON  period is that those states were not presented as individual and abstract perceptions, but rather as phantasmagorical apparitions, as forms of visual attraction.4 Hallucinations, forms of altered perceptions,5 apparitions of demons and other creatures were extremely common in early cinema, to such an extent that it is often difficult to differentiate clearly between these various types of altered conscious- ness. Besides the different ways in which these images are visually presented in early cinema,6 what needs to be stressed here is the fact that these forms of alteration pos- sessed a “physical nature”, a “potential interchangeability with the real”.7 Consider for instance the case of Histoire d’un crime (Ferdinand Zecca, 1901). The film begins with the killing of a bank employee by a burglar and is built on the juxtaposition of self-contained tableaux, in accordance with the stylistic conventions of the time. When the burglar is arrested and taken to prison, we see him sleep; here, thanks to an explicitly theatrical solution, Zecca is able to visualize what is at the same time both a dream and a rec- ollection of key events of the character’s life. This form of mise en abyme, which has more or less the same function as thought balloons in comics,8 is typical of the period. It confirms that, while the linguistic status of these “altered images” was still unclear, early cinema already stressed the problematic and still to be analyzed relationship between the mental and the temporal dimension. 4 I use the term in the sense outlined in the influential study by T. Gunning, “The cinema of attractions: early film, its spectator and the avant-garde”, in W. Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006): 381-388. 5 Consider for example the hallucinatory drunkenness represented in Rêve à la lune (1905) or the nightmarish consequences of the main character’s dinner in Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906). 6 For an inventory of these techniques, see E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot: 197-210. 7 E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot: 198. Later on, the concept is further emphasized as follows: “The objective physical quality forcefully inscribed into the continuity between subjective oneiric space and waking space characterizes all forms of representation of dreams developed by early cinema. It is not surprising, then, that in this context […] mixing the objective and the subjective, oneiric representation simultaneously assumes both the material characteristics of a physical apparition and the supernatural characteristics of a clairvoyance, as if it constituted a magical way of communicating with somewhere else, a place that is just as real, but also supernatural”, ibid.: 205. Even if here the author speaks explicitly of dreams, her argument seems to be applicable to all the types of altered consciousness explored by early cinema. 8 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema (Venice: Marsilio, 2004): 93. If not otherwise stated, the translations of Italian texts are always the author’s. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 40 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Ferdinand Zecca, Histoire d’un crime, 1901 With the institutionalization of the film industry and its language, the various manifestations of the mental in early cinema were progressively neutralized and reduced to figures of altered temporality.9 The variety of mental states encountered in the cinema of attractions, and the different stylistic devices used to present them, were replaced by recurrent and recognizable linguistic elements which neu- tralized the subversive potential of mental images in a con- text in which a clear and coherent narrative was required.10 The case of A Letter to Three Wives (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949) is emblematic in this sense. The protagonists of this sentimental drama are three women who receive, from a fourth woman, a letter stating that one of their husbands has run away with her. Haunted by doubt, each of the three gives rise to a flashback in which she remembers a specific episode of her life. The second flashback, which has as its protagonist Rita (a radio writer married to a mod- est but proudly intellectual teacher), is highly instructive 9 I am specifically referring to the flashback as a form of visualization of the past. On the various types of flashback, see at least: Y. Mouren, Le flash-back (Armand Colin: Paris, 2005); F. Centola, Il flashback nel cinema. Il tempo riavvolto nell’eterno presente cinematografico (Novara: UTET, 2019). For a theoretical and historical introduction to the topic, M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (London-New York: Routledge, 2013). On the role of flashback in literary theory see the quintessential study by G. Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972). 10 It should be noted that, according to many theoreticians such as Balázs and Bluestone, the only temporality of narrative cinema is the present. On this topic, S. Ghislotti, Film Time. Le dimensioni temporali della visione (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, 2012): 54-63. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 41 AN-ICON  of the way in which classical cinema connects the men- tal and the temporal dimensions. Rita is laid on the grass, and while the camera delicately zooms in on her face, we hear her thoughts in voiceover (she obsessively repeats a couple of troubling questions: “Why couldn’t George go fishing? Why the blue suit?”). Then, a crossfade marks the beginning of the flashback, a sequence that tells the story of a highly problematic and unhappy marriage. The long flashback will then be visually presented according to the conventions of classical narrative cinema: a set of objective shots connected through the use of linear and transparent montage. Beyond Classicism: from Hitchcock to Resnais When confronted with the ways in which clas- sical cinema elaborated the theme of mental images – re- ducing them to forms of altered temporality – Hitchcock’s exceptionality becomes even more apparent. As already mentioned, Deleuze identifies the false flashback of Stage Fright as a crucial moment for overcoming the move- ment-image. Indeed, the falseness of this sequence radi- cally challenges the idea that memories can be objective- ly visualized, without the deforming effect always implicit in subjectivity. Even more problematically, in the final se- quence of Marnie (1964), Hitchcock shows the emergence (or rather re-mergence) of a traumatic mental image of the protagonist, which she experiences not just optically but in a much more radically bodily sense. Influenced by the circumstances and as if hunted by a younger version of herself, Marnie actually re-experiences the dramatic events of her childhood. While being presented to the spectator through objective shots, these images – marked moreover by a chromatic alteration – have a material consistency for Marnie and she finds herself re-immersed in a past that she has already lived through. The discussion on the ways in which cinema reflected on the tension between the mental and the temporal dimension has shown that, while GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 42 AN-ICON  in early cinema a variety of altered states of consciousness was represented as hallucinatory but “physical” realities, classical narrative cinema progressively institutionalized figures of temporality11 within canonic filmic syntax.12 The link between mental and temporal will become crucial in the context of so-called modern cinema,13 specifically because – according to Deleuze – in this cultural context cinema will finally be able to assign a central place to thought and its mechanisms: “the essence of cinema […] has thought as its higher purpose, nothing but thought and its functioning”.14 This process will be made possible by the emergence of the category of mental image, which will on the one hand reassume and re-signify other kinds of images (such as the action-image) and on the other hand unleash the “modern- ist potential” inscribed in the flashback.15 The mental image is for Deleuze something profoundly related to the issue of time, but in an ex- tremely complex and problematizing way which implies 11 More specifically, classical narrative cinema tried to visualize almost exclusively the past and it is probably no coincidence that Hitchcock was one of the few directors who tried to imagine an image in the future. I am referring here to the sequence of Sabotage (1936) in which the protagonist sees the water of a fish tank in the city aquarium dissolving and acting as a sort of screen on which is prefigured the brutal outcome of a bombing. It is worth noticing that in this case the future is considered as a time of pure possibility, because the imagined event will take place in a completely different way. 12 Deleuze insists on the rhetorical function of the flashback in a poignant passage of The Time-Image: “We know very well that the flashback is a conventional, extrinsic device: it is generally indicated by a dissolve-link, and the images that it introduces are often superimposed or meshed. It is like a sign with the words: ‘watch out! recollection’. It can, therefore, indicate, by convention, a causality which is psychological, but still analogous to a sensory-motor determinism, and, despite its circuits, only confirms the progression of a linear narration”. G. Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989): 48. 13 For a critical definition of this concept, see the still relevant remarks by G. de Vincenti, Il concetto di modernità nel cinema (Parma: Pratiche, 2000): 11-24. 14 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 168. 15 M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History: 189. On the same issue, Ghislotti points out: “While in the classical flashback the scenes became part of the coherent narrative of the movie, that is of a set of knowledges that helped the public to have a trustworthy idea of the story, in the case of modernist flashback this aspect falls short: the flashback often becomes the subjective vision of a fact, and is consequently a possible version of the events, but not the definitive one […]. At the end of the film, the public is unable to have an idea of the story free of doubt and is forced to choose between this or that version of it”. S. Ghislotti, Film Time. Le dimensioni temporali della visione: 130-131. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 43 AN-ICON  the coexistence of different temporalities.16 In modern cin- ema, the visualization of mental states is made possible by the collision of /clash of /conflict of different temporal- ities that not only coexist, but can merge to the point of becoming indistinguishable: The images have to be present and past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time. [...] The past does not follow the present that it is no longer, it coexists with the present it was.17 Take for instance a movie such as Mirror (An- drei Tarkovsky, 1975), in which the continuous oscillation between various states of consciousness (from memory to dream and beyond) would be inconceivable in the context of classical narrative cinema, especially when we consider that in the movie “there is a constant retroactive reverber- ation of almost every scene”.18 The memorial act of the protagonist Aleksej generates a flux of memory and visions that will involve not just his own life but also the life of his son and even collective and historical memory (both in an allusive form and through the insertion of historical visual documents).19 In this sense, Mirror seems to fully resonate with the Deleuzian idea of time as a topological construct, a field composed of peaks and sheets which continuously involve each other and are freely explorable. This idea be- comes even more explicit when we consider the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which both the association between 16 “There is no present which is not haunted by a past and a future, by a past which is not reducible to a former present, by a future which does not consist of a present to come. Simple succession affects the present which passes, but each present coexists with a past and a future without which it would not itself pass on. It is characteristic of cinema to seize this past and this future that coexist with the present image”. G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 37 (emphasis added). The use of the term “haunted” is specifically interesting here and seems to foreshadow the arguments of J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London-New York: Routledge, 1994). 17 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 79 (emphasis added). Also, on this point: S. Shaw, Film Consciousness. From Phenomenology to Deleuze (Jefferson-London: McFarland&Company, 2008): 147. 18 S. Shaw, Film Consciousness. From Phenomenology to Deleuze : 94. 19 T. Masoni, P. Vecchi, Andrei Tarkovskij (Milan: Il Castoro, 1997): 72-74. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 44 AN-ICON  mental and temporal,20 and the conflict between various temporalities are quintessential. In his movies, the temporal oscillations do not involve issues of narrative clarity – as in classical cinema – but are rather used to visualize con- tradictory mental states that are always on the verge of undecidability. As pointed out by Deleuze, it is pointless to discuss Resnais’ cinema dissociating the issue of time from that of mental states: It is not difficult to show that dreams and nightmares, fantasies, hypotheses and anticipations, all forms of the imaginary, are more important than flashbacks.21 It is possible to identify a trend in Resnais’ cin- ema which, from Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) to Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968) through Last Year in Marienbad (1961) and Muriel (1963), questions and problematizes the mental dimensions of perception and their link with temporality. Consider for instance the emblematic case of Last Year in Marienbad: the claim of the man to have met a woman the year before could have easily offered the chance for a chain of illustrative flashbacks. On the contrary, the baroque setting of the hotel in which the two characters meet trig- gers a series of obsessive repetitions, uncertain memories (whose are these memories? Are these facts real or just imagined?), while the continuous and uncanny immobility of the bodies generates “a space-time in which there is no before or after, past or present, here and elsewhere, real and imaginary”.22 The film is structured by the connection between ambiguous and confusing mental states, altered forms of experience that continuously merge with halluci- nation. Deleuze sums up the issue as follows, underlining 20 According to Ishaghpour, the great issue of Resnais’ cinema is to understand “the way the mind functions”. Y. Ishaghpour, D’une image à l’autre (Paris: Gonthier, 1981): 182; quoted in G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 121. Shortly after, Deleuze comes back to this argument, stressing that “Resnais is always saying that he is interested only in what happens in the brain, in cerebral mechanisms – monstrous, chaotic or creative mechanisms”, Ibid.: 125. 21 Ibid.: 122. 22 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema: 113-114. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 45 AN-ICON  once again the inextricable interweaving of times and per- ceptions offered by the movie: In Last Year in Marienbad it is X who knew A (so A does not re- member or is lying), and it is A who does not know X (so X is mis- taken or playing a trick on her). Ultimately, all the three characters correspond to three different presents, but in such a way as to complicate the inexplicable instead of throwing light on it; in such a way as to bring about its existence instead of suppressing it: when X lives in a present of past, A lives in a present of future, so that the difference exudes or assumes a present of present (the third, the husband), all implicated in each other.23 The hallucination of Isak Borg Even if Deleuze never discussed Ingmar Berg- man directly in the pages of The Time-Image, his cinema seems to benefit from the aforementioned theorizations, especially if compared with the new possibilities provided by virtual reality in terms of immersivity. Indeed, the pres- ence of altered mental states is recurrent in his movies, which continuously address the link between temporality and perception. Consider for instance the hallucinatory visions of Persona (1966) or the nightmares that haunt the painter Johan in Hour of the Wolf (1968). The explicitly me- ta-filmic opening of this movie,24 as a matter of fact, seems to suggest that for Bergman cinema is defined precisely by its specific ability to visualize altered states of conscious- ness. This idea becomes even more explicit (especially in connection with time) in Wild Strawberries (1957), in which Bergman sets out what is probably his most acute reflec- tion on the topic. As is well-known, the protagonist is the elderly bacteriologist Isak Borg, who is about to receive his doctorate. The night before the celebration he has a terrible nightmare and decides to travel to the event by car, together with his daughter-in-law Marianne. During the trip, 23 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 101. 24 While the initial credits are running, we see voices that we can unmistakably associate to a film set: “Quiet all! Rolling! Take! Camera… and begin!”. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 46 AN-ICON  Isak will experience a whole set of daydreams, hallucina- tions and visions which will shed a new light on his former way of life. At the end of the day, after the celebration of his career, something will be changed in him, and he will start to approach life with more joy and respect for those around him. Wild Strawberries is a movie that reflects on memory and on the possible link between various tempo- ralities and forms of perception; thus, the fact that it has almost no flashbacks is even more striking.25 None of the sequences in which Isak experiences some altered form of consciousness can be considered flashbacks, since Isak physically takes part in them with his old man’s body “al- most as if he was observing the world to finally understand it”. 26 This is true for the oneiric scene that opens the film but also for the quintessential sequence in which Isak – taking a break from the trip near the house where he used to spend the summer during his youth – has a strange and highly interesting experience. We see him sitting under a tree, watching in close-up the old and now abandoned house, while we hear his thoughts in voiceover: Perhaps I got a little sentimental [...]. I don’t know how it happened, but the day’s clear reality dissolved into the even clearer images of memory, which appeared before my eyes with the strength of a true stream of events.27 Then we see him in counter-shot and, through a crossfade, we see the old house regaining its former ap- pearance. With a subsequent series of rapid crossfades we take part in what at first sight may be considered a flashback. Here, we see his beloved cousin Sara picking strawberries for her uncle. However, we immediately understand that what we are experiencing is not a flashback, for at least two different reasons. First of all, Isak takes part in this particular 25 The only real flashback in the film is in fact not experienced by Isak Borg but by his daughter-in-law, who confesses to the old professor an argument that she had with her husband about the child she is expecting. 26 P. Baldelli, Cinema dell’ambiguità. Bergman e Antonioni (Rome: Samonà e Savelli, 1969): 95. 27 Emphasis added. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 47 AN-ICON  “presentification” of the past with his elderly body and is able to move in this hallucinatory experience with a certain degree of freedom; secondly, the events that Isak is seeing are not his memories, because it is immediately clear that (as a young man) he never saw what he is experiencing now (Sara and Sigfrid flirting). Fig. 2. Ingmar Bergman, Wild Strawberries, 1957 Albano rightly argued that we cannot concep- tualize this important sequence in terms of a flashback: We may speak of rêverie éveillée, of daydream or — in German — of Tagtraum, of conscious fantasy. A reverie that shares with a dream [...] the sense of living [...] what is being dreamt.28 Isak knows very well that he is experiencing an impossible past, because he addresses his young and beautiful cousin in an unmistakable way: “Sara, it’s your cousin Isak. Well, I’ve become quite old, of course, so I don’t look the same. But you, you haven’t changed at all”. 28 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema: 76. On this point, see also: R. Campari, Film della memoria. Mondi perduti, ricordati e sognati (Venice: Marsilio, 2005):16, 22-28. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 48 AN-ICON  In this passage, we are confronted with a con- figuration of temporalities that is far more complex of those addressed above: it is a sort of double temporality because the present of the old Isak overlaps with a past that is – moreover – nonfactual, but rather seeped in the percep- tions, regrets and hopes of the young Isak. This conflictual combination of temporalities seems to resonate perfectly with a crucial passage by Metz: Memory is in effect the only vision [...] that posits its object as simultaneously real and imaginary, that is, real in the past and imaginary in the present.29 What Isak sees really happened, but the way in which he experiences it is hallucinatory and gives the spectator no reassurance about the fact that it happened in that way. It is worth noticing here that Deleuze actually theorized this kind of situation, even without referring to Bergman: “the present is the actual image and its contem- poraneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror”.30 Finally, it seems important to notice that, de- spite his being immersed in an altered perception in which he can more or less freely move, Isak has no possibility of interacting with it. He “stands before the theatre of his life as a spectator-voyeur, terribly attracted, morbidly intrigued, but never seen, in complete isolation”.31 Both the dialogue between Isak and Sara and the subsequent scene in which he hears her confessions after the family lunch are highly instructive in this regard. It is symptomatic, in this respect, that this long sequence ends precisely when Sara moves to the garden to meet with the Isak of the past. The percep- tion of the old Isak grants him the possibility to experience a time that he never lived and probably only imagined but 29 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016): 96 (emphasis added). 30 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 79 (emphasis added). It is worth noticing that the situation that Deleuze imagines (the simultaneous presence of past and present within a mirror image) is explicitly visualized in Wild Strawberries, during a subsequent passage in which the old Isak sees himself reflected in a mirror held by a young Sara. 31 L. Albano, “Il posto delle fragole”, in A. Costa ed., Ingmar Bergman (Venice: Marsilio, 2009): 77. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 49 AN-ICON  he is at the same time confronted with an insurmountable limit: he is precluded from every contact and any chance of interaction with this time that is not his own. Only in his present will he be given the chance to undo his mistakes, thanks to the apparition of a sort of double of the beloved Sara. The specific way in which Bergman approaches the representation of altered mental states, working on the dialectic between absence and presence, nostalgia and desire, seems to have more than one similarity with the contemporary form of immersivity promoted by various technological desire. In this sense, a wider archaeological account of the issue of virtuality should be developed, in order to establish a more complex theoretical framework to address this kind of images. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 50 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/15442

The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered by Luca Acquarelli Still image vision strategy Photography Hallucination Antonioni Bergman Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered vision strategy by Luca Acquarelli Abstract The article intends to propose some analyses of a possible formal occurrence of “altered states” in cine- ma: the stopping of the flow of the cinematographic image in a still image. Through some theoretical references (Metz, Bazin, Lyotard, Deleuze, Bellour, Barthes, Montani) I will try to understand if this kind of formal occurrence can be constituted as a figure of the altered state. The relationship between cinema and photography will be particularly ex- plored, starting with films such as Antonioni’s Blow Up and Bergman’s Persona. The hallucinatory effect will thus be discovered not as opposed to that of reality, but a dialectic will be constructed between the two. Still image Photography Hallucination Antonioni Bergman To quote this essay: L. Acquarelli, “The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered vision strategy”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 51-68 LUCA ACQUARELLI 51 AN-ICON  Dream as “authentic” absurdity, photography as “true” hallucination Like hallucinations, dreams are not the far end of the reality scale but rather share some of its features. Metz has argued that dream sequences are always barely credible in narrative films precisely because films struggle to represent the “authentic absurdity” of dreams. Indeed, dreams seem to combine the reality effect with a halluci- natory patina that film dynamics find hard to hold togeth- er. The most traditional enunciative shifts introducing the passage between “reality”’s diegesis and that of dreams, such as unfocused borders or images in black and white as opposed to colour, are indeed ineffective expedients for the purposes of rendering this “authentic absurdity”, this double binary between the authenticating effect, like perhaps realist photography, and the game of the absurd, that injection of perceptual intensity that undermines the reality principle. Weaving a somewhat daring theoretical thread, this oxymoronic terminology does not seem to me to be very far removed from that used by one of realism’s most famous theorists – and therefore a very long way away from Metz – André Bazin who, speaking of the use of pho- tography as a privileged surrealist technique, conceives of photography’s potential for creating “a true hallucination”. While the realist photography ontology has been widely criticised, less space has been given to this hallucinatory residue of photography, which occurs even when it seems to adhere to a realist aesthetic. It should be stressed that the dream hypothe- sis introduced with Metz is at the heart of one of cinema’s theoretical paradigms. Without dwelling on all aspects of this dimension, it will be useful here to digress into the dream-cinema relationship before introducing certain anal- yses of this article’s central theme, namely the presence of the fixed, especially photographic, image within film, which immobilises its movement, as a possible instant of altered vi- sion. Metz has thoroughly enquired into the epistemological LUCA ACQUARELLI 52 AN-ICON  potential of the oneiric vision, through the Freudian prism. In Psychoanalysis and Cinema. The Imaginary Signifier,1 condensation, displacement and secondary elaboration are the main processes of the oneiric “signifier” explored by this French theorist as tools for the interpretation of cinematographic language. For Metz, the image’s “affinity” with the unconscious and its oneiric imagination increases its exposure to these processes as compared to language, without the latter being immune to them. Elements of film grammar such as superimposition and cross-fading – the former being closer to displacement, the latter to conden- sation – are key examples of this affinity. These elements testify to a survival of the primary process that, for instance, tends to abolish the discontinuity between objects. These are emergencies, aberrations within a product of secondary elaboration, such as the narrative development of a film or the attempt to narrate a dream upon awakening, the latter being forced, at least partially, to favour narrative logic at the expense of the ambiguous and nebulous dimension of the primary process. Entstellung, the oneiric deformation caused by the power of unconscious impulses, has thus also become a theoretical paradigm for thinking in images of a sort of energy that is not played out in forms and ac- cumulates in fragments and temporary disfiguration. Although Freud wrote that “dreams hallucinate”,2 the kinship between dreams and hallucinations is anything but close, starting from the fact that the former occurs in a sleeping state and the latter in waking state. Moments of transition between wakefulness and sleep are often the scene of phenomena testifying to the kinship between the form the two experiences take: so-called hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations. This is not the place to go into this matter in depth, but we might say that these two dimensions, dreams and hallucinations, may be the two areas where the fixed image in cinema, as viewed in this article, tends to position itself in dialectical movement. 1 C. Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema. The Imaginary Signifier (London: Palgrave, 1982). 2 S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010): 79. LUCA ACQUARELLI 53 AN-ICON  A few case studies will give us a clearer understanding of the type of visual alterations we are talking about. Stopping the cinematic flow: intermediality and a-cinema The hypothesis discussed in this article is de- signed to examine whether there are other cinematic strat- egies capable of expressing visual alterity as regards nar- rating the flow of cinematic images – an alterity whose intensity borders on the hallucinatory – and, in particular, the alterity that is generated by the use of photography in cinema as a standstill in movement. The film theorist Ray- mond Bellour has, on several occasions, taken an interest in the interruption of movement in cinema, when it is, in various ways, inhabited by the photography hantise. In one short essay, in particular, his aim is to promote an, as yet hypothetical, study, in Bellour’s own words, whose interest is the “traitement de l’immobile dans cet art du mouvement qu’est le cinema”.3 Here this film theorist analyses these moments of arrested movement as privileged instants of fragmented time within a cine- matic time conceived of as unitary: “des points de tran- scendance, avérés, reconduits à travers les ellipses, les décompositions, les immobilisations qui les traversent”.4 Bellour’s insistence on privileged movement is also a way of questioning the view that sees cinema as a system of reproduction of “whatever movement”, of the “equidistant instant” chosen to give the effect of continuity. In Bellour’s analysis, this change of rhythm is also linked to a change in film’s narrative dimension. Following and taking up his analysis, this article’s aim is to examine cases in which this immobility interrupting the flow of images is, in its various forms, bound up with a hallucinatory state, of a dreamlike or other nature. 3 R. Bellour, “L’interruption, l’instant”, in R. Bellour, L’Entre-Images: Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo (Paris: Mimésis, 2020): 131. 4 Ibid.: 133. LUCA ACQUARELLI 54 AN-ICON  A fixed camera on a long take where move- ment is reduced to a minimum can restore this effect of immobility rendered by the emergence of a virtually still image in a 24 frames-per-second flow. But in actual fact, as Deleuze explains so well with regard to Ozu’s still lifes, this is a completely different frame of mind: At the point where the cinematographic image most directly con- fronts the photo, it also becomes most radically distinct from it. Ozu’s still lifes endure, have a duration, over ten seconds of the vase: this duration of the vase is precisely the representation of that which endures, through the succession of changing states.5 However, when photography’s fixity interrupts the cinematic flow, what we are left with is an alternative configuration. As Roland Barthes pointed out in his famous Camera Lucida: The cinema participates in this domestication of photography — at least the fictional cinema, precisely the one said to be the seventh art; a film can be mad by artifice, can present the cultural signs of madness, it is never mad by nature (by iconic status); it is always the very opposite of an hallucination; it is simply an illusion; its vi- sion is oneiric, not ecmnesic.6 If this opposition between photography and cinema where hallucination is concerned may indeed seem too general, it seems to me that the French theorist sees a certain specificity in the still image in relation to the moving image. In fact, this thought seems to be echoed in Bar- thes’ article on obtuse meaning theorised from a few frames of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (I) (1944). Barthes realises that the starting point in his analysis is the frame which, although all film originates from it, cinema itself seems 5 G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson, R. Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1989): 17. 6 R. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. R. Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). LUCA ACQUARELLI 55 AN-ICON  to forget in the amnesia of its 24 images-per-second flow. Paradoxically, frames seem very different in nature from the film they are part of: the possibility to observe a film frame offers a totally different epistemology as compared to when it is lost in the flow of the movement of animation.7 In the 1970s, Jean-François Lyotard theorised “a-cinema”, namely a cinema which goes beyond the nar- rative discourse of diegesis and the normalised image that follows on from it. A-cinema is not intended to be a negation of cinema, but a dimension in which it is the power of the image which takes precedence over its form, giving rise to image “pyrotechnics”.8 This French philosopher refers to two ways of complying with the pyrotechnical require- ment: immobility and excess movement. He examines John Avildsen’s film Joe (1970), comparing the only two scenes featuring this arrhythmia and bound up with the film’s deep- er narrative, namely the impossibility of the father’s incest with his daughter: Ces deux effets, l’un d’immobilisation, l’autre d’excès de mobilité, sont donc obtenus en dérogation des règles de représentation, qui exigent que le mouvement réel, imprimé à 24 images/seconde sur la pellicule, soit restitué à la projection à la même vitesse.9 One of the examples of immobilisation described by Lyotard – this paralysis in the image that provokes the most intense agitation – is most effectively embodied by the tableau vivant, linking this dispositif to the libidinal energy dimension that lies at the heart of his broader theory of the 7 Barthes adds: “For a long time, I have been intrigued by the phenomenon of being interested and even fascinated by photos from a film (outside a cinema, in the pages of Cahiers du cinema) and of then losing everything of those photos (not just the captivation but the memory of the image) when once inside the viewing room – a change which can even result in a complete reversal of values”. R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana Press, 1997): 65-66. 8 Lyotard takes the idea from Adorno who claimed that the only great art is that of the artificers: “la pyrotechnie simulerait à la perfection la consomption stérile des énergies de la jouissance” and then talking about currents that could meet pyrotechnic needs: “Ces deux pôles sont l’immobilité et l’excès de mouvement. En se laissant attirer vers ces antipodes, le cinéma cesse insensiblement d’être une force de l’ordre ; il produit de vrais, c’est-à-dire vains, simulacres, des intensités jouissives, au lieu d’objets consommables-productifs”. J.-F. Lyotard, Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Galilée, 1994): 60. 9 Ibid.: 63. LUCA ACQUARELLI 56 AN-ICON  figural.10 Immobilisation, immobility, stopping on a fixed image within the movement of the film: these are all effects that come close to the study hypotheses discussed here. But another aspect can usefully be underlined. When cinema mediates another kind of image, re-mediation and intermediality is generally talked of. This theoretical dimension has been approached from various points of view: Montani’s book speaks of intermedial aesthetics as places of “authentication” process activation.11 The term “intermedial” is used here as a philosophical option sum- marised in the first pages of the book: it is only by starting from an active comparison between different tech- nical formats of the image (optical and digital, for example) and between its different discursive forms (fictional and documentary, for example), that one can do justice to the irreducible otherness of the real world and the testimony of facts, (media and non-media facts), happening in it.12 If doubt is clearly cast on the problem of inter- mediality by the hypothesis of this article, let us try to focus on the specific case of the still image alone, disregarding authentication but rather proposing it as a case of visual alteration. That is to say, authentication as the result of a montage between different media can – as we shall see in one of the cases of still image cinema shown below – be understood as visual alteration, in accordance with the topic dealt with in this journal issue. 10 For an interdisciplinary study of the figural dimension of image analysis, allow me a reference to the collective volume, L. Acquarelli, ed., Au prisme du figural: Le sens des images entre forme et force (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015). 11 The term “authentication” can be problematic because it resonates semantically with authenticity and, therefore, truth. Montani immediately disambiguated the term, distancing it from this risk of confusion: “Authenticating, from this point of view, is akin to ‘rerealizing’, rehabilitating the image to the relationship with its irreducible other, with its radical and elusive off-screen”. P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2010): 14. My translation. 12 Ibid.: 13. My translation. LUCA ACQUARELLI 57 AN-ICON  The shifting fixity of photography in cinema and its hallucinatory effect. From Blow Up to Persona In one of the films most frequently cited in text- books on the photography-cinema relationship, Michelan- gelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966), it is the dialectic between the photographic medium as authenticating evidence and hallucinatory instrument which plays centre stage. The use of photography as evidence is apparently the main theme, but it is precisely photographic enlargements aimed at visualis- ing the evidence that leads our vision towards hallucination rather than authentication. The first scene is set in an anonymous park in which the main character Thomas is taking photographs of what seems to be the prudishly amorous games of a couple in the middle of the lawn, with a paparazzo’s curiosity and almost for fun. The whole scene is played back to viewers in a sequence in which Thomas, now back in his flat, is hunting out detail in the prints from the negatives he has just devel- oped. The spectator plays the same investigative game as Thomas, scrutinising the black and white images of the scene seen shortly before in the diegetic reality of the film. At a certain point, Thomas ceases to act as the viewer’s delegate, and the frame is entirely taken up by the images (Fig. 1 and 2). Fig. 1. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 2. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. LUCA ACQUARELLI 58 AN-ICON  We leave behind the narrative time frame of the film and move into a space-time otherness in which sound reproduces the background noise of the leaves blowing in the wind. A memory? The authentication of a memory? Or rather a hallucination? This exiting from the film, a sequence made up of 15 shots, lasting just under a minute in total, establishes a further space-time dimension. The succes- sion of shots apparently follows a “detective” logic, but the leaving behind of diegetic time and the photographic tex- ture, in the sense of figurative density – profoundly different from the cinematographic texture preceding and following on from it – and the immobility of the figuration, confer a different iconic nature on this sequence. Not only does it shift viewers into a space and time otherness, but it also seems to position itself within the film as a sequence whose diverse legibility gradually contaminates the rest of the film’s shots, suspending its already weak narrative currents. The photo designed to “indicate” the corpse, in its exaggerated enlargement, resembles an abstract paint- ing (Fig. 3), showing nothing but its support and its texture and, moreover, the film urges us to compare it with the paintings of Thomas’s friend Bill, an abstract figurative painter (Fig. 4).13 Fig. 3. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 4. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. 13 In Fig. 4, the female character in a dialogue with Thomas explicitly says that the photograph looks to her like one of Bill’s paintings. LUCA ACQUARELLI 59 AN-ICON  In an earlier scene, Bill tries to describe his paintings as follows: They don’t mean anything when I do them. Just a mess. Afterwards I find something to hang on to. Like that...like that leg. Then it sorts itself out...and adds up. It’s like finding a clue in a detective story. The abstract picture prefigures the search for evidence in the photo. But what if the picture itself is ab- stract? Thomas looks for fresh evidence of the murder seen in the photographs, first returning alone to the site of the alleged crime and finding the body. When he tries to convince another friend of his to look for proof of the existence of the corpse, he is not believed. No one seems to care about the possible referent of the photograph, as if the photograph itself was pushing for a return to Lacanian reality within a society hypnotised by fashionable images which no one wants to face up to. When Thomas returns to the park for a second time to photograph the corpse up close, it has disappeared. Initially examined as reassuring ontological realism, the photograph is actually the place where memory and hallucination break through into the reality effect generated by cinematic movement. Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona (1966), which Bellour himself included in the above-mentioned article, is an interesting still image in cinema case study. It takes various forms, first occupying the whole screen, then as an image displayed as a photograph within a diegetic action, then as a photograph explored by the camera, and then as a still image juxtaposing close-ups of the two women. The film focuses virtually in its entirety on the re- lationship between a patient, Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann) suffering from voluntary aphasia, and a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson). This caring relationship becomes increasingly intimate once the two women go to the beachfront house the clinic’s therapist has advised Elisabeth to recuperate in. The central theme of the film becomes the double, in the Freudian sense, as the two women’s relationship gets gradually more psychologically complex. While on one LUCA ACQUARELLI 60 AN-ICON  hand Elisabeth’s silence forces Alma to confide the secrets of her life, Alma herself, after secretly reading a letter from Elisabeth to the therapist which she feels ridicules her, be- comes increasingly irritable and begins to despise Elisabeth for what she sees as her selfish and corrupt nature. At the same time Alma begins to feel guilty for having an abortion and to identify with Elisabeth who seems unable to love her child, having rejected it from birth. Ingmar Bergman builds the film on this progressive identification, in a crescendo that culminates in something close to a mirror image be- tween the two figures before they are juxtaposed into a sort of hybrid face. The dizzying nature of the double is triggered even before the two characters come on the scene when, in a prologue in a morgue, a child gets up and moves towards a close-up of a woman’s photograph to examine it with his hand. The facial features of the two women – who we later discover to be Elisabeth and Alma – in this seemingly fixed photographic close-up gradually become less sharp until a subtle transition occurs between them (Fig. 5 and 6). Fig. 5. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 6. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. LUCA ACQUARELLI 61 AN-ICON  Although it is the pre-prologue that “disrupts” the linear- ity of the whole film’s narrative (a tight montage of fig- ures juxtaposed in disparate ways, sometimes following a meta-cinematic theme), the changing portrait sequence is charged with such great power as to expand its reach into the rest of the narrative. The photograph of Elisabeth’s son (Fig. 7) is a further key element, a sort of narrative ac- celerator, snatched from Elisabeth herself and then kept by her to be reassembled in the scene where the logic of the double between the two women reaches its climax. Fig. 7. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. But it is a historical snapshot, an emblem of Nazi violence and its humiliation of its victims, the photo of the so-called “Warsaw child” representing the greatest perceptive cae- sura. In the year Persona was released, although knowl- edge of Nazi atrocities was still generally not widespread, the photo had already been used a decade earlier in Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard (1956) and was already em- blematic of the Holocaust, after it was used as a post- er for a first exhibition on Nazism’s calculated ferocity in Berlin Die Vergangenheit mahnt. The photo as a di- egetic object (Fig. 8) casually found by Elisabeth inside a book, and placed under a bedside lamp to make it easier to see, absorbs the entire frame accompanied by a stri- dent note in a crescendo of intensity lasting 30 seconds in which the different shots blot out the photo’s details (Fig. 9). LUCA ACQUARELLI 62 AN-ICON  Fig. 8. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 9. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. A historical document which was already a symbol of Nazi violence (but also its unrepresentability), then, breaks into the psychological story of Elisabeth and Alma, isolated from the world and the rest of humanity, with its docu- mentary but also anthropological load: the gestures and glances associated with humiliation, the executioners’ and victims’ faces and expressions standing out around the child’s frightened eyes and his condition as a totally de- fenceless victim. Whilst the rightness of this choice might be questioned, if this intermedial treatment of the archive can more or less “authenticate” the photo itself,14 there is no doubt whatsoever that this half-minute in which photo- graphic fixity takes over from cinematic movement triggers a perceptive reaction. Not only is the spectator suddenly projected into traumatic memory of Nazism, but the film’s photographic standstill triggers a sort of perceptive shock, a dissonance between the flow of diegetic reality and the condensation of the photographic gaze and its details. 14 See P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale. LUCA ACQUARELLI 63 AN-ICON  Another case of intermediality brings the historical docu- mentary archive into the two women’s seemingly discon- nected-from-the-world narrative: a televised news extract about the Buddhist monk who committed suicide by setting himself on fire during the Vietnamese dictatorship supported by the American government. In contrast to the photo, this TV montage showing the excruciating image of his self-im- molating body remains diegetic, in a first shot because it is framed by the television set and, in a second one, in which it takes up the whole frame, because the television commenta- tor’s voice-off preserves the continuity of the film’s temporal rhythm. The turmoil in this sequence, both Elisabeth’s who, in alternating montage, brings her hand to her mouth and cries out in fright, and the viewer’s, who may identify with her feelings, is part of the continuity of filmic perception. The arrest scene in the photo, on the other hand, seems to be charged with excessive otherness, challenging the film’s narrative and rhythmic structure. Moreover, the scene following the photograph of the Warsaw ghetto marks an acceleration in the ambi- guity between reality and hallucination in which Elisabeth’s husband visits and mistakes Alma for his wife. The film’s last prolonged fixedness (Fig. 10) does not take the form of a photographic support but retains the very nature of the film, suggesting a pho- tographic standstill, first prefigured by a juxtaposition of the two halves of the two women’s respective faces. The hallucinatory feel of the exchange of personalities is com- plete and could only take the form of a final and more exper- imental freeze-frame. Fig. 10. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. LUCA ACQUARELLI 64 AN-ICON  A cinema made of photographs, the cine-photo-romance La Jetée These two analyses would seem to support my hypothesis that the presence of a photograph in a film – especially when it extends to the entire frame, breaking the rhythm of the moving image – provokes a visual alterity that generates a reality-hallucination ambiguity. It is difficult to generalise this hypothesis because each film has its own complexity and internal structure but it may, in any case, be a valid element of comparison for future analyses. I will bring this article to a close with an analysis of a film that brings us back to the dream considerations I made at the beginning of the article. Although it resembles a film, La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962) is, as the director declares in the opening credits, a photo-novel.15 The film is, in fact, constructed around the montage of photographic images only, often juxtaposed by means of a cross-fade, creating overlaps. Dream and memory interpenetrate in reminiscence: a survivor of the Third World War is taken prisoner and subjected to exper- iments, using his vivid imagination, to open up time gaps with the past and then with the future, in order to obtain the technologies needed to reactivate an uninhabitable world replete with destruction and radioactivity. This apocalyp- tic environment is the background to a psychoanalytical dimension of traumatic time. The beginning of the film is clear in this sense; the voice over reads: “Ceci est l’histoire d’un homme marqué par une image d’enfance”; later it will be spoken of as a “scène qui le troubla par sa violence”. 15 It is curious that Barthes, who wrote his text on the photogram and obtuse sense in 1970 (already quoted extensively at the beginning of this article), does not mention this film, especially if we consider a note in his text referring directly to the photo-novel, on popular culture magazines: “Here are other ‘arts’ which combine still (or at least drawing) and story, diegesis – namely the photo-novel and the comic-strip. I am convinced that these ‘arts’, born in the lower depths of high culture, possess theoretical qualifications and present a new signifier (related to the obtuse meaning). This is acknowledged as regards the comic strip but I myself experience this slight trauma of signifiance faced with certain photo-novels: ‘their stupidity touches me’ (which could be a certain definition of obtuse meaning)”. R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text: 66. If we are dealing here with an entirely different kind of photo-novel (surely not touching for its stupidity!), it seems to me that Barthes’ reflections on obtuse sense could also apply to La Jétée. LUCA ACQUARELLI 65 AN-ICON  The gap between image and scene explains the problem of the difficult figuration of childhood memories. An image affecting a child, then probably forgotten and stored away in the unconscious then emerging once again in a dream, in the film’s narration, in a memory of the past heterodirected by the executioners’ experiments. The key to the heterogeneity of the traumatic time grafted onto the images is once again present in the words recited by the voice-off: Rien ne distinguent le souvenir des autres moments. Ce n’est que plus tard qui se font reconnaître, à leurs cicatrices. Ce visage [Fig. 11] qui devait être la seule image du temps de paix à traverser le temps de guerre. Il se demanda longtemps s’il l’avait vraiment vu ou s’il avait créé ce moment de douceur pour étayer le moment de folie qu’allait venir. Fig. 11. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film Memory becomes image only après-coup, re-signifying certain moments, reabsorbing them around images. The La Jétée images indeed seem to have this pa- tina of après-coup re-signification. The sharpness of their black and white with vivid contrasts is only opacified by cross-fade transitions. In any case, even in their transpar- ency, all the images seem to be inhabited by this traumat- ic time, somewhere between memory, dream and hallu- cination. A very brief moving sequence suddenly breaks LUCA ACQUARELLI 66 AN-ICON  into the montage of still images when, in the intimacy of her bed, the woman in the memory wakes up, opens her eyes and directs her gaze into the camera (Fig. 12). Fig. 12. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film It is a sudden enunciative change that seems designed to awaken us from the torpor induced by this story told through salient points, fixed images where the forces of the image in movement converge, as if absorbed, in an oneiric iconology that barely opens up a gap in traumatic time. This douceur scene, immersed in a distant child- hood memory in the context of the children taken onto the jetée at Orly airport to watch the planes take off, is none other than the image preceding the trauma: the child who, on the jetée, sees the murder of his adult self, having been followed through time by one of his executioners to kill him (Figg. 13 and 14). Fig. 13. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film Fig. 14. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film LUCA ACQUARELLI 67 AN-ICON  While it is clear that the La Jetée theme lends itself to a hallucination rhetoric, it seems to me that the decision to use still images may make this film an extreme case corroborating this article’s thesis. Conclusions This short paper suggests that the boundary be- tween the transparency of the reality effect and the opacity of hallucination is labile and porous. We have seen that cin- ema, which immobilises 24-frames-per-second movement in favour of the fixed image, is one of the artistic strategies that seem to bring in the complexity of this boundary and this dialectic. As we have seen, this hypothesis is difficult to generalise, but it seems to me that it deserves further study in the broader field of intermediality and its effects. The three case studies analysed here bring in some addi- tional elements, differentiating in particular cases in which photos are inserted into the film’s diegesis (in Blow Up in the various scenes in Thomas’s studio, in Persona with the photo of the child but also, in a certain way, with the large portraits of the two women) and when they replace the film’s diegesis itself. The latter seem to highlight the hallucinatory power of the still image in cinema with greater intensity. LUCA ACQUARELLI 68 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/15442

The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered by Luca Acquarelli Still image vision strategy Photography Hallucination Antonioni Bergman Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered vision strategy by Luca Acquarelli Abstract The article intends to propose some analyses of a possible formal occurrence of “altered states” in cine- ma: the stopping of the flow of the cinematographic image in a still image. Through some theoretical references (Metz, Bazin, Lyotard, Deleuze, Bellour, Barthes, Montani) I will try to understand if this kind of formal occurrence can be constituted as a figure of the altered state. The relationship between cinema and photography will be particularly ex- plored, starting with films such as Antonioni’s Blow Up and Bergman’s Persona. The hallucinatory effect will thus be discovered not as opposed to that of reality, but a dialectic will be constructed between the two. Still image Photography Hallucination Antonioni Bergman To quote this essay: L. Acquarelli, “The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered vision strategy”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 51-68 LUCA ACQUARELLI 51 AN-ICON  Dream as “authentic” absurdity, photography as “true” hallucination Like hallucinations, dreams are not the far end of the reality scale but rather share some of its features. Metz has argued that dream sequences are always barely credible in narrative films precisely because films struggle to represent the “authentic absurdity” of dreams. Indeed, dreams seem to combine the reality effect with a halluci- natory patina that film dynamics find hard to hold togeth- er. The most traditional enunciative shifts introducing the passage between “reality”’s diegesis and that of dreams, such as unfocused borders or images in black and white as opposed to colour, are indeed ineffective expedients for the purposes of rendering this “authentic absurdity”, this double binary between the authenticating effect, like perhaps realist photography, and the game of the absurd, that injection of perceptual intensity that undermines the reality principle. Weaving a somewhat daring theoretical thread, this oxymoronic terminology does not seem to me to be very far removed from that used by one of realism’s most famous theorists – and therefore a very long way away from Metz – André Bazin who, speaking of the use of pho- tography as a privileged surrealist technique, conceives of photography’s potential for creating “a true hallucination”. While the realist photography ontology has been widely criticised, less space has been given to this hallucinatory residue of photography, which occurs even when it seems to adhere to a realist aesthetic. It should be stressed that the dream hypothe- sis introduced with Metz is at the heart of one of cinema’s theoretical paradigms. Without dwelling on all aspects of this dimension, it will be useful here to digress into the dream-cinema relationship before introducing certain anal- yses of this article’s central theme, namely the presence of the fixed, especially photographic, image within film, which immobilises its movement, as a possible instant of altered vi- sion. Metz has thoroughly enquired into the epistemological LUCA ACQUARELLI 52 AN-ICON  potential of the oneiric vision, through the Freudian prism. In Psychoanalysis and Cinema. The Imaginary Signifier,1 condensation, displacement and secondary elaboration are the main processes of the oneiric “signifier” explored by this French theorist as tools for the interpretation of cinematographic language. For Metz, the image’s “affinity” with the unconscious and its oneiric imagination increases its exposure to these processes as compared to language, without the latter being immune to them. Elements of film grammar such as superimposition and cross-fading – the former being closer to displacement, the latter to conden- sation – are key examples of this affinity. These elements testify to a survival of the primary process that, for instance, tends to abolish the discontinuity between objects. These are emergencies, aberrations within a product of secondary elaboration, such as the narrative development of a film or the attempt to narrate a dream upon awakening, the latter being forced, at least partially, to favour narrative logic at the expense of the ambiguous and nebulous dimension of the primary process. Entstellung, the oneiric deformation caused by the power of unconscious impulses, has thus also become a theoretical paradigm for thinking in images of a sort of energy that is not played out in forms and ac- cumulates in fragments and temporary disfiguration. Although Freud wrote that “dreams hallucinate”,2 the kinship between dreams and hallucinations is anything but close, starting from the fact that the former occurs in a sleeping state and the latter in waking state. Moments of transition between wakefulness and sleep are often the scene of phenomena testifying to the kinship between the form the two experiences take: so-called hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations. This is not the place to go into this matter in depth, but we might say that these two dimensions, dreams and hallucinations, may be the two areas where the fixed image in cinema, as viewed in this article, tends to position itself in dialectical movement. 1 C. Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema. The Imaginary Signifier (London: Palgrave, 1982). 2 S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010): 79. LUCA ACQUARELLI 53 AN-ICON  A few case studies will give us a clearer understanding of the type of visual alterations we are talking about. Stopping the cinematic flow: intermediality and a-cinema The hypothesis discussed in this article is de- signed to examine whether there are other cinematic strat- egies capable of expressing visual alterity as regards nar- rating the flow of cinematic images – an alterity whose intensity borders on the hallucinatory – and, in particular, the alterity that is generated by the use of photography in cinema as a standstill in movement. The film theorist Ray- mond Bellour has, on several occasions, taken an interest in the interruption of movement in cinema, when it is, in various ways, inhabited by the photography hantise. In one short essay, in particular, his aim is to promote an, as yet hypothetical, study, in Bellour’s own words, whose interest is the “traitement de l’immobile dans cet art du mouvement qu’est le cinema”.3 Here this film theorist analyses these moments of arrested movement as privileged instants of fragmented time within a cine- matic time conceived of as unitary: “des points de tran- scendance, avérés, reconduits à travers les ellipses, les décompositions, les immobilisations qui les traversent”.4 Bellour’s insistence on privileged movement is also a way of questioning the view that sees cinema as a system of reproduction of “whatever movement”, of the “equidistant instant” chosen to give the effect of continuity. In Bellour’s analysis, this change of rhythm is also linked to a change in film’s narrative dimension. Following and taking up his analysis, this article’s aim is to examine cases in which this immobility interrupting the flow of images is, in its various forms, bound up with a hallucinatory state, of a dreamlike or other nature. 3 R. Bellour, “L’interruption, l’instant”, in R. Bellour, L’Entre-Images: Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo (Paris: Mimésis, 2020): 131. 4 Ibid.: 133. LUCA ACQUARELLI 54 AN-ICON  A fixed camera on a long take where move- ment is reduced to a minimum can restore this effect of immobility rendered by the emergence of a virtually still image in a 24 frames-per-second flow. But in actual fact, as Deleuze explains so well with regard to Ozu’s still lifes, this is a completely different frame of mind: At the point where the cinematographic image most directly con- fronts the photo, it also becomes most radically distinct from it. Ozu’s still lifes endure, have a duration, over ten seconds of the vase: this duration of the vase is precisely the representation of that which endures, through the succession of changing states.5 However, when photography’s fixity interrupts the cinematic flow, what we are left with is an alternative configuration. As Roland Barthes pointed out in his famous Camera Lucida: The cinema participates in this domestication of photography — at least the fictional cinema, precisely the one said to be the seventh art; a film can be mad by artifice, can present the cultural signs of madness, it is never mad by nature (by iconic status); it is always the very opposite of an hallucination; it is simply an illusion; its vi- sion is oneiric, not ecmnesic.6 If this opposition between photography and cinema where hallucination is concerned may indeed seem too general, it seems to me that the French theorist sees a certain specificity in the still image in relation to the moving image. In fact, this thought seems to be echoed in Bar- thes’ article on obtuse meaning theorised from a few frames of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (I) (1944). Barthes realises that the starting point in his analysis is the frame which, although all film originates from it, cinema itself seems 5 G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson, R. Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1989): 17. 6 R. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. R. Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). LUCA ACQUARELLI 55 AN-ICON  to forget in the amnesia of its 24 images-per-second flow. Paradoxically, frames seem very different in nature from the film they are part of: the possibility to observe a film frame offers a totally different epistemology as compared to when it is lost in the flow of the movement of animation.7 In the 1970s, Jean-François Lyotard theorised “a-cinema”, namely a cinema which goes beyond the nar- rative discourse of diegesis and the normalised image that follows on from it. A-cinema is not intended to be a negation of cinema, but a dimension in which it is the power of the image which takes precedence over its form, giving rise to image “pyrotechnics”.8 This French philosopher refers to two ways of complying with the pyrotechnical require- ment: immobility and excess movement. He examines John Avildsen’s film Joe (1970), comparing the only two scenes featuring this arrhythmia and bound up with the film’s deep- er narrative, namely the impossibility of the father’s incest with his daughter: Ces deux effets, l’un d’immobilisation, l’autre d’excès de mobilité, sont donc obtenus en dérogation des règles de représentation, qui exigent que le mouvement réel, imprimé à 24 images/seconde sur la pellicule, soit restitué à la projection à la même vitesse.9 One of the examples of immobilisation described by Lyotard – this paralysis in the image that provokes the most intense agitation – is most effectively embodied by the tableau vivant, linking this dispositif to the libidinal energy dimension that lies at the heart of his broader theory of the 7 Barthes adds: “For a long time, I have been intrigued by the phenomenon of being interested and even fascinated by photos from a film (outside a cinema, in the pages of Cahiers du cinema) and of then losing everything of those photos (not just the captivation but the memory of the image) when once inside the viewing room – a change which can even result in a complete reversal of values”. R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana Press, 1997): 65-66. 8 Lyotard takes the idea from Adorno who claimed that the only great art is that of the artificers: “la pyrotechnie simulerait à la perfection la consomption stérile des énergies de la jouissance” and then talking about currents that could meet pyrotechnic needs: “Ces deux pôles sont l’immobilité et l’excès de mouvement. En se laissant attirer vers ces antipodes, le cinéma cesse insensiblement d’être une force de l’ordre ; il produit de vrais, c’est-à-dire vains, simulacres, des intensités jouissives, au lieu d’objets consommables-productifs”. J.-F. Lyotard, Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Galilée, 1994): 60. 9 Ibid.: 63. LUCA ACQUARELLI 56 AN-ICON  figural.10 Immobilisation, immobility, stopping on a fixed image within the movement of the film: these are all effects that come close to the study hypotheses discussed here. But another aspect can usefully be underlined. When cinema mediates another kind of image, re-mediation and intermediality is generally talked of. This theoretical dimension has been approached from various points of view: Montani’s book speaks of intermedial aesthetics as places of “authentication” process activation.11 The term “intermedial” is used here as a philosophical option sum- marised in the first pages of the book: it is only by starting from an active comparison between different tech- nical formats of the image (optical and digital, for example) and between its different discursive forms (fictional and documentary, for example), that one can do justice to the irreducible otherness of the real world and the testimony of facts, (media and non-media facts), happening in it.12 If doubt is clearly cast on the problem of inter- mediality by the hypothesis of this article, let us try to focus on the specific case of the still image alone, disregarding authentication but rather proposing it as a case of visual alteration. That is to say, authentication as the result of a montage between different media can – as we shall see in one of the cases of still image cinema shown below – be understood as visual alteration, in accordance with the topic dealt with in this journal issue. 10 For an interdisciplinary study of the figural dimension of image analysis, allow me a reference to the collective volume, L. Acquarelli, ed., Au prisme du figural: Le sens des images entre forme et force (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015). 11 The term “authentication” can be problematic because it resonates semantically with authenticity and, therefore, truth. Montani immediately disambiguated the term, distancing it from this risk of confusion: “Authenticating, from this point of view, is akin to ‘rerealizing’, rehabilitating the image to the relationship with its irreducible other, with its radical and elusive off-screen”. P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2010): 14. My translation. 12 Ibid.: 13. My translation. LUCA ACQUARELLI 57 AN-ICON  The shifting fixity of photography in cinema and its hallucinatory effect. From Blow Up to Persona In one of the films most frequently cited in text- books on the photography-cinema relationship, Michelan- gelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966), it is the dialectic between the photographic medium as authenticating evidence and hallucinatory instrument which plays centre stage. The use of photography as evidence is apparently the main theme, but it is precisely photographic enlargements aimed at visualis- ing the evidence that leads our vision towards hallucination rather than authentication. The first scene is set in an anonymous park in which the main character Thomas is taking photographs of what seems to be the prudishly amorous games of a couple in the middle of the lawn, with a paparazzo’s curiosity and almost for fun. The whole scene is played back to viewers in a sequence in which Thomas, now back in his flat, is hunting out detail in the prints from the negatives he has just devel- oped. The spectator plays the same investigative game as Thomas, scrutinising the black and white images of the scene seen shortly before in the diegetic reality of the film. At a certain point, Thomas ceases to act as the viewer’s delegate, and the frame is entirely taken up by the images (Fig. 1 and 2). Fig. 1. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 2. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. LUCA ACQUARELLI 58 AN-ICON  We leave behind the narrative time frame of the film and move into a space-time otherness in which sound reproduces the background noise of the leaves blowing in the wind. A memory? The authentication of a memory? Or rather a hallucination? This exiting from the film, a sequence made up of 15 shots, lasting just under a minute in total, establishes a further space-time dimension. The succes- sion of shots apparently follows a “detective” logic, but the leaving behind of diegetic time and the photographic tex- ture, in the sense of figurative density – profoundly different from the cinematographic texture preceding and following on from it – and the immobility of the figuration, confer a different iconic nature on this sequence. Not only does it shift viewers into a space and time otherness, but it also seems to position itself within the film as a sequence whose diverse legibility gradually contaminates the rest of the film’s shots, suspending its already weak narrative currents. The photo designed to “indicate” the corpse, in its exaggerated enlargement, resembles an abstract paint- ing (Fig. 3), showing nothing but its support and its texture and, moreover, the film urges us to compare it with the paintings of Thomas’s friend Bill, an abstract figurative painter (Fig. 4).13 Fig. 3. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 4. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. 13 In Fig. 4, the female character in a dialogue with Thomas explicitly says that the photograph looks to her like one of Bill’s paintings. LUCA ACQUARELLI 59 AN-ICON  In an earlier scene, Bill tries to describe his paintings as follows: They don’t mean anything when I do them. Just a mess. Afterwards I find something to hang on to. Like that...like that leg. Then it sorts itself out...and adds up. It’s like finding a clue in a detective story. The abstract picture prefigures the search for evidence in the photo. But what if the picture itself is ab- stract? Thomas looks for fresh evidence of the murder seen in the photographs, first returning alone to the site of the alleged crime and finding the body. When he tries to convince another friend of his to look for proof of the existence of the corpse, he is not believed. No one seems to care about the possible referent of the photograph, as if the photograph itself was pushing for a return to Lacanian reality within a society hypnotised by fashionable images which no one wants to face up to. When Thomas returns to the park for a second time to photograph the corpse up close, it has disappeared. Initially examined as reassuring ontological realism, the photograph is actually the place where memory and hallucination break through into the reality effect generated by cinematic movement. Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona (1966), which Bellour himself included in the above-mentioned article, is an interesting still image in cinema case study. It takes various forms, first occupying the whole screen, then as an image displayed as a photograph within a diegetic action, then as a photograph explored by the camera, and then as a still image juxtaposing close-ups of the two women. The film focuses virtually in its entirety on the re- lationship between a patient, Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann) suffering from voluntary aphasia, and a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson). This caring relationship becomes increasingly intimate once the two women go to the beachfront house the clinic’s therapist has advised Elisabeth to recuperate in. The central theme of the film becomes the double, in the Freudian sense, as the two women’s relationship gets gradually more psychologically complex. While on one LUCA ACQUARELLI 60 AN-ICON  hand Elisabeth’s silence forces Alma to confide the secrets of her life, Alma herself, after secretly reading a letter from Elisabeth to the therapist which she feels ridicules her, be- comes increasingly irritable and begins to despise Elisabeth for what she sees as her selfish and corrupt nature. At the same time Alma begins to feel guilty for having an abortion and to identify with Elisabeth who seems unable to love her child, having rejected it from birth. Ingmar Bergman builds the film on this progressive identification, in a crescendo that culminates in something close to a mirror image be- tween the two figures before they are juxtaposed into a sort of hybrid face. The dizzying nature of the double is triggered even before the two characters come on the scene when, in a prologue in a morgue, a child gets up and moves towards a close-up of a woman’s photograph to examine it with his hand. The facial features of the two women – who we later discover to be Elisabeth and Alma – in this seemingly fixed photographic close-up gradually become less sharp until a subtle transition occurs between them (Fig. 5 and 6). Fig. 5. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 6. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. LUCA ACQUARELLI 61 AN-ICON  Although it is the pre-prologue that “disrupts” the linear- ity of the whole film’s narrative (a tight montage of fig- ures juxtaposed in disparate ways, sometimes following a meta-cinematic theme), the changing portrait sequence is charged with such great power as to expand its reach into the rest of the narrative. The photograph of Elisabeth’s son (Fig. 7) is a further key element, a sort of narrative ac- celerator, snatched from Elisabeth herself and then kept by her to be reassembled in the scene where the logic of the double between the two women reaches its climax. Fig. 7. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. But it is a historical snapshot, an emblem of Nazi violence and its humiliation of its victims, the photo of the so-called “Warsaw child” representing the greatest perceptive cae- sura. In the year Persona was released, although knowl- edge of Nazi atrocities was still generally not widespread, the photo had already been used a decade earlier in Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard (1956) and was already em- blematic of the Holocaust, after it was used as a post- er for a first exhibition on Nazism’s calculated ferocity in Berlin Die Vergangenheit mahnt. The photo as a di- egetic object (Fig. 8) casually found by Elisabeth inside a book, and placed under a bedside lamp to make it easier to see, absorbs the entire frame accompanied by a stri- dent note in a crescendo of intensity lasting 30 seconds in which the different shots blot out the photo’s details (Fig. 9). LUCA ACQUARELLI 62 AN-ICON  Fig. 8. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 9. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. A historical document which was already a symbol of Nazi violence (but also its unrepresentability), then, breaks into the psychological story of Elisabeth and Alma, isolated from the world and the rest of humanity, with its docu- mentary but also anthropological load: the gestures and glances associated with humiliation, the executioners’ and victims’ faces and expressions standing out around the child’s frightened eyes and his condition as a totally de- fenceless victim. Whilst the rightness of this choice might be questioned, if this intermedial treatment of the archive can more or less “authenticate” the photo itself,14 there is no doubt whatsoever that this half-minute in which photo- graphic fixity takes over from cinematic movement triggers a perceptive reaction. Not only is the spectator suddenly projected into traumatic memory of Nazism, but the film’s photographic standstill triggers a sort of perceptive shock, a dissonance between the flow of diegetic reality and the condensation of the photographic gaze and its details. 14 See P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale. LUCA ACQUARELLI 63 AN-ICON  Another case of intermediality brings the historical docu- mentary archive into the two women’s seemingly discon- nected-from-the-world narrative: a televised news extract about the Buddhist monk who committed suicide by setting himself on fire during the Vietnamese dictatorship supported by the American government. In contrast to the photo, this TV montage showing the excruciating image of his self-im- molating body remains diegetic, in a first shot because it is framed by the television set and, in a second one, in which it takes up the whole frame, because the television commenta- tor’s voice-off preserves the continuity of the film’s temporal rhythm. The turmoil in this sequence, both Elisabeth’s who, in alternating montage, brings her hand to her mouth and cries out in fright, and the viewer’s, who may identify with her feelings, is part of the continuity of filmic perception. The arrest scene in the photo, on the other hand, seems to be charged with excessive otherness, challenging the film’s narrative and rhythmic structure. Moreover, the scene following the photograph of the Warsaw ghetto marks an acceleration in the ambi- guity between reality and hallucination in which Elisabeth’s husband visits and mistakes Alma for his wife. The film’s last prolonged fixedness (Fig. 10) does not take the form of a photographic support but retains the very nature of the film, suggesting a pho- tographic standstill, first prefigured by a juxtaposition of the two halves of the two women’s respective faces. The hallucinatory feel of the exchange of personalities is com- plete and could only take the form of a final and more exper- imental freeze-frame. Fig. 10. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. LUCA ACQUARELLI 64 AN-ICON  A cinema made of photographs, the cine-photo-romance La Jetée These two analyses would seem to support my hypothesis that the presence of a photograph in a film – especially when it extends to the entire frame, breaking the rhythm of the moving image – provokes a visual alterity that generates a reality-hallucination ambiguity. It is difficult to generalise this hypothesis because each film has its own complexity and internal structure but it may, in any case, be a valid element of comparison for future analyses. I will bring this article to a close with an analysis of a film that brings us back to the dream considerations I made at the beginning of the article. Although it resembles a film, La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962) is, as the director declares in the opening credits, a photo-novel.15 The film is, in fact, constructed around the montage of photographic images only, often juxtaposed by means of a cross-fade, creating overlaps. Dream and memory interpenetrate in reminiscence: a survivor of the Third World War is taken prisoner and subjected to exper- iments, using his vivid imagination, to open up time gaps with the past and then with the future, in order to obtain the technologies needed to reactivate an uninhabitable world replete with destruction and radioactivity. This apocalyp- tic environment is the background to a psychoanalytical dimension of traumatic time. The beginning of the film is clear in this sense; the voice over reads: “Ceci est l’histoire d’un homme marqué par une image d’enfance”; later it will be spoken of as a “scène qui le troubla par sa violence”. 15 It is curious that Barthes, who wrote his text on the photogram and obtuse sense in 1970 (already quoted extensively at the beginning of this article), does not mention this film, especially if we consider a note in his text referring directly to the photo-novel, on popular culture magazines: “Here are other ‘arts’ which combine still (or at least drawing) and story, diegesis – namely the photo-novel and the comic-strip. I am convinced that these ‘arts’, born in the lower depths of high culture, possess theoretical qualifications and present a new signifier (related to the obtuse meaning). This is acknowledged as regards the comic strip but I myself experience this slight trauma of signifiance faced with certain photo-novels: ‘their stupidity touches me’ (which could be a certain definition of obtuse meaning)”. R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text: 66. If we are dealing here with an entirely different kind of photo-novel (surely not touching for its stupidity!), it seems to me that Barthes’ reflections on obtuse sense could also apply to La Jétée. LUCA ACQUARELLI 65 AN-ICON  The gap between image and scene explains the problem of the difficult figuration of childhood memories. An image affecting a child, then probably forgotten and stored away in the unconscious then emerging once again in a dream, in the film’s narration, in a memory of the past heterodirected by the executioners’ experiments. The key to the heterogeneity of the traumatic time grafted onto the images is once again present in the words recited by the voice-off: Rien ne distinguent le souvenir des autres moments. Ce n’est que plus tard qui se font reconnaître, à leurs cicatrices. Ce visage [Fig. 11] qui devait être la seule image du temps de paix à traverser le temps de guerre. Il se demanda longtemps s’il l’avait vraiment vu ou s’il avait créé ce moment de douceur pour étayer le moment de folie qu’allait venir. Fig. 11. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film Memory becomes image only après-coup, re-signifying certain moments, reabsorbing them around images. The La Jétée images indeed seem to have this pa- tina of après-coup re-signification. The sharpness of their black and white with vivid contrasts is only opacified by cross-fade transitions. In any case, even in their transpar- ency, all the images seem to be inhabited by this traumat- ic time, somewhere between memory, dream and hallu- cination. A very brief moving sequence suddenly breaks LUCA ACQUARELLI 66 AN-ICON  into the montage of still images when, in the intimacy of her bed, the woman in the memory wakes up, opens her eyes and directs her gaze into the camera (Fig. 12). Fig. 12. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film It is a sudden enunciative change that seems designed to awaken us from the torpor induced by this story told through salient points, fixed images where the forces of the image in movement converge, as if absorbed, in an oneiric iconology that barely opens up a gap in traumatic time. This douceur scene, immersed in a distant child- hood memory in the context of the children taken onto the jetée at Orly airport to watch the planes take off, is none other than the image preceding the trauma: the child who, on the jetée, sees the murder of his adult self, having been followed through time by one of his executioners to kill him (Figg. 13 and 14). Fig. 13. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film Fig. 14. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film LUCA ACQUARELLI 67 AN-ICON  While it is clear that the La Jetée theme lends itself to a hallucination rhetoric, it seems to me that the decision to use still images may make this film an extreme case corroborating this article’s thesis. Conclusions This short paper suggests that the boundary be- tween the transparency of the reality effect and the opacity of hallucination is labile and porous. We have seen that cin- ema, which immobilises 24-frames-per-second movement in favour of the fixed image, is one of the artistic strategies that seem to bring in the complexity of this boundary and this dialectic. As we have seen, this hypothesis is difficult to generalise, but it seems to me that it deserves further study in the broader field of intermediality and its effects. The three case studies analysed here bring in some addi- tional elements, differentiating in particular cases in which photos are inserted into the film’s diegesis (in Blow Up in the various scenes in Thomas’s studio, in Persona with the photo of the child but also, in a certain way, with the large portraits of the two women) and when they replace the film’s diegesis itself. The latter seem to highlight the hallucinatory power of the still image in cinema with greater intensity. LUCA ACQUARELLI 68 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/15158

Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual Filmreality by Enrico Terrone Virtual Reality Perception Memory Imagination Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual reality by Enrico Terrone Abstract This paper casts film experience as a sort of disembodied perception. I will show how this experience can be manipulated and altered in order to approximate to mental states of fictional characters, in particular embodied perception, memory and imagination. I will acknowledge that film experience can approximate to non-perceptual at- titudes such as memory and imagination much better than the experience elicited by theater. Yet, I will contend, film experience cannot emulate the phenomenology of non-per- ceptual attitudes since it remains a sort of disembodied perception even when it is manipulated by filmmakers in order to approximate memory states or imaginative states of fictional characters. Finally, I will argue that virtual real- ity, in virtue of both its proximity to embodied perception and its potential for manipulation, is, in principle, in a bet- ter position than film when it comes to trying to emulate non-perceptual attitudes such as memory and imagination. Film Virtual Reality Perception Memory Imagination To quote this essay: E. Terrone, “Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual reality”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 69-90 ENRICO TERRONE 69 AN-ICON  Cloe sees a black cat, Jack remembers a black cat, Lisa imagines a black cat. According to representa- tionalist conceptions of the mind,1 Cloe’s, Jack’s and Li- sa’s mental states have the same representational content, namely a black cat, and yet they differ as regards their attitude, that is, the way that content is represented. Per- ceiving a black cat, remembering a black cat and imagin- ing a black cat are three different experiences in virtue of three different attitudes. Specifically, according to Uriah Kriegel’s “Sartrean account”,2 the perceptual attitude rep- resents-as-present its content, the memory attitude rep- resents-as-past its content, and the imaginative attitude represents-as-possible its content. All this raises an interesting issue about film experience. On the one hand, according to experiential theories of depiction,3 films provide us with experiences whose “pictorial attitude” somehow emulates the perceptual attitude. On the other hand, scholars such as Hugo Mün- sterberg or Erwin Panofsky have stated that films allow us to share not only the perceptual point of view of fictional characters but also their inner life, which involves states such as memory or imagination.4 These two statements are in tension: if the pictorial attitude which characterizes film experience is a sort of perceptual attitude, how can film spectators enjoy experiences based on memory attitudes or imaginative attitudes? I will argue that the spectator cannot enjoy the latter experiences. The spectator can only ascribe such experiences to characters by relying on the perceptual experience she is enjoying. Finally, I will argue that, quite 1 T. Crane, “The intentional structure of consciousness”, in A. Jokic, Q. Smith, eds., Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 33- 56; D. Chalmers. “The representational character of experience”, in B. Leiter, ed., The Future for Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 153-180. 2 U. Kriegel, “Perception and imagination. A Sartrean account”, in S. Miguens, G. Preyer, C. Bravo Morando, eds., Prereflective Consciousness: Early Sartre in the Context of Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (London: Routledge, 2015): 257-288. 3 R. Hopkins, “Depiction”, in P. Livingston, C. Plantinga, eds., The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (London: Routledge, 2009): 64-74. 4 H. Münsterberg, The Photoplay: a Psychological Study (New York: Appleton, 1916); E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures” (1934), in D. Talbot, ed., Film: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959): 15-32. ENRICO TERRONE 70 AN-ICON  surprisingly, virtual reality is in a better position than film as regards the emulation of non-perceptual attitudes. Film experience as disembodied perception Film experience is a perceptual experience. The audience perceives objects and events taking place in the world that the film portrays. The Lumière Brothers Sortie des Usines Lumière (1895) is paradigmatic in this respect: the audience sees workers leaving the factory in a way that is analogous to the way one would see those workers if one were in front the factory. Analogous, however, does not mean identical. While in ordinary perception we experience things as organized in an “egocentric space”, that is, a space that has our body as its own center,5 in cinematic perception we experience things as organized in a space that has only our sight, not our body, as its own center. The space depicted is experienced as “detached” from our body.6 The spectator of Sortie des Usines Lumière sees workers exiting the factory from a standpoint in front of the factory, but she does not occupy that standpoint and she does not have the impression of occupying it. Even spectators of the Lumière Brothers L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) normally do not have the impres- sion of occupying the standpoint in front of the train, in spite of the popular fable that suggests otherwise.7 Film experience, so understood, is a disembod- ied perception. We can perceive things from a viewpoint that our body is not forced to occupy. It is worth noting that by “disembodied perception” here is just meant the percep- tion of a space in which our body does not have any place. Hence, film experience is disembodied only with respect to the experienced relationship between the spectator and 5 G. Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 6 N. Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 7 M. Loiperdinger, “Lumière’s arrival of the train. Cinema’s founding myth”, The Moving Image 4, no. 1 (2004): 89-118. ENRICO TERRONE 71 AN-ICON  the space portrayed. The spectator’s body, however, keeps playing a crucial role in the whole film experience which, as a twofold experience, also includes the spectator’s re- lationship to the space in which the film is screened.8 Even a paradigmatic essay on the embodied character of film experience, namely Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992), acknowledges that the perspective of the spectator as an embodied subject is different from the perspective on the world depicted that the film provides us with. Yet, Sob- chack states that film experience is embodied all the way through because there is a further body at work, namely, the film’s body: We recognize the moving picture as the work of an anonymous and sign-producing body subject intentionally marking visible choices with the very behavior of its bodily being. However, these choices are not initiated by the movement of our bodies or our intending consciousness. They are seen and visible as the visual and phys- ical choices of some body other than ourselves [...]. That some body is the film’s body.9 What does it exactly mean that the film has a body? This seems to be a suggestive metaphor that should be unpacked for rigorous theorizing. Sobchack offers the following characterization of the film’s body: “The cam- era its perceptive organ, the projector its expressive organ, the screen its discrete and material occupation of worldly space”.10 If the film’s body is just that, it comes down to a suggestive characterization of the film’s screening. Still Sobchack also insists on the “choices” that the alleged film’s body makes thereby determining our point of view on the space portrayed. Precisely because that point of view does not depend on the position and the movement of our 8 R. Hopkins, “Depiction”. See also E. Terrone, “Imagination and perception in film experience”, Ergo, no. 5 (2020): 161-190. 9 V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 278. Thanks to a referee for pushing me to discuss Sobchack’s view. 10 Ibid.: 299. ENRICO TERRONE 72 AN-ICON  body, I find it worthwhile to cast the experience it provides as disembodied. While ordinary perception, as an embodied experience, depends on the position and movement of our body, film experience is disembodied since it depends on choices that are not up to us. Whom are those choices up to? To the filmmaker for sure, and yet scholars like George Wilson argue that, in our engagement with fiction films, we rather experience those choices as the outcome of the “min- imal narrating agency” of a fictional narrator.11 Perhaps what Sobchack calls the film’s body may be an interesting char- acterization of how we experience the actual agency of the filmmaker or, if Wilson is right, the fictional agency of the narrator. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the film’s body is not the spectator’s body and I reckon that this is enough to warrant the characterization of film experience as disem- bodied perception. Such a disembodied nature of film experience has an interesting consequence. Since film experience, as disembodied perception, involves a point of view that does not depend on our body, that point of view can change without the need of moving our body. Neither Sortie des Usines Lumière nor L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ci- otat exploit this option, but later films do so by means of camera movements and editing. The specificity of film experience In ordinary perception we experience things as taking place in a determinate place and time, namely, here, the place where our body is, and now, the time when our experience occurs. In cinematic perception, on the other hand, place and time remain indeterminate. Our perception, as such, does not tell us where and when the things per- ceived take place. Cinematic perception needs a cognitive supplementation in order to fix the spatial and temporal coordinates of what one is perceiving. Films can provide 11 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 129. ENRICO TERRONE 73 AN-ICON  such supplementation either explicitly, by means of devices such as voice over and inscriptions, or implicitly, by relying on clues embedded in the scenes portrayed. Furthermore, film perception is not up to us in the way ordinary perception is. In the latter, I can decide, at least to a certain extent, what I am going to perceive. In film experience, instead, I am completely deprived of au- tonomy. In other words, film experience is predetermined in a way ordinary experience is not. One might say that ordinary perception is a natural experience whereas cine- matic perception is rather an artificial experience whereby we perceive what filmmakers (or narrators) have established for us. In the specific case of fiction films, filmmakers (or narrators) guide us in the perceptual exploration of fictional worlds. That is arguably the most insightful way of unpack- ing Sobchack’s metaphor of the film’s body. Let me consider, as an example, David W. Grif- fith’s An Unseen Enemy (1912), which tells the story of two orphan sisters whose heritage is threatened by a treach- erous housekeeper and her accomplice. We discover this story through a series of disembodied perceptual expe- riences of the same kind as those elicited by Sortie des Usines Lumière and L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat. We see the two orphans, then the housekeeper, then the elder brother of the two girls who places the heritage in the safe, then the housekeeper who spies him, and so on and so forth. The filmmaker has designed this series of percep- tions in a way that provides us with a sort of “unrestricted epistemic access” to the relevant facts of the story.12 Unlike the two orphans, we are aware from the beginning of the threat coming from the housekeeper. Moreover, unlike the housekeeper, we are aware of the brother’s attempt to help his sisters and prevent theft. In sum, the spectator of An Unseen Enemy perceives more, and therefore knows more, than the characters in the story; the “enemy” is “unseen” only for the characters, not for the audience. 12 G.M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). ENRICO TERRONE 74 AN-ICON  This is the basic functioning of fiction films, which corresponds to the omniscient narrator in literature. However, other configurations are possible in which the audience’s knowledge of relevant facts is “restricted” to that available to characters or is even narrower than the latter.13 For example, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1948) the audience’s knowledge is as restricted as that of the character L.B. Jef- feries (with one important exception, however: we see the murderer leaving his apartment with his lover while Jefferies is sleeping). In Pablo Larrain’s Ema (2019), the audience’s knowledge is even narrower than that of the eponymous heroine; the latter has access from the beginning to the truth about the new adoptive parents of her son whereas the audience will discover this truth only at the end of the film. A further restriction that affects film experience concerns the mode of this experience, which is just dis- embodied perception. In ordinary experience, on the other hand, one can enjoy a variety of experiential attitudes: em- bodied perception, first of all, but also memory and imag- ination, and possibly perceptual illusion, hallucination and dream. Here is another sense in which the audience can find it hard to know what characters know. What is at stake here is phenomenal knowledge, that is, knowing what it is like for a subject to undergo a certain experience. For sure, empathy may enable the audience to acquire phenomenal knowledge concerning the affective and emotional dimension of a fictional character’s expe- rience.14 For instance, the audience can share the char- acter’s fear or the character’s surprise. Yet, affects and emotions are evaluative mental states that are grafted onto more basic cognitive states such as perceptions, memo- ries, and imaginings,15 whose distinctive attitude is sure- ly harder to access through empathy. The audience may deploy empathy to know what it is like to for a character to feel fear or joy but something more is required to grasp 13 Ibid. 14 J. Stadler, “Empathy and film”, in H.L. Maibom, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (London: Routledge, 2016): 317-326. Thanks to a referee for leading me to consider the role of empathy. 15 K. Mulligan, “From appropriate emotions to values”, The Monist 81, no. 1 (1998): 161-188. ENRICO TERRONE 75 AN-ICON  the phenomenal difference between an embodied percep- tual experience and a memory episode or an imagining. Filmmakers are thus challenged to design disembodied perceptual experiences that can approximate to the ba- sic cognitive experiences enjoyed by characters, thereby leading the audience to grasp what is going on in the char- acters’ minds. This is arguably one of the most fascinating challenges that cinema has addressed along its history. Approximating to embodied perception Although film experience and ordinary percep- tion are both perceptual experiences, they differ inasmuch the latter is embodied in a way the former is not. That is why, in ordinary experience, we can move towards the things we perceive and possibly touch them, but we cannot do so in film experience. The usual way in which filmmakers lead the audience to share the embodied perceptual experience of a character consists in providing the audience with a standpoint that corresponds to that of the character. This mode of representation, which is usually called “subjective shot”, enables us to share the visual perspective of the character in spite of the fact that our body does not occupy the corresponding standpoint, which is instead occupied by the character’s body. As Kendall Walton puts it, Following a shot of a character looking out a window, there is a shot of a scene outside. Watching the second shot, we imagine observing the scene, and we judge that the character looking out the window has an experience “like this”, like the one we imagine enjoying. We do not attribute to the character an experience (much) like our actual visual experience, a visual experience of a film shot, of a depiction of the scene outside the window. The experience we attribute to the character is like our actual one only insofar as imagining seeing is like actually seeing.16 16 K.L. Walton, “Fictionality and imagination – mind the gap”, in In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015): 17-35, 13. ENRICO TERRONE 76 AN-ICON  Let me assume that what Walton calls “imag- ining seeing”, here, matches what I call “disembodied per- ception”. Under this assumption, we can interpret Walton’s last sentence as stating that the experience elicited by the point-of-view remains a disembodied perception, which is not identical with, but only approximates to, the embodied perception of the character. Overlooking this limitation can lead to disastrous effects. Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947), for example, aims to turn the audience’s disembodied perception into the perceptual experience of the main character along the whole duration of the film, but the result is just that the audience has “the impression that there is a camera by the name of ‘Philip Marlowe’ stumbling around Los Angeles and passing itself off as the well-known human being of the same name”.17 In fact, more cautious and parsimonious uses of the subjective shot can have outstanding aesthetic ef- fects. Griffith’s An Unseen Enemy is exemplary in this re- spect. I pointed out earlier that the film is based on “ob- jective” shots from neutral standpoints that are aimed to elicit pure disembodied experiences from the audience. Yet, quite exceptionally, one subjective shot emphasizes the most dramatic passage of the story. This shot is a close- up of the gun that the housekeeper passes through a hole in the door of the room where the two sisters took refuge (Fig. 1). We see the gun from the standpoint of the young- er sister (Fig. 2), and this subjective shot emphasizes the centrality of that character in the narrative. Fig. 1. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. 17 G.M. Wilson, Narration in Light: 86. ENRICO TERRONE 77 AN-ICON  Fig. 2. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. She is the one who has a psychological and relational arc of transformation along the story: at the be- ginning she refuses reluctantly to kiss her boyfriend but in the last image of the film she finally accepts the kiss. It is tempting to see the film as a sort of bildungsroman of this girl; specifically, her initiation to sexuality. This hermeneutic temptation is encouraged by the subjective shot in which the gun passing through the hole evokes a sort of phallic figure. The next shot shows that the girl is horrified by the gun. Later in the story, however, she finds the courage to try to grasp the gun, and then slumps back (Fig. 3 and 4). Fig. 3. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. Fig. 4. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. ENRICO TERRONE 78 AN-ICON  Interestingly, the editing connects this image of the girl to the image of her boyfriend walking in the fields (Fig. 5). Fig. 5. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. This link does not seem to be motivated by the course of the narrative but rather by a sort of symbolic pattern. Approximating to memory The experience of the spectator who watches a film such as An Unseen Enemy consists in a series of per- ceptual perspectives on the fictional world. Many of them are from a neutral, unoccupied point of view but some of them can match the perceptual point of view of a charac- ter. Most films function in this way. Some films even try to make us share the perceptual point of view of non-human characters. For example, John McTiernan’s Predator (1987) makes us share the perceptual point of view of an alien creature, and Pietro Marcello’s Bella e perduta (2015) that of a buffalo. On the other hand, there are films that do not limit themselves to making us share the perceptions of certain fictional characters but also aim to make us share other basic cognitive states of them. Let me begin with the case of memory. At the turning point of Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), Rick remembers his love affair with Ilsa in Paris. The combination of the movement of the camera towards Rick’s face with the crescendo of the music and the white dissolve indicates that the following scenes are to be taken as memories of Rick (Figg. 6,7 and 8). Yet, the kind of experience whereby the spectator experiences this scene is perception, not memory. ENRICO TERRONE 79 AN-ICON  The flashback makes us perceive the events that Rick is remembering rather than his memory experience. We have not the impression of remembering those events, that is, we are not enjoying the peculiar phenomenology of memory. Rather, we keep perceiving those past events set in Paris in the same disembodied way in which we were perceiv- ing the present events set in Casablanca which have been portrayed before the flashback. Fig. 6. Michael Curtiz, Casablanca, 1942. Still from film. Fig. 7. Michael Curtiz, Casablanca, 1942. Still from film. Fig. 8. Michael Curtiz, Casablanca, 1942. Still from film. ENRICO TERRONE 80 AN-ICON  Memory experiences usually are fragmentary, in- complete and unstable whereas the Paris events portrayed in the film exhibit the typical accuracy, fluidity and stability of perception. Moreover, memory experiences typically in- volve a first-person perspective whereas most shots in the Casablanca flashback are taken from a neutral objective perspective, not from Rick’s perspective. Most importantly, memory experiences, as such, involve a feeling of pastness whatever their content, whereas our experience of these scenes of Casablanca lack that phenomenological hall- mark. Although Rick is represented as remembering, the flashback only makes us perceive what is remembered, the content of his memory. This is the standard way in which flashbacks encode memory in film. We do not think that Rick’s memory experience is like this. We just think that we are seeing (in a perceptual attitude) the events that Rick is remembering (in the memory attitude). At most, certain films can use stylistic device such as blurred images or shift from color to black and white in order to stress that the spectator’s perceptual experience is meant to encode another kind of mental state. Yet, the spectator experience remains perceptual in nature. Seeing blurry or seeing in black and white are still ways of seeing. Perhaps a better way of getting the spectator closer to the memory state of a character might consist in casting as a flashback a shot that was previously conjugat- ed in the present tense. For example, in François Truffaut’s L’amour en fuite (1979) flashbacks are made of shots of previous films of the Antoine Doinel series, so that the spec- tator shares Antoine’s experience of remembering those events. Yet, these cases are quite exceptional. In most films that use flashbacks, only the character is undergoing a memory experience while the spectator is rather enjoying a disembodied perception. Approximating to imagination Memory differs from imagination in that one remembers events that one previously perceived whereas ENRICO TERRONE 81 AN-ICON  the events imagined could not have been perceived. Imag- ination indeed, unlike memory, can represent events that did not take place. So, when in John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar (1963) Billy images himself to be the ruler of an imaginary country called Ambrosia, we cannot perceive the corre- sponding events in the story world of Billy Liar because there are no such events in that world. However, the way in which Billy Liar’s spectators are invited to consider Billy’s imaginings is analogous to that in which Casablanca’s spectators are invited to consider Rick’s memories. That is, the combination of a camera movement towards the character’s face with music and visual dissolve (Figg. 9, 10 and 11). In Billy Liar, the shift to imagination is also stressed by the inner voice of Billy himself who says: “It was a big day for us. We had won the war in Ambrosia. Democracy was back once more in our beloved country...”. Yet, the experience that this segment of Billy Liar elicits from its spectators remains a perceptual experience. We see Billy on a tank in the middle of the crowd which celebrates his triumph in the war. Just as Casablanca makes us perceive the events that Rick is re- membering, Billy Liar makes us perceive the events that Billy is imagining. The difference is just that the events remem- bered belongs to the story world of Casablanca, whereas the events imagined do not belong to the story world of Billy Liar. Rather, those events belong to a nested fictional world, which the filmmaker has built up within the main fiction in order to represent Billy’s imagining.18 Fig. 9. John Schlesinger, Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film. 18 On the notion of nested world, see K.L. Walton, “Fictionality and imagination”. ENRICO TERRONE 82 AN-ICON  Fig. 10. John Schlesinger, Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film. Fig. 11. John Schlesinger, Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film. Billy Liar does not make us share the imagina- tive experience of Billy, just as Casablanca did not make us share the memory experience of Rick. Imaginings, indeed, usually lack the kind of accuracy, fluidity, objectivity and stability that characterizes our perceptual experience of the events imagined by Billy. Moreover, imaginative experienc- es, as such, should involve a feeling of unreality whatever their content whereas our experience of these scenes of Billy Liar lacks such phenomenological hallmark. The con- tent of our perception, namely, Billy’s triumph, may look weird and non-realistic but we experience it in the same way in which we experience other scenes of the film that look much more realistic. Thus, films such as Billy Liar do not make us share the imaginative states of fictional char- acters but only approximate to such states by providing us with perceptual experiences of nested fictional worlds. Altering the epistemic status of film experience From a phenomenological perspective, there is just one basic experiential attitude that film spectators ENRICO TERRONE 83 AN-ICON  can take towards the fictional events portrayed. Wilson,19 following Walton,20 calls it “imagining seeing” while I prefer to dub it “disembodied perception”. That said, there are different ways in which spectators can relate this experi- ence to the fictional world they are exploring; this is what Wilson calls the “the epistemic status of the contents of their imagined seeing”.21 The default assumption about the epistemic status of film experience is that we are perceiving the fic- tional world as it is, from a neutral perspective that does not match the point of view of anybody. In other words, the basic epistemic status of film experience is pure perceptual knowledge. Yet, this basic epistemic status can be altered by cues coming from the content or the context of our per- ceptual experience. The main way of altering the epistemic status consists in a shift from the neutral viewpoint of the spectator as a detached observer to the subjective view- point of a character. In such cases, the spectator is invited to relate what she is perceiving in a disembodied way to the embodied perception or memory or imagination of a certain character. Yet, the spectator’s experience does not turn into an embodied perception or memory or imagina- tion. It remains a disembodied perception; only its epistemic status undergoes alteration. In the default case, we cast our disembodied experience merely as a source of perceptual knowledge about the objective facts of the fictional world. In the altered states, on the other hand, we cast our disem- bodied experience as a source of knowledge concerning also (in the case of embodied perception and memory) or only (in the case of imagination) the subjectivity of a character. Some films leave the epistemic status of cer- tain shots indeterminate. In Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Straw- berries (1957), for instance, it is not evident whether the protagonist Isak Borg is remembering or rather imagining certain episodes of his teenage. Spectators just perceive 19 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164. 20 K.L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 21 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164. ENRICO TERRONE 84 AN-ICON  such episodes in the usual disembodied way and acknowl- edge that something is going on in Isak’s mind rather than in the outer world. One might say that the spectator per- ceives a nested fictional world which is made of elements coming from both Isak’s memory and Isak’s imagination, but she cannot precisely tell the imaginative elements from the memory elements. The epistemic status of these shots thus remains indeterminate: suspended, as it were, between memory and imagination. Likewise, the scenes of Federico Fellini’s Otto e mezzo (1963) that portray the protagonist Guido Anselmi in his childhood (being bathed in wine lees and then put in bed; playing football in the schoolyard and then visiting Saraghina; being punished by the priests and then returning to Saraghina) have an inde- terminate epistemic status which lies between memory and imagination. The spectator has a perceptual disembodied experience of a nested fictional world which is made of elements arguably coming from both Guido’s imagination and Guido’s memory, but she finds it hard to precisely dis- tinguish what is coming from where. The phenomenological virtues of film compared to theater If film experience is just a kind of perceptual experience which can at most approximate to other mental states such as memory or imagination, why scholars like Münsterberg and Panofsky have stated that films can lead spectators to enjoy the latter mental states? I propose a historical explanation according to which statements such as Münsterberg’s or Panofsky’s are to be read as comparisons between film and theater. Both these forms of art invite the spectator to enjoy a per- ceptual experience of a fictional world. Yet, the experience that theater elicits from the spectator is ordinary embod- ied perception whereas film experience is a peculiar kind of disembodied perception. At the theater, the spectator sees the play from a standpoint that corresponds to the standpoint of her body, and that standpoint can change ENRICO TERRONE 85 AN-ICON  if the body moves. Slightly moving one’s head can be sufficient to change one’s perspective on the events por- trayed by a play; if one moved closer to the stage, one would even perceive those events from a closer standpoint. In this sense, theater experience works just as ordinary perception; it is as if fictional events had been magical- ly transported in our own environment, in our egocentric space. In film experience, on the other hand, it is the spec- tator’s viewpoint that seems to be magically transported in the middle of fictional events even though her body firmly remains in her seat. Film experience is thus independent from the spectator’s bodily movement in a way theater ex- perience is not. This is what motivates the characterization of film experience as a sort of disembodied perception. Thus, film experience is much more flexible than theater experience when it comes to approximating to other mental states such as memory or imagination, whose content also is quite independent from the position and the possible movements of one’s body. Panofsky nicely makes this point when he writes: In a theater, space is static, that is, the space represented on the stage, as well as the spatial relation of the beholder to the spectacle, is unalterably fixed. [.. ] With the movies the situation is reversed. Here, too, the spectator occupies a fixed seat, but only physically, not as the subject of an aesthetic experience. Aesthetically, he is in permanent motion as his eye identifies itself with the lens of the camera, which permanently shifts in distance and direction. [.. ] This opens up a world of possibilities of which the stage can never dream.22 Among the possibilities of film in comparison with theater, there is surely the capacity to lead the spec- tator in the proximity of the mental states of the characters. Yet, this does not mean that, in those cases, film experience turns into a memory experience or into an imaginative ex- perience; it remains a perceptual experience, though one aimed at approximating to other mental states. 22 E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures”: 18-19. ENRICO TERRONE 86 AN-ICON  Film experience, as a disembodied perceptual experience, reveals itself to be especially apt to emulate mental states such as perceptual illusion, hallucination and dream, whose attitude is not as distinct from that of per- ception as it is the attitude of memory or that of imagina- tion. One can cast perceptual illusions, hallucinations and dreams as perceptual experiences that, unlike standard perception, fail to represent things as they are. Specifical- ly, perceptual illusions lead the perceiver to cast things as having properties they do not actually have, while “partial hallucinations” lead her to perceive things that actually have not their place in her environment, and “total hallucinations”, just like dreams, leads the subject to experience a totally made up environment.23 Ordinary perception is somehow authoritative as for the reality of its content, and theater experience tends to inherit this epistemic authority, which it applies to the story world. Film experience, on the other hand, has a weaker epistemic authority despite its perceptual character. I contend that this depends on its peculiarly disembodied attitude. While watching a film, we have the impression of seeing characters who inhabit the story world, and events that occur in it, and we usually tend to endorse such im- pression thereby acquiring pieces of information about the story world. Yet, we do not perceive these events as occur- ring in the environment we inhabit with our body, and this somehow affect the degree of reliability of those pieces of information. Even though we tend to cast film experienc- es as a perception of events in the fictional world, we are disposed to acknowledge that this experience might mis- lead us as regards the way things are in that world. In this sense, film experience is a perceptual experience that can get closer than standard perception and theater experience to illusion, hallucination and dream. 23 For the distinction between partial and total hallucinations, see A.D. Smith, The Problem of Perception (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002): 193. Note that I am putting total hallucination and dreams on a par not because I think they are, but just because I reckon that discussing their difference goes beyond the scope of this paper. ENRICO TERRONE 87 AN-ICON  If the perceptual experience is a genus among whose species one can find not only standard perception but also illusion, hallucination, and dream, then film ex- perience can be cast as a peculiar further species of the genus, which can emulate all the other mental states of that genus. This fact is exploited by those films that lead the spectator to share the deceptive perceptual experi- ences of a character. In films such as David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001) we share the partial hallucination of the heroes by being in turn deceived by our perceptual experience of the events portrayed. Likewise, in films such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) or Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944), we share the total hallucinations or dreams of the characters by wrongly casting certain film experiences as perceptions of events that actually occur in the story world. In Wilson’s terms,24 spectators of such films enjoy the proper perceptual experiences but fail to endow them with the proper epistemic status, which is not the reliability of standard perception but rather the unreli- ability of illusion, hallucination or dream. In David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), at least according to a popular interpretation of the film,25 dream, memory and perception are combined in a way that can be grasped only after the fact. The first part of the film is presented from an allegedly neutral perceptual perspective but later reveals itself to be a dream of the protagonist Di- ane Selwyn. The material of that dream comes from Diane’s memories constituting the flashbacks that we find in the second part of the film, which also provides us with a neu- tral perceptual perspective on the last moments of Diane’s life, from her waking up from her dream to her suicide. 24 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164. 25 See for instance B. Wyman, M. Garrone, A. Klein, “Everything you were afraid to ask about Mulholland Drive”, Salon (October 24, 2001), https://www.salon.com/2001/10/24/ mulholland_drive_analysis/; P. Bertetto, “L’analisi interpretativa. Mulholland Drive”, in P. Bertetto, ed., Metodologie di analisi del film (Rome-Bari: Laterza: 2007): 223-255. ENRICO TERRONE 88 AN-ICON  The phenomenological virtues of virtual reality compared to film While film provides us with a disembodied per- ceptual experience, virtual reality makes us perceive an egocentric space, that is, a space which is centered in our body in the way the space of ordinary perception is. Both or- dinary perception and virtual-reality experience are such as that our bodily movements correspond to change in our viewpoint whereas the viewpoint of film experience is in- dependent from the viewer’s body. Virtual reality thus shares with theater a sig- nificant proximity to ordinary perception that film, instead, lacks. Should we conclude that virtual reality, just like the- ater, is less apt than film to approximate to non-perceptual mental states such as memory or imagination? Not so. Film experience, as disembodied perception, is already an altered state in comparison to ordinary per- ception. Nothing else remains to be altered at the phenom- enological level. The only possible alterations, as I have argued earlier, are alterations in the epistemic status of our perceptual experience: clues in the context or in the content of film experience may lead us to cast it as the memory or the imagining of a character, or even as a de- ceptive experience such as an illusion, an hallucination or a dream. Virtual-reality experience and theater experience, on the other hand, are not intrinsically altered; they work just as ordinary perception works. Yet, virtual-reality expe- rience can be altered in a way in which theater experience surely cannot be altered. Even though the default mode of virtual-reality experience is the emulation of ordinary perception, a virtual reality system might be designed so to provide users with experiences of completely different kinds. Whether and how such experience can effectively emulate memory episodes and imaginings remains an open question. Arguably the emulation of perception has been the main aim of virtual reality technology so far. Still, this technology has also a potential for altering its basic per- ceptual mode thereby getting the user’s experience closer ENRICO TERRONE 89 AN-ICON  to other kinds of mental states. Emulating memory and imagination through perception, the great challenge for filmmakers in the twentieth century, might become the great challenge for virtual-reality makers in the twenty-first. Para- phrasing Panofsky’s statement, virtual reality might open up a world of possibilities of which film can never dream. ENRICO TERRONE 90 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/15158

Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual Filmreality by Enrico Terrone Virtual Reality Perception Memory Imagination Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual reality by Enrico Terrone Abstract This paper casts film experience as a sort of disembodied perception. I will show how this experience can be manipulated and altered in order to approximate to mental states of fictional characters, in particular embodied perception, memory and imagination. I will acknowledge that film experience can approximate to non-perceptual at- titudes such as memory and imagination much better than the experience elicited by theater. Yet, I will contend, film experience cannot emulate the phenomenology of non-per- ceptual attitudes since it remains a sort of disembodied perception even when it is manipulated by filmmakers in order to approximate memory states or imaginative states of fictional characters. Finally, I will argue that virtual real- ity, in virtue of both its proximity to embodied perception and its potential for manipulation, is, in principle, in a bet- ter position than film when it comes to trying to emulate non-perceptual attitudes such as memory and imagination. Film Virtual Reality Perception Memory Imagination To quote this essay: E. Terrone, “Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual reality”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 69-90 ENRICO TERRONE 69 AN-ICON  Cloe sees a black cat, Jack remembers a black cat, Lisa imagines a black cat. According to representa- tionalist conceptions of the mind,1 Cloe’s, Jack’s and Li- sa’s mental states have the same representational content, namely a black cat, and yet they differ as regards their attitude, that is, the way that content is represented. Per- ceiving a black cat, remembering a black cat and imagin- ing a black cat are three different experiences in virtue of three different attitudes. Specifically, according to Uriah Kriegel’s “Sartrean account”,2 the perceptual attitude rep- resents-as-present its content, the memory attitude rep- resents-as-past its content, and the imaginative attitude represents-as-possible its content. All this raises an interesting issue about film experience. On the one hand, according to experiential theories of depiction,3 films provide us with experiences whose “pictorial attitude” somehow emulates the perceptual attitude. On the other hand, scholars such as Hugo Mün- sterberg or Erwin Panofsky have stated that films allow us to share not only the perceptual point of view of fictional characters but also their inner life, which involves states such as memory or imagination.4 These two statements are in tension: if the pictorial attitude which characterizes film experience is a sort of perceptual attitude, how can film spectators enjoy experiences based on memory attitudes or imaginative attitudes? I will argue that the spectator cannot enjoy the latter experiences. The spectator can only ascribe such experiences to characters by relying on the perceptual experience she is enjoying. Finally, I will argue that, quite 1 T. Crane, “The intentional structure of consciousness”, in A. Jokic, Q. Smith, eds., Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 33- 56; D. Chalmers. “The representational character of experience”, in B. Leiter, ed., The Future for Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 153-180. 2 U. Kriegel, “Perception and imagination. A Sartrean account”, in S. Miguens, G. Preyer, C. Bravo Morando, eds., Prereflective Consciousness: Early Sartre in the Context of Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (London: Routledge, 2015): 257-288. 3 R. Hopkins, “Depiction”, in P. Livingston, C. Plantinga, eds., The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (London: Routledge, 2009): 64-74. 4 H. Münsterberg, The Photoplay: a Psychological Study (New York: Appleton, 1916); E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures” (1934), in D. Talbot, ed., Film: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959): 15-32. ENRICO TERRONE 70 AN-ICON  surprisingly, virtual reality is in a better position than film as regards the emulation of non-perceptual attitudes. Film experience as disembodied perception Film experience is a perceptual experience. The audience perceives objects and events taking place in the world that the film portrays. The Lumière Brothers Sortie des Usines Lumière (1895) is paradigmatic in this respect: the audience sees workers leaving the factory in a way that is analogous to the way one would see those workers if one were in front the factory. Analogous, however, does not mean identical. While in ordinary perception we experience things as organized in an “egocentric space”, that is, a space that has our body as its own center,5 in cinematic perception we experience things as organized in a space that has only our sight, not our body, as its own center. The space depicted is experienced as “detached” from our body.6 The spectator of Sortie des Usines Lumière sees workers exiting the factory from a standpoint in front of the factory, but she does not occupy that standpoint and she does not have the impression of occupying it. Even spectators of the Lumière Brothers L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) normally do not have the impres- sion of occupying the standpoint in front of the train, in spite of the popular fable that suggests otherwise.7 Film experience, so understood, is a disembod- ied perception. We can perceive things from a viewpoint that our body is not forced to occupy. It is worth noting that by “disembodied perception” here is just meant the percep- tion of a space in which our body does not have any place. Hence, film experience is disembodied only with respect to the experienced relationship between the spectator and 5 G. Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 6 N. Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 7 M. Loiperdinger, “Lumière’s arrival of the train. Cinema’s founding myth”, The Moving Image 4, no. 1 (2004): 89-118. ENRICO TERRONE 71 AN-ICON  the space portrayed. The spectator’s body, however, keeps playing a crucial role in the whole film experience which, as a twofold experience, also includes the spectator’s re- lationship to the space in which the film is screened.8 Even a paradigmatic essay on the embodied character of film experience, namely Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992), acknowledges that the perspective of the spectator as an embodied subject is different from the perspective on the world depicted that the film provides us with. Yet, Sob- chack states that film experience is embodied all the way through because there is a further body at work, namely, the film’s body: We recognize the moving picture as the work of an anonymous and sign-producing body subject intentionally marking visible choices with the very behavior of its bodily being. However, these choices are not initiated by the movement of our bodies or our intending consciousness. They are seen and visible as the visual and phys- ical choices of some body other than ourselves [...]. That some body is the film’s body.9 What does it exactly mean that the film has a body? This seems to be a suggestive metaphor that should be unpacked for rigorous theorizing. Sobchack offers the following characterization of the film’s body: “The cam- era its perceptive organ, the projector its expressive organ, the screen its discrete and material occupation of worldly space”.10 If the film’s body is just that, it comes down to a suggestive characterization of the film’s screening. Still Sobchack also insists on the “choices” that the alleged film’s body makes thereby determining our point of view on the space portrayed. Precisely because that point of view does not depend on the position and the movement of our 8 R. Hopkins, “Depiction”. See also E. Terrone, “Imagination and perception in film experience”, Ergo, no. 5 (2020): 161-190. 9 V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 278. Thanks to a referee for pushing me to discuss Sobchack’s view. 10 Ibid.: 299. ENRICO TERRONE 72 AN-ICON  body, I find it worthwhile to cast the experience it provides as disembodied. While ordinary perception, as an embodied experience, depends on the position and movement of our body, film experience is disembodied since it depends on choices that are not up to us. Whom are those choices up to? To the filmmaker for sure, and yet scholars like George Wilson argue that, in our engagement with fiction films, we rather experience those choices as the outcome of the “min- imal narrating agency” of a fictional narrator.11 Perhaps what Sobchack calls the film’s body may be an interesting char- acterization of how we experience the actual agency of the filmmaker or, if Wilson is right, the fictional agency of the narrator. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the film’s body is not the spectator’s body and I reckon that this is enough to warrant the characterization of film experience as disem- bodied perception. Such a disembodied nature of film experience has an interesting consequence. Since film experience, as disembodied perception, involves a point of view that does not depend on our body, that point of view can change without the need of moving our body. Neither Sortie des Usines Lumière nor L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ci- otat exploit this option, but later films do so by means of camera movements and editing. The specificity of film experience In ordinary perception we experience things as taking place in a determinate place and time, namely, here, the place where our body is, and now, the time when our experience occurs. In cinematic perception, on the other hand, place and time remain indeterminate. Our perception, as such, does not tell us where and when the things per- ceived take place. Cinematic perception needs a cognitive supplementation in order to fix the spatial and temporal coordinates of what one is perceiving. Films can provide 11 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 129. ENRICO TERRONE 73 AN-ICON  such supplementation either explicitly, by means of devices such as voice over and inscriptions, or implicitly, by relying on clues embedded in the scenes portrayed. Furthermore, film perception is not up to us in the way ordinary perception is. In the latter, I can decide, at least to a certain extent, what I am going to perceive. In film experience, instead, I am completely deprived of au- tonomy. In other words, film experience is predetermined in a way ordinary experience is not. One might say that ordinary perception is a natural experience whereas cine- matic perception is rather an artificial experience whereby we perceive what filmmakers (or narrators) have established for us. In the specific case of fiction films, filmmakers (or narrators) guide us in the perceptual exploration of fictional worlds. That is arguably the most insightful way of unpack- ing Sobchack’s metaphor of the film’s body. Let me consider, as an example, David W. Grif- fith’s An Unseen Enemy (1912), which tells the story of two orphan sisters whose heritage is threatened by a treach- erous housekeeper and her accomplice. We discover this story through a series of disembodied perceptual expe- riences of the same kind as those elicited by Sortie des Usines Lumière and L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat. We see the two orphans, then the housekeeper, then the elder brother of the two girls who places the heritage in the safe, then the housekeeper who spies him, and so on and so forth. The filmmaker has designed this series of percep- tions in a way that provides us with a sort of “unrestricted epistemic access” to the relevant facts of the story.12 Unlike the two orphans, we are aware from the beginning of the threat coming from the housekeeper. Moreover, unlike the housekeeper, we are aware of the brother’s attempt to help his sisters and prevent theft. In sum, the spectator of An Unseen Enemy perceives more, and therefore knows more, than the characters in the story; the “enemy” is “unseen” only for the characters, not for the audience. 12 G.M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). ENRICO TERRONE 74 AN-ICON  This is the basic functioning of fiction films, which corresponds to the omniscient narrator in literature. However, other configurations are possible in which the audience’s knowledge of relevant facts is “restricted” to that available to characters or is even narrower than the latter.13 For example, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1948) the audience’s knowledge is as restricted as that of the character L.B. Jef- feries (with one important exception, however: we see the murderer leaving his apartment with his lover while Jefferies is sleeping). In Pablo Larrain’s Ema (2019), the audience’s knowledge is even narrower than that of the eponymous heroine; the latter has access from the beginning to the truth about the new adoptive parents of her son whereas the audience will discover this truth only at the end of the film. A further restriction that affects film experience concerns the mode of this experience, which is just dis- embodied perception. In ordinary experience, on the other hand, one can enjoy a variety of experiential attitudes: em- bodied perception, first of all, but also memory and imag- ination, and possibly perceptual illusion, hallucination and dream. Here is another sense in which the audience can find it hard to know what characters know. What is at stake here is phenomenal knowledge, that is, knowing what it is like for a subject to undergo a certain experience. For sure, empathy may enable the audience to acquire phenomenal knowledge concerning the affective and emotional dimension of a fictional character’s expe- rience.14 For instance, the audience can share the char- acter’s fear or the character’s surprise. Yet, affects and emotions are evaluative mental states that are grafted onto more basic cognitive states such as perceptions, memo- ries, and imaginings,15 whose distinctive attitude is sure- ly harder to access through empathy. The audience may deploy empathy to know what it is like to for a character to feel fear or joy but something more is required to grasp 13 Ibid. 14 J. Stadler, “Empathy and film”, in H.L. Maibom, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (London: Routledge, 2016): 317-326. Thanks to a referee for leading me to consider the role of empathy. 15 K. Mulligan, “From appropriate emotions to values”, The Monist 81, no. 1 (1998): 161-188. ENRICO TERRONE 75 AN-ICON  the phenomenal difference between an embodied percep- tual experience and a memory episode or an imagining. Filmmakers are thus challenged to design disembodied perceptual experiences that can approximate to the ba- sic cognitive experiences enjoyed by characters, thereby leading the audience to grasp what is going on in the char- acters’ minds. This is arguably one of the most fascinating challenges that cinema has addressed along its history. Approximating to embodied perception Although film experience and ordinary percep- tion are both perceptual experiences, they differ inasmuch the latter is embodied in a way the former is not. That is why, in ordinary experience, we can move towards the things we perceive and possibly touch them, but we cannot do so in film experience. The usual way in which filmmakers lead the audience to share the embodied perceptual experience of a character consists in providing the audience with a standpoint that corresponds to that of the character. This mode of representation, which is usually called “subjective shot”, enables us to share the visual perspective of the character in spite of the fact that our body does not occupy the corresponding standpoint, which is instead occupied by the character’s body. As Kendall Walton puts it, Following a shot of a character looking out a window, there is a shot of a scene outside. Watching the second shot, we imagine observing the scene, and we judge that the character looking out the window has an experience “like this”, like the one we imagine enjoying. We do not attribute to the character an experience (much) like our actual visual experience, a visual experience of a film shot, of a depiction of the scene outside the window. The experience we attribute to the character is like our actual one only insofar as imagining seeing is like actually seeing.16 16 K.L. Walton, “Fictionality and imagination – mind the gap”, in In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015): 17-35, 13. ENRICO TERRONE 76 AN-ICON  Let me assume that what Walton calls “imag- ining seeing”, here, matches what I call “disembodied per- ception”. Under this assumption, we can interpret Walton’s last sentence as stating that the experience elicited by the point-of-view remains a disembodied perception, which is not identical with, but only approximates to, the embodied perception of the character. Overlooking this limitation can lead to disastrous effects. Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947), for example, aims to turn the audience’s disembodied perception into the perceptual experience of the main character along the whole duration of the film, but the result is just that the audience has “the impression that there is a camera by the name of ‘Philip Marlowe’ stumbling around Los Angeles and passing itself off as the well-known human being of the same name”.17 In fact, more cautious and parsimonious uses of the subjective shot can have outstanding aesthetic ef- fects. Griffith’s An Unseen Enemy is exemplary in this re- spect. I pointed out earlier that the film is based on “ob- jective” shots from neutral standpoints that are aimed to elicit pure disembodied experiences from the audience. Yet, quite exceptionally, one subjective shot emphasizes the most dramatic passage of the story. This shot is a close- up of the gun that the housekeeper passes through a hole in the door of the room where the two sisters took refuge (Fig. 1). We see the gun from the standpoint of the young- er sister (Fig. 2), and this subjective shot emphasizes the centrality of that character in the narrative. Fig. 1. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. 17 G.M. Wilson, Narration in Light: 86. ENRICO TERRONE 77 AN-ICON  Fig. 2. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. She is the one who has a psychological and relational arc of transformation along the story: at the be- ginning she refuses reluctantly to kiss her boyfriend but in the last image of the film she finally accepts the kiss. It is tempting to see the film as a sort of bildungsroman of this girl; specifically, her initiation to sexuality. This hermeneutic temptation is encouraged by the subjective shot in which the gun passing through the hole evokes a sort of phallic figure. The next shot shows that the girl is horrified by the gun. Later in the story, however, she finds the courage to try to grasp the gun, and then slumps back (Fig. 3 and 4). Fig. 3. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. Fig. 4. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. ENRICO TERRONE 78 AN-ICON  Interestingly, the editing connects this image of the girl to the image of her boyfriend walking in the fields (Fig. 5). Fig. 5. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. This link does not seem to be motivated by the course of the narrative but rather by a sort of symbolic pattern. Approximating to memory The experience of the spectator who watches a film such as An Unseen Enemy consists in a series of per- ceptual perspectives on the fictional world. Many of them are from a neutral, unoccupied point of view but some of them can match the perceptual point of view of a charac- ter. Most films function in this way. Some films even try to make us share the perceptual point of view of non-human characters. For example, John McTiernan’s Predator (1987) makes us share the perceptual point of view of an alien creature, and Pietro Marcello’s Bella e perduta (2015) that of a buffalo. On the other hand, there are films that do not limit themselves to making us share the perceptions of certain fictional characters but also aim to make us share other basic cognitive states of them. Let me begin with the case of memory. At the turning point of Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), Rick remembers his love affair with Ilsa in Paris. The combination of the movement of the camera towards Rick’s face with the crescendo of the music and the white dissolve indicates that the following scenes are to be taken as memories of Rick (Figg. 6,7 and 8). Yet, the kind of experience whereby the spectator experiences this scene is perception, not memory. ENRICO TERRONE 79 AN-ICON  The flashback makes us perceive the events that Rick is remembering rather than his memory experience. We have not the impression of remembering those events, that is, we are not enjoying the peculiar phenomenology of memory. Rather, we keep perceiving those past events set in Paris in the same disembodied way in which we were perceiv- ing the present events set in Casablanca which have been portrayed before the flashback. Fig. 6. Michael Curtiz, Casablanca, 1942. Still from film. Fig. 7. Michael Curtiz, Casablanca, 1942. Still from film. Fig. 8. Michael Curtiz, Casablanca, 1942. Still from film. ENRICO TERRONE 80 AN-ICON  Memory experiences usually are fragmentary, in- complete and unstable whereas the Paris events portrayed in the film exhibit the typical accuracy, fluidity and stability of perception. Moreover, memory experiences typically in- volve a first-person perspective whereas most shots in the Casablanca flashback are taken from a neutral objective perspective, not from Rick’s perspective. Most importantly, memory experiences, as such, involve a feeling of pastness whatever their content, whereas our experience of these scenes of Casablanca lack that phenomenological hall- mark. Although Rick is represented as remembering, the flashback only makes us perceive what is remembered, the content of his memory. This is the standard way in which flashbacks encode memory in film. We do not think that Rick’s memory experience is like this. We just think that we are seeing (in a perceptual attitude) the events that Rick is remembering (in the memory attitude). At most, certain films can use stylistic device such as blurred images or shift from color to black and white in order to stress that the spectator’s perceptual experience is meant to encode another kind of mental state. Yet, the spectator experience remains perceptual in nature. Seeing blurry or seeing in black and white are still ways of seeing. Perhaps a better way of getting the spectator closer to the memory state of a character might consist in casting as a flashback a shot that was previously conjugat- ed in the present tense. For example, in François Truffaut’s L’amour en fuite (1979) flashbacks are made of shots of previous films of the Antoine Doinel series, so that the spec- tator shares Antoine’s experience of remembering those events. Yet, these cases are quite exceptional. In most films that use flashbacks, only the character is undergoing a memory experience while the spectator is rather enjoying a disembodied perception. Approximating to imagination Memory differs from imagination in that one remembers events that one previously perceived whereas ENRICO TERRONE 81 AN-ICON  the events imagined could not have been perceived. Imag- ination indeed, unlike memory, can represent events that did not take place. So, when in John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar (1963) Billy images himself to be the ruler of an imaginary country called Ambrosia, we cannot perceive the corre- sponding events in the story world of Billy Liar because there are no such events in that world. However, the way in which Billy Liar’s spectators are invited to consider Billy’s imaginings is analogous to that in which Casablanca’s spectators are invited to consider Rick’s memories. That is, the combination of a camera movement towards the character’s face with music and visual dissolve (Figg. 9, 10 and 11). In Billy Liar, the shift to imagination is also stressed by the inner voice of Billy himself who says: “It was a big day for us. We had won the war in Ambrosia. Democracy was back once more in our beloved country...”. Yet, the experience that this segment of Billy Liar elicits from its spectators remains a perceptual experience. We see Billy on a tank in the middle of the crowd which celebrates his triumph in the war. Just as Casablanca makes us perceive the events that Rick is re- membering, Billy Liar makes us perceive the events that Billy is imagining. The difference is just that the events remem- bered belongs to the story world of Casablanca, whereas the events imagined do not belong to the story world of Billy Liar. Rather, those events belong to a nested fictional world, which the filmmaker has built up within the main fiction in order to represent Billy’s imagining.18 Fig. 9. John Schlesinger, Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film. 18 On the notion of nested world, see K.L. Walton, “Fictionality and imagination”. ENRICO TERRONE 82 AN-ICON  Fig. 10. John Schlesinger, Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film. Fig. 11. John Schlesinger, Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film. Billy Liar does not make us share the imagina- tive experience of Billy, just as Casablanca did not make us share the memory experience of Rick. Imaginings, indeed, usually lack the kind of accuracy, fluidity, objectivity and stability that characterizes our perceptual experience of the events imagined by Billy. Moreover, imaginative experienc- es, as such, should involve a feeling of unreality whatever their content whereas our experience of these scenes of Billy Liar lacks such phenomenological hallmark. The con- tent of our perception, namely, Billy’s triumph, may look weird and non-realistic but we experience it in the same way in which we experience other scenes of the film that look much more realistic. Thus, films such as Billy Liar do not make us share the imaginative states of fictional char- acters but only approximate to such states by providing us with perceptual experiences of nested fictional worlds. Altering the epistemic status of film experience From a phenomenological perspective, there is just one basic experiential attitude that film spectators ENRICO TERRONE 83 AN-ICON  can take towards the fictional events portrayed. Wilson,19 following Walton,20 calls it “imagining seeing” while I prefer to dub it “disembodied perception”. That said, there are different ways in which spectators can relate this experi- ence to the fictional world they are exploring; this is what Wilson calls the “the epistemic status of the contents of their imagined seeing”.21 The default assumption about the epistemic status of film experience is that we are perceiving the fic- tional world as it is, from a neutral perspective that does not match the point of view of anybody. In other words, the basic epistemic status of film experience is pure perceptual knowledge. Yet, this basic epistemic status can be altered by cues coming from the content or the context of our per- ceptual experience. The main way of altering the epistemic status consists in a shift from the neutral viewpoint of the spectator as a detached observer to the subjective view- point of a character. In such cases, the spectator is invited to relate what she is perceiving in a disembodied way to the embodied perception or memory or imagination of a certain character. Yet, the spectator’s experience does not turn into an embodied perception or memory or imagina- tion. It remains a disembodied perception; only its epistemic status undergoes alteration. In the default case, we cast our disembodied experience merely as a source of perceptual knowledge about the objective facts of the fictional world. In the altered states, on the other hand, we cast our disem- bodied experience as a source of knowledge concerning also (in the case of embodied perception and memory) or only (in the case of imagination) the subjectivity of a character. Some films leave the epistemic status of cer- tain shots indeterminate. In Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Straw- berries (1957), for instance, it is not evident whether the protagonist Isak Borg is remembering or rather imagining certain episodes of his teenage. Spectators just perceive 19 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164. 20 K.L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 21 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164. ENRICO TERRONE 84 AN-ICON  such episodes in the usual disembodied way and acknowl- edge that something is going on in Isak’s mind rather than in the outer world. One might say that the spectator per- ceives a nested fictional world which is made of elements coming from both Isak’s memory and Isak’s imagination, but she cannot precisely tell the imaginative elements from the memory elements. The epistemic status of these shots thus remains indeterminate: suspended, as it were, between memory and imagination. Likewise, the scenes of Federico Fellini’s Otto e mezzo (1963) that portray the protagonist Guido Anselmi in his childhood (being bathed in wine lees and then put in bed; playing football in the schoolyard and then visiting Saraghina; being punished by the priests and then returning to Saraghina) have an inde- terminate epistemic status which lies between memory and imagination. The spectator has a perceptual disembodied experience of a nested fictional world which is made of elements arguably coming from both Guido’s imagination and Guido’s memory, but she finds it hard to precisely dis- tinguish what is coming from where. The phenomenological virtues of film compared to theater If film experience is just a kind of perceptual experience which can at most approximate to other mental states such as memory or imagination, why scholars like Münsterberg and Panofsky have stated that films can lead spectators to enjoy the latter mental states? I propose a historical explanation according to which statements such as Münsterberg’s or Panofsky’s are to be read as comparisons between film and theater. Both these forms of art invite the spectator to enjoy a per- ceptual experience of a fictional world. Yet, the experience that theater elicits from the spectator is ordinary embod- ied perception whereas film experience is a peculiar kind of disembodied perception. At the theater, the spectator sees the play from a standpoint that corresponds to the standpoint of her body, and that standpoint can change ENRICO TERRONE 85 AN-ICON  if the body moves. Slightly moving one’s head can be sufficient to change one’s perspective on the events por- trayed by a play; if one moved closer to the stage, one would even perceive those events from a closer standpoint. In this sense, theater experience works just as ordinary perception; it is as if fictional events had been magical- ly transported in our own environment, in our egocentric space. In film experience, on the other hand, it is the spec- tator’s viewpoint that seems to be magically transported in the middle of fictional events even though her body firmly remains in her seat. Film experience is thus independent from the spectator’s bodily movement in a way theater ex- perience is not. This is what motivates the characterization of film experience as a sort of disembodied perception. Thus, film experience is much more flexible than theater experience when it comes to approximating to other mental states such as memory or imagination, whose content also is quite independent from the position and the possible movements of one’s body. Panofsky nicely makes this point when he writes: In a theater, space is static, that is, the space represented on the stage, as well as the spatial relation of the beholder to the spectacle, is unalterably fixed. [.. ] With the movies the situation is reversed. Here, too, the spectator occupies a fixed seat, but only physically, not as the subject of an aesthetic experience. Aesthetically, he is in permanent motion as his eye identifies itself with the lens of the camera, which permanently shifts in distance and direction. [.. ] This opens up a world of possibilities of which the stage can never dream.22 Among the possibilities of film in comparison with theater, there is surely the capacity to lead the spec- tator in the proximity of the mental states of the characters. Yet, this does not mean that, in those cases, film experience turns into a memory experience or into an imaginative ex- perience; it remains a perceptual experience, though one aimed at approximating to other mental states. 22 E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures”: 18-19. ENRICO TERRONE 86 AN-ICON  Film experience, as a disembodied perceptual experience, reveals itself to be especially apt to emulate mental states such as perceptual illusion, hallucination and dream, whose attitude is not as distinct from that of per- ception as it is the attitude of memory or that of imagina- tion. One can cast perceptual illusions, hallucinations and dreams as perceptual experiences that, unlike standard perception, fail to represent things as they are. Specifical- ly, perceptual illusions lead the perceiver to cast things as having properties they do not actually have, while “partial hallucinations” lead her to perceive things that actually have not their place in her environment, and “total hallucinations”, just like dreams, leads the subject to experience a totally made up environment.23 Ordinary perception is somehow authoritative as for the reality of its content, and theater experience tends to inherit this epistemic authority, which it applies to the story world. Film experience, on the other hand, has a weaker epistemic authority despite its perceptual character. I contend that this depends on its peculiarly disembodied attitude. While watching a film, we have the impression of seeing characters who inhabit the story world, and events that occur in it, and we usually tend to endorse such im- pression thereby acquiring pieces of information about the story world. Yet, we do not perceive these events as occur- ring in the environment we inhabit with our body, and this somehow affect the degree of reliability of those pieces of information. Even though we tend to cast film experienc- es as a perception of events in the fictional world, we are disposed to acknowledge that this experience might mis- lead us as regards the way things are in that world. In this sense, film experience is a perceptual experience that can get closer than standard perception and theater experience to illusion, hallucination and dream. 23 For the distinction between partial and total hallucinations, see A.D. Smith, The Problem of Perception (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002): 193. Note that I am putting total hallucination and dreams on a par not because I think they are, but just because I reckon that discussing their difference goes beyond the scope of this paper. ENRICO TERRONE 87 AN-ICON  If the perceptual experience is a genus among whose species one can find not only standard perception but also illusion, hallucination, and dream, then film ex- perience can be cast as a peculiar further species of the genus, which can emulate all the other mental states of that genus. This fact is exploited by those films that lead the spectator to share the deceptive perceptual experi- ences of a character. In films such as David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001) we share the partial hallucination of the heroes by being in turn deceived by our perceptual experience of the events portrayed. Likewise, in films such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) or Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944), we share the total hallucinations or dreams of the characters by wrongly casting certain film experiences as perceptions of events that actually occur in the story world. In Wilson’s terms,24 spectators of such films enjoy the proper perceptual experiences but fail to endow them with the proper epistemic status, which is not the reliability of standard perception but rather the unreli- ability of illusion, hallucination or dream. In David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), at least according to a popular interpretation of the film,25 dream, memory and perception are combined in a way that can be grasped only after the fact. The first part of the film is presented from an allegedly neutral perceptual perspective but later reveals itself to be a dream of the protagonist Di- ane Selwyn. The material of that dream comes from Diane’s memories constituting the flashbacks that we find in the second part of the film, which also provides us with a neu- tral perceptual perspective on the last moments of Diane’s life, from her waking up from her dream to her suicide. 24 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164. 25 See for instance B. Wyman, M. Garrone, A. Klein, “Everything you were afraid to ask about Mulholland Drive”, Salon (October 24, 2001), https://www.salon.com/2001/10/24/ mulholland_drive_analysis/; P. Bertetto, “L’analisi interpretativa. Mulholland Drive”, in P. Bertetto, ed., Metodologie di analisi del film (Rome-Bari: Laterza: 2007): 223-255. ENRICO TERRONE 88 AN-ICON  The phenomenological virtues of virtual reality compared to film While film provides us with a disembodied per- ceptual experience, virtual reality makes us perceive an egocentric space, that is, a space which is centered in our body in the way the space of ordinary perception is. Both or- dinary perception and virtual-reality experience are such as that our bodily movements correspond to change in our viewpoint whereas the viewpoint of film experience is in- dependent from the viewer’s body. Virtual reality thus shares with theater a sig- nificant proximity to ordinary perception that film, instead, lacks. Should we conclude that virtual reality, just like the- ater, is less apt than film to approximate to non-perceptual mental states such as memory or imagination? Not so. Film experience, as disembodied perception, is already an altered state in comparison to ordinary per- ception. Nothing else remains to be altered at the phenom- enological level. The only possible alterations, as I have argued earlier, are alterations in the epistemic status of our perceptual experience: clues in the context or in the content of film experience may lead us to cast it as the memory or the imagining of a character, or even as a de- ceptive experience such as an illusion, an hallucination or a dream. Virtual-reality experience and theater experience, on the other hand, are not intrinsically altered; they work just as ordinary perception works. Yet, virtual-reality expe- rience can be altered in a way in which theater experience surely cannot be altered. Even though the default mode of virtual-reality experience is the emulation of ordinary perception, a virtual reality system might be designed so to provide users with experiences of completely different kinds. Whether and how such experience can effectively emulate memory episodes and imaginings remains an open question. Arguably the emulation of perception has been the main aim of virtual reality technology so far. Still, this technology has also a potential for altering its basic per- ceptual mode thereby getting the user’s experience closer ENRICO TERRONE 89 AN-ICON  to other kinds of mental states. Emulating memory and imagination through perception, the great challenge for filmmakers in the twentieth century, might become the great challenge for virtual-reality makers in the twenty-first. Para- phrasing Panofsky’s statement, virtual reality might open up a world of possibilities of which film can never dream. ENRICO TERRONE 90 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/15460

On the altered states of machine vision. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory by Antonio Somaini Chatonsky Machine learning Digital images Paglen Steyerl Chatonsky Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti On the altered states of machine vision. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory Chatonsky by Antonio Somaini Abstract The landscape of contemporary visual culture and contemporary artistic practices is currently undergo- ing profound transformations caused by the application of technologies of machine learning to the vast domain of networked digital images. The impact of such technologies is so profound that it leads us to raise the very question of what we mean by “vision” and “image” in the age of artifi- cial intelligence. This paper will focus on the work of three artists – Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory Chatonsky – who have recently employed technologies of machine learning in non-standard ways. Rather than using them to train systems of machine vision with their different op- erations (face and emotion recognition, object and move- ment detection, etc.) and their different fields of application (surveillance, policing, process control, driverless vehicle guidance, etc.), they have used them in order to produce entirely new images, never seen before, that they present as altered states of the machine itself. Machine learning Digital images Paglen Steyerl Chatonsky To quote this essay: A. Somaini, “On the altered states of machine vision. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory Chatonsky”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 91-111 ANTONIO SOMAINI 91 AN-ICON  The landscape of contemporary visual culture and contemporary artistic practices is currently undergo- ing profound transformations caused by the application of technologies of machine learning – one of the areas of so-called “artificial intelligence” – to the vast domain of networked digital images. Three strictly interrelated phe- nomena, in particular, are producing a real tectonic shift in the contemporary iconosphere, introducing new ways of “seeing” and new “images” – we’ll return later to the mean- ing of these quotation marks – that extend and reorganize the field of the visible, while redrawing the borders between what can and what cannot be seen. These three strictly interrelated phenomena are: ჸ the new technologies of machine vision fuelled by pro- cesses of machine learning such as the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN); ჸ the ever-growing presence on the internet of trillions of networked digital images that are machine-readable, in the sense that they can be seen and analyzed by such technologies of ma- chine vision; ჸ the entirely new images that the processes of machine learning may generate. Considered from the perspective of the longue durée of the history of images and visual media, the ap- pearance of these three phenomena raises a whole series of aesthetic, epistemological, ontological, historical and political questions. Their impact onto contemporary visu- al culture is so profound that it leads us to raise the very question of what we mean by “vision” and “image” in the age of artificial intelligence. What is “seeing” when the human psycho-phys- iological process of vision is reduced, in the case of machine vision technologies, to entirely automated operations of pat- tern recognition and labelling, and when the various appli- cations of such operations (face and emotion recognition, object and motion detection) may be deployed across an ex- tremely vast visual field (all the still and moving images acces- sible online) that no human eye could ever attain? In speak- ing of “machine vision”, are we using an anthropomorphic ANTONIO SOMAINI 92 AN-ICON  term that we should discard in favor of a different set of technical terms, specifically related to the field of computer science and data analysis, that bear no connection with the physiological and psychological dynamics of human vision? Artists-researchers such as Francis Hunger and scholars such as Andreas Broeckmann (with his notion of “optical calculus” as “an unthinking, mindless mechanism, a calcu- lation based on optically derived input data, abstracted into calculable values, which can become part of computational procedures and operations”),1 Adrian MacKenzie and Anna Munster (with their ideas of a “platform seeing” operating onto “image ensembles” through an “invisual perception”),2 Fabian Offert and Peter Bell (with their idea according to which the “perceptual topology” of machines is irreconcil- able with human perception)3 have argued for the necessity of moving beyond anthropocentric frameworks and terms, highlighting the fact that machine vision poses a real chal- lenge for the humanities. Can we still use the term “image” for a digital file, encoded in some image format,4 that is machine-read- able even when it is not visible by human eyes, or that be- comes visible on a screen as a pattern of pixels only for a small fraction of time, spending the rest of its indefinite lifespan circulating across invisible digital networks? Can concepts such as that of “iconic difference” [ikonische Dif- ferenz],5 which highlights the fundamental perceptual dif- ference between an image and its surroundings (its “hors champ”) be still applied to machine-readable images? And what is the status of the entirely new im- ages produced by processes of machine learning? These 1 A. Broeckmann, “Optical Calculus”, paper presented November 2020 at the conference Images Beyond Control, FAMU, Prague, video, 5:01, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=FnAgBbInMfA. 2 A. MacKenzie, A. Munster, “Platform Seeing: Image Ensembles and Their Invisualities”, Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 5 (2019): 3-22. 3 F. Offert, P. Bell, “Perceptual bias and technical metapictures: critical machine vision as a humanities challenge”, AI & Society (2020), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146- 020-01058-z. 4 On the theory of formats, see M. Jancovic, A. Schneider, A. Volmar, eds., Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media Cultures (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2019). 5 On the notion of “iconic difference”, see G. Boehm, “Ikonische Differenz”, Rheinsprung 11. Zeitschrift für Bildkritik 1 (2011): 170-176. ANTONIO SOMAINI 93 AN-ICON  are images that are not produced through some traditional form of lens-based analog or digital optical recording, nor through traditional computer-generated imagery (CGI) sys- tems, but rather through processes belonging to the wide realm of artificial intelligence that either transform existing images in ways that were impossible until a few years ago, or create entirely new images, never seen before. What do such images represent, what kind of agency do they have, how do they mediate our visual relation to the past, the present, and the future? And why have such new images generated by processes of machine learning been so of- ten considered, both in popular culture and in the work of contemporary artists, to be the product of some kind of altered state – a “dream”, a “hallucination”, a “vision”, an “artificial imagination” – of the machine itself? Before we analyse the way in which this last question is raised, in different ways, by popular computer programs such as Google’s DeepDream (whose initial name echoed Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film “Inception”), and by the recent work of contemporary artists and theorists such as Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl and Grégory Chatonsky, let us begin with a quick overview of the current state of ma- chine vision technologies, with their operations and appli- cations, and of the new images produced by processes of machine learning that are increasingly appearing through- out contemporary visual culture. The impact of machine learning technologies onto contemporary visual culture First tested in the late 1950s, with image rec- ognition machines such as the Perceptron (developed at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory by Frank Rosenblatt in 1957), and then developed during the 1960s and 1970s as a way of imitating the human visual system in order to endow robots with intelligent behavior, machine vision technologies have entered a new phase, in recent years, with the development of machine learning processes, ANTONIO SOMAINI 94 AN-ICON  and with the possibility of using immense image databases accessible online as both training sets and fields of appli- cation.6 If in the 1960s and 1970s the goal was mainly to extract three-dimensional structures from images through the localization of edges, the labelling of lines, the detection of shapes and the modelling of volumes through feature extraction techniques such as the Hough transform (invent- ed by Richard Duda and Peter Hart in 1972, on the basis of a 1962 patent by Paul Hough), the recent development of machine learning techniques and the use of vast image training sets organized according to precise taxonomies – such as ImageNet, in which 14 millions of images are organized according to 21,000 categories derived from the WordNet hierarchy (a large lexical database of English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs)7 – have allowed a rapid increase in the precision of all the operations of ma- chine vision. Among such operations, we find pixel counting; segmenting, sorting, and thresholding; feature, edge, and depth detection; pattern recognition and discrimination; object detection, tracking, and measurement; motion cap- ture; color analysis; optical character recognition (this last operation allowing for the reading of words and texts within images, extending the act of machine “seeing” to a form of machine “reading”). For a few years now, such operations have been applied to the immense field of machine-readable images. A field whose dimensions may be imagined only if we understand that any networked digital image – wheth- er produced through some kind of optical recording, or entirely computer-generated, or a mix of the two, as it is often the case – may be analysed by machine vision tech- nologies based on processes of machine learning such as the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN).8 Starting from vast training sets containing images similar to the 6 For a general overview of computer vision and computer imagery, with its historical developments, see S. Arcagni, L’occhio della macchina (Turin: Einaudi, 2018). 7 “ImageNet”, accessed November 3, 2021, http://www.image-net.org/. 8 I. Goodfellow et al., “Generative adversarial nets”, Advances in neural information processing systems (2014): 2672-2680. ANTONIO SOMAINI 95 AN-ICON  ones the system has to learn to identify, and feeding such training sets into an ensemble of two adversarial neural networks that act as a Generator and a Discriminator that are in competition against one another, the GAN-based machine vision systems have gradually become more and more precise in performing their tasks. All the main smart phone producers have equipped their devices with cam- eras and image processing technologies that turn every photo we take into a machine-readable image, and internet giants such as Google and Facebook, as well as a host of other companies, have developed machine vision and face recognition systems capable of analysing the immense quantity of fixed and moving images that exist on the in- ternet and that continue to be uploaded every day, raising all sorts of ethical and political issues and highlighting the need for a broader legal framework that for the moment is largely missing.9 Considered together, such machine vision sys- tems are turning the contemporary digital iconosphere and the entire array of contemporary screens, with their various dimensions and degrees of definition,10 into a vast field for data mining and data aggregation. A field in which faces, bodies, gestures, expressions, emotions, objects, move- ments, places, atmospheres and moods – but also voices and sounds, through technologies of machine hearing – may be identified, labelled, stored, organized, retrieved, and processed as data that can be quickly accessed and activated for a wide variety of purposes: from surveillance to policing, from marketing to advertising, from the mon- itoring of industrial processes to military operations, from the functioning of driverless vehicles to that of drones and robots, from the study of the inside of the human body through the analysis of medical imagining all the way up to 9 As I complete the final revisions of this essay, on 2 November 2021, Facebook just announced its decision to stop using facial-recognition software that could automatically recognize people in photos and videos posted on the social network: a massive shift for a company that is currently trying to reposition itself, also through the new company name Meta, adopted in October 2021. 10 On the aesthetic, epistemological, historical and political implications of the high and low definition of images, see F. Casetti, A. Somaini, eds., La haute et la basse définition des images. Photographie, cinéma, art contemporain, culture visuelle (Milan-Udine: Mimesis, 2021). ANTONIO SOMAINI 96 AN-ICON  the study of the surface of the Earth and of climate change through the analysis of satellite images. Even disciplines that might seem to be distant from the most common cur- rent applications of machine vision technologies, such as art history and film studies, are beginning to test the pos- sibilities introduced by such an automated gaze, capable of “seeing” and analyzing, according to different criteria, vast quantities of visual reproductions of artworks or vast corpuses of films and videos in an extremely short time.11 In order to fully understand the impact of ma- chine learning onto contemporary visual culture, we need to add, to the vast field of machine vision technologies that we just described, the new images produced by processes of machine learning – often, the same GAN that are used to train and apply machine vision systems – that either transform pre-existing images in ways that were impossible until a few years ago, or create entirely new images, never seen before. In the first case, we are referring to processes of machine learning capable of transforming existing imag- es that can have very different applications: producing 3D models of objects from 2D images; changing photographs of human faces in order to show how an individual’s ap- pearance might change with age (as with the app Face- App) or by merging a face with another face (Faceswap);12 animating in a highly realistic way the old photograph of a deceased person (Deep Nostalgia, developed by My- Heritage);13 creating street maps from satellite imagery;14 taking any given video, and “upscaling” it, by increasing its frame rate and its definition. An emblematic example 11 See for example the various experiments being developed at the Google Arts & Culture Lab: “Google Arts & Culture”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://artsandculture.google. com/, or the way in which the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam is testing new ways of accessing its collections through a program fuelled by machine vision systems: “Jan Bot”, accessed December 2, 2021, https://www.jan.bot/. 12 The website of Faceswap, which announces itself as “the leading free and OpenSource multiplatform Deepfakes software”: “Faceswap”, accessed November 3, 2021, https:// faceswap.dev/. 13 “Deep Nostalgia”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.myheritage.fr/deep-nostalgia. 14 R. Matheson, “Using artificial intelligence to enrich digital maps. Model tags road features based on satellite images, to improve GPS navigation in places with limited map data”, MIT News, January 23, 2020, https://news.mit.edu/2020/artificial-intelligence-digital-maps-0123. ANTONIO SOMAINI 97 AN-ICON  of this last application, which may alter significantly our experience of visual documents of the past, would be the videos realized by Denis Shiryaev15 in which, through a process of machine learning, a Lumière film such as L’Ar- rivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896) is transformed from the original 16 frames per second to 60 frames per second, from the original 1.33:1 format to a contemporary 16:9 format, and from the original, grainy 35mm analog film to a 4K digital resolution.16 In other examples of imag- es transformed by machine learning, the transformations are much more radical, as it happens with the so-called “deepfakes”: videos that use neural networks in order to ma- nipulate the images and the sounds of pre-existing videos – in some cases a single, pre-existing image – producing new videos that have a high potential to deceive. Among the many examples that can now be found across the in- ternet in different domains such as pornography, politics and social media, pornographic videos in which faces of celebrities are swapped onto the bodies of porn actors, a TikTok account with a whole series of odd videos by a “Deep Tom Cruise”,17 or speeches by public figures such as Barack Obama18 and Queen Elizabeth19 whose content has been completely altered in such a way that the movements of their mouths perfectly match the new, invented words they are uttering. And among the applications of deepfakes in the musical realm, the “new” songs by long deceased singers, whose style and voice are reproduced in a highly realistic way by applications of machine learning such as Jukebox, developed by OpenAI20: a “resurrecting” function 15 “Denis Shiryaev”, Youtube channel, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.youtube. com/c/DenisShiryaev/videos. For an online platform offering video enhancement powered by AI, see: “Neural Love”, accessed December 2, 2021, https://neural.love/. 16 The video of the upscaled version of L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896) can be found all across YouTube, in various black-and-white and colored version. For a version in color, see: Deoldify videos, “[DeOldified] Arrival on a Train at La Ciotat (The Lumière Brothers, 1896)”, Youtube video, February 4, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqbOhqXHL7E. 17 “Deep Tom Cruise”, TikTok account, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.tiktok. com/@deeptomcruise. 18 BuzzFeed Video, “You Won’t Believe What Obama Says in This Video!”, Youtube video, April 17, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0. 19 Channel 4, “Deepfake Queen: 2020 Alternative Christmas Message”, Youtube video, December 25, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvY-Abd2FfM. 20 “Jukebox”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 98 AN-ICON  that in the animated photographs of deceased persons of Deep Nostalgia. In the second case, the use of machine learning processes leads to the creation of entirely new images or sections of images: modelling patterns of motion (for ex- ample, crowd motion) in video, thereby leading computer generated imagery, in some cases fuelled by artificial intelli- gence, to produce new kinds of “contingent motion”;21 pro- ducing highly photorealistic images of objects and environ- ments for different kinds of advertising; inventing perfectly realistic faces of people that actually do not exist through open source softwares such as StyleGan and then make them accessible through projects such as Philip Wang’s This Person Does Not Exist.22 To these widespread applications of machine learning we may add the hybrid, unprecedented imagery produced by the software DeepDream, created in 2015 by the Google engineer and artist Alexander Mordvintsev: a program that uses Convolutional Neural Networks in order to enhance patterns in pre-existing images, creating a form of algorithmic pareidolia, the impression of seeing a figure where there is none, which is here generated by a process which repeatedly detects in a given image patterns and shapes that the machine vision system has been trained to see. 23 The result of such a recursive process, in which every new image is submitted again to the same kind of pattern and shape recognition, are images that recall an entire psychedelic iconography that spans through cinema, photography, the visual arts and even so-called art brut: images that are here presented as a sort of dream – a hal- lucinogenic, psychedelic dream – of the machine itself. 21 J. Schonig, “Contingent Motion: Rethinking the ‘Wind in the Trees’ in Early Cinema and CGI”, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 40, no. 1 (2018): 30-61. 22 “This Person does not exist”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/. 23 The program is now open source: see “Deep Dream Generator”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://deepdreamgenerator.com/. See also: “Alexander Mordvintsev”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://znah.net/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 99 AN-ICON  Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 The original image (Fig. 1) has been modified by applying ten (Fig. 2) and then fifty (Fig. 3) iterations of the software DeepDream, the network having been trained to perceive dogs. ANTONIO SOMAINI 100 AN-ICON  Exploring the “altered states” of machine vision through Generative Adversarial Networks The idea that lies at the basis of the DeepDream software – the idea that machine learning technologies, and in particular the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), may be used in order to explore and reveal the altered states of machine vision – can also be found in the recent works of artists (often active also as theorists) such as Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and Grégory Chatonsky.24 By insisting on the “creative”, image-producing potential of Generative Adversarial neural networks – rather than on their standard application for the training of machine vision systems – the three of them explore a vast field of images that they consider to be “hallucinations”, “visions of the future”, or the product of an “artificial imagination”, char- acterized by a new form of realism, a “disrealism”. Trevor Paglen’s entire work as an artist and the- orist, since 2016, has been dedicated to the attempt of un- derstanding and visualizing the principles that lie at the basis of machine vision technology. Through texts (sometimes written in collaboration with the researcher Kate Crawford),25 exhibitions, performances, and works made of still and mov- ing images, Paglen has tried to highlight not only the social and political biases that are inherent in the way machine vi- sion systems are structured, but also the way in which such systems diverge profoundly from human vision.26 In an article published in December 2016 in The New Inquiry with the title “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)”,27 Paglen discusses the new challeng- es that arise in a context in which “sight” itself has be- come machine-operated and separated by human eyes, 24 Among the first artists who started working with GANs, one should remember Helena Sarin and Mike Tyka. See “Helena Sarin”, AI Artist, accessed November 3, 2021 https://aiartists.org/ helena-sarin, and “Mike Tyka”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://miketyka.com/. 25 K. Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 26 See: “Trevor Paglen”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://paglen.studio/. 27 T. Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)”, The New Inquiry, December 8, 2016: https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 101 AN-ICON  participating in a vast field of image operations. Arguing that what we are currently experiencing is part of a vast transition from human-seeable to machine-readable imag- es – a new condition in which “the overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop” – Paglen writes that if we want to understand the invisible world of machine-machine vi- sual culture, we need to unlearn to see like humans. We need to learn how to see a parallel universe composed of activations, keypoints, eigenfaces, feature transforms, classifiers, training sets, and the like.28 We need to unlearn to see like humans. But how can we not see like humans, how can we step out of our human point of view? Accomplishing this apparently impos- sible task – a task which echoes the recurrent philosophical problem of how to step out of one’s own socio-historical position, of one’s own cognitive and emotional framework – has been the main goal of Trevor Paglen’s artistic practice during the last few years, as we can see in a body of works that was initially produced in 2017 through various col- laborations with computer vision and artificial intelligence researchers as an artist-in-residence at Stanford Univer- sity, and was first exhibited at the Metro Pictures Gallery in New York in an exhibition entitled A Study of Invisible Images (September 8 – October 21, 2017) 29, before being presented at various other galleries and museums such as the Osservatorio of the Fondazione Prada in Milan, or the Carnegie Museum of Art in Philadelphia, in an exhibition entitled Opposing Geometries (2020). The works in the exhibition at Metro Pictures present a possible response to the challenge of how to pen- etrate within systems of machine vision that tend to expel the human gaze from their processes. Among them, we find the attempt to master the machine learning techniques 28 Ibid. 29 A series of images of the works presented in the exhibition can be found at the following address: “Trevor Paglen. A study of Invisible Images”, Metro Pictures, accessed January 19, 2020, http://origin.www.metropictures.com/exhibitions/trevor-paglen4. ANTONIO SOMAINI 102 AN-ICON  that are commonly used for machine vision applications, in order to hack them and lead them to produce entirely new images, never seen before, that may be considered as a form of hallucination of machine vision. This is what happens in a series of still images entitled Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, which Paglen developed through a non-standard application, in three steps, of Generative Adversarial Networks.30 The first step consisted in establishing new, original training sets. Instead of using the usual corpuses of images that are used to train machine vision systems in recognizing faces, objects, places and even emotions – corpuses that are often derived by pre-existing and easily available image databases such as the already mentioned ImageNet – Paglen established new training sets composed by images derived from literature, psychoanalysis, political economy, military history, and poetry. Among the various taxonomies he used in order to compose his training sets we find “monsters that have been historically interpreted as allegories of capitalism”, such as vampires, zombies, etc.; “omens and portents”, such as comets, eclipses, etc.; “figures and places that appear in Sigmund Freud’s The In- terpretation of Dreams”, a corpus which includes various symbols from Freudian psychoanalysis; “Eye-Machines”, a series of images clearly inspired by Harun Farocki’s videoin- stallations Eye-Machine I, II, III (2001-2003) and containing images of surveillance cameras or of spaces under surveil- lance; “American Predators”, a corpus containing various predatory animals, plants, and humans indigenous to the United States, mixed with military hardware like predator drones and stealth bombers. The second step consisted in feeding these un- usual training sets into the two neural networks of the GAN system: the Discriminator and the Generator. These two networks begin interacting with one another in an adver- sarial, competitive way, in such a way that the Discriminator, 30 Information on the Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations can be found in Trevor Paglen’s website: T. Paglen, “Hallucinations”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://paglen. studio/2020/04/09/hallucinations/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 103 AN-ICON  after having received the initial training set, has to evaluate the images that it receives from the Generator, deciding whether they resemble or not to those of the training set. As the process unfolds through reiterated exchanges between the two neural networks, the Discriminator becomes more and more precise and effective in evaluating the images that are submitted to it. The third step consists in the artist intervening in the process and choosing to extract, at a given mo- ment, one of the images produced by the Generator: an image that emerges from the sequence of the adversarial exchanges, and that is the result of one of the countless attempts by the Generator to test the precision of the Dis- criminator, trying to fool it. In the case of the series of the Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, all the images selected by Paglen seem to bear some kind of resemblance to the ones contained in the original training sets – even though we cannot really assess the degree of this resemblance, because the training sets are not accessible to us – while displaying at the same time different forms of deviations and aberrations that recall a sort of psychedelic imaginary. Among Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hal- lucinations, we find images with titles such as Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), Comet (Corpus: Omens and Portents), The Great Hall (Corpus: The Interpreta- tion of Dreams), Venus Flytrap (Corpus: American Pred- ators), A Prison Without Gards (Corpus: Eye-Machines). In the case of Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), ANTONIO SOMAINI 104 AN-ICON  Fig. 4. Trevor Paglen, Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), dye sublimation metal print, 2017 the Discriminator was trained on thousands of images of zombies, vampires, Frankensteins, and other ghosts that have been at some point – be it in essays, liter- ary texts, or films – associated with capitalism. Paglen then set the Generator and Discriminator running until they had synthesized a series of images that corresponded at least in part to a specific class within the given corpus. From all of the even slightly acceptable options that the GAN gen- erated, Paglen then selected the one we see in the series exhibited at Metro Pictures as the “finished work”. There may be multiple reasons behind Trevor Paglen’s decision to call these images “hallucinations”. To begin with, such images recall a type of imagery that we might consider to be “psychedelic” or “surrealist”: in some of them, we definitely see echoes of Max Ernst, or Salvador Dalì. A second reason may lie in the attempt to emphasize the fact that the result of this non-standard application of the processes of machine learning – a process which un- folds within a closed machine-to-machine space, the in- visible space of the back-and-forth between the Generator and the Discriminator from which human eyes are excluded – produces images that, just like human hallucinations, have no footing in exterior reality, or may merge in unpredictable ANTONIO SOMAINI 105 AN-ICON  way with shapes and forms stemming from the perception of the outer world. Finally, the term “adversarially evolved hallucinations” may underline the fact that these images are the result of a machine learning process gone astray: a process which has been hacked and led to drift away from its original, standard applications. The reference to the term “hallucinations”, though, should not be misleading. What Trevor Paglen tries to show us with his Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations has really nothing to do with a disruption of the orderly functioning of human consciousness. What they highlight, rather, is the radical otherness of machine vision, if compared with human vision. A radical otherness based on operations that have nothing to do with human, embodied vision, which we may just try to grasp through the impossible attempt of “unlearn- ing to see like humans”. We find a different application of images pro- duced by machine learning in This is the Future, an instal- lation by Hito Steyerl which was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2019, and which was conceived as an expan- sion of the exhibition Power Plants at the Serpentine Gal- lery in London the previous year. In the Venice installation, Hito Steyerl arranged onto different platforms a series of nine videos in which one could see images resembling to some kind of “vegetal” time-lapse imagery: flowers quickly blossoming and spreading out, plants and bamboo shoots growing in height and width. Fig. 5a ANTONIO SOMAINI 106 AN-ICON  Fig. 5b Fig. 5c Figg. 5a, 5b and 5c. Hito Steyerl, This if the Future: A 100% Accurate Prediction, stills from the single channel HD video, color, sound, 16’, 2019 What interested Steyerl in the use of neural networks in this installation was the predictive nature of machine learning, and the status of “visions of the future” of its imagery: the fact that neural predictive algorithms op- erate through statistical models and predictions based on immense, “big data” databases, and are therefore related to the vast spectrum of predictive systems (be they finan- cial, political, meteorological, environmental, etc.) that are present in contemporary “control societies”, while at the same time being part of the longue durée of the history of prediction systems elaborated by human cultures. The main video presented in Hito Steyerl’s instal- lation, entitled This is the Future: A 100% Accurate Prediction, consists of images produced through a collaboration with the programmer Damien Henry, author of a series of videos entitled A Train Window31 in which a machine learning algo- rithm has been trained to predict the next frame of a video by analyzing samples from the previous image, in such a way that, as in a perfect feedback loop, each output image 31 The videos, programmed with Tensorflow, are available at: D. Henry, “A train window”, Magenta, October 3rd, 2018, https://magenta.tensorflow.org/nfp_p2p. I thank both Hito Steyerl and Damien Henry for useful information on the coding used in This is the Future. ANTONIO SOMAINI 107 AN-ICON  becomes the input for the next step in the calculation. In this way, after intentionally choosing or producing only the first image, all the following ones are generated by the algorithm, without any human intervention. In Hito Steyerl’s work, this idea of a video entirely made up of images “predicted” by neural networks and located, as the video says, “0.04 sec- onds in the future”, is presented as a new kind of documen- tary imagery: an imagery that can at the same time predict and document the future, as paradoxical as this may seem. The video begins with white text on a black background that reads: “These are documentary images of the future. Not about what it will bring, but about what it is made of”. The next five sections of the video – Heja’s Garden, The Future: A History, Bambusa Futuris, Power Plants and Heja’s Pre- diction – lead us to a psychedelic landscape of images that morph sample images stemming from categories such as “sea”, “fish”, “flower”, “rose” or “orchid”: each of them is produced by a neural network that, as the electronic voice accompanying the video tells us, “can see one fraction of a second into the future”. Second Earth (2019) by Grégory Chatonsky takes another route into the iconosphere produced by GAN-driven machine learning. What interests him is the idea of an “artificial imagination”, capable of visualizing, through the means of artificial intelligence, “the halluci- nation of a senseless machine, a monument dedicated to the memory of the extinct human species”.32 Himself in charge of the coding which lies at the base of the various elements and the various media mobilized in his work, Cha- tonsky works in particular on what he calls the “chaînage”, the “sequencing” of different artificial intelligence sys- tems that, taken all together, produce a whole cascade of new forms: among them, neural networks capable of generating new texts (read by synthetic voices) starting from some given text databases, or capable of generat- ing images from given texts, and texts from given images, 32 See the presentation of Second Earth: G. Chatonsky, “Second Earth / Terre Seconde”, accessed November 29, 2021, http://chatonsky.net/earth/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 108 AN-ICON  with a new kind of AI-powered ekphrasis. The metamor- phical universe that we see in the videos of Second Earth, Fig. 6a Fig. 6b Fig. 6c Fig. 6d Figg. 6a, 6b, 6c and 6d. Grégory Chatonsky, Second Earth, stills from one of the videos in the installation, 2019 a work that Chatonsky presents as an “evolving installation”, evokes the idea of a form-generating power that used to be rooted in nature and which is now taken over by machines which are incorporating and re-elaborating the trillions of ANTONIO SOMAINI 109 AN-ICON  images that humans have uploaded on the internet as a sort of hypertrophic memory. The text accompanying the work reads: “Accumulate data. Outsourcing our memories. Feed software with this data so that it produces similar data. Produce realism without reality, become possible. Disap- pear. Coming back in our absence, like somebody else”.33 As products of a “realism without reality”, what Chatonsky calls a “disrealism”,34 the images produced through Generative Adversarial Networks in Second Earth do have a hallucinatory, oneiric, “surrealistic” quality, that bears a strange kind of “family resemblance” to the ones that we find in Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, Steyerl’s This is the Future, and in the work of other artists who have recently explored the GAN-generated imagery, such as Pierre Huyghe in his installation Uumwelt (2018). In Chatonsky’s Second Earth, these images do refer to some kind of “outer reality”, but the status of this outer reality is highly unclear. On the one hand, they bear traces of the imag- es contained in the training sets that have been employed in order to activate the GANs: in the cases of the stills from one of the videos in the installation that are here reproduced, such training sets referred probably to categories such as “birds”, “faces”, “eyes”, etc., and the images contained in the training sets – be they actual photographs, or still from videos – do in most cases refer to some profilmic reality. On the other, extracted as they are from the “latent space” of a process of machine learning in motion from the pole of absolute noise to the pole of a perfect re- semblance to the images of the training set, the images of Second Earth refer to another kind of reality, one that does not exist yet. We are here in the domain of “anticipation”, rather than “prediction”,35 in the perspective of an explora- 33 G. Chatonsky, Second Earth, http://chatonsky.net/earth/. 34 Grégory Chatonsky has begun to use and theorize this term in recent lectures held at the Jeu de Paume and at Campus Condorcet in Paris, in the framework of the lecture cycle L’esthétique à l’heure du pixel (September 2021 – May 2022) and the seminar L’image à l’épreuve des machines. Reconfigurations du visible (25-26 October 2021). See for example “Le disréalisme (le pixel perdu de l’espace latent)”, Jeu de Paume, accessed november 29, 2021, https://jeudepaume.org/evenement/seminaire-esthetique-pixel-1/. 35 Unpublished conversation with Grégory Chatonsky, 2019, whom I thank for the useful information on the different software used in Second Earth. ANTONIO SOMAINI 110 AN-ICON  tion of a non-human “artificial imagination”, rather than in the denunciation of the pervasive presence of systems of control and surveillance, as it was the case in the work of Hito Steyerl. At the basis of Chatonsky’s “Second Earth”, we find the observation that the machine was becoming capable of automatically producing a phenomenal quantity of realistic images from the accumulation of data on the Web. This realism is similar to the world we know, but it is not an identical reproduction. Species metamorphose into each other, stones mutate into plants and the ocean shores into unseen organisms. The result: this “second” Earth, a reinvention of our world, produced by a machine that wonders about the nature of its production. Over fifty years ago, in his seminal Understand- ing Media. The Extensions of Man (1964), Marshall McLuhan formulated the idea that art could become, in some deci- sive historical moments, a form of “advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology”, and added that new art forms might become in these moments “social navigation charts”, help- ing us find some orientation across a sensorium entirely transformed by new media and new technologies. Today, while we witness the first signs of what promises to be a massive impact of artificial intelligence onto all areas of our psychic, social, and cultural life, the works of artists such as Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl and Grégory Chatonsky do appear like “navigation charts”: their exploration of the al- tered states of machine vision through the appropriation and the détournement of technologies such as the Gen- erative Adversarial Networks help us better understand the aesthetic, epistemological and political implications of the transformations that such technologies are producing within contemporary visual culture. Taken together, they highlight the fact that what is at stake is the very status of what we mean by “image” and by “vision” in the age of artificial intelligence. ANTONIO SOMAINI 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/15460

On the altered states of machine vision. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory by Antonio Somaini Chatonsky Machine learning Digital images Paglen Steyerl Chatonsky Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti On the altered states of machine vision. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory Chatonsky by Antonio Somaini Abstract The landscape of contemporary visual culture and contemporary artistic practices is currently undergo- ing profound transformations caused by the application of technologies of machine learning to the vast domain of networked digital images. The impact of such technologies is so profound that it leads us to raise the very question of what we mean by “vision” and “image” in the age of artifi- cial intelligence. This paper will focus on the work of three artists – Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory Chatonsky – who have recently employed technologies of machine learning in non-standard ways. Rather than using them to train systems of machine vision with their different op- erations (face and emotion recognition, object and move- ment detection, etc.) and their different fields of application (surveillance, policing, process control, driverless vehicle guidance, etc.), they have used them in order to produce entirely new images, never seen before, that they present as altered states of the machine itself. Machine learning Digital images Paglen Steyerl Chatonsky To quote this essay: A. Somaini, “On the altered states of machine vision. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory Chatonsky”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 91-111 ANTONIO SOMAINI 91 AN-ICON  The landscape of contemporary visual culture and contemporary artistic practices is currently undergo- ing profound transformations caused by the application of technologies of machine learning – one of the areas of so-called “artificial intelligence” – to the vast domain of networked digital images. Three strictly interrelated phe- nomena, in particular, are producing a real tectonic shift in the contemporary iconosphere, introducing new ways of “seeing” and new “images” – we’ll return later to the mean- ing of these quotation marks – that extend and reorganize the field of the visible, while redrawing the borders between what can and what cannot be seen. These three strictly interrelated phenomena are: ჸ the new technologies of machine vision fuelled by pro- cesses of machine learning such as the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN); ჸ the ever-growing presence on the internet of trillions of networked digital images that are machine-readable, in the sense that they can be seen and analyzed by such technologies of ma- chine vision; ჸ the entirely new images that the processes of machine learning may generate. Considered from the perspective of the longue durée of the history of images and visual media, the ap- pearance of these three phenomena raises a whole series of aesthetic, epistemological, ontological, historical and political questions. Their impact onto contemporary visu- al culture is so profound that it leads us to raise the very question of what we mean by “vision” and “image” in the age of artificial intelligence. What is “seeing” when the human psycho-phys- iological process of vision is reduced, in the case of machine vision technologies, to entirely automated operations of pat- tern recognition and labelling, and when the various appli- cations of such operations (face and emotion recognition, object and motion detection) may be deployed across an ex- tremely vast visual field (all the still and moving images acces- sible online) that no human eye could ever attain? In speak- ing of “machine vision”, are we using an anthropomorphic ANTONIO SOMAINI 92 AN-ICON  term that we should discard in favor of a different set of technical terms, specifically related to the field of computer science and data analysis, that bear no connection with the physiological and psychological dynamics of human vision? Artists-researchers such as Francis Hunger and scholars such as Andreas Broeckmann (with his notion of “optical calculus” as “an unthinking, mindless mechanism, a calcu- lation based on optically derived input data, abstracted into calculable values, which can become part of computational procedures and operations”),1 Adrian MacKenzie and Anna Munster (with their ideas of a “platform seeing” operating onto “image ensembles” through an “invisual perception”),2 Fabian Offert and Peter Bell (with their idea according to which the “perceptual topology” of machines is irreconcil- able with human perception)3 have argued for the necessity of moving beyond anthropocentric frameworks and terms, highlighting the fact that machine vision poses a real chal- lenge for the humanities. Can we still use the term “image” for a digital file, encoded in some image format,4 that is machine-read- able even when it is not visible by human eyes, or that be- comes visible on a screen as a pattern of pixels only for a small fraction of time, spending the rest of its indefinite lifespan circulating across invisible digital networks? Can concepts such as that of “iconic difference” [ikonische Dif- ferenz],5 which highlights the fundamental perceptual dif- ference between an image and its surroundings (its “hors champ”) be still applied to machine-readable images? And what is the status of the entirely new im- ages produced by processes of machine learning? These 1 A. Broeckmann, “Optical Calculus”, paper presented November 2020 at the conference Images Beyond Control, FAMU, Prague, video, 5:01, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=FnAgBbInMfA. 2 A. MacKenzie, A. Munster, “Platform Seeing: Image Ensembles and Their Invisualities”, Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 5 (2019): 3-22. 3 F. Offert, P. Bell, “Perceptual bias and technical metapictures: critical machine vision as a humanities challenge”, AI & Society (2020), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146- 020-01058-z. 4 On the theory of formats, see M. Jancovic, A. Schneider, A. Volmar, eds., Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media Cultures (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2019). 5 On the notion of “iconic difference”, see G. Boehm, “Ikonische Differenz”, Rheinsprung 11. Zeitschrift für Bildkritik 1 (2011): 170-176. ANTONIO SOMAINI 93 AN-ICON  are images that are not produced through some traditional form of lens-based analog or digital optical recording, nor through traditional computer-generated imagery (CGI) sys- tems, but rather through processes belonging to the wide realm of artificial intelligence that either transform existing images in ways that were impossible until a few years ago, or create entirely new images, never seen before. What do such images represent, what kind of agency do they have, how do they mediate our visual relation to the past, the present, and the future? And why have such new images generated by processes of machine learning been so of- ten considered, both in popular culture and in the work of contemporary artists, to be the product of some kind of altered state – a “dream”, a “hallucination”, a “vision”, an “artificial imagination” – of the machine itself? Before we analyse the way in which this last question is raised, in different ways, by popular computer programs such as Google’s DeepDream (whose initial name echoed Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film “Inception”), and by the recent work of contemporary artists and theorists such as Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl and Grégory Chatonsky, let us begin with a quick overview of the current state of ma- chine vision technologies, with their operations and appli- cations, and of the new images produced by processes of machine learning that are increasingly appearing through- out contemporary visual culture. The impact of machine learning technologies onto contemporary visual culture First tested in the late 1950s, with image rec- ognition machines such as the Perceptron (developed at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory by Frank Rosenblatt in 1957), and then developed during the 1960s and 1970s as a way of imitating the human visual system in order to endow robots with intelligent behavior, machine vision technologies have entered a new phase, in recent years, with the development of machine learning processes, ANTONIO SOMAINI 94 AN-ICON  and with the possibility of using immense image databases accessible online as both training sets and fields of appli- cation.6 If in the 1960s and 1970s the goal was mainly to extract three-dimensional structures from images through the localization of edges, the labelling of lines, the detection of shapes and the modelling of volumes through feature extraction techniques such as the Hough transform (invent- ed by Richard Duda and Peter Hart in 1972, on the basis of a 1962 patent by Paul Hough), the recent development of machine learning techniques and the use of vast image training sets organized according to precise taxonomies – such as ImageNet, in which 14 millions of images are organized according to 21,000 categories derived from the WordNet hierarchy (a large lexical database of English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs)7 – have allowed a rapid increase in the precision of all the operations of ma- chine vision. Among such operations, we find pixel counting; segmenting, sorting, and thresholding; feature, edge, and depth detection; pattern recognition and discrimination; object detection, tracking, and measurement; motion cap- ture; color analysis; optical character recognition (this last operation allowing for the reading of words and texts within images, extending the act of machine “seeing” to a form of machine “reading”). For a few years now, such operations have been applied to the immense field of machine-readable images. A field whose dimensions may be imagined only if we understand that any networked digital image – wheth- er produced through some kind of optical recording, or entirely computer-generated, or a mix of the two, as it is often the case – may be analysed by machine vision tech- nologies based on processes of machine learning such as the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN).8 Starting from vast training sets containing images similar to the 6 For a general overview of computer vision and computer imagery, with its historical developments, see S. Arcagni, L’occhio della macchina (Turin: Einaudi, 2018). 7 “ImageNet”, accessed November 3, 2021, http://www.image-net.org/. 8 I. Goodfellow et al., “Generative adversarial nets”, Advances in neural information processing systems (2014): 2672-2680. ANTONIO SOMAINI 95 AN-ICON  ones the system has to learn to identify, and feeding such training sets into an ensemble of two adversarial neural networks that act as a Generator and a Discriminator that are in competition against one another, the GAN-based machine vision systems have gradually become more and more precise in performing their tasks. All the main smart phone producers have equipped their devices with cam- eras and image processing technologies that turn every photo we take into a machine-readable image, and internet giants such as Google and Facebook, as well as a host of other companies, have developed machine vision and face recognition systems capable of analysing the immense quantity of fixed and moving images that exist on the in- ternet and that continue to be uploaded every day, raising all sorts of ethical and political issues and highlighting the need for a broader legal framework that for the moment is largely missing.9 Considered together, such machine vision sys- tems are turning the contemporary digital iconosphere and the entire array of contemporary screens, with their various dimensions and degrees of definition,10 into a vast field for data mining and data aggregation. A field in which faces, bodies, gestures, expressions, emotions, objects, move- ments, places, atmospheres and moods – but also voices and sounds, through technologies of machine hearing – may be identified, labelled, stored, organized, retrieved, and processed as data that can be quickly accessed and activated for a wide variety of purposes: from surveillance to policing, from marketing to advertising, from the mon- itoring of industrial processes to military operations, from the functioning of driverless vehicles to that of drones and robots, from the study of the inside of the human body through the analysis of medical imagining all the way up to 9 As I complete the final revisions of this essay, on 2 November 2021, Facebook just announced its decision to stop using facial-recognition software that could automatically recognize people in photos and videos posted on the social network: a massive shift for a company that is currently trying to reposition itself, also through the new company name Meta, adopted in October 2021. 10 On the aesthetic, epistemological, historical and political implications of the high and low definition of images, see F. Casetti, A. Somaini, eds., La haute et la basse définition des images. Photographie, cinéma, art contemporain, culture visuelle (Milan-Udine: Mimesis, 2021). ANTONIO SOMAINI 96 AN-ICON  the study of the surface of the Earth and of climate change through the analysis of satellite images. Even disciplines that might seem to be distant from the most common cur- rent applications of machine vision technologies, such as art history and film studies, are beginning to test the pos- sibilities introduced by such an automated gaze, capable of “seeing” and analyzing, according to different criteria, vast quantities of visual reproductions of artworks or vast corpuses of films and videos in an extremely short time.11 In order to fully understand the impact of ma- chine learning onto contemporary visual culture, we need to add, to the vast field of machine vision technologies that we just described, the new images produced by processes of machine learning – often, the same GAN that are used to train and apply machine vision systems – that either transform pre-existing images in ways that were impossible until a few years ago, or create entirely new images, never seen before. In the first case, we are referring to processes of machine learning capable of transforming existing imag- es that can have very different applications: producing 3D models of objects from 2D images; changing photographs of human faces in order to show how an individual’s ap- pearance might change with age (as with the app Face- App) or by merging a face with another face (Faceswap);12 animating in a highly realistic way the old photograph of a deceased person (Deep Nostalgia, developed by My- Heritage);13 creating street maps from satellite imagery;14 taking any given video, and “upscaling” it, by increasing its frame rate and its definition. An emblematic example 11 See for example the various experiments being developed at the Google Arts & Culture Lab: “Google Arts & Culture”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://artsandculture.google. com/, or the way in which the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam is testing new ways of accessing its collections through a program fuelled by machine vision systems: “Jan Bot”, accessed December 2, 2021, https://www.jan.bot/. 12 The website of Faceswap, which announces itself as “the leading free and OpenSource multiplatform Deepfakes software”: “Faceswap”, accessed November 3, 2021, https:// faceswap.dev/. 13 “Deep Nostalgia”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.myheritage.fr/deep-nostalgia. 14 R. Matheson, “Using artificial intelligence to enrich digital maps. Model tags road features based on satellite images, to improve GPS navigation in places with limited map data”, MIT News, January 23, 2020, https://news.mit.edu/2020/artificial-intelligence-digital-maps-0123. ANTONIO SOMAINI 97 AN-ICON  of this last application, which may alter significantly our experience of visual documents of the past, would be the videos realized by Denis Shiryaev15 in which, through a process of machine learning, a Lumière film such as L’Ar- rivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896) is transformed from the original 16 frames per second to 60 frames per second, from the original 1.33:1 format to a contemporary 16:9 format, and from the original, grainy 35mm analog film to a 4K digital resolution.16 In other examples of imag- es transformed by machine learning, the transformations are much more radical, as it happens with the so-called “deepfakes”: videos that use neural networks in order to ma- nipulate the images and the sounds of pre-existing videos – in some cases a single, pre-existing image – producing new videos that have a high potential to deceive. Among the many examples that can now be found across the in- ternet in different domains such as pornography, politics and social media, pornographic videos in which faces of celebrities are swapped onto the bodies of porn actors, a TikTok account with a whole series of odd videos by a “Deep Tom Cruise”,17 or speeches by public figures such as Barack Obama18 and Queen Elizabeth19 whose content has been completely altered in such a way that the movements of their mouths perfectly match the new, invented words they are uttering. And among the applications of deepfakes in the musical realm, the “new” songs by long deceased singers, whose style and voice are reproduced in a highly realistic way by applications of machine learning such as Jukebox, developed by OpenAI20: a “resurrecting” function 15 “Denis Shiryaev”, Youtube channel, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.youtube. com/c/DenisShiryaev/videos. For an online platform offering video enhancement powered by AI, see: “Neural Love”, accessed December 2, 2021, https://neural.love/. 16 The video of the upscaled version of L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896) can be found all across YouTube, in various black-and-white and colored version. For a version in color, see: Deoldify videos, “[DeOldified] Arrival on a Train at La Ciotat (The Lumière Brothers, 1896)”, Youtube video, February 4, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqbOhqXHL7E. 17 “Deep Tom Cruise”, TikTok account, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.tiktok. com/@deeptomcruise. 18 BuzzFeed Video, “You Won’t Believe What Obama Says in This Video!”, Youtube video, April 17, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0. 19 Channel 4, “Deepfake Queen: 2020 Alternative Christmas Message”, Youtube video, December 25, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvY-Abd2FfM. 20 “Jukebox”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 98 AN-ICON  that in the animated photographs of deceased persons of Deep Nostalgia. In the second case, the use of machine learning processes leads to the creation of entirely new images or sections of images: modelling patterns of motion (for ex- ample, crowd motion) in video, thereby leading computer generated imagery, in some cases fuelled by artificial intelli- gence, to produce new kinds of “contingent motion”;21 pro- ducing highly photorealistic images of objects and environ- ments for different kinds of advertising; inventing perfectly realistic faces of people that actually do not exist through open source softwares such as StyleGan and then make them accessible through projects such as Philip Wang’s This Person Does Not Exist.22 To these widespread applications of machine learning we may add the hybrid, unprecedented imagery produced by the software DeepDream, created in 2015 by the Google engineer and artist Alexander Mordvintsev: a program that uses Convolutional Neural Networks in order to enhance patterns in pre-existing images, creating a form of algorithmic pareidolia, the impression of seeing a figure where there is none, which is here generated by a process which repeatedly detects in a given image patterns and shapes that the machine vision system has been trained to see. 23 The result of such a recursive process, in which every new image is submitted again to the same kind of pattern and shape recognition, are images that recall an entire psychedelic iconography that spans through cinema, photography, the visual arts and even so-called art brut: images that are here presented as a sort of dream – a hal- lucinogenic, psychedelic dream – of the machine itself. 21 J. Schonig, “Contingent Motion: Rethinking the ‘Wind in the Trees’ in Early Cinema and CGI”, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 40, no. 1 (2018): 30-61. 22 “This Person does not exist”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/. 23 The program is now open source: see “Deep Dream Generator”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://deepdreamgenerator.com/. See also: “Alexander Mordvintsev”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://znah.net/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 99 AN-ICON  Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 The original image (Fig. 1) has been modified by applying ten (Fig. 2) and then fifty (Fig. 3) iterations of the software DeepDream, the network having been trained to perceive dogs. ANTONIO SOMAINI 100 AN-ICON  Exploring the “altered states” of machine vision through Generative Adversarial Networks The idea that lies at the basis of the DeepDream software – the idea that machine learning technologies, and in particular the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), may be used in order to explore and reveal the altered states of machine vision – can also be found in the recent works of artists (often active also as theorists) such as Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and Grégory Chatonsky.24 By insisting on the “creative”, image-producing potential of Generative Adversarial neural networks – rather than on their standard application for the training of machine vision systems – the three of them explore a vast field of images that they consider to be “hallucinations”, “visions of the future”, or the product of an “artificial imagination”, char- acterized by a new form of realism, a “disrealism”. Trevor Paglen’s entire work as an artist and the- orist, since 2016, has been dedicated to the attempt of un- derstanding and visualizing the principles that lie at the basis of machine vision technology. Through texts (sometimes written in collaboration with the researcher Kate Crawford),25 exhibitions, performances, and works made of still and mov- ing images, Paglen has tried to highlight not only the social and political biases that are inherent in the way machine vi- sion systems are structured, but also the way in which such systems diverge profoundly from human vision.26 In an article published in December 2016 in The New Inquiry with the title “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)”,27 Paglen discusses the new challeng- es that arise in a context in which “sight” itself has be- come machine-operated and separated by human eyes, 24 Among the first artists who started working with GANs, one should remember Helena Sarin and Mike Tyka. See “Helena Sarin”, AI Artist, accessed November 3, 2021 https://aiartists.org/ helena-sarin, and “Mike Tyka”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://miketyka.com/. 25 K. Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 26 See: “Trevor Paglen”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://paglen.studio/. 27 T. Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)”, The New Inquiry, December 8, 2016: https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 101 AN-ICON  participating in a vast field of image operations. Arguing that what we are currently experiencing is part of a vast transition from human-seeable to machine-readable imag- es – a new condition in which “the overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop” – Paglen writes that if we want to understand the invisible world of machine-machine vi- sual culture, we need to unlearn to see like humans. We need to learn how to see a parallel universe composed of activations, keypoints, eigenfaces, feature transforms, classifiers, training sets, and the like.28 We need to unlearn to see like humans. But how can we not see like humans, how can we step out of our human point of view? Accomplishing this apparently impos- sible task – a task which echoes the recurrent philosophical problem of how to step out of one’s own socio-historical position, of one’s own cognitive and emotional framework – has been the main goal of Trevor Paglen’s artistic practice during the last few years, as we can see in a body of works that was initially produced in 2017 through various col- laborations with computer vision and artificial intelligence researchers as an artist-in-residence at Stanford Univer- sity, and was first exhibited at the Metro Pictures Gallery in New York in an exhibition entitled A Study of Invisible Images (September 8 – October 21, 2017) 29, before being presented at various other galleries and museums such as the Osservatorio of the Fondazione Prada in Milan, or the Carnegie Museum of Art in Philadelphia, in an exhibition entitled Opposing Geometries (2020). The works in the exhibition at Metro Pictures present a possible response to the challenge of how to pen- etrate within systems of machine vision that tend to expel the human gaze from their processes. Among them, we find the attempt to master the machine learning techniques 28 Ibid. 29 A series of images of the works presented in the exhibition can be found at the following address: “Trevor Paglen. A study of Invisible Images”, Metro Pictures, accessed January 19, 2020, http://origin.www.metropictures.com/exhibitions/trevor-paglen4. ANTONIO SOMAINI 102 AN-ICON  that are commonly used for machine vision applications, in order to hack them and lead them to produce entirely new images, never seen before, that may be considered as a form of hallucination of machine vision. This is what happens in a series of still images entitled Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, which Paglen developed through a non-standard application, in three steps, of Generative Adversarial Networks.30 The first step consisted in establishing new, original training sets. Instead of using the usual corpuses of images that are used to train machine vision systems in recognizing faces, objects, places and even emotions – corpuses that are often derived by pre-existing and easily available image databases such as the already mentioned ImageNet – Paglen established new training sets composed by images derived from literature, psychoanalysis, political economy, military history, and poetry. Among the various taxonomies he used in order to compose his training sets we find “monsters that have been historically interpreted as allegories of capitalism”, such as vampires, zombies, etc.; “omens and portents”, such as comets, eclipses, etc.; “figures and places that appear in Sigmund Freud’s The In- terpretation of Dreams”, a corpus which includes various symbols from Freudian psychoanalysis; “Eye-Machines”, a series of images clearly inspired by Harun Farocki’s videoin- stallations Eye-Machine I, II, III (2001-2003) and containing images of surveillance cameras or of spaces under surveil- lance; “American Predators”, a corpus containing various predatory animals, plants, and humans indigenous to the United States, mixed with military hardware like predator drones and stealth bombers. The second step consisted in feeding these un- usual training sets into the two neural networks of the GAN system: the Discriminator and the Generator. These two networks begin interacting with one another in an adver- sarial, competitive way, in such a way that the Discriminator, 30 Information on the Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations can be found in Trevor Paglen’s website: T. Paglen, “Hallucinations”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://paglen. studio/2020/04/09/hallucinations/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 103 AN-ICON  after having received the initial training set, has to evaluate the images that it receives from the Generator, deciding whether they resemble or not to those of the training set. As the process unfolds through reiterated exchanges between the two neural networks, the Discriminator becomes more and more precise and effective in evaluating the images that are submitted to it. The third step consists in the artist intervening in the process and choosing to extract, at a given mo- ment, one of the images produced by the Generator: an image that emerges from the sequence of the adversarial exchanges, and that is the result of one of the countless attempts by the Generator to test the precision of the Dis- criminator, trying to fool it. In the case of the series of the Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, all the images selected by Paglen seem to bear some kind of resemblance to the ones contained in the original training sets – even though we cannot really assess the degree of this resemblance, because the training sets are not accessible to us – while displaying at the same time different forms of deviations and aberrations that recall a sort of psychedelic imaginary. Among Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hal- lucinations, we find images with titles such as Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), Comet (Corpus: Omens and Portents), The Great Hall (Corpus: The Interpreta- tion of Dreams), Venus Flytrap (Corpus: American Pred- ators), A Prison Without Gards (Corpus: Eye-Machines). In the case of Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), ANTONIO SOMAINI 104 AN-ICON  Fig. 4. Trevor Paglen, Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), dye sublimation metal print, 2017 the Discriminator was trained on thousands of images of zombies, vampires, Frankensteins, and other ghosts that have been at some point – be it in essays, liter- ary texts, or films – associated with capitalism. Paglen then set the Generator and Discriminator running until they had synthesized a series of images that corresponded at least in part to a specific class within the given corpus. From all of the even slightly acceptable options that the GAN gen- erated, Paglen then selected the one we see in the series exhibited at Metro Pictures as the “finished work”. There may be multiple reasons behind Trevor Paglen’s decision to call these images “hallucinations”. To begin with, such images recall a type of imagery that we might consider to be “psychedelic” or “surrealist”: in some of them, we definitely see echoes of Max Ernst, or Salvador Dalì. A second reason may lie in the attempt to emphasize the fact that the result of this non-standard application of the processes of machine learning – a process which un- folds within a closed machine-to-machine space, the in- visible space of the back-and-forth between the Generator and the Discriminator from which human eyes are excluded – produces images that, just like human hallucinations, have no footing in exterior reality, or may merge in unpredictable ANTONIO SOMAINI 105 AN-ICON  way with shapes and forms stemming from the perception of the outer world. Finally, the term “adversarially evolved hallucinations” may underline the fact that these images are the result of a machine learning process gone astray: a process which has been hacked and led to drift away from its original, standard applications. The reference to the term “hallucinations”, though, should not be misleading. What Trevor Paglen tries to show us with his Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations has really nothing to do with a disruption of the orderly functioning of human consciousness. What they highlight, rather, is the radical otherness of machine vision, if compared with human vision. A radical otherness based on operations that have nothing to do with human, embodied vision, which we may just try to grasp through the impossible attempt of “unlearn- ing to see like humans”. We find a different application of images pro- duced by machine learning in This is the Future, an instal- lation by Hito Steyerl which was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2019, and which was conceived as an expan- sion of the exhibition Power Plants at the Serpentine Gal- lery in London the previous year. In the Venice installation, Hito Steyerl arranged onto different platforms a series of nine videos in which one could see images resembling to some kind of “vegetal” time-lapse imagery: flowers quickly blossoming and spreading out, plants and bamboo shoots growing in height and width. Fig. 5a ANTONIO SOMAINI 106 AN-ICON  Fig. 5b Fig. 5c Figg. 5a, 5b and 5c. Hito Steyerl, This if the Future: A 100% Accurate Prediction, stills from the single channel HD video, color, sound, 16’, 2019 What interested Steyerl in the use of neural networks in this installation was the predictive nature of machine learning, and the status of “visions of the future” of its imagery: the fact that neural predictive algorithms op- erate through statistical models and predictions based on immense, “big data” databases, and are therefore related to the vast spectrum of predictive systems (be they finan- cial, political, meteorological, environmental, etc.) that are present in contemporary “control societies”, while at the same time being part of the longue durée of the history of prediction systems elaborated by human cultures. The main video presented in Hito Steyerl’s instal- lation, entitled This is the Future: A 100% Accurate Prediction, consists of images produced through a collaboration with the programmer Damien Henry, author of a series of videos entitled A Train Window31 in which a machine learning algo- rithm has been trained to predict the next frame of a video by analyzing samples from the previous image, in such a way that, as in a perfect feedback loop, each output image 31 The videos, programmed with Tensorflow, are available at: D. Henry, “A train window”, Magenta, October 3rd, 2018, https://magenta.tensorflow.org/nfp_p2p. I thank both Hito Steyerl and Damien Henry for useful information on the coding used in This is the Future. ANTONIO SOMAINI 107 AN-ICON  becomes the input for the next step in the calculation. In this way, after intentionally choosing or producing only the first image, all the following ones are generated by the algorithm, without any human intervention. In Hito Steyerl’s work, this idea of a video entirely made up of images “predicted” by neural networks and located, as the video says, “0.04 sec- onds in the future”, is presented as a new kind of documen- tary imagery: an imagery that can at the same time predict and document the future, as paradoxical as this may seem. The video begins with white text on a black background that reads: “These are documentary images of the future. Not about what it will bring, but about what it is made of”. The next five sections of the video – Heja’s Garden, The Future: A History, Bambusa Futuris, Power Plants and Heja’s Pre- diction – lead us to a psychedelic landscape of images that morph sample images stemming from categories such as “sea”, “fish”, “flower”, “rose” or “orchid”: each of them is produced by a neural network that, as the electronic voice accompanying the video tells us, “can see one fraction of a second into the future”. Second Earth (2019) by Grégory Chatonsky takes another route into the iconosphere produced by GAN-driven machine learning. What interests him is the idea of an “artificial imagination”, capable of visualizing, through the means of artificial intelligence, “the halluci- nation of a senseless machine, a monument dedicated to the memory of the extinct human species”.32 Himself in charge of the coding which lies at the base of the various elements and the various media mobilized in his work, Cha- tonsky works in particular on what he calls the “chaînage”, the “sequencing” of different artificial intelligence sys- tems that, taken all together, produce a whole cascade of new forms: among them, neural networks capable of generating new texts (read by synthetic voices) starting from some given text databases, or capable of generat- ing images from given texts, and texts from given images, 32 See the presentation of Second Earth: G. Chatonsky, “Second Earth / Terre Seconde”, accessed November 29, 2021, http://chatonsky.net/earth/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 108 AN-ICON  with a new kind of AI-powered ekphrasis. The metamor- phical universe that we see in the videos of Second Earth, Fig. 6a Fig. 6b Fig. 6c Fig. 6d Figg. 6a, 6b, 6c and 6d. Grégory Chatonsky, Second Earth, stills from one of the videos in the installation, 2019 a work that Chatonsky presents as an “evolving installation”, evokes the idea of a form-generating power that used to be rooted in nature and which is now taken over by machines which are incorporating and re-elaborating the trillions of ANTONIO SOMAINI 109 AN-ICON  images that humans have uploaded on the internet as a sort of hypertrophic memory. The text accompanying the work reads: “Accumulate data. Outsourcing our memories. Feed software with this data so that it produces similar data. Produce realism without reality, become possible. Disap- pear. Coming back in our absence, like somebody else”.33 As products of a “realism without reality”, what Chatonsky calls a “disrealism”,34 the images produced through Generative Adversarial Networks in Second Earth do have a hallucinatory, oneiric, “surrealistic” quality, that bears a strange kind of “family resemblance” to the ones that we find in Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, Steyerl’s This is the Future, and in the work of other artists who have recently explored the GAN-generated imagery, such as Pierre Huyghe in his installation Uumwelt (2018). In Chatonsky’s Second Earth, these images do refer to some kind of “outer reality”, but the status of this outer reality is highly unclear. On the one hand, they bear traces of the imag- es contained in the training sets that have been employed in order to activate the GANs: in the cases of the stills from one of the videos in the installation that are here reproduced, such training sets referred probably to categories such as “birds”, “faces”, “eyes”, etc., and the images contained in the training sets – be they actual photographs, or still from videos – do in most cases refer to some profilmic reality. On the other, extracted as they are from the “latent space” of a process of machine learning in motion from the pole of absolute noise to the pole of a perfect re- semblance to the images of the training set, the images of Second Earth refer to another kind of reality, one that does not exist yet. We are here in the domain of “anticipation”, rather than “prediction”,35 in the perspective of an explora- 33 G. Chatonsky, Second Earth, http://chatonsky.net/earth/. 34 Grégory Chatonsky has begun to use and theorize this term in recent lectures held at the Jeu de Paume and at Campus Condorcet in Paris, in the framework of the lecture cycle L’esthétique à l’heure du pixel (September 2021 – May 2022) and the seminar L’image à l’épreuve des machines. Reconfigurations du visible (25-26 October 2021). See for example “Le disréalisme (le pixel perdu de l’espace latent)”, Jeu de Paume, accessed november 29, 2021, https://jeudepaume.org/evenement/seminaire-esthetique-pixel-1/. 35 Unpublished conversation with Grégory Chatonsky, 2019, whom I thank for the useful information on the different software used in Second Earth. ANTONIO SOMAINI 110 AN-ICON  tion of a non-human “artificial imagination”, rather than in the denunciation of the pervasive presence of systems of control and surveillance, as it was the case in the work of Hito Steyerl. At the basis of Chatonsky’s “Second Earth”, we find the observation that the machine was becoming capable of automatically producing a phenomenal quantity of realistic images from the accumulation of data on the Web. This realism is similar to the world we know, but it is not an identical reproduction. Species metamorphose into each other, stones mutate into plants and the ocean shores into unseen organisms. The result: this “second” Earth, a reinvention of our world, produced by a machine that wonders about the nature of its production. Over fifty years ago, in his seminal Understand- ing Media. The Extensions of Man (1964), Marshall McLuhan formulated the idea that art could become, in some deci- sive historical moments, a form of “advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology”, and added that new art forms might become in these moments “social navigation charts”, help- ing us find some orientation across a sensorium entirely transformed by new media and new technologies. Today, while we witness the first signs of what promises to be a massive impact of artificial intelligence onto all areas of our psychic, social, and cultural life, the works of artists such as Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl and Grégory Chatonsky do appear like “navigation charts”: their exploration of the al- tered states of machine vision through the appropriation and the détournement of technologies such as the Gen- erative Adversarial Networks help us better understand the aesthetic, epistemological and political implications of the transformations that such technologies are producing within contemporary visual culture. Taken together, they highlight the fact that what is at stake is the very status of what we mean by “image” and by “vision” in the age of artificial intelligence. ANTONIO SOMAINI 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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Perception, hallucination, virtual reality. From controlled hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard Perception by Claudio Paolucci Imagination Hallucination Enunciation Resident Evil Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Perception, hallucination, virtual reality. From controlled hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard by Claudio Paolucci Abstract In this paper, I will work on the relationship be- tween perception and imagination in Virtual Reality, claiming that “hallucination” is the ordinary motor also for online perception and not only a deviant form of it. First, I will deal with the problem of perception from the point of view of cognitive semiotics and I will try to underline the crucial role of imagination, claiming that perception is a form of “con- trolled hallucination”. Later, I will focus on the relationship between perception, hallucination, and memory in Virtual Reality. On the one hand, I will claim that Virtual Reality expresses the transition from actual perception to imagina- tion, memory or dream through another actual perception. On the other hand, I will claim that it can express it with- out any problems through the old techniques coming from cinema and other audiovisual languages, since they par- tially share the very same formal apparatus of enunciation. I will demonstrate all of this by analyzing Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Perception Imagination Hallucination Enunciation Resident Evil To quote this essay: 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 CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 112 AN-ICON  Perception, imagination, and the control of the reality First, I will deal with the problem of percep- tion from the point of view of cognitive semiotics.1 I will try to underline the crucial role of imagination, claiming that perception is a form of “controlled hallucination”,2 where, by “controlled hallucination”, I mean the product of the imagination controlled by the world. The main idea is that “hallucination” is the model of perception and not a devi- ant form of it. With “hallucination”, as defined in percep- tion studies and in the neurogeometry of vision,3 I mean the morphological activity of the production of forms by the imagination, which remains crucial both when it is not controlled by the world – as in the case of hallucination, imagination, or dream – and when it is controlled by the world, as in the case of online perception. In Virtual Reality, the world that controls perception is substituted by a tech- nology, a prosthesis capable of creating a strong effect of reality, a simulacrum with an effect of presence that no oth- er audiovisual has ever been able to build.4 In Augmented Reality, on the other side, the technology adds elements to the world that controls perception, without a full-blown substitution, as it happens with Virtual Reality. Maybe, the word “hallucination” can be mis- leading, since perceptual phenomena under the aegis of hallucination may seem to lose the concreteness that I want to characterize them as having. It is possible that 1 See C. Paolucci, Cognitive Semiotics. Integrating signs, minds, menaing and cognition (Berlin-New York: Springer, 2021). 2 See A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”, in L. Albertazzi et al., eds., Perception Beyond Inference: The Information Content of Visual Processes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010): 27-57. 3 See J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”; A. Sarti et al., “The symplectic structure of the primary visual cortex”, Biological Cybernetics 98 (2008): 33-48. 4 See C. Paolucci, “Una percezione macchinica: realtà virtuale e realtà aumentata tra simulacri e protesi dell’enunciazione”, in F. Biggio et al., eds., Meaning–Making in Extended Reality. Senso e Virtualità (Rome: Aracne, I Saggi di Lexia, 2020): 43-62. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 113 AN-ICON  “figuration” would fit better with the ideas I will develop here, since no Sartrean “derealization” is involved.5 However, since our brains try to guess what is out there, and to the extent that that guess matches the evolving sensory data, we perceive the world, in Surfing Uncertainty, Clark recalls the slogan coined by the vision scientist Ramesh Jain that perception is “controlled hallucination”. This is the direc- tion I am going to take. But, precisely because “this view of perception puts us in genuine cognitive contact with the salient aspects of our environment”, Clark suggests we consider hallucination as a form of “uncontrolled percep- tion”.6 However, Clark’s view – if it is put like that – is the classical one that thinks of perception as grounding both hallucination and imagination, which are supposed to be “deviant” or “uncontrolled” forms of perception. Since I want to claim the opposite, I will continue to use “hallucination”, and since there is a well-established tradition regarding this concept in the field of perception studies, I will do so with the caveat that “hallucination” does not imply any kind of “derealization” of perceptual phenomena from a phenom- enological point of view.7 Indeed, with “hallucination”, or “figuration”, I indicate a process of microgenesis8 that continuously pro- duces the next thread of perceptual experience while the current one fades, and does so without voluntary control.9 I claim that meaning guides this microgenesis, or hallucina- tion, and that imagination is the engine of this microgenesis guided by meaning. 5 See G. Matteucci, Estetica e natura umana. La mente estesa tra percezione, emozione ed espressione (Rome: Carocci, 2019). 6 A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: 326. See also paragraph 6.10. 7 See S. Gallagher, D. Zahavi, “Primal impression and enactive perception”, in V. Arstila, D. Lloyd, eds., Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014): 83-99. 8 See J.W. Brown, Self–Embodying Mind: Process, Brain Dynamics and the Conscious Present (Barytown, NY: Barytown Ltd, 2020) 9 See J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 114 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Kanizsa’s triangle. For instance, in Kanizsa’s triangle (Fig. 1), the triangle is totally a product of our hallucination, since it is the only thing that is not present in the stimuli. It is not by chance that, as Reddy and colleagues show, not only are online perception and imagination closely related in the brain, but perception, as it occurs in creatures like us, is co-emergent with imagination.10 What we perceive is literal- ly (not metaphorically) the future, not the present, because perception is the anticipation of the next thread of sensory information through previous knowledge. Indeed, in percep- tion we build through imagination the world that we expect. There is a beautiful experiment by Adams and colleagues that shows that, in some circumstances, we hear the presence of the absence, that is, we hallucinate something that is not there, but we expect to be there.11 When silence arrives, we literally do not hear it as we are supposed to do (i.e. as nothing playing). In its place, we hear the presence of the absent sound that we were 10 L. Reddy et al., “Reading the mindʼs eye: decoding category information during mental imagery”, NeuroImage 50, no. 2, (2010): 818-825; G. Ganis et al. “Brain areas underlying visual mental imagery and visual perception: An fMRI study”, in Cognitive Brain Research 20, no. 2 (2004): 226-241. 11 R.A. Adams et al., “Predictions not commands: active inference in the motor system”, Brain Structure and Function 218, no. 3 (2013): 611-643. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 115 AN-ICON  expecting. Adams and colleagues’ experiment runs as fol- lows. They used a simple computer simulation of birdsong. A multi-layer prediction machine processes sequences of simulated bird-chirps. The simulations were then repeated but omitting the last three chirps of the original signal. At the first missing chirp, the network responds with a strong precise moment where the first missing chirp should have occurred, the system generated a brief, transient illusory percept. This hallucinated percept was not strong, but the timing was correct with respect to the missing chirp. Thus, our perceptive system first dimly “perceived” (hallucinated) the missing chirp, before responding with a strong error signal when the actual absence of the anticipated sensory evidence became apparent. Of course, Kanizsa’s triangle is a visual correspondent of Adams and colleagues’ ex- periment. This is what I call perception as a “controlled hallucination”, which is the general functioning of our rich, world-revealing perception at any level, since it concerns an organism structurally coupled with its environment trying to minimize disorder and surprise.12 The Goethean account of perception I refer here to what Jan Koenderink, a cognitive scientist and mathematician who works on the connection between theory of singularities and perception, used to call the “Marrian” and the “Goethean” accounts of perception. ■ According to the Marrian account: perception is the result of standard computations on optical data. ■ According to the Goethean account: perception is con- trolled hallucination, or “controlled figuration”. The mainstream view in cognitive science and neuroscience, which is often also the commonsense view, 12 S. Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 116 AN-ICON  is that perception is all about a kind of passive imprinting of the world upon the sense organs and the brain. As Eg- ner and colleagues say, “on traditional accounts the visual system was seen as a passive analyzer of bottom-up sen- sory information”.13 This is a view of the perceiving brain as highly stimulus-driven, taking energetic inputs from the senses and turning them into a coherent percept by a kind of inwards flowing stream. The Predictive Processing account of percep- tion takes a different direction and includes a top-down predictive aspect in its account.14 However, Predictive Pro- cessing thinks of perception as a kind of new schematism between aesthetics (the sensory data) and the concepts (the priors). According to this view, our brains are proac- tive: they are constantly buzzing as they try to predict the sensory signals arriving across all modalities. When such proactive brains “match” the incoming sensory signal, we perceive the world, understand it, and are immediately posi- tioned to imagine it so as to act in it too. However, “halluci- nation” is different from the mainstream notion of “prior”. A prior – as used in Bayesian inference – is a generic, usually statistical, property.15 For example, light comes from above is such a prior (if put in suitable format). It applies, on the average, for terrestrial animals that live in open spaces. Such priors package ‘frozen’ prior experience as it were. ‘Hallucinations’ differ by not being frozen, applying to the actual situation. Hallucinations can be regarded as specific, necessar- ily tentative, instantiations of the observer’s present “situational awareness” instead of its average past.16 13 T. Egner et al., “Expectation and surprise determine neural population responses in the ventral visual stream”, Journal of Neuroscience 30, no. 49 (2010): 16601-16608. 14 See A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty. 15 D. Purves, “Why we see things the way we do: evidence for a wholly empirical strategy of vision”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 356 (2001): 285-297. 16 J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”: 32. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 117 AN-ICON  This is important, because we do not always update our perceptions according to our past experience and according to the changes in our priors. This is very well seen in the popular Muller-Layer illusion, where even when we learn that the two lines have the same length, we still keep on seeing them in the previous way. In per- ception, “data” are constructed through an attunement of the organism and the world, where the organism looks for elements that are worth for him to look for. For instance, as in Kanizsa’s triangle, we look for edges and we perceive edges even if edges are the only thing that are not present in the stimulus. This is because, given evolutionary pressure and experience driven plasticity, we are wired to the environment in order to produce states that track edges when exposed to discontinuities. The system is physically at- tuned to such things, ‘set up to be set off’ by such visual discontinuities.17 Exploring the world, the organism casts his questions to the environment through imagination and pre- dicts its answers until he encounters resistance. This very action turns optical or sound structure into “data”, which are not sent from the world to the organism through senses but are the actual product of the autopoietic structure of the system of perception. Perception occurs when the top down activity of the imagination succeeds at generating the sensory data for itself, building a coherent story that paves the way for efficacious action. When it can gener- ate the future sensory data, the agent perceives the world. When it cannot, encountering a resistance, it tries a new attunement or changes the world through action. Therefore, data are built up because we produce them in looking for what we need for action, in order to minimize our work in the environment. 17 S. Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: 120. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 118 AN-ICON  Moving towards virtual and augmented reality The difference between the mainstream view, where data are sent by the environment and processed through perception, and the view where they are the product of what we look for in a coupled environment, can be operationalized as follows: perception is sensorily guid- ed potential behavior.18 Potential is key here. Perception is grounded on imagination, as it concerns the potential behavior con- nected to a coherent “story” we are building in order to act in the world and minimize disorder.19 Perception as sensorily guided potential be- havior is meant to reveal a world of salient, meaningful, in- teracting causes selected in the light of human needs and possibilities, which is exactly what pragmatists had in mind when they were telling us that the meaning of something consists in its conceivable practical bearings. This also marks the difference between pragmatism and behaviorism, since perception is neither action nor behavior. This prag- matist idea is consistent with the Affordance Competition Hypothesis originally introduced by Cisek,20 which is also a key hypothesis for the Predictive Processing by Andy Clark.21 The brain processes sensory information to specify, in parallel, several potential actions that are currently avail- able. These potential actions compete against each other 18 J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”: 32. 19 C. Paolucci, “Social cognition, mindreading and narratives. A cognitive semiotics perspective on narrative practices from early mindreading to autism spectrum disorders”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18, no. 2 (2019): 375-400; and Cognitive Semiotics. Integrating Signs, Minds, Meaning and Cognition (Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer, 2021). 20 P. Cisek, “Cortical mechanisms of action selection: The affordance competition hypothesis”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 362 (2007): 1585-1599. 21 A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Chapter 6. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 119 AN-ICON  for further processing, while information is collected to bias this competition until a single response is selected.22 If we go beyond Cisek’s terminology of “pro- cessing information”, like I think we have to do in order to focus on the main problem of perception as controlled hallucination, we see that, at the moment, we are see- ing a good deal of confirmation regarding this “pragma- tist” approach from the neurosciences.23 The classic dis- tinction between perception, cognition and action simply fails to reflect not only the phenomenology of our expe- rience, but also the global functional architecture of the brain, where, for instance, motor systems are active and play a huge part also in perception, decision making, social cognition and problem solving.24 Increasing and highly suggestive evidence challenges the view of core cognitive capacities (such as planning and deciding) as neurophysiologically distinct from the circuitry of sensorimotor con- trol. For example, decisions concerning eye movements and the execution of eye movements recruit highly overlapping circuits in lateral intraparietal area (LIP), frontal eye fields (FEF), and the superior colliculus [...]. In the same vein, a perceptual decision task (one in which the decision is reported by an arm movement) re- vealed marked responses within premotor cortex corresponding to the process of deciding upon a response (Romo et al. 2004). Quite generally, wherever a decision is to be reported by (or oth- erwise invokes) some motor action, there looks to be an entwining 22 P. Cisek, “Cortical mechanisms of action selection”: 1585. 23 See C. Paolucci, “Per una concezione strutturale della cognizione: semiotica e scienze cognitive tra embodiment ed estensione della mente”, in M. Graziano, C. Luverà, eds., Bioestetica, bioetica, biopolitica. I linguaggi delle scienze cognitive (Messina: Corisco Edizioni, 2012): 245-276; V. Cuccio, F. Caruana, “Il corpo come icona. Abduzione, strumenti ed Embodied Simulation”, VS-Quaderni di Studi Semiotici 120 (2015): 93-103. 24 See V. Gallese, “Mirror neurons and the neural exploitation hypothesis: from embodied simulation to social cognition”, in J.A. Pineda, ed., Mirror Neuron Systems (New York: Humana Press, 2009): 163-190; A.M. Borghi, F. Caruana, “Embodied Cognition, una nuova psicologia”, Giornale Italiano di Psicologia 35, no. 1 (2013): 23-48; V. Gallese et al., “A unifying view of the basis of social cognition”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8, no. 9 (2004): 396-403; G. Rizzolatti, C. Sinigaglia, “Mirror neurons and motor intentionality”, Functional Neurology 22, no. 4 (2007): 205-221. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 120 AN-ICON of perceptuo-motor processing and decision-making, leading Cis- ek and Kalaska to suggest that ‘decisions, at least those reported through actions, are made within the same sensorimotor circuits that are responsible for planning and executing the associated action’ (Cisek and Kalaska 2011: 274). In cortical associative regions such as posterior parietal cortex (PPC), Cisek and Kalaska go on to argue, activity does not seem in any way to respect the tradi- tional divisions between perception, cognition, and action. Instead we find neuronal populations that trade in shifting and context-re- sponsive combinations of perceiving, deciding, and acting, and in which even single cells may participate in many such functions (Andersen and Buneo 2003).25 If perception is supposed to work as a process that is continuous with action, the Marrian casual chain is inverted. Instead of “data” arriving at the eye, being pro- cessed, being further processed and finally resulting in a “representation” of the scene in front of us, the agent ex- plores the world in any conceivable direction, casting his questions and producing data in relation to what he needs for action, until it encounters resistance. This is why imagination is the real engine for online perception. Since imagination is a faculty that allows us to move our consciousness from a proximal to a distal place, which can be in the past (memory), future (pros- pects) or in an invented reality, this “looking for the future” in online perception, trying to anticipate the next thread of the world, is grounded exactly on imagination. This places Virtual Reality and Augmented Real- ity (VAR) in radical continuity with online perception. Indeed, if, in phenomenological terms, hallucination is a “percep- tion in the absence of the external object”, and if the ob- jects that appear in virtual reality are artificial simulacra of presence that we perceive without them being anchored in 25 A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: 178. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 121 AN-ICON  our experience of the physical world, we shall understand immersive virtual experience as a form of voluntary and deliberate hallucination. But this does not imply any kind of derealization: it simply implies the substitution of the control of the world with the control of a technology. This is why VAR promises important scientific applications, which, in a few years, will radically change many of our laboratories of psychology, neuroscience and cognitive sciences. Indeed, on the one hand, we want a world in which reality is not so “real” as to modify the ex- perimental results and influence them, and VAR provides us with only a virtual reality, which can be controlled in detail and put into brackets at will. On the other hand, we also want a world that is not so unreal as to be indistinguish- able from the normal conditions of a laboratory, which at full capacity lives by cutting off every variable that cannot be controlled and ends up producing data that have the purpose of explaining our experience in a condition that we know to be a radical impoverishment of this very same experience. VARs allows us to create a very strong effect of presence within a world-environment,26 capable of sim- ulating a reality that remains only virtual and can therefore be controlled in its different parameters. At the same time, VAR allows us to increase the “gradient of reality” inside a laboratory, integrating those experiences and variables that a laboratory usually tends to cut away, in the name of the robustness of its measurements. Thus, the conditions of the laboratory are “augmented” with a reconstructed and simulated reality, which we can see and experience only thanks to the prostheses of VAR. In this respect, VAR is a prosthetic technology that is in its own way unprecedented, capable of generating a controllable world without losing at the same time the phenomenological richness of the world. 26 A. Pinotti, “Self–negating images: towards an-iconology”, Proceedings 2017, I, 856 (2017). CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 122 AN-ICON  Precisely because of its ability to make the world present through perception, without the world being in any way unamendable – since it can be controlled – it is completely normal that people who set up environments in VAR exploit this possibility, preferring online perception to other expressive possibilities and using online percep- tion in order to express dreams, hallucinations or memo- ries. However, this choice does not in any way reside in a technological, semiotic or enunciative limit of VAR and its language. On the contrary, it is only a “stylistic” choice, which can be suspended. As we will see, many of these suspensions, which result in the use of old cinematographic techniques within Virtual Reality, can be seen for example in an extraordinary game for Play Station VR such as Res- ident Evil 7: Biohazard. Elsewehere,27 I tried to show how, from a semi- otic point of view,28 VAR works by holding together a formal apparatus of the prosthetic type of enunciation, typical of audiovisuals, and a formal apparatus of enunciation of the simulacral type, which is instead typical of other se- miotic systems, such as verbal language.29 If this is true, as I believe it is, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are not incapable of effectively representing the modifications of perception that cinema has always expressed through its representative strategies, such as dissolve, shift from 27 C. Paolucci, “Una percezione macchinica”. 28 Some semiotic approaches to VR can be found in G. Bettetini, L’Ulisse semiotico e le sirene informatiche (Milano: Bompiani, 2006); and B.R. Barricelli et al., “Semiotic Framework for Virtual Reality Usability and UX Evaluation: a Pilot Study”, in M. De Marsico et al., eds., Games-Human Interaction (2018): 1-6. A nice take on the illusory cancellation of the distance that occurs during an immersive experience and the establishment of a critical distance in the user, linked to the emergence of a meta experiential competence, can be found in F. Biggio, “Semiotics of distances in virtual and augmented environments”, Img Journal 2, no. 3 (2020): 82-103. Some important remarks on virtuality and subjectivity can be found in a nice book by Ruggero Eugeni, La condizione postmediale (Brescia: La scuola, 2015) and in the reader edited by F. Biggio et al., Meaning-Making in Extended Reality. Senso e Virtualità (Rome: Aracne, 2020). However, the most comprehensive and original semiotic work on this topic is the PhD thesis by Gianmarco Giuliana, Meaningfulness and Experience in Virtual Realities. Semiotics of a Digital Pla(y)typus, University of Turin (2021). 29 See C. Paolucci, “Prothèses de la subjectivité. L’appareil formel de l’énonciation dans l’audiovisuel”, in M.G. Dondero et al., eds., Les plis du visuel. Réflexivité et énonciation dans l’image (Limoges: Éditions Lambert-Lucas, 2017): 53-68. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 123 AN-ICON  color to black-and-white, flou or blur, used to indicate, in a point-of-view shot, the transition from actual perception to memory, dream, daydream, fantasy, or hallucination. VAR can use all these techniques without any problems at all, since it shares with cinema and audiovisual languages the very same formal apparatus of enunciation. We can have a dissolve or a shift from color to black-and-white also in VAR. If this is not done, or it is not done so often, it is only because of a choice from the “authors” or the VAR, who clearly opt for a “pan-perceptive way” for stylistic or “aes- thetical” reasons. But this does not mean that VAR cannot ex- press non-perceptive conditions such as memory, dream, daydream, fantasy, or hallucination. On the contrary, it does that through perception, perfectly expressing the transi- tion from actual perception to memory, dream, daydream, fantasy, or hallucination in a “pan-perceptive” way. Indeed, Virtual Reality expresses the transition from the actual per- ception through the actual perception. And sometimes it in- corporates the old audiovisual techniques, embodying them inside this transition from perception through perception. A conclusion in the form of a case study. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard As a case study, I will work here on Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, a survival horror game for PS4 devel- oped by Capcom. The game, which can be played through Play Station VR, is full of shifts from actual perception to memories, dreams, and hallucinations. All these shifts are expressed through pure perception, while incorporating from time to time some techniques originating from cinema or audiovisual languages. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is set somewhere in the southern United States, after the murder of a three-man CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 124 AN-ICON  TV crew by the infected Baker family members Jack and Mia. Ethan Winters is the protagonist, who is searching for his missing wife, Mia, which leads him to a derelict plantation mansion, home of the Baker family. At the very beginning of the story, the player, in the role of Ethan, finds a video- tape containing a short video shot by the television crew and, in an adjacent room, he also finds a VCR and a TV where he can see it. Notice how the videotape is a “tech- nological quotation”: it is through an old audiovisual that we come to know what happened in the past,30 now that we are in VR. The player has some expectations at this point:31 we know that a TV crew has been there before us, because we have previously explored their abandoned van. However, the narration of this flashback, which also gives the player important information on the topography of the house, takes place by giving the player control of one or three crew members, not surprisingly the cameraman, who must film what happened previously and return it to the eyes of the player, who is controlling him through his joypad. Here the flashback and the memory, in a form that clearly identifies that they are flashbacks and memories, are obtained through the perception of a “machinic” eye that was there, watching for us. And who now identifies with us and our avatar.32 The very same thing happens when the player controls Mia Winters, in the central part of the plot. Mia hallucinates (we will understand later that she has been infected and her mind is controlled by Eveline) and sees a 10-year-old girl who tells her to watch another video- tape, “so they can be a family”. The videotape introduces 30 According to Kirkland, in the Resident Evil saga “old media technologies contribute a sense of the real perceived as lacking in digital media, yet central to a generically-significant impression of embodiment”. See E. Kirkland, “Resident Evil’s typewriter: horror videogames and their media”, Games and Culture 4, no. 2 (2009). 31 On the way the Resident Evil saga handles expectations of its players, see C. Reed, “Resident Evil’s rhetoric: the communication of corruption in survival horror video games”, Games and Culture 11, no. 6 (2016). 32 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBsOqYpx2ng&t=1550s CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 125 AN-ICON  a memory through which we learn that Mia was a scientist, taking care of a bioweapon under the form of a little girl, but something went wrong. Once again, it is through actual perception that memories and hallucinations are performed. It is through perception that Virtual Reality expresses the transition from actual perception. Controlling Mia Winters, playing through her and perceiving through her eyes and ears, we come to know the truth about the story that we are playing as Ethan Winters, to the point that one of our aims is to send Ethan (ourselves) the very same message we receive when Resident Evil 7: Biohazard starts.33 However, the main moments connected to the relationship between perception, memories and halluci- nation in Virtual Reality are still to come in Resident Evil 7. At a certain point of the plot, Ethan meets Jack Baker’s daughter, Zoe, who also wants to escape Baker’s house. Zoe tells Ethan that his wife Mia is still alive, even if Ethan (us) has already killed her, since Mia has been given the very same infection the Bakers have, and this infection gives her body powerful regenerative abilities and extreme mu- tations. Ethan is told that she and Mia would need to have their infections cured by a special serum first, before leav- ing Baker’s house. Ethan heads out to an old house to find the ingredients for the serum, where he is forced to battle and kill Marguerite Baker. Once he retrieves the ingredient, Ethan begins to have strange visions of a young girl. From this point on, hallucinations, memories and perceptions coexist and alternate in all the Resident Evil 7 gameplay and VAR has no problems at expressing their development throughout the whole story at all, using the very same tech- niques that audiovisual languages used to employ. For instance, in the final boss fight, Ethan per- ceives the world through a grayish film and sees Eveline 33 See a complete walkthrough of this part of the game here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Gh3CkPI0UpA CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 126 AN-ICON  in her 10-year old girl form, that we know being nothing else but a hallucination, since we are told thanks to the Nexbas document found in the salt mines that almost immediately after the infection, the subject begins to see images of Eveline (though she is not in fact there) and even hear her voice (which is inaudible to anyone else). Auditions with infected subjects throughout the stages of infection reveal that at first, the phantom Eveline appears to be a normal young girl, sometimes desiring companionship or assistance. However, after being able to approach her and inject the toxin that we have previously synthetized in the neck, we see an explosion of light flood the screen and then dissolve, indicating the transition from actual percep- tion, that is hallucination, to real online perception. Indeed, when dissolve and blur fade, the girl we are holding in our arms reveals herself to be an old monstrous lady whom we have already met (Baker’s “grandmother” in the wheelchair), that melts into the ground in a colorful scenario (not grey- ish as before), telling us “why does everybody hate me? I just wanted a family”.34 In her actual form she attacks the player, giving birth to the final boss fight. Memories make no exception and are ex- pressed perfectly fine (like hallucinations are) in Virtual Reality. For instance, immediately before, the player is told the true story through the reliving of a painful memory by Mia while he is exploring the house. While we are perceiv- ing the actual scene in the house and after we have found a doll on the ground close to a wheelchair (foreshadowing Eveline’s true identity), we hear a buzz sound that indicates a clear discontinuity and Mia shows up in our perceptive field without interacting with us nor seeing that we are there. 34 The whole sequence can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Rs8bkVhDuA0 CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 127 AN-ICON  What we see is a memory by Mia, while she was taking care of Eveline, the E-Series Biohazard weapon (E-001) built by the company she was working for (a common appearance was selected for the bioweapons; that of a roughly 10-year- old girl, to ensure ease blending in with urban population). It is through these memories perceived through Virtual Reality that we come to know that Eveline infected Mia because she wanted Mia to be her mother. Immediately later, we are inside that memory, we can interact with it and we are part of its compound: indeed, Eveline asks us to be her father (“and if he does not want to be my father, he can die”) and we ask ourselves “why am I seeing this?”.35 As we see, VAR has no problems at all at in us- ing all the classic audiovisual techniques in order to express the transition from online perception to memory, dream or hallucination. It simply prefers doing that the majority of the time through its pan-perceptive model. However, not only can VAR utilise the old audiovisual techniques, but it looks like that also the old audiovisual languages used to express hallucinations, memories and dreams through perception: they simply did not give the observer the sen- sation of “being there”. How could cinema express memory, dream or hallucination through dissolve, blur or flou if not through perception? Since both cinema and VAR share the very same prosthetic structure of their formal appara- tus of enunciation, they both use a prosthesis (a screen, a mounted display etc.) in order to make us see things that we could not have seen without the text.36 In this way, from a semiotic point of view, VAR confirms its mixed nature, keeping together a simulacral and a prosthetic structure of its language. 35 See the whole sequence at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7TZk2iYM-k 36 C. Paolucci, Persona. Soggettività nel linguaggio e semiotica dell’enunciazione (Milano: Bompiani, 2020): Chapter 6. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 128 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/15443

Perception, hallucination, virtual reality. From controlled hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard Perception by Claudio Paolucci Imagination Hallucination Enunciation Resident Evil Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Perception, hallucination, virtual reality. From controlled hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard by Claudio Paolucci Abstract In this paper, I will work on the relationship be- tween perception and imagination in Virtual Reality, claiming that “hallucination” is the ordinary motor also for online perception and not only a deviant form of it. First, I will deal with the problem of perception from the point of view of cognitive semiotics and I will try to underline the crucial role of imagination, claiming that perception is a form of “con- trolled hallucination”. Later, I will focus on the relationship between perception, hallucination, and memory in Virtual Reality. On the one hand, I will claim that Virtual Reality expresses the transition from actual perception to imagina- tion, memory or dream through another actual perception. On the other hand, I will claim that it can express it with- out any problems through the old techniques coming from cinema and other audiovisual languages, since they par- tially share the very same formal apparatus of enunciation. I will demonstrate all of this by analyzing Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Perception Imagination Hallucination Enunciation Resident Evil To quote this essay: 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 CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 112 AN-ICON  Perception, imagination, and the control of the reality First, I will deal with the problem of percep- tion from the point of view of cognitive semiotics.1 I will try to underline the crucial role of imagination, claiming that perception is a form of “controlled hallucination”,2 where, by “controlled hallucination”, I mean the product of the imagination controlled by the world. The main idea is that “hallucination” is the model of perception and not a devi- ant form of it. With “hallucination”, as defined in percep- tion studies and in the neurogeometry of vision,3 I mean the morphological activity of the production of forms by the imagination, which remains crucial both when it is not controlled by the world – as in the case of hallucination, imagination, or dream – and when it is controlled by the world, as in the case of online perception. In Virtual Reality, the world that controls perception is substituted by a tech- nology, a prosthesis capable of creating a strong effect of reality, a simulacrum with an effect of presence that no oth- er audiovisual has ever been able to build.4 In Augmented Reality, on the other side, the technology adds elements to the world that controls perception, without a full-blown substitution, as it happens with Virtual Reality. Maybe, the word “hallucination” can be mis- leading, since perceptual phenomena under the aegis of hallucination may seem to lose the concreteness that I want to characterize them as having. It is possible that 1 See C. Paolucci, Cognitive Semiotics. Integrating signs, minds, menaing and cognition (Berlin-New York: Springer, 2021). 2 See A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”, in L. Albertazzi et al., eds., Perception Beyond Inference: The Information Content of Visual Processes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010): 27-57. 3 See J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”; A. Sarti et al., “The symplectic structure of the primary visual cortex”, Biological Cybernetics 98 (2008): 33-48. 4 See C. Paolucci, “Una percezione macchinica: realtà virtuale e realtà aumentata tra simulacri e protesi dell’enunciazione”, in F. Biggio et al., eds., Meaning–Making in Extended Reality. Senso e Virtualità (Rome: Aracne, I Saggi di Lexia, 2020): 43-62. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 113 AN-ICON  “figuration” would fit better with the ideas I will develop here, since no Sartrean “derealization” is involved.5 However, since our brains try to guess what is out there, and to the extent that that guess matches the evolving sensory data, we perceive the world, in Surfing Uncertainty, Clark recalls the slogan coined by the vision scientist Ramesh Jain that perception is “controlled hallucination”. This is the direc- tion I am going to take. But, precisely because “this view of perception puts us in genuine cognitive contact with the salient aspects of our environment”, Clark suggests we consider hallucination as a form of “uncontrolled percep- tion”.6 However, Clark’s view – if it is put like that – is the classical one that thinks of perception as grounding both hallucination and imagination, which are supposed to be “deviant” or “uncontrolled” forms of perception. Since I want to claim the opposite, I will continue to use “hallucination”, and since there is a well-established tradition regarding this concept in the field of perception studies, I will do so with the caveat that “hallucination” does not imply any kind of “derealization” of perceptual phenomena from a phenom- enological point of view.7 Indeed, with “hallucination”, or “figuration”, I indicate a process of microgenesis8 that continuously pro- duces the next thread of perceptual experience while the current one fades, and does so without voluntary control.9 I claim that meaning guides this microgenesis, or hallucina- tion, and that imagination is the engine of this microgenesis guided by meaning. 5 See G. Matteucci, Estetica e natura umana. La mente estesa tra percezione, emozione ed espressione (Rome: Carocci, 2019). 6 A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: 326. See also paragraph 6.10. 7 See S. Gallagher, D. Zahavi, “Primal impression and enactive perception”, in V. Arstila, D. Lloyd, eds., Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014): 83-99. 8 See J.W. Brown, Self–Embodying Mind: Process, Brain Dynamics and the Conscious Present (Barytown, NY: Barytown Ltd, 2020) 9 See J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 114 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Kanizsa’s triangle. For instance, in Kanizsa’s triangle (Fig. 1), the triangle is totally a product of our hallucination, since it is the only thing that is not present in the stimuli. It is not by chance that, as Reddy and colleagues show, not only are online perception and imagination closely related in the brain, but perception, as it occurs in creatures like us, is co-emergent with imagination.10 What we perceive is literal- ly (not metaphorically) the future, not the present, because perception is the anticipation of the next thread of sensory information through previous knowledge. Indeed, in percep- tion we build through imagination the world that we expect. There is a beautiful experiment by Adams and colleagues that shows that, in some circumstances, we hear the presence of the absence, that is, we hallucinate something that is not there, but we expect to be there.11 When silence arrives, we literally do not hear it as we are supposed to do (i.e. as nothing playing). In its place, we hear the presence of the absent sound that we were 10 L. Reddy et al., “Reading the mindʼs eye: decoding category information during mental imagery”, NeuroImage 50, no. 2, (2010): 818-825; G. Ganis et al. “Brain areas underlying visual mental imagery and visual perception: An fMRI study”, in Cognitive Brain Research 20, no. 2 (2004): 226-241. 11 R.A. Adams et al., “Predictions not commands: active inference in the motor system”, Brain Structure and Function 218, no. 3 (2013): 611-643. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 115 AN-ICON  expecting. Adams and colleagues’ experiment runs as fol- lows. They used a simple computer simulation of birdsong. A multi-layer prediction machine processes sequences of simulated bird-chirps. The simulations were then repeated but omitting the last three chirps of the original signal. At the first missing chirp, the network responds with a strong precise moment where the first missing chirp should have occurred, the system generated a brief, transient illusory percept. This hallucinated percept was not strong, but the timing was correct with respect to the missing chirp. Thus, our perceptive system first dimly “perceived” (hallucinated) the missing chirp, before responding with a strong error signal when the actual absence of the anticipated sensory evidence became apparent. Of course, Kanizsa’s triangle is a visual correspondent of Adams and colleagues’ ex- periment. This is what I call perception as a “controlled hallucination”, which is the general functioning of our rich, world-revealing perception at any level, since it concerns an organism structurally coupled with its environment trying to minimize disorder and surprise.12 The Goethean account of perception I refer here to what Jan Koenderink, a cognitive scientist and mathematician who works on the connection between theory of singularities and perception, used to call the “Marrian” and the “Goethean” accounts of perception. ■ According to the Marrian account: perception is the result of standard computations on optical data. ■ According to the Goethean account: perception is con- trolled hallucination, or “controlled figuration”. The mainstream view in cognitive science and neuroscience, which is often also the commonsense view, 12 S. Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 116 AN-ICON  is that perception is all about a kind of passive imprinting of the world upon the sense organs and the brain. As Eg- ner and colleagues say, “on traditional accounts the visual system was seen as a passive analyzer of bottom-up sen- sory information”.13 This is a view of the perceiving brain as highly stimulus-driven, taking energetic inputs from the senses and turning them into a coherent percept by a kind of inwards flowing stream. The Predictive Processing account of percep- tion takes a different direction and includes a top-down predictive aspect in its account.14 However, Predictive Pro- cessing thinks of perception as a kind of new schematism between aesthetics (the sensory data) and the concepts (the priors). According to this view, our brains are proac- tive: they are constantly buzzing as they try to predict the sensory signals arriving across all modalities. When such proactive brains “match” the incoming sensory signal, we perceive the world, understand it, and are immediately posi- tioned to imagine it so as to act in it too. However, “halluci- nation” is different from the mainstream notion of “prior”. A prior – as used in Bayesian inference – is a generic, usually statistical, property.15 For example, light comes from above is such a prior (if put in suitable format). It applies, on the average, for terrestrial animals that live in open spaces. Such priors package ‘frozen’ prior experience as it were. ‘Hallucinations’ differ by not being frozen, applying to the actual situation. Hallucinations can be regarded as specific, necessar- ily tentative, instantiations of the observer’s present “situational awareness” instead of its average past.16 13 T. Egner et al., “Expectation and surprise determine neural population responses in the ventral visual stream”, Journal of Neuroscience 30, no. 49 (2010): 16601-16608. 14 See A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty. 15 D. Purves, “Why we see things the way we do: evidence for a wholly empirical strategy of vision”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 356 (2001): 285-297. 16 J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”: 32. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 117 AN-ICON  This is important, because we do not always update our perceptions according to our past experience and according to the changes in our priors. This is very well seen in the popular Muller-Layer illusion, where even when we learn that the two lines have the same length, we still keep on seeing them in the previous way. In per- ception, “data” are constructed through an attunement of the organism and the world, where the organism looks for elements that are worth for him to look for. For instance, as in Kanizsa’s triangle, we look for edges and we perceive edges even if edges are the only thing that are not present in the stimulus. This is because, given evolutionary pressure and experience driven plasticity, we are wired to the environment in order to produce states that track edges when exposed to discontinuities. The system is physically at- tuned to such things, ‘set up to be set off’ by such visual discontinuities.17 Exploring the world, the organism casts his questions to the environment through imagination and pre- dicts its answers until he encounters resistance. This very action turns optical or sound structure into “data”, which are not sent from the world to the organism through senses but are the actual product of the autopoietic structure of the system of perception. Perception occurs when the top down activity of the imagination succeeds at generating the sensory data for itself, building a coherent story that paves the way for efficacious action. When it can gener- ate the future sensory data, the agent perceives the world. When it cannot, encountering a resistance, it tries a new attunement or changes the world through action. Therefore, data are built up because we produce them in looking for what we need for action, in order to minimize our work in the environment. 17 S. Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: 120. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 118 AN-ICON  Moving towards virtual and augmented reality The difference between the mainstream view, where data are sent by the environment and processed through perception, and the view where they are the product of what we look for in a coupled environment, can be operationalized as follows: perception is sensorily guid- ed potential behavior.18 Potential is key here. Perception is grounded on imagination, as it concerns the potential behavior con- nected to a coherent “story” we are building in order to act in the world and minimize disorder.19 Perception as sensorily guided potential be- havior is meant to reveal a world of salient, meaningful, in- teracting causes selected in the light of human needs and possibilities, which is exactly what pragmatists had in mind when they were telling us that the meaning of something consists in its conceivable practical bearings. This also marks the difference between pragmatism and behaviorism, since perception is neither action nor behavior. This prag- matist idea is consistent with the Affordance Competition Hypothesis originally introduced by Cisek,20 which is also a key hypothesis for the Predictive Processing by Andy Clark.21 The brain processes sensory information to specify, in parallel, several potential actions that are currently avail- able. These potential actions compete against each other 18 J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”: 32. 19 C. Paolucci, “Social cognition, mindreading and narratives. A cognitive semiotics perspective on narrative practices from early mindreading to autism spectrum disorders”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18, no. 2 (2019): 375-400; and Cognitive Semiotics. Integrating Signs, Minds, Meaning and Cognition (Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer, 2021). 20 P. Cisek, “Cortical mechanisms of action selection: The affordance competition hypothesis”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 362 (2007): 1585-1599. 21 A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Chapter 6. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 119 AN-ICON  for further processing, while information is collected to bias this competition until a single response is selected.22 If we go beyond Cisek’s terminology of “pro- cessing information”, like I think we have to do in order to focus on the main problem of perception as controlled hallucination, we see that, at the moment, we are see- ing a good deal of confirmation regarding this “pragma- tist” approach from the neurosciences.23 The classic dis- tinction between perception, cognition and action simply fails to reflect not only the phenomenology of our expe- rience, but also the global functional architecture of the brain, where, for instance, motor systems are active and play a huge part also in perception, decision making, social cognition and problem solving.24 Increasing and highly suggestive evidence challenges the view of core cognitive capacities (such as planning and deciding) as neurophysiologically distinct from the circuitry of sensorimotor con- trol. For example, decisions concerning eye movements and the execution of eye movements recruit highly overlapping circuits in lateral intraparietal area (LIP), frontal eye fields (FEF), and the superior colliculus [...]. In the same vein, a perceptual decision task (one in which the decision is reported by an arm movement) re- vealed marked responses within premotor cortex corresponding to the process of deciding upon a response (Romo et al. 2004). Quite generally, wherever a decision is to be reported by (or oth- erwise invokes) some motor action, there looks to be an entwining 22 P. Cisek, “Cortical mechanisms of action selection”: 1585. 23 See C. Paolucci, “Per una concezione strutturale della cognizione: semiotica e scienze cognitive tra embodiment ed estensione della mente”, in M. Graziano, C. Luverà, eds., Bioestetica, bioetica, biopolitica. I linguaggi delle scienze cognitive (Messina: Corisco Edizioni, 2012): 245-276; V. Cuccio, F. Caruana, “Il corpo come icona. Abduzione, strumenti ed Embodied Simulation”, VS-Quaderni di Studi Semiotici 120 (2015): 93-103. 24 See V. Gallese, “Mirror neurons and the neural exploitation hypothesis: from embodied simulation to social cognition”, in J.A. Pineda, ed., Mirror Neuron Systems (New York: Humana Press, 2009): 163-190; A.M. Borghi, F. Caruana, “Embodied Cognition, una nuova psicologia”, Giornale Italiano di Psicologia 35, no. 1 (2013): 23-48; V. Gallese et al., “A unifying view of the basis of social cognition”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8, no. 9 (2004): 396-403; G. Rizzolatti, C. Sinigaglia, “Mirror neurons and motor intentionality”, Functional Neurology 22, no. 4 (2007): 205-221. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 120 AN-ICON of perceptuo-motor processing and decision-making, leading Cis- ek and Kalaska to suggest that ‘decisions, at least those reported through actions, are made within the same sensorimotor circuits that are responsible for planning and executing the associated action’ (Cisek and Kalaska 2011: 274). In cortical associative regions such as posterior parietal cortex (PPC), Cisek and Kalaska go on to argue, activity does not seem in any way to respect the tradi- tional divisions between perception, cognition, and action. Instead we find neuronal populations that trade in shifting and context-re- sponsive combinations of perceiving, deciding, and acting, and in which even single cells may participate in many such functions (Andersen and Buneo 2003).25 If perception is supposed to work as a process that is continuous with action, the Marrian casual chain is inverted. Instead of “data” arriving at the eye, being pro- cessed, being further processed and finally resulting in a “representation” of the scene in front of us, the agent ex- plores the world in any conceivable direction, casting his questions and producing data in relation to what he needs for action, until it encounters resistance. This is why imagination is the real engine for online perception. Since imagination is a faculty that allows us to move our consciousness from a proximal to a distal place, which can be in the past (memory), future (pros- pects) or in an invented reality, this “looking for the future” in online perception, trying to anticipate the next thread of the world, is grounded exactly on imagination. This places Virtual Reality and Augmented Real- ity (VAR) in radical continuity with online perception. Indeed, if, in phenomenological terms, hallucination is a “percep- tion in the absence of the external object”, and if the ob- jects that appear in virtual reality are artificial simulacra of presence that we perceive without them being anchored in 25 A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: 178. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 121 AN-ICON  our experience of the physical world, we shall understand immersive virtual experience as a form of voluntary and deliberate hallucination. But this does not imply any kind of derealization: it simply implies the substitution of the control of the world with the control of a technology. This is why VAR promises important scientific applications, which, in a few years, will radically change many of our laboratories of psychology, neuroscience and cognitive sciences. Indeed, on the one hand, we want a world in which reality is not so “real” as to modify the ex- perimental results and influence them, and VAR provides us with only a virtual reality, which can be controlled in detail and put into brackets at will. On the other hand, we also want a world that is not so unreal as to be indistinguish- able from the normal conditions of a laboratory, which at full capacity lives by cutting off every variable that cannot be controlled and ends up producing data that have the purpose of explaining our experience in a condition that we know to be a radical impoverishment of this very same experience. VARs allows us to create a very strong effect of presence within a world-environment,26 capable of sim- ulating a reality that remains only virtual and can therefore be controlled in its different parameters. At the same time, VAR allows us to increase the “gradient of reality” inside a laboratory, integrating those experiences and variables that a laboratory usually tends to cut away, in the name of the robustness of its measurements. Thus, the conditions of the laboratory are “augmented” with a reconstructed and simulated reality, which we can see and experience only thanks to the prostheses of VAR. In this respect, VAR is a prosthetic technology that is in its own way unprecedented, capable of generating a controllable world without losing at the same time the phenomenological richness of the world. 26 A. Pinotti, “Self–negating images: towards an-iconology”, Proceedings 2017, I, 856 (2017). CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 122 AN-ICON  Precisely because of its ability to make the world present through perception, without the world being in any way unamendable – since it can be controlled – it is completely normal that people who set up environments in VAR exploit this possibility, preferring online perception to other expressive possibilities and using online percep- tion in order to express dreams, hallucinations or memo- ries. However, this choice does not in any way reside in a technological, semiotic or enunciative limit of VAR and its language. On the contrary, it is only a “stylistic” choice, which can be suspended. As we will see, many of these suspensions, which result in the use of old cinematographic techniques within Virtual Reality, can be seen for example in an extraordinary game for Play Station VR such as Res- ident Evil 7: Biohazard. Elsewehere,27 I tried to show how, from a semi- otic point of view,28 VAR works by holding together a formal apparatus of the prosthetic type of enunciation, typical of audiovisuals, and a formal apparatus of enunciation of the simulacral type, which is instead typical of other se- miotic systems, such as verbal language.29 If this is true, as I believe it is, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are not incapable of effectively representing the modifications of perception that cinema has always expressed through its representative strategies, such as dissolve, shift from 27 C. Paolucci, “Una percezione macchinica”. 28 Some semiotic approaches to VR can be found in G. Bettetini, L’Ulisse semiotico e le sirene informatiche (Milano: Bompiani, 2006); and B.R. Barricelli et al., “Semiotic Framework for Virtual Reality Usability and UX Evaluation: a Pilot Study”, in M. De Marsico et al., eds., Games-Human Interaction (2018): 1-6. A nice take on the illusory cancellation of the distance that occurs during an immersive experience and the establishment of a critical distance in the user, linked to the emergence of a meta experiential competence, can be found in F. Biggio, “Semiotics of distances in virtual and augmented environments”, Img Journal 2, no. 3 (2020): 82-103. Some important remarks on virtuality and subjectivity can be found in a nice book by Ruggero Eugeni, La condizione postmediale (Brescia: La scuola, 2015) and in the reader edited by F. Biggio et al., Meaning-Making in Extended Reality. Senso e Virtualità (Rome: Aracne, 2020). However, the most comprehensive and original semiotic work on this topic is the PhD thesis by Gianmarco Giuliana, Meaningfulness and Experience in Virtual Realities. Semiotics of a Digital Pla(y)typus, University of Turin (2021). 29 See C. Paolucci, “Prothèses de la subjectivité. L’appareil formel de l’énonciation dans l’audiovisuel”, in M.G. Dondero et al., eds., Les plis du visuel. Réflexivité et énonciation dans l’image (Limoges: Éditions Lambert-Lucas, 2017): 53-68. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 123 AN-ICON  color to black-and-white, flou or blur, used to indicate, in a point-of-view shot, the transition from actual perception to memory, dream, daydream, fantasy, or hallucination. VAR can use all these techniques without any problems at all, since it shares with cinema and audiovisual languages the very same formal apparatus of enunciation. We can have a dissolve or a shift from color to black-and-white also in VAR. If this is not done, or it is not done so often, it is only because of a choice from the “authors” or the VAR, who clearly opt for a “pan-perceptive way” for stylistic or “aes- thetical” reasons. But this does not mean that VAR cannot ex- press non-perceptive conditions such as memory, dream, daydream, fantasy, or hallucination. On the contrary, it does that through perception, perfectly expressing the transi- tion from actual perception to memory, dream, daydream, fantasy, or hallucination in a “pan-perceptive” way. Indeed, Virtual Reality expresses the transition from the actual per- ception through the actual perception. And sometimes it in- corporates the old audiovisual techniques, embodying them inside this transition from perception through perception. A conclusion in the form of a case study. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard As a case study, I will work here on Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, a survival horror game for PS4 devel- oped by Capcom. The game, which can be played through Play Station VR, is full of shifts from actual perception to memories, dreams, and hallucinations. All these shifts are expressed through pure perception, while incorporating from time to time some techniques originating from cinema or audiovisual languages. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is set somewhere in the southern United States, after the murder of a three-man CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 124 AN-ICON  TV crew by the infected Baker family members Jack and Mia. Ethan Winters is the protagonist, who is searching for his missing wife, Mia, which leads him to a derelict plantation mansion, home of the Baker family. At the very beginning of the story, the player, in the role of Ethan, finds a video- tape containing a short video shot by the television crew and, in an adjacent room, he also finds a VCR and a TV where he can see it. Notice how the videotape is a “tech- nological quotation”: it is through an old audiovisual that we come to know what happened in the past,30 now that we are in VR. The player has some expectations at this point:31 we know that a TV crew has been there before us, because we have previously explored their abandoned van. However, the narration of this flashback, which also gives the player important information on the topography of the house, takes place by giving the player control of one or three crew members, not surprisingly the cameraman, who must film what happened previously and return it to the eyes of the player, who is controlling him through his joypad. Here the flashback and the memory, in a form that clearly identifies that they are flashbacks and memories, are obtained through the perception of a “machinic” eye that was there, watching for us. And who now identifies with us and our avatar.32 The very same thing happens when the player controls Mia Winters, in the central part of the plot. Mia hallucinates (we will understand later that she has been infected and her mind is controlled by Eveline) and sees a 10-year-old girl who tells her to watch another video- tape, “so they can be a family”. The videotape introduces 30 According to Kirkland, in the Resident Evil saga “old media technologies contribute a sense of the real perceived as lacking in digital media, yet central to a generically-significant impression of embodiment”. See E. Kirkland, “Resident Evil’s typewriter: horror videogames and their media”, Games and Culture 4, no. 2 (2009). 31 On the way the Resident Evil saga handles expectations of its players, see C. Reed, “Resident Evil’s rhetoric: the communication of corruption in survival horror video games”, Games and Culture 11, no. 6 (2016). 32 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBsOqYpx2ng&t=1550s CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 125 AN-ICON  a memory through which we learn that Mia was a scientist, taking care of a bioweapon under the form of a little girl, but something went wrong. Once again, it is through actual perception that memories and hallucinations are performed. It is through perception that Virtual Reality expresses the transition from actual perception. Controlling Mia Winters, playing through her and perceiving through her eyes and ears, we come to know the truth about the story that we are playing as Ethan Winters, to the point that one of our aims is to send Ethan (ourselves) the very same message we receive when Resident Evil 7: Biohazard starts.33 However, the main moments connected to the relationship between perception, memories and halluci- nation in Virtual Reality are still to come in Resident Evil 7. At a certain point of the plot, Ethan meets Jack Baker’s daughter, Zoe, who also wants to escape Baker’s house. Zoe tells Ethan that his wife Mia is still alive, even if Ethan (us) has already killed her, since Mia has been given the very same infection the Bakers have, and this infection gives her body powerful regenerative abilities and extreme mu- tations. Ethan is told that she and Mia would need to have their infections cured by a special serum first, before leav- ing Baker’s house. Ethan heads out to an old house to find the ingredients for the serum, where he is forced to battle and kill Marguerite Baker. Once he retrieves the ingredient, Ethan begins to have strange visions of a young girl. From this point on, hallucinations, memories and perceptions coexist and alternate in all the Resident Evil 7 gameplay and VAR has no problems at expressing their development throughout the whole story at all, using the very same tech- niques that audiovisual languages used to employ. For instance, in the final boss fight, Ethan per- ceives the world through a grayish film and sees Eveline 33 See a complete walkthrough of this part of the game here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Gh3CkPI0UpA CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 126 AN-ICON  in her 10-year old girl form, that we know being nothing else but a hallucination, since we are told thanks to the Nexbas document found in the salt mines that almost immediately after the infection, the subject begins to see images of Eveline (though she is not in fact there) and even hear her voice (which is inaudible to anyone else). Auditions with infected subjects throughout the stages of infection reveal that at first, the phantom Eveline appears to be a normal young girl, sometimes desiring companionship or assistance. However, after being able to approach her and inject the toxin that we have previously synthetized in the neck, we see an explosion of light flood the screen and then dissolve, indicating the transition from actual percep- tion, that is hallucination, to real online perception. Indeed, when dissolve and blur fade, the girl we are holding in our arms reveals herself to be an old monstrous lady whom we have already met (Baker’s “grandmother” in the wheelchair), that melts into the ground in a colorful scenario (not grey- ish as before), telling us “why does everybody hate me? I just wanted a family”.34 In her actual form she attacks the player, giving birth to the final boss fight. Memories make no exception and are ex- pressed perfectly fine (like hallucinations are) in Virtual Reality. For instance, immediately before, the player is told the true story through the reliving of a painful memory by Mia while he is exploring the house. While we are perceiv- ing the actual scene in the house and after we have found a doll on the ground close to a wheelchair (foreshadowing Eveline’s true identity), we hear a buzz sound that indicates a clear discontinuity and Mia shows up in our perceptive field without interacting with us nor seeing that we are there. 34 The whole sequence can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Rs8bkVhDuA0 CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 127 AN-ICON  What we see is a memory by Mia, while she was taking care of Eveline, the E-Series Biohazard weapon (E-001) built by the company she was working for (a common appearance was selected for the bioweapons; that of a roughly 10-year- old girl, to ensure ease blending in with urban population). It is through these memories perceived through Virtual Reality that we come to know that Eveline infected Mia because she wanted Mia to be her mother. Immediately later, we are inside that memory, we can interact with it and we are part of its compound: indeed, Eveline asks us to be her father (“and if he does not want to be my father, he can die”) and we ask ourselves “why am I seeing this?”.35 As we see, VAR has no problems at all at in us- ing all the classic audiovisual techniques in order to express the transition from online perception to memory, dream or hallucination. It simply prefers doing that the majority of the time through its pan-perceptive model. However, not only can VAR utilise the old audiovisual techniques, but it looks like that also the old audiovisual languages used to express hallucinations, memories and dreams through perception: they simply did not give the observer the sen- sation of “being there”. How could cinema express memory, dream or hallucination through dissolve, blur or flou if not through perception? Since both cinema and VAR share the very same prosthetic structure of their formal appara- tus of enunciation, they both use a prosthesis (a screen, a mounted display etc.) in order to make us see things that we could not have seen without the text.36 In this way, from a semiotic point of view, VAR confirms its mixed nature, keeping together a simulacral and a prosthetic structure of its language. 35 See the whole sequence at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7TZk2iYM-k 36 C. Paolucci, Persona. Soggettività nel linguaggio e semiotica dell’enunciazione (Milano: Bompiani, 2020): Chapter 6. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 128 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/15161

Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media by Martine Beugnet and Lily Hibberd Cinema Darkness Spectatorship Dream Consciousness Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media by Martine Beugnet and Lily Hibberd Abstract As with films previously, claims are being made today about the capacity of immersive environments, in- cluding virtual reality, to offer viewers or experiencers ef- fective simulations of altered states of consciousness. In this article, we look anew at the enduring question of time- based mechanical (lens based and digital) media’s ability not merely to take us outside of or besides ourselves, but to generate an imaginary realm of their own. Our analysis centres on the use of darkness. Often associated with the passage from one state of consciousness to another, dark- ness has become a prevalent aesthetic in cinematic immer- sive media. In some ways, as we will see, the latest tech- nologies of audio-vision appear less apt than conventional cinema to induce us to “cross the bridge” and venture into the land of phantoms. In others, they emerge as privileged entries into the dreamlike worlds of our contemporary, tech- nologized era. In spite of differences in viewing conditions, we find that between the older medium of 2D film and that of cinematic virtual reality, darkness, combined with the illusion of depth and visual replication of motion proves to be a particularly potent harbinger of altered states. Cinema Darkness Spectatorship Dream Consciousness To quote this essay: M. Beugnet & L. Hibberd, “Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 129-152 MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 129 AN-ICON (...) spectators at the exit, brutally rejected by the black belly of the theater into the glaring and mischievous light of the lobby, some- times have the bewildered expression (happy and unhappy) of people waking up. To leave the movies is a little like getting up: not always easy.1 Introduction: cine-obscurity Darkness is dream’s natural associate. It is no wonder audiovisual works that seek to transport us beyond the here and now of awakened reality continue to rely on the power of darkness to enfold us and to unravel our sense of place and time. Though there are structural differences between the aesthetics and spectatorship of cinema and that of virtual reality, darkness functions across many me- dia forms as both a metaphor and as a corporeal device for immersion, encouraging spectators and participants to submit to imaginary realms. The scope of this article is not to review the wider lineage of darkness across immersive forms of media, or indeed to revisit their origins going back to Plato’s cave. The media archaeology of moving images and obscurity has already been done by theorists such as Oliver Grau, and in groundwork of Siegfried Zielinski and Gloria Custance, who described the cinema as a dark “womb”.2 Other media theorists have delineated the parameters of interactive or immersive 3D viewing, most notably Maria Engberg and Jay Bolter on virtual reality aesthetics, as well as William 1 C. Metz, A. Guzzetti, “The fiction film and its spectator: A metapsychological study”, New Literary History 8, no. 1 (1976): 75-105, 86. 2 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, trans. G. Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): 151-152. S. Zielinski, G. Custance, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999): 92, 246. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 130 AN-ICON  Brown with the notion of “gaseous perception” in relation to stereoscopic cinema and darkness.3 In contrast with earlier theorizations, in what follows we focus on adaptations of cinematic immersive reality in the hands of artists and experimental filmmakers. To further account for the contemporary emergence of an aesthetic of darkness we firstly seek to establish a histori- cal backdrop. We then turn our attention to the works and, where available, the words of the creators’ themselves, as we consider four recent immersive media works imbibed in darkness: Anouk De Clercq’s Thing, Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang’s La camera insabbiata/Chalkroom, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness and Parragirls Past, Pres- ent: Unlocking Memories of Institutional “Care”. As immer- sion in darkness is closely related to dreamworlds and to dreams of outer space, these phenomena provide the un- derpinning rationale in the first half of this article and for our subsequent analysis of these four works. Enfolding darkness, from awakened dreaming to altered states Amongst the most memorable scenes of F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) is the imaginary screening in which a seductress from the city appears to lure a naïve country man into a fantasized vision of urban life. One evening, as they sit together on the shore of a lake, the woman launches into an eloquent description of nightlife in the city. To demonstrate the impression made by her tale, Murnau materializes it in the form of a projection that magically appears in front of the two characters. Thanks to an astute system of transparencies, the dream show of the modern city superimposes itself onto the nocturnal sky, under the halo of a fake moon that 3 M. Engberg, J.D. Bolter, “The aesthetics of reality media”, Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 81-95. W. Brown, “Avatar: stereoscopic cinema, gaseous perception and darkness”, Animation 7, no. 3 (2012): 259-271. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 131 AN-ICON  glows like the lamp of a projector.4 Stylized cityscapes al- ternate with kaleidoscopic, blurry visions of frenzied revelry: there is no attempt at harnessing this fantastic vision to a specific or stable point of view. The fantasy may originate in the female character’s mind, but it feeds on a collective imaginary, and the projection allows her to share it with her companion, as well as beyond the diegesis, with the audi- ence of Murnau’s film. The sequence is a celebration of the powers of the cinema not merely as a “factory of dreams”, but also as a sharing of the experience of dreaming itself. Dreams and daydreams, hallucinations and memories, as the products of the human psyche, fascinate not only because they elude our self control (we can no more prevent or design our nightmares at will than we can consciously erase a memory), but also because they con- found our capacity to communicate and share experiences. In every medium, from literature to the theatre, painting and photography, techniques have been developed to evoke altered states of consciousness. The gap, however, be- tween the viewer or reader and the subjective creations of the psyche mediated by objective, external sources, is not easily bridged. Key to Sunrise’s mise en abyme of a screen- ing is the choice of a nocturnal setting: in a film theatre the night on screen blends with the darkness that surrounds the cinema spectator like a connecting tissue. Because the visibility of the projected film im- age initially relied on a beam of light, darkness – also the companion of sleep and dreams – has been associated with the cinema from the start. With the shift from analogue to digital, the glow of the LCD monitor has increasingly complemented the light beam of the projector, alongside other self-illuminating screens found in the domestic en- vironment. Regardless of location, we still lower the lights while watching films whenever possible. More than a mere 4 M. Beugnet, L’attrait du flou (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2017): 33-34. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 132 AN-ICON  condition of visibility, obscurity facilitates the slipping in and out of total awakened awareness. Film was the first medium to offer the promise of more than the mere representation of our imaginings – to engender a form of awakened dreaming through spectacle and apparatus. The increasingly photorealistic quality of cinematic images and sounds set in motion guaranteed the “credibility of its fabulations”.5 A spectator could hope to become immersed in a film in a manner similar to the dreamer, who experiences even the most absurd world of mental images equally as “real” as daily life occurrences, or of a daydreamer who indulges in memories or fanciful imaginings to the point of forgetting their actual surround- ings. The conditions of reception in the cinema auditorium came to reflect and strengthen the analogy: cut off from the outer world, plunged in darkness and silence, with limited physical activity, at the end of a screening the spectator often emerges as if they were awakening. Yet in spite of the unequalled ability to blur the frontier between representation and perception,6 the fusion of image and reality never occurs fully.7 As Christian Metz reminds us, where in deep sleep the dreamer does not know that they are dreaming, film induces, at best, a semi-wakeful state: more than dream per se, the experience of watching a film (which can be emulated, though imperfectly, in indi- vidual situations of viewing) resembles that of reminiscing, 5 C. Metz, A. Guzzetti, “The fiction film and its spectator: A metapsychological study”, New Literary History 8, no. 1 (1976): 75-105. 6 S. Sharot, “Dreams in films and films as dreams: surrealism and popular American cinema”, Canadian Journal of Film Studies 24, no. 1 (2015): 66-89. Also, on the myth of the credulous audience, see T. Gunning, “An aesthetic of astonishment. Early film and the (in)credulous spectator”, Art and Text, no. 34 (1989): 31-45. 7 In contrast, “dreaming is subjectively indistinguishable from waking experience”. See T.K. Metzigner, “Why is virtual reality interesting for philosophers?”, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, no. 5 (2018). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 133 AN-ICON  fantasizing or slipping into reverie. For Raymond Bellour, it is better compared with a form of hypnosis.8 Nonetheless, fascination for the medium’s oneiric qualities has driven some of the most radical and creative practices and theorizing of the medium. The rep- resentation of dreams themselves has had little to do with this evolution: from Antonin Artaud and the surrealists to Jean Epstein, the earliest avant-gardes nurtured the belief that the medium’s aesthetic potential laid not in the repre- sentation of dreams or reminiscences, but in the possibil- ity to dream or reminisce with images.9 In classic cinema however, as in avant-garde or experimental filmmaking, darkness and immobility remain the spectator-dreamer’s first allies. In The Absent Body, Drew Leder observes that in normal situations of perception the awareness of our body diminishes: the reason we can focus on what we watch, or concentrate on what we touch, is that we do not pay attention to the actual process, nor to the eye or hand involved in it.10 A similar receding of bodily awareness occurs when we are absorbed in our own thoughts. Such “absenting” of the lived body is not however “equivalent to a mere void, a lack of being”.11 Rather, it testifies to the extent in which a sentient subject might be beside itself, “ecstatically caught-up in the world”: the very nature of the body is to project outwards from its place of standing. From the “here” arises a perceptual world of near and far distances. From the “now” we inhabit a meaningful past and a futural realm of projects and goals.12 8 R. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: POL / Trafic, 2009). 9 J. Epstein, Écrits sur le cinéma, vol. 2 (Paris: Cinéma Club/Seghers, 1975): 18-20. Also see, A. Artaud “Cinéma et réalité”, Œuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris : Gallimard, 1978): 19; and M. Beugnet, L’attrait du flou (Crisnée: Yellow Now: 2017): 82-83. 10 A. Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990): 70-71. 11 Ibid.: 22. 12 Ibid.: 23. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 134 AN-ICON  Leder’s description of this phenomenon recalls James Gibson’s theory of “affordance”, according to which individuals are entwined with their surroundings, their pro- spective actions informed by the constant collecting of information from their environment.13 This capacity to feel or to picture our bodies outside or alongside themselves in time and space is an equally fundamental feature of dream- ing, hallucination and reverie, as well as the fabrication of their similitude in movies. Indeed, it is often the altered sense in which our body appears to relate to its perceived environment (feeling one’s bodily affordance hindered, dis- torted or augmented in turns) that marks the difference between awakened and dreamlike states. In the cinema, the body’s capacity for ecstasis is simultaneously enhanced and directed away from the immediate environment, towards the virtual world that ap- pears on the screen. The film auditorium, as a space, has sometimes been compared to a womb.14 Darkness engulfs the barely moving spectators, allowing them to be together and alone at once, to ignore the borders of the screen as they recede in the obscurity. Within the secluded space of the theatre, the light originating from behind the audience trains spectators to project themselves on the screen, to sit- uate themselves within the perspectival view of the spaces offered to the eye, and the anthropomorphic quality of the camera’s gaze that explores them. From the 1950s onwards, anamorphic lenses widened the frame, and shortened the optical depth of field, with a corresponding increase in visual blur effects. Strengthening the sense of immersion and bringing the cinematic closer to the human field of vision, the blurring of the margins of the visual frame also subtly blended the projected image into the surrounding 13 J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). 14 T. Elsaesser, “Cinephilia or the uses of disenchantment”, in M. de Valck, M. Hagener, eds., Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005): 32. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 135 AN-ICON  darkness, heightening the feeling of being suspended in a virtual dimension without physical limits. In the cinema and at home, dimming the lights and turning up the volume amplifies the degree to which we forget about our own body so as to engage in watch- ing and listening to a movie, sometimes even touching or tasting through the synesthetic or haptic powers of certain images.15 Accordingly, in classic narrative cinema’s sub- jective point of view, a character’s body partly or wholly disappears from the frame. Such strategies allow us, as the spectator, not only to half-dream our way through a film, but also to engage with the expression of altered states of consciousness where images and sounds are supposedly the product of mental processes. Paradoxically, both of these experiences can involve audiovisual representations of extreme physicality (fighting, crying, flying…). Whether awake or dreaming,16 characters in films move, fall or take off in the air, as we ourselves sometimes do in our sleep. In all such cases, however, it is the incapacity to act on the film’s progression that grants the experience its onei- ric quality: as the dreamer with dreams, the film spectator does not control the flow of images: once triggered, they cannot be easily altered or fully erased at will.17 Nor can we always choose to retain a memory, or the trace of a dream, 15 L.U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). M. Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 16 Whereas a dream or a memory is a subjective reality emanating from the psyche, a film is an external product constructed according to a common idiom. In conventional filmmaking, transitions mark out the passage from woken to altered states of consciousness (fades in and out, blurredness, distorted perspectives, spiralling images amongst others). Film dreaming is thus reclaimed and repurposed as the representation of dreaming in film. 17 See T. Kuntzel, “Le defilement”, La revue d’esthétique (1972), reprinted in D. Noguez, ed., Cinéma: théorie, lectures (Paris, Klincksieck, 1978): 97-110. R. Bellour, L’entre-images: photo, cinéma, vidéo (Paris: La Différence, 2002): 86. M. Beugnet, Le Cinéma et ses doubles (Bordeaux: Bord de l’eau, 2021): 5-6. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 136 AN-ICON  any more that we can keep a precise recollection of all the images of a film whose course we can hardly change.18 As with films previously, claims are being made today about the capacity of immersive environments, in- cluding virtual reality, to offer viewers or experiencers ef- fective simulations of altered states of consciousness.19 In what follows, we look anew at the enduring question of time-based mechanical (lens based and digital) media’s ability not merely to take us outside of or besides ourselves, but also to generate an imaginary realm of their own. In doing so we consider the issue of aesthetics alongside the conditions of spectatorship and reception. In some ways, as we will see, the new technologies of audio-vision appear less apt than conventional cinema to induce us to “cross the bridge” and venture into the land of phantoms. In others, they emerge as privileged entries into dream-like worlds of our contemporary, technologized era. What inter- ests us most is not the lure of the “myth of total immersion” or the pursuit of the perfect conflation of perception and representation that would entail the erasure of the frontier between reality and fantasy.20 Rather, we concentrate on the way cinematic virtual reality (including built immersive environments and head-mounted displays) creates the illu- sion of presence while exploiting digital imaging to emulate 18 Remote control usage destroys the experience of time as co-presence, or of time slipping away (also an essential dimension of memories and dreams). Accordingly, Laura Mulvey associates the remote control with the emergence of a possessive spectator in Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 19 From David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) to Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) and Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018) amongst others, the association of immersive technology and altered states of consciousness is a favoured topic in mainstream cinema. For a VR example see Dream (2016) by Philippe Lambert, which is built on a custom audio-visual synthesizer coded by Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit. https://www.nfb.ca/interactive/dream/. 20 See M. Beugnet, L. Hibberd, “Absorbed in experience: new perspectives on immersive media”, Screen 61, no. 4 (2020). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 137 AN-ICON  the dreamlike state of cinematic reception and conjure up a specific, distinctive kind of imagining.21 In the cinema, the obscurity afforded by the auditorium creates the condition for a unique experience: that of a shared space where a collective dreamlike or light hypnotic state prevails. Contrastingly, when viewing a work in a head-mounted display, there is no “joint watching”. The solitude is inescapable, only faintly or temporarily relieved in encounters with others, as characters or actors in the shape of avatars. Darkness creates a connection nonethe- less, an evocation of an infinite space that, ultimately, we all have in common. Hence, in spite of differences in viewing conditions, we find that between the medium of 2D film and that of cinematic virtual reality, darkness combined with the visual replication of motion proves to be a potent harbinger of the dreamlike. It unsettles our grounded-ness in place and demands that we forge new connections with images, and with the world, ourselves and others. We further sug- gest that across VR and film, darkness inaugurates a shift from the collective experience of subjective states toward the individual experience of an unconscious shaped by the shared knowledge of our finitude. Though we are told we live in the age of the Anthropocene, we have an acute sense of the relativity of our existence, of being caught in perpetual movement, connected yet unanchored. Like the dot-size character who faces the starry vastness of the universe at the end of The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1957), the viewer who slides into the seem- ingly limitless night of contemporary films and immersive environments may experience a dreamlike state of radical groundlessness – a contemporary sense of solitary, yet shared, unmooring. 21 Virtual reality is assumed to be closely entwined with interactive gaming and simulated training. This article however focuses on the transmedial practices of narrative and immersion – across film, video art, and immersive installation art – where the spectator rarely drives the story or provokes events. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 138 AN-ICON  In “Of other spaces”, Michel Foucault notes how, from Galileo onwards, things could now only exist in their relative placement and movement: a thing’s place was no longer anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo in the 17th cen- tury, extension was substituted for localization.22 The site of an object, from then on came to be defined as “relations of proximity between points or ele- ments”, like “the dots in a constellation”.23 Foucault builds on the pre-modern analogy between body and universe, arguing that traditionally, space had been constructed as “a space of radiation. Man is surrounded by it on every side; but, inversely, he transmits these resemblances back into the world from which he receives them”.24 In other words, the body is conceived as the medium through which the world is organized as it is perceived. Perspectival art, with its stable construction of space and anchoring of the gaze to a specific position in space, emphasizes such a sense of place-ness and orientation. Though convention- al filmmaking adopted the continuity system in an effort to emulate this centralized condition, its mobile gaze and time-based structure always threatened to reveal the fra- gility of the model.25 Alternative uses of cinematography thus sought to explore the relativity of movement and place, showing the anthropomorphic gaze, with its safely located source, to be an artifice. This approach was not exclusive to ex- perimental cinema: in science fiction and documentary film 22 M. Foucault, “Of other spaces: utopias and heterotopias”, trans. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics 6, no.1 (1986): 22. 23 Ibid.: 23. 24 M. Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Random House, 1970): 23. 25 J. Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972): 18. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 139 AN-ICON  reconstitutions of outer space in particular have made us familiar with “impossible” viewpoints, where a virtual cam- era circles around planets and floats through constella- tions.26 Here again, darkness, like the sidereal night, is key – sucking the spectators into its awesome solitude even as they sit in a crowd. As we will see, immersive technologies have in turn proven to be remarkably able to produce a radi- cal sense of dis-anchoring. A 360-degree omnidirectional scape that moves independently from the viewer’s own movement implies a constant and uncontrollable fluctuation of one’s place within the image. With the dissolution of a stable single-point perspective the body of the observer ceases to be the sole reference and singular source of the gaze as an ordering principle of visible space. The most potent aspect however of these novel immersive environ- ments is the means to enter into the boundlessness of 3D constructed worlds, endless spaces that find in darkness their most compelling expression. In the fathomless black- ness of virtual spaces, furthermore, the solidity of repre- sented things is prone to slip away. The liminal threshold of immersive worlds is arguably always teetering on the brink of dreams – an aspect that the fanfare of virtual reality and the clumsiness of head-mounted displays paradoxi- cally diminishes. Even in 2D iterations construed from 3D renderings however, as is the case in the floating world of Thing, such an evocation of the universe offers itself as powerfully oneiric experience. Sidereal night: Anouk De Clercq’s Thing The first minute of Anouk De Clercq’s film Thing27 is entirely black. The sound track is also initially 26 Famously in the “Blue Danube” sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). 27 Video, b/w, 16:9, stereo, BE/IT/FR, 2013, 18’. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 140 AN-ICON  completely silent, though after a few seconds the faint noise of a light wind or breathing is heard, followed by a voice. The sound of the voice is slightly echoey, as if heard in a large, empty space. Then a crashing noise, followed by the appearance of thin, veil-like formations white dots that move into view from the right of the frame. But whose view? For the voice remains disembodied throughout, and its musings do not refer to the images with any specificity. Nor can we safely establish its location, as its stereophonic transcription varies in spatial orientation, switching from our right to our left ear. Equally impossible to determine is the origin of the movement that alters what we are given to see. Suggested by the changing size of the shapes and their moving in and out of frame, such spatial proximity or distance could equally mirror the trajectory of an invisible observer floating in the dark space, or that of the cloud formations themselves as they enter the former’s field of vision. Occasionally, a fade or a cut to black or a glitch- like effect (with a crackling sound emitted as all vanishes) plunges the screen back into utter darkness.28 Thing appears to be a journey through a virtual world, born out of the imagination of a fictional dreamer – given the nature of the images and the model-like appa- ritions of cities and buildings this dreamer could be the engineer of this world. De Clercq describes Thing as a journey through an architect’s “virtual memory”, “a bound- less, imaginary space” where fictional buildings and urban patterns emerge and disperse in the darkness, a series of ephemeral nebulas that manifest as a kind of “paradoxi- cal materiality” precisely because they are “virtual”.29 The film was made using LiDAR imaging of urbanscapes (an acronym for Light Detection and Ranging) a remote sensor 28 See R. Misek, “The black screen”, in M. Beugnet, A. Cameron, A. Fetveit, eds., Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017): 38-52. 29 See the video here: https://portapak.be/works/30/thing, accessed 18/12/2020. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 141 AN-ICON  technology that generates accurate 3D information about the shape of very large surfaces and their characteristics using pulsed laser emissions to measure ranges between the sensor and the surface. Developed for architectural, archaeological and engineering surveys, such visualiza- tions provide a way of seeing spatial information, which is augmented when viewed in a 3D stereoscopic environ- ment. Yet another digital program subsequently renders the LiDAR data as “point clouds”, the dots of light we see in Thing. Most of the shapes and forms conjured up in Thing are made of these unstable, constantly reshaping clouds of dots. Although the initial light point formations re- semble natural phenomena – cirrostratus, cirrocumulus or constellations – they later produce artificial patterns. An elongated, geometrical form floats in the dark like a space- ship, and the monumental entrance to a city materializes and dissolves. We then travel through the diaphanous out- lines of a district with a mesh of buildings with terraces and hanging gardens. The cross-cutting of a workshop appears and slowly glides in and out of view, its furnishings (stairs, hanging lamps, an easel, the semi-circular shape of what looks like part of a bull’s eye window) sketched in brilliant white against the surrounding night. Some of the point cloud renditions are reminis- cent of white charcoal drawings on black paper, while the buildings and the room resemble X-rays: ghostly, silvery shapes in a process of disintegration. While X-rays and 3D scanners are already used to document vestiges, as well as to augment the existing data of artefacts and archaeo- logical sites, film also holds a specific connection to ruins. Of the attraction exercised by ruins on the cinema, André Habib notes how they offer themselves as the poignant manifestation of the transience of all things human, includ- ing that of our own existence. The inexorability of the flow MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 142 AN-ICON  of 24 images or frames per second – of the ephemerality of its linear course from beginning to end that may be re- peated or looped but not halted – explains the “melancholy, quasi-ontological” relation that connects the medium to the temporality and spatiality of ruins.30 Drawing on tech- niques and visualizations that fuse the astrological and the architectural, De Clercq collapses human time and space (its material, located traces, its memories and dreams) in the infinity of the sidereal night. To craft its boundless post-Galilean dream of space as a universe where the individual body and the individual consciousness are free floating or diffuse, Thing uses the tools of 20th and 21st century imaging. This draw- ing together of film, architecture, and infinite space gives De Clercq’s film an affinity with so-called immersive envi- ronments: a 2D film with a 3D sensibility, best seen in the obscurity of a cinema, it makes full use of the darkened film-theatre as its immediate, continuous extension. “Dark, weird and shadowy”: Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang’s La camera insabbiata/Chalkroom Experimental multimedia artist Laurie Ander- son has produced a series of virtual reality works that elu- cidate some of the aesthetic traits of De Clercq’s Thing in a fully 3D format, also harnessing some of VR’s aptitude to create dreamlike and out-of-body experiences. Created in collaboration with media artist Hsin-Chien Huang in 2017, Chalkroom is an installation and an interactive VR experience, permanently installed at the MoCA in Massachusetts, USA.31 Seated viewers don a head-mounted display and take up two handheld controllers to enter into the VR 30 A. Habib, L’attrait de la ruine (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2011): 9. 31 Virtual reality 360 degree3D interactive video and installation, EN, 2017. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 143 AN-ICON  experience. In the first scene, a lone architectural structure sits on top of a mountain. Unlike the architecture in Thing, the building appears to be concrete. You are coaxed to fly over and enter it, navigating a series of narrow corridors toward a small portal at the end. The controller, which also acts as a torch, is the only source of light. The virtual walls are covered in chalk writing, like their physical counter- part outside the head-mounted display. Here, however, the torchlight illuminates a small orb, making the text all the more elusive – a curious and perverse effect given that the artists have designated us as “readers” instead of viewers. Words disintegrate into phenomes, and break apart again into letters, like swarms of flies. Yet, Laurie Anderson’s vel- vet intonations flow over this eerie place, making it homely. Claustrophobic passages open out into an infinite black space that contains a constellation of text. You’re free to fly around and explore the space, hidden sto- ries narrated by Anderson, which emerge as you approach certain zones. Objects, such as an illuminated, leafy tree, dissolve on closer inspection, and you see this too is made up of letters, as Anderson whispers to us: “You realise that things are made of words”. In interview, she explains being initially unsure about VR because it was too game-like, but that if she could make something “very homemade, dark, weird and shadowy, a different kind of space, a different kind of mental space” then she would be interested.32 Her aim, she adds, was to create an experience where you could fly “like in your dreams”. On the face of it, since immersive environments such as 3D films in 360 degree cinema projection and virtual reality experiences on head-mounted display or HMD, 33 32 “Laurie Anderson interview: A virtual reality of stories”, 2017, Louisiana Channel. Accessed 20/12/2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHT016FbR30. 33 It is important not to confuse VR with the HMD. In simplest terms, Virtual Reality is defined as being the coherence of technical means that enable a person to interact in real time with a virtual world. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 144 AN-ICON  effectively “environmentalize”34 the image, one could ex- pect the “womb” effect to be perfected and even emulated, as with Anderson’s installation. However, in contrast with conventional spectatorship, absorbed viewing is under- mined by the degree of physical activity involved in the experience.35 In addition to the heaviness and discomfort of the hardware – the headset and headphones – and the optical strain of stereoscopic vision, the attention and effort involved in interacting with the virtual environment para- doxically induce a sense of heightened physical awareness. Rather than projecting itself, the sentient subject engages with the task of controlling the effects of its own motricity in the here and now: a “presenting”, rather than an absent- ing of the body. These effects might be the result of VR’s relative novelty. Nonetheless, it seems that in the narrative context of cinematic VR – beyond gaming and therapeutic applications – interaction and causative acts tend to un- dermine immersion, contradicting widespread theories of “presence” in VR.36 After all, it can be very unnerving to feel your body split in two: an HMD effectively separates our head from the rest of our body. Not only can we not see our (real) selves but unless we are offered some form of avatar we also lack a visible body in the virtual world. Once we get used to this literal mode of “absenting” however, new forms of ecstasis become possible. As we become familiar with the process of virtual seeing, touching and moving, our experiencer or avatar body may recede into the background of our awareness, just like our lived body 34 A. Pinotti, “Environmentalising the image. Towards an-iconology”, in dossier M. Beugnet, L. Hibberd, eds., “Absorbed in experience: new perspectives on immersive media”, Screen 61, no. 4 (2020): 594-603. 35 Interestingly, in Sunrise the virtual screen vanishes when the woman starts dancing. 36 See C. Heeter, “Being there: the subjective experience of presence”, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 1, no. 2 (1992): 262-271. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 145 AN-ICON  does in a reverie, leaving us to be “ecstatically caught-up in the virtual world”.37 Distinct from many other VR interactive ex- periences, Chalkroom’s freedom to roam inhabits this liminal zone for two reasons: one, choices don’t lead to deterministic or sequential narratives, and thus, similar to a dream or hallucination, we feel that we are driven by compulsions and desires. Two, and even more compelling, is the sense that you cannot put your feet on the ground, that you are floating free. Anderson describes this in terms of disembodiment, stating that “losing your body” is one of her chief interests in producing these works.38 The inherent disembodiment felt when navigat- ing a 3D world in VR immersion is all the more estranging when it is set in the dark. The chiaroscuro effect is theatrical and exaggerates the sense of volume and depth as in a Ba- roque painting. And lower levels of light are also less visually straining in VR. In Chalkroom the upshot of floating through the dark signals our descent into the night; a diurnal cycle that we are bound to as circadian creatures. Anderson aptly remarks: “What are nights for? To fall through time into an- other world”; a world where, as Huang points out, “the words become a nebula” – chalk dust, atomised, diffuse matter disintegrating upon touch, evading our grasp. While not all HMD-supported VR relies on interactive interfaces, wearing a head-mounted display cuts us off from the surrounding reality more effectively than the dimness of our living room, or the darkness of the cinema auditorium (where exit signs, are by necessity always visible).39 Distinct from watching the audience at a film screening, to observe someone wearing an HMD feels 37 A. Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990): 22. 38 “Laurie Anderson Interview: A Virtual Reality of Stories”. In performance studies, such a transit state is called “liminoid performance”. See Alexandra G. Murphy, “Organizational politics of place and space: the perpetual liminoid performance of commercial flight”, Text and Performance Quarterly 22, no. 4 (2002): 297-316. 39 A. Pinotti, “Environmentalising the image. Towards an-iconology”. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 146 AN-ICON  a bit like trespassing. As when we look at someone who is sleeping, the experiencer is not aware of our gaze. At the same time, we have no access to what they are seeing. The duality of mind and eye as well as inner and outer worlds is a consistent theme in narrative VR experiences, one that is explicitly realised in works that manifest otherwise invisible or intangible traces, senses or information – or as in Notes on Blindness a lack of access thereof. Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness. The virtual reality film, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness40 was created as a counterpart to the feature documentary Notes on Blindness produced by Peter Mid- dleton and James Spinney in 2016. Both works arise from the first-person audio narration of John Hull, who describes in visceral and philosophical terms the process of losing his sight.41 Mired in darkness, as its title indicates, the VR version of the feature film has a wraith-like quality; of thin veils of light suspended in twilight. Its narrative is structured around six parts, each one being a memory, a moment, and a specific location recorded on John Hull’s tapes; each scene requiring a different level and form of interaction from the viewer in order to follow or progress through the narrative. Sound is central to the work, augmented through binaural audio (that spatializes sound as if it were bouncing around your ears), while the 3D rendering of objects and moving figures create a highly immersive experience. Sim- ilar to Thing, its most evocative aspect is the use of point 40 With narrator John Hull. Interactive virtual reality, 360-degree 3D video, colour, EN/FR, 7’, 2016. 41 Based on John Hull’s memoir, On Sight and Insight: A Journey Into the World of Blindness (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 147 AN-ICON  cloud to suspend firefly-like dots in a seemingly infinite deep indigo.42 The first two scenes in Notes on Blindness establish the parameters for acoustic seeing: in the obscure world evoked by John Hull we must learn anew how to look with our ears. Light signals how sound might feel and alerts us to the acoustic realm in three dimensions. It is, however, in the second and third scenes that we are subjected to something closer to liminal performance. As Hull begins to realise that he can no longer remember what things or loved ones look like, he descends into despair. His fear of being trapped alone in darkness culminates in a scene out in the snow, where he panics because he loses all sense of place. At the end of the narration however, the VR interaction invites us to dissolve his footprints in the snow by training our attention, with our head position tracked by the HMD, on their impression in the darkness. When the first set of footprints vanish another pair appear, leading us in Hull’s steps back to the safety of home. In the episode that features rain, Hull’s house is an almost silent place except for his gentle voice and the reverberation of raindrops falling on ordinary objects in the room. We are again invited to interact with our gaze, this time to give shape to otherwise hidden forms that the rain defines acoustically: pots, pans, glasses, dishes. This is a pivotal moment in Hull’s own life and the VR film; we too understand what it is to create the virtual shape of things by listening to them. There is also a specific, oneiric qual- ity to the space that the VR work creates whereby Hull’s experience becomes a shared one, rather than a voyeuris- tic observation of someone losing their sight.43 Everything we hear is echoed in its visual equivalent; renderings that 42 Point cloud started to appear in cinematic VR works at this time. See, for instance, “Coexistence” 2016, at the Venice Architecture Biennale: https://vimeo.com/183596023 43 For ethical issues related to the work, see D. Leblond, “Landscape Shaped by Blindness. Touching the Rock (1990) and Notes on Blindness (2016): Towards an ec(h)ology of vision”, Études britanniques contemporaines no. 55 (2018). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 148 AN-ICON  appear as point clouds: luminescent, 3D shapes of objects and moving bodies that create elusive, lace-like silhou- ettes in the darkened space. In the process of becoming fully recognizable, and as they unravel and disperse into thinning clouds of bright specks, these forms resemble constellations. Hence, in Notes on Blindness, as in Thing and Chalkroom, the darkness acts as a connecting mate- rial: boundless, it enfolds all of us (seeing and non-seeing individuals) in a cosmic infinity that is simultaneously inti- mate and terrifying. “Cold space, a dark place”: Parragirls Past, Present: unlocking memories of institutional “care” The immersive VR film Parragirls Past, Present44 is set in the grounds and buildings of Parramatta Girls Home – a punitive welfare institution for teenage girls sit- uated in Western Sydney, Australia, closed in 1974 and abandoned since the late 1990s. Its creation pivots on the memories of five former occupants, among the hundreds who have returned after many decades to confront this terrible place. As a labour of remembrance mired in trauma, the project required more than a year of collaboration with the aim of finding a form of testimony that might convey the survivors’ experiences to a wider public. In Parramatta Girls Home, children were not only deprived of freedom, but also cruelly disciplined and abused. Later, both Australian government inquiries and media reporting sensationalized and underscored their stigma and victimhood. The last thing Parragirls could abide was to provide viewers with prurient pleasures. Hence, a number of counter-visual strat- egies were developed, ruling out interactivity as a means 44 360-degree 3D stereoscopic video, ambisonic spatial sound, EN, 2017, 23’. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 149 AN-ICON  for viewers to progress through the virtual environment and its narratives. As with Thing, Chalkroom and Notes on Blind- ness, the point cloud photographic technique, materializing against the surrounding darkness, proved key. Among the varied ways that images can be “environmentalized” in 3D and 360 degrees, point cloud is distinct: it bears little resemblance to the synthetic imagery of game and CGI animation. Cartographic in origin, point cloud provides a means to project these as experienceable architectures – places we can fly through, as if in space. In addition to the sense of irrepressible movement, of being sucked into the institution’s spatio-temporal vortex, it is the transformation of photographs into points of light and colour that float in an abysmal 3D world that gives Parragirls Past, Present its wraithlike and enigmatic atmosphere. Accompanying the journey is the sound of the Parragirls’ voices, captured in ambisonic recordings. Wo- ven together, they offer a deeply personal yet collective ac- count of their experience as inmates. There is one location in particular in the Girls Home that former occupants find difficult to revisit: a basement solitary confinement cell, col- loquially known as the dungeon. In the film, Gypsie Hayes describes it thus: the only way you can survive in there is to curl up and go to sleep. That’s all you could do to survive that. It was nothingness. It was just a cold space, a dark place. In contrast to the exterior point cloud scenes, the cell is represented as a stereoscopic spherical panorama in 360 degrees. Moving between the differently rendered and spatially located spaces, presented yet another dilemma however, which was resolved using the point cloud aes- thetic as a form of transition in conjunction with moving MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 150 AN-ICON  tracking shots, to dissolve the image across one space or dimension into another. The most unusual impact of combining point cloud with mobile tracking shots in the 3D world of Parra- girls Past, Present is the feeling of being pulled through the experience, almost against our will. The data points seem to transcend and even pierce our body, so that we become part of the ghost-like substance of the Girls Home. Distinct from its head-mounted display viewing, in the 3D 360-de- gree film screenings of Parragirls Past, Present at UNSW EPICentre. Standing alongside 10 to 15 spectators wearing 3D glasses, you can see the points appear to emerge in 3D from the circular screen and pass through the bodies of the viewers beside you. The imagery may appear spectral as it floats through space, but so are the audience, whose bod- ies are traversed as if they had no consistency or solidity. Crucially, in conjunction with the nightmarish, endless darkness and the omnidirectional eye, point cloud effectively disassembles the centralized gaze of VR’s typi- cally first-person perspective: enfolded in swarms of float- ing pixels, we start to feel what it must have been like to be under constant disciplinary surveillance – to be watched at all times by invisible omniscient eyes. In the concluding shot, however, we fly out backwards, as if pulled up and out into the sky, discovering the vast emptiness that extends beyond the perimeter of the institution. On the one hand, what we are literally seeing are the limits of the photogrammetric images that could be recorded – black holes in both data and historical memory. On the other hand, as the sound of the multiple voices van- ishes, we grasp a sense of the collective unconscious that Parragirls still share with the other former occupants of the Home: the internalisation of a state of incarceration, being severed from the rest of the world, unable to imagine what lays beyond the space of incarceration other than a void. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 151 AN-ICON  Conclusion In moving image media, as in real life, darkness has always been a privileged channel towards alternate states of self or alterity. Black spaces encourage us to re- linquish control of sensing bodies, simultaneously fostering a sense of placeless-ness: in the dark, we lose our sense of orientation and lack the necessary landmarks to eval- uate distance and depth, and order the space according to the familiar rules of perspective and proprioception. In immersive environments, the feeling of being unmoored is heightened by the “environmentalizing” of the space: night enfolds us on all sides. Within this dis-anchored realm, the voices that appear to address us but remain devoid of a visible source seem to take possession of us, strength- ening the sense of losing one’s grip. But darkness is not the only precondition to our slipping into an altered state of consciousness. The experience of the scene unfold- ing independently from our will is equally important, which also occurs when watching 2D films. While spectators can look around in every direction in both the HMD and in a 360-degree 3D cinema, if you cannot control your propul- sion through a space or scene then the film acts on you. Only at this price – in accepting that I cannot change the “order” of the images and sounds – can a form of “dreamwork” take place.45 In the works described here, the unravelling of the images is inseparable from the relent- less, gliding movement that sucks us in, and, in the case of 360 degree 3D films, passes “through” us: to turn our head and look back is to experience the sense of memory disinte- grating, and history as ruins, that Walter Benjamin so vividly 45 As Thierry Kuntzel points out, such is the specificity of time-based media and its special link to the dream-like and to the unconscious: “the film and the story unravel outside of me, I cannot possibly intervene”. T. Kuntzel, “Le travail du film”, Communications, no. 19 (1972): 27. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 152 AN-ICON  evoked with the allegory of the angel of history.46 Lighting up in darkness, point clouds appear like the ultimate expression of transience. Though they are a mere effect of a particular imaging technology, they often look like constellations, or like particles that float in space, such as dust, petals or snowflakes; points that redefine deep space as a conduit to the dreamlike. A figuration of matter propagating, taking form and then dissolving, point clouds perfectly capture the melancholy awareness of the impermanence of the material world, and the all-too human, shared sense of finitude, loss, and awe experienced in reminiscing and day-dreaming. 46 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the philosophy of history”, trans. H. Zohn, in H. Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): 249. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 153 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/15161

Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media by Martine Beugnet and Lily Hibberd Cinema Darkness Spectatorship Dream Consciousness Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media by Martine Beugnet and Lily Hibberd Abstract As with films previously, claims are being made today about the capacity of immersive environments, in- cluding virtual reality, to offer viewers or experiencers ef- fective simulations of altered states of consciousness. In this article, we look anew at the enduring question of time- based mechanical (lens based and digital) media’s ability not merely to take us outside of or besides ourselves, but to generate an imaginary realm of their own. Our analysis centres on the use of darkness. Often associated with the passage from one state of consciousness to another, dark- ness has become a prevalent aesthetic in cinematic immer- sive media. In some ways, as we will see, the latest tech- nologies of audio-vision appear less apt than conventional cinema to induce us to “cross the bridge” and venture into the land of phantoms. In others, they emerge as privileged entries into the dreamlike worlds of our contemporary, tech- nologized era. In spite of differences in viewing conditions, we find that between the older medium of 2D film and that of cinematic virtual reality, darkness, combined with the illusion of depth and visual replication of motion proves to be a particularly potent harbinger of altered states. Cinema Darkness Spectatorship Dream Consciousness To quote this essay: M. Beugnet & L. Hibberd, “Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 129-152 MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 129 AN-ICON (...) spectators at the exit, brutally rejected by the black belly of the theater into the glaring and mischievous light of the lobby, some- times have the bewildered expression (happy and unhappy) of people waking up. To leave the movies is a little like getting up: not always easy.1 Introduction: cine-obscurity Darkness is dream’s natural associate. It is no wonder audiovisual works that seek to transport us beyond the here and now of awakened reality continue to rely on the power of darkness to enfold us and to unravel our sense of place and time. Though there are structural differences between the aesthetics and spectatorship of cinema and that of virtual reality, darkness functions across many me- dia forms as both a metaphor and as a corporeal device for immersion, encouraging spectators and participants to submit to imaginary realms. The scope of this article is not to review the wider lineage of darkness across immersive forms of media, or indeed to revisit their origins going back to Plato’s cave. The media archaeology of moving images and obscurity has already been done by theorists such as Oliver Grau, and in groundwork of Siegfried Zielinski and Gloria Custance, who described the cinema as a dark “womb”.2 Other media theorists have delineated the parameters of interactive or immersive 3D viewing, most notably Maria Engberg and Jay Bolter on virtual reality aesthetics, as well as William 1 C. Metz, A. Guzzetti, “The fiction film and its spectator: A metapsychological study”, New Literary History 8, no. 1 (1976): 75-105, 86. 2 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, trans. G. Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): 151-152. S. Zielinski, G. Custance, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999): 92, 246. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 130 AN-ICON  Brown with the notion of “gaseous perception” in relation to stereoscopic cinema and darkness.3 In contrast with earlier theorizations, in what follows we focus on adaptations of cinematic immersive reality in the hands of artists and experimental filmmakers. To further account for the contemporary emergence of an aesthetic of darkness we firstly seek to establish a histori- cal backdrop. We then turn our attention to the works and, where available, the words of the creators’ themselves, as we consider four recent immersive media works imbibed in darkness: Anouk De Clercq’s Thing, Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang’s La camera insabbiata/Chalkroom, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness and Parragirls Past, Pres- ent: Unlocking Memories of Institutional “Care”. As immer- sion in darkness is closely related to dreamworlds and to dreams of outer space, these phenomena provide the un- derpinning rationale in the first half of this article and for our subsequent analysis of these four works. Enfolding darkness, from awakened dreaming to altered states Amongst the most memorable scenes of F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) is the imaginary screening in which a seductress from the city appears to lure a naïve country man into a fantasized vision of urban life. One evening, as they sit together on the shore of a lake, the woman launches into an eloquent description of nightlife in the city. To demonstrate the impression made by her tale, Murnau materializes it in the form of a projection that magically appears in front of the two characters. Thanks to an astute system of transparencies, the dream show of the modern city superimposes itself onto the nocturnal sky, under the halo of a fake moon that 3 M. Engberg, J.D. Bolter, “The aesthetics of reality media”, Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 81-95. W. Brown, “Avatar: stereoscopic cinema, gaseous perception and darkness”, Animation 7, no. 3 (2012): 259-271. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 131 AN-ICON  glows like the lamp of a projector.4 Stylized cityscapes al- ternate with kaleidoscopic, blurry visions of frenzied revelry: there is no attempt at harnessing this fantastic vision to a specific or stable point of view. The fantasy may originate in the female character’s mind, but it feeds on a collective imaginary, and the projection allows her to share it with her companion, as well as beyond the diegesis, with the audi- ence of Murnau’s film. The sequence is a celebration of the powers of the cinema not merely as a “factory of dreams”, but also as a sharing of the experience of dreaming itself. Dreams and daydreams, hallucinations and memories, as the products of the human psyche, fascinate not only because they elude our self control (we can no more prevent or design our nightmares at will than we can consciously erase a memory), but also because they con- found our capacity to communicate and share experiences. In every medium, from literature to the theatre, painting and photography, techniques have been developed to evoke altered states of consciousness. The gap, however, be- tween the viewer or reader and the subjective creations of the psyche mediated by objective, external sources, is not easily bridged. Key to Sunrise’s mise en abyme of a screen- ing is the choice of a nocturnal setting: in a film theatre the night on screen blends with the darkness that surrounds the cinema spectator like a connecting tissue. Because the visibility of the projected film im- age initially relied on a beam of light, darkness – also the companion of sleep and dreams – has been associated with the cinema from the start. With the shift from analogue to digital, the glow of the LCD monitor has increasingly complemented the light beam of the projector, alongside other self-illuminating screens found in the domestic en- vironment. Regardless of location, we still lower the lights while watching films whenever possible. More than a mere 4 M. Beugnet, L’attrait du flou (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2017): 33-34. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 132 AN-ICON  condition of visibility, obscurity facilitates the slipping in and out of total awakened awareness. Film was the first medium to offer the promise of more than the mere representation of our imaginings – to engender a form of awakened dreaming through spectacle and apparatus. The increasingly photorealistic quality of cinematic images and sounds set in motion guaranteed the “credibility of its fabulations”.5 A spectator could hope to become immersed in a film in a manner similar to the dreamer, who experiences even the most absurd world of mental images equally as “real” as daily life occurrences, or of a daydreamer who indulges in memories or fanciful imaginings to the point of forgetting their actual surround- ings. The conditions of reception in the cinema auditorium came to reflect and strengthen the analogy: cut off from the outer world, plunged in darkness and silence, with limited physical activity, at the end of a screening the spectator often emerges as if they were awakening. Yet in spite of the unequalled ability to blur the frontier between representation and perception,6 the fusion of image and reality never occurs fully.7 As Christian Metz reminds us, where in deep sleep the dreamer does not know that they are dreaming, film induces, at best, a semi-wakeful state: more than dream per se, the experience of watching a film (which can be emulated, though imperfectly, in indi- vidual situations of viewing) resembles that of reminiscing, 5 C. Metz, A. Guzzetti, “The fiction film and its spectator: A metapsychological study”, New Literary History 8, no. 1 (1976): 75-105. 6 S. Sharot, “Dreams in films and films as dreams: surrealism and popular American cinema”, Canadian Journal of Film Studies 24, no. 1 (2015): 66-89. Also, on the myth of the credulous audience, see T. Gunning, “An aesthetic of astonishment. Early film and the (in)credulous spectator”, Art and Text, no. 34 (1989): 31-45. 7 In contrast, “dreaming is subjectively indistinguishable from waking experience”. See T.K. Metzigner, “Why is virtual reality interesting for philosophers?”, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, no. 5 (2018). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 133 AN-ICON  fantasizing or slipping into reverie. For Raymond Bellour, it is better compared with a form of hypnosis.8 Nonetheless, fascination for the medium’s oneiric qualities has driven some of the most radical and creative practices and theorizing of the medium. The rep- resentation of dreams themselves has had little to do with this evolution: from Antonin Artaud and the surrealists to Jean Epstein, the earliest avant-gardes nurtured the belief that the medium’s aesthetic potential laid not in the repre- sentation of dreams or reminiscences, but in the possibil- ity to dream or reminisce with images.9 In classic cinema however, as in avant-garde or experimental filmmaking, darkness and immobility remain the spectator-dreamer’s first allies. In The Absent Body, Drew Leder observes that in normal situations of perception the awareness of our body diminishes: the reason we can focus on what we watch, or concentrate on what we touch, is that we do not pay attention to the actual process, nor to the eye or hand involved in it.10 A similar receding of bodily awareness occurs when we are absorbed in our own thoughts. Such “absenting” of the lived body is not however “equivalent to a mere void, a lack of being”.11 Rather, it testifies to the extent in which a sentient subject might be beside itself, “ecstatically caught-up in the world”: the very nature of the body is to project outwards from its place of standing. From the “here” arises a perceptual world of near and far distances. From the “now” we inhabit a meaningful past and a futural realm of projects and goals.12 8 R. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: POL / Trafic, 2009). 9 J. Epstein, Écrits sur le cinéma, vol. 2 (Paris: Cinéma Club/Seghers, 1975): 18-20. Also see, A. Artaud “Cinéma et réalité”, Œuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris : Gallimard, 1978): 19; and M. Beugnet, L’attrait du flou (Crisnée: Yellow Now: 2017): 82-83. 10 A. Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990): 70-71. 11 Ibid.: 22. 12 Ibid.: 23. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 134 AN-ICON  Leder’s description of this phenomenon recalls James Gibson’s theory of “affordance”, according to which individuals are entwined with their surroundings, their pro- spective actions informed by the constant collecting of information from their environment.13 This capacity to feel or to picture our bodies outside or alongside themselves in time and space is an equally fundamental feature of dream- ing, hallucination and reverie, as well as the fabrication of their similitude in movies. Indeed, it is often the altered sense in which our body appears to relate to its perceived environment (feeling one’s bodily affordance hindered, dis- torted or augmented in turns) that marks the difference between awakened and dreamlike states. In the cinema, the body’s capacity for ecstasis is simultaneously enhanced and directed away from the immediate environment, towards the virtual world that ap- pears on the screen. The film auditorium, as a space, has sometimes been compared to a womb.14 Darkness engulfs the barely moving spectators, allowing them to be together and alone at once, to ignore the borders of the screen as they recede in the obscurity. Within the secluded space of the theatre, the light originating from behind the audience trains spectators to project themselves on the screen, to sit- uate themselves within the perspectival view of the spaces offered to the eye, and the anthropomorphic quality of the camera’s gaze that explores them. From the 1950s onwards, anamorphic lenses widened the frame, and shortened the optical depth of field, with a corresponding increase in visual blur effects. Strengthening the sense of immersion and bringing the cinematic closer to the human field of vision, the blurring of the margins of the visual frame also subtly blended the projected image into the surrounding 13 J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). 14 T. Elsaesser, “Cinephilia or the uses of disenchantment”, in M. de Valck, M. Hagener, eds., Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005): 32. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 135 AN-ICON  darkness, heightening the feeling of being suspended in a virtual dimension without physical limits. In the cinema and at home, dimming the lights and turning up the volume amplifies the degree to which we forget about our own body so as to engage in watch- ing and listening to a movie, sometimes even touching or tasting through the synesthetic or haptic powers of certain images.15 Accordingly, in classic narrative cinema’s sub- jective point of view, a character’s body partly or wholly disappears from the frame. Such strategies allow us, as the spectator, not only to half-dream our way through a film, but also to engage with the expression of altered states of consciousness where images and sounds are supposedly the product of mental processes. Paradoxically, both of these experiences can involve audiovisual representations of extreme physicality (fighting, crying, flying…). Whether awake or dreaming,16 characters in films move, fall or take off in the air, as we ourselves sometimes do in our sleep. In all such cases, however, it is the incapacity to act on the film’s progression that grants the experience its onei- ric quality: as the dreamer with dreams, the film spectator does not control the flow of images: once triggered, they cannot be easily altered or fully erased at will.17 Nor can we always choose to retain a memory, or the trace of a dream, 15 L.U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). M. Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 16 Whereas a dream or a memory is a subjective reality emanating from the psyche, a film is an external product constructed according to a common idiom. In conventional filmmaking, transitions mark out the passage from woken to altered states of consciousness (fades in and out, blurredness, distorted perspectives, spiralling images amongst others). Film dreaming is thus reclaimed and repurposed as the representation of dreaming in film. 17 See T. Kuntzel, “Le defilement”, La revue d’esthétique (1972), reprinted in D. Noguez, ed., Cinéma: théorie, lectures (Paris, Klincksieck, 1978): 97-110. R. Bellour, L’entre-images: photo, cinéma, vidéo (Paris: La Différence, 2002): 86. M. Beugnet, Le Cinéma et ses doubles (Bordeaux: Bord de l’eau, 2021): 5-6. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 136 AN-ICON  any more that we can keep a precise recollection of all the images of a film whose course we can hardly change.18 As with films previously, claims are being made today about the capacity of immersive environments, in- cluding virtual reality, to offer viewers or experiencers ef- fective simulations of altered states of consciousness.19 In what follows, we look anew at the enduring question of time-based mechanical (lens based and digital) media’s ability not merely to take us outside of or besides ourselves, but also to generate an imaginary realm of their own. In doing so we consider the issue of aesthetics alongside the conditions of spectatorship and reception. In some ways, as we will see, the new technologies of audio-vision appear less apt than conventional cinema to induce us to “cross the bridge” and venture into the land of phantoms. In others, they emerge as privileged entries into dream-like worlds of our contemporary, technologized era. What inter- ests us most is not the lure of the “myth of total immersion” or the pursuit of the perfect conflation of perception and representation that would entail the erasure of the frontier between reality and fantasy.20 Rather, we concentrate on the way cinematic virtual reality (including built immersive environments and head-mounted displays) creates the illu- sion of presence while exploiting digital imaging to emulate 18 Remote control usage destroys the experience of time as co-presence, or of time slipping away (also an essential dimension of memories and dreams). Accordingly, Laura Mulvey associates the remote control with the emergence of a possessive spectator in Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 19 From David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) to Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) and Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018) amongst others, the association of immersive technology and altered states of consciousness is a favoured topic in mainstream cinema. For a VR example see Dream (2016) by Philippe Lambert, which is built on a custom audio-visual synthesizer coded by Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit. https://www.nfb.ca/interactive/dream/. 20 See M. Beugnet, L. Hibberd, “Absorbed in experience: new perspectives on immersive media”, Screen 61, no. 4 (2020). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 137 AN-ICON  the dreamlike state of cinematic reception and conjure up a specific, distinctive kind of imagining.21 In the cinema, the obscurity afforded by the auditorium creates the condition for a unique experience: that of a shared space where a collective dreamlike or light hypnotic state prevails. Contrastingly, when viewing a work in a head-mounted display, there is no “joint watching”. The solitude is inescapable, only faintly or temporarily relieved in encounters with others, as characters or actors in the shape of avatars. Darkness creates a connection nonethe- less, an evocation of an infinite space that, ultimately, we all have in common. Hence, in spite of differences in viewing conditions, we find that between the medium of 2D film and that of cinematic virtual reality, darkness combined with the visual replication of motion proves to be a potent harbinger of the dreamlike. It unsettles our grounded-ness in place and demands that we forge new connections with images, and with the world, ourselves and others. We further sug- gest that across VR and film, darkness inaugurates a shift from the collective experience of subjective states toward the individual experience of an unconscious shaped by the shared knowledge of our finitude. Though we are told we live in the age of the Anthropocene, we have an acute sense of the relativity of our existence, of being caught in perpetual movement, connected yet unanchored. Like the dot-size character who faces the starry vastness of the universe at the end of The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1957), the viewer who slides into the seem- ingly limitless night of contemporary films and immersive environments may experience a dreamlike state of radical groundlessness – a contemporary sense of solitary, yet shared, unmooring. 21 Virtual reality is assumed to be closely entwined with interactive gaming and simulated training. This article however focuses on the transmedial practices of narrative and immersion – across film, video art, and immersive installation art – where the spectator rarely drives the story or provokes events. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 138 AN-ICON  In “Of other spaces”, Michel Foucault notes how, from Galileo onwards, things could now only exist in their relative placement and movement: a thing’s place was no longer anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo in the 17th cen- tury, extension was substituted for localization.22 The site of an object, from then on came to be defined as “relations of proximity between points or ele- ments”, like “the dots in a constellation”.23 Foucault builds on the pre-modern analogy between body and universe, arguing that traditionally, space had been constructed as “a space of radiation. Man is surrounded by it on every side; but, inversely, he transmits these resemblances back into the world from which he receives them”.24 In other words, the body is conceived as the medium through which the world is organized as it is perceived. Perspectival art, with its stable construction of space and anchoring of the gaze to a specific position in space, emphasizes such a sense of place-ness and orientation. Though convention- al filmmaking adopted the continuity system in an effort to emulate this centralized condition, its mobile gaze and time-based structure always threatened to reveal the fra- gility of the model.25 Alternative uses of cinematography thus sought to explore the relativity of movement and place, showing the anthropomorphic gaze, with its safely located source, to be an artifice. This approach was not exclusive to ex- perimental cinema: in science fiction and documentary film 22 M. Foucault, “Of other spaces: utopias and heterotopias”, trans. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics 6, no.1 (1986): 22. 23 Ibid.: 23. 24 M. Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Random House, 1970): 23. 25 J. Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972): 18. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 139 AN-ICON  reconstitutions of outer space in particular have made us familiar with “impossible” viewpoints, where a virtual cam- era circles around planets and floats through constella- tions.26 Here again, darkness, like the sidereal night, is key – sucking the spectators into its awesome solitude even as they sit in a crowd. As we will see, immersive technologies have in turn proven to be remarkably able to produce a radi- cal sense of dis-anchoring. A 360-degree omnidirectional scape that moves independently from the viewer’s own movement implies a constant and uncontrollable fluctuation of one’s place within the image. With the dissolution of a stable single-point perspective the body of the observer ceases to be the sole reference and singular source of the gaze as an ordering principle of visible space. The most potent aspect however of these novel immersive environ- ments is the means to enter into the boundlessness of 3D constructed worlds, endless spaces that find in darkness their most compelling expression. In the fathomless black- ness of virtual spaces, furthermore, the solidity of repre- sented things is prone to slip away. The liminal threshold of immersive worlds is arguably always teetering on the brink of dreams – an aspect that the fanfare of virtual reality and the clumsiness of head-mounted displays paradoxi- cally diminishes. Even in 2D iterations construed from 3D renderings however, as is the case in the floating world of Thing, such an evocation of the universe offers itself as powerfully oneiric experience. Sidereal night: Anouk De Clercq’s Thing The first minute of Anouk De Clercq’s film Thing27 is entirely black. The sound track is also initially 26 Famously in the “Blue Danube” sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). 27 Video, b/w, 16:9, stereo, BE/IT/FR, 2013, 18’. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 140 AN-ICON  completely silent, though after a few seconds the faint noise of a light wind or breathing is heard, followed by a voice. The sound of the voice is slightly echoey, as if heard in a large, empty space. Then a crashing noise, followed by the appearance of thin, veil-like formations white dots that move into view from the right of the frame. But whose view? For the voice remains disembodied throughout, and its musings do not refer to the images with any specificity. Nor can we safely establish its location, as its stereophonic transcription varies in spatial orientation, switching from our right to our left ear. Equally impossible to determine is the origin of the movement that alters what we are given to see. Suggested by the changing size of the shapes and their moving in and out of frame, such spatial proximity or distance could equally mirror the trajectory of an invisible observer floating in the dark space, or that of the cloud formations themselves as they enter the former’s field of vision. Occasionally, a fade or a cut to black or a glitch- like effect (with a crackling sound emitted as all vanishes) plunges the screen back into utter darkness.28 Thing appears to be a journey through a virtual world, born out of the imagination of a fictional dreamer – given the nature of the images and the model-like appa- ritions of cities and buildings this dreamer could be the engineer of this world. De Clercq describes Thing as a journey through an architect’s “virtual memory”, “a bound- less, imaginary space” where fictional buildings and urban patterns emerge and disperse in the darkness, a series of ephemeral nebulas that manifest as a kind of “paradoxi- cal materiality” precisely because they are “virtual”.29 The film was made using LiDAR imaging of urbanscapes (an acronym for Light Detection and Ranging) a remote sensor 28 See R. Misek, “The black screen”, in M. Beugnet, A. Cameron, A. Fetveit, eds., Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017): 38-52. 29 See the video here: https://portapak.be/works/30/thing, accessed 18/12/2020. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 141 AN-ICON  technology that generates accurate 3D information about the shape of very large surfaces and their characteristics using pulsed laser emissions to measure ranges between the sensor and the surface. Developed for architectural, archaeological and engineering surveys, such visualiza- tions provide a way of seeing spatial information, which is augmented when viewed in a 3D stereoscopic environ- ment. Yet another digital program subsequently renders the LiDAR data as “point clouds”, the dots of light we see in Thing. Most of the shapes and forms conjured up in Thing are made of these unstable, constantly reshaping clouds of dots. Although the initial light point formations re- semble natural phenomena – cirrostratus, cirrocumulus or constellations – they later produce artificial patterns. An elongated, geometrical form floats in the dark like a space- ship, and the monumental entrance to a city materializes and dissolves. We then travel through the diaphanous out- lines of a district with a mesh of buildings with terraces and hanging gardens. The cross-cutting of a workshop appears and slowly glides in and out of view, its furnishings (stairs, hanging lamps, an easel, the semi-circular shape of what looks like part of a bull’s eye window) sketched in brilliant white against the surrounding night. Some of the point cloud renditions are reminis- cent of white charcoal drawings on black paper, while the buildings and the room resemble X-rays: ghostly, silvery shapes in a process of disintegration. While X-rays and 3D scanners are already used to document vestiges, as well as to augment the existing data of artefacts and archaeo- logical sites, film also holds a specific connection to ruins. Of the attraction exercised by ruins on the cinema, André Habib notes how they offer themselves as the poignant manifestation of the transience of all things human, includ- ing that of our own existence. The inexorability of the flow MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 142 AN-ICON  of 24 images or frames per second – of the ephemerality of its linear course from beginning to end that may be re- peated or looped but not halted – explains the “melancholy, quasi-ontological” relation that connects the medium to the temporality and spatiality of ruins.30 Drawing on tech- niques and visualizations that fuse the astrological and the architectural, De Clercq collapses human time and space (its material, located traces, its memories and dreams) in the infinity of the sidereal night. To craft its boundless post-Galilean dream of space as a universe where the individual body and the individual consciousness are free floating or diffuse, Thing uses the tools of 20th and 21st century imaging. This draw- ing together of film, architecture, and infinite space gives De Clercq’s film an affinity with so-called immersive envi- ronments: a 2D film with a 3D sensibility, best seen in the obscurity of a cinema, it makes full use of the darkened film-theatre as its immediate, continuous extension. “Dark, weird and shadowy”: Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang’s La camera insabbiata/Chalkroom Experimental multimedia artist Laurie Ander- son has produced a series of virtual reality works that elu- cidate some of the aesthetic traits of De Clercq’s Thing in a fully 3D format, also harnessing some of VR’s aptitude to create dreamlike and out-of-body experiences. Created in collaboration with media artist Hsin-Chien Huang in 2017, Chalkroom is an installation and an interactive VR experience, permanently installed at the MoCA in Massachusetts, USA.31 Seated viewers don a head-mounted display and take up two handheld controllers to enter into the VR 30 A. Habib, L’attrait de la ruine (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2011): 9. 31 Virtual reality 360 degree3D interactive video and installation, EN, 2017. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 143 AN-ICON  experience. In the first scene, a lone architectural structure sits on top of a mountain. Unlike the architecture in Thing, the building appears to be concrete. You are coaxed to fly over and enter it, navigating a series of narrow corridors toward a small portal at the end. The controller, which also acts as a torch, is the only source of light. The virtual walls are covered in chalk writing, like their physical counter- part outside the head-mounted display. Here, however, the torchlight illuminates a small orb, making the text all the more elusive – a curious and perverse effect given that the artists have designated us as “readers” instead of viewers. Words disintegrate into phenomes, and break apart again into letters, like swarms of flies. Yet, Laurie Anderson’s vel- vet intonations flow over this eerie place, making it homely. Claustrophobic passages open out into an infinite black space that contains a constellation of text. You’re free to fly around and explore the space, hidden sto- ries narrated by Anderson, which emerge as you approach certain zones. Objects, such as an illuminated, leafy tree, dissolve on closer inspection, and you see this too is made up of letters, as Anderson whispers to us: “You realise that things are made of words”. In interview, she explains being initially unsure about VR because it was too game-like, but that if she could make something “very homemade, dark, weird and shadowy, a different kind of space, a different kind of mental space” then she would be interested.32 Her aim, she adds, was to create an experience where you could fly “like in your dreams”. On the face of it, since immersive environments such as 3D films in 360 degree cinema projection and virtual reality experiences on head-mounted display or HMD, 33 32 “Laurie Anderson interview: A virtual reality of stories”, 2017, Louisiana Channel. Accessed 20/12/2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHT016FbR30. 33 It is important not to confuse VR with the HMD. In simplest terms, Virtual Reality is defined as being the coherence of technical means that enable a person to interact in real time with a virtual world. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 144 AN-ICON  effectively “environmentalize”34 the image, one could ex- pect the “womb” effect to be perfected and even emulated, as with Anderson’s installation. However, in contrast with conventional spectatorship, absorbed viewing is under- mined by the degree of physical activity involved in the experience.35 In addition to the heaviness and discomfort of the hardware – the headset and headphones – and the optical strain of stereoscopic vision, the attention and effort involved in interacting with the virtual environment para- doxically induce a sense of heightened physical awareness. Rather than projecting itself, the sentient subject engages with the task of controlling the effects of its own motricity in the here and now: a “presenting”, rather than an absent- ing of the body. These effects might be the result of VR’s relative novelty. Nonetheless, it seems that in the narrative context of cinematic VR – beyond gaming and therapeutic applications – interaction and causative acts tend to un- dermine immersion, contradicting widespread theories of “presence” in VR.36 After all, it can be very unnerving to feel your body split in two: an HMD effectively separates our head from the rest of our body. Not only can we not see our (real) selves but unless we are offered some form of avatar we also lack a visible body in the virtual world. Once we get used to this literal mode of “absenting” however, new forms of ecstasis become possible. As we become familiar with the process of virtual seeing, touching and moving, our experiencer or avatar body may recede into the background of our awareness, just like our lived body 34 A. Pinotti, “Environmentalising the image. Towards an-iconology”, in dossier M. Beugnet, L. Hibberd, eds., “Absorbed in experience: new perspectives on immersive media”, Screen 61, no. 4 (2020): 594-603. 35 Interestingly, in Sunrise the virtual screen vanishes when the woman starts dancing. 36 See C. Heeter, “Being there: the subjective experience of presence”, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 1, no. 2 (1992): 262-271. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 145 AN-ICON  does in a reverie, leaving us to be “ecstatically caught-up in the virtual world”.37 Distinct from many other VR interactive ex- periences, Chalkroom’s freedom to roam inhabits this liminal zone for two reasons: one, choices don’t lead to deterministic or sequential narratives, and thus, similar to a dream or hallucination, we feel that we are driven by compulsions and desires. Two, and even more compelling, is the sense that you cannot put your feet on the ground, that you are floating free. Anderson describes this in terms of disembodiment, stating that “losing your body” is one of her chief interests in producing these works.38 The inherent disembodiment felt when navigat- ing a 3D world in VR immersion is all the more estranging when it is set in the dark. The chiaroscuro effect is theatrical and exaggerates the sense of volume and depth as in a Ba- roque painting. And lower levels of light are also less visually straining in VR. In Chalkroom the upshot of floating through the dark signals our descent into the night; a diurnal cycle that we are bound to as circadian creatures. Anderson aptly remarks: “What are nights for? To fall through time into an- other world”; a world where, as Huang points out, “the words become a nebula” – chalk dust, atomised, diffuse matter disintegrating upon touch, evading our grasp. While not all HMD-supported VR relies on interactive interfaces, wearing a head-mounted display cuts us off from the surrounding reality more effectively than the dimness of our living room, or the darkness of the cinema auditorium (where exit signs, are by necessity always visible).39 Distinct from watching the audience at a film screening, to observe someone wearing an HMD feels 37 A. Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990): 22. 38 “Laurie Anderson Interview: A Virtual Reality of Stories”. In performance studies, such a transit state is called “liminoid performance”. See Alexandra G. Murphy, “Organizational politics of place and space: the perpetual liminoid performance of commercial flight”, Text and Performance Quarterly 22, no. 4 (2002): 297-316. 39 A. Pinotti, “Environmentalising the image. Towards an-iconology”. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 146 AN-ICON  a bit like trespassing. As when we look at someone who is sleeping, the experiencer is not aware of our gaze. At the same time, we have no access to what they are seeing. The duality of mind and eye as well as inner and outer worlds is a consistent theme in narrative VR experiences, one that is explicitly realised in works that manifest otherwise invisible or intangible traces, senses or information – or as in Notes on Blindness a lack of access thereof. Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness. The virtual reality film, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness40 was created as a counterpart to the feature documentary Notes on Blindness produced by Peter Mid- dleton and James Spinney in 2016. Both works arise from the first-person audio narration of John Hull, who describes in visceral and philosophical terms the process of losing his sight.41 Mired in darkness, as its title indicates, the VR version of the feature film has a wraith-like quality; of thin veils of light suspended in twilight. Its narrative is structured around six parts, each one being a memory, a moment, and a specific location recorded on John Hull’s tapes; each scene requiring a different level and form of interaction from the viewer in order to follow or progress through the narrative. Sound is central to the work, augmented through binaural audio (that spatializes sound as if it were bouncing around your ears), while the 3D rendering of objects and moving figures create a highly immersive experience. Sim- ilar to Thing, its most evocative aspect is the use of point 40 With narrator John Hull. Interactive virtual reality, 360-degree 3D video, colour, EN/FR, 7’, 2016. 41 Based on John Hull’s memoir, On Sight and Insight: A Journey Into the World of Blindness (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 147 AN-ICON  cloud to suspend firefly-like dots in a seemingly infinite deep indigo.42 The first two scenes in Notes on Blindness establish the parameters for acoustic seeing: in the obscure world evoked by John Hull we must learn anew how to look with our ears. Light signals how sound might feel and alerts us to the acoustic realm in three dimensions. It is, however, in the second and third scenes that we are subjected to something closer to liminal performance. As Hull begins to realise that he can no longer remember what things or loved ones look like, he descends into despair. His fear of being trapped alone in darkness culminates in a scene out in the snow, where he panics because he loses all sense of place. At the end of the narration however, the VR interaction invites us to dissolve his footprints in the snow by training our attention, with our head position tracked by the HMD, on their impression in the darkness. When the first set of footprints vanish another pair appear, leading us in Hull’s steps back to the safety of home. In the episode that features rain, Hull’s house is an almost silent place except for his gentle voice and the reverberation of raindrops falling on ordinary objects in the room. We are again invited to interact with our gaze, this time to give shape to otherwise hidden forms that the rain defines acoustically: pots, pans, glasses, dishes. This is a pivotal moment in Hull’s own life and the VR film; we too understand what it is to create the virtual shape of things by listening to them. There is also a specific, oneiric qual- ity to the space that the VR work creates whereby Hull’s experience becomes a shared one, rather than a voyeuris- tic observation of someone losing their sight.43 Everything we hear is echoed in its visual equivalent; renderings that 42 Point cloud started to appear in cinematic VR works at this time. See, for instance, “Coexistence” 2016, at the Venice Architecture Biennale: https://vimeo.com/183596023 43 For ethical issues related to the work, see D. Leblond, “Landscape Shaped by Blindness. Touching the Rock (1990) and Notes on Blindness (2016): Towards an ec(h)ology of vision”, Études britanniques contemporaines no. 55 (2018). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 148 AN-ICON  appear as point clouds: luminescent, 3D shapes of objects and moving bodies that create elusive, lace-like silhou- ettes in the darkened space. In the process of becoming fully recognizable, and as they unravel and disperse into thinning clouds of bright specks, these forms resemble constellations. Hence, in Notes on Blindness, as in Thing and Chalkroom, the darkness acts as a connecting mate- rial: boundless, it enfolds all of us (seeing and non-seeing individuals) in a cosmic infinity that is simultaneously inti- mate and terrifying. “Cold space, a dark place”: Parragirls Past, Present: unlocking memories of institutional “care” The immersive VR film Parragirls Past, Present44 is set in the grounds and buildings of Parramatta Girls Home – a punitive welfare institution for teenage girls sit- uated in Western Sydney, Australia, closed in 1974 and abandoned since the late 1990s. Its creation pivots on the memories of five former occupants, among the hundreds who have returned after many decades to confront this terrible place. As a labour of remembrance mired in trauma, the project required more than a year of collaboration with the aim of finding a form of testimony that might convey the survivors’ experiences to a wider public. In Parramatta Girls Home, children were not only deprived of freedom, but also cruelly disciplined and abused. Later, both Australian government inquiries and media reporting sensationalized and underscored their stigma and victimhood. The last thing Parragirls could abide was to provide viewers with prurient pleasures. Hence, a number of counter-visual strat- egies were developed, ruling out interactivity as a means 44 360-degree 3D stereoscopic video, ambisonic spatial sound, EN, 2017, 23’. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 149 AN-ICON  for viewers to progress through the virtual environment and its narratives. As with Thing, Chalkroom and Notes on Blind- ness, the point cloud photographic technique, materializing against the surrounding darkness, proved key. Among the varied ways that images can be “environmentalized” in 3D and 360 degrees, point cloud is distinct: it bears little resemblance to the synthetic imagery of game and CGI animation. Cartographic in origin, point cloud provides a means to project these as experienceable architectures – places we can fly through, as if in space. In addition to the sense of irrepressible movement, of being sucked into the institution’s spatio-temporal vortex, it is the transformation of photographs into points of light and colour that float in an abysmal 3D world that gives Parragirls Past, Present its wraithlike and enigmatic atmosphere. Accompanying the journey is the sound of the Parragirls’ voices, captured in ambisonic recordings. Wo- ven together, they offer a deeply personal yet collective ac- count of their experience as inmates. There is one location in particular in the Girls Home that former occupants find difficult to revisit: a basement solitary confinement cell, col- loquially known as the dungeon. In the film, Gypsie Hayes describes it thus: the only way you can survive in there is to curl up and go to sleep. That’s all you could do to survive that. It was nothingness. It was just a cold space, a dark place. In contrast to the exterior point cloud scenes, the cell is represented as a stereoscopic spherical panorama in 360 degrees. Moving between the differently rendered and spatially located spaces, presented yet another dilemma however, which was resolved using the point cloud aes- thetic as a form of transition in conjunction with moving MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 150 AN-ICON  tracking shots, to dissolve the image across one space or dimension into another. The most unusual impact of combining point cloud with mobile tracking shots in the 3D world of Parra- girls Past, Present is the feeling of being pulled through the experience, almost against our will. The data points seem to transcend and even pierce our body, so that we become part of the ghost-like substance of the Girls Home. Distinct from its head-mounted display viewing, in the 3D 360-de- gree film screenings of Parragirls Past, Present at UNSW EPICentre. Standing alongside 10 to 15 spectators wearing 3D glasses, you can see the points appear to emerge in 3D from the circular screen and pass through the bodies of the viewers beside you. The imagery may appear spectral as it floats through space, but so are the audience, whose bod- ies are traversed as if they had no consistency or solidity. Crucially, in conjunction with the nightmarish, endless darkness and the omnidirectional eye, point cloud effectively disassembles the centralized gaze of VR’s typi- cally first-person perspective: enfolded in swarms of float- ing pixels, we start to feel what it must have been like to be under constant disciplinary surveillance – to be watched at all times by invisible omniscient eyes. In the concluding shot, however, we fly out backwards, as if pulled up and out into the sky, discovering the vast emptiness that extends beyond the perimeter of the institution. On the one hand, what we are literally seeing are the limits of the photogrammetric images that could be recorded – black holes in both data and historical memory. On the other hand, as the sound of the multiple voices van- ishes, we grasp a sense of the collective unconscious that Parragirls still share with the other former occupants of the Home: the internalisation of a state of incarceration, being severed from the rest of the world, unable to imagine what lays beyond the space of incarceration other than a void. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 151 AN-ICON  Conclusion In moving image media, as in real life, darkness has always been a privileged channel towards alternate states of self or alterity. Black spaces encourage us to re- linquish control of sensing bodies, simultaneously fostering a sense of placeless-ness: in the dark, we lose our sense of orientation and lack the necessary landmarks to eval- uate distance and depth, and order the space according to the familiar rules of perspective and proprioception. In immersive environments, the feeling of being unmoored is heightened by the “environmentalizing” of the space: night enfolds us on all sides. Within this dis-anchored realm, the voices that appear to address us but remain devoid of a visible source seem to take possession of us, strength- ening the sense of losing one’s grip. But darkness is not the only precondition to our slipping into an altered state of consciousness. The experience of the scene unfold- ing independently from our will is equally important, which also occurs when watching 2D films. While spectators can look around in every direction in both the HMD and in a 360-degree 3D cinema, if you cannot control your propul- sion through a space or scene then the film acts on you. Only at this price – in accepting that I cannot change the “order” of the images and sounds – can a form of “dreamwork” take place.45 In the works described here, the unravelling of the images is inseparable from the relent- less, gliding movement that sucks us in, and, in the case of 360 degree 3D films, passes “through” us: to turn our head and look back is to experience the sense of memory disinte- grating, and history as ruins, that Walter Benjamin so vividly 45 As Thierry Kuntzel points out, such is the specificity of time-based media and its special link to the dream-like and to the unconscious: “the film and the story unravel outside of me, I cannot possibly intervene”. T. Kuntzel, “Le travail du film”, Communications, no. 19 (1972): 27. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 152 AN-ICON  evoked with the allegory of the angel of history.46 Lighting up in darkness, point clouds appear like the ultimate expression of transience. Though they are a mere effect of a particular imaging technology, they often look like constellations, or like particles that float in space, such as dust, petals or snowflakes; points that redefine deep space as a conduit to the dreamlike. A figuration of matter propagating, taking form and then dissolving, point clouds perfectly capture the melancholy awareness of the impermanence of the material world, and the all-too human, shared sense of finitude, loss, and awe experienced in reminiscing and day-dreaming. 46 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the philosophy of history”, trans. H. Zohn, in H. Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): 249. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 153 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/15441

The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the Image as a Bilderschrift by Pietro Montani Virtual Reality Imagination Hallucination Dream Regression Intermediality Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the 1 Image as a Bilderschrift by Pietro Montani Abstract This article discusses the following points: ■ The analogies which can be identified between Virtual Reali- ty (VR) and the hallucinatory aspects of dream activity make sense within a network of relations characterised by certain important cognitive performances (in particular inferential performances) which can be attributed to the work of the imagination; ■ To assure the plasticity of these performances, the imagi- nation seems to have to distance itself somewhat from linguistic thought and in dreams this is achieved regressively via the hallu- cinatory state. Various authoritative neuroscientific approaches to dreams significantly substantiate this theory. ■ At the time when its correlation with linguistic thought is deactivated, the imagination does not, however, surrender it- self to the hallucinatory event but elaborates it with recourse to practices similar to those of syncretic writing – a Bilderschrift or “pictographic script” as defined by Freud; ■ It is significant that very early cinema also addressed the quasi-hallucinatory aspects of films, practising an “intermedial” Bilderschrift, i.e. a treatment of the images that is attentive to the comparison and integration of the different levels of expression which work together in the composition of a film; ■ Digital images seem to revive this production model in sev- eral ways and I will offer two examples highlighting their affinity with syncretic and intermedial writing. Virtual Reality Imagination Hallucination Dream Regression Intermediality To quote this essay: P. Montani, “The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the image as a Bilderschrift”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 153-171 PIETRO MONTANI 154 AN-ICON  Virtual reality, hallucination and the dream-imagination The hallucinatory aspect of VR is obvious to those who have experienced or wish to study it. However, not everyone hallucinates and so the hallucinatory nature of dreams offers the most immediate and comprehensible parallel – an experience we undergo during sleep with a frequency and regularity familiar to all.2 VR and dreams cannot be treated as entirely identical phenomena, indeed there are many and signifi- cant differences as we shall see shortly. However we can immediately highlight at least two essential parallels. The first is the compelling illusion of reality that differentiates hallucinatory dreams and VR images from other types of internal and external images processed by the imagination. This leads to the second parallel, regarding the unalterable nature of what is perceived. Apart from some exception- al cases (e.g. “lucid dreaming”), we cannot intervene in dream images, the realism of which is experienced as both convincingly plausible and undeniably objective. The same applies to the fundamentally hallucinatory nature of VR images (although there are clearly many potential excep- tions, to which I shall return in the final section). I would happily add a further property in the presence of sufficient evidence and that is how easily we forget dreams, which corresponds – although this is a totally subjective obser- vation – to the ease with which we discard large portions of our VR experiences. I must stress that the two aforementioned prop- erties are linked to the particular realism of dream and VR 1 This article refers to the European research project “The Future of Humanity: New Scenarios of Imagination” (Vilnius University). This research is funded by the European Social Fund (project no. 09.3.3-LMTK-712-01-0078). 2 The analogy between VR and dreaming has already been explored. See for example R. Diodato, Estetica del virtuale (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2005), which, however, chooses a different approach from the one I will propose here. PIETRO MONTANI 155 AN-ICON  images. So, although the latter come in several interactive forms (e.g. immersive installations) that can alter the per- ceived environment, this does not impact on the funda- mentally hallucinatory state of the images delivered. On the contrary, the degree of interactivity in dreams is limited to the activation of cognitive processes internal to the dream event such as the linguistic formulation of judgements and inferences, and an evaluation of the emotions experienced. But here, too, these processes are dependent on the objec- tivity of the images experienced. I shall provide a personal example: the night before starting this article I dreamt that I encountered a stranger in the street and sensed with great pity and concern that he clearly felt ashamed, although there was no indication as to why. Without entering into more detailed analysis, what I have described was clearly a hallucinatory event accompanied by a congruent judge- ment explicitly formulated in the dreamer’s inner discourse, and which included the word “ashamed”. But it was not a “lucid dream”. A Freudian analyst would say that the dream was mine so the pity and concern were directed at a part of me. This may be so, but this split within the dreamer reinforces rather than diminishes the objectivity of the sentiment I felt and the congruence of the judgement I associated with it (i.e. that the human condition is truly compassionate – and mysterious – if someone can show shame for no apparent reason). Ultimately, it is the radically immersive state of the two traits shared by VR and dreams that should be underscored:3 we become caught up in a 3 For a helpful classification of all the VR forms 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. Tyerry Giuliana, eds., Meaning- Making in Extended Reality (Rome: Aracne, 2020): 63-90. According to the accurate schema divided into four categories discussed in the article, the type on which these considerations focus occupies the second level of the third type (“Advanced cinematic VR”). However, the authors describe “radical immersive media” as a broad category of devices (which can be further divided into two subgroups) designed to interact in different ways with the real world. For reasons that will become clear later, I shall limit my considerations to a very general analogy between VR and dreams. PIETRO MONTANI 156 AN-ICON  simulated environment featuring images that coercively force their presence on us. And now for the equally significant differences. What I have described – and why I was able to describe it – was clearly a dream occurring in a REM sleep phase. It was one of those dreams availing of closer integration with Freud’s “secondary process” and the ones we remember (or reorganise) with greater satisfaction. The neurophys- iological processes at work in all sleep phases are fairly well known today, although the scientific community has reached no full agreement on the functional meaning to attribute to the incoherence and transience of their dream products. We do not know exactly what purpose is served by the low structural level of dreams but there appears to be good support for the theory – adopted here – accord- ing to which their principal function is to increase the “fit- ness” of some processes of the imagination conducted in a wakeful state (particularly inferential ones) by reducing their redundancy and complexity in several ways.4 What does this strange neural work look like? Some have likened it to the wandering undertaken by our vigilant imagination5. Dreams (REM and NREM) also seem- ingly implement a momentary state of generally indeter- minate, organised and specialised cognitive function (e.g. intentionality and attention) to maintain the brain-mind for periods of varying length in the purely virtual phase effec- tively described as the “default mode network”. This is a typically “experimental” phase as both the dream and the wandering explore numerous potential configurations of 4 Here and elsewhere I refer in particular to an important essay by J.A. Hobson et al., “Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming”, Frontiers in Psychology 5, no. 1133 (2014) https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01133. Hobson is an undisputed authority on dream studies and shares the theory (see in particular the works by G. Tononi) that dreams optimise some wakeful cognitive processes by alleviating and “pruning” the synapses in excess. 5 See M. Corballis, The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You’re Not Looking (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2014). Corballis is a psychologist who mainly studies language but his book is up-to-date on the most accredited developments of the neurosciences regarding the dream phenomenon. PIETRO MONTANI 157 AN-ICON  well-defined or simply hypothetical situations and problems, often varied or even disparate. In this sense, the “default mode network” active in dreams in the hallucinatory form familiar to us prompts the entire neuronal apparatus to enter into free flow with no fixed objectives, allowing the “innate generator of virtual reality” in our brains to behave as a “free-running inference machine”.6 This machine – and we shall return to this – benefits from a “synaptic regression”7, a temporary reinstatement of extremely primitive neural circuits not used in the wakeful state. In other words, our brain seemingly needs to suspend dealings with the real world (and its complexity) at regular intervals and start dialoguing with itself, gener- ating simplified and incoherent simulacra of a world so as to optimise, on reawakening, the performances that will enable it to cope once again with the complex (and harsh) reality. The autopoietic and virtualising nature of this work8 offers a simple explanation for the fact that the foetus falls into full REM sleep in the thirtieth week of life.9 This is pure cognitive and proprioceptive training in VR as, at that stage, its only experience of the world is intrauterine. Hobson, Hong and Friston astutely likened this surprising evolution- al phase to an insurgence and initial coordination of the a 6 J.A. Hobson et al., “Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming”: 22. As better clarified below, I shall here intend the concept or “regression” also in the specifically Freudian sense. 7 Ibid.: 15. 8 I discuss this point in P. Montani, Tre forme di creatività. Tecnica, arte, politica (Napoli: Cronopio, 2017). 9 See J.A. Hobson, “REM sleep and dreaming: towards a theory of protoconsciousness”, Nature Review Neurosciences 10 (2020): 803-813 10.1038/nrn2716. PIETRO MONTANI 158 AN-ICON  priori (intuitive and intellectual) forms discussed by Kant10 (to whom we shall return). What temporary conclusions can we draw from the parallel between the dream hallucination and VR? A cru- cial point regarding both the analogies and the differences seems to require critical attention. The neurophysiological study of dreams shows that a significant relationship can form between the sometimes hallucinatory and incoher- ent nature of images and the emergence of our cognitive strategies in the broad sense (e.g. the inferential activity attributable to the imagination).11 The emphasis should fall on both requisites – the incoherence and the hallucinatory nature – although, for obvious reasons, VR seems keen to focus primarily on the latter. To address this problem prop- erly, we should refer to Freud’s great work on the mental significance of dreams12, starting from a fairly solid point of contact between the neurophysiological model with which he worked and the very different ones we work with today. This point of contact consists in the specific importance of regression in hallucinatory and incoherent processes managed by the dream-imagination. Regression and “Bilderschrift” in dreams When referring to Freud I shall totally disre- gard the aspect dearest to his heart, that dreams are in- terpretable and that this very interpretability defines their 10 J.A. Hobson et al., “Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming”: 19. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1787), trans. P. Guyer, A. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). In a very important book, Before Tomorrow. Epigenesis and Rationality (Polity Press: Cambridge, 2016), Catherine Malabou argued in favor of an “epigenetic” interpretation of the development of Kantian a priori forms. I have developed a similar approach to Kant’s critical philosophy in P. Montani, “Imagination and its technological destiny”, Open Philosophy 3 (2020): 187-201. 11 The “judgement” I formulated during the described dream is typically inferential in form. For the Kant of the third Critique, it is the Urteilskraft, i.e. the “power of judgement”, that is essentially inferential and abductive in nature. See I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), trans. P. Guyer, E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 12 See S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), trans. J. Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vols. 4-5, (London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955). PIETRO MONTANI 159 AN-ICON  immensely important metapsychological condition. Is this approach justifiable? Yes if we refer to the last chapter of Traumdeutung, “The psychology of Dream Processes”. A footnote added in 1925 at the end of the previous chapter (VI, “Dream-work”) introduces its objectives significantly, saying that the particular nature of the dream-work should be studied as such, over and above the fact that this form of working is used by the unconscious in a hallucinatory and disguised mode to achieve its drives. Freud writes At bottom dreams are nothing other than a particular form of think- ing, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dream-work which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming - the explanation of its peculiar nature.13 The peculiarities of the dream-work – brilliantly studied by Freud in Chapter VI – are well known: conden- sation, displacement and considerations of representability. But the common trait is regression, intended by the author in a strictly topical sense. Explained as simply as possible (and in non-Freudian language), during dreams our mind- brain reconnects with a very primitive prelinguistic and preconceptual stage of its memory store. Or rather, it is a phase in which a profoundly embodied imagination (think of a baby just a few months old) has also had to perform the work (e.g. inferential) that would subsequently be del- egated to linguistic thought.14 The phenomenon of regression does not only belong to dreams, observes Freud, although in dreams it produces a particular “vividness”, a hallucinatory Belebung. That this is, in other respects, a somewhat paradoxical process emerges from the fact that “a particular form of 13 Ibid.: 510. My italics. 14 Using the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari, we could say that here the imagination adopts a predominately “striated” manner of proceeding. See G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), trans. B. Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988). PIETRO MONTANI 160 AN-ICON  thinking” is entrusted to the process of regression in which “the fabric of the dream-thoughts is resolved [aufgelöst: dis- rupted] into its raw material”.15 But, we must add, it is dis- rupted as far as is possible for, although the archaic zone of the memory store in question dates from an evolutionary phase when linguistic thought did not yet exist, the latter will leave a trace in the regressive path implemented by the dream state in adulthood.16 As demonstrated, for example, by perhaps the most surprising requisite of the dream- work: the ability to treat words as if they were objects and play with their signifying matter. Further on, with regard to dream-hallucinations, Freud speaks of a “transvalua- tion” of thought into images; thought is drawn towards the most archaic memory store, to be seen specifically as a disabling of its logical and linguistic relations in favour of the earliest work of a totally embodied imagination. But these remain transvaluated thoughts and are by no means a reinstatement of a prelinguistic condition. Rather, it is a new reorganisation of the relationship between image and word, a radical renegotiation of their “normal” bond (I shall return to this key point later). This brings fresh relevance to the factor of dream-work that Freud called “regard for representability” What we have described, in our analysis of dream-work, as ‘re- gard for representability’ might be brought into connection with the selective attraction exercised by the visually recollected scenes touched upon by the dream-thoughts (...) [So that] dreaming is on the whole an example of regression to the dreamer’s earliest condition, a revival (ein Wiederbeleben) of his childhood, of the 15 Ibid.: 545. My italics. 16 This is the theory developed by J. Derrida in Writing and Difference (1967), trans. A. Bass (London: Routledge, 2001). PIETRO MONTANI 161 AN-ICON instinctual impulses which dominated it and of the methods of expression which were then available to him.17 Freud appears to refer to non-elaborated (or semi-elaborated) nuclei linked to powerful emotional in- vestments, such as the “internal objects” Melanie Klein and her followers later discussed when re-elaborating Freudian dream theory in broader and more flexible terms, and today considered widely reliable and compatible with neurosci- entific findings.18 The last lines of the citation (from a 1919 addition) allow us to conclude that the regressive move- ment Freud attributed to the physiology of dreams can be acquired as a structural requisite of the dream-imagination without necessarily attributing it to instinctual motivation. In other words, if dream-work is rooted in the condition of very early infancy – the condition of being “in-fans” i.e. not yet capable of speech – this means that the regressive movement of the dream reaches and revives not only the desiring aspects but the concomitant inferential process- es too. Thus, these processes take place in the absence of language and make predominant use of prelinguistic images and schema. We could call it an imagination that “schematises without any concept” as Kant said regarding “reflective judgement”, highlighting its exceptional episte- mological significance.19 This further Kantian indication is by no means casual20 and should be paralleled with the “free-running inference machine” discussed by Hobson, Hong and Friston. Preliminary and free imaginative train- ing is required, hypothetical and exempted from defined 17 Ibid.: 549-550. My italics. 18 This is the theory persuasively argued by M. Mancia, Il sogno e la sua storia. (Venice: Marsilio, 2004); and Sonno & sogno. (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2006). 19 See E. Garroni, Estetica ed epistemologia (Milan: Unicopli 2003); P. Montani, “The Imagination and Its Technological Destiny”: 3; L. Palmer, “Schematizzare senza concetti e senso comune”, in D. Cecchi, M. Feyles, P. Montani (eds.), Ambienti mediali (Milan: Meltemi 2018): 39-56. Significantly, Palmer accompanies his rethinking of the Kantian concept with experimental evidence. 20 See Montani, Tre forme di creatività; and “The Imagination and Its Technological Destiny”. PIETRO MONTANI 162 AN-ICON  tasks, simplified and experimental, not only (as is obvious) before cognition can start to be deployed but also so that it can function constantly – e.g. (Tononi’s proposal largely endorsed by Hobson) in terms of synaptic pruning, simpli- fication and resetting of the inferential device.21 Before leaving Freud we must adopt another of his valuable indications. Above, I linked dreams to a particular way of reorganising the image-word relationship. I will specify that Freud clearly sees them, ultimately, as a relationship guided by a principle of reversibility. Not only are words used as if things, images also display a key trait of discursive convention. This trait is also fully comprehensible in intuitive terms: both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, the human imagination must have performed a major work of segmentation, classification and organisation (e.g. in- ferential) on the experience, valorising a certain intelligible profile of the images – precisely that which language will later formalise. Freud calls this property, reactivated by the dream-imagination, a Bilderschrift, a picture writing: The dream-content (...) is expressed as it were in a pictographic script [Bilderschrift], the characters of which have to be trans- posed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts. If we attempted to read these characters according to their pictorial value instead of according to their symbolic relation [Zeichenbezie- hung], we should clearly be led into error.22 Freud speaks here from the standpoint of inter- pretability (not relevant for us) but the observation can of course be generalised. Products of the dream-imagination 21 See G. Tononi, C. Cirelli, Sleep function and synaptic homeostasis, Sleep Medicine Reviews 10 (2006): 49-62. In this sense and precisely because of its hallucinatory “resuscitation”, the dream-work restores not so much the contents of the oldest inferences but the earliest manner of that performance (i.e. “schematises without any concept”) which conduct precious selective functions for pruning purposes. 22 Ibid.: 296. The translation of Bilderschrift as “pictographic script” is highly questionable; and that of Zeichenbeziehung as “symbolic relation” is frankly erroneous as the “symbolism” of dreams is not involved here but only the more general sign profile of dream-images. PIETRO MONTANI 163 AN-ICON  should above all be observed in terms of their Zeichen- beziehung, their singular and archaic relationship with the semiotic order. In other words, despite being hallucinatory, dream-images should also be appreciated for their ability to reactivate a condition in which the imagination has also processed them as the signs of a particular Bilderschrift.23 Our Freudian journey has taken us another major step forward: the relational aspect –stressed in the conclusions of the first section – can now avail of a specif- ic and significant reference to a scriptural element within the work of the imagination. This element can be linked to the radical regressive condition in which the imagination behaves literally as a VR generator. We can now try to better understand how this correlation works. Bilderschrift in very early cinema and in the digital age: the syncretism and intermediality of images Interestingly, in its very early days, and roughly when Freud was developing his Traumdeutung and subse- quent metapsychological additions, the cinema was seen (or conceived) by some film-makers and theoreticians as closely resembling the device of image-word reversibility highlighted at the end of the previous section. This means that the birth of the cinema also featured a major focus on the network of relationships which the powerful illusion of reality produced by the cinematographic image was clearly keen to unite. In some cases, in particular, that image was seen as a syncretic form of expression: a space of compar- ison and integration between different levels of expression. This section dwells briefly on two significant examples of 23 On the image-word connection and its meaning for an appropriate understanding of a “history” of the arts, C. Brandi’s observations in Segno e immagine (Palermo: Aesthetica, 2002) are valuable, not coincidentally introduced by a discussion on Kant’s schematism, PIETRO MONTANI 164 AN-ICON  this understanding of the image – which I call “intermedi- al”24: a reflection on the cinema of the “Russian Formalists” and Sergei M. Eisenstein’s first cinematographic theory centred on the project of an “intellectual cinema”.25 I shall conclude with some comments on VR installations and their inclusion in the intermedial paradigm of the image. The Formalists felt strongly that the emergence of the cinema gave their era the privilege of observing a form of art in its nascent state. Cinema brought a brand-new addition to the technically reproduced image – the ability to move in time. Boris Eikhenbaum, for instance, argued that with cinema “for the first time in history, an art which was ‘depictive’ by its very nature became capable of evolving in time and proved to be beyond any comparison, classi- fication or analogy”.26 He was struck in particular by the fact that, in cinema, the image medium adopted an original condition because the reception of the film has to develop with a time sequence typical of other media (e.g. writing). To better use these peculiarities, thought Eikhen- baum, the structural principles of the cinematographic text would have to comply with two preferential options, one paradigmatic and the other syntagmatic. The paradig- matic option consisted in asserting the conventionality of the image (its Zeichenbeziehung as Freud would say) in a head-on contrast with the naturalistic values of photograph- ic reproduction; the syntagmatic option consisted in em- phasising the discrete (or potentially discrete) nature of the formal unities placed in a reciprocal relationship following a short, markedly divided montage. These two requisites are therefore totally comparable to Freud’s Bilderschrift. But Eikhenbaum underscored another aspect concerning 24 On this concept, see P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2010). 25 See R. Taylor, ed., Russian Poetics in Translation, vol. 9: The Poetics of Cinema. (Department of Language & Linguistics: University of Essex, 1982); S.M. Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage (London-New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2010). 26 B. Eikhenbaum, “Problems of cine-stylistics”, trans. R. Sherwood, in R. Taylor, ed., The Poetics of Cinema (Oxford: RTP, 1982): 10-21. My italics. PIETRO MONTANI 165 AN-ICON  not the construction options but the structural conditions of understanding a film, arguing that the image plane in the cinema is always accompanied by the articulation of “inner speech” in the spectator’s mind. So, the cinematic experi- ence has to proceed via a constant integration of image and language planes, more akin to a process of reading than a prolonged and guided form of contemplation.27 Returning to the parallel with Freud’s reflection on the figures of the dream-work, we could say that, in films, the autonomous expressive and pathemic resources of the image come to- gether in a constant relationship with the broader cognitive resources accessed by linguistic thought. Remaining largely on the wavelength of Eikhen- baum’s theories, Sergei Eisenstein pushed himself even further forward in the same 1920s’ time-frame, especially from a design perspective. In short, he believed that the discursiveness of cinema could function as a device that takes the spectator into close contact with the semiotic op- erations that enable the imagination to give sensible content to concepts. That is, it could explore the key imaginative performance that Kant called “schematism”. A performance that, unsurprisingly, we have already referred to regard- ing its relationship with dream-work. Eisenstein called this cinema “intellectual” because, from the political perspec- tive that excited him at the time, the cinematic experience promised to considerably alter the spectators’ “power of judgment” (to use another Kantian term), training them, for instance, in dialectical thinking, as we read in one of his notes for the planned film adaptation of Marx’s Capital.28 Although Eikhenbaum and Eisenstein’s the- ories cannot be generalised, we can agree on the fact 27 On the complex intermedial nature of reading, see S.B. Trasmundi, S.C. Cowley, “Reading: how readers beget imagining”, Frontiers in Psychology 11: 531682 (2020), doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.531682. 28 On this subject, see an important work by E. Vogman, Dance of Values. Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital project (Zurich-Berlin: Diaphanes, 2019). PIETRO MONTANI 166 AN-ICON  that, throughout the silent film period, the treatment of cinematographic images largely adhered to the general Bilderschrift principles discussed here, and often invented new figures of them. We can also agree that, whatever its strengths and weaknesses, this trend was destined to un- dergo a marked shift after the introduction of sound, which could inevitably be expected to produce – and Eisenstein was one of the first to denounce this29 – a strengthening of the reproductive and illusionistic effects of the film image and an ensuing increase in the naturalistic understanding of the film. From that moment on, the cinema pursued different paths which we cannot follow here although it may be interesting to ask what transformations would have been seen in the “scriptural” direction I discussed briefly at the start of this section.30 We must instead ask ourselves, and I shall do so rapidly below, whether the fundamental principle embraced by this direction, namely the activation of a critical countermovement physiologically correlated to the regressive nature of the image, reappeared elsewhere. And how it could also concern VR where the regressive movement, as mentioned at the beginning, reaches the extreme condition of a hallucinatory event. Before proceeding we should again stress the relational, and more precisely intermedial, nature of the critical countermovement which accompanies the regres- sive process of the imagination – and thus also presumably its extreme outcomes in the hallucinatory version of VR. Against this backdrop, I shall conclude by touching on two different spheres of exemplification. The first concerns the spontaneous practices of syncretic writing in use on the Web for about 20 years now and which are increasingly widespread among its users. In the second, I shall pres- ent some brief comments on how the intermedial device 29 See S.M. Eisenstein, “Buduščee zvukovoj fil’my. Zajavka”, in Id., Izbrannye Proizvedenija v šesti tomach. II (Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1963-1979): 15-16. 30 I have done so partially in P. Montani, Emozioni dell’intelligenza (Milan: Meltemi, 2020). PIETRO MONTANI 167 AN-ICON  has been managed in two remarkable recent installations: Carne y arena by Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu (2017) and VR_I by Jilles Jobin (2018).31 It is a fact that the birth of the interactive Web supported the emergence of a form of syncretic writing that does not merely combine image, word and sound but also very frequently exploits their reciprocal relations to obtain significant effects of meaning from this interme- dial confrontation – for the moment predominantly tuned into a playful, ironic and paradoxical register (I am thinking of all the “meme” forms). As well as not excluding signifi- cant evolutions and further differentiations, this aspect in itself already guarantees great (and spontaneous) reflexive control of the semiotic material manipulated.32 I have sug- gested calling this practice “extended writing”, adding that significant innovation might develop in the technologies of human expression. Indeed, the first thing to do is to study the internalisation processes and feedback on the imag- inative and cognitive conduct of those using it (but it is a mass phenomenon).33 I am keen to stress here that the regressive values linked to the image in extended writing are placed in a constant, systematic and plastic relationship with several critical and intellectual distancing practices, often of a distinctly intermedial nature. That is to say, they are conceived to exploit the effects of meaning ensuing from the re-mediation and comparison of different media. The two installations mentioned above are im- portant not only for their uncommon design complexity but also and primarily for their intermedial tone (i.e. distanced and reflexive), albeit diversely interpreted in the two cases. In 31 The two installations could be visited at the Fondazione Prada in Milan (2017) and the Istituto Svizzero di Roma (2018), respectively. 32 See P. Montani, “Materialità del virtuale”, Agalma. Rivista di studi culturali e di estetica 40, no. 2 (2020): 11-18; and “Apology for technical distancing. But beware the feedback!”, IMG: Interdisciplinary journal on image, imagery and imagination 3 (2020): 264-281. 33 The issue of “extended writing” should be included in an extensive case study of technological aesthetics, as well illustrated recently by V. Gallese, “The aesthetic world in the digital era. A call to arms for experimental aesthetics”, Reti, saperi, linguaggi 9, no. 17 (2020): 55-84. PIETRO MONTANI 168 AN-ICON  both, visitors realise that the VR is simply a part of a broader experience that can internally implement in various ways what I have just described as a critical countermovement. I shall conclude by indicating the essential coordinates below. Carne y arena is a journey in four stages, the second of which contains a VR installation. Here, the visitor – alone and free to move around – finds him/herself spend- ing six minutes in a desert zone with a group of Mexican refugees trying to cross the US border but being violently driven back by an American army patrol.34 In the first space, visitors are asked to remove their shoes and socks and place them in a locker from which they will collect them later. This is a key strategic move because during their mobile permanence in the virtual environment their bare feet will make them constantly proprioceptively aware of an essen- tial split (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible is the instal- lation’s astute subtitle). A walkway awaits when they exit the “arena”, after retrieving shoes and socks, from where the visitors can catch a glimpse of what is happening in the semi-dark space of the virtual simulation by looking, if they so wish, through the gaps between the wooden planks of a wall. This is a further distancing from the powerful en- gagement just experienced. The walkway leads to a final room where, free to decide how long to stop at each one, they can watch video clips of the migrants narrating details of the episode to which the visitors have been invisible witnesses and what happened to them afterwards. Their 34 I dwelled more analytically on the Iñarritu installation in P. Montani, Tre forme di creatività. See also F. Casetti, A. Pinotti, “Post–cinema ecology”, in D. Chateau, J. Moure, eds., Post– cinema. Cinema in the Post-Art Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 193- 217; A. D’Aloia “Virtually present, physically invisible: virtual reality immersion and emersion in Alejandro González Iñarritu’s Carne y Arena”, Senses of Cinema 87 (2018) http://www. sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/virtually-present-physically-invisible-virtual-reality- immersion-and-emersion-in-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritus-carne-y-arena/. For an important discussion of the “empathic” effects attributable to experiences in VR see A. Pinotti, “Autopsia in 360°. Il rigor mortis dell’empatia nel fuori-cornice del virtuale”, Fata Morgana 39 (2019): 17-32. On the aesthetics of’ “unframed” images see P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan- London: Mimesis International, 2020). PIETRO MONTANI 169 AN-ICON  faces appear in high definition on small screens placed in niches around the walls of the room. The important point here is that the VR is just one of the many elements in the installation and the overall experience stimulates visitors to engage in an intermedial reflection that invests them literally from head (equipped with visor and headphones) to toe (bare). The truly striking and forceful realism of the simulation thus finds its meaning within a complex narrative device. I shall add that even the patchy recollection of the six-minute VR simulation men- tioned at the start of this article finds interesting justification within the context of this complex cognitive and pathemic experience. VR_I is an all-VR installation and far more playful than Carne y arena. The artist is primarily a choreographer and paid particular attention to the fluidity of movement of the five dancers who inhabit the virtual space and define it with their performance. They take on very different sizes in the various phases of the event: gigantic and objectively threatening at the start but miniaturised and observable later on, almost as if in a lab experiment on a small quadrangular platform, and finally life-size. Five people enter the virtual space and each visitor’s avatar can interact with the other four, not only on a haptic and sensorimotorial level (the hands have sensors) but also linguistically thanks to phono-acoustic equipment. The visitors find themselves in a metamorphic space resembling that of dreams: sometimes a boundless desert, at other times an urban landscape or a mountain-top loft with sweeping views down over a wide valley. The envi- ronments are always clearly identifiable and their subsequent development follows the rhythm of the dancers and the spa- tial harmony created by their movements. It is also significant that famous paintings (Matisse, Bacon) are hung on the walls of the loft interiors. Basically, the whole encourages visitors to let themselves go in an experience constantly tuned to a free PIETRO MONTANI 170 AN-ICON  reflexive register and they quickly realise that the rhythmic play between the different spatial dimensions is one of the core themes of the choreographic flow they are engaged in, as too is the doubling of the performance (the dancers giant or miniaturised, the paintings), the comparison between the dimensions and the free exchange of dialogue about what is seen and happening. We could perhaps describe VR_I as a lucid intermedial dream which can be realised without any forcing by an embodied imagination fundamentally recon- ciled with its less docile partner: language. Conclusions ■ The hallucinatory immersiveness of VR must, just like that of dreams, be understood and studied against the backdrop of the network of significant relations it can entertain with other per- formances, for example inferential, of an embodied imagination. It seems inadvisable to isolate it from this broader context.35 ■ The regressive aspect characterising the specific halluci- natory immersiveness of dreams must be understood primarily in terms of the neurophysiological functions (synaptic pruning, plas- ticity, resetting of inferential devices) attributable to the movement which allows the brain-mind to return to the situation in which the work of the imagination autonomously conducted cognitive performances that would, in a subsequent phase, be guided by linguistic thought. ■ It is in this regressive sphere36 that, remaining with Freud, we see the particular resources of a significant link between im- age and writing (a Bilderschrift). It is a link that very early cinema 35 A critical-genealogical investigation into the life of media conducted in terms of the assemblages or true ecosystems, in which each time they assume a structural positioning and a cultural meaning, characterises the work of Francesco Casetti. See lastly and also for some significant analogies with the issue of immersiveness, “The Phantasmagoria: an enclosure and three worlds” (forthcoming). 36 A “regression in the service of the ego” we could say, using a fine expression introduced by E. Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), but the issue should also be addressed from a broader disciplinary perspective in terms of the adaptive and evolutionary advantages ascribable to the work of the dream imagination. PIETRO MONTANI 171 AN-ICON  interpreted predominantly as an intermedial comparison, i.e. a comparison-integration of different media (starting with image and verbal discourse) such as to combine a critical and reflexive countermovement constantly and systematically with the natu- ralistic and quasi-hallucinatory reception of the film. ■ This same countermovement is perceived today in the spontaneous phenomenon of extended writing which can be re- corded on the Web and in the design of some major installations in which VR features, in various ways, as a component of a more complex and “scriptural” narrative device in the broadest sense. PIETRO MONTANI 172 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/15441

The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the Image as a Bilderschrift by Pietro Montani Virtual Reality Imagination Hallucination Dream Regression Intermediality Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the 1 Image as a Bilderschrift by Pietro Montani Abstract This article discusses the following points: ■ The analogies which can be identified between Virtual Reali- ty (VR) and the hallucinatory aspects of dream activity make sense within a network of relations characterised by certain important cognitive performances (in particular inferential performances) which can be attributed to the work of the imagination; ■ To assure the plasticity of these performances, the imagi- nation seems to have to distance itself somewhat from linguistic thought and in dreams this is achieved regressively via the hallu- cinatory state. Various authoritative neuroscientific approaches to dreams significantly substantiate this theory. ■ At the time when its correlation with linguistic thought is deactivated, the imagination does not, however, surrender it- self to the hallucinatory event but elaborates it with recourse to practices similar to those of syncretic writing – a Bilderschrift or “pictographic script” as defined by Freud; ■ It is significant that very early cinema also addressed the quasi-hallucinatory aspects of films, practising an “intermedial” Bilderschrift, i.e. a treatment of the images that is attentive to the comparison and integration of the different levels of expression which work together in the composition of a film; ■ Digital images seem to revive this production model in sev- eral ways and I will offer two examples highlighting their affinity with syncretic and intermedial writing. Virtual Reality Imagination Hallucination Dream Regression Intermediality To quote this essay: P. Montani, “The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the image as a Bilderschrift”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 153-171 PIETRO MONTANI 154 AN-ICON  Virtual reality, hallucination and the dream-imagination The hallucinatory aspect of VR is obvious to those who have experienced or wish to study it. However, not everyone hallucinates and so the hallucinatory nature of dreams offers the most immediate and comprehensible parallel – an experience we undergo during sleep with a frequency and regularity familiar to all.2 VR and dreams cannot be treated as entirely identical phenomena, indeed there are many and signifi- cant differences as we shall see shortly. However we can immediately highlight at least two essential parallels. The first is the compelling illusion of reality that differentiates hallucinatory dreams and VR images from other types of internal and external images processed by the imagination. This leads to the second parallel, regarding the unalterable nature of what is perceived. Apart from some exception- al cases (e.g. “lucid dreaming”), we cannot intervene in dream images, the realism of which is experienced as both convincingly plausible and undeniably objective. The same applies to the fundamentally hallucinatory nature of VR images (although there are clearly many potential excep- tions, to which I shall return in the final section). I would happily add a further property in the presence of sufficient evidence and that is how easily we forget dreams, which corresponds – although this is a totally subjective obser- vation – to the ease with which we discard large portions of our VR experiences. I must stress that the two aforementioned prop- erties are linked to the particular realism of dream and VR 1 This article refers to the European research project “The Future of Humanity: New Scenarios of Imagination” (Vilnius University). This research is funded by the European Social Fund (project no. 09.3.3-LMTK-712-01-0078). 2 The analogy between VR and dreaming has already been explored. See for example R. Diodato, Estetica del virtuale (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2005), which, however, chooses a different approach from the one I will propose here. PIETRO MONTANI 155 AN-ICON  images. So, although the latter come in several interactive forms (e.g. immersive installations) that can alter the per- ceived environment, this does not impact on the funda- mentally hallucinatory state of the images delivered. On the contrary, the degree of interactivity in dreams is limited to the activation of cognitive processes internal to the dream event such as the linguistic formulation of judgements and inferences, and an evaluation of the emotions experienced. But here, too, these processes are dependent on the objec- tivity of the images experienced. I shall provide a personal example: the night before starting this article I dreamt that I encountered a stranger in the street and sensed with great pity and concern that he clearly felt ashamed, although there was no indication as to why. Without entering into more detailed analysis, what I have described was clearly a hallucinatory event accompanied by a congruent judge- ment explicitly formulated in the dreamer’s inner discourse, and which included the word “ashamed”. But it was not a “lucid dream”. A Freudian analyst would say that the dream was mine so the pity and concern were directed at a part of me. This may be so, but this split within the dreamer reinforces rather than diminishes the objectivity of the sentiment I felt and the congruence of the judgement I associated with it (i.e. that the human condition is truly compassionate – and mysterious – if someone can show shame for no apparent reason). Ultimately, it is the radically immersive state of the two traits shared by VR and dreams that should be underscored:3 we become caught up in a 3 For a helpful classification of all the VR forms 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. Tyerry Giuliana, eds., Meaning- Making in Extended Reality (Rome: Aracne, 2020): 63-90. According to the accurate schema divided into four categories discussed in the article, the type on which these considerations focus occupies the second level of the third type (“Advanced cinematic VR”). However, the authors describe “radical immersive media” as a broad category of devices (which can be further divided into two subgroups) designed to interact in different ways with the real world. For reasons that will become clear later, I shall limit my considerations to a very general analogy between VR and dreams. PIETRO MONTANI 156 AN-ICON  simulated environment featuring images that coercively force their presence on us. And now for the equally significant differences. What I have described – and why I was able to describe it – was clearly a dream occurring in a REM sleep phase. It was one of those dreams availing of closer integration with Freud’s “secondary process” and the ones we remember (or reorganise) with greater satisfaction. The neurophys- iological processes at work in all sleep phases are fairly well known today, although the scientific community has reached no full agreement on the functional meaning to attribute to the incoherence and transience of their dream products. We do not know exactly what purpose is served by the low structural level of dreams but there appears to be good support for the theory – adopted here – accord- ing to which their principal function is to increase the “fit- ness” of some processes of the imagination conducted in a wakeful state (particularly inferential ones) by reducing their redundancy and complexity in several ways.4 What does this strange neural work look like? Some have likened it to the wandering undertaken by our vigilant imagination5. Dreams (REM and NREM) also seem- ingly implement a momentary state of generally indeter- minate, organised and specialised cognitive function (e.g. intentionality and attention) to maintain the brain-mind for periods of varying length in the purely virtual phase effec- tively described as the “default mode network”. This is a typically “experimental” phase as both the dream and the wandering explore numerous potential configurations of 4 Here and elsewhere I refer in particular to an important essay by J.A. Hobson et al., “Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming”, Frontiers in Psychology 5, no. 1133 (2014) https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01133. Hobson is an undisputed authority on dream studies and shares the theory (see in particular the works by G. Tononi) that dreams optimise some wakeful cognitive processes by alleviating and “pruning” the synapses in excess. 5 See M. Corballis, The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You’re Not Looking (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2014). Corballis is a psychologist who mainly studies language but his book is up-to-date on the most accredited developments of the neurosciences regarding the dream phenomenon. PIETRO MONTANI 157 AN-ICON  well-defined or simply hypothetical situations and problems, often varied or even disparate. In this sense, the “default mode network” active in dreams in the hallucinatory form familiar to us prompts the entire neuronal apparatus to enter into free flow with no fixed objectives, allowing the “innate generator of virtual reality” in our brains to behave as a “free-running inference machine”.6 This machine – and we shall return to this – benefits from a “synaptic regression”7, a temporary reinstatement of extremely primitive neural circuits not used in the wakeful state. In other words, our brain seemingly needs to suspend dealings with the real world (and its complexity) at regular intervals and start dialoguing with itself, gener- ating simplified and incoherent simulacra of a world so as to optimise, on reawakening, the performances that will enable it to cope once again with the complex (and harsh) reality. The autopoietic and virtualising nature of this work8 offers a simple explanation for the fact that the foetus falls into full REM sleep in the thirtieth week of life.9 This is pure cognitive and proprioceptive training in VR as, at that stage, its only experience of the world is intrauterine. Hobson, Hong and Friston astutely likened this surprising evolution- al phase to an insurgence and initial coordination of the a 6 J.A. Hobson et al., “Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming”: 22. As better clarified below, I shall here intend the concept or “regression” also in the specifically Freudian sense. 7 Ibid.: 15. 8 I discuss this point in P. Montani, Tre forme di creatività. Tecnica, arte, politica (Napoli: Cronopio, 2017). 9 See J.A. Hobson, “REM sleep and dreaming: towards a theory of protoconsciousness”, Nature Review Neurosciences 10 (2020): 803-813 10.1038/nrn2716. PIETRO MONTANI 158 AN-ICON  priori (intuitive and intellectual) forms discussed by Kant10 (to whom we shall return). What temporary conclusions can we draw from the parallel between the dream hallucination and VR? A cru- cial point regarding both the analogies and the differences seems to require critical attention. The neurophysiological study of dreams shows that a significant relationship can form between the sometimes hallucinatory and incoher- ent nature of images and the emergence of our cognitive strategies in the broad sense (e.g. the inferential activity attributable to the imagination).11 The emphasis should fall on both requisites – the incoherence and the hallucinatory nature – although, for obvious reasons, VR seems keen to focus primarily on the latter. To address this problem prop- erly, we should refer to Freud’s great work on the mental significance of dreams12, starting from a fairly solid point of contact between the neurophysiological model with which he worked and the very different ones we work with today. This point of contact consists in the specific importance of regression in hallucinatory and incoherent processes managed by the dream-imagination. Regression and “Bilderschrift” in dreams When referring to Freud I shall totally disre- gard the aspect dearest to his heart, that dreams are in- terpretable and that this very interpretability defines their 10 J.A. Hobson et al., “Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming”: 19. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1787), trans. P. Guyer, A. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). In a very important book, Before Tomorrow. Epigenesis and Rationality (Polity Press: Cambridge, 2016), Catherine Malabou argued in favor of an “epigenetic” interpretation of the development of Kantian a priori forms. I have developed a similar approach to Kant’s critical philosophy in P. Montani, “Imagination and its technological destiny”, Open Philosophy 3 (2020): 187-201. 11 The “judgement” I formulated during the described dream is typically inferential in form. For the Kant of the third Critique, it is the Urteilskraft, i.e. the “power of judgement”, that is essentially inferential and abductive in nature. See I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), trans. P. Guyer, E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 12 See S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), trans. J. Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vols. 4-5, (London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955). PIETRO MONTANI 159 AN-ICON  immensely important metapsychological condition. Is this approach justifiable? Yes if we refer to the last chapter of Traumdeutung, “The psychology of Dream Processes”. A footnote added in 1925 at the end of the previous chapter (VI, “Dream-work”) introduces its objectives significantly, saying that the particular nature of the dream-work should be studied as such, over and above the fact that this form of working is used by the unconscious in a hallucinatory and disguised mode to achieve its drives. Freud writes At bottom dreams are nothing other than a particular form of think- ing, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dream-work which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming - the explanation of its peculiar nature.13 The peculiarities of the dream-work – brilliantly studied by Freud in Chapter VI – are well known: conden- sation, displacement and considerations of representability. But the common trait is regression, intended by the author in a strictly topical sense. Explained as simply as possible (and in non-Freudian language), during dreams our mind- brain reconnects with a very primitive prelinguistic and preconceptual stage of its memory store. Or rather, it is a phase in which a profoundly embodied imagination (think of a baby just a few months old) has also had to perform the work (e.g. inferential) that would subsequently be del- egated to linguistic thought.14 The phenomenon of regression does not only belong to dreams, observes Freud, although in dreams it produces a particular “vividness”, a hallucinatory Belebung. That this is, in other respects, a somewhat paradoxical process emerges from the fact that “a particular form of 13 Ibid.: 510. My italics. 14 Using the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari, we could say that here the imagination adopts a predominately “striated” manner of proceeding. See G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), trans. B. Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988). PIETRO MONTANI 160 AN-ICON  thinking” is entrusted to the process of regression in which “the fabric of the dream-thoughts is resolved [aufgelöst: dis- rupted] into its raw material”.15 But, we must add, it is dis- rupted as far as is possible for, although the archaic zone of the memory store in question dates from an evolutionary phase when linguistic thought did not yet exist, the latter will leave a trace in the regressive path implemented by the dream state in adulthood.16 As demonstrated, for example, by perhaps the most surprising requisite of the dream- work: the ability to treat words as if they were objects and play with their signifying matter. Further on, with regard to dream-hallucinations, Freud speaks of a “transvalua- tion” of thought into images; thought is drawn towards the most archaic memory store, to be seen specifically as a disabling of its logical and linguistic relations in favour of the earliest work of a totally embodied imagination. But these remain transvaluated thoughts and are by no means a reinstatement of a prelinguistic condition. Rather, it is a new reorganisation of the relationship between image and word, a radical renegotiation of their “normal” bond (I shall return to this key point later). This brings fresh relevance to the factor of dream-work that Freud called “regard for representability” What we have described, in our analysis of dream-work, as ‘re- gard for representability’ might be brought into connection with the selective attraction exercised by the visually recollected scenes touched upon by the dream-thoughts (...) [So that] dreaming is on the whole an example of regression to the dreamer’s earliest condition, a revival (ein Wiederbeleben) of his childhood, of the 15 Ibid.: 545. My italics. 16 This is the theory developed by J. Derrida in Writing and Difference (1967), trans. A. Bass (London: Routledge, 2001). PIETRO MONTANI 161 AN-ICON instinctual impulses which dominated it and of the methods of expression which were then available to him.17 Freud appears to refer to non-elaborated (or semi-elaborated) nuclei linked to powerful emotional in- vestments, such as the “internal objects” Melanie Klein and her followers later discussed when re-elaborating Freudian dream theory in broader and more flexible terms, and today considered widely reliable and compatible with neurosci- entific findings.18 The last lines of the citation (from a 1919 addition) allow us to conclude that the regressive move- ment Freud attributed to the physiology of dreams can be acquired as a structural requisite of the dream-imagination without necessarily attributing it to instinctual motivation. In other words, if dream-work is rooted in the condition of very early infancy – the condition of being “in-fans” i.e. not yet capable of speech – this means that the regressive movement of the dream reaches and revives not only the desiring aspects but the concomitant inferential process- es too. Thus, these processes take place in the absence of language and make predominant use of prelinguistic images and schema. We could call it an imagination that “schematises without any concept” as Kant said regarding “reflective judgement”, highlighting its exceptional episte- mological significance.19 This further Kantian indication is by no means casual20 and should be paralleled with the “free-running inference machine” discussed by Hobson, Hong and Friston. Preliminary and free imaginative train- ing is required, hypothetical and exempted from defined 17 Ibid.: 549-550. My italics. 18 This is the theory persuasively argued by M. Mancia, Il sogno e la sua storia. (Venice: Marsilio, 2004); and Sonno & sogno. (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2006). 19 See E. Garroni, Estetica ed epistemologia (Milan: Unicopli 2003); P. Montani, “The Imagination and Its Technological Destiny”: 3; L. Palmer, “Schematizzare senza concetti e senso comune”, in D. Cecchi, M. Feyles, P. Montani (eds.), Ambienti mediali (Milan: Meltemi 2018): 39-56. Significantly, Palmer accompanies his rethinking of the Kantian concept with experimental evidence. 20 See Montani, Tre forme di creatività; and “The Imagination and Its Technological Destiny”. PIETRO MONTANI 162 AN-ICON  tasks, simplified and experimental, not only (as is obvious) before cognition can start to be deployed but also so that it can function constantly – e.g. (Tononi’s proposal largely endorsed by Hobson) in terms of synaptic pruning, simpli- fication and resetting of the inferential device.21 Before leaving Freud we must adopt another of his valuable indications. Above, I linked dreams to a particular way of reorganising the image-word relationship. I will specify that Freud clearly sees them, ultimately, as a relationship guided by a principle of reversibility. Not only are words used as if things, images also display a key trait of discursive convention. This trait is also fully comprehensible in intuitive terms: both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, the human imagination must have performed a major work of segmentation, classification and organisation (e.g. in- ferential) on the experience, valorising a certain intelligible profile of the images – precisely that which language will later formalise. Freud calls this property, reactivated by the dream-imagination, a Bilderschrift, a picture writing: The dream-content (...) is expressed as it were in a pictographic script [Bilderschrift], the characters of which have to be trans- posed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts. If we attempted to read these characters according to their pictorial value instead of according to their symbolic relation [Zeichenbezie- hung], we should clearly be led into error.22 Freud speaks here from the standpoint of inter- pretability (not relevant for us) but the observation can of course be generalised. Products of the dream-imagination 21 See G. Tononi, C. Cirelli, Sleep function and synaptic homeostasis, Sleep Medicine Reviews 10 (2006): 49-62. In this sense and precisely because of its hallucinatory “resuscitation”, the dream-work restores not so much the contents of the oldest inferences but the earliest manner of that performance (i.e. “schematises without any concept”) which conduct precious selective functions for pruning purposes. 22 Ibid.: 296. The translation of Bilderschrift as “pictographic script” is highly questionable; and that of Zeichenbeziehung as “symbolic relation” is frankly erroneous as the “symbolism” of dreams is not involved here but only the more general sign profile of dream-images. PIETRO MONTANI 163 AN-ICON  should above all be observed in terms of their Zeichen- beziehung, their singular and archaic relationship with the semiotic order. In other words, despite being hallucinatory, dream-images should also be appreciated for their ability to reactivate a condition in which the imagination has also processed them as the signs of a particular Bilderschrift.23 Our Freudian journey has taken us another major step forward: the relational aspect –stressed in the conclusions of the first section – can now avail of a specif- ic and significant reference to a scriptural element within the work of the imagination. This element can be linked to the radical regressive condition in which the imagination behaves literally as a VR generator. We can now try to better understand how this correlation works. Bilderschrift in very early cinema and in the digital age: the syncretism and intermediality of images Interestingly, in its very early days, and roughly when Freud was developing his Traumdeutung and subse- quent metapsychological additions, the cinema was seen (or conceived) by some film-makers and theoreticians as closely resembling the device of image-word reversibility highlighted at the end of the previous section. This means that the birth of the cinema also featured a major focus on the network of relationships which the powerful illusion of reality produced by the cinematographic image was clearly keen to unite. In some cases, in particular, that image was seen as a syncretic form of expression: a space of compar- ison and integration between different levels of expression. This section dwells briefly on two significant examples of 23 On the image-word connection and its meaning for an appropriate understanding of a “history” of the arts, C. Brandi’s observations in Segno e immagine (Palermo: Aesthetica, 2002) are valuable, not coincidentally introduced by a discussion on Kant’s schematism, PIETRO MONTANI 164 AN-ICON  this understanding of the image – which I call “intermedi- al”24: a reflection on the cinema of the “Russian Formalists” and Sergei M. Eisenstein’s first cinematographic theory centred on the project of an “intellectual cinema”.25 I shall conclude with some comments on VR installations and their inclusion in the intermedial paradigm of the image. The Formalists felt strongly that the emergence of the cinema gave their era the privilege of observing a form of art in its nascent state. Cinema brought a brand-new addition to the technically reproduced image – the ability to move in time. Boris Eikhenbaum, for instance, argued that with cinema “for the first time in history, an art which was ‘depictive’ by its very nature became capable of evolving in time and proved to be beyond any comparison, classi- fication or analogy”.26 He was struck in particular by the fact that, in cinema, the image medium adopted an original condition because the reception of the film has to develop with a time sequence typical of other media (e.g. writing). To better use these peculiarities, thought Eikhen- baum, the structural principles of the cinematographic text would have to comply with two preferential options, one paradigmatic and the other syntagmatic. The paradig- matic option consisted in asserting the conventionality of the image (its Zeichenbeziehung as Freud would say) in a head-on contrast with the naturalistic values of photograph- ic reproduction; the syntagmatic option consisted in em- phasising the discrete (or potentially discrete) nature of the formal unities placed in a reciprocal relationship following a short, markedly divided montage. These two requisites are therefore totally comparable to Freud’s Bilderschrift. But Eikhenbaum underscored another aspect concerning 24 On this concept, see P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2010). 25 See R. Taylor, ed., Russian Poetics in Translation, vol. 9: The Poetics of Cinema. (Department of Language & Linguistics: University of Essex, 1982); S.M. Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage (London-New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2010). 26 B. Eikhenbaum, “Problems of cine-stylistics”, trans. R. Sherwood, in R. Taylor, ed., The Poetics of Cinema (Oxford: RTP, 1982): 10-21. My italics. PIETRO MONTANI 165 AN-ICON  not the construction options but the structural conditions of understanding a film, arguing that the image plane in the cinema is always accompanied by the articulation of “inner speech” in the spectator’s mind. So, the cinematic experi- ence has to proceed via a constant integration of image and language planes, more akin to a process of reading than a prolonged and guided form of contemplation.27 Returning to the parallel with Freud’s reflection on the figures of the dream-work, we could say that, in films, the autonomous expressive and pathemic resources of the image come to- gether in a constant relationship with the broader cognitive resources accessed by linguistic thought. Remaining largely on the wavelength of Eikhen- baum’s theories, Sergei Eisenstein pushed himself even further forward in the same 1920s’ time-frame, especially from a design perspective. In short, he believed that the discursiveness of cinema could function as a device that takes the spectator into close contact with the semiotic op- erations that enable the imagination to give sensible content to concepts. That is, it could explore the key imaginative performance that Kant called “schematism”. A performance that, unsurprisingly, we have already referred to regard- ing its relationship with dream-work. Eisenstein called this cinema “intellectual” because, from the political perspec- tive that excited him at the time, the cinematic experience promised to considerably alter the spectators’ “power of judgment” (to use another Kantian term), training them, for instance, in dialectical thinking, as we read in one of his notes for the planned film adaptation of Marx’s Capital.28 Although Eikhenbaum and Eisenstein’s the- ories cannot be generalised, we can agree on the fact 27 On the complex intermedial nature of reading, see S.B. Trasmundi, S.C. Cowley, “Reading: how readers beget imagining”, Frontiers in Psychology 11: 531682 (2020), doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.531682. 28 On this subject, see an important work by E. Vogman, Dance of Values. Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital project (Zurich-Berlin: Diaphanes, 2019). PIETRO MONTANI 166 AN-ICON  that, throughout the silent film period, the treatment of cinematographic images largely adhered to the general Bilderschrift principles discussed here, and often invented new figures of them. We can also agree that, whatever its strengths and weaknesses, this trend was destined to un- dergo a marked shift after the introduction of sound, which could inevitably be expected to produce – and Eisenstein was one of the first to denounce this29 – a strengthening of the reproductive and illusionistic effects of the film image and an ensuing increase in the naturalistic understanding of the film. From that moment on, the cinema pursued different paths which we cannot follow here although it may be interesting to ask what transformations would have been seen in the “scriptural” direction I discussed briefly at the start of this section.30 We must instead ask ourselves, and I shall do so rapidly below, whether the fundamental principle embraced by this direction, namely the activation of a critical countermovement physiologically correlated to the regressive nature of the image, reappeared elsewhere. And how it could also concern VR where the regressive movement, as mentioned at the beginning, reaches the extreme condition of a hallucinatory event. Before proceeding we should again stress the relational, and more precisely intermedial, nature of the critical countermovement which accompanies the regres- sive process of the imagination – and thus also presumably its extreme outcomes in the hallucinatory version of VR. Against this backdrop, I shall conclude by touching on two different spheres of exemplification. The first concerns the spontaneous practices of syncretic writing in use on the Web for about 20 years now and which are increasingly widespread among its users. In the second, I shall pres- ent some brief comments on how the intermedial device 29 See S.M. Eisenstein, “Buduščee zvukovoj fil’my. Zajavka”, in Id., Izbrannye Proizvedenija v šesti tomach. II (Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1963-1979): 15-16. 30 I have done so partially in P. Montani, Emozioni dell’intelligenza (Milan: Meltemi, 2020). PIETRO MONTANI 167 AN-ICON  has been managed in two remarkable recent installations: Carne y arena by Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu (2017) and VR_I by Jilles Jobin (2018).31 It is a fact that the birth of the interactive Web supported the emergence of a form of syncretic writing that does not merely combine image, word and sound but also very frequently exploits their reciprocal relations to obtain significant effects of meaning from this interme- dial confrontation – for the moment predominantly tuned into a playful, ironic and paradoxical register (I am thinking of all the “meme” forms). As well as not excluding signifi- cant evolutions and further differentiations, this aspect in itself already guarantees great (and spontaneous) reflexive control of the semiotic material manipulated.32 I have sug- gested calling this practice “extended writing”, adding that significant innovation might develop in the technologies of human expression. Indeed, the first thing to do is to study the internalisation processes and feedback on the imag- inative and cognitive conduct of those using it (but it is a mass phenomenon).33 I am keen to stress here that the regressive values linked to the image in extended writing are placed in a constant, systematic and plastic relationship with several critical and intellectual distancing practices, often of a distinctly intermedial nature. That is to say, they are conceived to exploit the effects of meaning ensuing from the re-mediation and comparison of different media. The two installations mentioned above are im- portant not only for their uncommon design complexity but also and primarily for their intermedial tone (i.e. distanced and reflexive), albeit diversely interpreted in the two cases. In 31 The two installations could be visited at the Fondazione Prada in Milan (2017) and the Istituto Svizzero di Roma (2018), respectively. 32 See P. Montani, “Materialità del virtuale”, Agalma. Rivista di studi culturali e di estetica 40, no. 2 (2020): 11-18; and “Apology for technical distancing. But beware the feedback!”, IMG: Interdisciplinary journal on image, imagery and imagination 3 (2020): 264-281. 33 The issue of “extended writing” should be included in an extensive case study of technological aesthetics, as well illustrated recently by V. Gallese, “The aesthetic world in the digital era. A call to arms for experimental aesthetics”, Reti, saperi, linguaggi 9, no. 17 (2020): 55-84. PIETRO MONTANI 168 AN-ICON  both, visitors realise that the VR is simply a part of a broader experience that can internally implement in various ways what I have just described as a critical countermovement. I shall conclude by indicating the essential coordinates below. Carne y arena is a journey in four stages, the second of which contains a VR installation. Here, the visitor – alone and free to move around – finds him/herself spend- ing six minutes in a desert zone with a group of Mexican refugees trying to cross the US border but being violently driven back by an American army patrol.34 In the first space, visitors are asked to remove their shoes and socks and place them in a locker from which they will collect them later. This is a key strategic move because during their mobile permanence in the virtual environment their bare feet will make them constantly proprioceptively aware of an essen- tial split (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible is the instal- lation’s astute subtitle). A walkway awaits when they exit the “arena”, after retrieving shoes and socks, from where the visitors can catch a glimpse of what is happening in the semi-dark space of the virtual simulation by looking, if they so wish, through the gaps between the wooden planks of a wall. This is a further distancing from the powerful en- gagement just experienced. The walkway leads to a final room where, free to decide how long to stop at each one, they can watch video clips of the migrants narrating details of the episode to which the visitors have been invisible witnesses and what happened to them afterwards. Their 34 I dwelled more analytically on the Iñarritu installation in P. Montani, Tre forme di creatività. See also F. Casetti, A. Pinotti, “Post–cinema ecology”, in D. Chateau, J. Moure, eds., Post– cinema. Cinema in the Post-Art Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 193- 217; A. D’Aloia “Virtually present, physically invisible: virtual reality immersion and emersion in Alejandro González Iñarritu’s Carne y Arena”, Senses of Cinema 87 (2018) http://www. sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/virtually-present-physically-invisible-virtual-reality- immersion-and-emersion-in-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritus-carne-y-arena/. For an important discussion of the “empathic” effects attributable to experiences in VR see A. Pinotti, “Autopsia in 360°. Il rigor mortis dell’empatia nel fuori-cornice del virtuale”, Fata Morgana 39 (2019): 17-32. On the aesthetics of’ “unframed” images see P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan- London: Mimesis International, 2020). PIETRO MONTANI 169 AN-ICON  faces appear in high definition on small screens placed in niches around the walls of the room. The important point here is that the VR is just one of the many elements in the installation and the overall experience stimulates visitors to engage in an intermedial reflection that invests them literally from head (equipped with visor and headphones) to toe (bare). The truly striking and forceful realism of the simulation thus finds its meaning within a complex narrative device. I shall add that even the patchy recollection of the six-minute VR simulation men- tioned at the start of this article finds interesting justification within the context of this complex cognitive and pathemic experience. VR_I is an all-VR installation and far more playful than Carne y arena. The artist is primarily a choreographer and paid particular attention to the fluidity of movement of the five dancers who inhabit the virtual space and define it with their performance. They take on very different sizes in the various phases of the event: gigantic and objectively threatening at the start but miniaturised and observable later on, almost as if in a lab experiment on a small quadrangular platform, and finally life-size. Five people enter the virtual space and each visitor’s avatar can interact with the other four, not only on a haptic and sensorimotorial level (the hands have sensors) but also linguistically thanks to phono-acoustic equipment. The visitors find themselves in a metamorphic space resembling that of dreams: sometimes a boundless desert, at other times an urban landscape or a mountain-top loft with sweeping views down over a wide valley. The envi- ronments are always clearly identifiable and their subsequent development follows the rhythm of the dancers and the spa- tial harmony created by their movements. It is also significant that famous paintings (Matisse, Bacon) are hung on the walls of the loft interiors. Basically, the whole encourages visitors to let themselves go in an experience constantly tuned to a free PIETRO MONTANI 170 AN-ICON  reflexive register and they quickly realise that the rhythmic play between the different spatial dimensions is one of the core themes of the choreographic flow they are engaged in, as too is the doubling of the performance (the dancers giant or miniaturised, the paintings), the comparison between the dimensions and the free exchange of dialogue about what is seen and happening. We could perhaps describe VR_I as a lucid intermedial dream which can be realised without any forcing by an embodied imagination fundamentally recon- ciled with its less docile partner: language. Conclusions ■ The hallucinatory immersiveness of VR must, just like that of dreams, be understood and studied against the backdrop of the network of significant relations it can entertain with other per- formances, for example inferential, of an embodied imagination. It seems inadvisable to isolate it from this broader context.35 ■ The regressive aspect characterising the specific halluci- natory immersiveness of dreams must be understood primarily in terms of the neurophysiological functions (synaptic pruning, plas- ticity, resetting of inferential devices) attributable to the movement which allows the brain-mind to return to the situation in which the work of the imagination autonomously conducted cognitive performances that would, in a subsequent phase, be guided by linguistic thought. ■ It is in this regressive sphere36 that, remaining with Freud, we see the particular resources of a significant link between im- age and writing (a Bilderschrift). It is a link that very early cinema 35 A critical-genealogical investigation into the life of media conducted in terms of the assemblages or true ecosystems, in which each time they assume a structural positioning and a cultural meaning, characterises the work of Francesco Casetti. See lastly and also for some significant analogies with the issue of immersiveness, “The Phantasmagoria: an enclosure and three worlds” (forthcoming). 36 A “regression in the service of the ego” we could say, using a fine expression introduced by E. Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), but the issue should also be addressed from a broader disciplinary perspective in terms of the adaptive and evolutionary advantages ascribable to the work of the dream imagination. PIETRO MONTANI 171 AN-ICON  interpreted predominantly as an intermedial comparison, i.e. a comparison-integration of different media (starting with image and verbal discourse) such as to combine a critical and reflexive countermovement constantly and systematically with the natu- ralistic and quasi-hallucinatory reception of the film. ■ This same countermovement is perceived today in the spontaneous phenomenon of extended writing which can be re- corded on the Web and in the design of some major installations in which VR features, in various ways, as a component of a more complex and “scriptural” narrative device in the broadest sense. PIETRO MONTANI 172 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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Introduction: the image between presence and absence by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Altered states Dream Hallucination Filmic representation Immersive media Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Introduction: the image between 1 presence and absence Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Altered states Hallucination Immersive media Filmic representation Dream A visual history of alteration Dream images, anticipations of the future, memories of the past, perceptual distortions, delusional hallucinations, cognitions intoxicated by alcohol and drugs have always inhabited the visual representations of paint- ings, comics, films, television series, videogames and, more recently, virtual reality installations. We call them “altered states of consciousness”, meaning any perceptual state other than ordinary human perception.2 When they are expressed in a visual form, we see a material picture which represents a mental image.3 While a picture is completely experienced by the senses, mental imagery is ordinarily conceived of as a quasi-perceptual To quote this essay: G. Grossi and A. Pinotti, “Introduction: the image between presence and absence”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 4-16 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 into the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2018-2022” attributed by Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca (MIUR). 2 For a rigorous psychological definition of the concept of “altered state of consciousness”, embracing mental states occurring in sleep, meditation, hypnosis or while using drugs, see Ch.T. Tart, Altered States of Consciousness (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1972). 3 The distinction between the materiality, objectivity and prevalent visual character of the image intended as picture and the immateriality, subjectivity and multisensorial aspect of the mental image is perfectly explained by W.J.T. Mitchell in “What is an Image?”, New Literary History 15, no. 3 (1984): 503-537. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 4 AN-ICON  experience that occurs in the absence of external stimuli.4 What makes these pictures recognizable to us as such? We cannot, in fact, compare them with the reality of the mental image, which we know only in the first person, trapped in the secret of individual experience. And yet, it seems that the visual has always elaborated strategies, codes, and arrangements to ensure that, within a visual narrative, an image is interpreted as absent, because it is present in a mental space or as a perception of an altered state of consciousness. These representations are historically and cul- turally determined, depending on the way a mental image is conceived in each era and geographical context. The French historian Yannick Ripa, for example, has distin- guished an “ancien régime du rêve”, in which the dream is thought of as an external and metaphysical entity from the modern conception that leads it back to the universe of an inner subjectivity.5 At the same time, the medium that delivers these mental visions also contributes to differentiating cul- tural codes and shared representations that shape them. In Füssli’s The Nightmare (1781) or in Goya’s El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (1797), the oneiric emerges from a juxtaposition of the sleeping body with its nightmares, co-present in the same visual box. Differently, comics such as Winsor McCay’s Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend (1904-1913) and Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905-1927), represent altered states and especially dreaming in a visual regime that combines simultaneity and succession.6 The result is a progressive escalation of bizarreness that can only be interrupted by the last vignette, when the dreamer usually falls off the bed. Cinema, ever since Méliès, has used particular fades such as cross-dissolves to signal the passage from physical to mental presence, be it in memory, imagination, 4 A. Richardson, Mental Imagery (London: Routledge, 1969). 5 Y. Ripa, Histoire du rêve. Regards sur l’imaginaire des Français au 19e siècle (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1988). 6 T. Gunning, “The art of succession: reading, writing, and watching comics”, Critical Inquiry 40, no. 3 (2014): 36-51. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 5 AN-ICON  or dream. Another peculiar case is given by the extreme instability of the camera with which the alterations caused by indigestion, drunkenness, and drug consumption are rendered since early movies. Jean Epstein’s comparison between alcohol and cinema is thus significant to define the multiform, fluid, and malleable perception of the universe introduced by the medium.7 However, none of these codes is fixed: cultural contexts and historical fractures introduce radical differ- ences within each mediascape, and the same happens if we consider processes such as hybridization, conver- gence, and remediation of the different media. Nevertheless, a dreamlike or hallucinatory image remains immediately recognizable to many viewers. It is a representation that indicates its absence rather than its presence. The altered states of film theory The way in which cinema not only records ob- jective reality but also visualizes mental processes has al- ways been one of the most hotly-debated questions in film theory. In 1916, Hugo Münsterberg’s important essay The Photoplay. A Psychological Study laid the foundations of the question: the cinematic image is never merely objective, since the movement and depth that the spectator perceives in the film do not exist in themselves, but are the product of the cooperation of the images with the spectator’s mental activity.8 Moreover, in the film a series of techniques ex- ternalizes and makes materially visible on the screen cer- tain mental processes: attention is recreated by the zoom and the close-up; memory is expressed through the use of flashbacks; imagination, conceived as the capacity to anticipate future events, is portrayed through what contem- porary film grammar would call flashforwards. The relation- ship between film and mind thus appears analogical, based 7 J. Epstein, “Alcool et cinéma” (1949), in S. Keller, J.N. Paul, eds., Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012): 395-404. 8 H. Münsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study (1916) (New York City: Dover Publications, 1970). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 6 AN-ICON  on the similarity of the respective cognitive processes.9 A further peculiarity recognized by Münsterberg is that of visualizing what the characters “see in their own minds”,10 images belonging to memory and dreams whose transi- tion is reported by “soft-focus images, lighting variations, superimpositions”.11 In the same wake, in his famous essay devoted to Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures (1934), also Erwin Panofsky remarked that “the movies have the power, entirely denied to the theater, to convey psychological ex- periences by directly projecting their content to the screen, substituting, as it were, the eye of the beholder for the consciousness of the character”.12 The metonymic and metaphoric relationship between film and mind – to use Christian Metz’s semio- logical terminology –13 are the basis of the aesthetic spec- ificity of cinema, which succeeds in materializing mental operations with greater effectiveness than the previous arts. Sergej Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, with its adherence to thought faculties such as analogies and oppositions, en- hances this hallucinatory and oneiric power of the movie. It is no accident that in his Non-indifferent Nature (1945-1947) the Soviet director and theorist analyzes mental visualiza- tion techniques such as those used in Loyola’s spiritual exercises being interested in the artistic achievement of ecstasy and pathos.14 In many theories cinema takes on the charac- teristics of a mind objectified in material images and sounds: a magical double of the self-produced by processes of 9 N. Carroll, “Film/mind analogies: The case of Hugo Münsterberg”, Journal for Aesthetics and Criticism 46, no. 4 (1988): 489-499. 10 J. Moure, “The cinema as art of the mind: Hugo Münsterberg, first theorist of subjectivity in film”, in D. Chateau, ed., Subjectivity: Filmic Representation and the Spectator’s Experience (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011): 23-40, 39. 11 Ibid. 12 E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures” (1934), in Three Essays on Style (Cambridge MA: The Mit Press, 1995): 98. 13 Ch. Metz, “Metaphor/metonymy, or the imaginary referent”, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 3, no. 1 (1981): 42-65. See also L. Williams, “Dream rhetoric and film rhetoric: metaphor and metonymy in Un chien andalou”, Semiotica 33, no. 1-2 (1981): 87-103. 14 S. Eisenstein, Non-indifferent Nature (1945-1947), trans. H. Marshall (Cambridge-New York City: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 171. See also M. Lefebvre, “Eisenstein, rhetoric and imaginicity: towards a revolutionary memoria”, Screen 41, no. 4 (2000): 349-368. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 7 AN-ICON  identification and projection for Edgar Morin among oth- ers;15 a brain endowed with perceptions, actions, and affec- tions according to Gilles Deleuze;16 a narcissistic regression analogous to dreaming in the perspective of Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz.17 Metz in particular underlines some radical differences between cinema and that partic- ular form of mental image constituted by the dream: the awareness of being at the cinema versus the unawareness of dreaming; the impression of reality of the film versus the illusion of reality of nocturnal visions; the real exteriority of images and sounds perceived in the cinema versus the inte- riority of the “hallucinatory psychosis of desire”; the logical consistency of the film versus the bizarre discontinuity of dream images. Yet a profound analogy remains in the half- way states of both cinema and dream: when spectators are so engrossed that they interact with the characters on the screen and gesticulate like sleepwalkers, or when, thanks to the activation of defensive attention, the dream becomes more lucid and conscious. Returning to the problem of the representation of altered states of consciousness, it is necessary to con- sider how this has a history that is linked to the evolution of the moving image. In Gilles Deleuze’s cine-philosophy, for example, it is clear that the emergence of an image capable of questioning the subjective/objective distinction is linked to the emergence of modern cinema. In this historical con- text, in fact, a radical disorganization of the action-image takes place, with a prevalence of a pure optic-auditory sen- sation over its motor extension and narrative actualization. In this way, recollection-images, mental visualizations, hal- lucinations, and dreams take on a new centrality, in the form of virtualities that remain suspended and non-actualized, 15 E. Morin, The cinema, or the Imaginary Man (1956), trans. L. Mortimer (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 16 G. Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image (1983), trans. H. Tomlinson, B. Habberjam (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Id., Cinema 2. The Time Image (1985), trans. H. Tomlinson, R. Galeta (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 17 J.-L. Baudry, “Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus” (1970), trans. A. Williams, Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974): 39-47; Id., “The Apparatus” (1975), trans. B. Augst, Camera Obscura, no. 1 (1976): 104-126; Ch. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (1977), trans. C. Britton et al. (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1982). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 8 AN-ICON  typical of a crystal-image in which temporalities are reflect- ed simultaneously.18 Thus the dream-image assumes a par- ticular centrality. Following Henri Bergson and his famous discussion on dreams, Deleuze refers to the panoramic character of dream-images, which is also typical of near- death experiences in which the whole of life suddenly ap- pears before one’s eyes.19 What is created is a weak link between the optical or auditory sensations and this pan- oramic view of the whole. There are in fact two procedures common to the dream-image of cinema: One proceeds by rich and overloaded means [...] dissolves, super- impositions, deframings, complex camera movements, special ef- fects, manipulations in the laboratory [...]. The other, on the contrary, is very restrained, working by clear cuts or montage-cut, making progress simply through a perpetual unhinging which “looks like” dream, but between objects that remain concrete.20 Both recollection-images (flashbacks) and dream- images are virtual, but in different forms. The recollection-im- ages are actualized past events, while the dream-images are rooted in an image that refers itself to another virtual time, thus activating an infinite path of references. The result is a motor process very different from the concreteness of action, which is described by Deleuze following a conceptual apparatus taken from Ludwig Binswanger, as a movement of the world, “the fact of being inhaled by the world”.21 This is a virtuality and immersivity of the image which cinema proposes in its repre- sentations, but which the new digital media we know today have the power to realize at a technical level, with the user’s perception absorbed and enveloped by the virtual image. The recollection-image and the flashback have also been the subject of further theoretical investigation 18 A. Powell, Deleuze, Altered States and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 19 Deleuze, Cinema 2: 55-67. 20 Ibid.: 58. 21 Ibid.: 291. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 9 AN-ICON  since Deleuze. One example is Maureen Turim’s work,22 in which the flashback is considered as a structural device of film that is fundamental for understanding the non-linear development of film history itself. This process is particular- ly visible in the comparison between the representation of memories in melodrama and that presented by modernist cinema. At the same time, in the flashback emerges the strategy through which cinema represents the intersection between the individual dimension of memory and the so- cio-political dimension of history. More recent approaches to the relationship be- tween cinema and altered states of consciousness see the medium as a technological extension of a mind-body plexus to be rediscovered, above all, starting from the media-ar- chaeological investigation of 19th century sciences of the mind. This is in fact the episteme that witnesses the emer- gence of the cinematic experience. Along these lines, we can quote the genetic relationship between hypnosis and cinema identified by Ruggero Eugeni,23 Stefan Andriopoulos,24 and Raymond Bellour;25 the investigation into the relationship between cinema and hysteria proposed by Rae Beth Gor- don,26 Emmanuelle André,27 and Mireille Berton;28 and the link between the psychological mapping of gesture and the rise of the cinematic apparatus theorized by Pasi Valiaho.29 22 M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (London: Routledge, 1989). For a discussion on the relationship between the time of new media devices and the time represented within them, see G. Stewart, Framed Time. Towards a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 23 R. Eugeni, La relazione d’incanto. Studi su cinema e ipnosi (Milan: Vita & Pensiero, 2002). 24 S. Andriopoulos, Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 25 R. Bellour, Les corps du cinéma: hypnose, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L., 2009). 26 R.B. Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 27 E. André, Le choc du sujet. De l’hystérie au cinéma (XIXe-XXIe siècle) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011). 28 M. Berton, Les corps nerveux des spectateurs. Cinéma et sciences du psychisme de 1900 (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 2015). 29 P. Valiaho, Mapping the Moving Image. Gesture, Thought, and Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 10 AN-ICON  From hallucination to virtual realities In all these theoretical perspectives it becomes evident how cinema, by representing altered states of con- sciousness, often reflects on its own affinity with dreams and hallucination. More precisely, on its identity as a ma- terialization of mental visualization processes. Ken Rus- sell’s film Altered States (1980), which also gives the title to this monographic issue of AN-ICON. Studies in Envi- ronmental Images, can be considered paradigmatic in this regard. In this film, the psychiatrist Edward Jessup (William Hurt), loosely based on the real-life figure of the neurosci- entist John Lilly, carries out a series of experiments with the help of an isolation tank and the ingestion of halluci- nogenic mushrooms. His aim is to understand at first hand the subjective experience of schizophrenic patients, achiev- ing a hallucinatory and dream-like perception that belongs to primitive mental states. The film echoes a number of ideas related to the redefinition of consciousness typical of 1970s-80s counterculture. Julian Jaynes’s essay The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) is an example of these theories.30 In this book, the subjective perception of schizophrenia is presented as an activation of an evolutionary state prior to the emergence of consciousness, the “bicameral mind”, in which the right hemisphere of the brain was allocated the function of com- municating through visual and verbal hallucinations, and the left hemisphere had the task of obeying and executing. The film plays on two visual registers: one in the third person, that of the scientific community observing the experiment, and one in the first person, where the subjec- tive hallucinations of the protagonist emerge in fragments. The hallucination is thus presented as a repeatable experi- ment, through the insertion of the body in a device suitable for the production and reproduction of altered states. But what kind of medium does this device really resemble? The 30 J. Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 11 AN-ICON  body is immersed in water which, being at the same tem- perature as the body, cancels all sensory perception and, with it, all distinctions between inside and outside, tactile and external input. In this radical absence of the world, the mental image takes full shape, enveloping the person and becoming the only sensory horizon that can be perceived. Not only that: the mental image presents itself as a real space, and the effects of the hallucination seem to modify the user’s own body (in the movie, transforming him into an Australopithecus). This hallucination represented in cinema takes us forward to another device, which, like a halluci- nation, does not allow any escape from the image, but a radical symbiosis with it. This is virtual reality. In virtual reality, unlike cinema, it is not so easy to distinguish between objective and subjective shots. Firstly, because the virtual frame is always in some way sub- jective, since its source depends on the movements of the viewer’s gaze to which it adheres, saturating the field of vision. Secondly, precisely because of the powerful sense of presence and feeling of being there produced by virtual reality, in immersive digital environments it becomes more difficult to represent the estrangement from actual percep- tion that a previous medium like cinema obtained through cross-dissolves and other visual strategies. Is it therefore possible to portray altered states in immersive media? Can the tyranny of the sense of presence eliminate the images of absence, or do we just have to investigate new strategies of representation? In fact, some virtual reality installations pres- ent themselves, directly, in the form of memories, dreams, hallucinations, mental visions. Examples are virtual reality experiences such as Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (Ar- naud Colinart, Amaury LaBurthe, Peter Middleton, James Spinney, 2016), in which the user can experience the in- ner perspective of the blind theologian John Hull; The Key (Céline Tricart, 2019), which portrays the dreams of an Iraqi migrant; Porton Down (Callum Cooper, 2019), in which the user becomes the guinea pig in hallucination tests per- formed using LSD; Cosmos within Us (Tupac Martir, 2019) GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 12 AN-ICON  dedicated to the temporally and spatially unregulated per- ception of an Alzheimer’s patient; finally, the mystical and lysergic journey of the Amazonian shamanic ritual repro- duced in Ayahuasca - Kosmik Journey (Jan Kounen, 2019). The present issue These are problems that the first issue of AN- ICON. Studies on Environmental Images aims to investigate. A peculiar attention is devoted to the comparison between two media systems: an analogue system, dominated by the altered states of cinema, and a virtual one, where new experiential possibilities of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality emerge. The problem that runs through this com- parison is essentially whether the possibility of presenting perceptively distorted states belongs more properly to the cinematic image, or whether it is still at the center of the new digital and immersive mediascape. Barbara Grespi’s and Giuseppe Previtali’s con- tributions are directly related in their common purpose to search for a status of the virtual image in cinema in some nodal moments of film theory that interrogate the repre- sentation of mental states. Grespi’s essay starts from Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World (1991) and from the capability of the imaginary device represented in the movie to exteriorize and prosthesize subjective experiences such as visions and dreams. The fictional medium, halfway be- tween cinema and virtual reality, allows Grespi to reflect on the filmic access to mental states. This issue is investigated through the recovery of the first, but lesser-known, of the two volumes of Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma (1963- 1965) by Jean Mitry. This is a pillar of film theory, analyzed by Grespi in its unacknowledged Husserlian roots. Thus, the technical and psychic concept of “projection”, under- stood as a specific form of actualization, “an effect in which the perception of physical image intersects with mental envisioning”, becomes especially central to introduce a GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 13 AN-ICON  possible comparison between the cinematic forms of the visible and those that emerge in virtual experiences. Cinematic altered states, however, undergo radical transformations in history: this is what Previtali’s arti- cle discusses, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of cinema and examining the differences between the movement-im- age of classical cinema, in which dreams and memories are also expressed as physical realities intertwined with the world, and the time-image of modern cinema, capable of adhering to the dynamics of thought. For Previtali, an example of this process is Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Straw- berries (1957), where recollection-images are not real flash- backs, but rather virtual mixtures of memory, imagination, and dream, as evidenced by the fact that the protagonist relives the past moments of his childhood and youth while remaining as old as he actually is in the present. Still anchored to Bergman’s cinema, Luca Ac- quarelli’s investigation into the emergence of hallucination within the cinematic diegesis is grounded in the semiotic analysis of a further incursion: that of the photographic still image within the equidistant flow of the film’s moving frames. This can be seen in Bergman’s Persona (1966), but also in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) and Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), the latter consisting almost entirely of still images. In these moments a new balance is established between dream-states and the testimonial power of the image, seen through André Bazin’s conception of photography as “true hallucination”. Enrico Terrone, in a different perspective, con- siders cinema in terms of a disembodied experience, or- ganized in a space that has our sight but not our body as its own center. Because of this condition, cinema is able to approximate to non-perceptual attitudes such as mem- ories and dreams, but not completely emulate them. On the contrary, this emulation would be a concrete possibility for virtual reality precisely thanks to its adherence to the gaze and body of the spectator coupled with a potential GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 14 AN-ICON  for manipulation and alteration that it is impossible to find in another embodied experience such as that of theater. But how are altered states expressed in the new immersive and digital mediascape? Is it possible in virtual reality to make a distinction between the representation of a real state from that of an exclusively mental state? First of all, we need to investigate how the digital radically trans- forms the very ideas of visual perception and image. This is evident in Antonio Somaini’s contribution, devoted to new artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning and machine vision. In fact, their non-human perceptual functions appear in some cases as altered states that pro- duce dreamlike images, similar to those found in computer programs such as the one called, significantly, Google Deep Dream. Thus, it becomes necessary for Somaini to study the artistic practices that exploit the productive potential of machine learning in a creative and revolutionary way, such as in the artworks of Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and Grégory Chatonsky. The perceptual dimension is also at the center of Claudio Paolucci’s contribution. From the point of view of cognitive semiotics, Paolucci investigates the hallucinatory character of ordinary perception, always shaped by the in- tervention of imagination, to analyze the way mental states are represented in virtual and augmented environments. If perception can be defined in terms of a hallucination controlled by the world, what changes in immersive envi- ronments is only the simulated character of the world itself. The states of imagination, memory, and hallucination are then reproduced in virtual and augmented reality following two possible strategies: either in a pan-perceptual modal- ity, exploiting the full sense of presence produced by the immersive devices, or following the audiovisual strategies inherited from previous audiovisual languages with which virtual and augmented reality share the same formal appa- ratus of enunciation. To exemplify this double expressive GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 15 AN-ICON  possibility, Paolucci analyzes the immersive videogame Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. At this point, it becomes necessary to under- stand what the specifically dreamlike and hallucinatory character of virtual reality consists of and how it differs from other established media. The joint paper written by film theorist Martine Beugnet and new media artist Lily Hibberd focuses on the role played by darkness, which in the new immersive media takes on a completely new po- tential compared to cinema. In fact, it becomes an intrinsic component of the environmentalized image of the former – coupled with the illusion of depth and the replication of motion. If the darkness of the traditional audiovisual dis- tinguishes states of self and otherness, in virtual reality it envelops the users depriving them of the sense of distance and leading them back to a state of radical loss, in which they are haunted by sporadic sounds and visions, faithful to the dynamics more proper to memory and dream. Pietro Montani’s essay then becomes the ef- fective conclusion and synthesis of all the questions raised by this issue. The dreamlike character of virtual reality con- sists for Montani in a precise work of oneiric imagination, capable of distancing itself from linguistic thought without getting trapped in a pure hallucination, but finding its proper status in what Freud defines as “Bilderschrift” (pictographic script), a syncretic relationship between images and writ- ing functions, both pre-linguistic and performative, which can also be read in the Kantian terms of a schematization without concept. An expressive condition which resurfaces in early cinema and especially in Eisenstein’s film theory of the 1920s and which today finds a specific declination in immersive virtual installations such as Carne y Arena (2017) by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and VR_I (2018) by choreographer Gilles Jobin, where different participants can share a collective lucid dream. In fact, new media do not merely represent altered states of consciousness: they take on their performative power. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 16 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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Introduction: the image between presence and absence by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Altered states Dream Hallucination Filmic representation Immersive media Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Introduction: the image between 1 presence and absence Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Altered states Hallucination Immersive media Filmic representation Dream A visual history of alteration Dream images, anticipations of the future, memories of the past, perceptual distortions, delusional hallucinations, cognitions intoxicated by alcohol and drugs have always inhabited the visual representations of paint- ings, comics, films, television series, videogames and, more recently, virtual reality installations. We call them “altered states of consciousness”, meaning any perceptual state other than ordinary human perception.2 When they are expressed in a visual form, we see a material picture which represents a mental image.3 While a picture is completely experienced by the senses, mental imagery is ordinarily conceived of as a quasi-perceptual To quote this essay: G. Grossi and A. Pinotti, “Introduction: the image between presence and absence”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 4-16 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 into the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2018-2022” attributed by Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca (MIUR). 2 For a rigorous psychological definition of the concept of “altered state of consciousness”, embracing mental states occurring in sleep, meditation, hypnosis or while using drugs, see Ch.T. Tart, Altered States of Consciousness (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1972). 3 The distinction between the materiality, objectivity and prevalent visual character of the image intended as picture and the immateriality, subjectivity and multisensorial aspect of the mental image is perfectly explained by W.J.T. Mitchell in “What is an Image?”, New Literary History 15, no. 3 (1984): 503-537. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 4 AN-ICON  experience that occurs in the absence of external stimuli.4 What makes these pictures recognizable to us as such? We cannot, in fact, compare them with the reality of the mental image, which we know only in the first person, trapped in the secret of individual experience. And yet, it seems that the visual has always elaborated strategies, codes, and arrangements to ensure that, within a visual narrative, an image is interpreted as absent, because it is present in a mental space or as a perception of an altered state of consciousness. These representations are historically and cul- turally determined, depending on the way a mental image is conceived in each era and geographical context. The French historian Yannick Ripa, for example, has distin- guished an “ancien régime du rêve”, in which the dream is thought of as an external and metaphysical entity from the modern conception that leads it back to the universe of an inner subjectivity.5 At the same time, the medium that delivers these mental visions also contributes to differentiating cul- tural codes and shared representations that shape them. In Füssli’s The Nightmare (1781) or in Goya’s El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (1797), the oneiric emerges from a juxtaposition of the sleeping body with its nightmares, co-present in the same visual box. Differently, comics such as Winsor McCay’s Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend (1904-1913) and Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905-1927), represent altered states and especially dreaming in a visual regime that combines simultaneity and succession.6 The result is a progressive escalation of bizarreness that can only be interrupted by the last vignette, when the dreamer usually falls off the bed. Cinema, ever since Méliès, has used particular fades such as cross-dissolves to signal the passage from physical to mental presence, be it in memory, imagination, 4 A. Richardson, Mental Imagery (London: Routledge, 1969). 5 Y. Ripa, Histoire du rêve. Regards sur l’imaginaire des Français au 19e siècle (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1988). 6 T. Gunning, “The art of succession: reading, writing, and watching comics”, Critical Inquiry 40, no. 3 (2014): 36-51. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 5 AN-ICON  or dream. Another peculiar case is given by the extreme instability of the camera with which the alterations caused by indigestion, drunkenness, and drug consumption are rendered since early movies. Jean Epstein’s comparison between alcohol and cinema is thus significant to define the multiform, fluid, and malleable perception of the universe introduced by the medium.7 However, none of these codes is fixed: cultural contexts and historical fractures introduce radical differ- ences within each mediascape, and the same happens if we consider processes such as hybridization, conver- gence, and remediation of the different media. Nevertheless, a dreamlike or hallucinatory image remains immediately recognizable to many viewers. It is a representation that indicates its absence rather than its presence. The altered states of film theory The way in which cinema not only records ob- jective reality but also visualizes mental processes has al- ways been one of the most hotly-debated questions in film theory. In 1916, Hugo Münsterberg’s important essay The Photoplay. A Psychological Study laid the foundations of the question: the cinematic image is never merely objective, since the movement and depth that the spectator perceives in the film do not exist in themselves, but are the product of the cooperation of the images with the spectator’s mental activity.8 Moreover, in the film a series of techniques ex- ternalizes and makes materially visible on the screen cer- tain mental processes: attention is recreated by the zoom and the close-up; memory is expressed through the use of flashbacks; imagination, conceived as the capacity to anticipate future events, is portrayed through what contem- porary film grammar would call flashforwards. The relation- ship between film and mind thus appears analogical, based 7 J. Epstein, “Alcool et cinéma” (1949), in S. Keller, J.N. Paul, eds., Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012): 395-404. 8 H. Münsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study (1916) (New York City: Dover Publications, 1970). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 6 AN-ICON  on the similarity of the respective cognitive processes.9 A further peculiarity recognized by Münsterberg is that of visualizing what the characters “see in their own minds”,10 images belonging to memory and dreams whose transi- tion is reported by “soft-focus images, lighting variations, superimpositions”.11 In the same wake, in his famous essay devoted to Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures (1934), also Erwin Panofsky remarked that “the movies have the power, entirely denied to the theater, to convey psychological ex- periences by directly projecting their content to the screen, substituting, as it were, the eye of the beholder for the consciousness of the character”.12 The metonymic and metaphoric relationship between film and mind – to use Christian Metz’s semio- logical terminology –13 are the basis of the aesthetic spec- ificity of cinema, which succeeds in materializing mental operations with greater effectiveness than the previous arts. Sergej Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, with its adherence to thought faculties such as analogies and oppositions, en- hances this hallucinatory and oneiric power of the movie. It is no accident that in his Non-indifferent Nature (1945-1947) the Soviet director and theorist analyzes mental visualiza- tion techniques such as those used in Loyola’s spiritual exercises being interested in the artistic achievement of ecstasy and pathos.14 In many theories cinema takes on the charac- teristics of a mind objectified in material images and sounds: a magical double of the self-produced by processes of 9 N. Carroll, “Film/mind analogies: The case of Hugo Münsterberg”, Journal for Aesthetics and Criticism 46, no. 4 (1988): 489-499. 10 J. Moure, “The cinema as art of the mind: Hugo Münsterberg, first theorist of subjectivity in film”, in D. Chateau, ed., Subjectivity: Filmic Representation and the Spectator’s Experience (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011): 23-40, 39. 11 Ibid. 12 E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures” (1934), in Three Essays on Style (Cambridge MA: The Mit Press, 1995): 98. 13 Ch. Metz, “Metaphor/metonymy, or the imaginary referent”, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 3, no. 1 (1981): 42-65. See also L. Williams, “Dream rhetoric and film rhetoric: metaphor and metonymy in Un chien andalou”, Semiotica 33, no. 1-2 (1981): 87-103. 14 S. Eisenstein, Non-indifferent Nature (1945-1947), trans. H. Marshall (Cambridge-New York City: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 171. See also M. Lefebvre, “Eisenstein, rhetoric and imaginicity: towards a revolutionary memoria”, Screen 41, no. 4 (2000): 349-368. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 7 AN-ICON  identification and projection for Edgar Morin among oth- ers;15 a brain endowed with perceptions, actions, and affec- tions according to Gilles Deleuze;16 a narcissistic regression analogous to dreaming in the perspective of Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz.17 Metz in particular underlines some radical differences between cinema and that partic- ular form of mental image constituted by the dream: the awareness of being at the cinema versus the unawareness of dreaming; the impression of reality of the film versus the illusion of reality of nocturnal visions; the real exteriority of images and sounds perceived in the cinema versus the inte- riority of the “hallucinatory psychosis of desire”; the logical consistency of the film versus the bizarre discontinuity of dream images. Yet a profound analogy remains in the half- way states of both cinema and dream: when spectators are so engrossed that they interact with the characters on the screen and gesticulate like sleepwalkers, or when, thanks to the activation of defensive attention, the dream becomes more lucid and conscious. Returning to the problem of the representation of altered states of consciousness, it is necessary to con- sider how this has a history that is linked to the evolution of the moving image. In Gilles Deleuze’s cine-philosophy, for example, it is clear that the emergence of an image capable of questioning the subjective/objective distinction is linked to the emergence of modern cinema. In this historical con- text, in fact, a radical disorganization of the action-image takes place, with a prevalence of a pure optic-auditory sen- sation over its motor extension and narrative actualization. In this way, recollection-images, mental visualizations, hal- lucinations, and dreams take on a new centrality, in the form of virtualities that remain suspended and non-actualized, 15 E. Morin, The cinema, or the Imaginary Man (1956), trans. L. Mortimer (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 16 G. Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image (1983), trans. H. Tomlinson, B. Habberjam (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Id., Cinema 2. The Time Image (1985), trans. H. Tomlinson, R. Galeta (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 17 J.-L. Baudry, “Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus” (1970), trans. A. Williams, Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974): 39-47; Id., “The Apparatus” (1975), trans. B. Augst, Camera Obscura, no. 1 (1976): 104-126; Ch. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (1977), trans. C. Britton et al. (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1982). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 8 AN-ICON  typical of a crystal-image in which temporalities are reflect- ed simultaneously.18 Thus the dream-image assumes a par- ticular centrality. Following Henri Bergson and his famous discussion on dreams, Deleuze refers to the panoramic character of dream-images, which is also typical of near- death experiences in which the whole of life suddenly ap- pears before one’s eyes.19 What is created is a weak link between the optical or auditory sensations and this pan- oramic view of the whole. There are in fact two procedures common to the dream-image of cinema: One proceeds by rich and overloaded means [...] dissolves, super- impositions, deframings, complex camera movements, special ef- fects, manipulations in the laboratory [...]. The other, on the contrary, is very restrained, working by clear cuts or montage-cut, making progress simply through a perpetual unhinging which “looks like” dream, but between objects that remain concrete.20 Both recollection-images (flashbacks) and dream- images are virtual, but in different forms. The recollection-im- ages are actualized past events, while the dream-images are rooted in an image that refers itself to another virtual time, thus activating an infinite path of references. The result is a motor process very different from the concreteness of action, which is described by Deleuze following a conceptual apparatus taken from Ludwig Binswanger, as a movement of the world, “the fact of being inhaled by the world”.21 This is a virtuality and immersivity of the image which cinema proposes in its repre- sentations, but which the new digital media we know today have the power to realize at a technical level, with the user’s perception absorbed and enveloped by the virtual image. The recollection-image and the flashback have also been the subject of further theoretical investigation 18 A. Powell, Deleuze, Altered States and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 19 Deleuze, Cinema 2: 55-67. 20 Ibid.: 58. 21 Ibid.: 291. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 9 AN-ICON  since Deleuze. One example is Maureen Turim’s work,22 in which the flashback is considered as a structural device of film that is fundamental for understanding the non-linear development of film history itself. This process is particular- ly visible in the comparison between the representation of memories in melodrama and that presented by modernist cinema. At the same time, in the flashback emerges the strategy through which cinema represents the intersection between the individual dimension of memory and the so- cio-political dimension of history. More recent approaches to the relationship be- tween cinema and altered states of consciousness see the medium as a technological extension of a mind-body plexus to be rediscovered, above all, starting from the media-ar- chaeological investigation of 19th century sciences of the mind. This is in fact the episteme that witnesses the emer- gence of the cinematic experience. Along these lines, we can quote the genetic relationship between hypnosis and cinema identified by Ruggero Eugeni,23 Stefan Andriopoulos,24 and Raymond Bellour;25 the investigation into the relationship between cinema and hysteria proposed by Rae Beth Gor- don,26 Emmanuelle André,27 and Mireille Berton;28 and the link between the psychological mapping of gesture and the rise of the cinematic apparatus theorized by Pasi Valiaho.29 22 M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (London: Routledge, 1989). For a discussion on the relationship between the time of new media devices and the time represented within them, see G. Stewart, Framed Time. Towards a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 23 R. Eugeni, La relazione d’incanto. Studi su cinema e ipnosi (Milan: Vita & Pensiero, 2002). 24 S. Andriopoulos, Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 25 R. Bellour, Les corps du cinéma: hypnose, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L., 2009). 26 R.B. Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 27 E. André, Le choc du sujet. De l’hystérie au cinéma (XIXe-XXIe siècle) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011). 28 M. Berton, Les corps nerveux des spectateurs. Cinéma et sciences du psychisme de 1900 (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 2015). 29 P. Valiaho, Mapping the Moving Image. Gesture, Thought, and Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 10 AN-ICON  From hallucination to virtual realities In all these theoretical perspectives it becomes evident how cinema, by representing altered states of con- sciousness, often reflects on its own affinity with dreams and hallucination. More precisely, on its identity as a ma- terialization of mental visualization processes. Ken Rus- sell’s film Altered States (1980), which also gives the title to this monographic issue of AN-ICON. Studies in Envi- ronmental Images, can be considered paradigmatic in this regard. In this film, the psychiatrist Edward Jessup (William Hurt), loosely based on the real-life figure of the neurosci- entist John Lilly, carries out a series of experiments with the help of an isolation tank and the ingestion of halluci- nogenic mushrooms. His aim is to understand at first hand the subjective experience of schizophrenic patients, achiev- ing a hallucinatory and dream-like perception that belongs to primitive mental states. The film echoes a number of ideas related to the redefinition of consciousness typical of 1970s-80s counterculture. Julian Jaynes’s essay The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) is an example of these theories.30 In this book, the subjective perception of schizophrenia is presented as an activation of an evolutionary state prior to the emergence of consciousness, the “bicameral mind”, in which the right hemisphere of the brain was allocated the function of com- municating through visual and verbal hallucinations, and the left hemisphere had the task of obeying and executing. The film plays on two visual registers: one in the third person, that of the scientific community observing the experiment, and one in the first person, where the subjec- tive hallucinations of the protagonist emerge in fragments. The hallucination is thus presented as a repeatable experi- ment, through the insertion of the body in a device suitable for the production and reproduction of altered states. But what kind of medium does this device really resemble? The 30 J. Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 11 AN-ICON  body is immersed in water which, being at the same tem- perature as the body, cancels all sensory perception and, with it, all distinctions between inside and outside, tactile and external input. In this radical absence of the world, the mental image takes full shape, enveloping the person and becoming the only sensory horizon that can be perceived. Not only that: the mental image presents itself as a real space, and the effects of the hallucination seem to modify the user’s own body (in the movie, transforming him into an Australopithecus). This hallucination represented in cinema takes us forward to another device, which, like a halluci- nation, does not allow any escape from the image, but a radical symbiosis with it. This is virtual reality. In virtual reality, unlike cinema, it is not so easy to distinguish between objective and subjective shots. Firstly, because the virtual frame is always in some way sub- jective, since its source depends on the movements of the viewer’s gaze to which it adheres, saturating the field of vision. Secondly, precisely because of the powerful sense of presence and feeling of being there produced by virtual reality, in immersive digital environments it becomes more difficult to represent the estrangement from actual percep- tion that a previous medium like cinema obtained through cross-dissolves and other visual strategies. Is it therefore possible to portray altered states in immersive media? Can the tyranny of the sense of presence eliminate the images of absence, or do we just have to investigate new strategies of representation? In fact, some virtual reality installations pres- ent themselves, directly, in the form of memories, dreams, hallucinations, mental visions. Examples are virtual reality experiences such as Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (Ar- naud Colinart, Amaury LaBurthe, Peter Middleton, James Spinney, 2016), in which the user can experience the in- ner perspective of the blind theologian John Hull; The Key (Céline Tricart, 2019), which portrays the dreams of an Iraqi migrant; Porton Down (Callum Cooper, 2019), in which the user becomes the guinea pig in hallucination tests per- formed using LSD; Cosmos within Us (Tupac Martir, 2019) GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 12 AN-ICON  dedicated to the temporally and spatially unregulated per- ception of an Alzheimer’s patient; finally, the mystical and lysergic journey of the Amazonian shamanic ritual repro- duced in Ayahuasca - Kosmik Journey (Jan Kounen, 2019). The present issue These are problems that the first issue of AN- ICON. Studies on Environmental Images aims to investigate. A peculiar attention is devoted to the comparison between two media systems: an analogue system, dominated by the altered states of cinema, and a virtual one, where new experiential possibilities of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality emerge. The problem that runs through this com- parison is essentially whether the possibility of presenting perceptively distorted states belongs more properly to the cinematic image, or whether it is still at the center of the new digital and immersive mediascape. Barbara Grespi’s and Giuseppe Previtali’s con- tributions are directly related in their common purpose to search for a status of the virtual image in cinema in some nodal moments of film theory that interrogate the repre- sentation of mental states. Grespi’s essay starts from Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World (1991) and from the capability of the imaginary device represented in the movie to exteriorize and prosthesize subjective experiences such as visions and dreams. The fictional medium, halfway be- tween cinema and virtual reality, allows Grespi to reflect on the filmic access to mental states. This issue is investigated through the recovery of the first, but lesser-known, of the two volumes of Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma (1963- 1965) by Jean Mitry. This is a pillar of film theory, analyzed by Grespi in its unacknowledged Husserlian roots. Thus, the technical and psychic concept of “projection”, under- stood as a specific form of actualization, “an effect in which the perception of physical image intersects with mental envisioning”, becomes especially central to introduce a GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 13 AN-ICON  possible comparison between the cinematic forms of the visible and those that emerge in virtual experiences. Cinematic altered states, however, undergo radical transformations in history: this is what Previtali’s arti- cle discusses, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of cinema and examining the differences between the movement-im- age of classical cinema, in which dreams and memories are also expressed as physical realities intertwined with the world, and the time-image of modern cinema, capable of adhering to the dynamics of thought. For Previtali, an example of this process is Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Straw- berries (1957), where recollection-images are not real flash- backs, but rather virtual mixtures of memory, imagination, and dream, as evidenced by the fact that the protagonist relives the past moments of his childhood and youth while remaining as old as he actually is in the present. Still anchored to Bergman’s cinema, Luca Ac- quarelli’s investigation into the emergence of hallucination within the cinematic diegesis is grounded in the semiotic analysis of a further incursion: that of the photographic still image within the equidistant flow of the film’s moving frames. This can be seen in Bergman’s Persona (1966), but also in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) and Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), the latter consisting almost entirely of still images. In these moments a new balance is established between dream-states and the testimonial power of the image, seen through André Bazin’s conception of photography as “true hallucination”. Enrico Terrone, in a different perspective, con- siders cinema in terms of a disembodied experience, or- ganized in a space that has our sight but not our body as its own center. Because of this condition, cinema is able to approximate to non-perceptual attitudes such as mem- ories and dreams, but not completely emulate them. On the contrary, this emulation would be a concrete possibility for virtual reality precisely thanks to its adherence to the gaze and body of the spectator coupled with a potential GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 14 AN-ICON  for manipulation and alteration that it is impossible to find in another embodied experience such as that of theater. But how are altered states expressed in the new immersive and digital mediascape? Is it possible in virtual reality to make a distinction between the representation of a real state from that of an exclusively mental state? First of all, we need to investigate how the digital radically trans- forms the very ideas of visual perception and image. This is evident in Antonio Somaini’s contribution, devoted to new artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning and machine vision. In fact, their non-human perceptual functions appear in some cases as altered states that pro- duce dreamlike images, similar to those found in computer programs such as the one called, significantly, Google Deep Dream. Thus, it becomes necessary for Somaini to study the artistic practices that exploit the productive potential of machine learning in a creative and revolutionary way, such as in the artworks of Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and Grégory Chatonsky. The perceptual dimension is also at the center of Claudio Paolucci’s contribution. From the point of view of cognitive semiotics, Paolucci investigates the hallucinatory character of ordinary perception, always shaped by the in- tervention of imagination, to analyze the way mental states are represented in virtual and augmented environments. If perception can be defined in terms of a hallucination controlled by the world, what changes in immersive envi- ronments is only the simulated character of the world itself. The states of imagination, memory, and hallucination are then reproduced in virtual and augmented reality following two possible strategies: either in a pan-perceptual modal- ity, exploiting the full sense of presence produced by the immersive devices, or following the audiovisual strategies inherited from previous audiovisual languages with which virtual and augmented reality share the same formal appa- ratus of enunciation. To exemplify this double expressive GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 15 AN-ICON  possibility, Paolucci analyzes the immersive videogame Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. At this point, it becomes necessary to under- stand what the specifically dreamlike and hallucinatory character of virtual reality consists of and how it differs from other established media. The joint paper written by film theorist Martine Beugnet and new media artist Lily Hibberd focuses on the role played by darkness, which in the new immersive media takes on a completely new po- tential compared to cinema. In fact, it becomes an intrinsic component of the environmentalized image of the former – coupled with the illusion of depth and the replication of motion. If the darkness of the traditional audiovisual dis- tinguishes states of self and otherness, in virtual reality it envelops the users depriving them of the sense of distance and leading them back to a state of radical loss, in which they are haunted by sporadic sounds and visions, faithful to the dynamics more proper to memory and dream. Pietro Montani’s essay then becomes the ef- fective conclusion and synthesis of all the questions raised by this issue. The dreamlike character of virtual reality con- sists for Montani in a precise work of oneiric imagination, capable of distancing itself from linguistic thought without getting trapped in a pure hallucination, but finding its proper status in what Freud defines as “Bilderschrift” (pictographic script), a syncretic relationship between images and writ- ing functions, both pre-linguistic and performative, which can also be read in the Kantian terms of a schematization without concept. An expressive condition which resurfaces in early cinema and especially in Eisenstein’s film theory of the 1920s and which today finds a specific declination in immersive virtual installations such as Carne y Arena (2017) by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and VR_I (2018) by choreographer Gilles Jobin, where different participants can share a collective lucid dream. In fact, new media do not merely represent altered states of consciousness: they take on their performative power. GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI 16 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/15446

Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema by Barbara Grespi Mitry (I) Husserl Mental state Projection Imagination Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the vi1 rtual image in the cinema (I) by Barbara Grespi Abstract Representing altered states of consciousness, even through the most phantasmal of technical images, is an inherent contradiction; once we attribute a physical body, i.e. objectivity, to mental images, we deny what Husserl considers their very essence. Jean Mitry draws from this assumption when discussing filmic access to mental states from a phenomenological perspective. The following essay reconsiders Mitry’s contribution with specific reference to the role of projection, technically and metaphorically speak- ing, in the cinematic technique and imagination; this, with the intention of suggesting some crucial questions for the comparison between the filmic forms of the visible and those inaugurated by the technology of the virtual. Mitry Husserl Mental state Projection Imagination To quote this essay: B. Grespi, “Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (I)”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 17-36 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 into the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2018-2022” attributed by Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca (MIUR). BARBARA GRESPI 17 AN-ICON Le cinéma transforme l’écran en une image d’image.2 A silver visor, you would say an ancestor of a VR headset were it not for the cap that wraps around the lower part of the skull. It causes a sharp pain in the eyes and its function is not to watch images, but to record them, like an ordinary video camera. Nevertheless, it has no lens but two satin panels, one for each eye. From the outside, you can see the signal of a scanner running; fr m the inside, the captured images appear on two side-by-side screens. It is the device invented by Wim Wenders for Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt, 1991) (Fig.1), in the story, a prototype which all the great world powers are hunting down in the fevered climate of the end of the millennium. Its camera captures the biochemical event of vision, that is, not only what you see but also how your brain reacts to the perceived images, collecting electrical stimuli directly from the nerves. The recorded “visual” impulses can thus be transmitted to the brain of another person, even a blind one, and this allows them to see without using the retina. Still, as the story progresses, the machine evolves into something even more complicated: a technique for extracting from the mind images which are completely independent of sight and correspond to pure imagination, dreams or memories. Sight translated into data gives birth to “artificial” images, segmented in a grid and the result of numbers; imagination, on the other hand, has pictorial qualities, strong colours and blurred borders. Sci-fi cinema provides a long list of vision machines, but Wenders’ possesses a special allure, balanced, as it is, between the old and the new. 2 Dr. Allendy [René Allendy], “La valeur psychologique de l’image”, in AA.VV., L’art cinématographique (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1926): 75-103, 77. BARBARA GRESPI 18 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Wim Wenders, Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt), 1991. Screen capture. Between cinema and VR: an exquisitely optical prosthesis, it creates abstract images, devoid of somatic and sensory traces, but at the same time it is a medium of intersubjectivity, which allows the exchange of visions at a neural level. It is a digital device, but also a truth machine: it records, documents, reflects even the unconscious, or the deepest levels of our psyche. It represents the cinema in its increasingly sharp juxtaposition to other technologies of the contemporary era, such as VR: the first in perpetual balance between body and mind, the second completely biased towards the sensory. The representation of mental acts in cinema is always, as in Wenders’ movie, a metafilmic moment in which the image consciousness is elaborated, together with the ways in which multiple factors, material and immaterial, contribute to it, including the gaze and its structure. In the following pages, by rediscovering Jean Mitry’s reading of Husserl’s thinking, we will discuss the role of projection, technically and metaphorically speaking, in filmic access to the mental; this with the intention of bringing out some crucial questions for the comparison between the cinematic forms of the visible and those inaugurated by the technol- ogy of the virtual. BARBARA GRESPI 19 AN-ICON  The mental image and the filmic image Beyond what they represent, filmic images are “situated” in a space halfway between the mental and the real: the iconic stream that the spectator sees flowing would not exist outside his or her mind, which integrates and merges the perception of the single frames thus creating the movie. Even before the birth of cinema, the paradoxi- cal nature of the moving image struck William James, who referred to it to describe consciousness in terms of a zoe- trope: just as that optical toy produces effects of continuity by making discontinuous fragments flow, so the conscious- ness merges its sequences of scattered and uninterrupted micro-perceptions into an illusory whole.3 The similarity between the film and the activity of the mind will be at the core of one of the first essays in film theory, The Photoplay by Hugo Münsterberg, a former student of medicine who converted to psychology under the influence of Wilhelm Wundt, and later became James’s colleague at Harvard.4 The reference to James’s metaphor of the zoetrope allows us to understand what Münsterberg meant by suggesting that photographic images had been estranged from physi- cal reality once they had achieved movement – contrary to what one might naturally think – and were brought closer to the reality of consciousness. The massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of our own consciousness. The mind has triumphed over matter, and the pictures roll on with the ease of musical tones.5 Münsterberg develops a precise parallel be- tween cinema and mind, seeing the main filmic techniques 3 “Is consciousness really discontinuous, incessantly interrupted and recommencing (from the psychologist’s point of view)? And does it only seem continuous to itself by an illusion analogous to that of the zoetrope? Or is it at most times as continuous outwardly as it inwardly seems?”. W. James, The Principles of Psychology (Create Space, 2017): 125. 4 M. Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg: His Life and Work (New York: Appleton & Co., 1922): 21-22. 5 H. Münsterberg, “The psychology of the photoplay” (1916), in A. Langdale, ed., The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings (New York-London: Routledge, 2002): 153-154. BARBARA GRESPI 20 AN-ICON  as reflecting the activities of consciousness, such as atten- tion (corresponding to the close-up and the shifting from in-focus to out-of-focus), memory (represented by flash- back as enclosure of the past in the present) and emotion (in its development, according to William James, from a kinesthetic sensation).6 This early conception of the mind as a movie justifies the most common visual rhetoric that complemented the representation of a character’s mental acts: fading, superimposition, soft focus. Becoming con- solidated precisely in the years in which Münsterberg wrote his essay, these optical effects aim at framing a segment of the visible within a zone which is not real and not certain, just as the discontinuous hyphens of the thinking bubbles in comics highlight the difference between a thought spoken out loud and one which remains unspoken in the charac- ter’s mind. Transitions in classical cinema in essence pro- duce the slow fading of the actual into the mental, evoking an idea of the mind as a place of weakening, intermingling and metamorphosing of sensory input. These narrative fragments which interrupt the flow of the film by jumping onto a different level and moving beyond the diegetic physical reality, are thus presented and interpreted as the “contents” of a fictional consciousness; this implies believing that the human mind operates by storing impressions derived from perception in the shape of ghostly pictures to be inspected, when needed, by the mind’s eye. We are familiar with this notion, its ancient roots and its points of junction with modern thinking,7 as well as its confutation by phenomenology, whose intake is crucial but still difficult to integrate into studies of the imagination.8 Even a thinker like Sartre who tries to get rid, precisely through Husserl, of the idea of the mind as a repository of images, was victim to the same “illusion of immanence” that 6 Münsterberg shares the Jamesian perspective (the famous: “we do not weep because we are sad, but we are sad because we weep”). H. Münsterberg, “The psychology of the photoplay”: 107-108. 7 See the ancient idea of the mind as a room furnished with images in F.A. Yates, The Art of Memory (New York-London: Routledge, 1966). 8 See for instance J. Jansen, “Imagination: phenomenological approaches”, in M. Kelly, ed., Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 430-434. BARBARA GRESPI 21 AN-ICON  he intended to criticize once he admitted the existence of a “psychic object” (the analogon) and presented it as the mediator of the imaginative process.9 Sartre is very much present in Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma by Jean Mitry, the massive trea- tise in two volumes written by the French critic, activist and director between 1963 and 1965,10 a work capable of bridging, as Dudley Andrew wrote, the formalism of clas- sical theory with emerging semiotics.11 The second volume, centered on form and cin- ematic language, is the best known and most appreciated, while volume one, particularly eclectic, has suffered from an evident removal, also highlighted by the significant cuts made in current French and English editions.12 Here we find the first remarkable confrontation of film theory with Husserl, an attempt recognized by the pioneers of the phe- nomenological approach to cinema, but never investigated, and even dismissed, in the numerous developments of this branch of study.13 Mitry discusses precisely the theme of mental images, which Husserl brought together under the umbrella term of Phantasie, to indicate both the ensem- ble of images devoid of physical support and the act of imagination through which they “appear” (erscheinen).14 It is an act of imagination that which gives shape to a physical image, deposited on a support and capable of 9 Casey recognized the error. See E.S. Casey, “Sartre on imagination”, in P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (La Salle: Open Court 1981): 16-27. 10 J. Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma (vol. I: Le structure, and vol. II: Les formes) (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1963, 1965). A useful rediscovery of Mitry’s contribution to film theory in: M. Lefebvre, “Revisiting Mitry’s Esthétique et Psychologie du Cinéma at Fifty”, Mise au point [online], no. 6 (2014), accessed February 20, 2021. 11 See D. Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1976): 181ff. 12 The current English edition The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) was translated from the abridged French edition of 1990. We will quote from this book, unless otherwise specified. 13 Vivian Sobchack recognizes his engagement in a Husserlian phenomenology of cinema – see her The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 29 – while A. Casebier, Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) prefers to lean upon Baudry. Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Julian Hanich dismiss Mitry’s idea of mental image as a distortion of the phenomenological arguments. See their stimulating introduction “What is film phenomenology?” to “Film and phenomenology”, Studia Phaenomenologica XVI (2016): 36. 14 E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). BARBARA GRESPI 22 AN-ICON  depicting an absent entity (Bildvorstellung), as well as that which creates mental images (Phantasievorstellung), which are by no means comparable to “iconic contents” of the consciousness, but rather to be understood as intuitions based on “sensorial phantasms”.15 Mitry does not refer to these precise pages of Husserl, whose essential theses are however echoed, but rather he remodels phenomenol- ogy under the influence of his experience of the cinema. Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma stems indeed from a general philosophical position – a unique case in film theory, if we exclude Deleuze’s two tomes – a thesis in which it is of primary importance to define the role of perception by mediating among Husserl’s theses, Sartre and psychology. In Mitry’s interpretation of intentionality, per- ception is an act based on sensory impressions but is not reduced to them; consciousness completes them, by extracting an object from the undifferentiated continuum that constitutes matter and hence giving form, by difference, also to the subject. Consciousness is based on mental images, which are not residues of ocular perception which have survived in the absence of the object, and nor are they entities existing in themselves and of which thought could avail itself; they are rather forms through which thought became aware of itself. With this idea, Mitry gets rid of the metaphor of consciousness as a receptacle of data and substitutes it with that of consciousness as a reflex of per- ception. With perception in the absence of the object, that is Phantasie, the glare of consciousness is, so to speak, one-way: “the mental image is the product of a wish di- rected toward the object which we know to be absent [...] it is the consciousness of that wish becoming ‘known’ in the object of its volition”.16 15 In Husserl called precisely “Phantasmen”. In the comment on Husserl’s theory of imagination, we follow C. Calì, “Husserl and the phenomenological description of imagery: some issues for the cognitive sciences?”, Arhe 4, no. 10 (2006): 25-36 and Husserl e l’immagine (Palermo: Aesthetica Preprint, 2002): 113-114. 16 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 35-36. BARBARA GRESPI 23 AN-ICON  The moving image consciousness Mitry’s starting point, therefore, is not the cin- ematic representation of consciousness, but the mental images that become part of the imaginative process; this process is extremely important in cinema, a medium which powerfully simulates the real but at the same time possess- es a deep-rooted ghostly nature. According to Mitry, this double character of cinema is reflected by the two kinds of signs of which it is composed: linguistic and psycholog- ical signs; linguistic signs give shape to the filmic images (through a grammar of the visible), psychological signs con- struct mental images (with the collaboration of the spectator). To understand how these two “signs” intersect in the beholder’s experience, it is necessary to come back to Husserl and his well-known tripartition regarding image consciousness, which is not clearly referenced in Esthétique et psychologie du cinema, but still recognisable in many lines. Husserl’s classification is based on three perceptive dimensions: the first is the “image-thing” (Bildding), that is, the concrete material of which the image is made, its support; the second is the “image-object” (Bildobje t), that is, the immaterial object which depicts something (the ide- al content of a series of perception);17 the last is the “im- age-subject” (Bildsujet), that is, the depicted subject (the referent in the real world).18 A subtle but substantial differ- ence separates the image-thing from the image-object: if the support were damaged or destroyed (for instance, if a canvas was torn), the image-object would not be affected, because it does not possess a real existence, neither inside nor outside of consciousness (only a complex of sensations experienced by the spectator in front of the pigments exists, as well as the way in which he invests it with intentionality, by creating image consciousness). This component is more easily understood in the case of the mental image, which 17 In Mitry’s words, see J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 27. 18 I use this expression, although I am aware that between the image and the subject there is not properly a semiotic relationship. See C. Rozzoni, Nell’immagine: Realtà, fantasia, esperienza estetica (Milan: Le Monnier, 2017): 9. BARBARA GRESPI 24 AN-ICON  lacks a material support, in contrast to the physical image. Still, there is a minor difference between the two, because what matters is their common capacity of actualizing absent objects (that is to say, making them present). The illusion of presence is based on the production of sensorial phan- tasms that allow us to guess how an object would be if it fell under the sphere of our senses, for instance touch or hear- ing, but first and foremost sight.19 An “optical” phantasm makes us intuit how a specific object would appear to our gaze within a particular environment, and this imaginative act covers our perception, albeit not totally. Indeed, the mental image as well as the physical image insert them- selves into the perception in a contrastive way, that is, not fully covering and substituting our reality, but allowing us to keep it alive. It is not a question of greater or lesser illu- sionistic power (some images could appear so real to be mistaken for reality), and neither of frames (a more or less marked discontinuity in the space where they are situated), rather it is a matter of time: Husserl points out that this is more the contrast between the time of the image-object and the actual present,20 to which our body belongs above all (but also the Bildding, if we are talking about physical images). Here below, the echo of these concepts in Mitry: We have seen that the mental image presents a reality both vi- sualized and recognized as absent. If, as I write these lines, I think of my car in the garage, I can see it perfectly well, mentally - or, at least, I can see a certain aspect of it - but I am seeing it as not present. It appears to my consciousness as an image certifying the absence of what I am thinking about - more especially since, 19 This is what was brightly called an “artificial presence”. See L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence: Philosophical Studies in Image Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 20 “[The image-thing] bears within itself the characteristic of unreality, of conflict with the actual present. The perception of the surroundings, the perception in which the actual present becomes constituted for us, continues on through the frame and then signifies ‘printed paper’ or ‘painted canvas’”. E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 51 (emphasis in the original). On this base, I suspect that we should abandon the optical idea of the frame when we face an environmental image (like VR), and rethink it in corporeal terms, considering the spectator’s real body as the border; indeed, you always have the possibility to leave the artificially present world not by seeing outside of the image, but certainly by touching the surrounding space and objects (or people), that is, paradoxically, becoming aware of the unreal in the very moment in which we get the chance to imagine the real through our body (thus in a perfect inversion of the cinematic relationship between reality and imagination). BARBARA GRESPI 25 AN-ICON in so doing, I do not stop perceiving the world impinging on me from all sides. The mental image is therefore a product of the will standing in opposition to our normal perception of the world and its objects and which, though coexisting with it, becomes more isolated the more directly in opposition it stands.21 Mitry realises that these ideas are of great im- portance for the analysis of cinematic images, which had also attracted Husserl’s attention, albeit fleetingly. The great philosopher’s reflections about the art of the twenty-century concern the repeatability of cinematic screenings such as to leave the image-object unaltered,22 and the intensity of the actualization produced by filmic images, so high as to reduce the perception of the image-thing to the minimum. “Deception and sensory illusion of the sort belonging to panorama images, cinematographic images, and the like”, he wrote, “depend on the fact that the appearing objects in their whole appearing state are slightly or imperceptibly different from the objects appearing in normal perception. One can know in these cases that these are mere image objects, though one cannot vitally sense this”.23 His ger- minal reflection on cinema has been taken up by some important contributions, mainly centered on the relation- ship between consciousness and true believing and on the interplay between actor and character;24 but the path indicated by Mitry is just as interesting and perhaps more in line with Husserl’s suggestions. Mitry wrote: Stuck to a cellulose base, projected onto a screen [...] the film image, in contrast with the mental image, is objectively present; but, like the mental image, it is the image of an absent reality, a past real- ity of which it is merely the image. Its concrete reality is that it is 21 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 82-83. 22 “If I let a cinematographic presentation run off repeatedly, then (in relation to the subject) the image object in the How of its modes of appearance and each of these modes of appearance itself is given as identically the same image object or as identically the same mode of appearance”. E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 646. 23 E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 146. 24 See C. Rozzoni, “Cinema Consciousness: Elements of a Husserlian Approach to Film Image”, Studia Phaenomenologica, XVI (2016): 294-324; J. Brough, “Showing and Seeing: Film as Phenomenology”, in J. D. Parry, ed., Art and Phenomenology (New York-London: Routledge, 2010): 192-214. BARBARA GRESPI 26 AN-ICON fixed to a support and is thus objectively present and analyzable. The reality recorded on the celluloid strip is at all times capable of being projected. In this sense, projection is a kind of “actualization” in the same way as the mental image.25 In these lines, a central question arises: in cin- ema, the act of making something present (“actualization”, he writes, alluding specifically to Husserl) takes place in the very moment of projection, because the strip of film is only a “latent movie”; according to Mitry, the celluloid is the main support (the image-thing), while the screen un- balances perception from the thing to the object, allowing movement to be seen. Neither the destruction of the film, nor even a scratch in the screen cancels the object-film, which, as we said, is that ideal content which, though cre- ated during the projection, survives it – as Orson Welles’ Don Quixote never ceases to teach us, a foolish spectator who stabs the white screen with his sword in an attempt to heroically oppose his enemies of light and shadow. Welles shows that the screen is not the canvas, is not one and the same with the image, which resists its destruction, both because it is anchored to another, more real support, and because it lives in the mind, paradigmatically in that of the visionary Don Quixote. The celluloid is more similar to the concrete materials of the painter, so much so that the di- rector selects carefully its size and sensitivity, while he can do nothing with the surface of the screen. But if we look back at the origins, we find the two supports imploded into each other: in pre-cinema, frame and screen coincide, because the illusion of movement, for instance in Muto- scope, depends on the flow of photographs bound one on top of the other, within the screen format created by their borders: the “book”. Do we have thus a double “thingness” in the filmic image? And if so, is it not a fundamental prop- erty of all technical images,26 even in the many variants 25 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 31, 83. 26 This is perhaps another way to interpret the idea of technical images as proposed by V. Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). BARBARA GRESPI 27 AN-ICON  of the analogue, but also digital system? The material cin- ematic film behaves like photosensitive paper in photogra- phy, or data code in the digital system, while the shadows projected on the screen correspond to the photographic positive, and to the extraction of the mpeg file on the dis- play. From photography onwards,27 to codify an image and to visualize it, that is to render it accessible to the human eye, became two different and not necessarily concurrent processes; obviously, with the transition to digital, the gap between the two moments widens, because there the ma- trix is no more a first, far-fetched or incomplete visualization of the subject, but its translation into a numerical language, not accessible to the senses, and thus potentially shared only by machines.28 But the point is: to develop a theory of cinematic image anchored to the process of visualization instead of that of encoding – focusing at the same time on the spectator because, as Münsterberg said, without him the image in motion simply does not exist – we have to work on the intersection between the physical and the mental. By a different route, Tom Gunning drew similar conclusions, when he re-launched the theory of realism moving from Metz’s brief incursion into phenomenologi- cal territory;29 Gunning is not a supporter of the deviation toward the mental, but certainly an adversary of Peirce’s indexicality when used to reduce the impression of reality in cinema to the sole photographic base. Thomas Elsaess- er, on the other hand, is not a phenomenologist but he rediscovered the “mental side” of cinema when he drew the distinction between the transmission of the image to the human senses and its recording through traces, rather than optical geometry. Indeed, he saw the model of this process in the human memory, as Freud had conceived it (that is like a Mystic Writing Pad), and proposed to re-start 27 But not in its daguerreotype version, which did not use the positive-negative reverse process: the metal film plate in the camera was developed as a positive and as a unique copy. 28 On this topic see: F. Casetti, A. Pinotti, “Post-cinema ecology”, in D. Chateau, J. Moure, eds., Post-cinema: Cinema in the Post Art Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 193-218. 29 C. Metz, “On the impression of reality in the cinema”, in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974): 3-28, discussed by T. Gunning, “Moving away from the index: cinema and the impression of reality”, differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 29-52. BARBARA GRESPI 28 AN-ICON  the theoretical discourse about cinema from its nature of interface between data and the human senses, in the key of an archaeology of the digital.30 These excellent contributions are perfectly in tune with Mitry’s emphasis on projection as a Husserlian moment of actualization, an effect in which the perception of physical image intersects with mental envisioning; in it “the film frame merely takes the place of the mental image with all the force of its credible reality”.31 Moreover, Metz quoted by Gunning builds on Mitry in his analysis of the “filmic mode”, which he defines “the mode of presence”,32 thinking not of a state of sensory overwhelming, but of an active consciousness made up of the mental reflexes of perception. Nevertheless, the mental, though it is a reflex and a logic of the images, is precisely what the film could never make visible. “It is completely impossible to repre- sent a mental image”, Mitry wrote, “since, having become visual, it ceases to be mental”.33 The filmic image is helpless in the face of what is not accessible to the sight or at least what no one has ever seen; for this reason, Mitry would probably have ap- preciated the frameless film by Douglas Gordon (Feature Film, 1999), a video installation that basically consists of an orchestra performing the full soundtrack written by com- poser Bernard Hermann for the film Vertigo (Alfred Hitch- cock,1958). On the two walls of the exhibition room, only the conductor appears in large mirror projections. However, the real images filling the room are not the physical ones on the walls, but those which flow in the viewer’s mind in correspondence with the musical notes: the sequence where Kim Novak jumps into the bay under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, or when she comes back in her green suit like a ghost. The spectator experiences a kind of vision 30 T. Elsaesser, “Freud as media theorist: mystic writing pads and the matter of memory”, Screen 50, no. 1 (2009): 100-113. Kuntzel already worked on the similarities between Freudian model of memory and the cinema, see: T. Kuntzel, “A note upon the filmic apparatus”, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, no. 1 (1976): 266-271. 31 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 86. 32 C. Metz, “On the impression of reality in the cinema”: 4. 33 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 209. BARBARA GRESPI 29 AN-ICON  not based on retina, as the director himself reports, refer- ring to interviews with spectators coming out of the gallery: Vertigo is projected through the ears into the mind of the person listening to Hermann’s notes. States of mind and self projection Are we to think, then, that only the absence of images triggers imagination? And if it is totally impossible to simulate the mental with the means of cinema, how shall we construe the numerous attempts, since the origins of the medium, to simulate altered states of consciousness? Mitry argues that dream sequences, hallucinations and premo- nitions are not the most mental but the most subjective,34 and in this he joins Wenders, whose machine will show that the mental could be translated into the visible only by sharing subjectivity. Therefore, the result of the cinematic simulation of altered states depends on the ways in which the movie makes the viewer slip into the consciousness of a character, articulating his or her seeing and feeling through the “subjective shot”. Film theory has always juxtaposed two forms of the cinematic gaze: the so-called objective shot, corre- sponding to the simulation of a world that is completely independent from every perception, be this human, animal or belonging to other living and non-living species, and the subjective shot, the simulation of a perceived world, thus filtered at a sensorial and cognitive level through a specific fictional identity. The analysis of these two modes, together with other more nuanced ones, are part of the glorious problem of the point of view in the cinema, a pro- tagonist of the semiotic-narratological debate of the Eight- ies and Nineties, also discussed towards the end of the season in Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology, which takes up precisely Mitry’s contribution. The chapters about the point of view in Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma are indeed the best known and most discussed, even if, before 34 Ibid. BARBARA GRESPI 30 AN-ICON  Sobchack, perhaps not fully understood. Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992), was published only a year after Metz’s Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (1991),35 and thus criticiz- es the positions of the great semiologist, especially Metz reading Mitry;36 but in reality, Impersonal Enunciation is a point of encounter between the two authors. Mitry is among the first to study in depth The Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1946), the film noir shot almost entirely in subjective mode. Here we spectators investigate in the shoes of the detective Philip Marlowe, who is framed frontally only at the beginning and at the end of the movie, while for the rest his eyes are our eyes and our body is disguised in his. Mitry knows how to wonderfully describe the way in which the spectators’ gaze follows the character’s gait from the inside, striving to consider his feet as their own, or the way in which they hold onto the railing with him, trying to see their own hands in Marlowe’s. But this attempt fails. They cannot recognize the image of their own body. Rather they imagine themselves accompanying the body of an Other, objectified, as all the rest is. It is obviously not me climbing the stairs and acting like this, even though I am feeling sensations similar to those I might feel if I were climbing the stairs. I am, therefore, walking with someone, sharing his impressions.37 Then when the famous sequence of the mir- ror arrives, during which the face of Marlowe is reflected (always from the character’s view), spectators are slight- ly disappointed, Mitry apparently suggests. They have to admit that the impressions that they tried to embody were not theirs. Or rather: this is true for all the viewers except for the director, because he, Robert Montgomery, played Marlowe; thus, for him, and for him only, the subjective shot 35 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 36 C. Metz, “Problèmes actuels de théorie du cinéma” (1967), in Essais sur la signification au cinéma, 2 vol. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972): 35-86. 37 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 210. BARBARA GRESPI 31 AN-ICON  works. Put another way, in the subjective shots, Montgom- ery would experience himself as another, by again embody- ing the sensorial phantasms of his previous experience; most of the time, he would live through an experience of partial mirroring: proprioceptive but not optical.38 Sobchack addresses this analysis on two lev- els. On one level, she expands Mitry’s critique by adding the argument of the difficulties of simulating a proprioceptive act. It is not just a matter of noticing the difference between the spectator’s hands and the actor’s, but also the fact of being forced to perceive differently from the way in which the character would probably do so in reality. Indeed, the subjective shots serve two simultaneous purposes: they show the clues necessary to solve the mystery and at the same time they show Marlowe’s perception in a believable fashion. However, the fictional Marlowe would be interested only in the inquiries, and not in his percipient self; for this reason, Sobchack speaks of a difference in the intentional focus that detaches the viewer from the character. In addi- tion, our way of directing attention consists in moving our eyes inside a visual field in which everything remains equally sharp, even what we are not focusing on; on the contrary, classical cinema deploys a marked in-focus and out-of- focus procedure, it constructs clear and blurred zones of visibility by regulating the focal point. So, the analogy be- tween cinema and mind in Münsterberg’s theory (movie techniques as metaphors of the processes of attention), becomes for Sobchack an element which unmasks the difference between man and machine. This is indeed the second and more radical level on which Sobchack’s line of argument is based, and it is so important that it overturns, at least formally, Mitry’s reasoning. Building on a Merleau-Pontyan version of phe- nomenology, Sobchack challenged the semiotic distinction between subjective and objective gaze and introduced the 38 I suggest something similar to the inspiring idea of the shot/counter-shot relationship in terms of specular reflection without a mirror, as proposed by A.C. Dalmasso, “Le plan subjectif réversible: Sur le point de vue au cinéma à partir des écrits de Merleau-Ponty”, Studia Phaenomenologica, XVI (2016): 135-162. BARBARA GRESPI 32 AN-ICON  concept of the film’s body, meaning “an intentional instru- ment able to perceive and express perception”.39 From this standpoint, the film’s materially nonhuman (but percipient) body presents the world subjectively to the spectator’s eye. Consequently, the movie camera sees a character and sees him/her seeing with the same degree of subjectivity (its own). It can disguise itself totally as them, by attributing to them a temporary responsibility for the visible percep- tion, but not without a great effort.40 This is indeed the true unbridgeable difference between bodies in the subjective structure of the gaze: not between the body of the spectator and the body of the character, but between the machine’s body (“the non-human embodied film”) and the actor’s, and even more so, the spectator’s body. On the surface, we are dealing with an inversion of perspective, but in reality, it is a convergence: the film’s gaze overwrites that of the character whether we define the machine as an object (but always from a phenomenological perspective: Mitry), or as a subject (a sentient body: Sobchack). In the years between Mitry’s volume and Sob- chack’s, the supporters of the subjective gaze proliferated, with some epochal contributions;41 but when Metz closes that chapter with his Impersonal Enunciation, we come back, in a sense, to the beginning. Metz comes from his book on cinema and psychoanalysis, where he differentiat- ed a form of primary identification (with the camera) from a secondary one (with the character), so he is already inclined to elaborate on the reflexive role of the apparatus. But Im- personal Enunciation starts by arguing, exactly as Sobchak does, that the “semi-subjective shot” discovered by Mitry – an over-the-shoulder shot directed along an axis which more or less aligns with the character’s point of view – is the best form of subjectivity; firstly, because it also shows, even if partially, the body of the perceiver, a necessary 39 V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: 247. 40 Ibid.: 231. 41 See the still indispensable F. Casetti, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator (1986) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). BARBARA GRESPI 33 AN-ICON  factor to encourage identification,42 and secondly, because it makes you sense the presence of a second gaze that perceives the percipient. In conclusion, even leaving phe- nomenology and remaining in the sphere of semiotics, the point is this: the subjective shot is not an empty mould for the spectator’s gaze and body, it is rather a place for redoubling: it “performs above all a double doubling of the enunciative moment […] it doubles at a stroke the site [foyer] that shows via him, and the spectator, who sees via him […] subjective image is reflexive but not a mirror. It does not reflect itself; rather, it reflects the source and the spectator”.43 From this standpoint, the subjective shot be- comes a reproduction en abyme of the projection: we could probably rethink also the idea of the first person shot in VR (and XR) along this line; there the beholder’s body-gaze, apparently implied at every level, is rather to be construed in its radical coincidence with the machine of visibility. In conclusion, when we talk about subjectivity in the image, we talk about a reflexive form in which the movie makes itself visible44 (through the character’s eye or through other stylistic strategies and non-human bodies, so-called “enunciating entities”). Still, exploiting a fictional identity not to access the physical world but some form of Phantasie, to re-use a Husserlian word, means to introduce a further enunciative level in which the character, unques- tionably, mediates the visible with its Self, that is to say, its own human and fictional subjectivity. This is what Mitry meant, probably, when he maintained that mental images plead the cause not so much of the mental but of subjectivity. However, movies about people with supernatu- ral faculties offer a range of fictional representations of men- tal states more in tune with this idea of “impersonal subjec- tivity”; in those cases, indeed, the character’s altered states 42 Mitry argued first that to adopt a gaze, one must have seen the body of this gaze; see the development of this idea in E. Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Amsterdam-New York-Berlin: Mouton, 1984). 43 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or The Place of Film: 106. 44 Unless you think of the distribution of knowledge and the positioning of the narrator towards the diegetic universe (Genette’s focalization). BARBARA GRESPI 34 AN-ICON  are not to be explained through psychology, but through their function as human machines of vision (symmetrical to Sobchack’s cinematic machine as non-human body). Fig. 2. David Cronenberg, The Dead Zone, 1983. Screen capture. In The Dead Zone (David Cronenberg, 1983) (Fig. 2), the visions of John, who awakens from a coma lasting nearly five years, traverse his body and materialize around him. There is a physical support (an image-thing) where the “data” of the events that John is able to “hallucinate” are stored, and it is the body of the person who experienced them: each vision is generated by the contact between John’s hand and that of the subject, whose past or future is in question; the handshake produces tremors, signals travelling through the clairvoyant’s body and reaching his eyes, which at this point “project”45 the images (images-ob- jects) into the environment, and not without pain (the same consumption suffered by the protagonists of Until the End of the World). John becomes a visitor to these virtual spac- es, which he experiences with his body, while the specta- tors experience his hallucination as their own not by vir- tue of an unconditioned adhesion of gazes (the subjective shot), but rather by virtue of a plurality of subjectivisations 45 See the idea of divination as projection in one of the figures who inspired Jean Mitry’s thinking, known as Dr. Allendy: “The fortune tellers […] do nothing but project on reality something which doesn’t possess in itself any determination, a latent image that is inscribed in it — and therefore we can understand all the techniques of divination as projection on reality of an inner and obscure sense” (our translation and emphasis). See Dr. Allendy [René Allendy], “La valeur psychologique de l’image”: 99-100. BARBARA GRESPI 35 AN-ICON  which renders the visible a place for the emergence of the gaze.46 In his first vision, John hallucinates the fire in which the daughter of his nurse could die: the hospital room is transformed into the child’s bedroom, including John’s bed, suddenly surrounded by toys, teddy bears and flames. The vision is subjectified in a complex and multiple fashion: a rightward gaze opens the imaginary field with a classic subjective shot, and a leftward gaze brings the field back to reality; however, between the two gestures, the camera starts to wander in a mental space-time until it includes John, whose eyes have ceased to bear the sight of the images, while his voice remained altered as it is in his state of hallucination. In the most memorable of the visions, which concerns the young victim of a serial killer, John’s subjective shot projects the imaginary gazebo in which the murder took place; but his close-up was already “subjectified” before his visions, because his face no longer immersed in the darkness of the night (the actual present), but surrounded by a diffused glow, the one that was there at the moment of the crime (the virtual past); this abrupt change of illumination intimates that John is already part of his hallucination. His entrance into the virtual world, his artificial presence on the scene of the crime, right behind the victim, but invisible, is a quintessential cinematic scene. John ends up in the image almost accidentally: a dolly starts moving slowly and brings into the frame his figure, almost by chance; it is thanks to a slightly excessive movement that we can see our vision together with its source. And it is precisely this ghostly, casual and plural presence that characterizes the cinematic experience; it is difficult to think that it could be replicated in immersive media, like VR, where there is, at least for the moment, no possibility of detaching the spectator’s gaze from the “projector”. 46 See the idea of “plan subjective réversible” and of the film as a “visible surface cracked by different gazes” from the Merleau-Pontyan perspective adopted by A.C. Dalmasso, “Le plan subjectif réversible”: 140 (our translation). BARBARA GRESPI 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/15446

Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema by Barbara Grespi Mitry (I) Husserl Mental state Projection Imagination Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the vi1 rtual image in the cinema (I) by Barbara Grespi Abstract Representing altered states of consciousness, even through the most phantasmal of technical images, is an inherent contradiction; once we attribute a physical body, i.e. objectivity, to mental images, we deny what Husserl considers their very essence. Jean Mitry draws from this assumption when discussing filmic access to mental states from a phenomenological perspective. The following essay reconsiders Mitry’s contribution with specific reference to the role of projection, technically and metaphorically speak- ing, in the cinematic technique and imagination; this, with the intention of suggesting some crucial questions for the comparison between the filmic forms of the visible and those inaugurated by the technology of the virtual. Mitry Husserl Mental state Projection Imagination To quote this essay: B. Grespi, “Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (I)”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 17-36 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 into the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2018-2022” attributed by Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca (MIUR). BARBARA GRESPI 17 AN-ICON Le cinéma transforme l’écran en une image d’image.2 A silver visor, you would say an ancestor of a VR headset were it not for the cap that wraps around the lower part of the skull. It causes a sharp pain in the eyes and its function is not to watch images, but to record them, like an ordinary video camera. Nevertheless, it has no lens but two satin panels, one for each eye. From the outside, you can see the signal of a scanner running; fr m the inside, the captured images appear on two side-by-side screens. It is the device invented by Wim Wenders for Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt, 1991) (Fig.1), in the story, a prototype which all the great world powers are hunting down in the fevered climate of the end of the millennium. Its camera captures the biochemical event of vision, that is, not only what you see but also how your brain reacts to the perceived images, collecting electrical stimuli directly from the nerves. The recorded “visual” impulses can thus be transmitted to the brain of another person, even a blind one, and this allows them to see without using the retina. Still, as the story progresses, the machine evolves into something even more complicated: a technique for extracting from the mind images which are completely independent of sight and correspond to pure imagination, dreams or memories. Sight translated into data gives birth to “artificial” images, segmented in a grid and the result of numbers; imagination, on the other hand, has pictorial qualities, strong colours and blurred borders. Sci-fi cinema provides a long list of vision machines, but Wenders’ possesses a special allure, balanced, as it is, between the old and the new. 2 Dr. Allendy [René Allendy], “La valeur psychologique de l’image”, in AA.VV., L’art cinématographique (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1926): 75-103, 77. BARBARA GRESPI 18 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Wim Wenders, Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt), 1991. Screen capture. Between cinema and VR: an exquisitely optical prosthesis, it creates abstract images, devoid of somatic and sensory traces, but at the same time it is a medium of intersubjectivity, which allows the exchange of visions at a neural level. It is a digital device, but also a truth machine: it records, documents, reflects even the unconscious, or the deepest levels of our psyche. It represents the cinema in its increasingly sharp juxtaposition to other technologies of the contemporary era, such as VR: the first in perpetual balance between body and mind, the second completely biased towards the sensory. The representation of mental acts in cinema is always, as in Wenders’ movie, a metafilmic moment in which the image consciousness is elaborated, together with the ways in which multiple factors, material and immaterial, contribute to it, including the gaze and its structure. In the following pages, by rediscovering Jean Mitry’s reading of Husserl’s thinking, we will discuss the role of projection, technically and metaphorically speaking, in filmic access to the mental; this with the intention of bringing out some crucial questions for the comparison between the cinematic forms of the visible and those inaugurated by the technol- ogy of the virtual. BARBARA GRESPI 19 AN-ICON  The mental image and the filmic image Beyond what they represent, filmic images are “situated” in a space halfway between the mental and the real: the iconic stream that the spectator sees flowing would not exist outside his or her mind, which integrates and merges the perception of the single frames thus creating the movie. Even before the birth of cinema, the paradoxi- cal nature of the moving image struck William James, who referred to it to describe consciousness in terms of a zoe- trope: just as that optical toy produces effects of continuity by making discontinuous fragments flow, so the conscious- ness merges its sequences of scattered and uninterrupted micro-perceptions into an illusory whole.3 The similarity between the film and the activity of the mind will be at the core of one of the first essays in film theory, The Photoplay by Hugo Münsterberg, a former student of medicine who converted to psychology under the influence of Wilhelm Wundt, and later became James’s colleague at Harvard.4 The reference to James’s metaphor of the zoetrope allows us to understand what Münsterberg meant by suggesting that photographic images had been estranged from physi- cal reality once they had achieved movement – contrary to what one might naturally think – and were brought closer to the reality of consciousness. The massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of our own consciousness. The mind has triumphed over matter, and the pictures roll on with the ease of musical tones.5 Münsterberg develops a precise parallel be- tween cinema and mind, seeing the main filmic techniques 3 “Is consciousness really discontinuous, incessantly interrupted and recommencing (from the psychologist’s point of view)? And does it only seem continuous to itself by an illusion analogous to that of the zoetrope? Or is it at most times as continuous outwardly as it inwardly seems?”. W. James, The Principles of Psychology (Create Space, 2017): 125. 4 M. Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg: His Life and Work (New York: Appleton & Co., 1922): 21-22. 5 H. Münsterberg, “The psychology of the photoplay” (1916), in A. Langdale, ed., The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings (New York-London: Routledge, 2002): 153-154. BARBARA GRESPI 20 AN-ICON  as reflecting the activities of consciousness, such as atten- tion (corresponding to the close-up and the shifting from in-focus to out-of-focus), memory (represented by flash- back as enclosure of the past in the present) and emotion (in its development, according to William James, from a kinesthetic sensation).6 This early conception of the mind as a movie justifies the most common visual rhetoric that complemented the representation of a character’s mental acts: fading, superimposition, soft focus. Becoming con- solidated precisely in the years in which Münsterberg wrote his essay, these optical effects aim at framing a segment of the visible within a zone which is not real and not certain, just as the discontinuous hyphens of the thinking bubbles in comics highlight the difference between a thought spoken out loud and one which remains unspoken in the charac- ter’s mind. Transitions in classical cinema in essence pro- duce the slow fading of the actual into the mental, evoking an idea of the mind as a place of weakening, intermingling and metamorphosing of sensory input. These narrative fragments which interrupt the flow of the film by jumping onto a different level and moving beyond the diegetic physical reality, are thus presented and interpreted as the “contents” of a fictional consciousness; this implies believing that the human mind operates by storing impressions derived from perception in the shape of ghostly pictures to be inspected, when needed, by the mind’s eye. We are familiar with this notion, its ancient roots and its points of junction with modern thinking,7 as well as its confutation by phenomenology, whose intake is crucial but still difficult to integrate into studies of the imagination.8 Even a thinker like Sartre who tries to get rid, precisely through Husserl, of the idea of the mind as a repository of images, was victim to the same “illusion of immanence” that 6 Münsterberg shares the Jamesian perspective (the famous: “we do not weep because we are sad, but we are sad because we weep”). H. Münsterberg, “The psychology of the photoplay”: 107-108. 7 See the ancient idea of the mind as a room furnished with images in F.A. Yates, The Art of Memory (New York-London: Routledge, 1966). 8 See for instance J. Jansen, “Imagination: phenomenological approaches”, in M. Kelly, ed., Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 430-434. BARBARA GRESPI 21 AN-ICON  he intended to criticize once he admitted the existence of a “psychic object” (the analogon) and presented it as the mediator of the imaginative process.9 Sartre is very much present in Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma by Jean Mitry, the massive trea- tise in two volumes written by the French critic, activist and director between 1963 and 1965,10 a work capable of bridging, as Dudley Andrew wrote, the formalism of clas- sical theory with emerging semiotics.11 The second volume, centered on form and cin- ematic language, is the best known and most appreciated, while volume one, particularly eclectic, has suffered from an evident removal, also highlighted by the significant cuts made in current French and English editions.12 Here we find the first remarkable confrontation of film theory with Husserl, an attempt recognized by the pioneers of the phe- nomenological approach to cinema, but never investigated, and even dismissed, in the numerous developments of this branch of study.13 Mitry discusses precisely the theme of mental images, which Husserl brought together under the umbrella term of Phantasie, to indicate both the ensem- ble of images devoid of physical support and the act of imagination through which they “appear” (erscheinen).14 It is an act of imagination that which gives shape to a physical image, deposited on a support and capable of 9 Casey recognized the error. See E.S. Casey, “Sartre on imagination”, in P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (La Salle: Open Court 1981): 16-27. 10 J. Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma (vol. I: Le structure, and vol. II: Les formes) (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1963, 1965). A useful rediscovery of Mitry’s contribution to film theory in: M. Lefebvre, “Revisiting Mitry’s Esthétique et Psychologie du Cinéma at Fifty”, Mise au point [online], no. 6 (2014), accessed February 20, 2021. 11 See D. Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1976): 181ff. 12 The current English edition The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) was translated from the abridged French edition of 1990. We will quote from this book, unless otherwise specified. 13 Vivian Sobchack recognizes his engagement in a Husserlian phenomenology of cinema – see her The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 29 – while A. Casebier, Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) prefers to lean upon Baudry. Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Julian Hanich dismiss Mitry’s idea of mental image as a distortion of the phenomenological arguments. See their stimulating introduction “What is film phenomenology?” to “Film and phenomenology”, Studia Phaenomenologica XVI (2016): 36. 14 E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). BARBARA GRESPI 22 AN-ICON  depicting an absent entity (Bildvorstellung), as well as that which creates mental images (Phantasievorstellung), which are by no means comparable to “iconic contents” of the consciousness, but rather to be understood as intuitions based on “sensorial phantasms”.15 Mitry does not refer to these precise pages of Husserl, whose essential theses are however echoed, but rather he remodels phenomenol- ogy under the influence of his experience of the cinema. Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma stems indeed from a general philosophical position – a unique case in film theory, if we exclude Deleuze’s two tomes – a thesis in which it is of primary importance to define the role of perception by mediating among Husserl’s theses, Sartre and psychology. In Mitry’s interpretation of intentionality, per- ception is an act based on sensory impressions but is not reduced to them; consciousness completes them, by extracting an object from the undifferentiated continuum that constitutes matter and hence giving form, by difference, also to the subject. Consciousness is based on mental images, which are not residues of ocular perception which have survived in the absence of the object, and nor are they entities existing in themselves and of which thought could avail itself; they are rather forms through which thought became aware of itself. With this idea, Mitry gets rid of the metaphor of consciousness as a receptacle of data and substitutes it with that of consciousness as a reflex of per- ception. With perception in the absence of the object, that is Phantasie, the glare of consciousness is, so to speak, one-way: “the mental image is the product of a wish di- rected toward the object which we know to be absent [...] it is the consciousness of that wish becoming ‘known’ in the object of its volition”.16 15 In Husserl called precisely “Phantasmen”. In the comment on Husserl’s theory of imagination, we follow C. Calì, “Husserl and the phenomenological description of imagery: some issues for the cognitive sciences?”, Arhe 4, no. 10 (2006): 25-36 and Husserl e l’immagine (Palermo: Aesthetica Preprint, 2002): 113-114. 16 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 35-36. BARBARA GRESPI 23 AN-ICON  The moving image consciousness Mitry’s starting point, therefore, is not the cin- ematic representation of consciousness, but the mental images that become part of the imaginative process; this process is extremely important in cinema, a medium which powerfully simulates the real but at the same time possess- es a deep-rooted ghostly nature. According to Mitry, this double character of cinema is reflected by the two kinds of signs of which it is composed: linguistic and psycholog- ical signs; linguistic signs give shape to the filmic images (through a grammar of the visible), psychological signs con- struct mental images (with the collaboration of the spectator). To understand how these two “signs” intersect in the beholder’s experience, it is necessary to come back to Husserl and his well-known tripartition regarding image consciousness, which is not clearly referenced in Esthétique et psychologie du cinema, but still recognisable in many lines. Husserl’s classification is based on three perceptive dimensions: the first is the “image-thing” (Bildding), that is, the concrete material of which the image is made, its support; the second is the “image-object” (Bildobje t), that is, the immaterial object which depicts something (the ide- al content of a series of perception);17 the last is the “im- age-subject” (Bildsujet), that is, the depicted subject (the referent in the real world).18 A subtle but substantial differ- ence separates the image-thing from the image-object: if the support were damaged or destroyed (for instance, if a canvas was torn), the image-object would not be affected, because it does not possess a real existence, neither inside nor outside of consciousness (only a complex of sensations experienced by the spectator in front of the pigments exists, as well as the way in which he invests it with intentionality, by creating image consciousness). This component is more easily understood in the case of the mental image, which 17 In Mitry’s words, see J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 27. 18 I use this expression, although I am aware that between the image and the subject there is not properly a semiotic relationship. See C. Rozzoni, Nell’immagine: Realtà, fantasia, esperienza estetica (Milan: Le Monnier, 2017): 9. BARBARA GRESPI 24 AN-ICON  lacks a material support, in contrast to the physical image. Still, there is a minor difference between the two, because what matters is their common capacity of actualizing absent objects (that is to say, making them present). The illusion of presence is based on the production of sensorial phan- tasms that allow us to guess how an object would be if it fell under the sphere of our senses, for instance touch or hear- ing, but first and foremost sight.19 An “optical” phantasm makes us intuit how a specific object would appear to our gaze within a particular environment, and this imaginative act covers our perception, albeit not totally. Indeed, the mental image as well as the physical image insert them- selves into the perception in a contrastive way, that is, not fully covering and substituting our reality, but allowing us to keep it alive. It is not a question of greater or lesser illu- sionistic power (some images could appear so real to be mistaken for reality), and neither of frames (a more or less marked discontinuity in the space where they are situated), rather it is a matter of time: Husserl points out that this is more the contrast between the time of the image-object and the actual present,20 to which our body belongs above all (but also the Bildding, if we are talking about physical images). Here below, the echo of these concepts in Mitry: We have seen that the mental image presents a reality both vi- sualized and recognized as absent. If, as I write these lines, I think of my car in the garage, I can see it perfectly well, mentally - or, at least, I can see a certain aspect of it - but I am seeing it as not present. It appears to my consciousness as an image certifying the absence of what I am thinking about - more especially since, 19 This is what was brightly called an “artificial presence”. See L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence: Philosophical Studies in Image Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 20 “[The image-thing] bears within itself the characteristic of unreality, of conflict with the actual present. The perception of the surroundings, the perception in which the actual present becomes constituted for us, continues on through the frame and then signifies ‘printed paper’ or ‘painted canvas’”. E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 51 (emphasis in the original). On this base, I suspect that we should abandon the optical idea of the frame when we face an environmental image (like VR), and rethink it in corporeal terms, considering the spectator’s real body as the border; indeed, you always have the possibility to leave the artificially present world not by seeing outside of the image, but certainly by touching the surrounding space and objects (or people), that is, paradoxically, becoming aware of the unreal in the very moment in which we get the chance to imagine the real through our body (thus in a perfect inversion of the cinematic relationship between reality and imagination). BARBARA GRESPI 25 AN-ICON in so doing, I do not stop perceiving the world impinging on me from all sides. The mental image is therefore a product of the will standing in opposition to our normal perception of the world and its objects and which, though coexisting with it, becomes more isolated the more directly in opposition it stands.21 Mitry realises that these ideas are of great im- portance for the analysis of cinematic images, which had also attracted Husserl’s attention, albeit fleetingly. The great philosopher’s reflections about the art of the twenty-century concern the repeatability of cinematic screenings such as to leave the image-object unaltered,22 and the intensity of the actualization produced by filmic images, so high as to reduce the perception of the image-thing to the minimum. “Deception and sensory illusion of the sort belonging to panorama images, cinematographic images, and the like”, he wrote, “depend on the fact that the appearing objects in their whole appearing state are slightly or imperceptibly different from the objects appearing in normal perception. One can know in these cases that these are mere image objects, though one cannot vitally sense this”.23 His ger- minal reflection on cinema has been taken up by some important contributions, mainly centered on the relation- ship between consciousness and true believing and on the interplay between actor and character;24 but the path indicated by Mitry is just as interesting and perhaps more in line with Husserl’s suggestions. Mitry wrote: Stuck to a cellulose base, projected onto a screen [...] the film image, in contrast with the mental image, is objectively present; but, like the mental image, it is the image of an absent reality, a past real- ity of which it is merely the image. Its concrete reality is that it is 21 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 82-83. 22 “If I let a cinematographic presentation run off repeatedly, then (in relation to the subject) the image object in the How of its modes of appearance and each of these modes of appearance itself is given as identically the same image object or as identically the same mode of appearance”. E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 646. 23 E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 146. 24 See C. Rozzoni, “Cinema Consciousness: Elements of a Husserlian Approach to Film Image”, Studia Phaenomenologica, XVI (2016): 294-324; J. Brough, “Showing and Seeing: Film as Phenomenology”, in J. D. Parry, ed., Art and Phenomenology (New York-London: Routledge, 2010): 192-214. BARBARA GRESPI 26 AN-ICON fixed to a support and is thus objectively present and analyzable. The reality recorded on the celluloid strip is at all times capable of being projected. In this sense, projection is a kind of “actualization” in the same way as the mental image.25 In these lines, a central question arises: in cin- ema, the act of making something present (“actualization”, he writes, alluding specifically to Husserl) takes place in the very moment of projection, because the strip of film is only a “latent movie”; according to Mitry, the celluloid is the main support (the image-thing), while the screen un- balances perception from the thing to the object, allowing movement to be seen. Neither the destruction of the film, nor even a scratch in the screen cancels the object-film, which, as we said, is that ideal content which, though cre- ated during the projection, survives it – as Orson Welles’ Don Quixote never ceases to teach us, a foolish spectator who stabs the white screen with his sword in an attempt to heroically oppose his enemies of light and shadow. Welles shows that the screen is not the canvas, is not one and the same with the image, which resists its destruction, both because it is anchored to another, more real support, and because it lives in the mind, paradigmatically in that of the visionary Don Quixote. The celluloid is more similar to the concrete materials of the painter, so much so that the di- rector selects carefully its size and sensitivity, while he can do nothing with the surface of the screen. But if we look back at the origins, we find the two supports imploded into each other: in pre-cinema, frame and screen coincide, because the illusion of movement, for instance in Muto- scope, depends on the flow of photographs bound one on top of the other, within the screen format created by their borders: the “book”. Do we have thus a double “thingness” in the filmic image? And if so, is it not a fundamental prop- erty of all technical images,26 even in the many variants 25 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 31, 83. 26 This is perhaps another way to interpret the idea of technical images as proposed by V. Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). BARBARA GRESPI 27 AN-ICON  of the analogue, but also digital system? The material cin- ematic film behaves like photosensitive paper in photogra- phy, or data code in the digital system, while the shadows projected on the screen correspond to the photographic positive, and to the extraction of the mpeg file on the dis- play. From photography onwards,27 to codify an image and to visualize it, that is to render it accessible to the human eye, became two different and not necessarily concurrent processes; obviously, with the transition to digital, the gap between the two moments widens, because there the ma- trix is no more a first, far-fetched or incomplete visualization of the subject, but its translation into a numerical language, not accessible to the senses, and thus potentially shared only by machines.28 But the point is: to develop a theory of cinematic image anchored to the process of visualization instead of that of encoding – focusing at the same time on the spectator because, as Münsterberg said, without him the image in motion simply does not exist – we have to work on the intersection between the physical and the mental. By a different route, Tom Gunning drew similar conclusions, when he re-launched the theory of realism moving from Metz’s brief incursion into phenomenologi- cal territory;29 Gunning is not a supporter of the deviation toward the mental, but certainly an adversary of Peirce’s indexicality when used to reduce the impression of reality in cinema to the sole photographic base. Thomas Elsaess- er, on the other hand, is not a phenomenologist but he rediscovered the “mental side” of cinema when he drew the distinction between the transmission of the image to the human senses and its recording through traces, rather than optical geometry. Indeed, he saw the model of this process in the human memory, as Freud had conceived it (that is like a Mystic Writing Pad), and proposed to re-start 27 But not in its daguerreotype version, which did not use the positive-negative reverse process: the metal film plate in the camera was developed as a positive and as a unique copy. 28 On this topic see: F. Casetti, A. Pinotti, “Post-cinema ecology”, in D. Chateau, J. Moure, eds., Post-cinema: Cinema in the Post Art Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 193-218. 29 C. Metz, “On the impression of reality in the cinema”, in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974): 3-28, discussed by T. Gunning, “Moving away from the index: cinema and the impression of reality”, differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 29-52. BARBARA GRESPI 28 AN-ICON  the theoretical discourse about cinema from its nature of interface between data and the human senses, in the key of an archaeology of the digital.30 These excellent contributions are perfectly in tune with Mitry’s emphasis on projection as a Husserlian moment of actualization, an effect in which the perception of physical image intersects with mental envisioning; in it “the film frame merely takes the place of the mental image with all the force of its credible reality”.31 Moreover, Metz quoted by Gunning builds on Mitry in his analysis of the “filmic mode”, which he defines “the mode of presence”,32 thinking not of a state of sensory overwhelming, but of an active consciousness made up of the mental reflexes of perception. Nevertheless, the mental, though it is a reflex and a logic of the images, is precisely what the film could never make visible. “It is completely impossible to repre- sent a mental image”, Mitry wrote, “since, having become visual, it ceases to be mental”.33 The filmic image is helpless in the face of what is not accessible to the sight or at least what no one has ever seen; for this reason, Mitry would probably have ap- preciated the frameless film by Douglas Gordon (Feature Film, 1999), a video installation that basically consists of an orchestra performing the full soundtrack written by com- poser Bernard Hermann for the film Vertigo (Alfred Hitch- cock,1958). On the two walls of the exhibition room, only the conductor appears in large mirror projections. However, the real images filling the room are not the physical ones on the walls, but those which flow in the viewer’s mind in correspondence with the musical notes: the sequence where Kim Novak jumps into the bay under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, or when she comes back in her green suit like a ghost. The spectator experiences a kind of vision 30 T. Elsaesser, “Freud as media theorist: mystic writing pads and the matter of memory”, Screen 50, no. 1 (2009): 100-113. Kuntzel already worked on the similarities between Freudian model of memory and the cinema, see: T. Kuntzel, “A note upon the filmic apparatus”, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, no. 1 (1976): 266-271. 31 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 86. 32 C. Metz, “On the impression of reality in the cinema”: 4. 33 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 209. BARBARA GRESPI 29 AN-ICON  not based on retina, as the director himself reports, refer- ring to interviews with spectators coming out of the gallery: Vertigo is projected through the ears into the mind of the person listening to Hermann’s notes. States of mind and self projection Are we to think, then, that only the absence of images triggers imagination? And if it is totally impossible to simulate the mental with the means of cinema, how shall we construe the numerous attempts, since the origins of the medium, to simulate altered states of consciousness? Mitry argues that dream sequences, hallucinations and premo- nitions are not the most mental but the most subjective,34 and in this he joins Wenders, whose machine will show that the mental could be translated into the visible only by sharing subjectivity. Therefore, the result of the cinematic simulation of altered states depends on the ways in which the movie makes the viewer slip into the consciousness of a character, articulating his or her seeing and feeling through the “subjective shot”. Film theory has always juxtaposed two forms of the cinematic gaze: the so-called objective shot, corre- sponding to the simulation of a world that is completely independent from every perception, be this human, animal or belonging to other living and non-living species, and the subjective shot, the simulation of a perceived world, thus filtered at a sensorial and cognitive level through a specific fictional identity. The analysis of these two modes, together with other more nuanced ones, are part of the glorious problem of the point of view in the cinema, a pro- tagonist of the semiotic-narratological debate of the Eight- ies and Nineties, also discussed towards the end of the season in Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology, which takes up precisely Mitry’s contribution. The chapters about the point of view in Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma are indeed the best known and most discussed, even if, before 34 Ibid. BARBARA GRESPI 30 AN-ICON  Sobchack, perhaps not fully understood. Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992), was published only a year after Metz’s Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (1991),35 and thus criticiz- es the positions of the great semiologist, especially Metz reading Mitry;36 but in reality, Impersonal Enunciation is a point of encounter between the two authors. Mitry is among the first to study in depth The Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1946), the film noir shot almost entirely in subjective mode. Here we spectators investigate in the shoes of the detective Philip Marlowe, who is framed frontally only at the beginning and at the end of the movie, while for the rest his eyes are our eyes and our body is disguised in his. Mitry knows how to wonderfully describe the way in which the spectators’ gaze follows the character’s gait from the inside, striving to consider his feet as their own, or the way in which they hold onto the railing with him, trying to see their own hands in Marlowe’s. But this attempt fails. They cannot recognize the image of their own body. Rather they imagine themselves accompanying the body of an Other, objectified, as all the rest is. It is obviously not me climbing the stairs and acting like this, even though I am feeling sensations similar to those I might feel if I were climbing the stairs. I am, therefore, walking with someone, sharing his impressions.37 Then when the famous sequence of the mir- ror arrives, during which the face of Marlowe is reflected (always from the character’s view), spectators are slight- ly disappointed, Mitry apparently suggests. They have to admit that the impressions that they tried to embody were not theirs. Or rather: this is true for all the viewers except for the director, because he, Robert Montgomery, played Marlowe; thus, for him, and for him only, the subjective shot 35 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 36 C. Metz, “Problèmes actuels de théorie du cinéma” (1967), in Essais sur la signification au cinéma, 2 vol. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972): 35-86. 37 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 210. BARBARA GRESPI 31 AN-ICON  works. Put another way, in the subjective shots, Montgom- ery would experience himself as another, by again embody- ing the sensorial phantasms of his previous experience; most of the time, he would live through an experience of partial mirroring: proprioceptive but not optical.38 Sobchack addresses this analysis on two lev- els. On one level, she expands Mitry’s critique by adding the argument of the difficulties of simulating a proprioceptive act. It is not just a matter of noticing the difference between the spectator’s hands and the actor’s, but also the fact of being forced to perceive differently from the way in which the character would probably do so in reality. Indeed, the subjective shots serve two simultaneous purposes: they show the clues necessary to solve the mystery and at the same time they show Marlowe’s perception in a believable fashion. However, the fictional Marlowe would be interested only in the inquiries, and not in his percipient self; for this reason, Sobchack speaks of a difference in the intentional focus that detaches the viewer from the character. In addi- tion, our way of directing attention consists in moving our eyes inside a visual field in which everything remains equally sharp, even what we are not focusing on; on the contrary, classical cinema deploys a marked in-focus and out-of- focus procedure, it constructs clear and blurred zones of visibility by regulating the focal point. So, the analogy be- tween cinema and mind in Münsterberg’s theory (movie techniques as metaphors of the processes of attention), becomes for Sobchack an element which unmasks the difference between man and machine. This is indeed the second and more radical level on which Sobchack’s line of argument is based, and it is so important that it overturns, at least formally, Mitry’s reasoning. Building on a Merleau-Pontyan version of phe- nomenology, Sobchack challenged the semiotic distinction between subjective and objective gaze and introduced the 38 I suggest something similar to the inspiring idea of the shot/counter-shot relationship in terms of specular reflection without a mirror, as proposed by A.C. Dalmasso, “Le plan subjectif réversible: Sur le point de vue au cinéma à partir des écrits de Merleau-Ponty”, Studia Phaenomenologica, XVI (2016): 135-162. BARBARA GRESPI 32 AN-ICON  concept of the film’s body, meaning “an intentional instru- ment able to perceive and express perception”.39 From this standpoint, the film’s materially nonhuman (but percipient) body presents the world subjectively to the spectator’s eye. Consequently, the movie camera sees a character and sees him/her seeing with the same degree of subjectivity (its own). It can disguise itself totally as them, by attributing to them a temporary responsibility for the visible percep- tion, but not without a great effort.40 This is indeed the true unbridgeable difference between bodies in the subjective structure of the gaze: not between the body of the spectator and the body of the character, but between the machine’s body (“the non-human embodied film”) and the actor’s, and even more so, the spectator’s body. On the surface, we are dealing with an inversion of perspective, but in reality, it is a convergence: the film’s gaze overwrites that of the character whether we define the machine as an object (but always from a phenomenological perspective: Mitry), or as a subject (a sentient body: Sobchack). In the years between Mitry’s volume and Sob- chack’s, the supporters of the subjective gaze proliferated, with some epochal contributions;41 but when Metz closes that chapter with his Impersonal Enunciation, we come back, in a sense, to the beginning. Metz comes from his book on cinema and psychoanalysis, where he differentiat- ed a form of primary identification (with the camera) from a secondary one (with the character), so he is already inclined to elaborate on the reflexive role of the apparatus. But Im- personal Enunciation starts by arguing, exactly as Sobchak does, that the “semi-subjective shot” discovered by Mitry – an over-the-shoulder shot directed along an axis which more or less aligns with the character’s point of view – is the best form of subjectivity; firstly, because it also shows, even if partially, the body of the perceiver, a necessary 39 V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: 247. 40 Ibid.: 231. 41 See the still indispensable F. Casetti, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator (1986) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). BARBARA GRESPI 33 AN-ICON  factor to encourage identification,42 and secondly, because it makes you sense the presence of a second gaze that perceives the percipient. In conclusion, even leaving phe- nomenology and remaining in the sphere of semiotics, the point is this: the subjective shot is not an empty mould for the spectator’s gaze and body, it is rather a place for redoubling: it “performs above all a double doubling of the enunciative moment […] it doubles at a stroke the site [foyer] that shows via him, and the spectator, who sees via him […] subjective image is reflexive but not a mirror. It does not reflect itself; rather, it reflects the source and the spectator”.43 From this standpoint, the subjective shot be- comes a reproduction en abyme of the projection: we could probably rethink also the idea of the first person shot in VR (and XR) along this line; there the beholder’s body-gaze, apparently implied at every level, is rather to be construed in its radical coincidence with the machine of visibility. In conclusion, when we talk about subjectivity in the image, we talk about a reflexive form in which the movie makes itself visible44 (through the character’s eye or through other stylistic strategies and non-human bodies, so-called “enunciating entities”). Still, exploiting a fictional identity not to access the physical world but some form of Phantasie, to re-use a Husserlian word, means to introduce a further enunciative level in which the character, unques- tionably, mediates the visible with its Self, that is to say, its own human and fictional subjectivity. This is what Mitry meant, probably, when he maintained that mental images plead the cause not so much of the mental but of subjectivity. However, movies about people with supernatu- ral faculties offer a range of fictional representations of men- tal states more in tune with this idea of “impersonal subjec- tivity”; in those cases, indeed, the character’s altered states 42 Mitry argued first that to adopt a gaze, one must have seen the body of this gaze; see the development of this idea in E. Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Amsterdam-New York-Berlin: Mouton, 1984). 43 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or The Place of Film: 106. 44 Unless you think of the distribution of knowledge and the positioning of the narrator towards the diegetic universe (Genette’s focalization). BARBARA GRESPI 34 AN-ICON  are not to be explained through psychology, but through their function as human machines of vision (symmetrical to Sobchack’s cinematic machine as non-human body). Fig. 2. David Cronenberg, The Dead Zone, 1983. Screen capture. In The Dead Zone (David Cronenberg, 1983) (Fig. 2), the visions of John, who awakens from a coma lasting nearly five years, traverse his body and materialize around him. There is a physical support (an image-thing) where the “data” of the events that John is able to “hallucinate” are stored, and it is the body of the person who experienced them: each vision is generated by the contact between John’s hand and that of the subject, whose past or future is in question; the handshake produces tremors, signals travelling through the clairvoyant’s body and reaching his eyes, which at this point “project”45 the images (images-ob- jects) into the environment, and not without pain (the same consumption suffered by the protagonists of Until the End of the World). John becomes a visitor to these virtual spac- es, which he experiences with his body, while the specta- tors experience his hallucination as their own not by vir- tue of an unconditioned adhesion of gazes (the subjective shot), but rather by virtue of a plurality of subjectivisations 45 See the idea of divination as projection in one of the figures who inspired Jean Mitry’s thinking, known as Dr. Allendy: “The fortune tellers […] do nothing but project on reality something which doesn’t possess in itself any determination, a latent image that is inscribed in it — and therefore we can understand all the techniques of divination as projection on reality of an inner and obscure sense” (our translation and emphasis). See Dr. Allendy [René Allendy], “La valeur psychologique de l’image”: 99-100. BARBARA GRESPI 35 AN-ICON  which renders the visible a place for the emergence of the gaze.46 In his first vision, John hallucinates the fire in which the daughter of his nurse could die: the hospital room is transformed into the child’s bedroom, including John’s bed, suddenly surrounded by toys, teddy bears and flames. The vision is subjectified in a complex and multiple fashion: a rightward gaze opens the imaginary field with a classic subjective shot, and a leftward gaze brings the field back to reality; however, between the two gestures, the camera starts to wander in a mental space-time until it includes John, whose eyes have ceased to bear the sight of the images, while his voice remained altered as it is in his state of hallucination. In the most memorable of the visions, which concerns the young victim of a serial killer, John’s subjective shot projects the imaginary gazebo in which the murder took place; but his close-up was already “subjectified” before his visions, because his face no longer immersed in the darkness of the night (the actual present), but surrounded by a diffused glow, the one that was there at the moment of the crime (the virtual past); this abrupt change of illumination intimates that John is already part of his hallucination. His entrance into the virtual world, his artificial presence on the scene of the crime, right behind the victim, but invisible, is a quintessential cinematic scene. John ends up in the image almost accidentally: a dolly starts moving slowly and brings into the frame his figure, almost by chance; it is thanks to a slightly excessive movement that we can see our vision together with its source. And it is precisely this ghostly, casual and plural presence that characterizes the cinematic experience; it is difficult to think that it could be replicated in immersive media, like VR, where there is, at least for the moment, no possibility of detaching the spectator’s gaze from the “projector”. 46 See the idea of “plan subjective réversible” and of the film as a “visible surface cracked by different gazes” from the Merleau-Pontyan perspective adopted by A.C. Dalmasso, “Le plan subjectif réversible”: 140 (our translation). BARBARA GRESPI 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/15448

Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image in theDeleuze cinema (II) by Giuseppe Previtali Cinema Temporality Hallucination Bergman Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (II) by Giuseppe Previtali Abstract From its very origins, cinema has demonstrated a particular interest in the representation of altered states of consciousness: memories, visions, nightmares and dreams are a common feature of narrative films and usually inter- rupt a flow of events by inserting different temporalities in the present of the story. Following the arguments explored by Gilles Deleuze in his groundbreaking works on cinema, this essay will address the issue of how narrative cinema has represented altered states of consciousness. If in early cinema of attractions altered states were represented as physical realities intertwined with the world, classical Hol- lywood films progressively exorcised the disruptive poten- tial of such images by defining a visual grammar in order to normalize them within the narrative. It will be modern cinema which will focus on this issue in depth, given its new interest in the link between the moving image and the mechanisms of thought. In this regard, the essay will in conclusion address the hallucinations experienced by Isak Borg in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, a complex and highly illuminating case of various forms of altered mental states. Deleuze Cinema Temporality Hallucination Bergman To quote this essay: G. Previtali, “Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (II)”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 37-50 GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 37 AN-ICON  Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) begins with a shot of a young couple (Jonathan and Eve) in a car. We immediately understand that they are running from the police and they are heading towards a dock. The girl asks the man (who we will later recognize as her boyfriend) what happened and, when Jonathan starts to tell his story (“I was in my kitchen, it was about 5:00”) the close-up shot of the two begins to fade out. He explains that earlier in the morning he had received a visit from the singer and actress Charlotte Inwood, who showed up at his house with a dress covered in the blood of her husband. Jonathan managed to sneak into Charlotte’s house but was glimpsed by the housemaid and forced to run away. He later received a visit from two policemen, from whom he was able to escape only thanks to Eve. The description of this long sequence, which corresponds to the first fifteen minutes of the movie, would be incomplete without stressing the fact that Jona- than’s tale will prove to be a lie, despite the fact that visually it adopts those criteria of clarity, legibility and transparen- cy which were typical of classic Hollywood cinema and in which the spectator usually put his trust. The exceptionality of this sequence and its ex- emplarity in showing how the temporal dimension (the se- quence is a recollection of a supposed past) and the mental dimension (it is a false recollection of a certain character) are linked, is such that Deleuze identifies in it the first ap- pearance of the mental image in the history of cinema. This crucial analysis, programmatically located in the last pages of The Movement-Image, explicitly connects the distorted evocation of the past and an altered state of conscious- ness. It is precisely this relationship which, questioning the omniscience of the spectator, heralds the advent of a new kind of filmic image: GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 38 AN-ICON The mental image not only frames the others, but transforms them by penetrating them. For this reason, one might say that Hitchcock accomplishes and brings to completion the whole of the cinema by pursuing the movement-image to its limits.1 Altered states of consciousness in early and classical cinema Deleuze’s arguments, which will later be dis- cussed more extensively, attempt to address the excep- tionality of Hitchcock’s movies in the context of classical narrative cinema. However, it is important to recognize that from its origins, cinema has continuously sought to make visible altered states of consciousness. If film theory immediately stressed the role of visual media in preserv- ing the memory of what is absent (thus “presentifying” it),2 another of the great obsessions of cinema has to do with “the aspiration to visualize what dwells in the human mind, to represent thought, to exteriorize what is internal”.3 As Dagrada acutely pointed out, this urge was not limited to cinema itself, but was rather a common feature in the vi- sual culture of the 18th and 19th centuries. Theatre, magic lantern shows and optical toys were just some of the most common examples of this interest shown in the visual ex- ternalization of mental states. Cinema, nevertheless, played a crucial role in this sense, given its specific ability to visu- alize reality. Long before the institutionalization of classical filmic syntax, early cinema developed a specific way of visualizing mental states. What is peculiar to this historical 1 G. Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986): 204. The use of Deleuzean concepts in film studies is an established trend and this paper follows this tradition addressing a perhaps slightly different problem. For a general understanding of this theoretical link, see: P. Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture. Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); P. Maratti, Gilles Deleuze. Cinema and Philosophy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008); D. Angelucci, Deleuze e i concetti del cinema (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2012); D. Martin-Jones, W. Brown eds., Deleuze and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 2 I am referring to the fundamental remarks by theoreticians such as A. Bazin, “The ontology of photographic image”, in Id., What is Cinema? Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 204): 9-16 and R. Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981): 96. Moreover, see the relevant passages in A. Boschi, Teorie del cinema. Il periodo classico 1915-1945 (Rome: Carocci, 1998). 3 E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot (Brussels: Peter Lang,2014): 193. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 39 AN-ICON  period is that those states were not presented as individual and abstract perceptions, but rather as phantasmagorical apparitions, as forms of visual attraction.4 Hallucinations, forms of altered perceptions,5 apparitions of demons and other creatures were extremely common in early cinema, to such an extent that it is often difficult to differentiate clearly between these various types of altered conscious- ness. Besides the different ways in which these images are visually presented in early cinema,6 what needs to be stressed here is the fact that these forms of alteration pos- sessed a “physical nature”, a “potential interchangeability with the real”.7 Consider for instance the case of Histoire d’un crime (Ferdinand Zecca, 1901). The film begins with the killing of a bank employee by a burglar and is built on the juxtaposition of self-contained tableaux, in accordance with the stylistic conventions of the time. When the burglar is arrested and taken to prison, we see him sleep; here, thanks to an explicitly theatrical solution, Zecca is able to visualize what is at the same time both a dream and a rec- ollection of key events of the character’s life. This form of mise en abyme, which has more or less the same function as thought balloons in comics,8 is typical of the period. It confirms that, while the linguistic status of these “altered images” was still unclear, early cinema already stressed the problematic and still to be analyzed relationship between the mental and the temporal dimension. 4 I use the term in the sense outlined in the influential study by T. Gunning, “The cinema of attractions: early film, its spectator and the avant-garde”, in W. Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006): 381-388. 5 Consider for example the hallucinatory drunkenness represented in Rêve à la lune (1905) or the nightmarish consequences of the main character’s dinner in Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906). 6 For an inventory of these techniques, see E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot: 197-210. 7 E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot: 198. Later on, the concept is further emphasized as follows: “The objective physical quality forcefully inscribed into the continuity between subjective oneiric space and waking space characterizes all forms of representation of dreams developed by early cinema. It is not surprising, then, that in this context […] mixing the objective and the subjective, oneiric representation simultaneously assumes both the material characteristics of a physical apparition and the supernatural characteristics of a clairvoyance, as if it constituted a magical way of communicating with somewhere else, a place that is just as real, but also supernatural”, ibid.: 205. Even if here the author speaks explicitly of dreams, her argument seems to be applicable to all the types of altered consciousness explored by early cinema. 8 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema (Venice: Marsilio, 2004): 93. If not otherwise stated, the translations of Italian texts are always the author’s. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 40 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Ferdinand Zecca, Histoire d’un crime, 1901 With the institutionalization of the film industry and its language, the various manifestations of the mental in early cinema were progressively neutralized and reduced to figures of altered temporality.9 The variety of mental states encountered in the cinema of attractions, and the different stylistic devices used to present them, were replaced by recurrent and recognizable linguistic elements which neu- tralized the subversive potential of mental images in a con- text in which a clear and coherent narrative was required.10 The case of A Letter to Three Wives (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949) is emblematic in this sense. The protagonists of this sentimental drama are three women who receive, from a fourth woman, a letter stating that one of their husbands has run away with her. Haunted by doubt, each of the three gives rise to a flashback in which she remembers a specific episode of her life. The second flashback, which has as its protagonist Rita (a radio writer married to a mod- est but proudly intellectual teacher), is highly instructive 9 I am specifically referring to the flashback as a form of visualization of the past. On the various types of flashback, see at least: Y. Mouren, Le flash-back (Armand Colin: Paris, 2005); F. Centola, Il flashback nel cinema. Il tempo riavvolto nell’eterno presente cinematografico (Novara: UTET, 2019). For a theoretical and historical introduction to the topic, M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (London-New York: Routledge, 2013). On the role of flashback in literary theory see the quintessential study by G. Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972). 10 It should be noted that, according to many theoreticians such as Balázs and Bluestone, the only temporality of narrative cinema is the present. On this topic, S. Ghislotti, Film Time. Le dimensioni temporali della visione (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, 2012): 54-63. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 41 AN-ICON  of the way in which classical cinema connects the men- tal and the temporal dimensions. Rita is laid on the grass, and while the camera delicately zooms in on her face, we hear her thoughts in voiceover (she obsessively repeats a couple of troubling questions: “Why couldn’t George go fishing? Why the blue suit?”). Then, a crossfade marks the beginning of the flashback, a sequence that tells the story of a highly problematic and unhappy marriage. The long flashback will then be visually presented according to the conventions of classical narrative cinema: a set of objective shots connected through the use of linear and transparent montage. Beyond Classicism: from Hitchcock to Resnais When confronted with the ways in which clas- sical cinema elaborated the theme of mental images – re- ducing them to forms of altered temporality – Hitchcock’s exceptionality becomes even more apparent. As already mentioned, Deleuze identifies the false flashback of Stage Fright as a crucial moment for overcoming the move- ment-image. Indeed, the falseness of this sequence radi- cally challenges the idea that memories can be objective- ly visualized, without the deforming effect always implicit in subjectivity. Even more problematically, in the final se- quence of Marnie (1964), Hitchcock shows the emergence (or rather re-mergence) of a traumatic mental image of the protagonist, which she experiences not just optically but in a much more radically bodily sense. Influenced by the circumstances and as if hunted by a younger version of herself, Marnie actually re-experiences the dramatic events of her childhood. While being presented to the spectator through objective shots, these images – marked moreover by a chromatic alteration – have a material consistency for Marnie and she finds herself re-immersed in a past that she has already lived through. The discussion on the ways in which cinema reflected on the tension between the mental and the temporal dimension has shown that, while GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 42 AN-ICON  in early cinema a variety of altered states of consciousness was represented as hallucinatory but “physical” realities, classical narrative cinema progressively institutionalized figures of temporality11 within canonic filmic syntax.12 The link between mental and temporal will become crucial in the context of so-called modern cinema,13 specifically because – according to Deleuze – in this cultural context cinema will finally be able to assign a central place to thought and its mechanisms: “the essence of cinema […] has thought as its higher purpose, nothing but thought and its functioning”.14 This process will be made possible by the emergence of the category of mental image, which will on the one hand reassume and re-signify other kinds of images (such as the action-image) and on the other hand unleash the “modern- ist potential” inscribed in the flashback.15 The mental image is for Deleuze something profoundly related to the issue of time, but in an ex- tremely complex and problematizing way which implies 11 More specifically, classical narrative cinema tried to visualize almost exclusively the past and it is probably no coincidence that Hitchcock was one of the few directors who tried to imagine an image in the future. I am referring here to the sequence of Sabotage (1936) in which the protagonist sees the water of a fish tank in the city aquarium dissolving and acting as a sort of screen on which is prefigured the brutal outcome of a bombing. It is worth noticing that in this case the future is considered as a time of pure possibility, because the imagined event will take place in a completely different way. 12 Deleuze insists on the rhetorical function of the flashback in a poignant passage of The Time-Image: “We know very well that the flashback is a conventional, extrinsic device: it is generally indicated by a dissolve-link, and the images that it introduces are often superimposed or meshed. It is like a sign with the words: ‘watch out! recollection’. It can, therefore, indicate, by convention, a causality which is psychological, but still analogous to a sensory-motor determinism, and, despite its circuits, only confirms the progression of a linear narration”. G. Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989): 48. 13 For a critical definition of this concept, see the still relevant remarks by G. de Vincenti, Il concetto di modernità nel cinema (Parma: Pratiche, 2000): 11-24. 14 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 168. 15 M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History: 189. On the same issue, Ghislotti points out: “While in the classical flashback the scenes became part of the coherent narrative of the movie, that is of a set of knowledges that helped the public to have a trustworthy idea of the story, in the case of modernist flashback this aspect falls short: the flashback often becomes the subjective vision of a fact, and is consequently a possible version of the events, but not the definitive one […]. At the end of the film, the public is unable to have an idea of the story free of doubt and is forced to choose between this or that version of it”. S. Ghislotti, Film Time. Le dimensioni temporali della visione: 130-131. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 43 AN-ICON  the coexistence of different temporalities.16 In modern cin- ema, the visualization of mental states is made possible by the collision of /clash of /conflict of different temporal- ities that not only coexist, but can merge to the point of becoming indistinguishable: The images have to be present and past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time. [...] The past does not follow the present that it is no longer, it coexists with the present it was.17 Take for instance a movie such as Mirror (An- drei Tarkovsky, 1975), in which the continuous oscillation between various states of consciousness (from memory to dream and beyond) would be inconceivable in the context of classical narrative cinema, especially when we consider that in the movie “there is a constant retroactive reverber- ation of almost every scene”.18 The memorial act of the protagonist Aleksej generates a flux of memory and visions that will involve not just his own life but also the life of his son and even collective and historical memory (both in an allusive form and through the insertion of historical visual documents).19 In this sense, Mirror seems to fully resonate with the Deleuzian idea of time as a topological construct, a field composed of peaks and sheets which continuously involve each other and are freely explorable. This idea be- comes even more explicit when we consider the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which both the association between 16 “There is no present which is not haunted by a past and a future, by a past which is not reducible to a former present, by a future which does not consist of a present to come. Simple succession affects the present which passes, but each present coexists with a past and a future without which it would not itself pass on. It is characteristic of cinema to seize this past and this future that coexist with the present image”. G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 37 (emphasis added). The use of the term “haunted” is specifically interesting here and seems to foreshadow the arguments of J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London-New York: Routledge, 1994). 17 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 79 (emphasis added). Also, on this point: S. Shaw, Film Consciousness. From Phenomenology to Deleuze (Jefferson-London: McFarland&Company, 2008): 147. 18 S. Shaw, Film Consciousness. From Phenomenology to Deleuze : 94. 19 T. Masoni, P. Vecchi, Andrei Tarkovskij (Milan: Il Castoro, 1997): 72-74. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 44 AN-ICON  mental and temporal,20 and the conflict between various temporalities are quintessential. In his movies, the temporal oscillations do not involve issues of narrative clarity – as in classical cinema – but are rather used to visualize con- tradictory mental states that are always on the verge of undecidability. As pointed out by Deleuze, it is pointless to discuss Resnais’ cinema dissociating the issue of time from that of mental states: It is not difficult to show that dreams and nightmares, fantasies, hypotheses and anticipations, all forms of the imaginary, are more important than flashbacks.21 It is possible to identify a trend in Resnais’ cin- ema which, from Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) to Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968) through Last Year in Marienbad (1961) and Muriel (1963), questions and problematizes the mental dimensions of perception and their link with temporality. Consider for instance the emblematic case of Last Year in Marienbad: the claim of the man to have met a woman the year before could have easily offered the chance for a chain of illustrative flashbacks. On the contrary, the baroque setting of the hotel in which the two characters meet trig- gers a series of obsessive repetitions, uncertain memories (whose are these memories? Are these facts real or just imagined?), while the continuous and uncanny immobility of the bodies generates “a space-time in which there is no before or after, past or present, here and elsewhere, real and imaginary”.22 The film is structured by the connection between ambiguous and confusing mental states, altered forms of experience that continuously merge with halluci- nation. Deleuze sums up the issue as follows, underlining 20 According to Ishaghpour, the great issue of Resnais’ cinema is to understand “the way the mind functions”. Y. Ishaghpour, D’une image à l’autre (Paris: Gonthier, 1981): 182; quoted in G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 121. Shortly after, Deleuze comes back to this argument, stressing that “Resnais is always saying that he is interested only in what happens in the brain, in cerebral mechanisms – monstrous, chaotic or creative mechanisms”, Ibid.: 125. 21 Ibid.: 122. 22 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema: 113-114. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 45 AN-ICON  once again the inextricable interweaving of times and per- ceptions offered by the movie: In Last Year in Marienbad it is X who knew A (so A does not re- member or is lying), and it is A who does not know X (so X is mis- taken or playing a trick on her). Ultimately, all the three characters correspond to three different presents, but in such a way as to complicate the inexplicable instead of throwing light on it; in such a way as to bring about its existence instead of suppressing it: when X lives in a present of past, A lives in a present of future, so that the difference exudes or assumes a present of present (the third, the husband), all implicated in each other.23 The hallucination of Isak Borg Even if Deleuze never discussed Ingmar Berg- man directly in the pages of The Time-Image, his cinema seems to benefit from the aforementioned theorizations, especially if compared with the new possibilities provided by virtual reality in terms of immersivity. Indeed, the pres- ence of altered mental states is recurrent in his movies, which continuously address the link between temporality and perception. Consider for instance the hallucinatory visions of Persona (1966) or the nightmares that haunt the painter Johan in Hour of the Wolf (1968). The explicitly me- ta-filmic opening of this movie,24 as a matter of fact, seems to suggest that for Bergman cinema is defined precisely by its specific ability to visualize altered states of conscious- ness. This idea becomes even more explicit (especially in connection with time) in Wild Strawberries (1957), in which Bergman sets out what is probably his most acute reflec- tion on the topic. As is well-known, the protagonist is the elderly bacteriologist Isak Borg, who is about to receive his doctorate. The night before the celebration he has a terrible nightmare and decides to travel to the event by car, together with his daughter-in-law Marianne. During the trip, 23 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 101. 24 While the initial credits are running, we see voices that we can unmistakably associate to a film set: “Quiet all! Rolling! Take! Camera… and begin!”. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 46 AN-ICON  Isak will experience a whole set of daydreams, hallucina- tions and visions which will shed a new light on his former way of life. At the end of the day, after the celebration of his career, something will be changed in him, and he will start to approach life with more joy and respect for those around him. Wild Strawberries is a movie that reflects on memory and on the possible link between various tempo- ralities and forms of perception; thus, the fact that it has almost no flashbacks is even more striking.25 None of the sequences in which Isak experiences some altered form of consciousness can be considered flashbacks, since Isak physically takes part in them with his old man’s body “al- most as if he was observing the world to finally understand it”. 26 This is true for the oneiric scene that opens the film but also for the quintessential sequence in which Isak – taking a break from the trip near the house where he used to spend the summer during his youth – has a strange and highly interesting experience. We see him sitting under a tree, watching in close-up the old and now abandoned house, while we hear his thoughts in voiceover: Perhaps I got a little sentimental [...]. I don’t know how it happened, but the day’s clear reality dissolved into the even clearer images of memory, which appeared before my eyes with the strength of a true stream of events.27 Then we see him in counter-shot and, through a crossfade, we see the old house regaining its former ap- pearance. With a subsequent series of rapid crossfades we take part in what at first sight may be considered a flashback. Here, we see his beloved cousin Sara picking strawberries for her uncle. However, we immediately understand that what we are experiencing is not a flashback, for at least two different reasons. First of all, Isak takes part in this particular 25 The only real flashback in the film is in fact not experienced by Isak Borg but by his daughter-in-law, who confesses to the old professor an argument that she had with her husband about the child she is expecting. 26 P. Baldelli, Cinema dell’ambiguità. Bergman e Antonioni (Rome: Samonà e Savelli, 1969): 95. 27 Emphasis added. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 47 AN-ICON  “presentification” of the past with his elderly body and is able to move in this hallucinatory experience with a certain degree of freedom; secondly, the events that Isak is seeing are not his memories, because it is immediately clear that (as a young man) he never saw what he is experiencing now (Sara and Sigfrid flirting). Fig. 2. Ingmar Bergman, Wild Strawberries, 1957 Albano rightly argued that we cannot concep- tualize this important sequence in terms of a flashback: We may speak of rêverie éveillée, of daydream or — in German — of Tagtraum, of conscious fantasy. A reverie that shares with a dream [...] the sense of living [...] what is being dreamt.28 Isak knows very well that he is experiencing an impossible past, because he addresses his young and beautiful cousin in an unmistakable way: “Sara, it’s your cousin Isak. Well, I’ve become quite old, of course, so I don’t look the same. But you, you haven’t changed at all”. 28 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema: 76. On this point, see also: R. Campari, Film della memoria. Mondi perduti, ricordati e sognati (Venice: Marsilio, 2005):16, 22-28. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 48 AN-ICON  In this passage, we are confronted with a con- figuration of temporalities that is far more complex of those addressed above: it is a sort of double temporality because the present of the old Isak overlaps with a past that is – moreover – nonfactual, but rather seeped in the percep- tions, regrets and hopes of the young Isak. This conflictual combination of temporalities seems to resonate perfectly with a crucial passage by Metz: Memory is in effect the only vision [...] that posits its object as simultaneously real and imaginary, that is, real in the past and imaginary in the present.29 What Isak sees really happened, but the way in which he experiences it is hallucinatory and gives the spectator no reassurance about the fact that it happened in that way. It is worth noticing here that Deleuze actually theorized this kind of situation, even without referring to Bergman: “the present is the actual image and its contem- poraneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror”.30 Finally, it seems important to notice that, de- spite his being immersed in an altered perception in which he can more or less freely move, Isak has no possibility of interacting with it. He “stands before the theatre of his life as a spectator-voyeur, terribly attracted, morbidly intrigued, but never seen, in complete isolation”.31 Both the dialogue between Isak and Sara and the subsequent scene in which he hears her confessions after the family lunch are highly instructive in this regard. It is symptomatic, in this respect, that this long sequence ends precisely when Sara moves to the garden to meet with the Isak of the past. The percep- tion of the old Isak grants him the possibility to experience a time that he never lived and probably only imagined but 29 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016): 96 (emphasis added). 30 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 79 (emphasis added). It is worth noticing that the situation that Deleuze imagines (the simultaneous presence of past and present within a mirror image) is explicitly visualized in Wild Strawberries, during a subsequent passage in which the old Isak sees himself reflected in a mirror held by a young Sara. 31 L. Albano, “Il posto delle fragole”, in A. Costa ed., Ingmar Bergman (Venice: Marsilio, 2009): 77. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 49 AN-ICON  he is at the same time confronted with an insurmountable limit: he is precluded from every contact and any chance of interaction with this time that is not his own. Only in his present will he be given the chance to undo his mistakes, thanks to the apparition of a sort of double of the beloved Sara. The specific way in which Bergman approaches the representation of altered mental states, working on the dialectic between absence and presence, nostalgia and desire, seems to have more than one similarity with the contemporary form of immersivity promoted by various technological desire. In this sense, a wider archaeological account of the issue of virtuality should be developed, in order to establish a more complex theoretical framework to address this kind of images. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 50 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/15448

Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image in theDeleuze cinema (II) by Giuseppe Previtali Cinema Temporality Hallucination Bergman Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (II) by Giuseppe Previtali Abstract From its very origins, cinema has demonstrated a particular interest in the representation of altered states of consciousness: memories, visions, nightmares and dreams are a common feature of narrative films and usually inter- rupt a flow of events by inserting different temporalities in the present of the story. Following the arguments explored by Gilles Deleuze in his groundbreaking works on cinema, this essay will address the issue of how narrative cinema has represented altered states of consciousness. If in early cinema of attractions altered states were represented as physical realities intertwined with the world, classical Hol- lywood films progressively exorcised the disruptive poten- tial of such images by defining a visual grammar in order to normalize them within the narrative. It will be modern cinema which will focus on this issue in depth, given its new interest in the link between the moving image and the mechanisms of thought. In this regard, the essay will in conclusion address the hallucinations experienced by Isak Borg in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, a complex and highly illuminating case of various forms of altered mental states. Deleuze Cinema Temporality Hallucination Bergman To quote this essay: G. Previtali, “Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (II)”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 37-50 GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 37 AN-ICON  Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) begins with a shot of a young couple (Jonathan and Eve) in a car. We immediately understand that they are running from the police and they are heading towards a dock. The girl asks the man (who we will later recognize as her boyfriend) what happened and, when Jonathan starts to tell his story (“I was in my kitchen, it was about 5:00”) the close-up shot of the two begins to fade out. He explains that earlier in the morning he had received a visit from the singer and actress Charlotte Inwood, who showed up at his house with a dress covered in the blood of her husband. Jonathan managed to sneak into Charlotte’s house but was glimpsed by the housemaid and forced to run away. He later received a visit from two policemen, from whom he was able to escape only thanks to Eve. The description of this long sequence, which corresponds to the first fifteen minutes of the movie, would be incomplete without stressing the fact that Jona- than’s tale will prove to be a lie, despite the fact that visually it adopts those criteria of clarity, legibility and transparen- cy which were typical of classic Hollywood cinema and in which the spectator usually put his trust. The exceptionality of this sequence and its ex- emplarity in showing how the temporal dimension (the se- quence is a recollection of a supposed past) and the mental dimension (it is a false recollection of a certain character) are linked, is such that Deleuze identifies in it the first ap- pearance of the mental image in the history of cinema. This crucial analysis, programmatically located in the last pages of The Movement-Image, explicitly connects the distorted evocation of the past and an altered state of conscious- ness. It is precisely this relationship which, questioning the omniscience of the spectator, heralds the advent of a new kind of filmic image: GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 38 AN-ICON The mental image not only frames the others, but transforms them by penetrating them. For this reason, one might say that Hitchcock accomplishes and brings to completion the whole of the cinema by pursuing the movement-image to its limits.1 Altered states of consciousness in early and classical cinema Deleuze’s arguments, which will later be dis- cussed more extensively, attempt to address the excep- tionality of Hitchcock’s movies in the context of classical narrative cinema. However, it is important to recognize that from its origins, cinema has continuously sought to make visible altered states of consciousness. If film theory immediately stressed the role of visual media in preserv- ing the memory of what is absent (thus “presentifying” it),2 another of the great obsessions of cinema has to do with “the aspiration to visualize what dwells in the human mind, to represent thought, to exteriorize what is internal”.3 As Dagrada acutely pointed out, this urge was not limited to cinema itself, but was rather a common feature in the vi- sual culture of the 18th and 19th centuries. Theatre, magic lantern shows and optical toys were just some of the most common examples of this interest shown in the visual ex- ternalization of mental states. Cinema, nevertheless, played a crucial role in this sense, given its specific ability to visu- alize reality. Long before the institutionalization of classical filmic syntax, early cinema developed a specific way of visualizing mental states. What is peculiar to this historical 1 G. Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986): 204. The use of Deleuzean concepts in film studies is an established trend and this paper follows this tradition addressing a perhaps slightly different problem. For a general understanding of this theoretical link, see: P. Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture. Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); P. Maratti, Gilles Deleuze. Cinema and Philosophy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008); D. Angelucci, Deleuze e i concetti del cinema (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2012); D. Martin-Jones, W. Brown eds., Deleuze and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 2 I am referring to the fundamental remarks by theoreticians such as A. Bazin, “The ontology of photographic image”, in Id., What is Cinema? Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 204): 9-16 and R. Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981): 96. Moreover, see the relevant passages in A. Boschi, Teorie del cinema. Il periodo classico 1915-1945 (Rome: Carocci, 1998). 3 E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot (Brussels: Peter Lang,2014): 193. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 39 AN-ICON  period is that those states were not presented as individual and abstract perceptions, but rather as phantasmagorical apparitions, as forms of visual attraction.4 Hallucinations, forms of altered perceptions,5 apparitions of demons and other creatures were extremely common in early cinema, to such an extent that it is often difficult to differentiate clearly between these various types of altered conscious- ness. Besides the different ways in which these images are visually presented in early cinema,6 what needs to be stressed here is the fact that these forms of alteration pos- sessed a “physical nature”, a “potential interchangeability with the real”.7 Consider for instance the case of Histoire d’un crime (Ferdinand Zecca, 1901). The film begins with the killing of a bank employee by a burglar and is built on the juxtaposition of self-contained tableaux, in accordance with the stylistic conventions of the time. When the burglar is arrested and taken to prison, we see him sleep; here, thanks to an explicitly theatrical solution, Zecca is able to visualize what is at the same time both a dream and a rec- ollection of key events of the character’s life. This form of mise en abyme, which has more or less the same function as thought balloons in comics,8 is typical of the period. It confirms that, while the linguistic status of these “altered images” was still unclear, early cinema already stressed the problematic and still to be analyzed relationship between the mental and the temporal dimension. 4 I use the term in the sense outlined in the influential study by T. Gunning, “The cinema of attractions: early film, its spectator and the avant-garde”, in W. Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006): 381-388. 5 Consider for example the hallucinatory drunkenness represented in Rêve à la lune (1905) or the nightmarish consequences of the main character’s dinner in Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906). 6 For an inventory of these techniques, see E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot: 197-210. 7 E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot: 198. Later on, the concept is further emphasized as follows: “The objective physical quality forcefully inscribed into the continuity between subjective oneiric space and waking space characterizes all forms of representation of dreams developed by early cinema. It is not surprising, then, that in this context […] mixing the objective and the subjective, oneiric representation simultaneously assumes both the material characteristics of a physical apparition and the supernatural characteristics of a clairvoyance, as if it constituted a magical way of communicating with somewhere else, a place that is just as real, but also supernatural”, ibid.: 205. Even if here the author speaks explicitly of dreams, her argument seems to be applicable to all the types of altered consciousness explored by early cinema. 8 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema (Venice: Marsilio, 2004): 93. If not otherwise stated, the translations of Italian texts are always the author’s. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 40 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Ferdinand Zecca, Histoire d’un crime, 1901 With the institutionalization of the film industry and its language, the various manifestations of the mental in early cinema were progressively neutralized and reduced to figures of altered temporality.9 The variety of mental states encountered in the cinema of attractions, and the different stylistic devices used to present them, were replaced by recurrent and recognizable linguistic elements which neu- tralized the subversive potential of mental images in a con- text in which a clear and coherent narrative was required.10 The case of A Letter to Three Wives (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949) is emblematic in this sense. The protagonists of this sentimental drama are three women who receive, from a fourth woman, a letter stating that one of their husbands has run away with her. Haunted by doubt, each of the three gives rise to a flashback in which she remembers a specific episode of her life. The second flashback, which has as its protagonist Rita (a radio writer married to a mod- est but proudly intellectual teacher), is highly instructive 9 I am specifically referring to the flashback as a form of visualization of the past. On the various types of flashback, see at least: Y. Mouren, Le flash-back (Armand Colin: Paris, 2005); F. Centola, Il flashback nel cinema. Il tempo riavvolto nell’eterno presente cinematografico (Novara: UTET, 2019). For a theoretical and historical introduction to the topic, M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (London-New York: Routledge, 2013). On the role of flashback in literary theory see the quintessential study by G. Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972). 10 It should be noted that, according to many theoreticians such as Balázs and Bluestone, the only temporality of narrative cinema is the present. On this topic, S. Ghislotti, Film Time. Le dimensioni temporali della visione (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, 2012): 54-63. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 41 AN-ICON  of the way in which classical cinema connects the men- tal and the temporal dimensions. Rita is laid on the grass, and while the camera delicately zooms in on her face, we hear her thoughts in voiceover (she obsessively repeats a couple of troubling questions: “Why couldn’t George go fishing? Why the blue suit?”). Then, a crossfade marks the beginning of the flashback, a sequence that tells the story of a highly problematic and unhappy marriage. The long flashback will then be visually presented according to the conventions of classical narrative cinema: a set of objective shots connected through the use of linear and transparent montage. Beyond Classicism: from Hitchcock to Resnais When confronted with the ways in which clas- sical cinema elaborated the theme of mental images – re- ducing them to forms of altered temporality – Hitchcock’s exceptionality becomes even more apparent. As already mentioned, Deleuze identifies the false flashback of Stage Fright as a crucial moment for overcoming the move- ment-image. Indeed, the falseness of this sequence radi- cally challenges the idea that memories can be objective- ly visualized, without the deforming effect always implicit in subjectivity. Even more problematically, in the final se- quence of Marnie (1964), Hitchcock shows the emergence (or rather re-mergence) of a traumatic mental image of the protagonist, which she experiences not just optically but in a much more radically bodily sense. Influenced by the circumstances and as if hunted by a younger version of herself, Marnie actually re-experiences the dramatic events of her childhood. While being presented to the spectator through objective shots, these images – marked moreover by a chromatic alteration – have a material consistency for Marnie and she finds herself re-immersed in a past that she has already lived through. The discussion on the ways in which cinema reflected on the tension between the mental and the temporal dimension has shown that, while GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 42 AN-ICON  in early cinema a variety of altered states of consciousness was represented as hallucinatory but “physical” realities, classical narrative cinema progressively institutionalized figures of temporality11 within canonic filmic syntax.12 The link between mental and temporal will become crucial in the context of so-called modern cinema,13 specifically because – according to Deleuze – in this cultural context cinema will finally be able to assign a central place to thought and its mechanisms: “the essence of cinema […] has thought as its higher purpose, nothing but thought and its functioning”.14 This process will be made possible by the emergence of the category of mental image, which will on the one hand reassume and re-signify other kinds of images (such as the action-image) and on the other hand unleash the “modern- ist potential” inscribed in the flashback.15 The mental image is for Deleuze something profoundly related to the issue of time, but in an ex- tremely complex and problematizing way which implies 11 More specifically, classical narrative cinema tried to visualize almost exclusively the past and it is probably no coincidence that Hitchcock was one of the few directors who tried to imagine an image in the future. I am referring here to the sequence of Sabotage (1936) in which the protagonist sees the water of a fish tank in the city aquarium dissolving and acting as a sort of screen on which is prefigured the brutal outcome of a bombing. It is worth noticing that in this case the future is considered as a time of pure possibility, because the imagined event will take place in a completely different way. 12 Deleuze insists on the rhetorical function of the flashback in a poignant passage of The Time-Image: “We know very well that the flashback is a conventional, extrinsic device: it is generally indicated by a dissolve-link, and the images that it introduces are often superimposed or meshed. It is like a sign with the words: ‘watch out! recollection’. It can, therefore, indicate, by convention, a causality which is psychological, but still analogous to a sensory-motor determinism, and, despite its circuits, only confirms the progression of a linear narration”. G. Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989): 48. 13 For a critical definition of this concept, see the still relevant remarks by G. de Vincenti, Il concetto di modernità nel cinema (Parma: Pratiche, 2000): 11-24. 14 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 168. 15 M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History: 189. On the same issue, Ghislotti points out: “While in the classical flashback the scenes became part of the coherent narrative of the movie, that is of a set of knowledges that helped the public to have a trustworthy idea of the story, in the case of modernist flashback this aspect falls short: the flashback often becomes the subjective vision of a fact, and is consequently a possible version of the events, but not the definitive one […]. At the end of the film, the public is unable to have an idea of the story free of doubt and is forced to choose between this or that version of it”. S. Ghislotti, Film Time. Le dimensioni temporali della visione: 130-131. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 43 AN-ICON  the coexistence of different temporalities.16 In modern cin- ema, the visualization of mental states is made possible by the collision of /clash of /conflict of different temporal- ities that not only coexist, but can merge to the point of becoming indistinguishable: The images have to be present and past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time. [...] The past does not follow the present that it is no longer, it coexists with the present it was.17 Take for instance a movie such as Mirror (An- drei Tarkovsky, 1975), in which the continuous oscillation between various states of consciousness (from memory to dream and beyond) would be inconceivable in the context of classical narrative cinema, especially when we consider that in the movie “there is a constant retroactive reverber- ation of almost every scene”.18 The memorial act of the protagonist Aleksej generates a flux of memory and visions that will involve not just his own life but also the life of his son and even collective and historical memory (both in an allusive form and through the insertion of historical visual documents).19 In this sense, Mirror seems to fully resonate with the Deleuzian idea of time as a topological construct, a field composed of peaks and sheets which continuously involve each other and are freely explorable. This idea be- comes even more explicit when we consider the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which both the association between 16 “There is no present which is not haunted by a past and a future, by a past which is not reducible to a former present, by a future which does not consist of a present to come. Simple succession affects the present which passes, but each present coexists with a past and a future without which it would not itself pass on. It is characteristic of cinema to seize this past and this future that coexist with the present image”. G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 37 (emphasis added). The use of the term “haunted” is specifically interesting here and seems to foreshadow the arguments of J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London-New York: Routledge, 1994). 17 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 79 (emphasis added). Also, on this point: S. Shaw, Film Consciousness. From Phenomenology to Deleuze (Jefferson-London: McFarland&Company, 2008): 147. 18 S. Shaw, Film Consciousness. From Phenomenology to Deleuze : 94. 19 T. Masoni, P. Vecchi, Andrei Tarkovskij (Milan: Il Castoro, 1997): 72-74. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 44 AN-ICON  mental and temporal,20 and the conflict between various temporalities are quintessential. In his movies, the temporal oscillations do not involve issues of narrative clarity – as in classical cinema – but are rather used to visualize con- tradictory mental states that are always on the verge of undecidability. As pointed out by Deleuze, it is pointless to discuss Resnais’ cinema dissociating the issue of time from that of mental states: It is not difficult to show that dreams and nightmares, fantasies, hypotheses and anticipations, all forms of the imaginary, are more important than flashbacks.21 It is possible to identify a trend in Resnais’ cin- ema which, from Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) to Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968) through Last Year in Marienbad (1961) and Muriel (1963), questions and problematizes the mental dimensions of perception and their link with temporality. Consider for instance the emblematic case of Last Year in Marienbad: the claim of the man to have met a woman the year before could have easily offered the chance for a chain of illustrative flashbacks. On the contrary, the baroque setting of the hotel in which the two characters meet trig- gers a series of obsessive repetitions, uncertain memories (whose are these memories? Are these facts real or just imagined?), while the continuous and uncanny immobility of the bodies generates “a space-time in which there is no before or after, past or present, here and elsewhere, real and imaginary”.22 The film is structured by the connection between ambiguous and confusing mental states, altered forms of experience that continuously merge with halluci- nation. Deleuze sums up the issue as follows, underlining 20 According to Ishaghpour, the great issue of Resnais’ cinema is to understand “the way the mind functions”. Y. Ishaghpour, D’une image à l’autre (Paris: Gonthier, 1981): 182; quoted in G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 121. Shortly after, Deleuze comes back to this argument, stressing that “Resnais is always saying that he is interested only in what happens in the brain, in cerebral mechanisms – monstrous, chaotic or creative mechanisms”, Ibid.: 125. 21 Ibid.: 122. 22 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema: 113-114. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 45 AN-ICON  once again the inextricable interweaving of times and per- ceptions offered by the movie: In Last Year in Marienbad it is X who knew A (so A does not re- member or is lying), and it is A who does not know X (so X is mis- taken or playing a trick on her). Ultimately, all the three characters correspond to three different presents, but in such a way as to complicate the inexplicable instead of throwing light on it; in such a way as to bring about its existence instead of suppressing it: when X lives in a present of past, A lives in a present of future, so that the difference exudes or assumes a present of present (the third, the husband), all implicated in each other.23 The hallucination of Isak Borg Even if Deleuze never discussed Ingmar Berg- man directly in the pages of The Time-Image, his cinema seems to benefit from the aforementioned theorizations, especially if compared with the new possibilities provided by virtual reality in terms of immersivity. Indeed, the pres- ence of altered mental states is recurrent in his movies, which continuously address the link between temporality and perception. Consider for instance the hallucinatory visions of Persona (1966) or the nightmares that haunt the painter Johan in Hour of the Wolf (1968). The explicitly me- ta-filmic opening of this movie,24 as a matter of fact, seems to suggest that for Bergman cinema is defined precisely by its specific ability to visualize altered states of conscious- ness. This idea becomes even more explicit (especially in connection with time) in Wild Strawberries (1957), in which Bergman sets out what is probably his most acute reflec- tion on the topic. As is well-known, the protagonist is the elderly bacteriologist Isak Borg, who is about to receive his doctorate. The night before the celebration he has a terrible nightmare and decides to travel to the event by car, together with his daughter-in-law Marianne. During the trip, 23 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 101. 24 While the initial credits are running, we see voices that we can unmistakably associate to a film set: “Quiet all! Rolling! Take! Camera… and begin!”. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 46 AN-ICON  Isak will experience a whole set of daydreams, hallucina- tions and visions which will shed a new light on his former way of life. At the end of the day, after the celebration of his career, something will be changed in him, and he will start to approach life with more joy and respect for those around him. Wild Strawberries is a movie that reflects on memory and on the possible link between various tempo- ralities and forms of perception; thus, the fact that it has almost no flashbacks is even more striking.25 None of the sequences in which Isak experiences some altered form of consciousness can be considered flashbacks, since Isak physically takes part in them with his old man’s body “al- most as if he was observing the world to finally understand it”. 26 This is true for the oneiric scene that opens the film but also for the quintessential sequence in which Isak – taking a break from the trip near the house where he used to spend the summer during his youth – has a strange and highly interesting experience. We see him sitting under a tree, watching in close-up the old and now abandoned house, while we hear his thoughts in voiceover: Perhaps I got a little sentimental [...]. I don’t know how it happened, but the day’s clear reality dissolved into the even clearer images of memory, which appeared before my eyes with the strength of a true stream of events.27 Then we see him in counter-shot and, through a crossfade, we see the old house regaining its former ap- pearance. With a subsequent series of rapid crossfades we take part in what at first sight may be considered a flashback. Here, we see his beloved cousin Sara picking strawberries for her uncle. However, we immediately understand that what we are experiencing is not a flashback, for at least two different reasons. First of all, Isak takes part in this particular 25 The only real flashback in the film is in fact not experienced by Isak Borg but by his daughter-in-law, who confesses to the old professor an argument that she had with her husband about the child she is expecting. 26 P. Baldelli, Cinema dell’ambiguità. Bergman e Antonioni (Rome: Samonà e Savelli, 1969): 95. 27 Emphasis added. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 47 AN-ICON  “presentification” of the past with his elderly body and is able to move in this hallucinatory experience with a certain degree of freedom; secondly, the events that Isak is seeing are not his memories, because it is immediately clear that (as a young man) he never saw what he is experiencing now (Sara and Sigfrid flirting). Fig. 2. Ingmar Bergman, Wild Strawberries, 1957 Albano rightly argued that we cannot concep- tualize this important sequence in terms of a flashback: We may speak of rêverie éveillée, of daydream or — in German — of Tagtraum, of conscious fantasy. A reverie that shares with a dream [...] the sense of living [...] what is being dreamt.28 Isak knows very well that he is experiencing an impossible past, because he addresses his young and beautiful cousin in an unmistakable way: “Sara, it’s your cousin Isak. Well, I’ve become quite old, of course, so I don’t look the same. But you, you haven’t changed at all”. 28 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema: 76. On this point, see also: R. Campari, Film della memoria. Mondi perduti, ricordati e sognati (Venice: Marsilio, 2005):16, 22-28. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 48 AN-ICON  In this passage, we are confronted with a con- figuration of temporalities that is far more complex of those addressed above: it is a sort of double temporality because the present of the old Isak overlaps with a past that is – moreover – nonfactual, but rather seeped in the percep- tions, regrets and hopes of the young Isak. This conflictual combination of temporalities seems to resonate perfectly with a crucial passage by Metz: Memory is in effect the only vision [...] that posits its object as simultaneously real and imaginary, that is, real in the past and imaginary in the present.29 What Isak sees really happened, but the way in which he experiences it is hallucinatory and gives the spectator no reassurance about the fact that it happened in that way. It is worth noticing here that Deleuze actually theorized this kind of situation, even without referring to Bergman: “the present is the actual image and its contem- poraneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror”.30 Finally, it seems important to notice that, de- spite his being immersed in an altered perception in which he can more or less freely move, Isak has no possibility of interacting with it. He “stands before the theatre of his life as a spectator-voyeur, terribly attracted, morbidly intrigued, but never seen, in complete isolation”.31 Both the dialogue between Isak and Sara and the subsequent scene in which he hears her confessions after the family lunch are highly instructive in this regard. It is symptomatic, in this respect, that this long sequence ends precisely when Sara moves to the garden to meet with the Isak of the past. The percep- tion of the old Isak grants him the possibility to experience a time that he never lived and probably only imagined but 29 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016): 96 (emphasis added). 30 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 79 (emphasis added). It is worth noticing that the situation that Deleuze imagines (the simultaneous presence of past and present within a mirror image) is explicitly visualized in Wild Strawberries, during a subsequent passage in which the old Isak sees himself reflected in a mirror held by a young Sara. 31 L. Albano, “Il posto delle fragole”, in A. Costa ed., Ingmar Bergman (Venice: Marsilio, 2009): 77. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 49 AN-ICON  he is at the same time confronted with an insurmountable limit: he is precluded from every contact and any chance of interaction with this time that is not his own. Only in his present will he be given the chance to undo his mistakes, thanks to the apparition of a sort of double of the beloved Sara. The specific way in which Bergman approaches the representation of altered mental states, working on the dialectic between absence and presence, nostalgia and desire, seems to have more than one similarity with the contemporary form of immersivity promoted by various technological desire. In this sense, a wider archaeological account of the issue of virtuality should be developed, in order to establish a more complex theoretical framework to address this kind of images. GIUSEPPE PREVITALI 50 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/15442

The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered by Luca Acquarelli Still image vision strategy Photography Hallucination Antonioni Bergman Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered vision strategy by Luca Acquarelli Abstract The article intends to propose some analyses of a possible formal occurrence of “altered states” in cine- ma: the stopping of the flow of the cinematographic image in a still image. Through some theoretical references (Metz, Bazin, Lyotard, Deleuze, Bellour, Barthes, Montani) I will try to understand if this kind of formal occurrence can be constituted as a figure of the altered state. The relationship between cinema and photography will be particularly ex- plored, starting with films such as Antonioni’s Blow Up and Bergman’s Persona. The hallucinatory effect will thus be discovered not as opposed to that of reality, but a dialectic will be constructed between the two. Still image Photography Hallucination Antonioni Bergman To quote this essay: L. Acquarelli, “The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered vision strategy”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 51-68 LUCA ACQUARELLI 51 AN-ICON  Dream as “authentic” absurdity, photography as “true” hallucination Like hallucinations, dreams are not the far end of the reality scale but rather share some of its features. Metz has argued that dream sequences are always barely credible in narrative films precisely because films struggle to represent the “authentic absurdity” of dreams. Indeed, dreams seem to combine the reality effect with a halluci- natory patina that film dynamics find hard to hold togeth- er. The most traditional enunciative shifts introducing the passage between “reality”’s diegesis and that of dreams, such as unfocused borders or images in black and white as opposed to colour, are indeed ineffective expedients for the purposes of rendering this “authentic absurdity”, this double binary between the authenticating effect, like perhaps realist photography, and the game of the absurd, that injection of perceptual intensity that undermines the reality principle. Weaving a somewhat daring theoretical thread, this oxymoronic terminology does not seem to me to be very far removed from that used by one of realism’s most famous theorists – and therefore a very long way away from Metz – André Bazin who, speaking of the use of pho- tography as a privileged surrealist technique, conceives of photography’s potential for creating “a true hallucination”. While the realist photography ontology has been widely criticised, less space has been given to this hallucinatory residue of photography, which occurs even when it seems to adhere to a realist aesthetic. It should be stressed that the dream hypothe- sis introduced with Metz is at the heart of one of cinema’s theoretical paradigms. Without dwelling on all aspects of this dimension, it will be useful here to digress into the dream-cinema relationship before introducing certain anal- yses of this article’s central theme, namely the presence of the fixed, especially photographic, image within film, which immobilises its movement, as a possible instant of altered vi- sion. Metz has thoroughly enquired into the epistemological LUCA ACQUARELLI 52 AN-ICON  potential of the oneiric vision, through the Freudian prism. In Psychoanalysis and Cinema. The Imaginary Signifier,1 condensation, displacement and secondary elaboration are the main processes of the oneiric “signifier” explored by this French theorist as tools for the interpretation of cinematographic language. For Metz, the image’s “affinity” with the unconscious and its oneiric imagination increases its exposure to these processes as compared to language, without the latter being immune to them. Elements of film grammar such as superimposition and cross-fading – the former being closer to displacement, the latter to conden- sation – are key examples of this affinity. These elements testify to a survival of the primary process that, for instance, tends to abolish the discontinuity between objects. These are emergencies, aberrations within a product of secondary elaboration, such as the narrative development of a film or the attempt to narrate a dream upon awakening, the latter being forced, at least partially, to favour narrative logic at the expense of the ambiguous and nebulous dimension of the primary process. Entstellung, the oneiric deformation caused by the power of unconscious impulses, has thus also become a theoretical paradigm for thinking in images of a sort of energy that is not played out in forms and ac- cumulates in fragments and temporary disfiguration. Although Freud wrote that “dreams hallucinate”,2 the kinship between dreams and hallucinations is anything but close, starting from the fact that the former occurs in a sleeping state and the latter in waking state. Moments of transition between wakefulness and sleep are often the scene of phenomena testifying to the kinship between the form the two experiences take: so-called hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations. This is not the place to go into this matter in depth, but we might say that these two dimensions, dreams and hallucinations, may be the two areas where the fixed image in cinema, as viewed in this article, tends to position itself in dialectical movement. 1 C. Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema. The Imaginary Signifier (London: Palgrave, 1982). 2 S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010): 79. LUCA ACQUARELLI 53 AN-ICON  A few case studies will give us a clearer understanding of the type of visual alterations we are talking about. Stopping the cinematic flow: intermediality and a-cinema The hypothesis discussed in this article is de- signed to examine whether there are other cinematic strat- egies capable of expressing visual alterity as regards nar- rating the flow of cinematic images – an alterity whose intensity borders on the hallucinatory – and, in particular, the alterity that is generated by the use of photography in cinema as a standstill in movement. The film theorist Ray- mond Bellour has, on several occasions, taken an interest in the interruption of movement in cinema, when it is, in various ways, inhabited by the photography hantise. In one short essay, in particular, his aim is to promote an, as yet hypothetical, study, in Bellour’s own words, whose interest is the “traitement de l’immobile dans cet art du mouvement qu’est le cinema”.3 Here this film theorist analyses these moments of arrested movement as privileged instants of fragmented time within a cine- matic time conceived of as unitary: “des points de tran- scendance, avérés, reconduits à travers les ellipses, les décompositions, les immobilisations qui les traversent”.4 Bellour’s insistence on privileged movement is also a way of questioning the view that sees cinema as a system of reproduction of “whatever movement”, of the “equidistant instant” chosen to give the effect of continuity. In Bellour’s analysis, this change of rhythm is also linked to a change in film’s narrative dimension. Following and taking up his analysis, this article’s aim is to examine cases in which this immobility interrupting the flow of images is, in its various forms, bound up with a hallucinatory state, of a dreamlike or other nature. 3 R. Bellour, “L’interruption, l’instant”, in R. Bellour, L’Entre-Images: Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo (Paris: Mimésis, 2020): 131. 4 Ibid.: 133. LUCA ACQUARELLI 54 AN-ICON  A fixed camera on a long take where move- ment is reduced to a minimum can restore this effect of immobility rendered by the emergence of a virtually still image in a 24 frames-per-second flow. But in actual fact, as Deleuze explains so well with regard to Ozu’s still lifes, this is a completely different frame of mind: At the point where the cinematographic image most directly con- fronts the photo, it also becomes most radically distinct from it. Ozu’s still lifes endure, have a duration, over ten seconds of the vase: this duration of the vase is precisely the representation of that which endures, through the succession of changing states.5 However, when photography’s fixity interrupts the cinematic flow, what we are left with is an alternative configuration. As Roland Barthes pointed out in his famous Camera Lucida: The cinema participates in this domestication of photography — at least the fictional cinema, precisely the one said to be the seventh art; a film can be mad by artifice, can present the cultural signs of madness, it is never mad by nature (by iconic status); it is always the very opposite of an hallucination; it is simply an illusion; its vi- sion is oneiric, not ecmnesic.6 If this opposition between photography and cinema where hallucination is concerned may indeed seem too general, it seems to me that the French theorist sees a certain specificity in the still image in relation to the moving image. In fact, this thought seems to be echoed in Bar- thes’ article on obtuse meaning theorised from a few frames of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (I) (1944). Barthes realises that the starting point in his analysis is the frame which, although all film originates from it, cinema itself seems 5 G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson, R. Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1989): 17. 6 R. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. R. Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). LUCA ACQUARELLI 55 AN-ICON  to forget in the amnesia of its 24 images-per-second flow. Paradoxically, frames seem very different in nature from the film they are part of: the possibility to observe a film frame offers a totally different epistemology as compared to when it is lost in the flow of the movement of animation.7 In the 1970s, Jean-François Lyotard theorised “a-cinema”, namely a cinema which goes beyond the nar- rative discourse of diegesis and the normalised image that follows on from it. A-cinema is not intended to be a negation of cinema, but a dimension in which it is the power of the image which takes precedence over its form, giving rise to image “pyrotechnics”.8 This French philosopher refers to two ways of complying with the pyrotechnical require- ment: immobility and excess movement. He examines John Avildsen’s film Joe (1970), comparing the only two scenes featuring this arrhythmia and bound up with the film’s deep- er narrative, namely the impossibility of the father’s incest with his daughter: Ces deux effets, l’un d’immobilisation, l’autre d’excès de mobilité, sont donc obtenus en dérogation des règles de représentation, qui exigent que le mouvement réel, imprimé à 24 images/seconde sur la pellicule, soit restitué à la projection à la même vitesse.9 One of the examples of immobilisation described by Lyotard – this paralysis in the image that provokes the most intense agitation – is most effectively embodied by the tableau vivant, linking this dispositif to the libidinal energy dimension that lies at the heart of his broader theory of the 7 Barthes adds: “For a long time, I have been intrigued by the phenomenon of being interested and even fascinated by photos from a film (outside a cinema, in the pages of Cahiers du cinema) and of then losing everything of those photos (not just the captivation but the memory of the image) when once inside the viewing room – a change which can even result in a complete reversal of values”. R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana Press, 1997): 65-66. 8 Lyotard takes the idea from Adorno who claimed that the only great art is that of the artificers: “la pyrotechnie simulerait à la perfection la consomption stérile des énergies de la jouissance” and then talking about currents that could meet pyrotechnic needs: “Ces deux pôles sont l’immobilité et l’excès de mouvement. En se laissant attirer vers ces antipodes, le cinéma cesse insensiblement d’être une force de l’ordre ; il produit de vrais, c’est-à-dire vains, simulacres, des intensités jouissives, au lieu d’objets consommables-productifs”. J.-F. Lyotard, Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Galilée, 1994): 60. 9 Ibid.: 63. LUCA ACQUARELLI 56 AN-ICON  figural.10 Immobilisation, immobility, stopping on a fixed image within the movement of the film: these are all effects that come close to the study hypotheses discussed here. But another aspect can usefully be underlined. When cinema mediates another kind of image, re-mediation and intermediality is generally talked of. This theoretical dimension has been approached from various points of view: Montani’s book speaks of intermedial aesthetics as places of “authentication” process activation.11 The term “intermedial” is used here as a philosophical option sum- marised in the first pages of the book: it is only by starting from an active comparison between different tech- nical formats of the image (optical and digital, for example) and between its different discursive forms (fictional and documentary, for example), that one can do justice to the irreducible otherness of the real world and the testimony of facts, (media and non-media facts), happening in it.12 If doubt is clearly cast on the problem of inter- mediality by the hypothesis of this article, let us try to focus on the specific case of the still image alone, disregarding authentication but rather proposing it as a case of visual alteration. That is to say, authentication as the result of a montage between different media can – as we shall see in one of the cases of still image cinema shown below – be understood as visual alteration, in accordance with the topic dealt with in this journal issue. 10 For an interdisciplinary study of the figural dimension of image analysis, allow me a reference to the collective volume, L. Acquarelli, ed., Au prisme du figural: Le sens des images entre forme et force (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015). 11 The term “authentication” can be problematic because it resonates semantically with authenticity and, therefore, truth. Montani immediately disambiguated the term, distancing it from this risk of confusion: “Authenticating, from this point of view, is akin to ‘rerealizing’, rehabilitating the image to the relationship with its irreducible other, with its radical and elusive off-screen”. P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2010): 14. My translation. 12 Ibid.: 13. My translation. LUCA ACQUARELLI 57 AN-ICON  The shifting fixity of photography in cinema and its hallucinatory effect. From Blow Up to Persona In one of the films most frequently cited in text- books on the photography-cinema relationship, Michelan- gelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966), it is the dialectic between the photographic medium as authenticating evidence and hallucinatory instrument which plays centre stage. The use of photography as evidence is apparently the main theme, but it is precisely photographic enlargements aimed at visualis- ing the evidence that leads our vision towards hallucination rather than authentication. The first scene is set in an anonymous park in which the main character Thomas is taking photographs of what seems to be the prudishly amorous games of a couple in the middle of the lawn, with a paparazzo’s curiosity and almost for fun. The whole scene is played back to viewers in a sequence in which Thomas, now back in his flat, is hunting out detail in the prints from the negatives he has just devel- oped. The spectator plays the same investigative game as Thomas, scrutinising the black and white images of the scene seen shortly before in the diegetic reality of the film. At a certain point, Thomas ceases to act as the viewer’s delegate, and the frame is entirely taken up by the images (Fig. 1 and 2). Fig. 1. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 2. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. LUCA ACQUARELLI 58 AN-ICON  We leave behind the narrative time frame of the film and move into a space-time otherness in which sound reproduces the background noise of the leaves blowing in the wind. A memory? The authentication of a memory? Or rather a hallucination? This exiting from the film, a sequence made up of 15 shots, lasting just under a minute in total, establishes a further space-time dimension. The succes- sion of shots apparently follows a “detective” logic, but the leaving behind of diegetic time and the photographic tex- ture, in the sense of figurative density – profoundly different from the cinematographic texture preceding and following on from it – and the immobility of the figuration, confer a different iconic nature on this sequence. Not only does it shift viewers into a space and time otherness, but it also seems to position itself within the film as a sequence whose diverse legibility gradually contaminates the rest of the film’s shots, suspending its already weak narrative currents. The photo designed to “indicate” the corpse, in its exaggerated enlargement, resembles an abstract paint- ing (Fig. 3), showing nothing but its support and its texture and, moreover, the film urges us to compare it with the paintings of Thomas’s friend Bill, an abstract figurative painter (Fig. 4).13 Fig. 3. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 4. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. 13 In Fig. 4, the female character in a dialogue with Thomas explicitly says that the photograph looks to her like one of Bill’s paintings. LUCA ACQUARELLI 59 AN-ICON  In an earlier scene, Bill tries to describe his paintings as follows: They don’t mean anything when I do them. Just a mess. Afterwards I find something to hang on to. Like that...like that leg. Then it sorts itself out...and adds up. It’s like finding a clue in a detective story. The abstract picture prefigures the search for evidence in the photo. But what if the picture itself is ab- stract? Thomas looks for fresh evidence of the murder seen in the photographs, first returning alone to the site of the alleged crime and finding the body. When he tries to convince another friend of his to look for proof of the existence of the corpse, he is not believed. No one seems to care about the possible referent of the photograph, as if the photograph itself was pushing for a return to Lacanian reality within a society hypnotised by fashionable images which no one wants to face up to. When Thomas returns to the park for a second time to photograph the corpse up close, it has disappeared. Initially examined as reassuring ontological realism, the photograph is actually the place where memory and hallucination break through into the reality effect generated by cinematic movement. Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona (1966), which Bellour himself included in the above-mentioned article, is an interesting still image in cinema case study. It takes various forms, first occupying the whole screen, then as an image displayed as a photograph within a diegetic action, then as a photograph explored by the camera, and then as a still image juxtaposing close-ups of the two women. The film focuses virtually in its entirety on the re- lationship between a patient, Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann) suffering from voluntary aphasia, and a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson). This caring relationship becomes increasingly intimate once the two women go to the beachfront house the clinic’s therapist has advised Elisabeth to recuperate in. The central theme of the film becomes the double, in the Freudian sense, as the two women’s relationship gets gradually more psychologically complex. While on one LUCA ACQUARELLI 60 AN-ICON  hand Elisabeth’s silence forces Alma to confide the secrets of her life, Alma herself, after secretly reading a letter from Elisabeth to the therapist which she feels ridicules her, be- comes increasingly irritable and begins to despise Elisabeth for what she sees as her selfish and corrupt nature. At the same time Alma begins to feel guilty for having an abortion and to identify with Elisabeth who seems unable to love her child, having rejected it from birth. Ingmar Bergman builds the film on this progressive identification, in a crescendo that culminates in something close to a mirror image be- tween the two figures before they are juxtaposed into a sort of hybrid face. The dizzying nature of the double is triggered even before the two characters come on the scene when, in a prologue in a morgue, a child gets up and moves towards a close-up of a woman’s photograph to examine it with his hand. The facial features of the two women – who we later discover to be Elisabeth and Alma – in this seemingly fixed photographic close-up gradually become less sharp until a subtle transition occurs between them (Fig. 5 and 6). Fig. 5. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 6. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. LUCA ACQUARELLI 61 AN-ICON  Although it is the pre-prologue that “disrupts” the linear- ity of the whole film’s narrative (a tight montage of fig- ures juxtaposed in disparate ways, sometimes following a meta-cinematic theme), the changing portrait sequence is charged with such great power as to expand its reach into the rest of the narrative. The photograph of Elisabeth’s son (Fig. 7) is a further key element, a sort of narrative ac- celerator, snatched from Elisabeth herself and then kept by her to be reassembled in the scene where the logic of the double between the two women reaches its climax. Fig. 7. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. But it is a historical snapshot, an emblem of Nazi violence and its humiliation of its victims, the photo of the so-called “Warsaw child” representing the greatest perceptive cae- sura. In the year Persona was released, although knowl- edge of Nazi atrocities was still generally not widespread, the photo had already been used a decade earlier in Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard (1956) and was already em- blematic of the Holocaust, after it was used as a post- er for a first exhibition on Nazism’s calculated ferocity in Berlin Die Vergangenheit mahnt. The photo as a di- egetic object (Fig. 8) casually found by Elisabeth inside a book, and placed under a bedside lamp to make it easier to see, absorbs the entire frame accompanied by a stri- dent note in a crescendo of intensity lasting 30 seconds in which the different shots blot out the photo’s details (Fig. 9). LUCA ACQUARELLI 62 AN-ICON  Fig. 8. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 9. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. A historical document which was already a symbol of Nazi violence (but also its unrepresentability), then, breaks into the psychological story of Elisabeth and Alma, isolated from the world and the rest of humanity, with its docu- mentary but also anthropological load: the gestures and glances associated with humiliation, the executioners’ and victims’ faces and expressions standing out around the child’s frightened eyes and his condition as a totally de- fenceless victim. Whilst the rightness of this choice might be questioned, if this intermedial treatment of the archive can more or less “authenticate” the photo itself,14 there is no doubt whatsoever that this half-minute in which photo- graphic fixity takes over from cinematic movement triggers a perceptive reaction. Not only is the spectator suddenly projected into traumatic memory of Nazism, but the film’s photographic standstill triggers a sort of perceptive shock, a dissonance between the flow of diegetic reality and the condensation of the photographic gaze and its details. 14 See P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale. LUCA ACQUARELLI 63 AN-ICON  Another case of intermediality brings the historical docu- mentary archive into the two women’s seemingly discon- nected-from-the-world narrative: a televised news extract about the Buddhist monk who committed suicide by setting himself on fire during the Vietnamese dictatorship supported by the American government. In contrast to the photo, this TV montage showing the excruciating image of his self-im- molating body remains diegetic, in a first shot because it is framed by the television set and, in a second one, in which it takes up the whole frame, because the television commenta- tor’s voice-off preserves the continuity of the film’s temporal rhythm. The turmoil in this sequence, both Elisabeth’s who, in alternating montage, brings her hand to her mouth and cries out in fright, and the viewer’s, who may identify with her feelings, is part of the continuity of filmic perception. The arrest scene in the photo, on the other hand, seems to be charged with excessive otherness, challenging the film’s narrative and rhythmic structure. Moreover, the scene following the photograph of the Warsaw ghetto marks an acceleration in the ambi- guity between reality and hallucination in which Elisabeth’s husband visits and mistakes Alma for his wife. The film’s last prolonged fixedness (Fig. 10) does not take the form of a photographic support but retains the very nature of the film, suggesting a pho- tographic standstill, first prefigured by a juxtaposition of the two halves of the two women’s respective faces. The hallucinatory feel of the exchange of personalities is com- plete and could only take the form of a final and more exper- imental freeze-frame. Fig. 10. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. LUCA ACQUARELLI 64 AN-ICON  A cinema made of photographs, the cine-photo-romance La Jetée These two analyses would seem to support my hypothesis that the presence of a photograph in a film – especially when it extends to the entire frame, breaking the rhythm of the moving image – provokes a visual alterity that generates a reality-hallucination ambiguity. It is difficult to generalise this hypothesis because each film has its own complexity and internal structure but it may, in any case, be a valid element of comparison for future analyses. I will bring this article to a close with an analysis of a film that brings us back to the dream considerations I made at the beginning of the article. Although it resembles a film, La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962) is, as the director declares in the opening credits, a photo-novel.15 The film is, in fact, constructed around the montage of photographic images only, often juxtaposed by means of a cross-fade, creating overlaps. Dream and memory interpenetrate in reminiscence: a survivor of the Third World War is taken prisoner and subjected to exper- iments, using his vivid imagination, to open up time gaps with the past and then with the future, in order to obtain the technologies needed to reactivate an uninhabitable world replete with destruction and radioactivity. This apocalyp- tic environment is the background to a psychoanalytical dimension of traumatic time. The beginning of the film is clear in this sense; the voice over reads: “Ceci est l’histoire d’un homme marqué par une image d’enfance”; later it will be spoken of as a “scène qui le troubla par sa violence”. 15 It is curious that Barthes, who wrote his text on the photogram and obtuse sense in 1970 (already quoted extensively at the beginning of this article), does not mention this film, especially if we consider a note in his text referring directly to the photo-novel, on popular culture magazines: “Here are other ‘arts’ which combine still (or at least drawing) and story, diegesis – namely the photo-novel and the comic-strip. I am convinced that these ‘arts’, born in the lower depths of high culture, possess theoretical qualifications and present a new signifier (related to the obtuse meaning). This is acknowledged as regards the comic strip but I myself experience this slight trauma of signifiance faced with certain photo-novels: ‘their stupidity touches me’ (which could be a certain definition of obtuse meaning)”. R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text: 66. If we are dealing here with an entirely different kind of photo-novel (surely not touching for its stupidity!), it seems to me that Barthes’ reflections on obtuse sense could also apply to La Jétée. LUCA ACQUARELLI 65 AN-ICON  The gap between image and scene explains the problem of the difficult figuration of childhood memories. An image affecting a child, then probably forgotten and stored away in the unconscious then emerging once again in a dream, in the film’s narration, in a memory of the past heterodirected by the executioners’ experiments. The key to the heterogeneity of the traumatic time grafted onto the images is once again present in the words recited by the voice-off: Rien ne distinguent le souvenir des autres moments. Ce n’est que plus tard qui se font reconnaître, à leurs cicatrices. Ce visage [Fig. 11] qui devait être la seule image du temps de paix à traverser le temps de guerre. Il se demanda longtemps s’il l’avait vraiment vu ou s’il avait créé ce moment de douceur pour étayer le moment de folie qu’allait venir. Fig. 11. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film Memory becomes image only après-coup, re-signifying certain moments, reabsorbing them around images. The La Jétée images indeed seem to have this pa- tina of après-coup re-signification. The sharpness of their black and white with vivid contrasts is only opacified by cross-fade transitions. In any case, even in their transpar- ency, all the images seem to be inhabited by this traumat- ic time, somewhere between memory, dream and hallu- cination. A very brief moving sequence suddenly breaks LUCA ACQUARELLI 66 AN-ICON  into the montage of still images when, in the intimacy of her bed, the woman in the memory wakes up, opens her eyes and directs her gaze into the camera (Fig. 12). Fig. 12. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film It is a sudden enunciative change that seems designed to awaken us from the torpor induced by this story told through salient points, fixed images where the forces of the image in movement converge, as if absorbed, in an oneiric iconology that barely opens up a gap in traumatic time. This douceur scene, immersed in a distant child- hood memory in the context of the children taken onto the jetée at Orly airport to watch the planes take off, is none other than the image preceding the trauma: the child who, on the jetée, sees the murder of his adult self, having been followed through time by one of his executioners to kill him (Figg. 13 and 14). Fig. 13. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film Fig. 14. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film LUCA ACQUARELLI 67 AN-ICON  While it is clear that the La Jetée theme lends itself to a hallucination rhetoric, it seems to me that the decision to use still images may make this film an extreme case corroborating this article’s thesis. Conclusions This short paper suggests that the boundary be- tween the transparency of the reality effect and the opacity of hallucination is labile and porous. We have seen that cin- ema, which immobilises 24-frames-per-second movement in favour of the fixed image, is one of the artistic strategies that seem to bring in the complexity of this boundary and this dialectic. As we have seen, this hypothesis is difficult to generalise, but it seems to me that it deserves further study in the broader field of intermediality and its effects. The three case studies analysed here bring in some addi- tional elements, differentiating in particular cases in which photos are inserted into the film’s diegesis (in Blow Up in the various scenes in Thomas’s studio, in Persona with the photo of the child but also, in a certain way, with the large portraits of the two women) and when they replace the film’s diegesis itself. The latter seem to highlight the hallucinatory power of the still image in cinema with greater intensity. LUCA ACQUARELLI 68 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/15442

The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered by Luca Acquarelli Still image vision strategy Photography Hallucination Antonioni Bergman Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered vision strategy by Luca Acquarelli Abstract The article intends to propose some analyses of a possible formal occurrence of “altered states” in cine- ma: the stopping of the flow of the cinematographic image in a still image. Through some theoretical references (Metz, Bazin, Lyotard, Deleuze, Bellour, Barthes, Montani) I will try to understand if this kind of formal occurrence can be constituted as a figure of the altered state. The relationship between cinema and photography will be particularly ex- plored, starting with films such as Antonioni’s Blow Up and Bergman’s Persona. The hallucinatory effect will thus be discovered not as opposed to that of reality, but a dialectic will be constructed between the two. Still image Photography Hallucination Antonioni Bergman To quote this essay: L. Acquarelli, “The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered vision strategy”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 51-68 LUCA ACQUARELLI 51 AN-ICON  Dream as “authentic” absurdity, photography as “true” hallucination Like hallucinations, dreams are not the far end of the reality scale but rather share some of its features. Metz has argued that dream sequences are always barely credible in narrative films precisely because films struggle to represent the “authentic absurdity” of dreams. Indeed, dreams seem to combine the reality effect with a halluci- natory patina that film dynamics find hard to hold togeth- er. The most traditional enunciative shifts introducing the passage between “reality”’s diegesis and that of dreams, such as unfocused borders or images in black and white as opposed to colour, are indeed ineffective expedients for the purposes of rendering this “authentic absurdity”, this double binary between the authenticating effect, like perhaps realist photography, and the game of the absurd, that injection of perceptual intensity that undermines the reality principle. Weaving a somewhat daring theoretical thread, this oxymoronic terminology does not seem to me to be very far removed from that used by one of realism’s most famous theorists – and therefore a very long way away from Metz – André Bazin who, speaking of the use of pho- tography as a privileged surrealist technique, conceives of photography’s potential for creating “a true hallucination”. While the realist photography ontology has been widely criticised, less space has been given to this hallucinatory residue of photography, which occurs even when it seems to adhere to a realist aesthetic. It should be stressed that the dream hypothe- sis introduced with Metz is at the heart of one of cinema’s theoretical paradigms. Without dwelling on all aspects of this dimension, it will be useful here to digress into the dream-cinema relationship before introducing certain anal- yses of this article’s central theme, namely the presence of the fixed, especially photographic, image within film, which immobilises its movement, as a possible instant of altered vi- sion. Metz has thoroughly enquired into the epistemological LUCA ACQUARELLI 52 AN-ICON  potential of the oneiric vision, through the Freudian prism. In Psychoanalysis and Cinema. The Imaginary Signifier,1 condensation, displacement and secondary elaboration are the main processes of the oneiric “signifier” explored by this French theorist as tools for the interpretation of cinematographic language. For Metz, the image’s “affinity” with the unconscious and its oneiric imagination increases its exposure to these processes as compared to language, without the latter being immune to them. Elements of film grammar such as superimposition and cross-fading – the former being closer to displacement, the latter to conden- sation – are key examples of this affinity. These elements testify to a survival of the primary process that, for instance, tends to abolish the discontinuity between objects. These are emergencies, aberrations within a product of secondary elaboration, such as the narrative development of a film or the attempt to narrate a dream upon awakening, the latter being forced, at least partially, to favour narrative logic at the expense of the ambiguous and nebulous dimension of the primary process. Entstellung, the oneiric deformation caused by the power of unconscious impulses, has thus also become a theoretical paradigm for thinking in images of a sort of energy that is not played out in forms and ac- cumulates in fragments and temporary disfiguration. Although Freud wrote that “dreams hallucinate”,2 the kinship between dreams and hallucinations is anything but close, starting from the fact that the former occurs in a sleeping state and the latter in waking state. Moments of transition between wakefulness and sleep are often the scene of phenomena testifying to the kinship between the form the two experiences take: so-called hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations. This is not the place to go into this matter in depth, but we might say that these two dimensions, dreams and hallucinations, may be the two areas where the fixed image in cinema, as viewed in this article, tends to position itself in dialectical movement. 1 C. Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema. The Imaginary Signifier (London: Palgrave, 1982). 2 S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010): 79. LUCA ACQUARELLI 53 AN-ICON  A few case studies will give us a clearer understanding of the type of visual alterations we are talking about. Stopping the cinematic flow: intermediality and a-cinema The hypothesis discussed in this article is de- signed to examine whether there are other cinematic strat- egies capable of expressing visual alterity as regards nar- rating the flow of cinematic images – an alterity whose intensity borders on the hallucinatory – and, in particular, the alterity that is generated by the use of photography in cinema as a standstill in movement. The film theorist Ray- mond Bellour has, on several occasions, taken an interest in the interruption of movement in cinema, when it is, in various ways, inhabited by the photography hantise. In one short essay, in particular, his aim is to promote an, as yet hypothetical, study, in Bellour’s own words, whose interest is the “traitement de l’immobile dans cet art du mouvement qu’est le cinema”.3 Here this film theorist analyses these moments of arrested movement as privileged instants of fragmented time within a cine- matic time conceived of as unitary: “des points de tran- scendance, avérés, reconduits à travers les ellipses, les décompositions, les immobilisations qui les traversent”.4 Bellour’s insistence on privileged movement is also a way of questioning the view that sees cinema as a system of reproduction of “whatever movement”, of the “equidistant instant” chosen to give the effect of continuity. In Bellour’s analysis, this change of rhythm is also linked to a change in film’s narrative dimension. Following and taking up his analysis, this article’s aim is to examine cases in which this immobility interrupting the flow of images is, in its various forms, bound up with a hallucinatory state, of a dreamlike or other nature. 3 R. Bellour, “L’interruption, l’instant”, in R. Bellour, L’Entre-Images: Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo (Paris: Mimésis, 2020): 131. 4 Ibid.: 133. LUCA ACQUARELLI 54 AN-ICON  A fixed camera on a long take where move- ment is reduced to a minimum can restore this effect of immobility rendered by the emergence of a virtually still image in a 24 frames-per-second flow. But in actual fact, as Deleuze explains so well with regard to Ozu’s still lifes, this is a completely different frame of mind: At the point where the cinematographic image most directly con- fronts the photo, it also becomes most radically distinct from it. Ozu’s still lifes endure, have a duration, over ten seconds of the vase: this duration of the vase is precisely the representation of that which endures, through the succession of changing states.5 However, when photography’s fixity interrupts the cinematic flow, what we are left with is an alternative configuration. As Roland Barthes pointed out in his famous Camera Lucida: The cinema participates in this domestication of photography — at least the fictional cinema, precisely the one said to be the seventh art; a film can be mad by artifice, can present the cultural signs of madness, it is never mad by nature (by iconic status); it is always the very opposite of an hallucination; it is simply an illusion; its vi- sion is oneiric, not ecmnesic.6 If this opposition between photography and cinema where hallucination is concerned may indeed seem too general, it seems to me that the French theorist sees a certain specificity in the still image in relation to the moving image. In fact, this thought seems to be echoed in Bar- thes’ article on obtuse meaning theorised from a few frames of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (I) (1944). Barthes realises that the starting point in his analysis is the frame which, although all film originates from it, cinema itself seems 5 G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson, R. Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1989): 17. 6 R. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. R. Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). LUCA ACQUARELLI 55 AN-ICON  to forget in the amnesia of its 24 images-per-second flow. Paradoxically, frames seem very different in nature from the film they are part of: the possibility to observe a film frame offers a totally different epistemology as compared to when it is lost in the flow of the movement of animation.7 In the 1970s, Jean-François Lyotard theorised “a-cinema”, namely a cinema which goes beyond the nar- rative discourse of diegesis and the normalised image that follows on from it. A-cinema is not intended to be a negation of cinema, but a dimension in which it is the power of the image which takes precedence over its form, giving rise to image “pyrotechnics”.8 This French philosopher refers to two ways of complying with the pyrotechnical require- ment: immobility and excess movement. He examines John Avildsen’s film Joe (1970), comparing the only two scenes featuring this arrhythmia and bound up with the film’s deep- er narrative, namely the impossibility of the father’s incest with his daughter: Ces deux effets, l’un d’immobilisation, l’autre d’excès de mobilité, sont donc obtenus en dérogation des règles de représentation, qui exigent que le mouvement réel, imprimé à 24 images/seconde sur la pellicule, soit restitué à la projection à la même vitesse.9 One of the examples of immobilisation described by Lyotard – this paralysis in the image that provokes the most intense agitation – is most effectively embodied by the tableau vivant, linking this dispositif to the libidinal energy dimension that lies at the heart of his broader theory of the 7 Barthes adds: “For a long time, I have been intrigued by the phenomenon of being interested and even fascinated by photos from a film (outside a cinema, in the pages of Cahiers du cinema) and of then losing everything of those photos (not just the captivation but the memory of the image) when once inside the viewing room – a change which can even result in a complete reversal of values”. R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana Press, 1997): 65-66. 8 Lyotard takes the idea from Adorno who claimed that the only great art is that of the artificers: “la pyrotechnie simulerait à la perfection la consomption stérile des énergies de la jouissance” and then talking about currents that could meet pyrotechnic needs: “Ces deux pôles sont l’immobilité et l’excès de mouvement. En se laissant attirer vers ces antipodes, le cinéma cesse insensiblement d’être une force de l’ordre ; il produit de vrais, c’est-à-dire vains, simulacres, des intensités jouissives, au lieu d’objets consommables-productifs”. J.-F. Lyotard, Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Galilée, 1994): 60. 9 Ibid.: 63. LUCA ACQUARELLI 56 AN-ICON  figural.10 Immobilisation, immobility, stopping on a fixed image within the movement of the film: these are all effects that come close to the study hypotheses discussed here. But another aspect can usefully be underlined. When cinema mediates another kind of image, re-mediation and intermediality is generally talked of. This theoretical dimension has been approached from various points of view: Montani’s book speaks of intermedial aesthetics as places of “authentication” process activation.11 The term “intermedial” is used here as a philosophical option sum- marised in the first pages of the book: it is only by starting from an active comparison between different tech- nical formats of the image (optical and digital, for example) and between its different discursive forms (fictional and documentary, for example), that one can do justice to the irreducible otherness of the real world and the testimony of facts, (media and non-media facts), happening in it.12 If doubt is clearly cast on the problem of inter- mediality by the hypothesis of this article, let us try to focus on the specific case of the still image alone, disregarding authentication but rather proposing it as a case of visual alteration. That is to say, authentication as the result of a montage between different media can – as we shall see in one of the cases of still image cinema shown below – be understood as visual alteration, in accordance with the topic dealt with in this journal issue. 10 For an interdisciplinary study of the figural dimension of image analysis, allow me a reference to the collective volume, L. Acquarelli, ed., Au prisme du figural: Le sens des images entre forme et force (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015). 11 The term “authentication” can be problematic because it resonates semantically with authenticity and, therefore, truth. Montani immediately disambiguated the term, distancing it from this risk of confusion: “Authenticating, from this point of view, is akin to ‘rerealizing’, rehabilitating the image to the relationship with its irreducible other, with its radical and elusive off-screen”. P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2010): 14. My translation. 12 Ibid.: 13. My translation. LUCA ACQUARELLI 57 AN-ICON  The shifting fixity of photography in cinema and its hallucinatory effect. From Blow Up to Persona In one of the films most frequently cited in text- books on the photography-cinema relationship, Michelan- gelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966), it is the dialectic between the photographic medium as authenticating evidence and hallucinatory instrument which plays centre stage. The use of photography as evidence is apparently the main theme, but it is precisely photographic enlargements aimed at visualis- ing the evidence that leads our vision towards hallucination rather than authentication. The first scene is set in an anonymous park in which the main character Thomas is taking photographs of what seems to be the prudishly amorous games of a couple in the middle of the lawn, with a paparazzo’s curiosity and almost for fun. The whole scene is played back to viewers in a sequence in which Thomas, now back in his flat, is hunting out detail in the prints from the negatives he has just devel- oped. The spectator plays the same investigative game as Thomas, scrutinising the black and white images of the scene seen shortly before in the diegetic reality of the film. At a certain point, Thomas ceases to act as the viewer’s delegate, and the frame is entirely taken up by the images (Fig. 1 and 2). Fig. 1. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 2. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. LUCA ACQUARELLI 58 AN-ICON  We leave behind the narrative time frame of the film and move into a space-time otherness in which sound reproduces the background noise of the leaves blowing in the wind. A memory? The authentication of a memory? Or rather a hallucination? This exiting from the film, a sequence made up of 15 shots, lasting just under a minute in total, establishes a further space-time dimension. The succes- sion of shots apparently follows a “detective” logic, but the leaving behind of diegetic time and the photographic tex- ture, in the sense of figurative density – profoundly different from the cinematographic texture preceding and following on from it – and the immobility of the figuration, confer a different iconic nature on this sequence. Not only does it shift viewers into a space and time otherness, but it also seems to position itself within the film as a sequence whose diverse legibility gradually contaminates the rest of the film’s shots, suspending its already weak narrative currents. The photo designed to “indicate” the corpse, in its exaggerated enlargement, resembles an abstract paint- ing (Fig. 3), showing nothing but its support and its texture and, moreover, the film urges us to compare it with the paintings of Thomas’s friend Bill, an abstract figurative painter (Fig. 4).13 Fig. 3. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 4. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, 1966. Still from film. 13 In Fig. 4, the female character in a dialogue with Thomas explicitly says that the photograph looks to her like one of Bill’s paintings. LUCA ACQUARELLI 59 AN-ICON  In an earlier scene, Bill tries to describe his paintings as follows: They don’t mean anything when I do them. Just a mess. Afterwards I find something to hang on to. Like that...like that leg. Then it sorts itself out...and adds up. It’s like finding a clue in a detective story. The abstract picture prefigures the search for evidence in the photo. But what if the picture itself is ab- stract? Thomas looks for fresh evidence of the murder seen in the photographs, first returning alone to the site of the alleged crime and finding the body. When he tries to convince another friend of his to look for proof of the existence of the corpse, he is not believed. No one seems to care about the possible referent of the photograph, as if the photograph itself was pushing for a return to Lacanian reality within a society hypnotised by fashionable images which no one wants to face up to. When Thomas returns to the park for a second time to photograph the corpse up close, it has disappeared. Initially examined as reassuring ontological realism, the photograph is actually the place where memory and hallucination break through into the reality effect generated by cinematic movement. Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona (1966), which Bellour himself included in the above-mentioned article, is an interesting still image in cinema case study. It takes various forms, first occupying the whole screen, then as an image displayed as a photograph within a diegetic action, then as a photograph explored by the camera, and then as a still image juxtaposing close-ups of the two women. The film focuses virtually in its entirety on the re- lationship between a patient, Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann) suffering from voluntary aphasia, and a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson). This caring relationship becomes increasingly intimate once the two women go to the beachfront house the clinic’s therapist has advised Elisabeth to recuperate in. The central theme of the film becomes the double, in the Freudian sense, as the two women’s relationship gets gradually more psychologically complex. While on one LUCA ACQUARELLI 60 AN-ICON  hand Elisabeth’s silence forces Alma to confide the secrets of her life, Alma herself, after secretly reading a letter from Elisabeth to the therapist which she feels ridicules her, be- comes increasingly irritable and begins to despise Elisabeth for what she sees as her selfish and corrupt nature. At the same time Alma begins to feel guilty for having an abortion and to identify with Elisabeth who seems unable to love her child, having rejected it from birth. Ingmar Bergman builds the film on this progressive identification, in a crescendo that culminates in something close to a mirror image be- tween the two figures before they are juxtaposed into a sort of hybrid face. The dizzying nature of the double is triggered even before the two characters come on the scene when, in a prologue in a morgue, a child gets up and moves towards a close-up of a woman’s photograph to examine it with his hand. The facial features of the two women – who we later discover to be Elisabeth and Alma – in this seemingly fixed photographic close-up gradually become less sharp until a subtle transition occurs between them (Fig. 5 and 6). Fig. 5. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 6. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. LUCA ACQUARELLI 61 AN-ICON  Although it is the pre-prologue that “disrupts” the linear- ity of the whole film’s narrative (a tight montage of fig- ures juxtaposed in disparate ways, sometimes following a meta-cinematic theme), the changing portrait sequence is charged with such great power as to expand its reach into the rest of the narrative. The photograph of Elisabeth’s son (Fig. 7) is a further key element, a sort of narrative ac- celerator, snatched from Elisabeth herself and then kept by her to be reassembled in the scene where the logic of the double between the two women reaches its climax. Fig. 7. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. But it is a historical snapshot, an emblem of Nazi violence and its humiliation of its victims, the photo of the so-called “Warsaw child” representing the greatest perceptive cae- sura. In the year Persona was released, although knowl- edge of Nazi atrocities was still generally not widespread, the photo had already been used a decade earlier in Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard (1956) and was already em- blematic of the Holocaust, after it was used as a post- er for a first exhibition on Nazism’s calculated ferocity in Berlin Die Vergangenheit mahnt. The photo as a di- egetic object (Fig. 8) casually found by Elisabeth inside a book, and placed under a bedside lamp to make it easier to see, absorbs the entire frame accompanied by a stri- dent note in a crescendo of intensity lasting 30 seconds in which the different shots blot out the photo’s details (Fig. 9). LUCA ACQUARELLI 62 AN-ICON  Fig. 8. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. Fig. 9. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. A historical document which was already a symbol of Nazi violence (but also its unrepresentability), then, breaks into the psychological story of Elisabeth and Alma, isolated from the world and the rest of humanity, with its docu- mentary but also anthropological load: the gestures and glances associated with humiliation, the executioners’ and victims’ faces and expressions standing out around the child’s frightened eyes and his condition as a totally de- fenceless victim. Whilst the rightness of this choice might be questioned, if this intermedial treatment of the archive can more or less “authenticate” the photo itself,14 there is no doubt whatsoever that this half-minute in which photo- graphic fixity takes over from cinematic movement triggers a perceptive reaction. Not only is the spectator suddenly projected into traumatic memory of Nazism, but the film’s photographic standstill triggers a sort of perceptive shock, a dissonance between the flow of diegetic reality and the condensation of the photographic gaze and its details. 14 See P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale. LUCA ACQUARELLI 63 AN-ICON  Another case of intermediality brings the historical docu- mentary archive into the two women’s seemingly discon- nected-from-the-world narrative: a televised news extract about the Buddhist monk who committed suicide by setting himself on fire during the Vietnamese dictatorship supported by the American government. In contrast to the photo, this TV montage showing the excruciating image of his self-im- molating body remains diegetic, in a first shot because it is framed by the television set and, in a second one, in which it takes up the whole frame, because the television commenta- tor’s voice-off preserves the continuity of the film’s temporal rhythm. The turmoil in this sequence, both Elisabeth’s who, in alternating montage, brings her hand to her mouth and cries out in fright, and the viewer’s, who may identify with her feelings, is part of the continuity of filmic perception. The arrest scene in the photo, on the other hand, seems to be charged with excessive otherness, challenging the film’s narrative and rhythmic structure. Moreover, the scene following the photograph of the Warsaw ghetto marks an acceleration in the ambi- guity between reality and hallucination in which Elisabeth’s husband visits and mistakes Alma for his wife. The film’s last prolonged fixedness (Fig. 10) does not take the form of a photographic support but retains the very nature of the film, suggesting a pho- tographic standstill, first prefigured by a juxtaposition of the two halves of the two women’s respective faces. The hallucinatory feel of the exchange of personalities is com- plete and could only take the form of a final and more exper- imental freeze-frame. Fig. 10. Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. Still from film. LUCA ACQUARELLI 64 AN-ICON  A cinema made of photographs, the cine-photo-romance La Jetée These two analyses would seem to support my hypothesis that the presence of a photograph in a film – especially when it extends to the entire frame, breaking the rhythm of the moving image – provokes a visual alterity that generates a reality-hallucination ambiguity. It is difficult to generalise this hypothesis because each film has its own complexity and internal structure but it may, in any case, be a valid element of comparison for future analyses. I will bring this article to a close with an analysis of a film that brings us back to the dream considerations I made at the beginning of the article. Although it resembles a film, La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962) is, as the director declares in the opening credits, a photo-novel.15 The film is, in fact, constructed around the montage of photographic images only, often juxtaposed by means of a cross-fade, creating overlaps. Dream and memory interpenetrate in reminiscence: a survivor of the Third World War is taken prisoner and subjected to exper- iments, using his vivid imagination, to open up time gaps with the past and then with the future, in order to obtain the technologies needed to reactivate an uninhabitable world replete with destruction and radioactivity. This apocalyp- tic environment is the background to a psychoanalytical dimension of traumatic time. The beginning of the film is clear in this sense; the voice over reads: “Ceci est l’histoire d’un homme marqué par une image d’enfance”; later it will be spoken of as a “scène qui le troubla par sa violence”. 15 It is curious that Barthes, who wrote his text on the photogram and obtuse sense in 1970 (already quoted extensively at the beginning of this article), does not mention this film, especially if we consider a note in his text referring directly to the photo-novel, on popular culture magazines: “Here are other ‘arts’ which combine still (or at least drawing) and story, diegesis – namely the photo-novel and the comic-strip. I am convinced that these ‘arts’, born in the lower depths of high culture, possess theoretical qualifications and present a new signifier (related to the obtuse meaning). This is acknowledged as regards the comic strip but I myself experience this slight trauma of signifiance faced with certain photo-novels: ‘their stupidity touches me’ (which could be a certain definition of obtuse meaning)”. R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text: 66. If we are dealing here with an entirely different kind of photo-novel (surely not touching for its stupidity!), it seems to me that Barthes’ reflections on obtuse sense could also apply to La Jétée. LUCA ACQUARELLI 65 AN-ICON  The gap between image and scene explains the problem of the difficult figuration of childhood memories. An image affecting a child, then probably forgotten and stored away in the unconscious then emerging once again in a dream, in the film’s narration, in a memory of the past heterodirected by the executioners’ experiments. The key to the heterogeneity of the traumatic time grafted onto the images is once again present in the words recited by the voice-off: Rien ne distinguent le souvenir des autres moments. Ce n’est que plus tard qui se font reconnaître, à leurs cicatrices. Ce visage [Fig. 11] qui devait être la seule image du temps de paix à traverser le temps de guerre. Il se demanda longtemps s’il l’avait vraiment vu ou s’il avait créé ce moment de douceur pour étayer le moment de folie qu’allait venir. Fig. 11. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film Memory becomes image only après-coup, re-signifying certain moments, reabsorbing them around images. The La Jétée images indeed seem to have this pa- tina of après-coup re-signification. The sharpness of their black and white with vivid contrasts is only opacified by cross-fade transitions. In any case, even in their transpar- ency, all the images seem to be inhabited by this traumat- ic time, somewhere between memory, dream and hallu- cination. A very brief moving sequence suddenly breaks LUCA ACQUARELLI 66 AN-ICON  into the montage of still images when, in the intimacy of her bed, the woman in the memory wakes up, opens her eyes and directs her gaze into the camera (Fig. 12). Fig. 12. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film It is a sudden enunciative change that seems designed to awaken us from the torpor induced by this story told through salient points, fixed images where the forces of the image in movement converge, as if absorbed, in an oneiric iconology that barely opens up a gap in traumatic time. This douceur scene, immersed in a distant child- hood memory in the context of the children taken onto the jetée at Orly airport to watch the planes take off, is none other than the image preceding the trauma: the child who, on the jetée, sees the murder of his adult self, having been followed through time by one of his executioners to kill him (Figg. 13 and 14). Fig. 13. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film Fig. 14. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film LUCA ACQUARELLI 67 AN-ICON  While it is clear that the La Jetée theme lends itself to a hallucination rhetoric, it seems to me that the decision to use still images may make this film an extreme case corroborating this article’s thesis. Conclusions This short paper suggests that the boundary be- tween the transparency of the reality effect and the opacity of hallucination is labile and porous. We have seen that cin- ema, which immobilises 24-frames-per-second movement in favour of the fixed image, is one of the artistic strategies that seem to bring in the complexity of this boundary and this dialectic. As we have seen, this hypothesis is difficult to generalise, but it seems to me that it deserves further study in the broader field of intermediality and its effects. The three case studies analysed here bring in some addi- tional elements, differentiating in particular cases in which photos are inserted into the film’s diegesis (in Blow Up in the various scenes in Thomas’s studio, in Persona with the photo of the child but also, in a certain way, with the large portraits of the two women) and when they replace the film’s diegesis itself. The latter seem to highlight the hallucinatory power of the still image in cinema with greater intensity. LUCA ACQUARELLI 68 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/15158

Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual Filmreality by Enrico Terrone Virtual Reality Perception Memory Imagination Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual reality by Enrico Terrone Abstract This paper casts film experience as a sort of disembodied perception. I will show how this experience can be manipulated and altered in order to approximate to mental states of fictional characters, in particular embodied perception, memory and imagination. I will acknowledge that film experience can approximate to non-perceptual at- titudes such as memory and imagination much better than the experience elicited by theater. Yet, I will contend, film experience cannot emulate the phenomenology of non-per- ceptual attitudes since it remains a sort of disembodied perception even when it is manipulated by filmmakers in order to approximate memory states or imaginative states of fictional characters. Finally, I will argue that virtual real- ity, in virtue of both its proximity to embodied perception and its potential for manipulation, is, in principle, in a bet- ter position than film when it comes to trying to emulate non-perceptual attitudes such as memory and imagination. Film Virtual Reality Perception Memory Imagination To quote this essay: E. Terrone, “Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual reality”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 69-90 ENRICO TERRONE 69 AN-ICON  Cloe sees a black cat, Jack remembers a black cat, Lisa imagines a black cat. According to representa- tionalist conceptions of the mind,1 Cloe’s, Jack’s and Li- sa’s mental states have the same representational content, namely a black cat, and yet they differ as regards their attitude, that is, the way that content is represented. Per- ceiving a black cat, remembering a black cat and imagin- ing a black cat are three different experiences in virtue of three different attitudes. Specifically, according to Uriah Kriegel’s “Sartrean account”,2 the perceptual attitude rep- resents-as-present its content, the memory attitude rep- resents-as-past its content, and the imaginative attitude represents-as-possible its content. All this raises an interesting issue about film experience. On the one hand, according to experiential theories of depiction,3 films provide us with experiences whose “pictorial attitude” somehow emulates the perceptual attitude. On the other hand, scholars such as Hugo Mün- sterberg or Erwin Panofsky have stated that films allow us to share not only the perceptual point of view of fictional characters but also their inner life, which involves states such as memory or imagination.4 These two statements are in tension: if the pictorial attitude which characterizes film experience is a sort of perceptual attitude, how can film spectators enjoy experiences based on memory attitudes or imaginative attitudes? I will argue that the spectator cannot enjoy the latter experiences. The spectator can only ascribe such experiences to characters by relying on the perceptual experience she is enjoying. Finally, I will argue that, quite 1 T. Crane, “The intentional structure of consciousness”, in A. Jokic, Q. Smith, eds., Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 33- 56; D. Chalmers. “The representational character of experience”, in B. Leiter, ed., The Future for Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 153-180. 2 U. Kriegel, “Perception and imagination. A Sartrean account”, in S. Miguens, G. Preyer, C. Bravo Morando, eds., Prereflective Consciousness: Early Sartre in the Context of Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (London: Routledge, 2015): 257-288. 3 R. Hopkins, “Depiction”, in P. Livingston, C. Plantinga, eds., The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (London: Routledge, 2009): 64-74. 4 H. Münsterberg, The Photoplay: a Psychological Study (New York: Appleton, 1916); E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures” (1934), in D. Talbot, ed., Film: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959): 15-32. ENRICO TERRONE 70 AN-ICON  surprisingly, virtual reality is in a better position than film as regards the emulation of non-perceptual attitudes. Film experience as disembodied perception Film experience is a perceptual experience. The audience perceives objects and events taking place in the world that the film portrays. The Lumière Brothers Sortie des Usines Lumière (1895) is paradigmatic in this respect: the audience sees workers leaving the factory in a way that is analogous to the way one would see those workers if one were in front the factory. Analogous, however, does not mean identical. While in ordinary perception we experience things as organized in an “egocentric space”, that is, a space that has our body as its own center,5 in cinematic perception we experience things as organized in a space that has only our sight, not our body, as its own center. The space depicted is experienced as “detached” from our body.6 The spectator of Sortie des Usines Lumière sees workers exiting the factory from a standpoint in front of the factory, but she does not occupy that standpoint and she does not have the impression of occupying it. Even spectators of the Lumière Brothers L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) normally do not have the impres- sion of occupying the standpoint in front of the train, in spite of the popular fable that suggests otherwise.7 Film experience, so understood, is a disembod- ied perception. We can perceive things from a viewpoint that our body is not forced to occupy. It is worth noting that by “disembodied perception” here is just meant the percep- tion of a space in which our body does not have any place. Hence, film experience is disembodied only with respect to the experienced relationship between the spectator and 5 G. Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 6 N. Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 7 M. Loiperdinger, “Lumière’s arrival of the train. Cinema’s founding myth”, The Moving Image 4, no. 1 (2004): 89-118. ENRICO TERRONE 71 AN-ICON  the space portrayed. The spectator’s body, however, keeps playing a crucial role in the whole film experience which, as a twofold experience, also includes the spectator’s re- lationship to the space in which the film is screened.8 Even a paradigmatic essay on the embodied character of film experience, namely Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992), acknowledges that the perspective of the spectator as an embodied subject is different from the perspective on the world depicted that the film provides us with. Yet, Sob- chack states that film experience is embodied all the way through because there is a further body at work, namely, the film’s body: We recognize the moving picture as the work of an anonymous and sign-producing body subject intentionally marking visible choices with the very behavior of its bodily being. However, these choices are not initiated by the movement of our bodies or our intending consciousness. They are seen and visible as the visual and phys- ical choices of some body other than ourselves [...]. That some body is the film’s body.9 What does it exactly mean that the film has a body? This seems to be a suggestive metaphor that should be unpacked for rigorous theorizing. Sobchack offers the following characterization of the film’s body: “The cam- era its perceptive organ, the projector its expressive organ, the screen its discrete and material occupation of worldly space”.10 If the film’s body is just that, it comes down to a suggestive characterization of the film’s screening. Still Sobchack also insists on the “choices” that the alleged film’s body makes thereby determining our point of view on the space portrayed. Precisely because that point of view does not depend on the position and the movement of our 8 R. Hopkins, “Depiction”. See also E. Terrone, “Imagination and perception in film experience”, Ergo, no. 5 (2020): 161-190. 9 V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 278. Thanks to a referee for pushing me to discuss Sobchack’s view. 10 Ibid.: 299. ENRICO TERRONE 72 AN-ICON  body, I find it worthwhile to cast the experience it provides as disembodied. While ordinary perception, as an embodied experience, depends on the position and movement of our body, film experience is disembodied since it depends on choices that are not up to us. Whom are those choices up to? To the filmmaker for sure, and yet scholars like George Wilson argue that, in our engagement with fiction films, we rather experience those choices as the outcome of the “min- imal narrating agency” of a fictional narrator.11 Perhaps what Sobchack calls the film’s body may be an interesting char- acterization of how we experience the actual agency of the filmmaker or, if Wilson is right, the fictional agency of the narrator. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the film’s body is not the spectator’s body and I reckon that this is enough to warrant the characterization of film experience as disem- bodied perception. Such a disembodied nature of film experience has an interesting consequence. Since film experience, as disembodied perception, involves a point of view that does not depend on our body, that point of view can change without the need of moving our body. Neither Sortie des Usines Lumière nor L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ci- otat exploit this option, but later films do so by means of camera movements and editing. The specificity of film experience In ordinary perception we experience things as taking place in a determinate place and time, namely, here, the place where our body is, and now, the time when our experience occurs. In cinematic perception, on the other hand, place and time remain indeterminate. Our perception, as such, does not tell us where and when the things per- ceived take place. Cinematic perception needs a cognitive supplementation in order to fix the spatial and temporal coordinates of what one is perceiving. Films can provide 11 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 129. ENRICO TERRONE 73 AN-ICON  such supplementation either explicitly, by means of devices such as voice over and inscriptions, or implicitly, by relying on clues embedded in the scenes portrayed. Furthermore, film perception is not up to us in the way ordinary perception is. In the latter, I can decide, at least to a certain extent, what I am going to perceive. In film experience, instead, I am completely deprived of au- tonomy. In other words, film experience is predetermined in a way ordinary experience is not. One might say that ordinary perception is a natural experience whereas cine- matic perception is rather an artificial experience whereby we perceive what filmmakers (or narrators) have established for us. In the specific case of fiction films, filmmakers (or narrators) guide us in the perceptual exploration of fictional worlds. That is arguably the most insightful way of unpack- ing Sobchack’s metaphor of the film’s body. Let me consider, as an example, David W. Grif- fith’s An Unseen Enemy (1912), which tells the story of two orphan sisters whose heritage is threatened by a treach- erous housekeeper and her accomplice. We discover this story through a series of disembodied perceptual expe- riences of the same kind as those elicited by Sortie des Usines Lumière and L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat. We see the two orphans, then the housekeeper, then the elder brother of the two girls who places the heritage in the safe, then the housekeeper who spies him, and so on and so forth. The filmmaker has designed this series of percep- tions in a way that provides us with a sort of “unrestricted epistemic access” to the relevant facts of the story.12 Unlike the two orphans, we are aware from the beginning of the threat coming from the housekeeper. Moreover, unlike the housekeeper, we are aware of the brother’s attempt to help his sisters and prevent theft. In sum, the spectator of An Unseen Enemy perceives more, and therefore knows more, than the characters in the story; the “enemy” is “unseen” only for the characters, not for the audience. 12 G.M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). ENRICO TERRONE 74 AN-ICON  This is the basic functioning of fiction films, which corresponds to the omniscient narrator in literature. However, other configurations are possible in which the audience’s knowledge of relevant facts is “restricted” to that available to characters or is even narrower than the latter.13 For example, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1948) the audience’s knowledge is as restricted as that of the character L.B. Jef- feries (with one important exception, however: we see the murderer leaving his apartment with his lover while Jefferies is sleeping). In Pablo Larrain’s Ema (2019), the audience’s knowledge is even narrower than that of the eponymous heroine; the latter has access from the beginning to the truth about the new adoptive parents of her son whereas the audience will discover this truth only at the end of the film. A further restriction that affects film experience concerns the mode of this experience, which is just dis- embodied perception. In ordinary experience, on the other hand, one can enjoy a variety of experiential attitudes: em- bodied perception, first of all, but also memory and imag- ination, and possibly perceptual illusion, hallucination and dream. Here is another sense in which the audience can find it hard to know what characters know. What is at stake here is phenomenal knowledge, that is, knowing what it is like for a subject to undergo a certain experience. For sure, empathy may enable the audience to acquire phenomenal knowledge concerning the affective and emotional dimension of a fictional character’s expe- rience.14 For instance, the audience can share the char- acter’s fear or the character’s surprise. Yet, affects and emotions are evaluative mental states that are grafted onto more basic cognitive states such as perceptions, memo- ries, and imaginings,15 whose distinctive attitude is sure- ly harder to access through empathy. The audience may deploy empathy to know what it is like to for a character to feel fear or joy but something more is required to grasp 13 Ibid. 14 J. Stadler, “Empathy and film”, in H.L. Maibom, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (London: Routledge, 2016): 317-326. Thanks to a referee for leading me to consider the role of empathy. 15 K. Mulligan, “From appropriate emotions to values”, The Monist 81, no. 1 (1998): 161-188. ENRICO TERRONE 75 AN-ICON  the phenomenal difference between an embodied percep- tual experience and a memory episode or an imagining. Filmmakers are thus challenged to design disembodied perceptual experiences that can approximate to the ba- sic cognitive experiences enjoyed by characters, thereby leading the audience to grasp what is going on in the char- acters’ minds. This is arguably one of the most fascinating challenges that cinema has addressed along its history. Approximating to embodied perception Although film experience and ordinary percep- tion are both perceptual experiences, they differ inasmuch the latter is embodied in a way the former is not. That is why, in ordinary experience, we can move towards the things we perceive and possibly touch them, but we cannot do so in film experience. The usual way in which filmmakers lead the audience to share the embodied perceptual experience of a character consists in providing the audience with a standpoint that corresponds to that of the character. This mode of representation, which is usually called “subjective shot”, enables us to share the visual perspective of the character in spite of the fact that our body does not occupy the corresponding standpoint, which is instead occupied by the character’s body. As Kendall Walton puts it, Following a shot of a character looking out a window, there is a shot of a scene outside. Watching the second shot, we imagine observing the scene, and we judge that the character looking out the window has an experience “like this”, like the one we imagine enjoying. We do not attribute to the character an experience (much) like our actual visual experience, a visual experience of a film shot, of a depiction of the scene outside the window. The experience we attribute to the character is like our actual one only insofar as imagining seeing is like actually seeing.16 16 K.L. Walton, “Fictionality and imagination – mind the gap”, in In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015): 17-35, 13. ENRICO TERRONE 76 AN-ICON  Let me assume that what Walton calls “imag- ining seeing”, here, matches what I call “disembodied per- ception”. Under this assumption, we can interpret Walton’s last sentence as stating that the experience elicited by the point-of-view remains a disembodied perception, which is not identical with, but only approximates to, the embodied perception of the character. Overlooking this limitation can lead to disastrous effects. Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947), for example, aims to turn the audience’s disembodied perception into the perceptual experience of the main character along the whole duration of the film, but the result is just that the audience has “the impression that there is a camera by the name of ‘Philip Marlowe’ stumbling around Los Angeles and passing itself off as the well-known human being of the same name”.17 In fact, more cautious and parsimonious uses of the subjective shot can have outstanding aesthetic ef- fects. Griffith’s An Unseen Enemy is exemplary in this re- spect. I pointed out earlier that the film is based on “ob- jective” shots from neutral standpoints that are aimed to elicit pure disembodied experiences from the audience. Yet, quite exceptionally, one subjective shot emphasizes the most dramatic passage of the story. This shot is a close- up of the gun that the housekeeper passes through a hole in the door of the room where the two sisters took refuge (Fig. 1). We see the gun from the standpoint of the young- er sister (Fig. 2), and this subjective shot emphasizes the centrality of that character in the narrative. Fig. 1. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. 17 G.M. Wilson, Narration in Light: 86. ENRICO TERRONE 77 AN-ICON  Fig. 2. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. She is the one who has a psychological and relational arc of transformation along the story: at the be- ginning she refuses reluctantly to kiss her boyfriend but in the last image of the film she finally accepts the kiss. It is tempting to see the film as a sort of bildungsroman of this girl; specifically, her initiation to sexuality. This hermeneutic temptation is encouraged by the subjective shot in which the gun passing through the hole evokes a sort of phallic figure. The next shot shows that the girl is horrified by the gun. Later in the story, however, she finds the courage to try to grasp the gun, and then slumps back (Fig. 3 and 4). Fig. 3. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. Fig. 4. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. ENRICO TERRONE 78 AN-ICON  Interestingly, the editing connects this image of the girl to the image of her boyfriend walking in the fields (Fig. 5). Fig. 5. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. This link does not seem to be motivated by the course of the narrative but rather by a sort of symbolic pattern. Approximating to memory The experience of the spectator who watches a film such as An Unseen Enemy consists in a series of per- ceptual perspectives on the fictional world. Many of them are from a neutral, unoccupied point of view but some of them can match the perceptual point of view of a charac- ter. Most films function in this way. Some films even try to make us share the perceptual point of view of non-human characters. For example, John McTiernan’s Predator (1987) makes us share the perceptual point of view of an alien creature, and Pietro Marcello’s Bella e perduta (2015) that of a buffalo. On the other hand, there are films that do not limit themselves to making us share the perceptions of certain fictional characters but also aim to make us share other basic cognitive states of them. Let me begin with the case of memory. At the turning point of Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), Rick remembers his love affair with Ilsa in Paris. The combination of the movement of the camera towards Rick’s face with the crescendo of the music and the white dissolve indicates that the following scenes are to be taken as memories of Rick (Figg. 6,7 and 8). Yet, the kind of experience whereby the spectator experiences this scene is perception, not memory. ENRICO TERRONE 79 AN-ICON  The flashback makes us perceive the events that Rick is remembering rather than his memory experience. We have not the impression of remembering those events, that is, we are not enjoying the peculiar phenomenology of memory. Rather, we keep perceiving those past events set in Paris in the same disembodied way in which we were perceiv- ing the present events set in Casablanca which have been portrayed before the flashback. Fig. 6. Michael Curtiz, Casablanca, 1942. Still from film. Fig. 7. Michael Curtiz, Casablanca, 1942. Still from film. Fig. 8. Michael Curtiz, Casablanca, 1942. Still from film. ENRICO TERRONE 80 AN-ICON  Memory experiences usually are fragmentary, in- complete and unstable whereas the Paris events portrayed in the film exhibit the typical accuracy, fluidity and stability of perception. Moreover, memory experiences typically in- volve a first-person perspective whereas most shots in the Casablanca flashback are taken from a neutral objective perspective, not from Rick’s perspective. Most importantly, memory experiences, as such, involve a feeling of pastness whatever their content, whereas our experience of these scenes of Casablanca lack that phenomenological hall- mark. Although Rick is represented as remembering, the flashback only makes us perceive what is remembered, the content of his memory. This is the standard way in which flashbacks encode memory in film. We do not think that Rick’s memory experience is like this. We just think that we are seeing (in a perceptual attitude) the events that Rick is remembering (in the memory attitude). At most, certain films can use stylistic device such as blurred images or shift from color to black and white in order to stress that the spectator’s perceptual experience is meant to encode another kind of mental state. Yet, the spectator experience remains perceptual in nature. Seeing blurry or seeing in black and white are still ways of seeing. Perhaps a better way of getting the spectator closer to the memory state of a character might consist in casting as a flashback a shot that was previously conjugat- ed in the present tense. For example, in François Truffaut’s L’amour en fuite (1979) flashbacks are made of shots of previous films of the Antoine Doinel series, so that the spec- tator shares Antoine’s experience of remembering those events. Yet, these cases are quite exceptional. In most films that use flashbacks, only the character is undergoing a memory experience while the spectator is rather enjoying a disembodied perception. Approximating to imagination Memory differs from imagination in that one remembers events that one previously perceived whereas ENRICO TERRONE 81 AN-ICON  the events imagined could not have been perceived. Imag- ination indeed, unlike memory, can represent events that did not take place. So, when in John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar (1963) Billy images himself to be the ruler of an imaginary country called Ambrosia, we cannot perceive the corre- sponding events in the story world of Billy Liar because there are no such events in that world. However, the way in which Billy Liar’s spectators are invited to consider Billy’s imaginings is analogous to that in which Casablanca’s spectators are invited to consider Rick’s memories. That is, the combination of a camera movement towards the character’s face with music and visual dissolve (Figg. 9, 10 and 11). In Billy Liar, the shift to imagination is also stressed by the inner voice of Billy himself who says: “It was a big day for us. We had won the war in Ambrosia. Democracy was back once more in our beloved country...”. Yet, the experience that this segment of Billy Liar elicits from its spectators remains a perceptual experience. We see Billy on a tank in the middle of the crowd which celebrates his triumph in the war. Just as Casablanca makes us perceive the events that Rick is re- membering, Billy Liar makes us perceive the events that Billy is imagining. The difference is just that the events remem- bered belongs to the story world of Casablanca, whereas the events imagined do not belong to the story world of Billy Liar. Rather, those events belong to a nested fictional world, which the filmmaker has built up within the main fiction in order to represent Billy’s imagining.18 Fig. 9. John Schlesinger, Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film. 18 On the notion of nested world, see K.L. Walton, “Fictionality and imagination”. ENRICO TERRONE 82 AN-ICON  Fig. 10. John Schlesinger, Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film. Fig. 11. John Schlesinger, Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film. Billy Liar does not make us share the imagina- tive experience of Billy, just as Casablanca did not make us share the memory experience of Rick. Imaginings, indeed, usually lack the kind of accuracy, fluidity, objectivity and stability that characterizes our perceptual experience of the events imagined by Billy. Moreover, imaginative experienc- es, as such, should involve a feeling of unreality whatever their content whereas our experience of these scenes of Billy Liar lacks such phenomenological hallmark. The con- tent of our perception, namely, Billy’s triumph, may look weird and non-realistic but we experience it in the same way in which we experience other scenes of the film that look much more realistic. Thus, films such as Billy Liar do not make us share the imaginative states of fictional char- acters but only approximate to such states by providing us with perceptual experiences of nested fictional worlds. Altering the epistemic status of film experience From a phenomenological perspective, there is just one basic experiential attitude that film spectators ENRICO TERRONE 83 AN-ICON  can take towards the fictional events portrayed. Wilson,19 following Walton,20 calls it “imagining seeing” while I prefer to dub it “disembodied perception”. That said, there are different ways in which spectators can relate this experi- ence to the fictional world they are exploring; this is what Wilson calls the “the epistemic status of the contents of their imagined seeing”.21 The default assumption about the epistemic status of film experience is that we are perceiving the fic- tional world as it is, from a neutral perspective that does not match the point of view of anybody. In other words, the basic epistemic status of film experience is pure perceptual knowledge. Yet, this basic epistemic status can be altered by cues coming from the content or the context of our per- ceptual experience. The main way of altering the epistemic status consists in a shift from the neutral viewpoint of the spectator as a detached observer to the subjective view- point of a character. In such cases, the spectator is invited to relate what she is perceiving in a disembodied way to the embodied perception or memory or imagination of a certain character. Yet, the spectator’s experience does not turn into an embodied perception or memory or imagina- tion. It remains a disembodied perception; only its epistemic status undergoes alteration. In the default case, we cast our disembodied experience merely as a source of perceptual knowledge about the objective facts of the fictional world. In the altered states, on the other hand, we cast our disem- bodied experience as a source of knowledge concerning also (in the case of embodied perception and memory) or only (in the case of imagination) the subjectivity of a character. Some films leave the epistemic status of cer- tain shots indeterminate. In Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Straw- berries (1957), for instance, it is not evident whether the protagonist Isak Borg is remembering or rather imagining certain episodes of his teenage. Spectators just perceive 19 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164. 20 K.L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 21 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164. ENRICO TERRONE 84 AN-ICON  such episodes in the usual disembodied way and acknowl- edge that something is going on in Isak’s mind rather than in the outer world. One might say that the spectator per- ceives a nested fictional world which is made of elements coming from both Isak’s memory and Isak’s imagination, but she cannot precisely tell the imaginative elements from the memory elements. The epistemic status of these shots thus remains indeterminate: suspended, as it were, between memory and imagination. Likewise, the scenes of Federico Fellini’s Otto e mezzo (1963) that portray the protagonist Guido Anselmi in his childhood (being bathed in wine lees and then put in bed; playing football in the schoolyard and then visiting Saraghina; being punished by the priests and then returning to Saraghina) have an inde- terminate epistemic status which lies between memory and imagination. The spectator has a perceptual disembodied experience of a nested fictional world which is made of elements arguably coming from both Guido’s imagination and Guido’s memory, but she finds it hard to precisely dis- tinguish what is coming from where. The phenomenological virtues of film compared to theater If film experience is just a kind of perceptual experience which can at most approximate to other mental states such as memory or imagination, why scholars like Münsterberg and Panofsky have stated that films can lead spectators to enjoy the latter mental states? I propose a historical explanation according to which statements such as Münsterberg’s or Panofsky’s are to be read as comparisons between film and theater. Both these forms of art invite the spectator to enjoy a per- ceptual experience of a fictional world. Yet, the experience that theater elicits from the spectator is ordinary embod- ied perception whereas film experience is a peculiar kind of disembodied perception. At the theater, the spectator sees the play from a standpoint that corresponds to the standpoint of her body, and that standpoint can change ENRICO TERRONE 85 AN-ICON  if the body moves. Slightly moving one’s head can be sufficient to change one’s perspective on the events por- trayed by a play; if one moved closer to the stage, one would even perceive those events from a closer standpoint. In this sense, theater experience works just as ordinary perception; it is as if fictional events had been magical- ly transported in our own environment, in our egocentric space. In film experience, on the other hand, it is the spec- tator’s viewpoint that seems to be magically transported in the middle of fictional events even though her body firmly remains in her seat. Film experience is thus independent from the spectator’s bodily movement in a way theater ex- perience is not. This is what motivates the characterization of film experience as a sort of disembodied perception. Thus, film experience is much more flexible than theater experience when it comes to approximating to other mental states such as memory or imagination, whose content also is quite independent from the position and the possible movements of one’s body. Panofsky nicely makes this point when he writes: In a theater, space is static, that is, the space represented on the stage, as well as the spatial relation of the beholder to the spectacle, is unalterably fixed. [.. ] With the movies the situation is reversed. Here, too, the spectator occupies a fixed seat, but only physically, not as the subject of an aesthetic experience. Aesthetically, he is in permanent motion as his eye identifies itself with the lens of the camera, which permanently shifts in distance and direction. [.. ] This opens up a world of possibilities of which the stage can never dream.22 Among the possibilities of film in comparison with theater, there is surely the capacity to lead the spec- tator in the proximity of the mental states of the characters. Yet, this does not mean that, in those cases, film experience turns into a memory experience or into an imaginative ex- perience; it remains a perceptual experience, though one aimed at approximating to other mental states. 22 E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures”: 18-19. ENRICO TERRONE 86 AN-ICON  Film experience, as a disembodied perceptual experience, reveals itself to be especially apt to emulate mental states such as perceptual illusion, hallucination and dream, whose attitude is not as distinct from that of per- ception as it is the attitude of memory or that of imagina- tion. One can cast perceptual illusions, hallucinations and dreams as perceptual experiences that, unlike standard perception, fail to represent things as they are. Specifical- ly, perceptual illusions lead the perceiver to cast things as having properties they do not actually have, while “partial hallucinations” lead her to perceive things that actually have not their place in her environment, and “total hallucinations”, just like dreams, leads the subject to experience a totally made up environment.23 Ordinary perception is somehow authoritative as for the reality of its content, and theater experience tends to inherit this epistemic authority, which it applies to the story world. Film experience, on the other hand, has a weaker epistemic authority despite its perceptual character. I contend that this depends on its peculiarly disembodied attitude. While watching a film, we have the impression of seeing characters who inhabit the story world, and events that occur in it, and we usually tend to endorse such im- pression thereby acquiring pieces of information about the story world. Yet, we do not perceive these events as occur- ring in the environment we inhabit with our body, and this somehow affect the degree of reliability of those pieces of information. Even though we tend to cast film experienc- es as a perception of events in the fictional world, we are disposed to acknowledge that this experience might mis- lead us as regards the way things are in that world. In this sense, film experience is a perceptual experience that can get closer than standard perception and theater experience to illusion, hallucination and dream. 23 For the distinction between partial and total hallucinations, see A.D. Smith, The Problem of Perception (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002): 193. Note that I am putting total hallucination and dreams on a par not because I think they are, but just because I reckon that discussing their difference goes beyond the scope of this paper. ENRICO TERRONE 87 AN-ICON  If the perceptual experience is a genus among whose species one can find not only standard perception but also illusion, hallucination, and dream, then film ex- perience can be cast as a peculiar further species of the genus, which can emulate all the other mental states of that genus. This fact is exploited by those films that lead the spectator to share the deceptive perceptual experi- ences of a character. In films such as David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001) we share the partial hallucination of the heroes by being in turn deceived by our perceptual experience of the events portrayed. Likewise, in films such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) or Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944), we share the total hallucinations or dreams of the characters by wrongly casting certain film experiences as perceptions of events that actually occur in the story world. In Wilson’s terms,24 spectators of such films enjoy the proper perceptual experiences but fail to endow them with the proper epistemic status, which is not the reliability of standard perception but rather the unreli- ability of illusion, hallucination or dream. In David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), at least according to a popular interpretation of the film,25 dream, memory and perception are combined in a way that can be grasped only after the fact. The first part of the film is presented from an allegedly neutral perceptual perspective but later reveals itself to be a dream of the protagonist Di- ane Selwyn. The material of that dream comes from Diane’s memories constituting the flashbacks that we find in the second part of the film, which also provides us with a neu- tral perceptual perspective on the last moments of Diane’s life, from her waking up from her dream to her suicide. 24 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164. 25 See for instance B. Wyman, M. Garrone, A. Klein, “Everything you were afraid to ask about Mulholland Drive”, Salon (October 24, 2001), https://www.salon.com/2001/10/24/ mulholland_drive_analysis/; P. Bertetto, “L’analisi interpretativa. Mulholland Drive”, in P. Bertetto, ed., Metodologie di analisi del film (Rome-Bari: Laterza: 2007): 223-255. ENRICO TERRONE 88 AN-ICON  The phenomenological virtues of virtual reality compared to film While film provides us with a disembodied per- ceptual experience, virtual reality makes us perceive an egocentric space, that is, a space which is centered in our body in the way the space of ordinary perception is. Both or- dinary perception and virtual-reality experience are such as that our bodily movements correspond to change in our viewpoint whereas the viewpoint of film experience is in- dependent from the viewer’s body. Virtual reality thus shares with theater a sig- nificant proximity to ordinary perception that film, instead, lacks. Should we conclude that virtual reality, just like the- ater, is less apt than film to approximate to non-perceptual mental states such as memory or imagination? Not so. Film experience, as disembodied perception, is already an altered state in comparison to ordinary per- ception. Nothing else remains to be altered at the phenom- enological level. The only possible alterations, as I have argued earlier, are alterations in the epistemic status of our perceptual experience: clues in the context or in the content of film experience may lead us to cast it as the memory or the imagining of a character, or even as a de- ceptive experience such as an illusion, an hallucination or a dream. Virtual-reality experience and theater experience, on the other hand, are not intrinsically altered; they work just as ordinary perception works. Yet, virtual-reality expe- rience can be altered in a way in which theater experience surely cannot be altered. Even though the default mode of virtual-reality experience is the emulation of ordinary perception, a virtual reality system might be designed so to provide users with experiences of completely different kinds. Whether and how such experience can effectively emulate memory episodes and imaginings remains an open question. Arguably the emulation of perception has been the main aim of virtual reality technology so far. Still, this technology has also a potential for altering its basic per- ceptual mode thereby getting the user’s experience closer ENRICO TERRONE 89 AN-ICON  to other kinds of mental states. Emulating memory and imagination through perception, the great challenge for filmmakers in the twentieth century, might become the great challenge for virtual-reality makers in the twenty-first. Para- phrasing Panofsky’s statement, virtual reality might open up a world of possibilities of which film can never dream. ENRICO TERRONE 90 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/15158

Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual Filmreality by Enrico Terrone Virtual Reality Perception Memory Imagination Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual reality by Enrico Terrone Abstract This paper casts film experience as a sort of disembodied perception. I will show how this experience can be manipulated and altered in order to approximate to mental states of fictional characters, in particular embodied perception, memory and imagination. I will acknowledge that film experience can approximate to non-perceptual at- titudes such as memory and imagination much better than the experience elicited by theater. Yet, I will contend, film experience cannot emulate the phenomenology of non-per- ceptual attitudes since it remains a sort of disembodied perception even when it is manipulated by filmmakers in order to approximate memory states or imaginative states of fictional characters. Finally, I will argue that virtual real- ity, in virtue of both its proximity to embodied perception and its potential for manipulation, is, in principle, in a bet- ter position than film when it comes to trying to emulate non-perceptual attitudes such as memory and imagination. Film Virtual Reality Perception Memory Imagination To quote this essay: E. Terrone, “Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual reality”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 69-90 ENRICO TERRONE 69 AN-ICON  Cloe sees a black cat, Jack remembers a black cat, Lisa imagines a black cat. According to representa- tionalist conceptions of the mind,1 Cloe’s, Jack’s and Li- sa’s mental states have the same representational content, namely a black cat, and yet they differ as regards their attitude, that is, the way that content is represented. Per- ceiving a black cat, remembering a black cat and imagin- ing a black cat are three different experiences in virtue of three different attitudes. Specifically, according to Uriah Kriegel’s “Sartrean account”,2 the perceptual attitude rep- resents-as-present its content, the memory attitude rep- resents-as-past its content, and the imaginative attitude represents-as-possible its content. All this raises an interesting issue about film experience. On the one hand, according to experiential theories of depiction,3 films provide us with experiences whose “pictorial attitude” somehow emulates the perceptual attitude. On the other hand, scholars such as Hugo Mün- sterberg or Erwin Panofsky have stated that films allow us to share not only the perceptual point of view of fictional characters but also their inner life, which involves states such as memory or imagination.4 These two statements are in tension: if the pictorial attitude which characterizes film experience is a sort of perceptual attitude, how can film spectators enjoy experiences based on memory attitudes or imaginative attitudes? I will argue that the spectator cannot enjoy the latter experiences. The spectator can only ascribe such experiences to characters by relying on the perceptual experience she is enjoying. Finally, I will argue that, quite 1 T. Crane, “The intentional structure of consciousness”, in A. Jokic, Q. Smith, eds., Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 33- 56; D. Chalmers. “The representational character of experience”, in B. Leiter, ed., The Future for Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 153-180. 2 U. Kriegel, “Perception and imagination. A Sartrean account”, in S. Miguens, G. Preyer, C. Bravo Morando, eds., Prereflective Consciousness: Early Sartre in the Context of Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (London: Routledge, 2015): 257-288. 3 R. Hopkins, “Depiction”, in P. Livingston, C. Plantinga, eds., The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (London: Routledge, 2009): 64-74. 4 H. Münsterberg, The Photoplay: a Psychological Study (New York: Appleton, 1916); E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures” (1934), in D. Talbot, ed., Film: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959): 15-32. ENRICO TERRONE 70 AN-ICON  surprisingly, virtual reality is in a better position than film as regards the emulation of non-perceptual attitudes. Film experience as disembodied perception Film experience is a perceptual experience. The audience perceives objects and events taking place in the world that the film portrays. The Lumière Brothers Sortie des Usines Lumière (1895) is paradigmatic in this respect: the audience sees workers leaving the factory in a way that is analogous to the way one would see those workers if one were in front the factory. Analogous, however, does not mean identical. While in ordinary perception we experience things as organized in an “egocentric space”, that is, a space that has our body as its own center,5 in cinematic perception we experience things as organized in a space that has only our sight, not our body, as its own center. The space depicted is experienced as “detached” from our body.6 The spectator of Sortie des Usines Lumière sees workers exiting the factory from a standpoint in front of the factory, but she does not occupy that standpoint and she does not have the impression of occupying it. Even spectators of the Lumière Brothers L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) normally do not have the impres- sion of occupying the standpoint in front of the train, in spite of the popular fable that suggests otherwise.7 Film experience, so understood, is a disembod- ied perception. We can perceive things from a viewpoint that our body is not forced to occupy. It is worth noting that by “disembodied perception” here is just meant the percep- tion of a space in which our body does not have any place. Hence, film experience is disembodied only with respect to the experienced relationship between the spectator and 5 G. Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 6 N. Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 7 M. Loiperdinger, “Lumière’s arrival of the train. Cinema’s founding myth”, The Moving Image 4, no. 1 (2004): 89-118. ENRICO TERRONE 71 AN-ICON  the space portrayed. The spectator’s body, however, keeps playing a crucial role in the whole film experience which, as a twofold experience, also includes the spectator’s re- lationship to the space in which the film is screened.8 Even a paradigmatic essay on the embodied character of film experience, namely Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992), acknowledges that the perspective of the spectator as an embodied subject is different from the perspective on the world depicted that the film provides us with. Yet, Sob- chack states that film experience is embodied all the way through because there is a further body at work, namely, the film’s body: We recognize the moving picture as the work of an anonymous and sign-producing body subject intentionally marking visible choices with the very behavior of its bodily being. However, these choices are not initiated by the movement of our bodies or our intending consciousness. They are seen and visible as the visual and phys- ical choices of some body other than ourselves [...]. That some body is the film’s body.9 What does it exactly mean that the film has a body? This seems to be a suggestive metaphor that should be unpacked for rigorous theorizing. Sobchack offers the following characterization of the film’s body: “The cam- era its perceptive organ, the projector its expressive organ, the screen its discrete and material occupation of worldly space”.10 If the film’s body is just that, it comes down to a suggestive characterization of the film’s screening. Still Sobchack also insists on the “choices” that the alleged film’s body makes thereby determining our point of view on the space portrayed. Precisely because that point of view does not depend on the position and the movement of our 8 R. Hopkins, “Depiction”. See also E. Terrone, “Imagination and perception in film experience”, Ergo, no. 5 (2020): 161-190. 9 V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 278. Thanks to a referee for pushing me to discuss Sobchack’s view. 10 Ibid.: 299. ENRICO TERRONE 72 AN-ICON  body, I find it worthwhile to cast the experience it provides as disembodied. While ordinary perception, as an embodied experience, depends on the position and movement of our body, film experience is disembodied since it depends on choices that are not up to us. Whom are those choices up to? To the filmmaker for sure, and yet scholars like George Wilson argue that, in our engagement with fiction films, we rather experience those choices as the outcome of the “min- imal narrating agency” of a fictional narrator.11 Perhaps what Sobchack calls the film’s body may be an interesting char- acterization of how we experience the actual agency of the filmmaker or, if Wilson is right, the fictional agency of the narrator. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the film’s body is not the spectator’s body and I reckon that this is enough to warrant the characterization of film experience as disem- bodied perception. Such a disembodied nature of film experience has an interesting consequence. Since film experience, as disembodied perception, involves a point of view that does not depend on our body, that point of view can change without the need of moving our body. Neither Sortie des Usines Lumière nor L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ci- otat exploit this option, but later films do so by means of camera movements and editing. The specificity of film experience In ordinary perception we experience things as taking place in a determinate place and time, namely, here, the place where our body is, and now, the time when our experience occurs. In cinematic perception, on the other hand, place and time remain indeterminate. Our perception, as such, does not tell us where and when the things per- ceived take place. Cinematic perception needs a cognitive supplementation in order to fix the spatial and temporal coordinates of what one is perceiving. Films can provide 11 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 129. ENRICO TERRONE 73 AN-ICON  such supplementation either explicitly, by means of devices such as voice over and inscriptions, or implicitly, by relying on clues embedded in the scenes portrayed. Furthermore, film perception is not up to us in the way ordinary perception is. In the latter, I can decide, at least to a certain extent, what I am going to perceive. In film experience, instead, I am completely deprived of au- tonomy. In other words, film experience is predetermined in a way ordinary experience is not. One might say that ordinary perception is a natural experience whereas cine- matic perception is rather an artificial experience whereby we perceive what filmmakers (or narrators) have established for us. In the specific case of fiction films, filmmakers (or narrators) guide us in the perceptual exploration of fictional worlds. That is arguably the most insightful way of unpack- ing Sobchack’s metaphor of the film’s body. Let me consider, as an example, David W. Grif- fith’s An Unseen Enemy (1912), which tells the story of two orphan sisters whose heritage is threatened by a treach- erous housekeeper and her accomplice. We discover this story through a series of disembodied perceptual expe- riences of the same kind as those elicited by Sortie des Usines Lumière and L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat. We see the two orphans, then the housekeeper, then the elder brother of the two girls who places the heritage in the safe, then the housekeeper who spies him, and so on and so forth. The filmmaker has designed this series of percep- tions in a way that provides us with a sort of “unrestricted epistemic access” to the relevant facts of the story.12 Unlike the two orphans, we are aware from the beginning of the threat coming from the housekeeper. Moreover, unlike the housekeeper, we are aware of the brother’s attempt to help his sisters and prevent theft. In sum, the spectator of An Unseen Enemy perceives more, and therefore knows more, than the characters in the story; the “enemy” is “unseen” only for the characters, not for the audience. 12 G.M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). ENRICO TERRONE 74 AN-ICON  This is the basic functioning of fiction films, which corresponds to the omniscient narrator in literature. However, other configurations are possible in which the audience’s knowledge of relevant facts is “restricted” to that available to characters or is even narrower than the latter.13 For example, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1948) the audience’s knowledge is as restricted as that of the character L.B. Jef- feries (with one important exception, however: we see the murderer leaving his apartment with his lover while Jefferies is sleeping). In Pablo Larrain’s Ema (2019), the audience’s knowledge is even narrower than that of the eponymous heroine; the latter has access from the beginning to the truth about the new adoptive parents of her son whereas the audience will discover this truth only at the end of the film. A further restriction that affects film experience concerns the mode of this experience, which is just dis- embodied perception. In ordinary experience, on the other hand, one can enjoy a variety of experiential attitudes: em- bodied perception, first of all, but also memory and imag- ination, and possibly perceptual illusion, hallucination and dream. Here is another sense in which the audience can find it hard to know what characters know. What is at stake here is phenomenal knowledge, that is, knowing what it is like for a subject to undergo a certain experience. For sure, empathy may enable the audience to acquire phenomenal knowledge concerning the affective and emotional dimension of a fictional character’s expe- rience.14 For instance, the audience can share the char- acter’s fear or the character’s surprise. Yet, affects and emotions are evaluative mental states that are grafted onto more basic cognitive states such as perceptions, memo- ries, and imaginings,15 whose distinctive attitude is sure- ly harder to access through empathy. The audience may deploy empathy to know what it is like to for a character to feel fear or joy but something more is required to grasp 13 Ibid. 14 J. Stadler, “Empathy and film”, in H.L. Maibom, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (London: Routledge, 2016): 317-326. Thanks to a referee for leading me to consider the role of empathy. 15 K. Mulligan, “From appropriate emotions to values”, The Monist 81, no. 1 (1998): 161-188. ENRICO TERRONE 75 AN-ICON  the phenomenal difference between an embodied percep- tual experience and a memory episode or an imagining. Filmmakers are thus challenged to design disembodied perceptual experiences that can approximate to the ba- sic cognitive experiences enjoyed by characters, thereby leading the audience to grasp what is going on in the char- acters’ minds. This is arguably one of the most fascinating challenges that cinema has addressed along its history. Approximating to embodied perception Although film experience and ordinary percep- tion are both perceptual experiences, they differ inasmuch the latter is embodied in a way the former is not. That is why, in ordinary experience, we can move towards the things we perceive and possibly touch them, but we cannot do so in film experience. The usual way in which filmmakers lead the audience to share the embodied perceptual experience of a character consists in providing the audience with a standpoint that corresponds to that of the character. This mode of representation, which is usually called “subjective shot”, enables us to share the visual perspective of the character in spite of the fact that our body does not occupy the corresponding standpoint, which is instead occupied by the character’s body. As Kendall Walton puts it, Following a shot of a character looking out a window, there is a shot of a scene outside. Watching the second shot, we imagine observing the scene, and we judge that the character looking out the window has an experience “like this”, like the one we imagine enjoying. We do not attribute to the character an experience (much) like our actual visual experience, a visual experience of a film shot, of a depiction of the scene outside the window. The experience we attribute to the character is like our actual one only insofar as imagining seeing is like actually seeing.16 16 K.L. Walton, “Fictionality and imagination – mind the gap”, in In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015): 17-35, 13. ENRICO TERRONE 76 AN-ICON  Let me assume that what Walton calls “imag- ining seeing”, here, matches what I call “disembodied per- ception”. Under this assumption, we can interpret Walton’s last sentence as stating that the experience elicited by the point-of-view remains a disembodied perception, which is not identical with, but only approximates to, the embodied perception of the character. Overlooking this limitation can lead to disastrous effects. Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947), for example, aims to turn the audience’s disembodied perception into the perceptual experience of the main character along the whole duration of the film, but the result is just that the audience has “the impression that there is a camera by the name of ‘Philip Marlowe’ stumbling around Los Angeles and passing itself off as the well-known human being of the same name”.17 In fact, more cautious and parsimonious uses of the subjective shot can have outstanding aesthetic ef- fects. Griffith’s An Unseen Enemy is exemplary in this re- spect. I pointed out earlier that the film is based on “ob- jective” shots from neutral standpoints that are aimed to elicit pure disembodied experiences from the audience. Yet, quite exceptionally, one subjective shot emphasizes the most dramatic passage of the story. This shot is a close- up of the gun that the housekeeper passes through a hole in the door of the room where the two sisters took refuge (Fig. 1). We see the gun from the standpoint of the young- er sister (Fig. 2), and this subjective shot emphasizes the centrality of that character in the narrative. Fig. 1. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. 17 G.M. Wilson, Narration in Light: 86. ENRICO TERRONE 77 AN-ICON  Fig. 2. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. She is the one who has a psychological and relational arc of transformation along the story: at the be- ginning she refuses reluctantly to kiss her boyfriend but in the last image of the film she finally accepts the kiss. It is tempting to see the film as a sort of bildungsroman of this girl; specifically, her initiation to sexuality. This hermeneutic temptation is encouraged by the subjective shot in which the gun passing through the hole evokes a sort of phallic figure. The next shot shows that the girl is horrified by the gun. Later in the story, however, she finds the courage to try to grasp the gun, and then slumps back (Fig. 3 and 4). Fig. 3. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. Fig. 4. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. ENRICO TERRONE 78 AN-ICON  Interestingly, the editing connects this image of the girl to the image of her boyfriend walking in the fields (Fig. 5). Fig. 5. David W. Griffith, An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film. This link does not seem to be motivated by the course of the narrative but rather by a sort of symbolic pattern. Approximating to memory The experience of the spectator who watches a film such as An Unseen Enemy consists in a series of per- ceptual perspectives on the fictional world. Many of them are from a neutral, unoccupied point of view but some of them can match the perceptual point of view of a charac- ter. Most films function in this way. Some films even try to make us share the perceptual point of view of non-human characters. For example, John McTiernan’s Predator (1987) makes us share the perceptual point of view of an alien creature, and Pietro Marcello’s Bella e perduta (2015) that of a buffalo. On the other hand, there are films that do not limit themselves to making us share the perceptions of certain fictional characters but also aim to make us share other basic cognitive states of them. Let me begin with the case of memory. At the turning point of Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), Rick remembers his love affair with Ilsa in Paris. The combination of the movement of the camera towards Rick’s face with the crescendo of the music and the white dissolve indicates that the following scenes are to be taken as memories of Rick (Figg. 6,7 and 8). Yet, the kind of experience whereby the spectator experiences this scene is perception, not memory. ENRICO TERRONE 79 AN-ICON  The flashback makes us perceive the events that Rick is remembering rather than his memory experience. We have not the impression of remembering those events, that is, we are not enjoying the peculiar phenomenology of memory. Rather, we keep perceiving those past events set in Paris in the same disembodied way in which we were perceiv- ing the present events set in Casablanca which have been portrayed before the flashback. Fig. 6. Michael Curtiz, Casablanca, 1942. Still from film. Fig. 7. Michael Curtiz, Casablanca, 1942. Still from film. Fig. 8. Michael Curtiz, Casablanca, 1942. Still from film. ENRICO TERRONE 80 AN-ICON  Memory experiences usually are fragmentary, in- complete and unstable whereas the Paris events portrayed in the film exhibit the typical accuracy, fluidity and stability of perception. Moreover, memory experiences typically in- volve a first-person perspective whereas most shots in the Casablanca flashback are taken from a neutral objective perspective, not from Rick’s perspective. Most importantly, memory experiences, as such, involve a feeling of pastness whatever their content, whereas our experience of these scenes of Casablanca lack that phenomenological hall- mark. Although Rick is represented as remembering, the flashback only makes us perceive what is remembered, the content of his memory. This is the standard way in which flashbacks encode memory in film. We do not think that Rick’s memory experience is like this. We just think that we are seeing (in a perceptual attitude) the events that Rick is remembering (in the memory attitude). At most, certain films can use stylistic device such as blurred images or shift from color to black and white in order to stress that the spectator’s perceptual experience is meant to encode another kind of mental state. Yet, the spectator experience remains perceptual in nature. Seeing blurry or seeing in black and white are still ways of seeing. Perhaps a better way of getting the spectator closer to the memory state of a character might consist in casting as a flashback a shot that was previously conjugat- ed in the present tense. For example, in François Truffaut’s L’amour en fuite (1979) flashbacks are made of shots of previous films of the Antoine Doinel series, so that the spec- tator shares Antoine’s experience of remembering those events. Yet, these cases are quite exceptional. In most films that use flashbacks, only the character is undergoing a memory experience while the spectator is rather enjoying a disembodied perception. Approximating to imagination Memory differs from imagination in that one remembers events that one previously perceived whereas ENRICO TERRONE 81 AN-ICON  the events imagined could not have been perceived. Imag- ination indeed, unlike memory, can represent events that did not take place. So, when in John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar (1963) Billy images himself to be the ruler of an imaginary country called Ambrosia, we cannot perceive the corre- sponding events in the story world of Billy Liar because there are no such events in that world. However, the way in which Billy Liar’s spectators are invited to consider Billy’s imaginings is analogous to that in which Casablanca’s spectators are invited to consider Rick’s memories. That is, the combination of a camera movement towards the character’s face with music and visual dissolve (Figg. 9, 10 and 11). In Billy Liar, the shift to imagination is also stressed by the inner voice of Billy himself who says: “It was a big day for us. We had won the war in Ambrosia. Democracy was back once more in our beloved country...”. Yet, the experience that this segment of Billy Liar elicits from its spectators remains a perceptual experience. We see Billy on a tank in the middle of the crowd which celebrates his triumph in the war. Just as Casablanca makes us perceive the events that Rick is re- membering, Billy Liar makes us perceive the events that Billy is imagining. The difference is just that the events remem- bered belongs to the story world of Casablanca, whereas the events imagined do not belong to the story world of Billy Liar. Rather, those events belong to a nested fictional world, which the filmmaker has built up within the main fiction in order to represent Billy’s imagining.18 Fig. 9. John Schlesinger, Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film. 18 On the notion of nested world, see K.L. Walton, “Fictionality and imagination”. ENRICO TERRONE 82 AN-ICON  Fig. 10. John Schlesinger, Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film. Fig. 11. John Schlesinger, Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film. Billy Liar does not make us share the imagina- tive experience of Billy, just as Casablanca did not make us share the memory experience of Rick. Imaginings, indeed, usually lack the kind of accuracy, fluidity, objectivity and stability that characterizes our perceptual experience of the events imagined by Billy. Moreover, imaginative experienc- es, as such, should involve a feeling of unreality whatever their content whereas our experience of these scenes of Billy Liar lacks such phenomenological hallmark. The con- tent of our perception, namely, Billy’s triumph, may look weird and non-realistic but we experience it in the same way in which we experience other scenes of the film that look much more realistic. Thus, films such as Billy Liar do not make us share the imaginative states of fictional char- acters but only approximate to such states by providing us with perceptual experiences of nested fictional worlds. Altering the epistemic status of film experience From a phenomenological perspective, there is just one basic experiential attitude that film spectators ENRICO TERRONE 83 AN-ICON  can take towards the fictional events portrayed. Wilson,19 following Walton,20 calls it “imagining seeing” while I prefer to dub it “disembodied perception”. That said, there are different ways in which spectators can relate this experi- ence to the fictional world they are exploring; this is what Wilson calls the “the epistemic status of the contents of their imagined seeing”.21 The default assumption about the epistemic status of film experience is that we are perceiving the fic- tional world as it is, from a neutral perspective that does not match the point of view of anybody. In other words, the basic epistemic status of film experience is pure perceptual knowledge. Yet, this basic epistemic status can be altered by cues coming from the content or the context of our per- ceptual experience. The main way of altering the epistemic status consists in a shift from the neutral viewpoint of the spectator as a detached observer to the subjective view- point of a character. In such cases, the spectator is invited to relate what she is perceiving in a disembodied way to the embodied perception or memory or imagination of a certain character. Yet, the spectator’s experience does not turn into an embodied perception or memory or imagina- tion. It remains a disembodied perception; only its epistemic status undergoes alteration. In the default case, we cast our disembodied experience merely as a source of perceptual knowledge about the objective facts of the fictional world. In the altered states, on the other hand, we cast our disem- bodied experience as a source of knowledge concerning also (in the case of embodied perception and memory) or only (in the case of imagination) the subjectivity of a character. Some films leave the epistemic status of cer- tain shots indeterminate. In Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Straw- berries (1957), for instance, it is not evident whether the protagonist Isak Borg is remembering or rather imagining certain episodes of his teenage. Spectators just perceive 19 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164. 20 K.L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 21 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164. ENRICO TERRONE 84 AN-ICON  such episodes in the usual disembodied way and acknowl- edge that something is going on in Isak’s mind rather than in the outer world. One might say that the spectator per- ceives a nested fictional world which is made of elements coming from both Isak’s memory and Isak’s imagination, but she cannot precisely tell the imaginative elements from the memory elements. The epistemic status of these shots thus remains indeterminate: suspended, as it were, between memory and imagination. Likewise, the scenes of Federico Fellini’s Otto e mezzo (1963) that portray the protagonist Guido Anselmi in his childhood (being bathed in wine lees and then put in bed; playing football in the schoolyard and then visiting Saraghina; being punished by the priests and then returning to Saraghina) have an inde- terminate epistemic status which lies between memory and imagination. The spectator has a perceptual disembodied experience of a nested fictional world which is made of elements arguably coming from both Guido’s imagination and Guido’s memory, but she finds it hard to precisely dis- tinguish what is coming from where. The phenomenological virtues of film compared to theater If film experience is just a kind of perceptual experience which can at most approximate to other mental states such as memory or imagination, why scholars like Münsterberg and Panofsky have stated that films can lead spectators to enjoy the latter mental states? I propose a historical explanation according to which statements such as Münsterberg’s or Panofsky’s are to be read as comparisons between film and theater. Both these forms of art invite the spectator to enjoy a per- ceptual experience of a fictional world. Yet, the experience that theater elicits from the spectator is ordinary embod- ied perception whereas film experience is a peculiar kind of disembodied perception. At the theater, the spectator sees the play from a standpoint that corresponds to the standpoint of her body, and that standpoint can change ENRICO TERRONE 85 AN-ICON  if the body moves. Slightly moving one’s head can be sufficient to change one’s perspective on the events por- trayed by a play; if one moved closer to the stage, one would even perceive those events from a closer standpoint. In this sense, theater experience works just as ordinary perception; it is as if fictional events had been magical- ly transported in our own environment, in our egocentric space. In film experience, on the other hand, it is the spec- tator’s viewpoint that seems to be magically transported in the middle of fictional events even though her body firmly remains in her seat. Film experience is thus independent from the spectator’s bodily movement in a way theater ex- perience is not. This is what motivates the characterization of film experience as a sort of disembodied perception. Thus, film experience is much more flexible than theater experience when it comes to approximating to other mental states such as memory or imagination, whose content also is quite independent from the position and the possible movements of one’s body. Panofsky nicely makes this point when he writes: In a theater, space is static, that is, the space represented on the stage, as well as the spatial relation of the beholder to the spectacle, is unalterably fixed. [.. ] With the movies the situation is reversed. Here, too, the spectator occupies a fixed seat, but only physically, not as the subject of an aesthetic experience. Aesthetically, he is in permanent motion as his eye identifies itself with the lens of the camera, which permanently shifts in distance and direction. [.. ] This opens up a world of possibilities of which the stage can never dream.22 Among the possibilities of film in comparison with theater, there is surely the capacity to lead the spec- tator in the proximity of the mental states of the characters. Yet, this does not mean that, in those cases, film experience turns into a memory experience or into an imaginative ex- perience; it remains a perceptual experience, though one aimed at approximating to other mental states. 22 E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures”: 18-19. ENRICO TERRONE 86 AN-ICON  Film experience, as a disembodied perceptual experience, reveals itself to be especially apt to emulate mental states such as perceptual illusion, hallucination and dream, whose attitude is not as distinct from that of per- ception as it is the attitude of memory or that of imagina- tion. One can cast perceptual illusions, hallucinations and dreams as perceptual experiences that, unlike standard perception, fail to represent things as they are. Specifical- ly, perceptual illusions lead the perceiver to cast things as having properties they do not actually have, while “partial hallucinations” lead her to perceive things that actually have not their place in her environment, and “total hallucinations”, just like dreams, leads the subject to experience a totally made up environment.23 Ordinary perception is somehow authoritative as for the reality of its content, and theater experience tends to inherit this epistemic authority, which it applies to the story world. Film experience, on the other hand, has a weaker epistemic authority despite its perceptual character. I contend that this depends on its peculiarly disembodied attitude. While watching a film, we have the impression of seeing characters who inhabit the story world, and events that occur in it, and we usually tend to endorse such im- pression thereby acquiring pieces of information about the story world. Yet, we do not perceive these events as occur- ring in the environment we inhabit with our body, and this somehow affect the degree of reliability of those pieces of information. Even though we tend to cast film experienc- es as a perception of events in the fictional world, we are disposed to acknowledge that this experience might mis- lead us as regards the way things are in that world. In this sense, film experience is a perceptual experience that can get closer than standard perception and theater experience to illusion, hallucination and dream. 23 For the distinction between partial and total hallucinations, see A.D. Smith, The Problem of Perception (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002): 193. Note that I am putting total hallucination and dreams on a par not because I think they are, but just because I reckon that discussing their difference goes beyond the scope of this paper. ENRICO TERRONE 87 AN-ICON  If the perceptual experience is a genus among whose species one can find not only standard perception but also illusion, hallucination, and dream, then film ex- perience can be cast as a peculiar further species of the genus, which can emulate all the other mental states of that genus. This fact is exploited by those films that lead the spectator to share the deceptive perceptual experi- ences of a character. In films such as David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001) we share the partial hallucination of the heroes by being in turn deceived by our perceptual experience of the events portrayed. Likewise, in films such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) or Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944), we share the total hallucinations or dreams of the characters by wrongly casting certain film experiences as perceptions of events that actually occur in the story world. In Wilson’s terms,24 spectators of such films enjoy the proper perceptual experiences but fail to endow them with the proper epistemic status, which is not the reliability of standard perception but rather the unreli- ability of illusion, hallucination or dream. In David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), at least according to a popular interpretation of the film,25 dream, memory and perception are combined in a way that can be grasped only after the fact. The first part of the film is presented from an allegedly neutral perceptual perspective but later reveals itself to be a dream of the protagonist Di- ane Selwyn. The material of that dream comes from Diane’s memories constituting the flashbacks that we find in the second part of the film, which also provides us with a neu- tral perceptual perspective on the last moments of Diane’s life, from her waking up from her dream to her suicide. 24 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164. 25 See for instance B. Wyman, M. Garrone, A. Klein, “Everything you were afraid to ask about Mulholland Drive”, Salon (October 24, 2001), https://www.salon.com/2001/10/24/ mulholland_drive_analysis/; P. Bertetto, “L’analisi interpretativa. Mulholland Drive”, in P. Bertetto, ed., Metodologie di analisi del film (Rome-Bari: Laterza: 2007): 223-255. ENRICO TERRONE 88 AN-ICON  The phenomenological virtues of virtual reality compared to film While film provides us with a disembodied per- ceptual experience, virtual reality makes us perceive an egocentric space, that is, a space which is centered in our body in the way the space of ordinary perception is. Both or- dinary perception and virtual-reality experience are such as that our bodily movements correspond to change in our viewpoint whereas the viewpoint of film experience is in- dependent from the viewer’s body. Virtual reality thus shares with theater a sig- nificant proximity to ordinary perception that film, instead, lacks. Should we conclude that virtual reality, just like the- ater, is less apt than film to approximate to non-perceptual mental states such as memory or imagination? Not so. Film experience, as disembodied perception, is already an altered state in comparison to ordinary per- ception. Nothing else remains to be altered at the phenom- enological level. The only possible alterations, as I have argued earlier, are alterations in the epistemic status of our perceptual experience: clues in the context or in the content of film experience may lead us to cast it as the memory or the imagining of a character, or even as a de- ceptive experience such as an illusion, an hallucination or a dream. Virtual-reality experience and theater experience, on the other hand, are not intrinsically altered; they work just as ordinary perception works. Yet, virtual-reality expe- rience can be altered in a way in which theater experience surely cannot be altered. Even though the default mode of virtual-reality experience is the emulation of ordinary perception, a virtual reality system might be designed so to provide users with experiences of completely different kinds. Whether and how such experience can effectively emulate memory episodes and imaginings remains an open question. Arguably the emulation of perception has been the main aim of virtual reality technology so far. Still, this technology has also a potential for altering its basic per- ceptual mode thereby getting the user’s experience closer ENRICO TERRONE 89 AN-ICON  to other kinds of mental states. Emulating memory and imagination through perception, the great challenge for filmmakers in the twentieth century, might become the great challenge for virtual-reality makers in the twenty-first. Para- phrasing Panofsky’s statement, virtual reality might open up a world of possibilities of which film can never dream. ENRICO TERRONE 90 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/15460

On the altered states of machine vision. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory by Antonio Somaini Chatonsky Machine learning Digital images Paglen Steyerl Chatonsky Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti On the altered states of machine vision. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory Chatonsky by Antonio Somaini Abstract The landscape of contemporary visual culture and contemporary artistic practices is currently undergo- ing profound transformations caused by the application of technologies of machine learning to the vast domain of networked digital images. The impact of such technologies is so profound that it leads us to raise the very question of what we mean by “vision” and “image” in the age of artifi- cial intelligence. This paper will focus on the work of three artists – Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory Chatonsky – who have recently employed technologies of machine learning in non-standard ways. Rather than using them to train systems of machine vision with their different op- erations (face and emotion recognition, object and move- ment detection, etc.) and their different fields of application (surveillance, policing, process control, driverless vehicle guidance, etc.), they have used them in order to produce entirely new images, never seen before, that they present as altered states of the machine itself. Machine learning Digital images Paglen Steyerl Chatonsky To quote this essay: A. Somaini, “On the altered states of machine vision. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory Chatonsky”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 91-111 ANTONIO SOMAINI 91 AN-ICON  The landscape of contemporary visual culture and contemporary artistic practices is currently undergo- ing profound transformations caused by the application of technologies of machine learning – one of the areas of so-called “artificial intelligence” – to the vast domain of networked digital images. Three strictly interrelated phe- nomena, in particular, are producing a real tectonic shift in the contemporary iconosphere, introducing new ways of “seeing” and new “images” – we’ll return later to the mean- ing of these quotation marks – that extend and reorganize the field of the visible, while redrawing the borders between what can and what cannot be seen. These three strictly interrelated phenomena are: ჸ the new technologies of machine vision fuelled by pro- cesses of machine learning such as the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN); ჸ the ever-growing presence on the internet of trillions of networked digital images that are machine-readable, in the sense that they can be seen and analyzed by such technologies of ma- chine vision; ჸ the entirely new images that the processes of machine learning may generate. Considered from the perspective of the longue durée of the history of images and visual media, the ap- pearance of these three phenomena raises a whole series of aesthetic, epistemological, ontological, historical and political questions. Their impact onto contemporary visu- al culture is so profound that it leads us to raise the very question of what we mean by “vision” and “image” in the age of artificial intelligence. What is “seeing” when the human psycho-phys- iological process of vision is reduced, in the case of machine vision technologies, to entirely automated operations of pat- tern recognition and labelling, and when the various appli- cations of such operations (face and emotion recognition, object and motion detection) may be deployed across an ex- tremely vast visual field (all the still and moving images acces- sible online) that no human eye could ever attain? In speak- ing of “machine vision”, are we using an anthropomorphic ANTONIO SOMAINI 92 AN-ICON  term that we should discard in favor of a different set of technical terms, specifically related to the field of computer science and data analysis, that bear no connection with the physiological and psychological dynamics of human vision? Artists-researchers such as Francis Hunger and scholars such as Andreas Broeckmann (with his notion of “optical calculus” as “an unthinking, mindless mechanism, a calcu- lation based on optically derived input data, abstracted into calculable values, which can become part of computational procedures and operations”),1 Adrian MacKenzie and Anna Munster (with their ideas of a “platform seeing” operating onto “image ensembles” through an “invisual perception”),2 Fabian Offert and Peter Bell (with their idea according to which the “perceptual topology” of machines is irreconcil- able with human perception)3 have argued for the necessity of moving beyond anthropocentric frameworks and terms, highlighting the fact that machine vision poses a real chal- lenge for the humanities. Can we still use the term “image” for a digital file, encoded in some image format,4 that is machine-read- able even when it is not visible by human eyes, or that be- comes visible on a screen as a pattern of pixels only for a small fraction of time, spending the rest of its indefinite lifespan circulating across invisible digital networks? Can concepts such as that of “iconic difference” [ikonische Dif- ferenz],5 which highlights the fundamental perceptual dif- ference between an image and its surroundings (its “hors champ”) be still applied to machine-readable images? And what is the status of the entirely new im- ages produced by processes of machine learning? These 1 A. Broeckmann, “Optical Calculus”, paper presented November 2020 at the conference Images Beyond Control, FAMU, Prague, video, 5:01, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=FnAgBbInMfA. 2 A. MacKenzie, A. Munster, “Platform Seeing: Image Ensembles and Their Invisualities”, Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 5 (2019): 3-22. 3 F. Offert, P. Bell, “Perceptual bias and technical metapictures: critical machine vision as a humanities challenge”, AI & Society (2020), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146- 020-01058-z. 4 On the theory of formats, see M. Jancovic, A. Schneider, A. Volmar, eds., Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media Cultures (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2019). 5 On the notion of “iconic difference”, see G. Boehm, “Ikonische Differenz”, Rheinsprung 11. Zeitschrift für Bildkritik 1 (2011): 170-176. ANTONIO SOMAINI 93 AN-ICON  are images that are not produced through some traditional form of lens-based analog or digital optical recording, nor through traditional computer-generated imagery (CGI) sys- tems, but rather through processes belonging to the wide realm of artificial intelligence that either transform existing images in ways that were impossible until a few years ago, or create entirely new images, never seen before. What do such images represent, what kind of agency do they have, how do they mediate our visual relation to the past, the present, and the future? And why have such new images generated by processes of machine learning been so of- ten considered, both in popular culture and in the work of contemporary artists, to be the product of some kind of altered state – a “dream”, a “hallucination”, a “vision”, an “artificial imagination” – of the machine itself? Before we analyse the way in which this last question is raised, in different ways, by popular computer programs such as Google’s DeepDream (whose initial name echoed Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film “Inception”), and by the recent work of contemporary artists and theorists such as Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl and Grégory Chatonsky, let us begin with a quick overview of the current state of ma- chine vision technologies, with their operations and appli- cations, and of the new images produced by processes of machine learning that are increasingly appearing through- out contemporary visual culture. The impact of machine learning technologies onto contemporary visual culture First tested in the late 1950s, with image rec- ognition machines such as the Perceptron (developed at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory by Frank Rosenblatt in 1957), and then developed during the 1960s and 1970s as a way of imitating the human visual system in order to endow robots with intelligent behavior, machine vision technologies have entered a new phase, in recent years, with the development of machine learning processes, ANTONIO SOMAINI 94 AN-ICON  and with the possibility of using immense image databases accessible online as both training sets and fields of appli- cation.6 If in the 1960s and 1970s the goal was mainly to extract three-dimensional structures from images through the localization of edges, the labelling of lines, the detection of shapes and the modelling of volumes through feature extraction techniques such as the Hough transform (invent- ed by Richard Duda and Peter Hart in 1972, on the basis of a 1962 patent by Paul Hough), the recent development of machine learning techniques and the use of vast image training sets organized according to precise taxonomies – such as ImageNet, in which 14 millions of images are organized according to 21,000 categories derived from the WordNet hierarchy (a large lexical database of English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs)7 – have allowed a rapid increase in the precision of all the operations of ma- chine vision. Among such operations, we find pixel counting; segmenting, sorting, and thresholding; feature, edge, and depth detection; pattern recognition and discrimination; object detection, tracking, and measurement; motion cap- ture; color analysis; optical character recognition (this last operation allowing for the reading of words and texts within images, extending the act of machine “seeing” to a form of machine “reading”). For a few years now, such operations have been applied to the immense field of machine-readable images. A field whose dimensions may be imagined only if we understand that any networked digital image – wheth- er produced through some kind of optical recording, or entirely computer-generated, or a mix of the two, as it is often the case – may be analysed by machine vision tech- nologies based on processes of machine learning such as the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN).8 Starting from vast training sets containing images similar to the 6 For a general overview of computer vision and computer imagery, with its historical developments, see S. Arcagni, L’occhio della macchina (Turin: Einaudi, 2018). 7 “ImageNet”, accessed November 3, 2021, http://www.image-net.org/. 8 I. Goodfellow et al., “Generative adversarial nets”, Advances in neural information processing systems (2014): 2672-2680. ANTONIO SOMAINI 95 AN-ICON  ones the system has to learn to identify, and feeding such training sets into an ensemble of two adversarial neural networks that act as a Generator and a Discriminator that are in competition against one another, the GAN-based machine vision systems have gradually become more and more precise in performing their tasks. All the main smart phone producers have equipped their devices with cam- eras and image processing technologies that turn every photo we take into a machine-readable image, and internet giants such as Google and Facebook, as well as a host of other companies, have developed machine vision and face recognition systems capable of analysing the immense quantity of fixed and moving images that exist on the in- ternet and that continue to be uploaded every day, raising all sorts of ethical and political issues and highlighting the need for a broader legal framework that for the moment is largely missing.9 Considered together, such machine vision sys- tems are turning the contemporary digital iconosphere and the entire array of contemporary screens, with their various dimensions and degrees of definition,10 into a vast field for data mining and data aggregation. A field in which faces, bodies, gestures, expressions, emotions, objects, move- ments, places, atmospheres and moods – but also voices and sounds, through technologies of machine hearing – may be identified, labelled, stored, organized, retrieved, and processed as data that can be quickly accessed and activated for a wide variety of purposes: from surveillance to policing, from marketing to advertising, from the mon- itoring of industrial processes to military operations, from the functioning of driverless vehicles to that of drones and robots, from the study of the inside of the human body through the analysis of medical imagining all the way up to 9 As I complete the final revisions of this essay, on 2 November 2021, Facebook just announced its decision to stop using facial-recognition software that could automatically recognize people in photos and videos posted on the social network: a massive shift for a company that is currently trying to reposition itself, also through the new company name Meta, adopted in October 2021. 10 On the aesthetic, epistemological, historical and political implications of the high and low definition of images, see F. Casetti, A. Somaini, eds., La haute et la basse définition des images. Photographie, cinéma, art contemporain, culture visuelle (Milan-Udine: Mimesis, 2021). ANTONIO SOMAINI 96 AN-ICON  the study of the surface of the Earth and of climate change through the analysis of satellite images. Even disciplines that might seem to be distant from the most common cur- rent applications of machine vision technologies, such as art history and film studies, are beginning to test the pos- sibilities introduced by such an automated gaze, capable of “seeing” and analyzing, according to different criteria, vast quantities of visual reproductions of artworks or vast corpuses of films and videos in an extremely short time.11 In order to fully understand the impact of ma- chine learning onto contemporary visual culture, we need to add, to the vast field of machine vision technologies that we just described, the new images produced by processes of machine learning – often, the same GAN that are used to train and apply machine vision systems – that either transform pre-existing images in ways that were impossible until a few years ago, or create entirely new images, never seen before. In the first case, we are referring to processes of machine learning capable of transforming existing imag- es that can have very different applications: producing 3D models of objects from 2D images; changing photographs of human faces in order to show how an individual’s ap- pearance might change with age (as with the app Face- App) or by merging a face with another face (Faceswap);12 animating in a highly realistic way the old photograph of a deceased person (Deep Nostalgia, developed by My- Heritage);13 creating street maps from satellite imagery;14 taking any given video, and “upscaling” it, by increasing its frame rate and its definition. An emblematic example 11 See for example the various experiments being developed at the Google Arts & Culture Lab: “Google Arts & Culture”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://artsandculture.google. com/, or the way in which the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam is testing new ways of accessing its collections through a program fuelled by machine vision systems: “Jan Bot”, accessed December 2, 2021, https://www.jan.bot/. 12 The website of Faceswap, which announces itself as “the leading free and OpenSource multiplatform Deepfakes software”: “Faceswap”, accessed November 3, 2021, https:// faceswap.dev/. 13 “Deep Nostalgia”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.myheritage.fr/deep-nostalgia. 14 R. Matheson, “Using artificial intelligence to enrich digital maps. Model tags road features based on satellite images, to improve GPS navigation in places with limited map data”, MIT News, January 23, 2020, https://news.mit.edu/2020/artificial-intelligence-digital-maps-0123. ANTONIO SOMAINI 97 AN-ICON  of this last application, which may alter significantly our experience of visual documents of the past, would be the videos realized by Denis Shiryaev15 in which, through a process of machine learning, a Lumière film such as L’Ar- rivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896) is transformed from the original 16 frames per second to 60 frames per second, from the original 1.33:1 format to a contemporary 16:9 format, and from the original, grainy 35mm analog film to a 4K digital resolution.16 In other examples of imag- es transformed by machine learning, the transformations are much more radical, as it happens with the so-called “deepfakes”: videos that use neural networks in order to ma- nipulate the images and the sounds of pre-existing videos – in some cases a single, pre-existing image – producing new videos that have a high potential to deceive. Among the many examples that can now be found across the in- ternet in different domains such as pornography, politics and social media, pornographic videos in which faces of celebrities are swapped onto the bodies of porn actors, a TikTok account with a whole series of odd videos by a “Deep Tom Cruise”,17 or speeches by public figures such as Barack Obama18 and Queen Elizabeth19 whose content has been completely altered in such a way that the movements of their mouths perfectly match the new, invented words they are uttering. And among the applications of deepfakes in the musical realm, the “new” songs by long deceased singers, whose style and voice are reproduced in a highly realistic way by applications of machine learning such as Jukebox, developed by OpenAI20: a “resurrecting” function 15 “Denis Shiryaev”, Youtube channel, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.youtube. com/c/DenisShiryaev/videos. For an online platform offering video enhancement powered by AI, see: “Neural Love”, accessed December 2, 2021, https://neural.love/. 16 The video of the upscaled version of L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896) can be found all across YouTube, in various black-and-white and colored version. For a version in color, see: Deoldify videos, “[DeOldified] Arrival on a Train at La Ciotat (The Lumière Brothers, 1896)”, Youtube video, February 4, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqbOhqXHL7E. 17 “Deep Tom Cruise”, TikTok account, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.tiktok. com/@deeptomcruise. 18 BuzzFeed Video, “You Won’t Believe What Obama Says in This Video!”, Youtube video, April 17, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0. 19 Channel 4, “Deepfake Queen: 2020 Alternative Christmas Message”, Youtube video, December 25, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvY-Abd2FfM. 20 “Jukebox”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 98 AN-ICON  that in the animated photographs of deceased persons of Deep Nostalgia. In the second case, the use of machine learning processes leads to the creation of entirely new images or sections of images: modelling patterns of motion (for ex- ample, crowd motion) in video, thereby leading computer generated imagery, in some cases fuelled by artificial intelli- gence, to produce new kinds of “contingent motion”;21 pro- ducing highly photorealistic images of objects and environ- ments for different kinds of advertising; inventing perfectly realistic faces of people that actually do not exist through open source softwares such as StyleGan and then make them accessible through projects such as Philip Wang’s This Person Does Not Exist.22 To these widespread applications of machine learning we may add the hybrid, unprecedented imagery produced by the software DeepDream, created in 2015 by the Google engineer and artist Alexander Mordvintsev: a program that uses Convolutional Neural Networks in order to enhance patterns in pre-existing images, creating a form of algorithmic pareidolia, the impression of seeing a figure where there is none, which is here generated by a process which repeatedly detects in a given image patterns and shapes that the machine vision system has been trained to see. 23 The result of such a recursive process, in which every new image is submitted again to the same kind of pattern and shape recognition, are images that recall an entire psychedelic iconography that spans through cinema, photography, the visual arts and even so-called art brut: images that are here presented as a sort of dream – a hal- lucinogenic, psychedelic dream – of the machine itself. 21 J. Schonig, “Contingent Motion: Rethinking the ‘Wind in the Trees’ in Early Cinema and CGI”, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 40, no. 1 (2018): 30-61. 22 “This Person does not exist”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/. 23 The program is now open source: see “Deep Dream Generator”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://deepdreamgenerator.com/. See also: “Alexander Mordvintsev”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://znah.net/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 99 AN-ICON  Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 The original image (Fig. 1) has been modified by applying ten (Fig. 2) and then fifty (Fig. 3) iterations of the software DeepDream, the network having been trained to perceive dogs. ANTONIO SOMAINI 100 AN-ICON  Exploring the “altered states” of machine vision through Generative Adversarial Networks The idea that lies at the basis of the DeepDream software – the idea that machine learning technologies, and in particular the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), may be used in order to explore and reveal the altered states of machine vision – can also be found in the recent works of artists (often active also as theorists) such as Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and Grégory Chatonsky.24 By insisting on the “creative”, image-producing potential of Generative Adversarial neural networks – rather than on their standard application for the training of machine vision systems – the three of them explore a vast field of images that they consider to be “hallucinations”, “visions of the future”, or the product of an “artificial imagination”, char- acterized by a new form of realism, a “disrealism”. Trevor Paglen’s entire work as an artist and the- orist, since 2016, has been dedicated to the attempt of un- derstanding and visualizing the principles that lie at the basis of machine vision technology. Through texts (sometimes written in collaboration with the researcher Kate Crawford),25 exhibitions, performances, and works made of still and mov- ing images, Paglen has tried to highlight not only the social and political biases that are inherent in the way machine vi- sion systems are structured, but also the way in which such systems diverge profoundly from human vision.26 In an article published in December 2016 in The New Inquiry with the title “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)”,27 Paglen discusses the new challeng- es that arise in a context in which “sight” itself has be- come machine-operated and separated by human eyes, 24 Among the first artists who started working with GANs, one should remember Helena Sarin and Mike Tyka. See “Helena Sarin”, AI Artist, accessed November 3, 2021 https://aiartists.org/ helena-sarin, and “Mike Tyka”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://miketyka.com/. 25 K. Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 26 See: “Trevor Paglen”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://paglen.studio/. 27 T. Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)”, The New Inquiry, December 8, 2016: https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 101 AN-ICON  participating in a vast field of image operations. Arguing that what we are currently experiencing is part of a vast transition from human-seeable to machine-readable imag- es – a new condition in which “the overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop” – Paglen writes that if we want to understand the invisible world of machine-machine vi- sual culture, we need to unlearn to see like humans. We need to learn how to see a parallel universe composed of activations, keypoints, eigenfaces, feature transforms, classifiers, training sets, and the like.28 We need to unlearn to see like humans. But how can we not see like humans, how can we step out of our human point of view? Accomplishing this apparently impos- sible task – a task which echoes the recurrent philosophical problem of how to step out of one’s own socio-historical position, of one’s own cognitive and emotional framework – has been the main goal of Trevor Paglen’s artistic practice during the last few years, as we can see in a body of works that was initially produced in 2017 through various col- laborations with computer vision and artificial intelligence researchers as an artist-in-residence at Stanford Univer- sity, and was first exhibited at the Metro Pictures Gallery in New York in an exhibition entitled A Study of Invisible Images (September 8 – October 21, 2017) 29, before being presented at various other galleries and museums such as the Osservatorio of the Fondazione Prada in Milan, or the Carnegie Museum of Art in Philadelphia, in an exhibition entitled Opposing Geometries (2020). The works in the exhibition at Metro Pictures present a possible response to the challenge of how to pen- etrate within systems of machine vision that tend to expel the human gaze from their processes. Among them, we find the attempt to master the machine learning techniques 28 Ibid. 29 A series of images of the works presented in the exhibition can be found at the following address: “Trevor Paglen. A study of Invisible Images”, Metro Pictures, accessed January 19, 2020, http://origin.www.metropictures.com/exhibitions/trevor-paglen4. ANTONIO SOMAINI 102 AN-ICON  that are commonly used for machine vision applications, in order to hack them and lead them to produce entirely new images, never seen before, that may be considered as a form of hallucination of machine vision. This is what happens in a series of still images entitled Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, which Paglen developed through a non-standard application, in three steps, of Generative Adversarial Networks.30 The first step consisted in establishing new, original training sets. Instead of using the usual corpuses of images that are used to train machine vision systems in recognizing faces, objects, places and even emotions – corpuses that are often derived by pre-existing and easily available image databases such as the already mentioned ImageNet – Paglen established new training sets composed by images derived from literature, psychoanalysis, political economy, military history, and poetry. Among the various taxonomies he used in order to compose his training sets we find “monsters that have been historically interpreted as allegories of capitalism”, such as vampires, zombies, etc.; “omens and portents”, such as comets, eclipses, etc.; “figures and places that appear in Sigmund Freud’s The In- terpretation of Dreams”, a corpus which includes various symbols from Freudian psychoanalysis; “Eye-Machines”, a series of images clearly inspired by Harun Farocki’s videoin- stallations Eye-Machine I, II, III (2001-2003) and containing images of surveillance cameras or of spaces under surveil- lance; “American Predators”, a corpus containing various predatory animals, plants, and humans indigenous to the United States, mixed with military hardware like predator drones and stealth bombers. The second step consisted in feeding these un- usual training sets into the two neural networks of the GAN system: the Discriminator and the Generator. These two networks begin interacting with one another in an adver- sarial, competitive way, in such a way that the Discriminator, 30 Information on the Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations can be found in Trevor Paglen’s website: T. Paglen, “Hallucinations”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://paglen. studio/2020/04/09/hallucinations/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 103 AN-ICON  after having received the initial training set, has to evaluate the images that it receives from the Generator, deciding whether they resemble or not to those of the training set. As the process unfolds through reiterated exchanges between the two neural networks, the Discriminator becomes more and more precise and effective in evaluating the images that are submitted to it. The third step consists in the artist intervening in the process and choosing to extract, at a given mo- ment, one of the images produced by the Generator: an image that emerges from the sequence of the adversarial exchanges, and that is the result of one of the countless attempts by the Generator to test the precision of the Dis- criminator, trying to fool it. In the case of the series of the Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, all the images selected by Paglen seem to bear some kind of resemblance to the ones contained in the original training sets – even though we cannot really assess the degree of this resemblance, because the training sets are not accessible to us – while displaying at the same time different forms of deviations and aberrations that recall a sort of psychedelic imaginary. Among Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hal- lucinations, we find images with titles such as Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), Comet (Corpus: Omens and Portents), The Great Hall (Corpus: The Interpreta- tion of Dreams), Venus Flytrap (Corpus: American Pred- ators), A Prison Without Gards (Corpus: Eye-Machines). In the case of Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), ANTONIO SOMAINI 104 AN-ICON  Fig. 4. Trevor Paglen, Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), dye sublimation metal print, 2017 the Discriminator was trained on thousands of images of zombies, vampires, Frankensteins, and other ghosts that have been at some point – be it in essays, liter- ary texts, or films – associated with capitalism. Paglen then set the Generator and Discriminator running until they had synthesized a series of images that corresponded at least in part to a specific class within the given corpus. From all of the even slightly acceptable options that the GAN gen- erated, Paglen then selected the one we see in the series exhibited at Metro Pictures as the “finished work”. There may be multiple reasons behind Trevor Paglen’s decision to call these images “hallucinations”. To begin with, such images recall a type of imagery that we might consider to be “psychedelic” or “surrealist”: in some of them, we definitely see echoes of Max Ernst, or Salvador Dalì. A second reason may lie in the attempt to emphasize the fact that the result of this non-standard application of the processes of machine learning – a process which un- folds within a closed machine-to-machine space, the in- visible space of the back-and-forth between the Generator and the Discriminator from which human eyes are excluded – produces images that, just like human hallucinations, have no footing in exterior reality, or may merge in unpredictable ANTONIO SOMAINI 105 AN-ICON  way with shapes and forms stemming from the perception of the outer world. Finally, the term “adversarially evolved hallucinations” may underline the fact that these images are the result of a machine learning process gone astray: a process which has been hacked and led to drift away from its original, standard applications. The reference to the term “hallucinations”, though, should not be misleading. What Trevor Paglen tries to show us with his Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations has really nothing to do with a disruption of the orderly functioning of human consciousness. What they highlight, rather, is the radical otherness of machine vision, if compared with human vision. A radical otherness based on operations that have nothing to do with human, embodied vision, which we may just try to grasp through the impossible attempt of “unlearn- ing to see like humans”. We find a different application of images pro- duced by machine learning in This is the Future, an instal- lation by Hito Steyerl which was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2019, and which was conceived as an expan- sion of the exhibition Power Plants at the Serpentine Gal- lery in London the previous year. In the Venice installation, Hito Steyerl arranged onto different platforms a series of nine videos in which one could see images resembling to some kind of “vegetal” time-lapse imagery: flowers quickly blossoming and spreading out, plants and bamboo shoots growing in height and width. Fig. 5a ANTONIO SOMAINI 106 AN-ICON  Fig. 5b Fig. 5c Figg. 5a, 5b and 5c. Hito Steyerl, This if the Future: A 100% Accurate Prediction, stills from the single channel HD video, color, sound, 16’, 2019 What interested Steyerl in the use of neural networks in this installation was the predictive nature of machine learning, and the status of “visions of the future” of its imagery: the fact that neural predictive algorithms op- erate through statistical models and predictions based on immense, “big data” databases, and are therefore related to the vast spectrum of predictive systems (be they finan- cial, political, meteorological, environmental, etc.) that are present in contemporary “control societies”, while at the same time being part of the longue durée of the history of prediction systems elaborated by human cultures. The main video presented in Hito Steyerl’s instal- lation, entitled This is the Future: A 100% Accurate Prediction, consists of images produced through a collaboration with the programmer Damien Henry, author of a series of videos entitled A Train Window31 in which a machine learning algo- rithm has been trained to predict the next frame of a video by analyzing samples from the previous image, in such a way that, as in a perfect feedback loop, each output image 31 The videos, programmed with Tensorflow, are available at: D. Henry, “A train window”, Magenta, October 3rd, 2018, https://magenta.tensorflow.org/nfp_p2p. I thank both Hito Steyerl and Damien Henry for useful information on the coding used in This is the Future. ANTONIO SOMAINI 107 AN-ICON  becomes the input for the next step in the calculation. In this way, after intentionally choosing or producing only the first image, all the following ones are generated by the algorithm, without any human intervention. In Hito Steyerl’s work, this idea of a video entirely made up of images “predicted” by neural networks and located, as the video says, “0.04 sec- onds in the future”, is presented as a new kind of documen- tary imagery: an imagery that can at the same time predict and document the future, as paradoxical as this may seem. The video begins with white text on a black background that reads: “These are documentary images of the future. Not about what it will bring, but about what it is made of”. The next five sections of the video – Heja’s Garden, The Future: A History, Bambusa Futuris, Power Plants and Heja’s Pre- diction – lead us to a psychedelic landscape of images that morph sample images stemming from categories such as “sea”, “fish”, “flower”, “rose” or “orchid”: each of them is produced by a neural network that, as the electronic voice accompanying the video tells us, “can see one fraction of a second into the future”. Second Earth (2019) by Grégory Chatonsky takes another route into the iconosphere produced by GAN-driven machine learning. What interests him is the idea of an “artificial imagination”, capable of visualizing, through the means of artificial intelligence, “the halluci- nation of a senseless machine, a monument dedicated to the memory of the extinct human species”.32 Himself in charge of the coding which lies at the base of the various elements and the various media mobilized in his work, Cha- tonsky works in particular on what he calls the “chaînage”, the “sequencing” of different artificial intelligence sys- tems that, taken all together, produce a whole cascade of new forms: among them, neural networks capable of generating new texts (read by synthetic voices) starting from some given text databases, or capable of generat- ing images from given texts, and texts from given images, 32 See the presentation of Second Earth: G. Chatonsky, “Second Earth / Terre Seconde”, accessed November 29, 2021, http://chatonsky.net/earth/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 108 AN-ICON  with a new kind of AI-powered ekphrasis. The metamor- phical universe that we see in the videos of Second Earth, Fig. 6a Fig. 6b Fig. 6c Fig. 6d Figg. 6a, 6b, 6c and 6d. Grégory Chatonsky, Second Earth, stills from one of the videos in the installation, 2019 a work that Chatonsky presents as an “evolving installation”, evokes the idea of a form-generating power that used to be rooted in nature and which is now taken over by machines which are incorporating and re-elaborating the trillions of ANTONIO SOMAINI 109 AN-ICON  images that humans have uploaded on the internet as a sort of hypertrophic memory. The text accompanying the work reads: “Accumulate data. Outsourcing our memories. Feed software with this data so that it produces similar data. Produce realism without reality, become possible. Disap- pear. Coming back in our absence, like somebody else”.33 As products of a “realism without reality”, what Chatonsky calls a “disrealism”,34 the images produced through Generative Adversarial Networks in Second Earth do have a hallucinatory, oneiric, “surrealistic” quality, that bears a strange kind of “family resemblance” to the ones that we find in Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, Steyerl’s This is the Future, and in the work of other artists who have recently explored the GAN-generated imagery, such as Pierre Huyghe in his installation Uumwelt (2018). In Chatonsky’s Second Earth, these images do refer to some kind of “outer reality”, but the status of this outer reality is highly unclear. On the one hand, they bear traces of the imag- es contained in the training sets that have been employed in order to activate the GANs: in the cases of the stills from one of the videos in the installation that are here reproduced, such training sets referred probably to categories such as “birds”, “faces”, “eyes”, etc., and the images contained in the training sets – be they actual photographs, or still from videos – do in most cases refer to some profilmic reality. On the other, extracted as they are from the “latent space” of a process of machine learning in motion from the pole of absolute noise to the pole of a perfect re- semblance to the images of the training set, the images of Second Earth refer to another kind of reality, one that does not exist yet. We are here in the domain of “anticipation”, rather than “prediction”,35 in the perspective of an explora- 33 G. Chatonsky, Second Earth, http://chatonsky.net/earth/. 34 Grégory Chatonsky has begun to use and theorize this term in recent lectures held at the Jeu de Paume and at Campus Condorcet in Paris, in the framework of the lecture cycle L’esthétique à l’heure du pixel (September 2021 – May 2022) and the seminar L’image à l’épreuve des machines. Reconfigurations du visible (25-26 October 2021). See for example “Le disréalisme (le pixel perdu de l’espace latent)”, Jeu de Paume, accessed november 29, 2021, https://jeudepaume.org/evenement/seminaire-esthetique-pixel-1/. 35 Unpublished conversation with Grégory Chatonsky, 2019, whom I thank for the useful information on the different software used in Second Earth. ANTONIO SOMAINI 110 AN-ICON  tion of a non-human “artificial imagination”, rather than in the denunciation of the pervasive presence of systems of control and surveillance, as it was the case in the work of Hito Steyerl. At the basis of Chatonsky’s “Second Earth”, we find the observation that the machine was becoming capable of automatically producing a phenomenal quantity of realistic images from the accumulation of data on the Web. This realism is similar to the world we know, but it is not an identical reproduction. Species metamorphose into each other, stones mutate into plants and the ocean shores into unseen organisms. The result: this “second” Earth, a reinvention of our world, produced by a machine that wonders about the nature of its production. Over fifty years ago, in his seminal Understand- ing Media. The Extensions of Man (1964), Marshall McLuhan formulated the idea that art could become, in some deci- sive historical moments, a form of “advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology”, and added that new art forms might become in these moments “social navigation charts”, help- ing us find some orientation across a sensorium entirely transformed by new media and new technologies. Today, while we witness the first signs of what promises to be a massive impact of artificial intelligence onto all areas of our psychic, social, and cultural life, the works of artists such as Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl and Grégory Chatonsky do appear like “navigation charts”: their exploration of the al- tered states of machine vision through the appropriation and the détournement of technologies such as the Gen- erative Adversarial Networks help us better understand the aesthetic, epistemological and political implications of the transformations that such technologies are producing within contemporary visual culture. Taken together, they highlight the fact that what is at stake is the very status of what we mean by “image” and by “vision” in the age of artificial intelligence. ANTONIO SOMAINI 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/15460

On the altered states of machine vision. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory by Antonio Somaini Chatonsky Machine learning Digital images Paglen Steyerl Chatonsky Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti On the altered states of machine vision. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory Chatonsky by Antonio Somaini Abstract The landscape of contemporary visual culture and contemporary artistic practices is currently undergo- ing profound transformations caused by the application of technologies of machine learning to the vast domain of networked digital images. The impact of such technologies is so profound that it leads us to raise the very question of what we mean by “vision” and “image” in the age of artifi- cial intelligence. This paper will focus on the work of three artists – Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory Chatonsky – who have recently employed technologies of machine learning in non-standard ways. Rather than using them to train systems of machine vision with their different op- erations (face and emotion recognition, object and move- ment detection, etc.) and their different fields of application (surveillance, policing, process control, driverless vehicle guidance, etc.), they have used them in order to produce entirely new images, never seen before, that they present as altered states of the machine itself. Machine learning Digital images Paglen Steyerl Chatonsky To quote this essay: A. Somaini, “On the altered states of machine vision. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Grégory Chatonsky”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 91-111 ANTONIO SOMAINI 91 AN-ICON  The landscape of contemporary visual culture and contemporary artistic practices is currently undergo- ing profound transformations caused by the application of technologies of machine learning – one of the areas of so-called “artificial intelligence” – to the vast domain of networked digital images. Three strictly interrelated phe- nomena, in particular, are producing a real tectonic shift in the contemporary iconosphere, introducing new ways of “seeing” and new “images” – we’ll return later to the mean- ing of these quotation marks – that extend and reorganize the field of the visible, while redrawing the borders between what can and what cannot be seen. These three strictly interrelated phenomena are: ჸ the new technologies of machine vision fuelled by pro- cesses of machine learning such as the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN); ჸ the ever-growing presence on the internet of trillions of networked digital images that are machine-readable, in the sense that they can be seen and analyzed by such technologies of ma- chine vision; ჸ the entirely new images that the processes of machine learning may generate. Considered from the perspective of the longue durée of the history of images and visual media, the ap- pearance of these three phenomena raises a whole series of aesthetic, epistemological, ontological, historical and political questions. Their impact onto contemporary visu- al culture is so profound that it leads us to raise the very question of what we mean by “vision” and “image” in the age of artificial intelligence. What is “seeing” when the human psycho-phys- iological process of vision is reduced, in the case of machine vision technologies, to entirely automated operations of pat- tern recognition and labelling, and when the various appli- cations of such operations (face and emotion recognition, object and motion detection) may be deployed across an ex- tremely vast visual field (all the still and moving images acces- sible online) that no human eye could ever attain? In speak- ing of “machine vision”, are we using an anthropomorphic ANTONIO SOMAINI 92 AN-ICON  term that we should discard in favor of a different set of technical terms, specifically related to the field of computer science and data analysis, that bear no connection with the physiological and psychological dynamics of human vision? Artists-researchers such as Francis Hunger and scholars such as Andreas Broeckmann (with his notion of “optical calculus” as “an unthinking, mindless mechanism, a calcu- lation based on optically derived input data, abstracted into calculable values, which can become part of computational procedures and operations”),1 Adrian MacKenzie and Anna Munster (with their ideas of a “platform seeing” operating onto “image ensembles” through an “invisual perception”),2 Fabian Offert and Peter Bell (with their idea according to which the “perceptual topology” of machines is irreconcil- able with human perception)3 have argued for the necessity of moving beyond anthropocentric frameworks and terms, highlighting the fact that machine vision poses a real chal- lenge for the humanities. Can we still use the term “image” for a digital file, encoded in some image format,4 that is machine-read- able even when it is not visible by human eyes, or that be- comes visible on a screen as a pattern of pixels only for a small fraction of time, spending the rest of its indefinite lifespan circulating across invisible digital networks? Can concepts such as that of “iconic difference” [ikonische Dif- ferenz],5 which highlights the fundamental perceptual dif- ference between an image and its surroundings (its “hors champ”) be still applied to machine-readable images? And what is the status of the entirely new im- ages produced by processes of machine learning? These 1 A. Broeckmann, “Optical Calculus”, paper presented November 2020 at the conference Images Beyond Control, FAMU, Prague, video, 5:01, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=FnAgBbInMfA. 2 A. MacKenzie, A. Munster, “Platform Seeing: Image Ensembles and Their Invisualities”, Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 5 (2019): 3-22. 3 F. Offert, P. Bell, “Perceptual bias and technical metapictures: critical machine vision as a humanities challenge”, AI & Society (2020), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146- 020-01058-z. 4 On the theory of formats, see M. Jancovic, A. Schneider, A. Volmar, eds., Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media Cultures (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2019). 5 On the notion of “iconic difference”, see G. Boehm, “Ikonische Differenz”, Rheinsprung 11. Zeitschrift für Bildkritik 1 (2011): 170-176. ANTONIO SOMAINI 93 AN-ICON  are images that are not produced through some traditional form of lens-based analog or digital optical recording, nor through traditional computer-generated imagery (CGI) sys- tems, but rather through processes belonging to the wide realm of artificial intelligence that either transform existing images in ways that were impossible until a few years ago, or create entirely new images, never seen before. What do such images represent, what kind of agency do they have, how do they mediate our visual relation to the past, the present, and the future? And why have such new images generated by processes of machine learning been so of- ten considered, both in popular culture and in the work of contemporary artists, to be the product of some kind of altered state – a “dream”, a “hallucination”, a “vision”, an “artificial imagination” – of the machine itself? Before we analyse the way in which this last question is raised, in different ways, by popular computer programs such as Google’s DeepDream (whose initial name echoed Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film “Inception”), and by the recent work of contemporary artists and theorists such as Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl and Grégory Chatonsky, let us begin with a quick overview of the current state of ma- chine vision technologies, with their operations and appli- cations, and of the new images produced by processes of machine learning that are increasingly appearing through- out contemporary visual culture. The impact of machine learning technologies onto contemporary visual culture First tested in the late 1950s, with image rec- ognition machines such as the Perceptron (developed at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory by Frank Rosenblatt in 1957), and then developed during the 1960s and 1970s as a way of imitating the human visual system in order to endow robots with intelligent behavior, machine vision technologies have entered a new phase, in recent years, with the development of machine learning processes, ANTONIO SOMAINI 94 AN-ICON  and with the possibility of using immense image databases accessible online as both training sets and fields of appli- cation.6 If in the 1960s and 1970s the goal was mainly to extract three-dimensional structures from images through the localization of edges, the labelling of lines, the detection of shapes and the modelling of volumes through feature extraction techniques such as the Hough transform (invent- ed by Richard Duda and Peter Hart in 1972, on the basis of a 1962 patent by Paul Hough), the recent development of machine learning techniques and the use of vast image training sets organized according to precise taxonomies – such as ImageNet, in which 14 millions of images are organized according to 21,000 categories derived from the WordNet hierarchy (a large lexical database of English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs)7 – have allowed a rapid increase in the precision of all the operations of ma- chine vision. Among such operations, we find pixel counting; segmenting, sorting, and thresholding; feature, edge, and depth detection; pattern recognition and discrimination; object detection, tracking, and measurement; motion cap- ture; color analysis; optical character recognition (this last operation allowing for the reading of words and texts within images, extending the act of machine “seeing” to a form of machine “reading”). For a few years now, such operations have been applied to the immense field of machine-readable images. A field whose dimensions may be imagined only if we understand that any networked digital image – wheth- er produced through some kind of optical recording, or entirely computer-generated, or a mix of the two, as it is often the case – may be analysed by machine vision tech- nologies based on processes of machine learning such as the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN).8 Starting from vast training sets containing images similar to the 6 For a general overview of computer vision and computer imagery, with its historical developments, see S. Arcagni, L’occhio della macchina (Turin: Einaudi, 2018). 7 “ImageNet”, accessed November 3, 2021, http://www.image-net.org/. 8 I. Goodfellow et al., “Generative adversarial nets”, Advances in neural information processing systems (2014): 2672-2680. ANTONIO SOMAINI 95 AN-ICON  ones the system has to learn to identify, and feeding such training sets into an ensemble of two adversarial neural networks that act as a Generator and a Discriminator that are in competition against one another, the GAN-based machine vision systems have gradually become more and more precise in performing their tasks. All the main smart phone producers have equipped their devices with cam- eras and image processing technologies that turn every photo we take into a machine-readable image, and internet giants such as Google and Facebook, as well as a host of other companies, have developed machine vision and face recognition systems capable of analysing the immense quantity of fixed and moving images that exist on the in- ternet and that continue to be uploaded every day, raising all sorts of ethical and political issues and highlighting the need for a broader legal framework that for the moment is largely missing.9 Considered together, such machine vision sys- tems are turning the contemporary digital iconosphere and the entire array of contemporary screens, with their various dimensions and degrees of definition,10 into a vast field for data mining and data aggregation. A field in which faces, bodies, gestures, expressions, emotions, objects, move- ments, places, atmospheres and moods – but also voices and sounds, through technologies of machine hearing – may be identified, labelled, stored, organized, retrieved, and processed as data that can be quickly accessed and activated for a wide variety of purposes: from surveillance to policing, from marketing to advertising, from the mon- itoring of industrial processes to military operations, from the functioning of driverless vehicles to that of drones and robots, from the study of the inside of the human body through the analysis of medical imagining all the way up to 9 As I complete the final revisions of this essay, on 2 November 2021, Facebook just announced its decision to stop using facial-recognition software that could automatically recognize people in photos and videos posted on the social network: a massive shift for a company that is currently trying to reposition itself, also through the new company name Meta, adopted in October 2021. 10 On the aesthetic, epistemological, historical and political implications of the high and low definition of images, see F. Casetti, A. Somaini, eds., La haute et la basse définition des images. Photographie, cinéma, art contemporain, culture visuelle (Milan-Udine: Mimesis, 2021). ANTONIO SOMAINI 96 AN-ICON  the study of the surface of the Earth and of climate change through the analysis of satellite images. Even disciplines that might seem to be distant from the most common cur- rent applications of machine vision technologies, such as art history and film studies, are beginning to test the pos- sibilities introduced by such an automated gaze, capable of “seeing” and analyzing, according to different criteria, vast quantities of visual reproductions of artworks or vast corpuses of films and videos in an extremely short time.11 In order to fully understand the impact of ma- chine learning onto contemporary visual culture, we need to add, to the vast field of machine vision technologies that we just described, the new images produced by processes of machine learning – often, the same GAN that are used to train and apply machine vision systems – that either transform pre-existing images in ways that were impossible until a few years ago, or create entirely new images, never seen before. In the first case, we are referring to processes of machine learning capable of transforming existing imag- es that can have very different applications: producing 3D models of objects from 2D images; changing photographs of human faces in order to show how an individual’s ap- pearance might change with age (as with the app Face- App) or by merging a face with another face (Faceswap);12 animating in a highly realistic way the old photograph of a deceased person (Deep Nostalgia, developed by My- Heritage);13 creating street maps from satellite imagery;14 taking any given video, and “upscaling” it, by increasing its frame rate and its definition. An emblematic example 11 See for example the various experiments being developed at the Google Arts & Culture Lab: “Google Arts & Culture”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://artsandculture.google. com/, or the way in which the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam is testing new ways of accessing its collections through a program fuelled by machine vision systems: “Jan Bot”, accessed December 2, 2021, https://www.jan.bot/. 12 The website of Faceswap, which announces itself as “the leading free and OpenSource multiplatform Deepfakes software”: “Faceswap”, accessed November 3, 2021, https:// faceswap.dev/. 13 “Deep Nostalgia”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.myheritage.fr/deep-nostalgia. 14 R. Matheson, “Using artificial intelligence to enrich digital maps. Model tags road features based on satellite images, to improve GPS navigation in places with limited map data”, MIT News, January 23, 2020, https://news.mit.edu/2020/artificial-intelligence-digital-maps-0123. ANTONIO SOMAINI 97 AN-ICON  of this last application, which may alter significantly our experience of visual documents of the past, would be the videos realized by Denis Shiryaev15 in which, through a process of machine learning, a Lumière film such as L’Ar- rivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896) is transformed from the original 16 frames per second to 60 frames per second, from the original 1.33:1 format to a contemporary 16:9 format, and from the original, grainy 35mm analog film to a 4K digital resolution.16 In other examples of imag- es transformed by machine learning, the transformations are much more radical, as it happens with the so-called “deepfakes”: videos that use neural networks in order to ma- nipulate the images and the sounds of pre-existing videos – in some cases a single, pre-existing image – producing new videos that have a high potential to deceive. Among the many examples that can now be found across the in- ternet in different domains such as pornography, politics and social media, pornographic videos in which faces of celebrities are swapped onto the bodies of porn actors, a TikTok account with a whole series of odd videos by a “Deep Tom Cruise”,17 or speeches by public figures such as Barack Obama18 and Queen Elizabeth19 whose content has been completely altered in such a way that the movements of their mouths perfectly match the new, invented words they are uttering. And among the applications of deepfakes in the musical realm, the “new” songs by long deceased singers, whose style and voice are reproduced in a highly realistic way by applications of machine learning such as Jukebox, developed by OpenAI20: a “resurrecting” function 15 “Denis Shiryaev”, Youtube channel, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.youtube. com/c/DenisShiryaev/videos. For an online platform offering video enhancement powered by AI, see: “Neural Love”, accessed December 2, 2021, https://neural.love/. 16 The video of the upscaled version of L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896) can be found all across YouTube, in various black-and-white and colored version. For a version in color, see: Deoldify videos, “[DeOldified] Arrival on a Train at La Ciotat (The Lumière Brothers, 1896)”, Youtube video, February 4, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqbOhqXHL7E. 17 “Deep Tom Cruise”, TikTok account, accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.tiktok. com/@deeptomcruise. 18 BuzzFeed Video, “You Won’t Believe What Obama Says in This Video!”, Youtube video, April 17, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0. 19 Channel 4, “Deepfake Queen: 2020 Alternative Christmas Message”, Youtube video, December 25, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvY-Abd2FfM. 20 “Jukebox”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 98 AN-ICON  that in the animated photographs of deceased persons of Deep Nostalgia. In the second case, the use of machine learning processes leads to the creation of entirely new images or sections of images: modelling patterns of motion (for ex- ample, crowd motion) in video, thereby leading computer generated imagery, in some cases fuelled by artificial intelli- gence, to produce new kinds of “contingent motion”;21 pro- ducing highly photorealistic images of objects and environ- ments for different kinds of advertising; inventing perfectly realistic faces of people that actually do not exist through open source softwares such as StyleGan and then make them accessible through projects such as Philip Wang’s This Person Does Not Exist.22 To these widespread applications of machine learning we may add the hybrid, unprecedented imagery produced by the software DeepDream, created in 2015 by the Google engineer and artist Alexander Mordvintsev: a program that uses Convolutional Neural Networks in order to enhance patterns in pre-existing images, creating a form of algorithmic pareidolia, the impression of seeing a figure where there is none, which is here generated by a process which repeatedly detects in a given image patterns and shapes that the machine vision system has been trained to see. 23 The result of such a recursive process, in which every new image is submitted again to the same kind of pattern and shape recognition, are images that recall an entire psychedelic iconography that spans through cinema, photography, the visual arts and even so-called art brut: images that are here presented as a sort of dream – a hal- lucinogenic, psychedelic dream – of the machine itself. 21 J. Schonig, “Contingent Motion: Rethinking the ‘Wind in the Trees’ in Early Cinema and CGI”, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 40, no. 1 (2018): 30-61. 22 “This Person does not exist”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/. 23 The program is now open source: see “Deep Dream Generator”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://deepdreamgenerator.com/. See also: “Alexander Mordvintsev”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://znah.net/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 99 AN-ICON  Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 The original image (Fig. 1) has been modified by applying ten (Fig. 2) and then fifty (Fig. 3) iterations of the software DeepDream, the network having been trained to perceive dogs. ANTONIO SOMAINI 100 AN-ICON  Exploring the “altered states” of machine vision through Generative Adversarial Networks The idea that lies at the basis of the DeepDream software – the idea that machine learning technologies, and in particular the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), may be used in order to explore and reveal the altered states of machine vision – can also be found in the recent works of artists (often active also as theorists) such as Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and Grégory Chatonsky.24 By insisting on the “creative”, image-producing potential of Generative Adversarial neural networks – rather than on their standard application for the training of machine vision systems – the three of them explore a vast field of images that they consider to be “hallucinations”, “visions of the future”, or the product of an “artificial imagination”, char- acterized by a new form of realism, a “disrealism”. Trevor Paglen’s entire work as an artist and the- orist, since 2016, has been dedicated to the attempt of un- derstanding and visualizing the principles that lie at the basis of machine vision technology. Through texts (sometimes written in collaboration with the researcher Kate Crawford),25 exhibitions, performances, and works made of still and mov- ing images, Paglen has tried to highlight not only the social and political biases that are inherent in the way machine vi- sion systems are structured, but also the way in which such systems diverge profoundly from human vision.26 In an article published in December 2016 in The New Inquiry with the title “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)”,27 Paglen discusses the new challeng- es that arise in a context in which “sight” itself has be- come machine-operated and separated by human eyes, 24 Among the first artists who started working with GANs, one should remember Helena Sarin and Mike Tyka. See “Helena Sarin”, AI Artist, accessed November 3, 2021 https://aiartists.org/ helena-sarin, and “Mike Tyka”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://miketyka.com/. 25 K. Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 26 See: “Trevor Paglen”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://paglen.studio/. 27 T. Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)”, The New Inquiry, December 8, 2016: https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 101 AN-ICON  participating in a vast field of image operations. Arguing that what we are currently experiencing is part of a vast transition from human-seeable to machine-readable imag- es – a new condition in which “the overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop” – Paglen writes that if we want to understand the invisible world of machine-machine vi- sual culture, we need to unlearn to see like humans. We need to learn how to see a parallel universe composed of activations, keypoints, eigenfaces, feature transforms, classifiers, training sets, and the like.28 We need to unlearn to see like humans. But how can we not see like humans, how can we step out of our human point of view? Accomplishing this apparently impos- sible task – a task which echoes the recurrent philosophical problem of how to step out of one’s own socio-historical position, of one’s own cognitive and emotional framework – has been the main goal of Trevor Paglen’s artistic practice during the last few years, as we can see in a body of works that was initially produced in 2017 through various col- laborations with computer vision and artificial intelligence researchers as an artist-in-residence at Stanford Univer- sity, and was first exhibited at the Metro Pictures Gallery in New York in an exhibition entitled A Study of Invisible Images (September 8 – October 21, 2017) 29, before being presented at various other galleries and museums such as the Osservatorio of the Fondazione Prada in Milan, or the Carnegie Museum of Art in Philadelphia, in an exhibition entitled Opposing Geometries (2020). The works in the exhibition at Metro Pictures present a possible response to the challenge of how to pen- etrate within systems of machine vision that tend to expel the human gaze from their processes. Among them, we find the attempt to master the machine learning techniques 28 Ibid. 29 A series of images of the works presented in the exhibition can be found at the following address: “Trevor Paglen. A study of Invisible Images”, Metro Pictures, accessed January 19, 2020, http://origin.www.metropictures.com/exhibitions/trevor-paglen4. ANTONIO SOMAINI 102 AN-ICON  that are commonly used for machine vision applications, in order to hack them and lead them to produce entirely new images, never seen before, that may be considered as a form of hallucination of machine vision. This is what happens in a series of still images entitled Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, which Paglen developed through a non-standard application, in three steps, of Generative Adversarial Networks.30 The first step consisted in establishing new, original training sets. Instead of using the usual corpuses of images that are used to train machine vision systems in recognizing faces, objects, places and even emotions – corpuses that are often derived by pre-existing and easily available image databases such as the already mentioned ImageNet – Paglen established new training sets composed by images derived from literature, psychoanalysis, political economy, military history, and poetry. Among the various taxonomies he used in order to compose his training sets we find “monsters that have been historically interpreted as allegories of capitalism”, such as vampires, zombies, etc.; “omens and portents”, such as comets, eclipses, etc.; “figures and places that appear in Sigmund Freud’s The In- terpretation of Dreams”, a corpus which includes various symbols from Freudian psychoanalysis; “Eye-Machines”, a series of images clearly inspired by Harun Farocki’s videoin- stallations Eye-Machine I, II, III (2001-2003) and containing images of surveillance cameras or of spaces under surveil- lance; “American Predators”, a corpus containing various predatory animals, plants, and humans indigenous to the United States, mixed with military hardware like predator drones and stealth bombers. The second step consisted in feeding these un- usual training sets into the two neural networks of the GAN system: the Discriminator and the Generator. These two networks begin interacting with one another in an adver- sarial, competitive way, in such a way that the Discriminator, 30 Information on the Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations can be found in Trevor Paglen’s website: T. Paglen, “Hallucinations”, accessed November 3, 2021, https://paglen. studio/2020/04/09/hallucinations/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 103 AN-ICON  after having received the initial training set, has to evaluate the images that it receives from the Generator, deciding whether they resemble or not to those of the training set. As the process unfolds through reiterated exchanges between the two neural networks, the Discriminator becomes more and more precise and effective in evaluating the images that are submitted to it. The third step consists in the artist intervening in the process and choosing to extract, at a given mo- ment, one of the images produced by the Generator: an image that emerges from the sequence of the adversarial exchanges, and that is the result of one of the countless attempts by the Generator to test the precision of the Dis- criminator, trying to fool it. In the case of the series of the Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, all the images selected by Paglen seem to bear some kind of resemblance to the ones contained in the original training sets – even though we cannot really assess the degree of this resemblance, because the training sets are not accessible to us – while displaying at the same time different forms of deviations and aberrations that recall a sort of psychedelic imaginary. Among Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hal- lucinations, we find images with titles such as Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), Comet (Corpus: Omens and Portents), The Great Hall (Corpus: The Interpreta- tion of Dreams), Venus Flytrap (Corpus: American Pred- ators), A Prison Without Gards (Corpus: Eye-Machines). In the case of Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), ANTONIO SOMAINI 104 AN-ICON  Fig. 4. Trevor Paglen, Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), dye sublimation metal print, 2017 the Discriminator was trained on thousands of images of zombies, vampires, Frankensteins, and other ghosts that have been at some point – be it in essays, liter- ary texts, or films – associated with capitalism. Paglen then set the Generator and Discriminator running until they had synthesized a series of images that corresponded at least in part to a specific class within the given corpus. From all of the even slightly acceptable options that the GAN gen- erated, Paglen then selected the one we see in the series exhibited at Metro Pictures as the “finished work”. There may be multiple reasons behind Trevor Paglen’s decision to call these images “hallucinations”. To begin with, such images recall a type of imagery that we might consider to be “psychedelic” or “surrealist”: in some of them, we definitely see echoes of Max Ernst, or Salvador Dalì. A second reason may lie in the attempt to emphasize the fact that the result of this non-standard application of the processes of machine learning – a process which un- folds within a closed machine-to-machine space, the in- visible space of the back-and-forth between the Generator and the Discriminator from which human eyes are excluded – produces images that, just like human hallucinations, have no footing in exterior reality, or may merge in unpredictable ANTONIO SOMAINI 105 AN-ICON  way with shapes and forms stemming from the perception of the outer world. Finally, the term “adversarially evolved hallucinations” may underline the fact that these images are the result of a machine learning process gone astray: a process which has been hacked and led to drift away from its original, standard applications. The reference to the term “hallucinations”, though, should not be misleading. What Trevor Paglen tries to show us with his Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations has really nothing to do with a disruption of the orderly functioning of human consciousness. What they highlight, rather, is the radical otherness of machine vision, if compared with human vision. A radical otherness based on operations that have nothing to do with human, embodied vision, which we may just try to grasp through the impossible attempt of “unlearn- ing to see like humans”. We find a different application of images pro- duced by machine learning in This is the Future, an instal- lation by Hito Steyerl which was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2019, and which was conceived as an expan- sion of the exhibition Power Plants at the Serpentine Gal- lery in London the previous year. In the Venice installation, Hito Steyerl arranged onto different platforms a series of nine videos in which one could see images resembling to some kind of “vegetal” time-lapse imagery: flowers quickly blossoming and spreading out, plants and bamboo shoots growing in height and width. Fig. 5a ANTONIO SOMAINI 106 AN-ICON  Fig. 5b Fig. 5c Figg. 5a, 5b and 5c. Hito Steyerl, This if the Future: A 100% Accurate Prediction, stills from the single channel HD video, color, sound, 16’, 2019 What interested Steyerl in the use of neural networks in this installation was the predictive nature of machine learning, and the status of “visions of the future” of its imagery: the fact that neural predictive algorithms op- erate through statistical models and predictions based on immense, “big data” databases, and are therefore related to the vast spectrum of predictive systems (be they finan- cial, political, meteorological, environmental, etc.) that are present in contemporary “control societies”, while at the same time being part of the longue durée of the history of prediction systems elaborated by human cultures. The main video presented in Hito Steyerl’s instal- lation, entitled This is the Future: A 100% Accurate Prediction, consists of images produced through a collaboration with the programmer Damien Henry, author of a series of videos entitled A Train Window31 in which a machine learning algo- rithm has been trained to predict the next frame of a video by analyzing samples from the previous image, in such a way that, as in a perfect feedback loop, each output image 31 The videos, programmed with Tensorflow, are available at: D. Henry, “A train window”, Magenta, October 3rd, 2018, https://magenta.tensorflow.org/nfp_p2p. I thank both Hito Steyerl and Damien Henry for useful information on the coding used in This is the Future. ANTONIO SOMAINI 107 AN-ICON  becomes the input for the next step in the calculation. In this way, after intentionally choosing or producing only the first image, all the following ones are generated by the algorithm, without any human intervention. In Hito Steyerl’s work, this idea of a video entirely made up of images “predicted” by neural networks and located, as the video says, “0.04 sec- onds in the future”, is presented as a new kind of documen- tary imagery: an imagery that can at the same time predict and document the future, as paradoxical as this may seem. The video begins with white text on a black background that reads: “These are documentary images of the future. Not about what it will bring, but about what it is made of”. The next five sections of the video – Heja’s Garden, The Future: A History, Bambusa Futuris, Power Plants and Heja’s Pre- diction – lead us to a psychedelic landscape of images that morph sample images stemming from categories such as “sea”, “fish”, “flower”, “rose” or “orchid”: each of them is produced by a neural network that, as the electronic voice accompanying the video tells us, “can see one fraction of a second into the future”. Second Earth (2019) by Grégory Chatonsky takes another route into the iconosphere produced by GAN-driven machine learning. What interests him is the idea of an “artificial imagination”, capable of visualizing, through the means of artificial intelligence, “the halluci- nation of a senseless machine, a monument dedicated to the memory of the extinct human species”.32 Himself in charge of the coding which lies at the base of the various elements and the various media mobilized in his work, Cha- tonsky works in particular on what he calls the “chaînage”, the “sequencing” of different artificial intelligence sys- tems that, taken all together, produce a whole cascade of new forms: among them, neural networks capable of generating new texts (read by synthetic voices) starting from some given text databases, or capable of generat- ing images from given texts, and texts from given images, 32 See the presentation of Second Earth: G. Chatonsky, “Second Earth / Terre Seconde”, accessed November 29, 2021, http://chatonsky.net/earth/. ANTONIO SOMAINI 108 AN-ICON  with a new kind of AI-powered ekphrasis. The metamor- phical universe that we see in the videos of Second Earth, Fig. 6a Fig. 6b Fig. 6c Fig. 6d Figg. 6a, 6b, 6c and 6d. Grégory Chatonsky, Second Earth, stills from one of the videos in the installation, 2019 a work that Chatonsky presents as an “evolving installation”, evokes the idea of a form-generating power that used to be rooted in nature and which is now taken over by machines which are incorporating and re-elaborating the trillions of ANTONIO SOMAINI 109 AN-ICON  images that humans have uploaded on the internet as a sort of hypertrophic memory. The text accompanying the work reads: “Accumulate data. Outsourcing our memories. Feed software with this data so that it produces similar data. Produce realism without reality, become possible. Disap- pear. Coming back in our absence, like somebody else”.33 As products of a “realism without reality”, what Chatonsky calls a “disrealism”,34 the images produced through Generative Adversarial Networks in Second Earth do have a hallucinatory, oneiric, “surrealistic” quality, that bears a strange kind of “family resemblance” to the ones that we find in Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, Steyerl’s This is the Future, and in the work of other artists who have recently explored the GAN-generated imagery, such as Pierre Huyghe in his installation Uumwelt (2018). In Chatonsky’s Second Earth, these images do refer to some kind of “outer reality”, but the status of this outer reality is highly unclear. On the one hand, they bear traces of the imag- es contained in the training sets that have been employed in order to activate the GANs: in the cases of the stills from one of the videos in the installation that are here reproduced, such training sets referred probably to categories such as “birds”, “faces”, “eyes”, etc., and the images contained in the training sets – be they actual photographs, or still from videos – do in most cases refer to some profilmic reality. On the other, extracted as they are from the “latent space” of a process of machine learning in motion from the pole of absolute noise to the pole of a perfect re- semblance to the images of the training set, the images of Second Earth refer to another kind of reality, one that does not exist yet. We are here in the domain of “anticipation”, rather than “prediction”,35 in the perspective of an explora- 33 G. Chatonsky, Second Earth, http://chatonsky.net/earth/. 34 Grégory Chatonsky has begun to use and theorize this term in recent lectures held at the Jeu de Paume and at Campus Condorcet in Paris, in the framework of the lecture cycle L’esthétique à l’heure du pixel (September 2021 – May 2022) and the seminar L’image à l’épreuve des machines. Reconfigurations du visible (25-26 October 2021). See for example “Le disréalisme (le pixel perdu de l’espace latent)”, Jeu de Paume, accessed november 29, 2021, https://jeudepaume.org/evenement/seminaire-esthetique-pixel-1/. 35 Unpublished conversation with Grégory Chatonsky, 2019, whom I thank for the useful information on the different software used in Second Earth. ANTONIO SOMAINI 110 AN-ICON  tion of a non-human “artificial imagination”, rather than in the denunciation of the pervasive presence of systems of control and surveillance, as it was the case in the work of Hito Steyerl. At the basis of Chatonsky’s “Second Earth”, we find the observation that the machine was becoming capable of automatically producing a phenomenal quantity of realistic images from the accumulation of data on the Web. This realism is similar to the world we know, but it is not an identical reproduction. Species metamorphose into each other, stones mutate into plants and the ocean shores into unseen organisms. The result: this “second” Earth, a reinvention of our world, produced by a machine that wonders about the nature of its production. Over fifty years ago, in his seminal Understand- ing Media. The Extensions of Man (1964), Marshall McLuhan formulated the idea that art could become, in some deci- sive historical moments, a form of “advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology”, and added that new art forms might become in these moments “social navigation charts”, help- ing us find some orientation across a sensorium entirely transformed by new media and new technologies. Today, while we witness the first signs of what promises to be a massive impact of artificial intelligence onto all areas of our psychic, social, and cultural life, the works of artists such as Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl and Grégory Chatonsky do appear like “navigation charts”: their exploration of the al- tered states of machine vision through the appropriation and the détournement of technologies such as the Gen- erative Adversarial Networks help us better understand the aesthetic, epistemological and political implications of the transformations that such technologies are producing within contemporary visual culture. Taken together, they highlight the fact that what is at stake is the very status of what we mean by “image” and by “vision” in the age of artificial intelligence. ANTONIO SOMAINI 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/15443

Perception, hallucination, virtual reality. From controlled hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard Perception by Claudio Paolucci Imagination Hallucination Enunciation Resident Evil Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Perception, hallucination, virtual reality. From controlled hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard by Claudio Paolucci Abstract In this paper, I will work on the relationship be- tween perception and imagination in Virtual Reality, claiming that “hallucination” is the ordinary motor also for online perception and not only a deviant form of it. First, I will deal with the problem of perception from the point of view of cognitive semiotics and I will try to underline the crucial role of imagination, claiming that perception is a form of “con- trolled hallucination”. Later, I will focus on the relationship between perception, hallucination, and memory in Virtual Reality. On the one hand, I will claim that Virtual Reality expresses the transition from actual perception to imagina- tion, memory or dream through another actual perception. On the other hand, I will claim that it can express it with- out any problems through the old techniques coming from cinema and other audiovisual languages, since they par- tially share the very same formal apparatus of enunciation. I will demonstrate all of this by analyzing Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Perception Imagination Hallucination Enunciation Resident Evil To quote this essay: 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 CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 112 AN-ICON  Perception, imagination, and the control of the reality First, I will deal with the problem of percep- tion from the point of view of cognitive semiotics.1 I will try to underline the crucial role of imagination, claiming that perception is a form of “controlled hallucination”,2 where, by “controlled hallucination”, I mean the product of the imagination controlled by the world. The main idea is that “hallucination” is the model of perception and not a devi- ant form of it. With “hallucination”, as defined in percep- tion studies and in the neurogeometry of vision,3 I mean the morphological activity of the production of forms by the imagination, which remains crucial both when it is not controlled by the world – as in the case of hallucination, imagination, or dream – and when it is controlled by the world, as in the case of online perception. In Virtual Reality, the world that controls perception is substituted by a tech- nology, a prosthesis capable of creating a strong effect of reality, a simulacrum with an effect of presence that no oth- er audiovisual has ever been able to build.4 In Augmented Reality, on the other side, the technology adds elements to the world that controls perception, without a full-blown substitution, as it happens with Virtual Reality. Maybe, the word “hallucination” can be mis- leading, since perceptual phenomena under the aegis of hallucination may seem to lose the concreteness that I want to characterize them as having. It is possible that 1 See C. Paolucci, Cognitive Semiotics. Integrating signs, minds, menaing and cognition (Berlin-New York: Springer, 2021). 2 See A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”, in L. Albertazzi et al., eds., Perception Beyond Inference: The Information Content of Visual Processes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010): 27-57. 3 See J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”; A. Sarti et al., “The symplectic structure of the primary visual cortex”, Biological Cybernetics 98 (2008): 33-48. 4 See C. Paolucci, “Una percezione macchinica: realtà virtuale e realtà aumentata tra simulacri e protesi dell’enunciazione”, in F. Biggio et al., eds., Meaning–Making in Extended Reality. Senso e Virtualità (Rome: Aracne, I Saggi di Lexia, 2020): 43-62. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 113 AN-ICON  “figuration” would fit better with the ideas I will develop here, since no Sartrean “derealization” is involved.5 However, since our brains try to guess what is out there, and to the extent that that guess matches the evolving sensory data, we perceive the world, in Surfing Uncertainty, Clark recalls the slogan coined by the vision scientist Ramesh Jain that perception is “controlled hallucination”. This is the direc- tion I am going to take. But, precisely because “this view of perception puts us in genuine cognitive contact with the salient aspects of our environment”, Clark suggests we consider hallucination as a form of “uncontrolled percep- tion”.6 However, Clark’s view – if it is put like that – is the classical one that thinks of perception as grounding both hallucination and imagination, which are supposed to be “deviant” or “uncontrolled” forms of perception. Since I want to claim the opposite, I will continue to use “hallucination”, and since there is a well-established tradition regarding this concept in the field of perception studies, I will do so with the caveat that “hallucination” does not imply any kind of “derealization” of perceptual phenomena from a phenom- enological point of view.7 Indeed, with “hallucination”, or “figuration”, I indicate a process of microgenesis8 that continuously pro- duces the next thread of perceptual experience while the current one fades, and does so without voluntary control.9 I claim that meaning guides this microgenesis, or hallucina- tion, and that imagination is the engine of this microgenesis guided by meaning. 5 See G. Matteucci, Estetica e natura umana. La mente estesa tra percezione, emozione ed espressione (Rome: Carocci, 2019). 6 A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: 326. See also paragraph 6.10. 7 See S. Gallagher, D. Zahavi, “Primal impression and enactive perception”, in V. Arstila, D. Lloyd, eds., Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014): 83-99. 8 See J.W. Brown, Self–Embodying Mind: Process, Brain Dynamics and the Conscious Present (Barytown, NY: Barytown Ltd, 2020) 9 See J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 114 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Kanizsa’s triangle. For instance, in Kanizsa’s triangle (Fig. 1), the triangle is totally a product of our hallucination, since it is the only thing that is not present in the stimuli. It is not by chance that, as Reddy and colleagues show, not only are online perception and imagination closely related in the brain, but perception, as it occurs in creatures like us, is co-emergent with imagination.10 What we perceive is literal- ly (not metaphorically) the future, not the present, because perception is the anticipation of the next thread of sensory information through previous knowledge. Indeed, in percep- tion we build through imagination the world that we expect. There is a beautiful experiment by Adams and colleagues that shows that, in some circumstances, we hear the presence of the absence, that is, we hallucinate something that is not there, but we expect to be there.11 When silence arrives, we literally do not hear it as we are supposed to do (i.e. as nothing playing). In its place, we hear the presence of the absent sound that we were 10 L. Reddy et al., “Reading the mindʼs eye: decoding category information during mental imagery”, NeuroImage 50, no. 2, (2010): 818-825; G. Ganis et al. “Brain areas underlying visual mental imagery and visual perception: An fMRI study”, in Cognitive Brain Research 20, no. 2 (2004): 226-241. 11 R.A. Adams et al., “Predictions not commands: active inference in the motor system”, Brain Structure and Function 218, no. 3 (2013): 611-643. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 115 AN-ICON  expecting. Adams and colleagues’ experiment runs as fol- lows. They used a simple computer simulation of birdsong. A multi-layer prediction machine processes sequences of simulated bird-chirps. The simulations were then repeated but omitting the last three chirps of the original signal. At the first missing chirp, the network responds with a strong precise moment where the first missing chirp should have occurred, the system generated a brief, transient illusory percept. This hallucinated percept was not strong, but the timing was correct with respect to the missing chirp. Thus, our perceptive system first dimly “perceived” (hallucinated) the missing chirp, before responding with a strong error signal when the actual absence of the anticipated sensory evidence became apparent. Of course, Kanizsa’s triangle is a visual correspondent of Adams and colleagues’ ex- periment. This is what I call perception as a “controlled hallucination”, which is the general functioning of our rich, world-revealing perception at any level, since it concerns an organism structurally coupled with its environment trying to minimize disorder and surprise.12 The Goethean account of perception I refer here to what Jan Koenderink, a cognitive scientist and mathematician who works on the connection between theory of singularities and perception, used to call the “Marrian” and the “Goethean” accounts of perception. ■ According to the Marrian account: perception is the result of standard computations on optical data. ■ According to the Goethean account: perception is con- trolled hallucination, or “controlled figuration”. The mainstream view in cognitive science and neuroscience, which is often also the commonsense view, 12 S. Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 116 AN-ICON  is that perception is all about a kind of passive imprinting of the world upon the sense organs and the brain. As Eg- ner and colleagues say, “on traditional accounts the visual system was seen as a passive analyzer of bottom-up sen- sory information”.13 This is a view of the perceiving brain as highly stimulus-driven, taking energetic inputs from the senses and turning them into a coherent percept by a kind of inwards flowing stream. The Predictive Processing account of percep- tion takes a different direction and includes a top-down predictive aspect in its account.14 However, Predictive Pro- cessing thinks of perception as a kind of new schematism between aesthetics (the sensory data) and the concepts (the priors). According to this view, our brains are proac- tive: they are constantly buzzing as they try to predict the sensory signals arriving across all modalities. When such proactive brains “match” the incoming sensory signal, we perceive the world, understand it, and are immediately posi- tioned to imagine it so as to act in it too. However, “halluci- nation” is different from the mainstream notion of “prior”. A prior – as used in Bayesian inference – is a generic, usually statistical, property.15 For example, light comes from above is such a prior (if put in suitable format). It applies, on the average, for terrestrial animals that live in open spaces. Such priors package ‘frozen’ prior experience as it were. ‘Hallucinations’ differ by not being frozen, applying to the actual situation. Hallucinations can be regarded as specific, necessar- ily tentative, instantiations of the observer’s present “situational awareness” instead of its average past.16 13 T. Egner et al., “Expectation and surprise determine neural population responses in the ventral visual stream”, Journal of Neuroscience 30, no. 49 (2010): 16601-16608. 14 See A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty. 15 D. Purves, “Why we see things the way we do: evidence for a wholly empirical strategy of vision”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 356 (2001): 285-297. 16 J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”: 32. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 117 AN-ICON  This is important, because we do not always update our perceptions according to our past experience and according to the changes in our priors. This is very well seen in the popular Muller-Layer illusion, where even when we learn that the two lines have the same length, we still keep on seeing them in the previous way. In per- ception, “data” are constructed through an attunement of the organism and the world, where the organism looks for elements that are worth for him to look for. For instance, as in Kanizsa’s triangle, we look for edges and we perceive edges even if edges are the only thing that are not present in the stimulus. This is because, given evolutionary pressure and experience driven plasticity, we are wired to the environment in order to produce states that track edges when exposed to discontinuities. The system is physically at- tuned to such things, ‘set up to be set off’ by such visual discontinuities.17 Exploring the world, the organism casts his questions to the environment through imagination and pre- dicts its answers until he encounters resistance. This very action turns optical or sound structure into “data”, which are not sent from the world to the organism through senses but are the actual product of the autopoietic structure of the system of perception. Perception occurs when the top down activity of the imagination succeeds at generating the sensory data for itself, building a coherent story that paves the way for efficacious action. When it can gener- ate the future sensory data, the agent perceives the world. When it cannot, encountering a resistance, it tries a new attunement or changes the world through action. Therefore, data are built up because we produce them in looking for what we need for action, in order to minimize our work in the environment. 17 S. Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: 120. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 118 AN-ICON  Moving towards virtual and augmented reality The difference between the mainstream view, where data are sent by the environment and processed through perception, and the view where they are the product of what we look for in a coupled environment, can be operationalized as follows: perception is sensorily guid- ed potential behavior.18 Potential is key here. Perception is grounded on imagination, as it concerns the potential behavior con- nected to a coherent “story” we are building in order to act in the world and minimize disorder.19 Perception as sensorily guided potential be- havior is meant to reveal a world of salient, meaningful, in- teracting causes selected in the light of human needs and possibilities, which is exactly what pragmatists had in mind when they were telling us that the meaning of something consists in its conceivable practical bearings. This also marks the difference between pragmatism and behaviorism, since perception is neither action nor behavior. This prag- matist idea is consistent with the Affordance Competition Hypothesis originally introduced by Cisek,20 which is also a key hypothesis for the Predictive Processing by Andy Clark.21 The brain processes sensory information to specify, in parallel, several potential actions that are currently avail- able. These potential actions compete against each other 18 J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”: 32. 19 C. Paolucci, “Social cognition, mindreading and narratives. A cognitive semiotics perspective on narrative practices from early mindreading to autism spectrum disorders”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18, no. 2 (2019): 375-400; and Cognitive Semiotics. Integrating Signs, Minds, Meaning and Cognition (Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer, 2021). 20 P. Cisek, “Cortical mechanisms of action selection: The affordance competition hypothesis”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 362 (2007): 1585-1599. 21 A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Chapter 6. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 119 AN-ICON  for further processing, while information is collected to bias this competition until a single response is selected.22 If we go beyond Cisek’s terminology of “pro- cessing information”, like I think we have to do in order to focus on the main problem of perception as controlled hallucination, we see that, at the moment, we are see- ing a good deal of confirmation regarding this “pragma- tist” approach from the neurosciences.23 The classic dis- tinction between perception, cognition and action simply fails to reflect not only the phenomenology of our expe- rience, but also the global functional architecture of the brain, where, for instance, motor systems are active and play a huge part also in perception, decision making, social cognition and problem solving.24 Increasing and highly suggestive evidence challenges the view of core cognitive capacities (such as planning and deciding) as neurophysiologically distinct from the circuitry of sensorimotor con- trol. For example, decisions concerning eye movements and the execution of eye movements recruit highly overlapping circuits in lateral intraparietal area (LIP), frontal eye fields (FEF), and the superior colliculus [...]. In the same vein, a perceptual decision task (one in which the decision is reported by an arm movement) re- vealed marked responses within premotor cortex corresponding to the process of deciding upon a response (Romo et al. 2004). Quite generally, wherever a decision is to be reported by (or oth- erwise invokes) some motor action, there looks to be an entwining 22 P. Cisek, “Cortical mechanisms of action selection”: 1585. 23 See C. Paolucci, “Per una concezione strutturale della cognizione: semiotica e scienze cognitive tra embodiment ed estensione della mente”, in M. Graziano, C. Luverà, eds., Bioestetica, bioetica, biopolitica. I linguaggi delle scienze cognitive (Messina: Corisco Edizioni, 2012): 245-276; V. Cuccio, F. Caruana, “Il corpo come icona. Abduzione, strumenti ed Embodied Simulation”, VS-Quaderni di Studi Semiotici 120 (2015): 93-103. 24 See V. Gallese, “Mirror neurons and the neural exploitation hypothesis: from embodied simulation to social cognition”, in J.A. Pineda, ed., Mirror Neuron Systems (New York: Humana Press, 2009): 163-190; A.M. Borghi, F. Caruana, “Embodied Cognition, una nuova psicologia”, Giornale Italiano di Psicologia 35, no. 1 (2013): 23-48; V. Gallese et al., “A unifying view of the basis of social cognition”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8, no. 9 (2004): 396-403; G. Rizzolatti, C. Sinigaglia, “Mirror neurons and motor intentionality”, Functional Neurology 22, no. 4 (2007): 205-221. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 120 AN-ICON of perceptuo-motor processing and decision-making, leading Cis- ek and Kalaska to suggest that ‘decisions, at least those reported through actions, are made within the same sensorimotor circuits that are responsible for planning and executing the associated action’ (Cisek and Kalaska 2011: 274). In cortical associative regions such as posterior parietal cortex (PPC), Cisek and Kalaska go on to argue, activity does not seem in any way to respect the tradi- tional divisions between perception, cognition, and action. Instead we find neuronal populations that trade in shifting and context-re- sponsive combinations of perceiving, deciding, and acting, and in which even single cells may participate in many such functions (Andersen and Buneo 2003).25 If perception is supposed to work as a process that is continuous with action, the Marrian casual chain is inverted. Instead of “data” arriving at the eye, being pro- cessed, being further processed and finally resulting in a “representation” of the scene in front of us, the agent ex- plores the world in any conceivable direction, casting his questions and producing data in relation to what he needs for action, until it encounters resistance. This is why imagination is the real engine for online perception. Since imagination is a faculty that allows us to move our consciousness from a proximal to a distal place, which can be in the past (memory), future (pros- pects) or in an invented reality, this “looking for the future” in online perception, trying to anticipate the next thread of the world, is grounded exactly on imagination. This places Virtual Reality and Augmented Real- ity (VAR) in radical continuity with online perception. Indeed, if, in phenomenological terms, hallucination is a “percep- tion in the absence of the external object”, and if the ob- jects that appear in virtual reality are artificial simulacra of presence that we perceive without them being anchored in 25 A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: 178. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 121 AN-ICON  our experience of the physical world, we shall understand immersive virtual experience as a form of voluntary and deliberate hallucination. But this does not imply any kind of derealization: it simply implies the substitution of the control of the world with the control of a technology. This is why VAR promises important scientific applications, which, in a few years, will radically change many of our laboratories of psychology, neuroscience and cognitive sciences. Indeed, on the one hand, we want a world in which reality is not so “real” as to modify the ex- perimental results and influence them, and VAR provides us with only a virtual reality, which can be controlled in detail and put into brackets at will. On the other hand, we also want a world that is not so unreal as to be indistinguish- able from the normal conditions of a laboratory, which at full capacity lives by cutting off every variable that cannot be controlled and ends up producing data that have the purpose of explaining our experience in a condition that we know to be a radical impoverishment of this very same experience. VARs allows us to create a very strong effect of presence within a world-environment,26 capable of sim- ulating a reality that remains only virtual and can therefore be controlled in its different parameters. At the same time, VAR allows us to increase the “gradient of reality” inside a laboratory, integrating those experiences and variables that a laboratory usually tends to cut away, in the name of the robustness of its measurements. Thus, the conditions of the laboratory are “augmented” with a reconstructed and simulated reality, which we can see and experience only thanks to the prostheses of VAR. In this respect, VAR is a prosthetic technology that is in its own way unprecedented, capable of generating a controllable world without losing at the same time the phenomenological richness of the world. 26 A. Pinotti, “Self–negating images: towards an-iconology”, Proceedings 2017, I, 856 (2017). CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 122 AN-ICON  Precisely because of its ability to make the world present through perception, without the world being in any way unamendable – since it can be controlled – it is completely normal that people who set up environments in VAR exploit this possibility, preferring online perception to other expressive possibilities and using online percep- tion in order to express dreams, hallucinations or memo- ries. However, this choice does not in any way reside in a technological, semiotic or enunciative limit of VAR and its language. On the contrary, it is only a “stylistic” choice, which can be suspended. As we will see, many of these suspensions, which result in the use of old cinematographic techniques within Virtual Reality, can be seen for example in an extraordinary game for Play Station VR such as Res- ident Evil 7: Biohazard. Elsewehere,27 I tried to show how, from a semi- otic point of view,28 VAR works by holding together a formal apparatus of the prosthetic type of enunciation, typical of audiovisuals, and a formal apparatus of enunciation of the simulacral type, which is instead typical of other se- miotic systems, such as verbal language.29 If this is true, as I believe it is, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are not incapable of effectively representing the modifications of perception that cinema has always expressed through its representative strategies, such as dissolve, shift from 27 C. Paolucci, “Una percezione macchinica”. 28 Some semiotic approaches to VR can be found in G. Bettetini, L’Ulisse semiotico e le sirene informatiche (Milano: Bompiani, 2006); and B.R. Barricelli et al., “Semiotic Framework for Virtual Reality Usability and UX Evaluation: a Pilot Study”, in M. De Marsico et al., eds., Games-Human Interaction (2018): 1-6. A nice take on the illusory cancellation of the distance that occurs during an immersive experience and the establishment of a critical distance in the user, linked to the emergence of a meta experiential competence, can be found in F. Biggio, “Semiotics of distances in virtual and augmented environments”, Img Journal 2, no. 3 (2020): 82-103. Some important remarks on virtuality and subjectivity can be found in a nice book by Ruggero Eugeni, La condizione postmediale (Brescia: La scuola, 2015) and in the reader edited by F. Biggio et al., Meaning-Making in Extended Reality. Senso e Virtualità (Rome: Aracne, 2020). However, the most comprehensive and original semiotic work on this topic is the PhD thesis by Gianmarco Giuliana, Meaningfulness and Experience in Virtual Realities. Semiotics of a Digital Pla(y)typus, University of Turin (2021). 29 See C. Paolucci, “Prothèses de la subjectivité. L’appareil formel de l’énonciation dans l’audiovisuel”, in M.G. Dondero et al., eds., Les plis du visuel. Réflexivité et énonciation dans l’image (Limoges: Éditions Lambert-Lucas, 2017): 53-68. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 123 AN-ICON  color to black-and-white, flou or blur, used to indicate, in a point-of-view shot, the transition from actual perception to memory, dream, daydream, fantasy, or hallucination. VAR can use all these techniques without any problems at all, since it shares with cinema and audiovisual languages the very same formal apparatus of enunciation. We can have a dissolve or a shift from color to black-and-white also in VAR. If this is not done, or it is not done so often, it is only because of a choice from the “authors” or the VAR, who clearly opt for a “pan-perceptive way” for stylistic or “aes- thetical” reasons. But this does not mean that VAR cannot ex- press non-perceptive conditions such as memory, dream, daydream, fantasy, or hallucination. On the contrary, it does that through perception, perfectly expressing the transi- tion from actual perception to memory, dream, daydream, fantasy, or hallucination in a “pan-perceptive” way. Indeed, Virtual Reality expresses the transition from the actual per- ception through the actual perception. And sometimes it in- corporates the old audiovisual techniques, embodying them inside this transition from perception through perception. A conclusion in the form of a case study. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard As a case study, I will work here on Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, a survival horror game for PS4 devel- oped by Capcom. The game, which can be played through Play Station VR, is full of shifts from actual perception to memories, dreams, and hallucinations. All these shifts are expressed through pure perception, while incorporating from time to time some techniques originating from cinema or audiovisual languages. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is set somewhere in the southern United States, after the murder of a three-man CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 124 AN-ICON  TV crew by the infected Baker family members Jack and Mia. Ethan Winters is the protagonist, who is searching for his missing wife, Mia, which leads him to a derelict plantation mansion, home of the Baker family. At the very beginning of the story, the player, in the role of Ethan, finds a video- tape containing a short video shot by the television crew and, in an adjacent room, he also finds a VCR and a TV where he can see it. Notice how the videotape is a “tech- nological quotation”: it is through an old audiovisual that we come to know what happened in the past,30 now that we are in VR. The player has some expectations at this point:31 we know that a TV crew has been there before us, because we have previously explored their abandoned van. However, the narration of this flashback, which also gives the player important information on the topography of the house, takes place by giving the player control of one or three crew members, not surprisingly the cameraman, who must film what happened previously and return it to the eyes of the player, who is controlling him through his joypad. Here the flashback and the memory, in a form that clearly identifies that they are flashbacks and memories, are obtained through the perception of a “machinic” eye that was there, watching for us. And who now identifies with us and our avatar.32 The very same thing happens when the player controls Mia Winters, in the central part of the plot. Mia hallucinates (we will understand later that she has been infected and her mind is controlled by Eveline) and sees a 10-year-old girl who tells her to watch another video- tape, “so they can be a family”. The videotape introduces 30 According to Kirkland, in the Resident Evil saga “old media technologies contribute a sense of the real perceived as lacking in digital media, yet central to a generically-significant impression of embodiment”. See E. Kirkland, “Resident Evil’s typewriter: horror videogames and their media”, Games and Culture 4, no. 2 (2009). 31 On the way the Resident Evil saga handles expectations of its players, see C. Reed, “Resident Evil’s rhetoric: the communication of corruption in survival horror video games”, Games and Culture 11, no. 6 (2016). 32 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBsOqYpx2ng&t=1550s CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 125 AN-ICON  a memory through which we learn that Mia was a scientist, taking care of a bioweapon under the form of a little girl, but something went wrong. Once again, it is through actual perception that memories and hallucinations are performed. It is through perception that Virtual Reality expresses the transition from actual perception. Controlling Mia Winters, playing through her and perceiving through her eyes and ears, we come to know the truth about the story that we are playing as Ethan Winters, to the point that one of our aims is to send Ethan (ourselves) the very same message we receive when Resident Evil 7: Biohazard starts.33 However, the main moments connected to the relationship between perception, memories and halluci- nation in Virtual Reality are still to come in Resident Evil 7. At a certain point of the plot, Ethan meets Jack Baker’s daughter, Zoe, who also wants to escape Baker’s house. Zoe tells Ethan that his wife Mia is still alive, even if Ethan (us) has already killed her, since Mia has been given the very same infection the Bakers have, and this infection gives her body powerful regenerative abilities and extreme mu- tations. Ethan is told that she and Mia would need to have their infections cured by a special serum first, before leav- ing Baker’s house. Ethan heads out to an old house to find the ingredients for the serum, where he is forced to battle and kill Marguerite Baker. Once he retrieves the ingredient, Ethan begins to have strange visions of a young girl. From this point on, hallucinations, memories and perceptions coexist and alternate in all the Resident Evil 7 gameplay and VAR has no problems at expressing their development throughout the whole story at all, using the very same tech- niques that audiovisual languages used to employ. For instance, in the final boss fight, Ethan per- ceives the world through a grayish film and sees Eveline 33 See a complete walkthrough of this part of the game here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Gh3CkPI0UpA CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 126 AN-ICON  in her 10-year old girl form, that we know being nothing else but a hallucination, since we are told thanks to the Nexbas document found in the salt mines that almost immediately after the infection, the subject begins to see images of Eveline (though she is not in fact there) and even hear her voice (which is inaudible to anyone else). Auditions with infected subjects throughout the stages of infection reveal that at first, the phantom Eveline appears to be a normal young girl, sometimes desiring companionship or assistance. However, after being able to approach her and inject the toxin that we have previously synthetized in the neck, we see an explosion of light flood the screen and then dissolve, indicating the transition from actual percep- tion, that is hallucination, to real online perception. Indeed, when dissolve and blur fade, the girl we are holding in our arms reveals herself to be an old monstrous lady whom we have already met (Baker’s “grandmother” in the wheelchair), that melts into the ground in a colorful scenario (not grey- ish as before), telling us “why does everybody hate me? I just wanted a family”.34 In her actual form she attacks the player, giving birth to the final boss fight. Memories make no exception and are ex- pressed perfectly fine (like hallucinations are) in Virtual Reality. For instance, immediately before, the player is told the true story through the reliving of a painful memory by Mia while he is exploring the house. While we are perceiv- ing the actual scene in the house and after we have found a doll on the ground close to a wheelchair (foreshadowing Eveline’s true identity), we hear a buzz sound that indicates a clear discontinuity and Mia shows up in our perceptive field without interacting with us nor seeing that we are there. 34 The whole sequence can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Rs8bkVhDuA0 CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 127 AN-ICON  What we see is a memory by Mia, while she was taking care of Eveline, the E-Series Biohazard weapon (E-001) built by the company she was working for (a common appearance was selected for the bioweapons; that of a roughly 10-year- old girl, to ensure ease blending in with urban population). It is through these memories perceived through Virtual Reality that we come to know that Eveline infected Mia because she wanted Mia to be her mother. Immediately later, we are inside that memory, we can interact with it and we are part of its compound: indeed, Eveline asks us to be her father (“and if he does not want to be my father, he can die”) and we ask ourselves “why am I seeing this?”.35 As we see, VAR has no problems at all at in us- ing all the classic audiovisual techniques in order to express the transition from online perception to memory, dream or hallucination. It simply prefers doing that the majority of the time through its pan-perceptive model. However, not only can VAR utilise the old audiovisual techniques, but it looks like that also the old audiovisual languages used to express hallucinations, memories and dreams through perception: they simply did not give the observer the sen- sation of “being there”. How could cinema express memory, dream or hallucination through dissolve, blur or flou if not through perception? Since both cinema and VAR share the very same prosthetic structure of their formal appara- tus of enunciation, they both use a prosthesis (a screen, a mounted display etc.) in order to make us see things that we could not have seen without the text.36 In this way, from a semiotic point of view, VAR confirms its mixed nature, keeping together a simulacral and a prosthetic structure of its language. 35 See the whole sequence at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7TZk2iYM-k 36 C. Paolucci, Persona. Soggettività nel linguaggio e semiotica dell’enunciazione (Milano: Bompiani, 2020): Chapter 6. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 128 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/15443

Perception, hallucination, virtual reality. From controlled hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard Perception by Claudio Paolucci Imagination Hallucination Enunciation Resident Evil Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Perception, hallucination, virtual reality. From controlled hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard by Claudio Paolucci Abstract In this paper, I will work on the relationship be- tween perception and imagination in Virtual Reality, claiming that “hallucination” is the ordinary motor also for online perception and not only a deviant form of it. First, I will deal with the problem of perception from the point of view of cognitive semiotics and I will try to underline the crucial role of imagination, claiming that perception is a form of “con- trolled hallucination”. Later, I will focus on the relationship between perception, hallucination, and memory in Virtual Reality. On the one hand, I will claim that Virtual Reality expresses the transition from actual perception to imagina- tion, memory or dream through another actual perception. On the other hand, I will claim that it can express it with- out any problems through the old techniques coming from cinema and other audiovisual languages, since they par- tially share the very same formal apparatus of enunciation. I will demonstrate all of this by analyzing Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Perception Imagination Hallucination Enunciation Resident Evil To quote this essay: 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 CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 112 AN-ICON  Perception, imagination, and the control of the reality First, I will deal with the problem of percep- tion from the point of view of cognitive semiotics.1 I will try to underline the crucial role of imagination, claiming that perception is a form of “controlled hallucination”,2 where, by “controlled hallucination”, I mean the product of the imagination controlled by the world. The main idea is that “hallucination” is the model of perception and not a devi- ant form of it. With “hallucination”, as defined in percep- tion studies and in the neurogeometry of vision,3 I mean the morphological activity of the production of forms by the imagination, which remains crucial both when it is not controlled by the world – as in the case of hallucination, imagination, or dream – and when it is controlled by the world, as in the case of online perception. In Virtual Reality, the world that controls perception is substituted by a tech- nology, a prosthesis capable of creating a strong effect of reality, a simulacrum with an effect of presence that no oth- er audiovisual has ever been able to build.4 In Augmented Reality, on the other side, the technology adds elements to the world that controls perception, without a full-blown substitution, as it happens with Virtual Reality. Maybe, the word “hallucination” can be mis- leading, since perceptual phenomena under the aegis of hallucination may seem to lose the concreteness that I want to characterize them as having. It is possible that 1 See C. Paolucci, Cognitive Semiotics. Integrating signs, minds, menaing and cognition (Berlin-New York: Springer, 2021). 2 See A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”, in L. Albertazzi et al., eds., Perception Beyond Inference: The Information Content of Visual Processes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010): 27-57. 3 See J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”; A. Sarti et al., “The symplectic structure of the primary visual cortex”, Biological Cybernetics 98 (2008): 33-48. 4 See C. Paolucci, “Una percezione macchinica: realtà virtuale e realtà aumentata tra simulacri e protesi dell’enunciazione”, in F. Biggio et al., eds., Meaning–Making in Extended Reality. Senso e Virtualità (Rome: Aracne, I Saggi di Lexia, 2020): 43-62. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 113 AN-ICON  “figuration” would fit better with the ideas I will develop here, since no Sartrean “derealization” is involved.5 However, since our brains try to guess what is out there, and to the extent that that guess matches the evolving sensory data, we perceive the world, in Surfing Uncertainty, Clark recalls the slogan coined by the vision scientist Ramesh Jain that perception is “controlled hallucination”. This is the direc- tion I am going to take. But, precisely because “this view of perception puts us in genuine cognitive contact with the salient aspects of our environment”, Clark suggests we consider hallucination as a form of “uncontrolled percep- tion”.6 However, Clark’s view – if it is put like that – is the classical one that thinks of perception as grounding both hallucination and imagination, which are supposed to be “deviant” or “uncontrolled” forms of perception. Since I want to claim the opposite, I will continue to use “hallucination”, and since there is a well-established tradition regarding this concept in the field of perception studies, I will do so with the caveat that “hallucination” does not imply any kind of “derealization” of perceptual phenomena from a phenom- enological point of view.7 Indeed, with “hallucination”, or “figuration”, I indicate a process of microgenesis8 that continuously pro- duces the next thread of perceptual experience while the current one fades, and does so without voluntary control.9 I claim that meaning guides this microgenesis, or hallucina- tion, and that imagination is the engine of this microgenesis guided by meaning. 5 See G. Matteucci, Estetica e natura umana. La mente estesa tra percezione, emozione ed espressione (Rome: Carocci, 2019). 6 A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: 326. See also paragraph 6.10. 7 See S. Gallagher, D. Zahavi, “Primal impression and enactive perception”, in V. Arstila, D. Lloyd, eds., Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014): 83-99. 8 See J.W. Brown, Self–Embodying Mind: Process, Brain Dynamics and the Conscious Present (Barytown, NY: Barytown Ltd, 2020) 9 See J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 114 AN-ICON  Fig. 1. Kanizsa’s triangle. For instance, in Kanizsa’s triangle (Fig. 1), the triangle is totally a product of our hallucination, since it is the only thing that is not present in the stimuli. It is not by chance that, as Reddy and colleagues show, not only are online perception and imagination closely related in the brain, but perception, as it occurs in creatures like us, is co-emergent with imagination.10 What we perceive is literal- ly (not metaphorically) the future, not the present, because perception is the anticipation of the next thread of sensory information through previous knowledge. Indeed, in percep- tion we build through imagination the world that we expect. There is a beautiful experiment by Adams and colleagues that shows that, in some circumstances, we hear the presence of the absence, that is, we hallucinate something that is not there, but we expect to be there.11 When silence arrives, we literally do not hear it as we are supposed to do (i.e. as nothing playing). In its place, we hear the presence of the absent sound that we were 10 L. Reddy et al., “Reading the mindʼs eye: decoding category information during mental imagery”, NeuroImage 50, no. 2, (2010): 818-825; G. Ganis et al. “Brain areas underlying visual mental imagery and visual perception: An fMRI study”, in Cognitive Brain Research 20, no. 2 (2004): 226-241. 11 R.A. Adams et al., “Predictions not commands: active inference in the motor system”, Brain Structure and Function 218, no. 3 (2013): 611-643. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 115 AN-ICON  expecting. Adams and colleagues’ experiment runs as fol- lows. They used a simple computer simulation of birdsong. A multi-layer prediction machine processes sequences of simulated bird-chirps. The simulations were then repeated but omitting the last three chirps of the original signal. At the first missing chirp, the network responds with a strong precise moment where the first missing chirp should have occurred, the system generated a brief, transient illusory percept. This hallucinated percept was not strong, but the timing was correct with respect to the missing chirp. Thus, our perceptive system first dimly “perceived” (hallucinated) the missing chirp, before responding with a strong error signal when the actual absence of the anticipated sensory evidence became apparent. Of course, Kanizsa’s triangle is a visual correspondent of Adams and colleagues’ ex- periment. This is what I call perception as a “controlled hallucination”, which is the general functioning of our rich, world-revealing perception at any level, since it concerns an organism structurally coupled with its environment trying to minimize disorder and surprise.12 The Goethean account of perception I refer here to what Jan Koenderink, a cognitive scientist and mathematician who works on the connection between theory of singularities and perception, used to call the “Marrian” and the “Goethean” accounts of perception. ■ According to the Marrian account: perception is the result of standard computations on optical data. ■ According to the Goethean account: perception is con- trolled hallucination, or “controlled figuration”. The mainstream view in cognitive science and neuroscience, which is often also the commonsense view, 12 S. Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 116 AN-ICON  is that perception is all about a kind of passive imprinting of the world upon the sense organs and the brain. As Eg- ner and colleagues say, “on traditional accounts the visual system was seen as a passive analyzer of bottom-up sen- sory information”.13 This is a view of the perceiving brain as highly stimulus-driven, taking energetic inputs from the senses and turning them into a coherent percept by a kind of inwards flowing stream. The Predictive Processing account of percep- tion takes a different direction and includes a top-down predictive aspect in its account.14 However, Predictive Pro- cessing thinks of perception as a kind of new schematism between aesthetics (the sensory data) and the concepts (the priors). According to this view, our brains are proac- tive: they are constantly buzzing as they try to predict the sensory signals arriving across all modalities. When such proactive brains “match” the incoming sensory signal, we perceive the world, understand it, and are immediately posi- tioned to imagine it so as to act in it too. However, “halluci- nation” is different from the mainstream notion of “prior”. A prior – as used in Bayesian inference – is a generic, usually statistical, property.15 For example, light comes from above is such a prior (if put in suitable format). It applies, on the average, for terrestrial animals that live in open spaces. Such priors package ‘frozen’ prior experience as it were. ‘Hallucinations’ differ by not being frozen, applying to the actual situation. Hallucinations can be regarded as specific, necessar- ily tentative, instantiations of the observer’s present “situational awareness” instead of its average past.16 13 T. Egner et al., “Expectation and surprise determine neural population responses in the ventral visual stream”, Journal of Neuroscience 30, no. 49 (2010): 16601-16608. 14 See A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty. 15 D. Purves, “Why we see things the way we do: evidence for a wholly empirical strategy of vision”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 356 (2001): 285-297. 16 J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”: 32. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 117 AN-ICON  This is important, because we do not always update our perceptions according to our past experience and according to the changes in our priors. This is very well seen in the popular Muller-Layer illusion, where even when we learn that the two lines have the same length, we still keep on seeing them in the previous way. In per- ception, “data” are constructed through an attunement of the organism and the world, where the organism looks for elements that are worth for him to look for. For instance, as in Kanizsa’s triangle, we look for edges and we perceive edges even if edges are the only thing that are not present in the stimulus. This is because, given evolutionary pressure and experience driven plasticity, we are wired to the environment in order to produce states that track edges when exposed to discontinuities. The system is physically at- tuned to such things, ‘set up to be set off’ by such visual discontinuities.17 Exploring the world, the organism casts his questions to the environment through imagination and pre- dicts its answers until he encounters resistance. This very action turns optical or sound structure into “data”, which are not sent from the world to the organism through senses but are the actual product of the autopoietic structure of the system of perception. Perception occurs when the top down activity of the imagination succeeds at generating the sensory data for itself, building a coherent story that paves the way for efficacious action. When it can gener- ate the future sensory data, the agent perceives the world. When it cannot, encountering a resistance, it tries a new attunement or changes the world through action. Therefore, data are built up because we produce them in looking for what we need for action, in order to minimize our work in the environment. 17 S. Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: 120. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 118 AN-ICON  Moving towards virtual and augmented reality The difference between the mainstream view, where data are sent by the environment and processed through perception, and the view where they are the product of what we look for in a coupled environment, can be operationalized as follows: perception is sensorily guid- ed potential behavior.18 Potential is key here. Perception is grounded on imagination, as it concerns the potential behavior con- nected to a coherent “story” we are building in order to act in the world and minimize disorder.19 Perception as sensorily guided potential be- havior is meant to reveal a world of salient, meaningful, in- teracting causes selected in the light of human needs and possibilities, which is exactly what pragmatists had in mind when they were telling us that the meaning of something consists in its conceivable practical bearings. This also marks the difference between pragmatism and behaviorism, since perception is neither action nor behavior. This prag- matist idea is consistent with the Affordance Competition Hypothesis originally introduced by Cisek,20 which is also a key hypothesis for the Predictive Processing by Andy Clark.21 The brain processes sensory information to specify, in parallel, several potential actions that are currently avail- able. These potential actions compete against each other 18 J. Koenderink, “Vision and information”: 32. 19 C. Paolucci, “Social cognition, mindreading and narratives. A cognitive semiotics perspective on narrative practices from early mindreading to autism spectrum disorders”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18, no. 2 (2019): 375-400; and Cognitive Semiotics. Integrating Signs, Minds, Meaning and Cognition (Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer, 2021). 20 P. Cisek, “Cortical mechanisms of action selection: The affordance competition hypothesis”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 362 (2007): 1585-1599. 21 A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Chapter 6. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 119 AN-ICON  for further processing, while information is collected to bias this competition until a single response is selected.22 If we go beyond Cisek’s terminology of “pro- cessing information”, like I think we have to do in order to focus on the main problem of perception as controlled hallucination, we see that, at the moment, we are see- ing a good deal of confirmation regarding this “pragma- tist” approach from the neurosciences.23 The classic dis- tinction between perception, cognition and action simply fails to reflect not only the phenomenology of our expe- rience, but also the global functional architecture of the brain, where, for instance, motor systems are active and play a huge part also in perception, decision making, social cognition and problem solving.24 Increasing and highly suggestive evidence challenges the view of core cognitive capacities (such as planning and deciding) as neurophysiologically distinct from the circuitry of sensorimotor con- trol. For example, decisions concerning eye movements and the execution of eye movements recruit highly overlapping circuits in lateral intraparietal area (LIP), frontal eye fields (FEF), and the superior colliculus [...]. In the same vein, a perceptual decision task (one in which the decision is reported by an arm movement) re- vealed marked responses within premotor cortex corresponding to the process of deciding upon a response (Romo et al. 2004). Quite generally, wherever a decision is to be reported by (or oth- erwise invokes) some motor action, there looks to be an entwining 22 P. Cisek, “Cortical mechanisms of action selection”: 1585. 23 See C. Paolucci, “Per una concezione strutturale della cognizione: semiotica e scienze cognitive tra embodiment ed estensione della mente”, in M. Graziano, C. Luverà, eds., Bioestetica, bioetica, biopolitica. I linguaggi delle scienze cognitive (Messina: Corisco Edizioni, 2012): 245-276; V. Cuccio, F. Caruana, “Il corpo come icona. Abduzione, strumenti ed Embodied Simulation”, VS-Quaderni di Studi Semiotici 120 (2015): 93-103. 24 See V. Gallese, “Mirror neurons and the neural exploitation hypothesis: from embodied simulation to social cognition”, in J.A. Pineda, ed., Mirror Neuron Systems (New York: Humana Press, 2009): 163-190; A.M. Borghi, F. Caruana, “Embodied Cognition, una nuova psicologia”, Giornale Italiano di Psicologia 35, no. 1 (2013): 23-48; V. Gallese et al., “A unifying view of the basis of social cognition”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8, no. 9 (2004): 396-403; G. Rizzolatti, C. Sinigaglia, “Mirror neurons and motor intentionality”, Functional Neurology 22, no. 4 (2007): 205-221. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 120 AN-ICON of perceptuo-motor processing and decision-making, leading Cis- ek and Kalaska to suggest that ‘decisions, at least those reported through actions, are made within the same sensorimotor circuits that are responsible for planning and executing the associated action’ (Cisek and Kalaska 2011: 274). In cortical associative regions such as posterior parietal cortex (PPC), Cisek and Kalaska go on to argue, activity does not seem in any way to respect the tradi- tional divisions between perception, cognition, and action. Instead we find neuronal populations that trade in shifting and context-re- sponsive combinations of perceiving, deciding, and acting, and in which even single cells may participate in many such functions (Andersen and Buneo 2003).25 If perception is supposed to work as a process that is continuous with action, the Marrian casual chain is inverted. Instead of “data” arriving at the eye, being pro- cessed, being further processed and finally resulting in a “representation” of the scene in front of us, the agent ex- plores the world in any conceivable direction, casting his questions and producing data in relation to what he needs for action, until it encounters resistance. This is why imagination is the real engine for online perception. Since imagination is a faculty that allows us to move our consciousness from a proximal to a distal place, which can be in the past (memory), future (pros- pects) or in an invented reality, this “looking for the future” in online perception, trying to anticipate the next thread of the world, is grounded exactly on imagination. This places Virtual Reality and Augmented Real- ity (VAR) in radical continuity with online perception. Indeed, if, in phenomenological terms, hallucination is a “percep- tion in the absence of the external object”, and if the ob- jects that appear in virtual reality are artificial simulacra of presence that we perceive without them being anchored in 25 A. Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: 178. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 121 AN-ICON  our experience of the physical world, we shall understand immersive virtual experience as a form of voluntary and deliberate hallucination. But this does not imply any kind of derealization: it simply implies the substitution of the control of the world with the control of a technology. This is why VAR promises important scientific applications, which, in a few years, will radically change many of our laboratories of psychology, neuroscience and cognitive sciences. Indeed, on the one hand, we want a world in which reality is not so “real” as to modify the ex- perimental results and influence them, and VAR provides us with only a virtual reality, which can be controlled in detail and put into brackets at will. On the other hand, we also want a world that is not so unreal as to be indistinguish- able from the normal conditions of a laboratory, which at full capacity lives by cutting off every variable that cannot be controlled and ends up producing data that have the purpose of explaining our experience in a condition that we know to be a radical impoverishment of this very same experience. VARs allows us to create a very strong effect of presence within a world-environment,26 capable of sim- ulating a reality that remains only virtual and can therefore be controlled in its different parameters. At the same time, VAR allows us to increase the “gradient of reality” inside a laboratory, integrating those experiences and variables that a laboratory usually tends to cut away, in the name of the robustness of its measurements. Thus, the conditions of the laboratory are “augmented” with a reconstructed and simulated reality, which we can see and experience only thanks to the prostheses of VAR. In this respect, VAR is a prosthetic technology that is in its own way unprecedented, capable of generating a controllable world without losing at the same time the phenomenological richness of the world. 26 A. Pinotti, “Self–negating images: towards an-iconology”, Proceedings 2017, I, 856 (2017). CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 122 AN-ICON  Precisely because of its ability to make the world present through perception, without the world being in any way unamendable – since it can be controlled – it is completely normal that people who set up environments in VAR exploit this possibility, preferring online perception to other expressive possibilities and using online percep- tion in order to express dreams, hallucinations or memo- ries. However, this choice does not in any way reside in a technological, semiotic or enunciative limit of VAR and its language. On the contrary, it is only a “stylistic” choice, which can be suspended. As we will see, many of these suspensions, which result in the use of old cinematographic techniques within Virtual Reality, can be seen for example in an extraordinary game for Play Station VR such as Res- ident Evil 7: Biohazard. Elsewehere,27 I tried to show how, from a semi- otic point of view,28 VAR works by holding together a formal apparatus of the prosthetic type of enunciation, typical of audiovisuals, and a formal apparatus of enunciation of the simulacral type, which is instead typical of other se- miotic systems, such as verbal language.29 If this is true, as I believe it is, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are not incapable of effectively representing the modifications of perception that cinema has always expressed through its representative strategies, such as dissolve, shift from 27 C. Paolucci, “Una percezione macchinica”. 28 Some semiotic approaches to VR can be found in G. Bettetini, L’Ulisse semiotico e le sirene informatiche (Milano: Bompiani, 2006); and B.R. Barricelli et al., “Semiotic Framework for Virtual Reality Usability and UX Evaluation: a Pilot Study”, in M. De Marsico et al., eds., Games-Human Interaction (2018): 1-6. A nice take on the illusory cancellation of the distance that occurs during an immersive experience and the establishment of a critical distance in the user, linked to the emergence of a meta experiential competence, can be found in F. Biggio, “Semiotics of distances in virtual and augmented environments”, Img Journal 2, no. 3 (2020): 82-103. Some important remarks on virtuality and subjectivity can be found in a nice book by Ruggero Eugeni, La condizione postmediale (Brescia: La scuola, 2015) and in the reader edited by F. Biggio et al., Meaning-Making in Extended Reality. Senso e Virtualità (Rome: Aracne, 2020). However, the most comprehensive and original semiotic work on this topic is the PhD thesis by Gianmarco Giuliana, Meaningfulness and Experience in Virtual Realities. Semiotics of a Digital Pla(y)typus, University of Turin (2021). 29 See C. Paolucci, “Prothèses de la subjectivité. L’appareil formel de l’énonciation dans l’audiovisuel”, in M.G. Dondero et al., eds., Les plis du visuel. Réflexivité et énonciation dans l’image (Limoges: Éditions Lambert-Lucas, 2017): 53-68. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 123 AN-ICON  color to black-and-white, flou or blur, used to indicate, in a point-of-view shot, the transition from actual perception to memory, dream, daydream, fantasy, or hallucination. VAR can use all these techniques without any problems at all, since it shares with cinema and audiovisual languages the very same formal apparatus of enunciation. We can have a dissolve or a shift from color to black-and-white also in VAR. If this is not done, or it is not done so often, it is only because of a choice from the “authors” or the VAR, who clearly opt for a “pan-perceptive way” for stylistic or “aes- thetical” reasons. But this does not mean that VAR cannot ex- press non-perceptive conditions such as memory, dream, daydream, fantasy, or hallucination. On the contrary, it does that through perception, perfectly expressing the transi- tion from actual perception to memory, dream, daydream, fantasy, or hallucination in a “pan-perceptive” way. Indeed, Virtual Reality expresses the transition from the actual per- ception through the actual perception. And sometimes it in- corporates the old audiovisual techniques, embodying them inside this transition from perception through perception. A conclusion in the form of a case study. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard As a case study, I will work here on Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, a survival horror game for PS4 devel- oped by Capcom. The game, which can be played through Play Station VR, is full of shifts from actual perception to memories, dreams, and hallucinations. All these shifts are expressed through pure perception, while incorporating from time to time some techniques originating from cinema or audiovisual languages. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is set somewhere in the southern United States, after the murder of a three-man CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 124 AN-ICON  TV crew by the infected Baker family members Jack and Mia. Ethan Winters is the protagonist, who is searching for his missing wife, Mia, which leads him to a derelict plantation mansion, home of the Baker family. At the very beginning of the story, the player, in the role of Ethan, finds a video- tape containing a short video shot by the television crew and, in an adjacent room, he also finds a VCR and a TV where he can see it. Notice how the videotape is a “tech- nological quotation”: it is through an old audiovisual that we come to know what happened in the past,30 now that we are in VR. The player has some expectations at this point:31 we know that a TV crew has been there before us, because we have previously explored their abandoned van. However, the narration of this flashback, which also gives the player important information on the topography of the house, takes place by giving the player control of one or three crew members, not surprisingly the cameraman, who must film what happened previously and return it to the eyes of the player, who is controlling him through his joypad. Here the flashback and the memory, in a form that clearly identifies that they are flashbacks and memories, are obtained through the perception of a “machinic” eye that was there, watching for us. And who now identifies with us and our avatar.32 The very same thing happens when the player controls Mia Winters, in the central part of the plot. Mia hallucinates (we will understand later that she has been infected and her mind is controlled by Eveline) and sees a 10-year-old girl who tells her to watch another video- tape, “so they can be a family”. The videotape introduces 30 According to Kirkland, in the Resident Evil saga “old media technologies contribute a sense of the real perceived as lacking in digital media, yet central to a generically-significant impression of embodiment”. See E. Kirkland, “Resident Evil’s typewriter: horror videogames and their media”, Games and Culture 4, no. 2 (2009). 31 On the way the Resident Evil saga handles expectations of its players, see C. Reed, “Resident Evil’s rhetoric: the communication of corruption in survival horror video games”, Games and Culture 11, no. 6 (2016). 32 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBsOqYpx2ng&t=1550s CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 125 AN-ICON  a memory through which we learn that Mia was a scientist, taking care of a bioweapon under the form of a little girl, but something went wrong. Once again, it is through actual perception that memories and hallucinations are performed. It is through perception that Virtual Reality expresses the transition from actual perception. Controlling Mia Winters, playing through her and perceiving through her eyes and ears, we come to know the truth about the story that we are playing as Ethan Winters, to the point that one of our aims is to send Ethan (ourselves) the very same message we receive when Resident Evil 7: Biohazard starts.33 However, the main moments connected to the relationship between perception, memories and halluci- nation in Virtual Reality are still to come in Resident Evil 7. At a certain point of the plot, Ethan meets Jack Baker’s daughter, Zoe, who also wants to escape Baker’s house. Zoe tells Ethan that his wife Mia is still alive, even if Ethan (us) has already killed her, since Mia has been given the very same infection the Bakers have, and this infection gives her body powerful regenerative abilities and extreme mu- tations. Ethan is told that she and Mia would need to have their infections cured by a special serum first, before leav- ing Baker’s house. Ethan heads out to an old house to find the ingredients for the serum, where he is forced to battle and kill Marguerite Baker. Once he retrieves the ingredient, Ethan begins to have strange visions of a young girl. From this point on, hallucinations, memories and perceptions coexist and alternate in all the Resident Evil 7 gameplay and VAR has no problems at expressing their development throughout the whole story at all, using the very same tech- niques that audiovisual languages used to employ. For instance, in the final boss fight, Ethan per- ceives the world through a grayish film and sees Eveline 33 See a complete walkthrough of this part of the game here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Gh3CkPI0UpA CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 126 AN-ICON  in her 10-year old girl form, that we know being nothing else but a hallucination, since we are told thanks to the Nexbas document found in the salt mines that almost immediately after the infection, the subject begins to see images of Eveline (though she is not in fact there) and even hear her voice (which is inaudible to anyone else). Auditions with infected subjects throughout the stages of infection reveal that at first, the phantom Eveline appears to be a normal young girl, sometimes desiring companionship or assistance. However, after being able to approach her and inject the toxin that we have previously synthetized in the neck, we see an explosion of light flood the screen and then dissolve, indicating the transition from actual percep- tion, that is hallucination, to real online perception. Indeed, when dissolve and blur fade, the girl we are holding in our arms reveals herself to be an old monstrous lady whom we have already met (Baker’s “grandmother” in the wheelchair), that melts into the ground in a colorful scenario (not grey- ish as before), telling us “why does everybody hate me? I just wanted a family”.34 In her actual form she attacks the player, giving birth to the final boss fight. Memories make no exception and are ex- pressed perfectly fine (like hallucinations are) in Virtual Reality. For instance, immediately before, the player is told the true story through the reliving of a painful memory by Mia while he is exploring the house. While we are perceiv- ing the actual scene in the house and after we have found a doll on the ground close to a wheelchair (foreshadowing Eveline’s true identity), we hear a buzz sound that indicates a clear discontinuity and Mia shows up in our perceptive field without interacting with us nor seeing that we are there. 34 The whole sequence can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Rs8bkVhDuA0 CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 127 AN-ICON  What we see is a memory by Mia, while she was taking care of Eveline, the E-Series Biohazard weapon (E-001) built by the company she was working for (a common appearance was selected for the bioweapons; that of a roughly 10-year- old girl, to ensure ease blending in with urban population). It is through these memories perceived through Virtual Reality that we come to know that Eveline infected Mia because she wanted Mia to be her mother. Immediately later, we are inside that memory, we can interact with it and we are part of its compound: indeed, Eveline asks us to be her father (“and if he does not want to be my father, he can die”) and we ask ourselves “why am I seeing this?”.35 As we see, VAR has no problems at all at in us- ing all the classic audiovisual techniques in order to express the transition from online perception to memory, dream or hallucination. It simply prefers doing that the majority of the time through its pan-perceptive model. However, not only can VAR utilise the old audiovisual techniques, but it looks like that also the old audiovisual languages used to express hallucinations, memories and dreams through perception: they simply did not give the observer the sen- sation of “being there”. How could cinema express memory, dream or hallucination through dissolve, blur or flou if not through perception? Since both cinema and VAR share the very same prosthetic structure of their formal appara- tus of enunciation, they both use a prosthesis (a screen, a mounted display etc.) in order to make us see things that we could not have seen without the text.36 In this way, from a semiotic point of view, VAR confirms its mixed nature, keeping together a simulacral and a prosthetic structure of its language. 35 See the whole sequence at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7TZk2iYM-k 36 C. Paolucci, Persona. Soggettività nel linguaggio e semiotica dell’enunciazione (Milano: Bompiani, 2020): Chapter 6. CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI 128 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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Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media by Martine Beugnet and Lily Hibberd Cinema Darkness Spectatorship Dream Consciousness Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media by Martine Beugnet and Lily Hibberd Abstract As with films previously, claims are being made today about the capacity of immersive environments, in- cluding virtual reality, to offer viewers or experiencers ef- fective simulations of altered states of consciousness. In this article, we look anew at the enduring question of time- based mechanical (lens based and digital) media’s ability not merely to take us outside of or besides ourselves, but to generate an imaginary realm of their own. Our analysis centres on the use of darkness. Often associated with the passage from one state of consciousness to another, dark- ness has become a prevalent aesthetic in cinematic immer- sive media. In some ways, as we will see, the latest tech- nologies of audio-vision appear less apt than conventional cinema to induce us to “cross the bridge” and venture into the land of phantoms. In others, they emerge as privileged entries into the dreamlike worlds of our contemporary, tech- nologized era. In spite of differences in viewing conditions, we find that between the older medium of 2D film and that of cinematic virtual reality, darkness, combined with the illusion of depth and visual replication of motion proves to be a particularly potent harbinger of altered states. Cinema Darkness Spectatorship Dream Consciousness To quote this essay: M. Beugnet & L. Hibberd, “Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 129-152 MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 129 AN-ICON (...) spectators at the exit, brutally rejected by the black belly of the theater into the glaring and mischievous light of the lobby, some- times have the bewildered expression (happy and unhappy) of people waking up. To leave the movies is a little like getting up: not always easy.1 Introduction: cine-obscurity Darkness is dream’s natural associate. It is no wonder audiovisual works that seek to transport us beyond the here and now of awakened reality continue to rely on the power of darkness to enfold us and to unravel our sense of place and time. Though there are structural differences between the aesthetics and spectatorship of cinema and that of virtual reality, darkness functions across many me- dia forms as both a metaphor and as a corporeal device for immersion, encouraging spectators and participants to submit to imaginary realms. The scope of this article is not to review the wider lineage of darkness across immersive forms of media, or indeed to revisit their origins going back to Plato’s cave. The media archaeology of moving images and obscurity has already been done by theorists such as Oliver Grau, and in groundwork of Siegfried Zielinski and Gloria Custance, who described the cinema as a dark “womb”.2 Other media theorists have delineated the parameters of interactive or immersive 3D viewing, most notably Maria Engberg and Jay Bolter on virtual reality aesthetics, as well as William 1 C. Metz, A. Guzzetti, “The fiction film and its spectator: A metapsychological study”, New Literary History 8, no. 1 (1976): 75-105, 86. 2 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, trans. G. Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): 151-152. S. Zielinski, G. Custance, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999): 92, 246. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 130 AN-ICON  Brown with the notion of “gaseous perception” in relation to stereoscopic cinema and darkness.3 In contrast with earlier theorizations, in what follows we focus on adaptations of cinematic immersive reality in the hands of artists and experimental filmmakers. To further account for the contemporary emergence of an aesthetic of darkness we firstly seek to establish a histori- cal backdrop. We then turn our attention to the works and, where available, the words of the creators’ themselves, as we consider four recent immersive media works imbibed in darkness: Anouk De Clercq’s Thing, Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang’s La camera insabbiata/Chalkroom, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness and Parragirls Past, Pres- ent: Unlocking Memories of Institutional “Care”. As immer- sion in darkness is closely related to dreamworlds and to dreams of outer space, these phenomena provide the un- derpinning rationale in the first half of this article and for our subsequent analysis of these four works. Enfolding darkness, from awakened dreaming to altered states Amongst the most memorable scenes of F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) is the imaginary screening in which a seductress from the city appears to lure a naïve country man into a fantasized vision of urban life. One evening, as they sit together on the shore of a lake, the woman launches into an eloquent description of nightlife in the city. To demonstrate the impression made by her tale, Murnau materializes it in the form of a projection that magically appears in front of the two characters. Thanks to an astute system of transparencies, the dream show of the modern city superimposes itself onto the nocturnal sky, under the halo of a fake moon that 3 M. Engberg, J.D. Bolter, “The aesthetics of reality media”, Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 81-95. W. Brown, “Avatar: stereoscopic cinema, gaseous perception and darkness”, Animation 7, no. 3 (2012): 259-271. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 131 AN-ICON  glows like the lamp of a projector.4 Stylized cityscapes al- ternate with kaleidoscopic, blurry visions of frenzied revelry: there is no attempt at harnessing this fantastic vision to a specific or stable point of view. The fantasy may originate in the female character’s mind, but it feeds on a collective imaginary, and the projection allows her to share it with her companion, as well as beyond the diegesis, with the audi- ence of Murnau’s film. The sequence is a celebration of the powers of the cinema not merely as a “factory of dreams”, but also as a sharing of the experience of dreaming itself. Dreams and daydreams, hallucinations and memories, as the products of the human psyche, fascinate not only because they elude our self control (we can no more prevent or design our nightmares at will than we can consciously erase a memory), but also because they con- found our capacity to communicate and share experiences. In every medium, from literature to the theatre, painting and photography, techniques have been developed to evoke altered states of consciousness. The gap, however, be- tween the viewer or reader and the subjective creations of the psyche mediated by objective, external sources, is not easily bridged. Key to Sunrise’s mise en abyme of a screen- ing is the choice of a nocturnal setting: in a film theatre the night on screen blends with the darkness that surrounds the cinema spectator like a connecting tissue. Because the visibility of the projected film im- age initially relied on a beam of light, darkness – also the companion of sleep and dreams – has been associated with the cinema from the start. With the shift from analogue to digital, the glow of the LCD monitor has increasingly complemented the light beam of the projector, alongside other self-illuminating screens found in the domestic en- vironment. Regardless of location, we still lower the lights while watching films whenever possible. More than a mere 4 M. Beugnet, L’attrait du flou (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2017): 33-34. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 132 AN-ICON  condition of visibility, obscurity facilitates the slipping in and out of total awakened awareness. Film was the first medium to offer the promise of more than the mere representation of our imaginings – to engender a form of awakened dreaming through spectacle and apparatus. The increasingly photorealistic quality of cinematic images and sounds set in motion guaranteed the “credibility of its fabulations”.5 A spectator could hope to become immersed in a film in a manner similar to the dreamer, who experiences even the most absurd world of mental images equally as “real” as daily life occurrences, or of a daydreamer who indulges in memories or fanciful imaginings to the point of forgetting their actual surround- ings. The conditions of reception in the cinema auditorium came to reflect and strengthen the analogy: cut off from the outer world, plunged in darkness and silence, with limited physical activity, at the end of a screening the spectator often emerges as if they were awakening. Yet in spite of the unequalled ability to blur the frontier between representation and perception,6 the fusion of image and reality never occurs fully.7 As Christian Metz reminds us, where in deep sleep the dreamer does not know that they are dreaming, film induces, at best, a semi-wakeful state: more than dream per se, the experience of watching a film (which can be emulated, though imperfectly, in indi- vidual situations of viewing) resembles that of reminiscing, 5 C. Metz, A. Guzzetti, “The fiction film and its spectator: A metapsychological study”, New Literary History 8, no. 1 (1976): 75-105. 6 S. Sharot, “Dreams in films and films as dreams: surrealism and popular American cinema”, Canadian Journal of Film Studies 24, no. 1 (2015): 66-89. Also, on the myth of the credulous audience, see T. Gunning, “An aesthetic of astonishment. Early film and the (in)credulous spectator”, Art and Text, no. 34 (1989): 31-45. 7 In contrast, “dreaming is subjectively indistinguishable from waking experience”. See T.K. Metzigner, “Why is virtual reality interesting for philosophers?”, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, no. 5 (2018). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 133 AN-ICON  fantasizing or slipping into reverie. For Raymond Bellour, it is better compared with a form of hypnosis.8 Nonetheless, fascination for the medium’s oneiric qualities has driven some of the most radical and creative practices and theorizing of the medium. The rep- resentation of dreams themselves has had little to do with this evolution: from Antonin Artaud and the surrealists to Jean Epstein, the earliest avant-gardes nurtured the belief that the medium’s aesthetic potential laid not in the repre- sentation of dreams or reminiscences, but in the possibil- ity to dream or reminisce with images.9 In classic cinema however, as in avant-garde or experimental filmmaking, darkness and immobility remain the spectator-dreamer’s first allies. In The Absent Body, Drew Leder observes that in normal situations of perception the awareness of our body diminishes: the reason we can focus on what we watch, or concentrate on what we touch, is that we do not pay attention to the actual process, nor to the eye or hand involved in it.10 A similar receding of bodily awareness occurs when we are absorbed in our own thoughts. Such “absenting” of the lived body is not however “equivalent to a mere void, a lack of being”.11 Rather, it testifies to the extent in which a sentient subject might be beside itself, “ecstatically caught-up in the world”: the very nature of the body is to project outwards from its place of standing. From the “here” arises a perceptual world of near and far distances. From the “now” we inhabit a meaningful past and a futural realm of projects and goals.12 8 R. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: POL / Trafic, 2009). 9 J. Epstein, Écrits sur le cinéma, vol. 2 (Paris: Cinéma Club/Seghers, 1975): 18-20. Also see, A. Artaud “Cinéma et réalité”, Œuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris : Gallimard, 1978): 19; and M. Beugnet, L’attrait du flou (Crisnée: Yellow Now: 2017): 82-83. 10 A. Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990): 70-71. 11 Ibid.: 22. 12 Ibid.: 23. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 134 AN-ICON  Leder’s description of this phenomenon recalls James Gibson’s theory of “affordance”, according to which individuals are entwined with their surroundings, their pro- spective actions informed by the constant collecting of information from their environment.13 This capacity to feel or to picture our bodies outside or alongside themselves in time and space is an equally fundamental feature of dream- ing, hallucination and reverie, as well as the fabrication of their similitude in movies. Indeed, it is often the altered sense in which our body appears to relate to its perceived environment (feeling one’s bodily affordance hindered, dis- torted or augmented in turns) that marks the difference between awakened and dreamlike states. In the cinema, the body’s capacity for ecstasis is simultaneously enhanced and directed away from the immediate environment, towards the virtual world that ap- pears on the screen. The film auditorium, as a space, has sometimes been compared to a womb.14 Darkness engulfs the barely moving spectators, allowing them to be together and alone at once, to ignore the borders of the screen as they recede in the obscurity. Within the secluded space of the theatre, the light originating from behind the audience trains spectators to project themselves on the screen, to sit- uate themselves within the perspectival view of the spaces offered to the eye, and the anthropomorphic quality of the camera’s gaze that explores them. From the 1950s onwards, anamorphic lenses widened the frame, and shortened the optical depth of field, with a corresponding increase in visual blur effects. Strengthening the sense of immersion and bringing the cinematic closer to the human field of vision, the blurring of the margins of the visual frame also subtly blended the projected image into the surrounding 13 J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). 14 T. Elsaesser, “Cinephilia or the uses of disenchantment”, in M. de Valck, M. Hagener, eds., Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005): 32. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 135 AN-ICON  darkness, heightening the feeling of being suspended in a virtual dimension without physical limits. In the cinema and at home, dimming the lights and turning up the volume amplifies the degree to which we forget about our own body so as to engage in watch- ing and listening to a movie, sometimes even touching or tasting through the synesthetic or haptic powers of certain images.15 Accordingly, in classic narrative cinema’s sub- jective point of view, a character’s body partly or wholly disappears from the frame. Such strategies allow us, as the spectator, not only to half-dream our way through a film, but also to engage with the expression of altered states of consciousness where images and sounds are supposedly the product of mental processes. Paradoxically, both of these experiences can involve audiovisual representations of extreme physicality (fighting, crying, flying…). Whether awake or dreaming,16 characters in films move, fall or take off in the air, as we ourselves sometimes do in our sleep. In all such cases, however, it is the incapacity to act on the film’s progression that grants the experience its onei- ric quality: as the dreamer with dreams, the film spectator does not control the flow of images: once triggered, they cannot be easily altered or fully erased at will.17 Nor can we always choose to retain a memory, or the trace of a dream, 15 L.U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). M. Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 16 Whereas a dream or a memory is a subjective reality emanating from the psyche, a film is an external product constructed according to a common idiom. In conventional filmmaking, transitions mark out the passage from woken to altered states of consciousness (fades in and out, blurredness, distorted perspectives, spiralling images amongst others). Film dreaming is thus reclaimed and repurposed as the representation of dreaming in film. 17 See T. Kuntzel, “Le defilement”, La revue d’esthétique (1972), reprinted in D. Noguez, ed., Cinéma: théorie, lectures (Paris, Klincksieck, 1978): 97-110. R. Bellour, L’entre-images: photo, cinéma, vidéo (Paris: La Différence, 2002): 86. M. Beugnet, Le Cinéma et ses doubles (Bordeaux: Bord de l’eau, 2021): 5-6. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 136 AN-ICON  any more that we can keep a precise recollection of all the images of a film whose course we can hardly change.18 As with films previously, claims are being made today about the capacity of immersive environments, in- cluding virtual reality, to offer viewers or experiencers ef- fective simulations of altered states of consciousness.19 In what follows, we look anew at the enduring question of time-based mechanical (lens based and digital) media’s ability not merely to take us outside of or besides ourselves, but also to generate an imaginary realm of their own. In doing so we consider the issue of aesthetics alongside the conditions of spectatorship and reception. In some ways, as we will see, the new technologies of audio-vision appear less apt than conventional cinema to induce us to “cross the bridge” and venture into the land of phantoms. In others, they emerge as privileged entries into dream-like worlds of our contemporary, technologized era. What inter- ests us most is not the lure of the “myth of total immersion” or the pursuit of the perfect conflation of perception and representation that would entail the erasure of the frontier between reality and fantasy.20 Rather, we concentrate on the way cinematic virtual reality (including built immersive environments and head-mounted displays) creates the illu- sion of presence while exploiting digital imaging to emulate 18 Remote control usage destroys the experience of time as co-presence, or of time slipping away (also an essential dimension of memories and dreams). Accordingly, Laura Mulvey associates the remote control with the emergence of a possessive spectator in Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 19 From David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) to Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) and Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018) amongst others, the association of immersive technology and altered states of consciousness is a favoured topic in mainstream cinema. For a VR example see Dream (2016) by Philippe Lambert, which is built on a custom audio-visual synthesizer coded by Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit. https://www.nfb.ca/interactive/dream/. 20 See M. Beugnet, L. Hibberd, “Absorbed in experience: new perspectives on immersive media”, Screen 61, no. 4 (2020). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 137 AN-ICON  the dreamlike state of cinematic reception and conjure up a specific, distinctive kind of imagining.21 In the cinema, the obscurity afforded by the auditorium creates the condition for a unique experience: that of a shared space where a collective dreamlike or light hypnotic state prevails. Contrastingly, when viewing a work in a head-mounted display, there is no “joint watching”. The solitude is inescapable, only faintly or temporarily relieved in encounters with others, as characters or actors in the shape of avatars. Darkness creates a connection nonethe- less, an evocation of an infinite space that, ultimately, we all have in common. Hence, in spite of differences in viewing conditions, we find that between the medium of 2D film and that of cinematic virtual reality, darkness combined with the visual replication of motion proves to be a potent harbinger of the dreamlike. It unsettles our grounded-ness in place and demands that we forge new connections with images, and with the world, ourselves and others. We further sug- gest that across VR and film, darkness inaugurates a shift from the collective experience of subjective states toward the individual experience of an unconscious shaped by the shared knowledge of our finitude. Though we are told we live in the age of the Anthropocene, we have an acute sense of the relativity of our existence, of being caught in perpetual movement, connected yet unanchored. Like the dot-size character who faces the starry vastness of the universe at the end of The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1957), the viewer who slides into the seem- ingly limitless night of contemporary films and immersive environments may experience a dreamlike state of radical groundlessness – a contemporary sense of solitary, yet shared, unmooring. 21 Virtual reality is assumed to be closely entwined with interactive gaming and simulated training. This article however focuses on the transmedial practices of narrative and immersion – across film, video art, and immersive installation art – where the spectator rarely drives the story or provokes events. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 138 AN-ICON  In “Of other spaces”, Michel Foucault notes how, from Galileo onwards, things could now only exist in their relative placement and movement: a thing’s place was no longer anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo in the 17th cen- tury, extension was substituted for localization.22 The site of an object, from then on came to be defined as “relations of proximity between points or ele- ments”, like “the dots in a constellation”.23 Foucault builds on the pre-modern analogy between body and universe, arguing that traditionally, space had been constructed as “a space of radiation. Man is surrounded by it on every side; but, inversely, he transmits these resemblances back into the world from which he receives them”.24 In other words, the body is conceived as the medium through which the world is organized as it is perceived. Perspectival art, with its stable construction of space and anchoring of the gaze to a specific position in space, emphasizes such a sense of place-ness and orientation. Though convention- al filmmaking adopted the continuity system in an effort to emulate this centralized condition, its mobile gaze and time-based structure always threatened to reveal the fra- gility of the model.25 Alternative uses of cinematography thus sought to explore the relativity of movement and place, showing the anthropomorphic gaze, with its safely located source, to be an artifice. This approach was not exclusive to ex- perimental cinema: in science fiction and documentary film 22 M. Foucault, “Of other spaces: utopias and heterotopias”, trans. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics 6, no.1 (1986): 22. 23 Ibid.: 23. 24 M. Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Random House, 1970): 23. 25 J. Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972): 18. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 139 AN-ICON  reconstitutions of outer space in particular have made us familiar with “impossible” viewpoints, where a virtual cam- era circles around planets and floats through constella- tions.26 Here again, darkness, like the sidereal night, is key – sucking the spectators into its awesome solitude even as they sit in a crowd. As we will see, immersive technologies have in turn proven to be remarkably able to produce a radi- cal sense of dis-anchoring. A 360-degree omnidirectional scape that moves independently from the viewer’s own movement implies a constant and uncontrollable fluctuation of one’s place within the image. With the dissolution of a stable single-point perspective the body of the observer ceases to be the sole reference and singular source of the gaze as an ordering principle of visible space. The most potent aspect however of these novel immersive environ- ments is the means to enter into the boundlessness of 3D constructed worlds, endless spaces that find in darkness their most compelling expression. In the fathomless black- ness of virtual spaces, furthermore, the solidity of repre- sented things is prone to slip away. The liminal threshold of immersive worlds is arguably always teetering on the brink of dreams – an aspect that the fanfare of virtual reality and the clumsiness of head-mounted displays paradoxi- cally diminishes. Even in 2D iterations construed from 3D renderings however, as is the case in the floating world of Thing, such an evocation of the universe offers itself as powerfully oneiric experience. Sidereal night: Anouk De Clercq’s Thing The first minute of Anouk De Clercq’s film Thing27 is entirely black. The sound track is also initially 26 Famously in the “Blue Danube” sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). 27 Video, b/w, 16:9, stereo, BE/IT/FR, 2013, 18’. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 140 AN-ICON  completely silent, though after a few seconds the faint noise of a light wind or breathing is heard, followed by a voice. The sound of the voice is slightly echoey, as if heard in a large, empty space. Then a crashing noise, followed by the appearance of thin, veil-like formations white dots that move into view from the right of the frame. But whose view? For the voice remains disembodied throughout, and its musings do not refer to the images with any specificity. Nor can we safely establish its location, as its stereophonic transcription varies in spatial orientation, switching from our right to our left ear. Equally impossible to determine is the origin of the movement that alters what we are given to see. Suggested by the changing size of the shapes and their moving in and out of frame, such spatial proximity or distance could equally mirror the trajectory of an invisible observer floating in the dark space, or that of the cloud formations themselves as they enter the former’s field of vision. Occasionally, a fade or a cut to black or a glitch- like effect (with a crackling sound emitted as all vanishes) plunges the screen back into utter darkness.28 Thing appears to be a journey through a virtual world, born out of the imagination of a fictional dreamer – given the nature of the images and the model-like appa- ritions of cities and buildings this dreamer could be the engineer of this world. De Clercq describes Thing as a journey through an architect’s “virtual memory”, “a bound- less, imaginary space” where fictional buildings and urban patterns emerge and disperse in the darkness, a series of ephemeral nebulas that manifest as a kind of “paradoxi- cal materiality” precisely because they are “virtual”.29 The film was made using LiDAR imaging of urbanscapes (an acronym for Light Detection and Ranging) a remote sensor 28 See R. Misek, “The black screen”, in M. Beugnet, A. Cameron, A. Fetveit, eds., Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017): 38-52. 29 See the video here: https://portapak.be/works/30/thing, accessed 18/12/2020. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 141 AN-ICON  technology that generates accurate 3D information about the shape of very large surfaces and their characteristics using pulsed laser emissions to measure ranges between the sensor and the surface. Developed for architectural, archaeological and engineering surveys, such visualiza- tions provide a way of seeing spatial information, which is augmented when viewed in a 3D stereoscopic environ- ment. Yet another digital program subsequently renders the LiDAR data as “point clouds”, the dots of light we see in Thing. Most of the shapes and forms conjured up in Thing are made of these unstable, constantly reshaping clouds of dots. Although the initial light point formations re- semble natural phenomena – cirrostratus, cirrocumulus or constellations – they later produce artificial patterns. An elongated, geometrical form floats in the dark like a space- ship, and the monumental entrance to a city materializes and dissolves. We then travel through the diaphanous out- lines of a district with a mesh of buildings with terraces and hanging gardens. The cross-cutting of a workshop appears and slowly glides in and out of view, its furnishings (stairs, hanging lamps, an easel, the semi-circular shape of what looks like part of a bull’s eye window) sketched in brilliant white against the surrounding night. Some of the point cloud renditions are reminis- cent of white charcoal drawings on black paper, while the buildings and the room resemble X-rays: ghostly, silvery shapes in a process of disintegration. While X-rays and 3D scanners are already used to document vestiges, as well as to augment the existing data of artefacts and archaeo- logical sites, film also holds a specific connection to ruins. Of the attraction exercised by ruins on the cinema, André Habib notes how they offer themselves as the poignant manifestation of the transience of all things human, includ- ing that of our own existence. The inexorability of the flow MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 142 AN-ICON  of 24 images or frames per second – of the ephemerality of its linear course from beginning to end that may be re- peated or looped but not halted – explains the “melancholy, quasi-ontological” relation that connects the medium to the temporality and spatiality of ruins.30 Drawing on tech- niques and visualizations that fuse the astrological and the architectural, De Clercq collapses human time and space (its material, located traces, its memories and dreams) in the infinity of the sidereal night. To craft its boundless post-Galilean dream of space as a universe where the individual body and the individual consciousness are free floating or diffuse, Thing uses the tools of 20th and 21st century imaging. This draw- ing together of film, architecture, and infinite space gives De Clercq’s film an affinity with so-called immersive envi- ronments: a 2D film with a 3D sensibility, best seen in the obscurity of a cinema, it makes full use of the darkened film-theatre as its immediate, continuous extension. “Dark, weird and shadowy”: Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang’s La camera insabbiata/Chalkroom Experimental multimedia artist Laurie Ander- son has produced a series of virtual reality works that elu- cidate some of the aesthetic traits of De Clercq’s Thing in a fully 3D format, also harnessing some of VR’s aptitude to create dreamlike and out-of-body experiences. Created in collaboration with media artist Hsin-Chien Huang in 2017, Chalkroom is an installation and an interactive VR experience, permanently installed at the MoCA in Massachusetts, USA.31 Seated viewers don a head-mounted display and take up two handheld controllers to enter into the VR 30 A. Habib, L’attrait de la ruine (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2011): 9. 31 Virtual reality 360 degree3D interactive video and installation, EN, 2017. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 143 AN-ICON  experience. In the first scene, a lone architectural structure sits on top of a mountain. Unlike the architecture in Thing, the building appears to be concrete. You are coaxed to fly over and enter it, navigating a series of narrow corridors toward a small portal at the end. The controller, which also acts as a torch, is the only source of light. The virtual walls are covered in chalk writing, like their physical counter- part outside the head-mounted display. Here, however, the torchlight illuminates a small orb, making the text all the more elusive – a curious and perverse effect given that the artists have designated us as “readers” instead of viewers. Words disintegrate into phenomes, and break apart again into letters, like swarms of flies. Yet, Laurie Anderson’s vel- vet intonations flow over this eerie place, making it homely. Claustrophobic passages open out into an infinite black space that contains a constellation of text. You’re free to fly around and explore the space, hidden sto- ries narrated by Anderson, which emerge as you approach certain zones. Objects, such as an illuminated, leafy tree, dissolve on closer inspection, and you see this too is made up of letters, as Anderson whispers to us: “You realise that things are made of words”. In interview, she explains being initially unsure about VR because it was too game-like, but that if she could make something “very homemade, dark, weird and shadowy, a different kind of space, a different kind of mental space” then she would be interested.32 Her aim, she adds, was to create an experience where you could fly “like in your dreams”. On the face of it, since immersive environments such as 3D films in 360 degree cinema projection and virtual reality experiences on head-mounted display or HMD, 33 32 “Laurie Anderson interview: A virtual reality of stories”, 2017, Louisiana Channel. Accessed 20/12/2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHT016FbR30. 33 It is important not to confuse VR with the HMD. In simplest terms, Virtual Reality is defined as being the coherence of technical means that enable a person to interact in real time with a virtual world. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 144 AN-ICON  effectively “environmentalize”34 the image, one could ex- pect the “womb” effect to be perfected and even emulated, as with Anderson’s installation. However, in contrast with conventional spectatorship, absorbed viewing is under- mined by the degree of physical activity involved in the experience.35 In addition to the heaviness and discomfort of the hardware – the headset and headphones – and the optical strain of stereoscopic vision, the attention and effort involved in interacting with the virtual environment para- doxically induce a sense of heightened physical awareness. Rather than projecting itself, the sentient subject engages with the task of controlling the effects of its own motricity in the here and now: a “presenting”, rather than an absent- ing of the body. These effects might be the result of VR’s relative novelty. Nonetheless, it seems that in the narrative context of cinematic VR – beyond gaming and therapeutic applications – interaction and causative acts tend to un- dermine immersion, contradicting widespread theories of “presence” in VR.36 After all, it can be very unnerving to feel your body split in two: an HMD effectively separates our head from the rest of our body. Not only can we not see our (real) selves but unless we are offered some form of avatar we also lack a visible body in the virtual world. Once we get used to this literal mode of “absenting” however, new forms of ecstasis become possible. As we become familiar with the process of virtual seeing, touching and moving, our experiencer or avatar body may recede into the background of our awareness, just like our lived body 34 A. Pinotti, “Environmentalising the image. Towards an-iconology”, in dossier M. Beugnet, L. Hibberd, eds., “Absorbed in experience: new perspectives on immersive media”, Screen 61, no. 4 (2020): 594-603. 35 Interestingly, in Sunrise the virtual screen vanishes when the woman starts dancing. 36 See C. Heeter, “Being there: the subjective experience of presence”, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 1, no. 2 (1992): 262-271. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 145 AN-ICON  does in a reverie, leaving us to be “ecstatically caught-up in the virtual world”.37 Distinct from many other VR interactive ex- periences, Chalkroom’s freedom to roam inhabits this liminal zone for two reasons: one, choices don’t lead to deterministic or sequential narratives, and thus, similar to a dream or hallucination, we feel that we are driven by compulsions and desires. Two, and even more compelling, is the sense that you cannot put your feet on the ground, that you are floating free. Anderson describes this in terms of disembodiment, stating that “losing your body” is one of her chief interests in producing these works.38 The inherent disembodiment felt when navigat- ing a 3D world in VR immersion is all the more estranging when it is set in the dark. The chiaroscuro effect is theatrical and exaggerates the sense of volume and depth as in a Ba- roque painting. And lower levels of light are also less visually straining in VR. In Chalkroom the upshot of floating through the dark signals our descent into the night; a diurnal cycle that we are bound to as circadian creatures. Anderson aptly remarks: “What are nights for? To fall through time into an- other world”; a world where, as Huang points out, “the words become a nebula” – chalk dust, atomised, diffuse matter disintegrating upon touch, evading our grasp. While not all HMD-supported VR relies on interactive interfaces, wearing a head-mounted display cuts us off from the surrounding reality more effectively than the dimness of our living room, or the darkness of the cinema auditorium (where exit signs, are by necessity always visible).39 Distinct from watching the audience at a film screening, to observe someone wearing an HMD feels 37 A. Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990): 22. 38 “Laurie Anderson Interview: A Virtual Reality of Stories”. In performance studies, such a transit state is called “liminoid performance”. See Alexandra G. Murphy, “Organizational politics of place and space: the perpetual liminoid performance of commercial flight”, Text and Performance Quarterly 22, no. 4 (2002): 297-316. 39 A. Pinotti, “Environmentalising the image. Towards an-iconology”. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 146 AN-ICON  a bit like trespassing. As when we look at someone who is sleeping, the experiencer is not aware of our gaze. At the same time, we have no access to what they are seeing. The duality of mind and eye as well as inner and outer worlds is a consistent theme in narrative VR experiences, one that is explicitly realised in works that manifest otherwise invisible or intangible traces, senses or information – or as in Notes on Blindness a lack of access thereof. Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness. The virtual reality film, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness40 was created as a counterpart to the feature documentary Notes on Blindness produced by Peter Mid- dleton and James Spinney in 2016. Both works arise from the first-person audio narration of John Hull, who describes in visceral and philosophical terms the process of losing his sight.41 Mired in darkness, as its title indicates, the VR version of the feature film has a wraith-like quality; of thin veils of light suspended in twilight. Its narrative is structured around six parts, each one being a memory, a moment, and a specific location recorded on John Hull’s tapes; each scene requiring a different level and form of interaction from the viewer in order to follow or progress through the narrative. Sound is central to the work, augmented through binaural audio (that spatializes sound as if it were bouncing around your ears), while the 3D rendering of objects and moving figures create a highly immersive experience. Sim- ilar to Thing, its most evocative aspect is the use of point 40 With narrator John Hull. Interactive virtual reality, 360-degree 3D video, colour, EN/FR, 7’, 2016. 41 Based on John Hull’s memoir, On Sight and Insight: A Journey Into the World of Blindness (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 147 AN-ICON  cloud to suspend firefly-like dots in a seemingly infinite deep indigo.42 The first two scenes in Notes on Blindness establish the parameters for acoustic seeing: in the obscure world evoked by John Hull we must learn anew how to look with our ears. Light signals how sound might feel and alerts us to the acoustic realm in three dimensions. It is, however, in the second and third scenes that we are subjected to something closer to liminal performance. As Hull begins to realise that he can no longer remember what things or loved ones look like, he descends into despair. His fear of being trapped alone in darkness culminates in a scene out in the snow, where he panics because he loses all sense of place. At the end of the narration however, the VR interaction invites us to dissolve his footprints in the snow by training our attention, with our head position tracked by the HMD, on their impression in the darkness. When the first set of footprints vanish another pair appear, leading us in Hull’s steps back to the safety of home. In the episode that features rain, Hull’s house is an almost silent place except for his gentle voice and the reverberation of raindrops falling on ordinary objects in the room. We are again invited to interact with our gaze, this time to give shape to otherwise hidden forms that the rain defines acoustically: pots, pans, glasses, dishes. This is a pivotal moment in Hull’s own life and the VR film; we too understand what it is to create the virtual shape of things by listening to them. There is also a specific, oneiric qual- ity to the space that the VR work creates whereby Hull’s experience becomes a shared one, rather than a voyeuris- tic observation of someone losing their sight.43 Everything we hear is echoed in its visual equivalent; renderings that 42 Point cloud started to appear in cinematic VR works at this time. See, for instance, “Coexistence” 2016, at the Venice Architecture Biennale: https://vimeo.com/183596023 43 For ethical issues related to the work, see D. Leblond, “Landscape Shaped by Blindness. Touching the Rock (1990) and Notes on Blindness (2016): Towards an ec(h)ology of vision”, Études britanniques contemporaines no. 55 (2018). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 148 AN-ICON  appear as point clouds: luminescent, 3D shapes of objects and moving bodies that create elusive, lace-like silhou- ettes in the darkened space. In the process of becoming fully recognizable, and as they unravel and disperse into thinning clouds of bright specks, these forms resemble constellations. Hence, in Notes on Blindness, as in Thing and Chalkroom, the darkness acts as a connecting mate- rial: boundless, it enfolds all of us (seeing and non-seeing individuals) in a cosmic infinity that is simultaneously inti- mate and terrifying. “Cold space, a dark place”: Parragirls Past, Present: unlocking memories of institutional “care” The immersive VR film Parragirls Past, Present44 is set in the grounds and buildings of Parramatta Girls Home – a punitive welfare institution for teenage girls sit- uated in Western Sydney, Australia, closed in 1974 and abandoned since the late 1990s. Its creation pivots on the memories of five former occupants, among the hundreds who have returned after many decades to confront this terrible place. As a labour of remembrance mired in trauma, the project required more than a year of collaboration with the aim of finding a form of testimony that might convey the survivors’ experiences to a wider public. In Parramatta Girls Home, children were not only deprived of freedom, but also cruelly disciplined and abused. Later, both Australian government inquiries and media reporting sensationalized and underscored their stigma and victimhood. The last thing Parragirls could abide was to provide viewers with prurient pleasures. Hence, a number of counter-visual strat- egies were developed, ruling out interactivity as a means 44 360-degree 3D stereoscopic video, ambisonic spatial sound, EN, 2017, 23’. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 149 AN-ICON  for viewers to progress through the virtual environment and its narratives. As with Thing, Chalkroom and Notes on Blind- ness, the point cloud photographic technique, materializing against the surrounding darkness, proved key. Among the varied ways that images can be “environmentalized” in 3D and 360 degrees, point cloud is distinct: it bears little resemblance to the synthetic imagery of game and CGI animation. Cartographic in origin, point cloud provides a means to project these as experienceable architectures – places we can fly through, as if in space. In addition to the sense of irrepressible movement, of being sucked into the institution’s spatio-temporal vortex, it is the transformation of photographs into points of light and colour that float in an abysmal 3D world that gives Parragirls Past, Present its wraithlike and enigmatic atmosphere. Accompanying the journey is the sound of the Parragirls’ voices, captured in ambisonic recordings. Wo- ven together, they offer a deeply personal yet collective ac- count of their experience as inmates. There is one location in particular in the Girls Home that former occupants find difficult to revisit: a basement solitary confinement cell, col- loquially known as the dungeon. In the film, Gypsie Hayes describes it thus: the only way you can survive in there is to curl up and go to sleep. That’s all you could do to survive that. It was nothingness. It was just a cold space, a dark place. In contrast to the exterior point cloud scenes, the cell is represented as a stereoscopic spherical panorama in 360 degrees. Moving between the differently rendered and spatially located spaces, presented yet another dilemma however, which was resolved using the point cloud aes- thetic as a form of transition in conjunction with moving MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 150 AN-ICON  tracking shots, to dissolve the image across one space or dimension into another. The most unusual impact of combining point cloud with mobile tracking shots in the 3D world of Parra- girls Past, Present is the feeling of being pulled through the experience, almost against our will. The data points seem to transcend and even pierce our body, so that we become part of the ghost-like substance of the Girls Home. Distinct from its head-mounted display viewing, in the 3D 360-de- gree film screenings of Parragirls Past, Present at UNSW EPICentre. Standing alongside 10 to 15 spectators wearing 3D glasses, you can see the points appear to emerge in 3D from the circular screen and pass through the bodies of the viewers beside you. The imagery may appear spectral as it floats through space, but so are the audience, whose bod- ies are traversed as if they had no consistency or solidity. Crucially, in conjunction with the nightmarish, endless darkness and the omnidirectional eye, point cloud effectively disassembles the centralized gaze of VR’s typi- cally first-person perspective: enfolded in swarms of float- ing pixels, we start to feel what it must have been like to be under constant disciplinary surveillance – to be watched at all times by invisible omniscient eyes. In the concluding shot, however, we fly out backwards, as if pulled up and out into the sky, discovering the vast emptiness that extends beyond the perimeter of the institution. On the one hand, what we are literally seeing are the limits of the photogrammetric images that could be recorded – black holes in both data and historical memory. On the other hand, as the sound of the multiple voices van- ishes, we grasp a sense of the collective unconscious that Parragirls still share with the other former occupants of the Home: the internalisation of a state of incarceration, being severed from the rest of the world, unable to imagine what lays beyond the space of incarceration other than a void. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 151 AN-ICON  Conclusion In moving image media, as in real life, darkness has always been a privileged channel towards alternate states of self or alterity. Black spaces encourage us to re- linquish control of sensing bodies, simultaneously fostering a sense of placeless-ness: in the dark, we lose our sense of orientation and lack the necessary landmarks to eval- uate distance and depth, and order the space according to the familiar rules of perspective and proprioception. In immersive environments, the feeling of being unmoored is heightened by the “environmentalizing” of the space: night enfolds us on all sides. Within this dis-anchored realm, the voices that appear to address us but remain devoid of a visible source seem to take possession of us, strength- ening the sense of losing one’s grip. But darkness is not the only precondition to our slipping into an altered state of consciousness. The experience of the scene unfold- ing independently from our will is equally important, which also occurs when watching 2D films. While spectators can look around in every direction in both the HMD and in a 360-degree 3D cinema, if you cannot control your propul- sion through a space or scene then the film acts on you. Only at this price – in accepting that I cannot change the “order” of the images and sounds – can a form of “dreamwork” take place.45 In the works described here, the unravelling of the images is inseparable from the relent- less, gliding movement that sucks us in, and, in the case of 360 degree 3D films, passes “through” us: to turn our head and look back is to experience the sense of memory disinte- grating, and history as ruins, that Walter Benjamin so vividly 45 As Thierry Kuntzel points out, such is the specificity of time-based media and its special link to the dream-like and to the unconscious: “the film and the story unravel outside of me, I cannot possibly intervene”. T. Kuntzel, “Le travail du film”, Communications, no. 19 (1972): 27. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 152 AN-ICON  evoked with the allegory of the angel of history.46 Lighting up in darkness, point clouds appear like the ultimate expression of transience. Though they are a mere effect of a particular imaging technology, they often look like constellations, or like particles that float in space, such as dust, petals or snowflakes; points that redefine deep space as a conduit to the dreamlike. A figuration of matter propagating, taking form and then dissolving, point clouds perfectly capture the melancholy awareness of the impermanence of the material world, and the all-too human, shared sense of finitude, loss, and awe experienced in reminiscing and day-dreaming. 46 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the philosophy of history”, trans. H. Zohn, in H. Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): 249. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 153 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/15161

Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media by Martine Beugnet and Lily Hibberd Cinema Darkness Spectatorship Dream Consciousness Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media by Martine Beugnet and Lily Hibberd Abstract As with films previously, claims are being made today about the capacity of immersive environments, in- cluding virtual reality, to offer viewers or experiencers ef- fective simulations of altered states of consciousness. In this article, we look anew at the enduring question of time- based mechanical (lens based and digital) media’s ability not merely to take us outside of or besides ourselves, but to generate an imaginary realm of their own. Our analysis centres on the use of darkness. Often associated with the passage from one state of consciousness to another, dark- ness has become a prevalent aesthetic in cinematic immer- sive media. In some ways, as we will see, the latest tech- nologies of audio-vision appear less apt than conventional cinema to induce us to “cross the bridge” and venture into the land of phantoms. In others, they emerge as privileged entries into the dreamlike worlds of our contemporary, tech- nologized era. In spite of differences in viewing conditions, we find that between the older medium of 2D film and that of cinematic virtual reality, darkness, combined with the illusion of depth and visual replication of motion proves to be a particularly potent harbinger of altered states. Cinema Darkness Spectatorship Dream Consciousness To quote this essay: M. Beugnet & L. Hibberd, “Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 129-152 MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 129 AN-ICON (...) spectators at the exit, brutally rejected by the black belly of the theater into the glaring and mischievous light of the lobby, some- times have the bewildered expression (happy and unhappy) of people waking up. To leave the movies is a little like getting up: not always easy.1 Introduction: cine-obscurity Darkness is dream’s natural associate. It is no wonder audiovisual works that seek to transport us beyond the here and now of awakened reality continue to rely on the power of darkness to enfold us and to unravel our sense of place and time. Though there are structural differences between the aesthetics and spectatorship of cinema and that of virtual reality, darkness functions across many me- dia forms as both a metaphor and as a corporeal device for immersion, encouraging spectators and participants to submit to imaginary realms. The scope of this article is not to review the wider lineage of darkness across immersive forms of media, or indeed to revisit their origins going back to Plato’s cave. The media archaeology of moving images and obscurity has already been done by theorists such as Oliver Grau, and in groundwork of Siegfried Zielinski and Gloria Custance, who described the cinema as a dark “womb”.2 Other media theorists have delineated the parameters of interactive or immersive 3D viewing, most notably Maria Engberg and Jay Bolter on virtual reality aesthetics, as well as William 1 C. Metz, A. Guzzetti, “The fiction film and its spectator: A metapsychological study”, New Literary History 8, no. 1 (1976): 75-105, 86. 2 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, trans. G. Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): 151-152. S. Zielinski, G. Custance, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999): 92, 246. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 130 AN-ICON  Brown with the notion of “gaseous perception” in relation to stereoscopic cinema and darkness.3 In contrast with earlier theorizations, in what follows we focus on adaptations of cinematic immersive reality in the hands of artists and experimental filmmakers. To further account for the contemporary emergence of an aesthetic of darkness we firstly seek to establish a histori- cal backdrop. We then turn our attention to the works and, where available, the words of the creators’ themselves, as we consider four recent immersive media works imbibed in darkness: Anouk De Clercq’s Thing, Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang’s La camera insabbiata/Chalkroom, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness and Parragirls Past, Pres- ent: Unlocking Memories of Institutional “Care”. As immer- sion in darkness is closely related to dreamworlds and to dreams of outer space, these phenomena provide the un- derpinning rationale in the first half of this article and for our subsequent analysis of these four works. Enfolding darkness, from awakened dreaming to altered states Amongst the most memorable scenes of F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) is the imaginary screening in which a seductress from the city appears to lure a naïve country man into a fantasized vision of urban life. One evening, as they sit together on the shore of a lake, the woman launches into an eloquent description of nightlife in the city. To demonstrate the impression made by her tale, Murnau materializes it in the form of a projection that magically appears in front of the two characters. Thanks to an astute system of transparencies, the dream show of the modern city superimposes itself onto the nocturnal sky, under the halo of a fake moon that 3 M. Engberg, J.D. Bolter, “The aesthetics of reality media”, Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 81-95. W. Brown, “Avatar: stereoscopic cinema, gaseous perception and darkness”, Animation 7, no. 3 (2012): 259-271. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 131 AN-ICON  glows like the lamp of a projector.4 Stylized cityscapes al- ternate with kaleidoscopic, blurry visions of frenzied revelry: there is no attempt at harnessing this fantastic vision to a specific or stable point of view. The fantasy may originate in the female character’s mind, but it feeds on a collective imaginary, and the projection allows her to share it with her companion, as well as beyond the diegesis, with the audi- ence of Murnau’s film. The sequence is a celebration of the powers of the cinema not merely as a “factory of dreams”, but also as a sharing of the experience of dreaming itself. Dreams and daydreams, hallucinations and memories, as the products of the human psyche, fascinate not only because they elude our self control (we can no more prevent or design our nightmares at will than we can consciously erase a memory), but also because they con- found our capacity to communicate and share experiences. In every medium, from literature to the theatre, painting and photography, techniques have been developed to evoke altered states of consciousness. The gap, however, be- tween the viewer or reader and the subjective creations of the psyche mediated by objective, external sources, is not easily bridged. Key to Sunrise’s mise en abyme of a screen- ing is the choice of a nocturnal setting: in a film theatre the night on screen blends with the darkness that surrounds the cinema spectator like a connecting tissue. Because the visibility of the projected film im- age initially relied on a beam of light, darkness – also the companion of sleep and dreams – has been associated with the cinema from the start. With the shift from analogue to digital, the glow of the LCD monitor has increasingly complemented the light beam of the projector, alongside other self-illuminating screens found in the domestic en- vironment. Regardless of location, we still lower the lights while watching films whenever possible. More than a mere 4 M. Beugnet, L’attrait du flou (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2017): 33-34. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 132 AN-ICON  condition of visibility, obscurity facilitates the slipping in and out of total awakened awareness. Film was the first medium to offer the promise of more than the mere representation of our imaginings – to engender a form of awakened dreaming through spectacle and apparatus. The increasingly photorealistic quality of cinematic images and sounds set in motion guaranteed the “credibility of its fabulations”.5 A spectator could hope to become immersed in a film in a manner similar to the dreamer, who experiences even the most absurd world of mental images equally as “real” as daily life occurrences, or of a daydreamer who indulges in memories or fanciful imaginings to the point of forgetting their actual surround- ings. The conditions of reception in the cinema auditorium came to reflect and strengthen the analogy: cut off from the outer world, plunged in darkness and silence, with limited physical activity, at the end of a screening the spectator often emerges as if they were awakening. Yet in spite of the unequalled ability to blur the frontier between representation and perception,6 the fusion of image and reality never occurs fully.7 As Christian Metz reminds us, where in deep sleep the dreamer does not know that they are dreaming, film induces, at best, a semi-wakeful state: more than dream per se, the experience of watching a film (which can be emulated, though imperfectly, in indi- vidual situations of viewing) resembles that of reminiscing, 5 C. Metz, A. Guzzetti, “The fiction film and its spectator: A metapsychological study”, New Literary History 8, no. 1 (1976): 75-105. 6 S. Sharot, “Dreams in films and films as dreams: surrealism and popular American cinema”, Canadian Journal of Film Studies 24, no. 1 (2015): 66-89. Also, on the myth of the credulous audience, see T. Gunning, “An aesthetic of astonishment. Early film and the (in)credulous spectator”, Art and Text, no. 34 (1989): 31-45. 7 In contrast, “dreaming is subjectively indistinguishable from waking experience”. See T.K. Metzigner, “Why is virtual reality interesting for philosophers?”, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, no. 5 (2018). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 133 AN-ICON  fantasizing or slipping into reverie. For Raymond Bellour, it is better compared with a form of hypnosis.8 Nonetheless, fascination for the medium’s oneiric qualities has driven some of the most radical and creative practices and theorizing of the medium. The rep- resentation of dreams themselves has had little to do with this evolution: from Antonin Artaud and the surrealists to Jean Epstein, the earliest avant-gardes nurtured the belief that the medium’s aesthetic potential laid not in the repre- sentation of dreams or reminiscences, but in the possibil- ity to dream or reminisce with images.9 In classic cinema however, as in avant-garde or experimental filmmaking, darkness and immobility remain the spectator-dreamer’s first allies. In The Absent Body, Drew Leder observes that in normal situations of perception the awareness of our body diminishes: the reason we can focus on what we watch, or concentrate on what we touch, is that we do not pay attention to the actual process, nor to the eye or hand involved in it.10 A similar receding of bodily awareness occurs when we are absorbed in our own thoughts. Such “absenting” of the lived body is not however “equivalent to a mere void, a lack of being”.11 Rather, it testifies to the extent in which a sentient subject might be beside itself, “ecstatically caught-up in the world”: the very nature of the body is to project outwards from its place of standing. From the “here” arises a perceptual world of near and far distances. From the “now” we inhabit a meaningful past and a futural realm of projects and goals.12 8 R. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: POL / Trafic, 2009). 9 J. Epstein, Écrits sur le cinéma, vol. 2 (Paris: Cinéma Club/Seghers, 1975): 18-20. Also see, A. Artaud “Cinéma et réalité”, Œuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris : Gallimard, 1978): 19; and M. Beugnet, L’attrait du flou (Crisnée: Yellow Now: 2017): 82-83. 10 A. Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990): 70-71. 11 Ibid.: 22. 12 Ibid.: 23. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 134 AN-ICON  Leder’s description of this phenomenon recalls James Gibson’s theory of “affordance”, according to which individuals are entwined with their surroundings, their pro- spective actions informed by the constant collecting of information from their environment.13 This capacity to feel or to picture our bodies outside or alongside themselves in time and space is an equally fundamental feature of dream- ing, hallucination and reverie, as well as the fabrication of their similitude in movies. Indeed, it is often the altered sense in which our body appears to relate to its perceived environment (feeling one’s bodily affordance hindered, dis- torted or augmented in turns) that marks the difference between awakened and dreamlike states. In the cinema, the body’s capacity for ecstasis is simultaneously enhanced and directed away from the immediate environment, towards the virtual world that ap- pears on the screen. The film auditorium, as a space, has sometimes been compared to a womb.14 Darkness engulfs the barely moving spectators, allowing them to be together and alone at once, to ignore the borders of the screen as they recede in the obscurity. Within the secluded space of the theatre, the light originating from behind the audience trains spectators to project themselves on the screen, to sit- uate themselves within the perspectival view of the spaces offered to the eye, and the anthropomorphic quality of the camera’s gaze that explores them. From the 1950s onwards, anamorphic lenses widened the frame, and shortened the optical depth of field, with a corresponding increase in visual blur effects. Strengthening the sense of immersion and bringing the cinematic closer to the human field of vision, the blurring of the margins of the visual frame also subtly blended the projected image into the surrounding 13 J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). 14 T. Elsaesser, “Cinephilia or the uses of disenchantment”, in M. de Valck, M. Hagener, eds., Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005): 32. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 135 AN-ICON  darkness, heightening the feeling of being suspended in a virtual dimension without physical limits. In the cinema and at home, dimming the lights and turning up the volume amplifies the degree to which we forget about our own body so as to engage in watch- ing and listening to a movie, sometimes even touching or tasting through the synesthetic or haptic powers of certain images.15 Accordingly, in classic narrative cinema’s sub- jective point of view, a character’s body partly or wholly disappears from the frame. Such strategies allow us, as the spectator, not only to half-dream our way through a film, but also to engage with the expression of altered states of consciousness where images and sounds are supposedly the product of mental processes. Paradoxically, both of these experiences can involve audiovisual representations of extreme physicality (fighting, crying, flying…). Whether awake or dreaming,16 characters in films move, fall or take off in the air, as we ourselves sometimes do in our sleep. In all such cases, however, it is the incapacity to act on the film’s progression that grants the experience its onei- ric quality: as the dreamer with dreams, the film spectator does not control the flow of images: once triggered, they cannot be easily altered or fully erased at will.17 Nor can we always choose to retain a memory, or the trace of a dream, 15 L.U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). M. Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 16 Whereas a dream or a memory is a subjective reality emanating from the psyche, a film is an external product constructed according to a common idiom. In conventional filmmaking, transitions mark out the passage from woken to altered states of consciousness (fades in and out, blurredness, distorted perspectives, spiralling images amongst others). Film dreaming is thus reclaimed and repurposed as the representation of dreaming in film. 17 See T. Kuntzel, “Le defilement”, La revue d’esthétique (1972), reprinted in D. Noguez, ed., Cinéma: théorie, lectures (Paris, Klincksieck, 1978): 97-110. R. Bellour, L’entre-images: photo, cinéma, vidéo (Paris: La Différence, 2002): 86. M. Beugnet, Le Cinéma et ses doubles (Bordeaux: Bord de l’eau, 2021): 5-6. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 136 AN-ICON  any more that we can keep a precise recollection of all the images of a film whose course we can hardly change.18 As with films previously, claims are being made today about the capacity of immersive environments, in- cluding virtual reality, to offer viewers or experiencers ef- fective simulations of altered states of consciousness.19 In what follows, we look anew at the enduring question of time-based mechanical (lens based and digital) media’s ability not merely to take us outside of or besides ourselves, but also to generate an imaginary realm of their own. In doing so we consider the issue of aesthetics alongside the conditions of spectatorship and reception. In some ways, as we will see, the new technologies of audio-vision appear less apt than conventional cinema to induce us to “cross the bridge” and venture into the land of phantoms. In others, they emerge as privileged entries into dream-like worlds of our contemporary, technologized era. What inter- ests us most is not the lure of the “myth of total immersion” or the pursuit of the perfect conflation of perception and representation that would entail the erasure of the frontier between reality and fantasy.20 Rather, we concentrate on the way cinematic virtual reality (including built immersive environments and head-mounted displays) creates the illu- sion of presence while exploiting digital imaging to emulate 18 Remote control usage destroys the experience of time as co-presence, or of time slipping away (also an essential dimension of memories and dreams). Accordingly, Laura Mulvey associates the remote control with the emergence of a possessive spectator in Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 19 From David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) to Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) and Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018) amongst others, the association of immersive technology and altered states of consciousness is a favoured topic in mainstream cinema. For a VR example see Dream (2016) by Philippe Lambert, which is built on a custom audio-visual synthesizer coded by Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit. https://www.nfb.ca/interactive/dream/. 20 See M. Beugnet, L. Hibberd, “Absorbed in experience: new perspectives on immersive media”, Screen 61, no. 4 (2020). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 137 AN-ICON  the dreamlike state of cinematic reception and conjure up a specific, distinctive kind of imagining.21 In the cinema, the obscurity afforded by the auditorium creates the condition for a unique experience: that of a shared space where a collective dreamlike or light hypnotic state prevails. Contrastingly, when viewing a work in a head-mounted display, there is no “joint watching”. The solitude is inescapable, only faintly or temporarily relieved in encounters with others, as characters or actors in the shape of avatars. Darkness creates a connection nonethe- less, an evocation of an infinite space that, ultimately, we all have in common. Hence, in spite of differences in viewing conditions, we find that between the medium of 2D film and that of cinematic virtual reality, darkness combined with the visual replication of motion proves to be a potent harbinger of the dreamlike. It unsettles our grounded-ness in place and demands that we forge new connections with images, and with the world, ourselves and others. We further sug- gest that across VR and film, darkness inaugurates a shift from the collective experience of subjective states toward the individual experience of an unconscious shaped by the shared knowledge of our finitude. Though we are told we live in the age of the Anthropocene, we have an acute sense of the relativity of our existence, of being caught in perpetual movement, connected yet unanchored. Like the dot-size character who faces the starry vastness of the universe at the end of The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1957), the viewer who slides into the seem- ingly limitless night of contemporary films and immersive environments may experience a dreamlike state of radical groundlessness – a contemporary sense of solitary, yet shared, unmooring. 21 Virtual reality is assumed to be closely entwined with interactive gaming and simulated training. This article however focuses on the transmedial practices of narrative and immersion – across film, video art, and immersive installation art – where the spectator rarely drives the story or provokes events. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 138 AN-ICON  In “Of other spaces”, Michel Foucault notes how, from Galileo onwards, things could now only exist in their relative placement and movement: a thing’s place was no longer anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo in the 17th cen- tury, extension was substituted for localization.22 The site of an object, from then on came to be defined as “relations of proximity between points or ele- ments”, like “the dots in a constellation”.23 Foucault builds on the pre-modern analogy between body and universe, arguing that traditionally, space had been constructed as “a space of radiation. Man is surrounded by it on every side; but, inversely, he transmits these resemblances back into the world from which he receives them”.24 In other words, the body is conceived as the medium through which the world is organized as it is perceived. Perspectival art, with its stable construction of space and anchoring of the gaze to a specific position in space, emphasizes such a sense of place-ness and orientation. Though convention- al filmmaking adopted the continuity system in an effort to emulate this centralized condition, its mobile gaze and time-based structure always threatened to reveal the fra- gility of the model.25 Alternative uses of cinematography thus sought to explore the relativity of movement and place, showing the anthropomorphic gaze, with its safely located source, to be an artifice. This approach was not exclusive to ex- perimental cinema: in science fiction and documentary film 22 M. Foucault, “Of other spaces: utopias and heterotopias”, trans. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics 6, no.1 (1986): 22. 23 Ibid.: 23. 24 M. Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Random House, 1970): 23. 25 J. Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972): 18. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 139 AN-ICON  reconstitutions of outer space in particular have made us familiar with “impossible” viewpoints, where a virtual cam- era circles around planets and floats through constella- tions.26 Here again, darkness, like the sidereal night, is key – sucking the spectators into its awesome solitude even as they sit in a crowd. As we will see, immersive technologies have in turn proven to be remarkably able to produce a radi- cal sense of dis-anchoring. A 360-degree omnidirectional scape that moves independently from the viewer’s own movement implies a constant and uncontrollable fluctuation of one’s place within the image. With the dissolution of a stable single-point perspective the body of the observer ceases to be the sole reference and singular source of the gaze as an ordering principle of visible space. The most potent aspect however of these novel immersive environ- ments is the means to enter into the boundlessness of 3D constructed worlds, endless spaces that find in darkness their most compelling expression. In the fathomless black- ness of virtual spaces, furthermore, the solidity of repre- sented things is prone to slip away. The liminal threshold of immersive worlds is arguably always teetering on the brink of dreams – an aspect that the fanfare of virtual reality and the clumsiness of head-mounted displays paradoxi- cally diminishes. Even in 2D iterations construed from 3D renderings however, as is the case in the floating world of Thing, such an evocation of the universe offers itself as powerfully oneiric experience. Sidereal night: Anouk De Clercq’s Thing The first minute of Anouk De Clercq’s film Thing27 is entirely black. The sound track is also initially 26 Famously in the “Blue Danube” sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). 27 Video, b/w, 16:9, stereo, BE/IT/FR, 2013, 18’. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 140 AN-ICON  completely silent, though after a few seconds the faint noise of a light wind or breathing is heard, followed by a voice. The sound of the voice is slightly echoey, as if heard in a large, empty space. Then a crashing noise, followed by the appearance of thin, veil-like formations white dots that move into view from the right of the frame. But whose view? For the voice remains disembodied throughout, and its musings do not refer to the images with any specificity. Nor can we safely establish its location, as its stereophonic transcription varies in spatial orientation, switching from our right to our left ear. Equally impossible to determine is the origin of the movement that alters what we are given to see. Suggested by the changing size of the shapes and their moving in and out of frame, such spatial proximity or distance could equally mirror the trajectory of an invisible observer floating in the dark space, or that of the cloud formations themselves as they enter the former’s field of vision. Occasionally, a fade or a cut to black or a glitch- like effect (with a crackling sound emitted as all vanishes) plunges the screen back into utter darkness.28 Thing appears to be a journey through a virtual world, born out of the imagination of a fictional dreamer – given the nature of the images and the model-like appa- ritions of cities and buildings this dreamer could be the engineer of this world. De Clercq describes Thing as a journey through an architect’s “virtual memory”, “a bound- less, imaginary space” where fictional buildings and urban patterns emerge and disperse in the darkness, a series of ephemeral nebulas that manifest as a kind of “paradoxi- cal materiality” precisely because they are “virtual”.29 The film was made using LiDAR imaging of urbanscapes (an acronym for Light Detection and Ranging) a remote sensor 28 See R. Misek, “The black screen”, in M. Beugnet, A. Cameron, A. Fetveit, eds., Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017): 38-52. 29 See the video here: https://portapak.be/works/30/thing, accessed 18/12/2020. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 141 AN-ICON  technology that generates accurate 3D information about the shape of very large surfaces and their characteristics using pulsed laser emissions to measure ranges between the sensor and the surface. Developed for architectural, archaeological and engineering surveys, such visualiza- tions provide a way of seeing spatial information, which is augmented when viewed in a 3D stereoscopic environ- ment. Yet another digital program subsequently renders the LiDAR data as “point clouds”, the dots of light we see in Thing. Most of the shapes and forms conjured up in Thing are made of these unstable, constantly reshaping clouds of dots. Although the initial light point formations re- semble natural phenomena – cirrostratus, cirrocumulus or constellations – they later produce artificial patterns. An elongated, geometrical form floats in the dark like a space- ship, and the monumental entrance to a city materializes and dissolves. We then travel through the diaphanous out- lines of a district with a mesh of buildings with terraces and hanging gardens. The cross-cutting of a workshop appears and slowly glides in and out of view, its furnishings (stairs, hanging lamps, an easel, the semi-circular shape of what looks like part of a bull’s eye window) sketched in brilliant white against the surrounding night. Some of the point cloud renditions are reminis- cent of white charcoal drawings on black paper, while the buildings and the room resemble X-rays: ghostly, silvery shapes in a process of disintegration. While X-rays and 3D scanners are already used to document vestiges, as well as to augment the existing data of artefacts and archaeo- logical sites, film also holds a specific connection to ruins. Of the attraction exercised by ruins on the cinema, André Habib notes how they offer themselves as the poignant manifestation of the transience of all things human, includ- ing that of our own existence. The inexorability of the flow MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 142 AN-ICON  of 24 images or frames per second – of the ephemerality of its linear course from beginning to end that may be re- peated or looped but not halted – explains the “melancholy, quasi-ontological” relation that connects the medium to the temporality and spatiality of ruins.30 Drawing on tech- niques and visualizations that fuse the astrological and the architectural, De Clercq collapses human time and space (its material, located traces, its memories and dreams) in the infinity of the sidereal night. To craft its boundless post-Galilean dream of space as a universe where the individual body and the individual consciousness are free floating or diffuse, Thing uses the tools of 20th and 21st century imaging. This draw- ing together of film, architecture, and infinite space gives De Clercq’s film an affinity with so-called immersive envi- ronments: a 2D film with a 3D sensibility, best seen in the obscurity of a cinema, it makes full use of the darkened film-theatre as its immediate, continuous extension. “Dark, weird and shadowy”: Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang’s La camera insabbiata/Chalkroom Experimental multimedia artist Laurie Ander- son has produced a series of virtual reality works that elu- cidate some of the aesthetic traits of De Clercq’s Thing in a fully 3D format, also harnessing some of VR’s aptitude to create dreamlike and out-of-body experiences. Created in collaboration with media artist Hsin-Chien Huang in 2017, Chalkroom is an installation and an interactive VR experience, permanently installed at the MoCA in Massachusetts, USA.31 Seated viewers don a head-mounted display and take up two handheld controllers to enter into the VR 30 A. Habib, L’attrait de la ruine (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2011): 9. 31 Virtual reality 360 degree3D interactive video and installation, EN, 2017. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 143 AN-ICON  experience. In the first scene, a lone architectural structure sits on top of a mountain. Unlike the architecture in Thing, the building appears to be concrete. You are coaxed to fly over and enter it, navigating a series of narrow corridors toward a small portal at the end. The controller, which also acts as a torch, is the only source of light. The virtual walls are covered in chalk writing, like their physical counter- part outside the head-mounted display. Here, however, the torchlight illuminates a small orb, making the text all the more elusive – a curious and perverse effect given that the artists have designated us as “readers” instead of viewers. Words disintegrate into phenomes, and break apart again into letters, like swarms of flies. Yet, Laurie Anderson’s vel- vet intonations flow over this eerie place, making it homely. Claustrophobic passages open out into an infinite black space that contains a constellation of text. You’re free to fly around and explore the space, hidden sto- ries narrated by Anderson, which emerge as you approach certain zones. Objects, such as an illuminated, leafy tree, dissolve on closer inspection, and you see this too is made up of letters, as Anderson whispers to us: “You realise that things are made of words”. In interview, she explains being initially unsure about VR because it was too game-like, but that if she could make something “very homemade, dark, weird and shadowy, a different kind of space, a different kind of mental space” then she would be interested.32 Her aim, she adds, was to create an experience where you could fly “like in your dreams”. On the face of it, since immersive environments such as 3D films in 360 degree cinema projection and virtual reality experiences on head-mounted display or HMD, 33 32 “Laurie Anderson interview: A virtual reality of stories”, 2017, Louisiana Channel. Accessed 20/12/2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHT016FbR30. 33 It is important not to confuse VR with the HMD. In simplest terms, Virtual Reality is defined as being the coherence of technical means that enable a person to interact in real time with a virtual world. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 144 AN-ICON  effectively “environmentalize”34 the image, one could ex- pect the “womb” effect to be perfected and even emulated, as with Anderson’s installation. However, in contrast with conventional spectatorship, absorbed viewing is under- mined by the degree of physical activity involved in the experience.35 In addition to the heaviness and discomfort of the hardware – the headset and headphones – and the optical strain of stereoscopic vision, the attention and effort involved in interacting with the virtual environment para- doxically induce a sense of heightened physical awareness. Rather than projecting itself, the sentient subject engages with the task of controlling the effects of its own motricity in the here and now: a “presenting”, rather than an absent- ing of the body. These effects might be the result of VR’s relative novelty. Nonetheless, it seems that in the narrative context of cinematic VR – beyond gaming and therapeutic applications – interaction and causative acts tend to un- dermine immersion, contradicting widespread theories of “presence” in VR.36 After all, it can be very unnerving to feel your body split in two: an HMD effectively separates our head from the rest of our body. Not only can we not see our (real) selves but unless we are offered some form of avatar we also lack a visible body in the virtual world. Once we get used to this literal mode of “absenting” however, new forms of ecstasis become possible. As we become familiar with the process of virtual seeing, touching and moving, our experiencer or avatar body may recede into the background of our awareness, just like our lived body 34 A. Pinotti, “Environmentalising the image. Towards an-iconology”, in dossier M. Beugnet, L. Hibberd, eds., “Absorbed in experience: new perspectives on immersive media”, Screen 61, no. 4 (2020): 594-603. 35 Interestingly, in Sunrise the virtual screen vanishes when the woman starts dancing. 36 See C. Heeter, “Being there: the subjective experience of presence”, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 1, no. 2 (1992): 262-271. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 145 AN-ICON  does in a reverie, leaving us to be “ecstatically caught-up in the virtual world”.37 Distinct from many other VR interactive ex- periences, Chalkroom’s freedom to roam inhabits this liminal zone for two reasons: one, choices don’t lead to deterministic or sequential narratives, and thus, similar to a dream or hallucination, we feel that we are driven by compulsions and desires. Two, and even more compelling, is the sense that you cannot put your feet on the ground, that you are floating free. Anderson describes this in terms of disembodiment, stating that “losing your body” is one of her chief interests in producing these works.38 The inherent disembodiment felt when navigat- ing a 3D world in VR immersion is all the more estranging when it is set in the dark. The chiaroscuro effect is theatrical and exaggerates the sense of volume and depth as in a Ba- roque painting. And lower levels of light are also less visually straining in VR. In Chalkroom the upshot of floating through the dark signals our descent into the night; a diurnal cycle that we are bound to as circadian creatures. Anderson aptly remarks: “What are nights for? To fall through time into an- other world”; a world where, as Huang points out, “the words become a nebula” – chalk dust, atomised, diffuse matter disintegrating upon touch, evading our grasp. While not all HMD-supported VR relies on interactive interfaces, wearing a head-mounted display cuts us off from the surrounding reality more effectively than the dimness of our living room, or the darkness of the cinema auditorium (where exit signs, are by necessity always visible).39 Distinct from watching the audience at a film screening, to observe someone wearing an HMD feels 37 A. Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990): 22. 38 “Laurie Anderson Interview: A Virtual Reality of Stories”. In performance studies, such a transit state is called “liminoid performance”. See Alexandra G. Murphy, “Organizational politics of place and space: the perpetual liminoid performance of commercial flight”, Text and Performance Quarterly 22, no. 4 (2002): 297-316. 39 A. Pinotti, “Environmentalising the image. Towards an-iconology”. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 146 AN-ICON  a bit like trespassing. As when we look at someone who is sleeping, the experiencer is not aware of our gaze. At the same time, we have no access to what they are seeing. The duality of mind and eye as well as inner and outer worlds is a consistent theme in narrative VR experiences, one that is explicitly realised in works that manifest otherwise invisible or intangible traces, senses or information – or as in Notes on Blindness a lack of access thereof. Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness. The virtual reality film, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness40 was created as a counterpart to the feature documentary Notes on Blindness produced by Peter Mid- dleton and James Spinney in 2016. Both works arise from the first-person audio narration of John Hull, who describes in visceral and philosophical terms the process of losing his sight.41 Mired in darkness, as its title indicates, the VR version of the feature film has a wraith-like quality; of thin veils of light suspended in twilight. Its narrative is structured around six parts, each one being a memory, a moment, and a specific location recorded on John Hull’s tapes; each scene requiring a different level and form of interaction from the viewer in order to follow or progress through the narrative. Sound is central to the work, augmented through binaural audio (that spatializes sound as if it were bouncing around your ears), while the 3D rendering of objects and moving figures create a highly immersive experience. Sim- ilar to Thing, its most evocative aspect is the use of point 40 With narrator John Hull. Interactive virtual reality, 360-degree 3D video, colour, EN/FR, 7’, 2016. 41 Based on John Hull’s memoir, On Sight and Insight: A Journey Into the World of Blindness (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 147 AN-ICON  cloud to suspend firefly-like dots in a seemingly infinite deep indigo.42 The first two scenes in Notes on Blindness establish the parameters for acoustic seeing: in the obscure world evoked by John Hull we must learn anew how to look with our ears. Light signals how sound might feel and alerts us to the acoustic realm in three dimensions. It is, however, in the second and third scenes that we are subjected to something closer to liminal performance. As Hull begins to realise that he can no longer remember what things or loved ones look like, he descends into despair. His fear of being trapped alone in darkness culminates in a scene out in the snow, where he panics because he loses all sense of place. At the end of the narration however, the VR interaction invites us to dissolve his footprints in the snow by training our attention, with our head position tracked by the HMD, on their impression in the darkness. When the first set of footprints vanish another pair appear, leading us in Hull’s steps back to the safety of home. In the episode that features rain, Hull’s house is an almost silent place except for his gentle voice and the reverberation of raindrops falling on ordinary objects in the room. We are again invited to interact with our gaze, this time to give shape to otherwise hidden forms that the rain defines acoustically: pots, pans, glasses, dishes. This is a pivotal moment in Hull’s own life and the VR film; we too understand what it is to create the virtual shape of things by listening to them. There is also a specific, oneiric qual- ity to the space that the VR work creates whereby Hull’s experience becomes a shared one, rather than a voyeuris- tic observation of someone losing their sight.43 Everything we hear is echoed in its visual equivalent; renderings that 42 Point cloud started to appear in cinematic VR works at this time. See, for instance, “Coexistence” 2016, at the Venice Architecture Biennale: https://vimeo.com/183596023 43 For ethical issues related to the work, see D. Leblond, “Landscape Shaped by Blindness. Touching the Rock (1990) and Notes on Blindness (2016): Towards an ec(h)ology of vision”, Études britanniques contemporaines no. 55 (2018). MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 148 AN-ICON  appear as point clouds: luminescent, 3D shapes of objects and moving bodies that create elusive, lace-like silhou- ettes in the darkened space. In the process of becoming fully recognizable, and as they unravel and disperse into thinning clouds of bright specks, these forms resemble constellations. Hence, in Notes on Blindness, as in Thing and Chalkroom, the darkness acts as a connecting mate- rial: boundless, it enfolds all of us (seeing and non-seeing individuals) in a cosmic infinity that is simultaneously inti- mate and terrifying. “Cold space, a dark place”: Parragirls Past, Present: unlocking memories of institutional “care” The immersive VR film Parragirls Past, Present44 is set in the grounds and buildings of Parramatta Girls Home – a punitive welfare institution for teenage girls sit- uated in Western Sydney, Australia, closed in 1974 and abandoned since the late 1990s. Its creation pivots on the memories of five former occupants, among the hundreds who have returned after many decades to confront this terrible place. As a labour of remembrance mired in trauma, the project required more than a year of collaboration with the aim of finding a form of testimony that might convey the survivors’ experiences to a wider public. In Parramatta Girls Home, children were not only deprived of freedom, but also cruelly disciplined and abused. Later, both Australian government inquiries and media reporting sensationalized and underscored their stigma and victimhood. The last thing Parragirls could abide was to provide viewers with prurient pleasures. Hence, a number of counter-visual strat- egies were developed, ruling out interactivity as a means 44 360-degree 3D stereoscopic video, ambisonic spatial sound, EN, 2017, 23’. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 149 AN-ICON  for viewers to progress through the virtual environment and its narratives. As with Thing, Chalkroom and Notes on Blind- ness, the point cloud photographic technique, materializing against the surrounding darkness, proved key. Among the varied ways that images can be “environmentalized” in 3D and 360 degrees, point cloud is distinct: it bears little resemblance to the synthetic imagery of game and CGI animation. Cartographic in origin, point cloud provides a means to project these as experienceable architectures – places we can fly through, as if in space. In addition to the sense of irrepressible movement, of being sucked into the institution’s spatio-temporal vortex, it is the transformation of photographs into points of light and colour that float in an abysmal 3D world that gives Parragirls Past, Present its wraithlike and enigmatic atmosphere. Accompanying the journey is the sound of the Parragirls’ voices, captured in ambisonic recordings. Wo- ven together, they offer a deeply personal yet collective ac- count of their experience as inmates. There is one location in particular in the Girls Home that former occupants find difficult to revisit: a basement solitary confinement cell, col- loquially known as the dungeon. In the film, Gypsie Hayes describes it thus: the only way you can survive in there is to curl up and go to sleep. That’s all you could do to survive that. It was nothingness. It was just a cold space, a dark place. In contrast to the exterior point cloud scenes, the cell is represented as a stereoscopic spherical panorama in 360 degrees. Moving between the differently rendered and spatially located spaces, presented yet another dilemma however, which was resolved using the point cloud aes- thetic as a form of transition in conjunction with moving MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 150 AN-ICON  tracking shots, to dissolve the image across one space or dimension into another. The most unusual impact of combining point cloud with mobile tracking shots in the 3D world of Parra- girls Past, Present is the feeling of being pulled through the experience, almost against our will. The data points seem to transcend and even pierce our body, so that we become part of the ghost-like substance of the Girls Home. Distinct from its head-mounted display viewing, in the 3D 360-de- gree film screenings of Parragirls Past, Present at UNSW EPICentre. Standing alongside 10 to 15 spectators wearing 3D glasses, you can see the points appear to emerge in 3D from the circular screen and pass through the bodies of the viewers beside you. The imagery may appear spectral as it floats through space, but so are the audience, whose bod- ies are traversed as if they had no consistency or solidity. Crucially, in conjunction with the nightmarish, endless darkness and the omnidirectional eye, point cloud effectively disassembles the centralized gaze of VR’s typi- cally first-person perspective: enfolded in swarms of float- ing pixels, we start to feel what it must have been like to be under constant disciplinary surveillance – to be watched at all times by invisible omniscient eyes. In the concluding shot, however, we fly out backwards, as if pulled up and out into the sky, discovering the vast emptiness that extends beyond the perimeter of the institution. On the one hand, what we are literally seeing are the limits of the photogrammetric images that could be recorded – black holes in both data and historical memory. On the other hand, as the sound of the multiple voices van- ishes, we grasp a sense of the collective unconscious that Parragirls still share with the other former occupants of the Home: the internalisation of a state of incarceration, being severed from the rest of the world, unable to imagine what lays beyond the space of incarceration other than a void. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 151 AN-ICON  Conclusion In moving image media, as in real life, darkness has always been a privileged channel towards alternate states of self or alterity. Black spaces encourage us to re- linquish control of sensing bodies, simultaneously fostering a sense of placeless-ness: in the dark, we lose our sense of orientation and lack the necessary landmarks to eval- uate distance and depth, and order the space according to the familiar rules of perspective and proprioception. In immersive environments, the feeling of being unmoored is heightened by the “environmentalizing” of the space: night enfolds us on all sides. Within this dis-anchored realm, the voices that appear to address us but remain devoid of a visible source seem to take possession of us, strength- ening the sense of losing one’s grip. But darkness is not the only precondition to our slipping into an altered state of consciousness. The experience of the scene unfold- ing independently from our will is equally important, which also occurs when watching 2D films. While spectators can look around in every direction in both the HMD and in a 360-degree 3D cinema, if you cannot control your propul- sion through a space or scene then the film acts on you. Only at this price – in accepting that I cannot change the “order” of the images and sounds – can a form of “dreamwork” take place.45 In the works described here, the unravelling of the images is inseparable from the relent- less, gliding movement that sucks us in, and, in the case of 360 degree 3D films, passes “through” us: to turn our head and look back is to experience the sense of memory disinte- grating, and history as ruins, that Walter Benjamin so vividly 45 As Thierry Kuntzel points out, such is the specificity of time-based media and its special link to the dream-like and to the unconscious: “the film and the story unravel outside of me, I cannot possibly intervene”. T. Kuntzel, “Le travail du film”, Communications, no. 19 (1972): 27. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 152 AN-ICON  evoked with the allegory of the angel of history.46 Lighting up in darkness, point clouds appear like the ultimate expression of transience. Though they are a mere effect of a particular imaging technology, they often look like constellations, or like particles that float in space, such as dust, petals or snowflakes; points that redefine deep space as a conduit to the dreamlike. A figuration of matter propagating, taking form and then dissolving, point clouds perfectly capture the melancholy awareness of the impermanence of the material world, and the all-too human, shared sense of finitude, loss, and awe experienced in reminiscing and day-dreaming. 46 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the philosophy of history”, trans. H. Zohn, in H. Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): 249. MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD 153 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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The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the Image as a Bilderschrift by Pietro Montani Virtual Reality Imagination Hallucination Dream Regression Intermediality Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the 1 Image as a Bilderschrift by Pietro Montani Abstract This article discusses the following points: ■ The analogies which can be identified between Virtual Reali- ty (VR) and the hallucinatory aspects of dream activity make sense within a network of relations characterised by certain important cognitive performances (in particular inferential performances) which can be attributed to the work of the imagination; ■ To assure the plasticity of these performances, the imagi- nation seems to have to distance itself somewhat from linguistic thought and in dreams this is achieved regressively via the hallu- cinatory state. Various authoritative neuroscientific approaches to dreams significantly substantiate this theory. ■ At the time when its correlation with linguistic thought is deactivated, the imagination does not, however, surrender it- self to the hallucinatory event but elaborates it with recourse to practices similar to those of syncretic writing – a Bilderschrift or “pictographic script” as defined by Freud; ■ It is significant that very early cinema also addressed the quasi-hallucinatory aspects of films, practising an “intermedial” Bilderschrift, i.e. a treatment of the images that is attentive to the comparison and integration of the different levels of expression which work together in the composition of a film; ■ Digital images seem to revive this production model in sev- eral ways and I will offer two examples highlighting their affinity with syncretic and intermedial writing. Virtual Reality Imagination Hallucination Dream Regression Intermediality To quote this essay: P. Montani, “The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the image as a Bilderschrift”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 153-171 PIETRO MONTANI 154 AN-ICON  Virtual reality, hallucination and the dream-imagination The hallucinatory aspect of VR is obvious to those who have experienced or wish to study it. However, not everyone hallucinates and so the hallucinatory nature of dreams offers the most immediate and comprehensible parallel – an experience we undergo during sleep with a frequency and regularity familiar to all.2 VR and dreams cannot be treated as entirely identical phenomena, indeed there are many and signifi- cant differences as we shall see shortly. However we can immediately highlight at least two essential parallels. The first is the compelling illusion of reality that differentiates hallucinatory dreams and VR images from other types of internal and external images processed by the imagination. This leads to the second parallel, regarding the unalterable nature of what is perceived. Apart from some exception- al cases (e.g. “lucid dreaming”), we cannot intervene in dream images, the realism of which is experienced as both convincingly plausible and undeniably objective. The same applies to the fundamentally hallucinatory nature of VR images (although there are clearly many potential excep- tions, to which I shall return in the final section). I would happily add a further property in the presence of sufficient evidence and that is how easily we forget dreams, which corresponds – although this is a totally subjective obser- vation – to the ease with which we discard large portions of our VR experiences. I must stress that the two aforementioned prop- erties are linked to the particular realism of dream and VR 1 This article refers to the European research project “The Future of Humanity: New Scenarios of Imagination” (Vilnius University). This research is funded by the European Social Fund (project no. 09.3.3-LMTK-712-01-0078). 2 The analogy between VR and dreaming has already been explored. See for example R. Diodato, Estetica del virtuale (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2005), which, however, chooses a different approach from the one I will propose here. PIETRO MONTANI 155 AN-ICON  images. So, although the latter come in several interactive forms (e.g. immersive installations) that can alter the per- ceived environment, this does not impact on the funda- mentally hallucinatory state of the images delivered. On the contrary, the degree of interactivity in dreams is limited to the activation of cognitive processes internal to the dream event such as the linguistic formulation of judgements and inferences, and an evaluation of the emotions experienced. But here, too, these processes are dependent on the objec- tivity of the images experienced. I shall provide a personal example: the night before starting this article I dreamt that I encountered a stranger in the street and sensed with great pity and concern that he clearly felt ashamed, although there was no indication as to why. Without entering into more detailed analysis, what I have described was clearly a hallucinatory event accompanied by a congruent judge- ment explicitly formulated in the dreamer’s inner discourse, and which included the word “ashamed”. But it was not a “lucid dream”. A Freudian analyst would say that the dream was mine so the pity and concern were directed at a part of me. This may be so, but this split within the dreamer reinforces rather than diminishes the objectivity of the sentiment I felt and the congruence of the judgement I associated with it (i.e. that the human condition is truly compassionate – and mysterious – if someone can show shame for no apparent reason). Ultimately, it is the radically immersive state of the two traits shared by VR and dreams that should be underscored:3 we become caught up in a 3 For a helpful classification of all the VR forms 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. Tyerry Giuliana, eds., Meaning- Making in Extended Reality (Rome: Aracne, 2020): 63-90. According to the accurate schema divided into four categories discussed in the article, the type on which these considerations focus occupies the second level of the third type (“Advanced cinematic VR”). However, the authors describe “radical immersive media” as a broad category of devices (which can be further divided into two subgroups) designed to interact in different ways with the real world. For reasons that will become clear later, I shall limit my considerations to a very general analogy between VR and dreams. PIETRO MONTANI 156 AN-ICON  simulated environment featuring images that coercively force their presence on us. And now for the equally significant differences. What I have described – and why I was able to describe it – was clearly a dream occurring in a REM sleep phase. It was one of those dreams availing of closer integration with Freud’s “secondary process” and the ones we remember (or reorganise) with greater satisfaction. The neurophys- iological processes at work in all sleep phases are fairly well known today, although the scientific community has reached no full agreement on the functional meaning to attribute to the incoherence and transience of their dream products. We do not know exactly what purpose is served by the low structural level of dreams but there appears to be good support for the theory – adopted here – accord- ing to which their principal function is to increase the “fit- ness” of some processes of the imagination conducted in a wakeful state (particularly inferential ones) by reducing their redundancy and complexity in several ways.4 What does this strange neural work look like? Some have likened it to the wandering undertaken by our vigilant imagination5. Dreams (REM and NREM) also seem- ingly implement a momentary state of generally indeter- minate, organised and specialised cognitive function (e.g. intentionality and attention) to maintain the brain-mind for periods of varying length in the purely virtual phase effec- tively described as the “default mode network”. This is a typically “experimental” phase as both the dream and the wandering explore numerous potential configurations of 4 Here and elsewhere I refer in particular to an important essay by J.A. Hobson et al., “Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming”, Frontiers in Psychology 5, no. 1133 (2014) https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01133. Hobson is an undisputed authority on dream studies and shares the theory (see in particular the works by G. Tononi) that dreams optimise some wakeful cognitive processes by alleviating and “pruning” the synapses in excess. 5 See M. Corballis, The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You’re Not Looking (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2014). Corballis is a psychologist who mainly studies language but his book is up-to-date on the most accredited developments of the neurosciences regarding the dream phenomenon. PIETRO MONTANI 157 AN-ICON  well-defined or simply hypothetical situations and problems, often varied or even disparate. In this sense, the “default mode network” active in dreams in the hallucinatory form familiar to us prompts the entire neuronal apparatus to enter into free flow with no fixed objectives, allowing the “innate generator of virtual reality” in our brains to behave as a “free-running inference machine”.6 This machine – and we shall return to this – benefits from a “synaptic regression”7, a temporary reinstatement of extremely primitive neural circuits not used in the wakeful state. In other words, our brain seemingly needs to suspend dealings with the real world (and its complexity) at regular intervals and start dialoguing with itself, gener- ating simplified and incoherent simulacra of a world so as to optimise, on reawakening, the performances that will enable it to cope once again with the complex (and harsh) reality. The autopoietic and virtualising nature of this work8 offers a simple explanation for the fact that the foetus falls into full REM sleep in the thirtieth week of life.9 This is pure cognitive and proprioceptive training in VR as, at that stage, its only experience of the world is intrauterine. Hobson, Hong and Friston astutely likened this surprising evolution- al phase to an insurgence and initial coordination of the a 6 J.A. Hobson et al., “Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming”: 22. As better clarified below, I shall here intend the concept or “regression” also in the specifically Freudian sense. 7 Ibid.: 15. 8 I discuss this point in P. Montani, Tre forme di creatività. Tecnica, arte, politica (Napoli: Cronopio, 2017). 9 See J.A. Hobson, “REM sleep and dreaming: towards a theory of protoconsciousness”, Nature Review Neurosciences 10 (2020): 803-813 10.1038/nrn2716. PIETRO MONTANI 158 AN-ICON  priori (intuitive and intellectual) forms discussed by Kant10 (to whom we shall return). What temporary conclusions can we draw from the parallel between the dream hallucination and VR? A cru- cial point regarding both the analogies and the differences seems to require critical attention. The neurophysiological study of dreams shows that a significant relationship can form between the sometimes hallucinatory and incoher- ent nature of images and the emergence of our cognitive strategies in the broad sense (e.g. the inferential activity attributable to the imagination).11 The emphasis should fall on both requisites – the incoherence and the hallucinatory nature – although, for obvious reasons, VR seems keen to focus primarily on the latter. To address this problem prop- erly, we should refer to Freud’s great work on the mental significance of dreams12, starting from a fairly solid point of contact between the neurophysiological model with which he worked and the very different ones we work with today. This point of contact consists in the specific importance of regression in hallucinatory and incoherent processes managed by the dream-imagination. Regression and “Bilderschrift” in dreams When referring to Freud I shall totally disre- gard the aspect dearest to his heart, that dreams are in- terpretable and that this very interpretability defines their 10 J.A. Hobson et al., “Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming”: 19. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1787), trans. P. Guyer, A. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). In a very important book, Before Tomorrow. Epigenesis and Rationality (Polity Press: Cambridge, 2016), Catherine Malabou argued in favor of an “epigenetic” interpretation of the development of Kantian a priori forms. I have developed a similar approach to Kant’s critical philosophy in P. Montani, “Imagination and its technological destiny”, Open Philosophy 3 (2020): 187-201. 11 The “judgement” I formulated during the described dream is typically inferential in form. For the Kant of the third Critique, it is the Urteilskraft, i.e. the “power of judgement”, that is essentially inferential and abductive in nature. See I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), trans. P. Guyer, E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 12 See S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), trans. J. Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vols. 4-5, (London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955). PIETRO MONTANI 159 AN-ICON  immensely important metapsychological condition. Is this approach justifiable? Yes if we refer to the last chapter of Traumdeutung, “The psychology of Dream Processes”. A footnote added in 1925 at the end of the previous chapter (VI, “Dream-work”) introduces its objectives significantly, saying that the particular nature of the dream-work should be studied as such, over and above the fact that this form of working is used by the unconscious in a hallucinatory and disguised mode to achieve its drives. Freud writes At bottom dreams are nothing other than a particular form of think- ing, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dream-work which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming - the explanation of its peculiar nature.13 The peculiarities of the dream-work – brilliantly studied by Freud in Chapter VI – are well known: conden- sation, displacement and considerations of representability. But the common trait is regression, intended by the author in a strictly topical sense. Explained as simply as possible (and in non-Freudian language), during dreams our mind- brain reconnects with a very primitive prelinguistic and preconceptual stage of its memory store. Or rather, it is a phase in which a profoundly embodied imagination (think of a baby just a few months old) has also had to perform the work (e.g. inferential) that would subsequently be del- egated to linguistic thought.14 The phenomenon of regression does not only belong to dreams, observes Freud, although in dreams it produces a particular “vividness”, a hallucinatory Belebung. That this is, in other respects, a somewhat paradoxical process emerges from the fact that “a particular form of 13 Ibid.: 510. My italics. 14 Using the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari, we could say that here the imagination adopts a predominately “striated” manner of proceeding. See G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), trans. B. Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988). PIETRO MONTANI 160 AN-ICON  thinking” is entrusted to the process of regression in which “the fabric of the dream-thoughts is resolved [aufgelöst: dis- rupted] into its raw material”.15 But, we must add, it is dis- rupted as far as is possible for, although the archaic zone of the memory store in question dates from an evolutionary phase when linguistic thought did not yet exist, the latter will leave a trace in the regressive path implemented by the dream state in adulthood.16 As demonstrated, for example, by perhaps the most surprising requisite of the dream- work: the ability to treat words as if they were objects and play with their signifying matter. Further on, with regard to dream-hallucinations, Freud speaks of a “transvalua- tion” of thought into images; thought is drawn towards the most archaic memory store, to be seen specifically as a disabling of its logical and linguistic relations in favour of the earliest work of a totally embodied imagination. But these remain transvaluated thoughts and are by no means a reinstatement of a prelinguistic condition. Rather, it is a new reorganisation of the relationship between image and word, a radical renegotiation of their “normal” bond (I shall return to this key point later). This brings fresh relevance to the factor of dream-work that Freud called “regard for representability” What we have described, in our analysis of dream-work, as ‘re- gard for representability’ might be brought into connection with the selective attraction exercised by the visually recollected scenes touched upon by the dream-thoughts (...) [So that] dreaming is on the whole an example of regression to the dreamer’s earliest condition, a revival (ein Wiederbeleben) of his childhood, of the 15 Ibid.: 545. My italics. 16 This is the theory developed by J. Derrida in Writing and Difference (1967), trans. A. Bass (London: Routledge, 2001). PIETRO MONTANI 161 AN-ICON instinctual impulses which dominated it and of the methods of expression which were then available to him.17 Freud appears to refer to non-elaborated (or semi-elaborated) nuclei linked to powerful emotional in- vestments, such as the “internal objects” Melanie Klein and her followers later discussed when re-elaborating Freudian dream theory in broader and more flexible terms, and today considered widely reliable and compatible with neurosci- entific findings.18 The last lines of the citation (from a 1919 addition) allow us to conclude that the regressive move- ment Freud attributed to the physiology of dreams can be acquired as a structural requisite of the dream-imagination without necessarily attributing it to instinctual motivation. In other words, if dream-work is rooted in the condition of very early infancy – the condition of being “in-fans” i.e. not yet capable of speech – this means that the regressive movement of the dream reaches and revives not only the desiring aspects but the concomitant inferential process- es too. Thus, these processes take place in the absence of language and make predominant use of prelinguistic images and schema. We could call it an imagination that “schematises without any concept” as Kant said regarding “reflective judgement”, highlighting its exceptional episte- mological significance.19 This further Kantian indication is by no means casual20 and should be paralleled with the “free-running inference machine” discussed by Hobson, Hong and Friston. Preliminary and free imaginative train- ing is required, hypothetical and exempted from defined 17 Ibid.: 549-550. My italics. 18 This is the theory persuasively argued by M. Mancia, Il sogno e la sua storia. (Venice: Marsilio, 2004); and Sonno & sogno. (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2006). 19 See E. Garroni, Estetica ed epistemologia (Milan: Unicopli 2003); P. Montani, “The Imagination and Its Technological Destiny”: 3; L. Palmer, “Schematizzare senza concetti e senso comune”, in D. Cecchi, M. Feyles, P. Montani (eds.), Ambienti mediali (Milan: Meltemi 2018): 39-56. Significantly, Palmer accompanies his rethinking of the Kantian concept with experimental evidence. 20 See Montani, Tre forme di creatività; and “The Imagination and Its Technological Destiny”. PIETRO MONTANI 162 AN-ICON  tasks, simplified and experimental, not only (as is obvious) before cognition can start to be deployed but also so that it can function constantly – e.g. (Tononi’s proposal largely endorsed by Hobson) in terms of synaptic pruning, simpli- fication and resetting of the inferential device.21 Before leaving Freud we must adopt another of his valuable indications. Above, I linked dreams to a particular way of reorganising the image-word relationship. I will specify that Freud clearly sees them, ultimately, as a relationship guided by a principle of reversibility. Not only are words used as if things, images also display a key trait of discursive convention. This trait is also fully comprehensible in intuitive terms: both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, the human imagination must have performed a major work of segmentation, classification and organisation (e.g. in- ferential) on the experience, valorising a certain intelligible profile of the images – precisely that which language will later formalise. Freud calls this property, reactivated by the dream-imagination, a Bilderschrift, a picture writing: The dream-content (...) is expressed as it were in a pictographic script [Bilderschrift], the characters of which have to be trans- posed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts. If we attempted to read these characters according to their pictorial value instead of according to their symbolic relation [Zeichenbezie- hung], we should clearly be led into error.22 Freud speaks here from the standpoint of inter- pretability (not relevant for us) but the observation can of course be generalised. Products of the dream-imagination 21 See G. Tononi, C. Cirelli, Sleep function and synaptic homeostasis, Sleep Medicine Reviews 10 (2006): 49-62. In this sense and precisely because of its hallucinatory “resuscitation”, the dream-work restores not so much the contents of the oldest inferences but the earliest manner of that performance (i.e. “schematises without any concept”) which conduct precious selective functions for pruning purposes. 22 Ibid.: 296. The translation of Bilderschrift as “pictographic script” is highly questionable; and that of Zeichenbeziehung as “symbolic relation” is frankly erroneous as the “symbolism” of dreams is not involved here but only the more general sign profile of dream-images. PIETRO MONTANI 163 AN-ICON  should above all be observed in terms of their Zeichen- beziehung, their singular and archaic relationship with the semiotic order. In other words, despite being hallucinatory, dream-images should also be appreciated for their ability to reactivate a condition in which the imagination has also processed them as the signs of a particular Bilderschrift.23 Our Freudian journey has taken us another major step forward: the relational aspect –stressed in the conclusions of the first section – can now avail of a specif- ic and significant reference to a scriptural element within the work of the imagination. This element can be linked to the radical regressive condition in which the imagination behaves literally as a VR generator. We can now try to better understand how this correlation works. Bilderschrift in very early cinema and in the digital age: the syncretism and intermediality of images Interestingly, in its very early days, and roughly when Freud was developing his Traumdeutung and subse- quent metapsychological additions, the cinema was seen (or conceived) by some film-makers and theoreticians as closely resembling the device of image-word reversibility highlighted at the end of the previous section. This means that the birth of the cinema also featured a major focus on the network of relationships which the powerful illusion of reality produced by the cinematographic image was clearly keen to unite. In some cases, in particular, that image was seen as a syncretic form of expression: a space of compar- ison and integration between different levels of expression. This section dwells briefly on two significant examples of 23 On the image-word connection and its meaning for an appropriate understanding of a “history” of the arts, C. Brandi’s observations in Segno e immagine (Palermo: Aesthetica, 2002) are valuable, not coincidentally introduced by a discussion on Kant’s schematism, PIETRO MONTANI 164 AN-ICON  this understanding of the image – which I call “intermedi- al”24: a reflection on the cinema of the “Russian Formalists” and Sergei M. Eisenstein’s first cinematographic theory centred on the project of an “intellectual cinema”.25 I shall conclude with some comments on VR installations and their inclusion in the intermedial paradigm of the image. The Formalists felt strongly that the emergence of the cinema gave their era the privilege of observing a form of art in its nascent state. Cinema brought a brand-new addition to the technically reproduced image – the ability to move in time. Boris Eikhenbaum, for instance, argued that with cinema “for the first time in history, an art which was ‘depictive’ by its very nature became capable of evolving in time and proved to be beyond any comparison, classi- fication or analogy”.26 He was struck in particular by the fact that, in cinema, the image medium adopted an original condition because the reception of the film has to develop with a time sequence typical of other media (e.g. writing). To better use these peculiarities, thought Eikhen- baum, the structural principles of the cinematographic text would have to comply with two preferential options, one paradigmatic and the other syntagmatic. The paradig- matic option consisted in asserting the conventionality of the image (its Zeichenbeziehung as Freud would say) in a head-on contrast with the naturalistic values of photograph- ic reproduction; the syntagmatic option consisted in em- phasising the discrete (or potentially discrete) nature of the formal unities placed in a reciprocal relationship following a short, markedly divided montage. These two requisites are therefore totally comparable to Freud’s Bilderschrift. But Eikhenbaum underscored another aspect concerning 24 On this concept, see P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2010). 25 See R. Taylor, ed., Russian Poetics in Translation, vol. 9: The Poetics of Cinema. (Department of Language & Linguistics: University of Essex, 1982); S.M. Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage (London-New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2010). 26 B. Eikhenbaum, “Problems of cine-stylistics”, trans. R. Sherwood, in R. Taylor, ed., The Poetics of Cinema (Oxford: RTP, 1982): 10-21. My italics. PIETRO MONTANI 165 AN-ICON  not the construction options but the structural conditions of understanding a film, arguing that the image plane in the cinema is always accompanied by the articulation of “inner speech” in the spectator’s mind. So, the cinematic experi- ence has to proceed via a constant integration of image and language planes, more akin to a process of reading than a prolonged and guided form of contemplation.27 Returning to the parallel with Freud’s reflection on the figures of the dream-work, we could say that, in films, the autonomous expressive and pathemic resources of the image come to- gether in a constant relationship with the broader cognitive resources accessed by linguistic thought. Remaining largely on the wavelength of Eikhen- baum’s theories, Sergei Eisenstein pushed himself even further forward in the same 1920s’ time-frame, especially from a design perspective. In short, he believed that the discursiveness of cinema could function as a device that takes the spectator into close contact with the semiotic op- erations that enable the imagination to give sensible content to concepts. That is, it could explore the key imaginative performance that Kant called “schematism”. A performance that, unsurprisingly, we have already referred to regard- ing its relationship with dream-work. Eisenstein called this cinema “intellectual” because, from the political perspec- tive that excited him at the time, the cinematic experience promised to considerably alter the spectators’ “power of judgment” (to use another Kantian term), training them, for instance, in dialectical thinking, as we read in one of his notes for the planned film adaptation of Marx’s Capital.28 Although Eikhenbaum and Eisenstein’s the- ories cannot be generalised, we can agree on the fact 27 On the complex intermedial nature of reading, see S.B. Trasmundi, S.C. Cowley, “Reading: how readers beget imagining”, Frontiers in Psychology 11: 531682 (2020), doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.531682. 28 On this subject, see an important work by E. Vogman, Dance of Values. Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital project (Zurich-Berlin: Diaphanes, 2019). PIETRO MONTANI 166 AN-ICON  that, throughout the silent film period, the treatment of cinematographic images largely adhered to the general Bilderschrift principles discussed here, and often invented new figures of them. We can also agree that, whatever its strengths and weaknesses, this trend was destined to un- dergo a marked shift after the introduction of sound, which could inevitably be expected to produce – and Eisenstein was one of the first to denounce this29 – a strengthening of the reproductive and illusionistic effects of the film image and an ensuing increase in the naturalistic understanding of the film. From that moment on, the cinema pursued different paths which we cannot follow here although it may be interesting to ask what transformations would have been seen in the “scriptural” direction I discussed briefly at the start of this section.30 We must instead ask ourselves, and I shall do so rapidly below, whether the fundamental principle embraced by this direction, namely the activation of a critical countermovement physiologically correlated to the regressive nature of the image, reappeared elsewhere. And how it could also concern VR where the regressive movement, as mentioned at the beginning, reaches the extreme condition of a hallucinatory event. Before proceeding we should again stress the relational, and more precisely intermedial, nature of the critical countermovement which accompanies the regres- sive process of the imagination – and thus also presumably its extreme outcomes in the hallucinatory version of VR. Against this backdrop, I shall conclude by touching on two different spheres of exemplification. The first concerns the spontaneous practices of syncretic writing in use on the Web for about 20 years now and which are increasingly widespread among its users. In the second, I shall pres- ent some brief comments on how the intermedial device 29 See S.M. Eisenstein, “Buduščee zvukovoj fil’my. Zajavka”, in Id., Izbrannye Proizvedenija v šesti tomach. II (Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1963-1979): 15-16. 30 I have done so partially in P. Montani, Emozioni dell’intelligenza (Milan: Meltemi, 2020). PIETRO MONTANI 167 AN-ICON  has been managed in two remarkable recent installations: Carne y arena by Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu (2017) and VR_I by Jilles Jobin (2018).31 It is a fact that the birth of the interactive Web supported the emergence of a form of syncretic writing that does not merely combine image, word and sound but also very frequently exploits their reciprocal relations to obtain significant effects of meaning from this interme- dial confrontation – for the moment predominantly tuned into a playful, ironic and paradoxical register (I am thinking of all the “meme” forms). As well as not excluding signifi- cant evolutions and further differentiations, this aspect in itself already guarantees great (and spontaneous) reflexive control of the semiotic material manipulated.32 I have sug- gested calling this practice “extended writing”, adding that significant innovation might develop in the technologies of human expression. Indeed, the first thing to do is to study the internalisation processes and feedback on the imag- inative and cognitive conduct of those using it (but it is a mass phenomenon).33 I am keen to stress here that the regressive values linked to the image in extended writing are placed in a constant, systematic and plastic relationship with several critical and intellectual distancing practices, often of a distinctly intermedial nature. That is to say, they are conceived to exploit the effects of meaning ensuing from the re-mediation and comparison of different media. The two installations mentioned above are im- portant not only for their uncommon design complexity but also and primarily for their intermedial tone (i.e. distanced and reflexive), albeit diversely interpreted in the two cases. In 31 The two installations could be visited at the Fondazione Prada in Milan (2017) and the Istituto Svizzero di Roma (2018), respectively. 32 See P. Montani, “Materialità del virtuale”, Agalma. Rivista di studi culturali e di estetica 40, no. 2 (2020): 11-18; and “Apology for technical distancing. But beware the feedback!”, IMG: Interdisciplinary journal on image, imagery and imagination 3 (2020): 264-281. 33 The issue of “extended writing” should be included in an extensive case study of technological aesthetics, as well illustrated recently by V. Gallese, “The aesthetic world in the digital era. A call to arms for experimental aesthetics”, Reti, saperi, linguaggi 9, no. 17 (2020): 55-84. PIETRO MONTANI 168 AN-ICON  both, visitors realise that the VR is simply a part of a broader experience that can internally implement in various ways what I have just described as a critical countermovement. I shall conclude by indicating the essential coordinates below. Carne y arena is a journey in four stages, the second of which contains a VR installation. Here, the visitor – alone and free to move around – finds him/herself spend- ing six minutes in a desert zone with a group of Mexican refugees trying to cross the US border but being violently driven back by an American army patrol.34 In the first space, visitors are asked to remove their shoes and socks and place them in a locker from which they will collect them later. This is a key strategic move because during their mobile permanence in the virtual environment their bare feet will make them constantly proprioceptively aware of an essen- tial split (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible is the instal- lation’s astute subtitle). A walkway awaits when they exit the “arena”, after retrieving shoes and socks, from where the visitors can catch a glimpse of what is happening in the semi-dark space of the virtual simulation by looking, if they so wish, through the gaps between the wooden planks of a wall. This is a further distancing from the powerful en- gagement just experienced. The walkway leads to a final room where, free to decide how long to stop at each one, they can watch video clips of the migrants narrating details of the episode to which the visitors have been invisible witnesses and what happened to them afterwards. Their 34 I dwelled more analytically on the Iñarritu installation in P. Montani, Tre forme di creatività. See also F. Casetti, A. Pinotti, “Post–cinema ecology”, in D. Chateau, J. Moure, eds., Post– cinema. Cinema in the Post-Art Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 193- 217; A. D’Aloia “Virtually present, physically invisible: virtual reality immersion and emersion in Alejandro González Iñarritu’s Carne y Arena”, Senses of Cinema 87 (2018) http://www. sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/virtually-present-physically-invisible-virtual-reality- immersion-and-emersion-in-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritus-carne-y-arena/. For an important discussion of the “empathic” effects attributable to experiences in VR see A. Pinotti, “Autopsia in 360°. Il rigor mortis dell’empatia nel fuori-cornice del virtuale”, Fata Morgana 39 (2019): 17-32. On the aesthetics of’ “unframed” images see P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan- London: Mimesis International, 2020). PIETRO MONTANI 169 AN-ICON  faces appear in high definition on small screens placed in niches around the walls of the room. The important point here is that the VR is just one of the many elements in the installation and the overall experience stimulates visitors to engage in an intermedial reflection that invests them literally from head (equipped with visor and headphones) to toe (bare). The truly striking and forceful realism of the simulation thus finds its meaning within a complex narrative device. I shall add that even the patchy recollection of the six-minute VR simulation men- tioned at the start of this article finds interesting justification within the context of this complex cognitive and pathemic experience. VR_I is an all-VR installation and far more playful than Carne y arena. The artist is primarily a choreographer and paid particular attention to the fluidity of movement of the five dancers who inhabit the virtual space and define it with their performance. They take on very different sizes in the various phases of the event: gigantic and objectively threatening at the start but miniaturised and observable later on, almost as if in a lab experiment on a small quadrangular platform, and finally life-size. Five people enter the virtual space and each visitor’s avatar can interact with the other four, not only on a haptic and sensorimotorial level (the hands have sensors) but also linguistically thanks to phono-acoustic equipment. The visitors find themselves in a metamorphic space resembling that of dreams: sometimes a boundless desert, at other times an urban landscape or a mountain-top loft with sweeping views down over a wide valley. The envi- ronments are always clearly identifiable and their subsequent development follows the rhythm of the dancers and the spa- tial harmony created by their movements. It is also significant that famous paintings (Matisse, Bacon) are hung on the walls of the loft interiors. Basically, the whole encourages visitors to let themselves go in an experience constantly tuned to a free PIETRO MONTANI 170 AN-ICON  reflexive register and they quickly realise that the rhythmic play between the different spatial dimensions is one of the core themes of the choreographic flow they are engaged in, as too is the doubling of the performance (the dancers giant or miniaturised, the paintings), the comparison between the dimensions and the free exchange of dialogue about what is seen and happening. We could perhaps describe VR_I as a lucid intermedial dream which can be realised without any forcing by an embodied imagination fundamentally recon- ciled with its less docile partner: language. Conclusions ■ The hallucinatory immersiveness of VR must, just like that of dreams, be understood and studied against the backdrop of the network of significant relations it can entertain with other per- formances, for example inferential, of an embodied imagination. It seems inadvisable to isolate it from this broader context.35 ■ The regressive aspect characterising the specific halluci- natory immersiveness of dreams must be understood primarily in terms of the neurophysiological functions (synaptic pruning, plas- ticity, resetting of inferential devices) attributable to the movement which allows the brain-mind to return to the situation in which the work of the imagination autonomously conducted cognitive performances that would, in a subsequent phase, be guided by linguistic thought. ■ It is in this regressive sphere36 that, remaining with Freud, we see the particular resources of a significant link between im- age and writing (a Bilderschrift). It is a link that very early cinema 35 A critical-genealogical investigation into the life of media conducted in terms of the assemblages or true ecosystems, in which each time they assume a structural positioning and a cultural meaning, characterises the work of Francesco Casetti. See lastly and also for some significant analogies with the issue of immersiveness, “The Phantasmagoria: an enclosure and three worlds” (forthcoming). 36 A “regression in the service of the ego” we could say, using a fine expression introduced by E. Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), but the issue should also be addressed from a broader disciplinary perspective in terms of the adaptive and evolutionary advantages ascribable to the work of the dream imagination. PIETRO MONTANI 171 AN-ICON  interpreted predominantly as an intermedial comparison, i.e. a comparison-integration of different media (starting with image and verbal discourse) such as to combine a critical and reflexive countermovement constantly and systematically with the natu- ralistic and quasi-hallucinatory reception of the film. ■ This same countermovement is perceived today in the spontaneous phenomenon of extended writing which can be re- corded on the Web and in the design of some major installations in which VR features, in various ways, as a component of a more complex and “scriptural” narrative device in the broadest sense. PIETRO MONTANI 172 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/15441

The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the Image as a Bilderschrift by Pietro Montani Virtual Reality Imagination Hallucination Dream Regression Intermediality Issue №1 Year 2022 → Altered states Edited by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the 1 Image as a Bilderschrift by Pietro Montani Abstract This article discusses the following points: ■ The analogies which can be identified between Virtual Reali- ty (VR) and the hallucinatory aspects of dream activity make sense within a network of relations characterised by certain important cognitive performances (in particular inferential performances) which can be attributed to the work of the imagination; ■ To assure the plasticity of these performances, the imagi- nation seems to have to distance itself somewhat from linguistic thought and in dreams this is achieved regressively via the hallu- cinatory state. Various authoritative neuroscientific approaches to dreams significantly substantiate this theory. ■ At the time when its correlation with linguistic thought is deactivated, the imagination does not, however, surrender it- self to the hallucinatory event but elaborates it with recourse to practices similar to those of syncretic writing – a Bilderschrift or “pictographic script” as defined by Freud; ■ It is significant that very early cinema also addressed the quasi-hallucinatory aspects of films, practising an “intermedial” Bilderschrift, i.e. a treatment of the images that is attentive to the comparison and integration of the different levels of expression which work together in the composition of a film; ■ Digital images seem to revive this production model in sev- eral ways and I will offer two examples highlighting their affinity with syncretic and intermedial writing. Virtual Reality Imagination Hallucination Dream Regression Intermediality To quote this essay: P. Montani, “The hallucinatory aspect of virtual reality and the image as a Bilderschrift”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 153-171 PIETRO MONTANI 154 AN-ICON  Virtual reality, hallucination and the dream-imagination The hallucinatory aspect of VR is obvious to those who have experienced or wish to study it. However, not everyone hallucinates and so the hallucinatory nature of dreams offers the most immediate and comprehensible parallel – an experience we undergo during sleep with a frequency and regularity familiar to all.2 VR and dreams cannot be treated as entirely identical phenomena, indeed there are many and signifi- cant differences as we shall see shortly. However we can immediately highlight at least two essential parallels. The first is the compelling illusion of reality that differentiates hallucinatory dreams and VR images from other types of internal and external images processed by the imagination. This leads to the second parallel, regarding the unalterable nature of what is perceived. Apart from some exception- al cases (e.g. “lucid dreaming”), we cannot intervene in dream images, the realism of which is experienced as both convincingly plausible and undeniably objective. The same applies to the fundamentally hallucinatory nature of VR images (although there are clearly many potential excep- tions, to which I shall return in the final section). I would happily add a further property in the presence of sufficient evidence and that is how easily we forget dreams, which corresponds – although this is a totally subjective obser- vation – to the ease with which we discard large portions of our VR experiences. I must stress that the two aforementioned prop- erties are linked to the particular realism of dream and VR 1 This article refers to the European research project “The Future of Humanity: New Scenarios of Imagination” (Vilnius University). This research is funded by the European Social Fund (project no. 09.3.3-LMTK-712-01-0078). 2 The analogy between VR and dreaming has already been explored. See for example R. Diodato, Estetica del virtuale (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2005), which, however, chooses a different approach from the one I will propose here. PIETRO MONTANI 155 AN-ICON  images. So, although the latter come in several interactive forms (e.g. immersive installations) that can alter the per- ceived environment, this does not impact on the funda- mentally hallucinatory state of the images delivered. On the contrary, the degree of interactivity in dreams is limited to the activation of cognitive processes internal to the dream event such as the linguistic formulation of judgements and inferences, and an evaluation of the emotions experienced. But here, too, these processes are dependent on the objec- tivity of the images experienced. I shall provide a personal example: the night before starting this article I dreamt that I encountered a stranger in the street and sensed with great pity and concern that he clearly felt ashamed, although there was no indication as to why. Without entering into more detailed analysis, what I have described was clearly a hallucinatory event accompanied by a congruent judge- ment explicitly formulated in the dreamer’s inner discourse, and which included the word “ashamed”. But it was not a “lucid dream”. A Freudian analyst would say that the dream was mine so the pity and concern were directed at a part of me. This may be so, but this split within the dreamer reinforces rather than diminishes the objectivity of the sentiment I felt and the congruence of the judgement I associated with it (i.e. that the human condition is truly compassionate – and mysterious – if someone can show shame for no apparent reason). Ultimately, it is the radically immersive state of the two traits shared by VR and dreams that should be underscored:3 we become caught up in a 3 For a helpful classification of all the VR forms 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. Tyerry Giuliana, eds., Meaning- Making in Extended Reality (Rome: Aracne, 2020): 63-90. According to the accurate schema divided into four categories discussed in the article, the type on which these considerations focus occupies the second level of the third type (“Advanced cinematic VR”). However, the authors describe “radical immersive media” as a broad category of devices (which can be further divided into two subgroups) designed to interact in different ways with the real world. For reasons that will become clear later, I shall limit my considerations to a very general analogy between VR and dreams. PIETRO MONTANI 156 AN-ICON  simulated environment featuring images that coercively force their presence on us. And now for the equally significant differences. What I have described – and why I was able to describe it – was clearly a dream occurring in a REM sleep phase. It was one of those dreams availing of closer integration with Freud’s “secondary process” and the ones we remember (or reorganise) with greater satisfaction. The neurophys- iological processes at work in all sleep phases are fairly well known today, although the scientific community has reached no full agreement on the functional meaning to attribute to the incoherence and transience of their dream products. We do not know exactly what purpose is served by the low structural level of dreams but there appears to be good support for the theory – adopted here – accord- ing to which their principal function is to increase the “fit- ness” of some processes of the imagination conducted in a wakeful state (particularly inferential ones) by reducing their redundancy and complexity in several ways.4 What does this strange neural work look like? Some have likened it to the wandering undertaken by our vigilant imagination5. Dreams (REM and NREM) also seem- ingly implement a momentary state of generally indeter- minate, organised and specialised cognitive function (e.g. intentionality and attention) to maintain the brain-mind for periods of varying length in the purely virtual phase effec- tively described as the “default mode network”. This is a typically “experimental” phase as both the dream and the wandering explore numerous potential configurations of 4 Here and elsewhere I refer in particular to an important essay by J.A. Hobson et al., “Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming”, Frontiers in Psychology 5, no. 1133 (2014) https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01133. Hobson is an undisputed authority on dream studies and shares the theory (see in particular the works by G. Tononi) that dreams optimise some wakeful cognitive processes by alleviating and “pruning” the synapses in excess. 5 See M. Corballis, The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You’re Not Looking (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2014). Corballis is a psychologist who mainly studies language but his book is up-to-date on the most accredited developments of the neurosciences regarding the dream phenomenon. PIETRO MONTANI 157 AN-ICON  well-defined or simply hypothetical situations and problems, often varied or even disparate. In this sense, the “default mode network” active in dreams in the hallucinatory form familiar to us prompts the entire neuronal apparatus to enter into free flow with no fixed objectives, allowing the “innate generator of virtual reality” in our brains to behave as a “free-running inference machine”.6 This machine – and we shall return to this – benefits from a “synaptic regression”7, a temporary reinstatement of extremely primitive neural circuits not used in the wakeful state. In other words, our brain seemingly needs to suspend dealings with the real world (and its complexity) at regular intervals and start dialoguing with itself, gener- ating simplified and incoherent simulacra of a world so as to optimise, on reawakening, the performances that will enable it to cope once again with the complex (and harsh) reality. The autopoietic and virtualising nature of this work8 offers a simple explanation for the fact that the foetus falls into full REM sleep in the thirtieth week of life.9 This is pure cognitive and proprioceptive training in VR as, at that stage, its only experience of the world is intrauterine. Hobson, Hong and Friston astutely likened this surprising evolution- al phase to an insurgence and initial coordination of the a 6 J.A. Hobson et al., “Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming”: 22. As better clarified below, I shall here intend the concept or “regression” also in the specifically Freudian sense. 7 Ibid.: 15. 8 I discuss this point in P. Montani, Tre forme di creatività. Tecnica, arte, politica (Napoli: Cronopio, 2017). 9 See J.A. Hobson, “REM sleep and dreaming: towards a theory of protoconsciousness”, Nature Review Neurosciences 10 (2020): 803-813 10.1038/nrn2716. PIETRO MONTANI 158 AN-ICON  priori (intuitive and intellectual) forms discussed by Kant10 (to whom we shall return). What temporary conclusions can we draw from the parallel between the dream hallucination and VR? A cru- cial point regarding both the analogies and the differences seems to require critical attention. The neurophysiological study of dreams shows that a significant relationship can form between the sometimes hallucinatory and incoher- ent nature of images and the emergence of our cognitive strategies in the broad sense (e.g. the inferential activity attributable to the imagination).11 The emphasis should fall on both requisites – the incoherence and the hallucinatory nature – although, for obvious reasons, VR seems keen to focus primarily on the latter. To address this problem prop- erly, we should refer to Freud’s great work on the mental significance of dreams12, starting from a fairly solid point of contact between the neurophysiological model with which he worked and the very different ones we work with today. This point of contact consists in the specific importance of regression in hallucinatory and incoherent processes managed by the dream-imagination. Regression and “Bilderschrift” in dreams When referring to Freud I shall totally disre- gard the aspect dearest to his heart, that dreams are in- terpretable and that this very interpretability defines their 10 J.A. Hobson et al., “Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming”: 19. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1787), trans. P. Guyer, A. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). In a very important book, Before Tomorrow. Epigenesis and Rationality (Polity Press: Cambridge, 2016), Catherine Malabou argued in favor of an “epigenetic” interpretation of the development of Kantian a priori forms. I have developed a similar approach to Kant’s critical philosophy in P. Montani, “Imagination and its technological destiny”, Open Philosophy 3 (2020): 187-201. 11 The “judgement” I formulated during the described dream is typically inferential in form. For the Kant of the third Critique, it is the Urteilskraft, i.e. the “power of judgement”, that is essentially inferential and abductive in nature. See I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), trans. P. Guyer, E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 12 See S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), trans. J. Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vols. 4-5, (London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955). PIETRO MONTANI 159 AN-ICON  immensely important metapsychological condition. Is this approach justifiable? Yes if we refer to the last chapter of Traumdeutung, “The psychology of Dream Processes”. A footnote added in 1925 at the end of the previous chapter (VI, “Dream-work”) introduces its objectives significantly, saying that the particular nature of the dream-work should be studied as such, over and above the fact that this form of working is used by the unconscious in a hallucinatory and disguised mode to achieve its drives. Freud writes At bottom dreams are nothing other than a particular form of think- ing, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dream-work which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming - the explanation of its peculiar nature.13 The peculiarities of the dream-work – brilliantly studied by Freud in Chapter VI – are well known: conden- sation, displacement and considerations of representability. But the common trait is regression, intended by the author in a strictly topical sense. Explained as simply as possible (and in non-Freudian language), during dreams our mind- brain reconnects with a very primitive prelinguistic and preconceptual stage of its memory store. Or rather, it is a phase in which a profoundly embodied imagination (think of a baby just a few months old) has also had to perform the work (e.g. inferential) that would subsequently be del- egated to linguistic thought.14 The phenomenon of regression does not only belong to dreams, observes Freud, although in dreams it produces a particular “vividness”, a hallucinatory Belebung. That this is, in other respects, a somewhat paradoxical process emerges from the fact that “a particular form of 13 Ibid.: 510. My italics. 14 Using the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari, we could say that here the imagination adopts a predominately “striated” manner of proceeding. See G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), trans. B. Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988). PIETRO MONTANI 160 AN-ICON  thinking” is entrusted to the process of regression in which “the fabric of the dream-thoughts is resolved [aufgelöst: dis- rupted] into its raw material”.15 But, we must add, it is dis- rupted as far as is possible for, although the archaic zone of the memory store in question dates from an evolutionary phase when linguistic thought did not yet exist, the latter will leave a trace in the regressive path implemented by the dream state in adulthood.16 As demonstrated, for example, by perhaps the most surprising requisite of the dream- work: the ability to treat words as if they were objects and play with their signifying matter. Further on, with regard to dream-hallucinations, Freud speaks of a “transvalua- tion” of thought into images; thought is drawn towards the most archaic memory store, to be seen specifically as a disabling of its logical and linguistic relations in favour of the earliest work of a totally embodied imagination. But these remain transvaluated thoughts and are by no means a reinstatement of a prelinguistic condition. Rather, it is a new reorganisation of the relationship between image and word, a radical renegotiation of their “normal” bond (I shall return to this key point later). This brings fresh relevance to the factor of dream-work that Freud called “regard for representability” What we have described, in our analysis of dream-work, as ‘re- gard for representability’ might be brought into connection with the selective attraction exercised by the visually recollected scenes touched upon by the dream-thoughts (...) [So that] dreaming is on the whole an example of regression to the dreamer’s earliest condition, a revival (ein Wiederbeleben) of his childhood, of the 15 Ibid.: 545. My italics. 16 This is the theory developed by J. Derrida in Writing and Difference (1967), trans. A. Bass (London: Routledge, 2001). PIETRO MONTANI 161 AN-ICON instinctual impulses which dominated it and of the methods of expression which were then available to him.17 Freud appears to refer to non-elaborated (or semi-elaborated) nuclei linked to powerful emotional in- vestments, such as the “internal objects” Melanie Klein and her followers later discussed when re-elaborating Freudian dream theory in broader and more flexible terms, and today considered widely reliable and compatible with neurosci- entific findings.18 The last lines of the citation (from a 1919 addition) allow us to conclude that the regressive move- ment Freud attributed to the physiology of dreams can be acquired as a structural requisite of the dream-imagination without necessarily attributing it to instinctual motivation. In other words, if dream-work is rooted in the condition of very early infancy – the condition of being “in-fans” i.e. not yet capable of speech – this means that the regressive movement of the dream reaches and revives not only the desiring aspects but the concomitant inferential process- es too. Thus, these processes take place in the absence of language and make predominant use of prelinguistic images and schema. We could call it an imagination that “schematises without any concept” as Kant said regarding “reflective judgement”, highlighting its exceptional episte- mological significance.19 This further Kantian indication is by no means casual20 and should be paralleled with the “free-running inference machine” discussed by Hobson, Hong and Friston. Preliminary and free imaginative train- ing is required, hypothetical and exempted from defined 17 Ibid.: 549-550. My italics. 18 This is the theory persuasively argued by M. Mancia, Il sogno e la sua storia. (Venice: Marsilio, 2004); and Sonno & sogno. (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2006). 19 See E. Garroni, Estetica ed epistemologia (Milan: Unicopli 2003); P. Montani, “The Imagination and Its Technological Destiny”: 3; L. Palmer, “Schematizzare senza concetti e senso comune”, in D. Cecchi, M. Feyles, P. Montani (eds.), Ambienti mediali (Milan: Meltemi 2018): 39-56. Significantly, Palmer accompanies his rethinking of the Kantian concept with experimental evidence. 20 See Montani, Tre forme di creatività; and “The Imagination and Its Technological Destiny”. PIETRO MONTANI 162 AN-ICON  tasks, simplified and experimental, not only (as is obvious) before cognition can start to be deployed but also so that it can function constantly – e.g. (Tononi’s proposal largely endorsed by Hobson) in terms of synaptic pruning, simpli- fication and resetting of the inferential device.21 Before leaving Freud we must adopt another of his valuable indications. Above, I linked dreams to a particular way of reorganising the image-word relationship. I will specify that Freud clearly sees them, ultimately, as a relationship guided by a principle of reversibility. Not only are words used as if things, images also display a key trait of discursive convention. This trait is also fully comprehensible in intuitive terms: both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, the human imagination must have performed a major work of segmentation, classification and organisation (e.g. in- ferential) on the experience, valorising a certain intelligible profile of the images – precisely that which language will later formalise. Freud calls this property, reactivated by the dream-imagination, a Bilderschrift, a picture writing: The dream-content (...) is expressed as it were in a pictographic script [Bilderschrift], the characters of which have to be trans- posed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts. If we attempted to read these characters according to their pictorial value instead of according to their symbolic relation [Zeichenbezie- hung], we should clearly be led into error.22 Freud speaks here from the standpoint of inter- pretability (not relevant for us) but the observation can of course be generalised. Products of the dream-imagination 21 See G. Tononi, C. Cirelli, Sleep function and synaptic homeostasis, Sleep Medicine Reviews 10 (2006): 49-62. In this sense and precisely because of its hallucinatory “resuscitation”, the dream-work restores not so much the contents of the oldest inferences but the earliest manner of that performance (i.e. “schematises without any concept”) which conduct precious selective functions for pruning purposes. 22 Ibid.: 296. The translation of Bilderschrift as “pictographic script” is highly questionable; and that of Zeichenbeziehung as “symbolic relation” is frankly erroneous as the “symbolism” of dreams is not involved here but only the more general sign profile of dream-images. PIETRO MONTANI 163 AN-ICON  should above all be observed in terms of their Zeichen- beziehung, their singular and archaic relationship with the semiotic order. In other words, despite being hallucinatory, dream-images should also be appreciated for their ability to reactivate a condition in which the imagination has also processed them as the signs of a particular Bilderschrift.23 Our Freudian journey has taken us another major step forward: the relational aspect –stressed in the conclusions of the first section – can now avail of a specif- ic and significant reference to a scriptural element within the work of the imagination. This element can be linked to the radical regressive condition in which the imagination behaves literally as a VR generator. We can now try to better understand how this correlation works. Bilderschrift in very early cinema and in the digital age: the syncretism and intermediality of images Interestingly, in its very early days, and roughly when Freud was developing his Traumdeutung and subse- quent metapsychological additions, the cinema was seen (or conceived) by some film-makers and theoreticians as closely resembling the device of image-word reversibility highlighted at the end of the previous section. This means that the birth of the cinema also featured a major focus on the network of relationships which the powerful illusion of reality produced by the cinematographic image was clearly keen to unite. In some cases, in particular, that image was seen as a syncretic form of expression: a space of compar- ison and integration between different levels of expression. This section dwells briefly on two significant examples of 23 On the image-word connection and its meaning for an appropriate understanding of a “history” of the arts, C. Brandi’s observations in Segno e immagine (Palermo: Aesthetica, 2002) are valuable, not coincidentally introduced by a discussion on Kant’s schematism, PIETRO MONTANI 164 AN-ICON  this understanding of the image – which I call “intermedi- al”24: a reflection on the cinema of the “Russian Formalists” and Sergei M. Eisenstein’s first cinematographic theory centred on the project of an “intellectual cinema”.25 I shall conclude with some comments on VR installations and their inclusion in the intermedial paradigm of the image. The Formalists felt strongly that the emergence of the cinema gave their era the privilege of observing a form of art in its nascent state. Cinema brought a brand-new addition to the technically reproduced image – the ability to move in time. Boris Eikhenbaum, for instance, argued that with cinema “for the first time in history, an art which was ‘depictive’ by its very nature became capable of evolving in time and proved to be beyond any comparison, classi- fication or analogy”.26 He was struck in particular by the fact that, in cinema, the image medium adopted an original condition because the reception of the film has to develop with a time sequence typical of other media (e.g. writing). To better use these peculiarities, thought Eikhen- baum, the structural principles of the cinematographic text would have to comply with two preferential options, one paradigmatic and the other syntagmatic. The paradig- matic option consisted in asserting the conventionality of the image (its Zeichenbeziehung as Freud would say) in a head-on contrast with the naturalistic values of photograph- ic reproduction; the syntagmatic option consisted in em- phasising the discrete (or potentially discrete) nature of the formal unities placed in a reciprocal relationship following a short, markedly divided montage. These two requisites are therefore totally comparable to Freud’s Bilderschrift. But Eikhenbaum underscored another aspect concerning 24 On this concept, see P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2010). 25 See R. Taylor, ed., Russian Poetics in Translation, vol. 9: The Poetics of Cinema. (Department of Language & Linguistics: University of Essex, 1982); S.M. Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage (London-New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2010). 26 B. Eikhenbaum, “Problems of cine-stylistics”, trans. R. Sherwood, in R. Taylor, ed., The Poetics of Cinema (Oxford: RTP, 1982): 10-21. My italics. PIETRO MONTANI 165 AN-ICON  not the construction options but the structural conditions of understanding a film, arguing that the image plane in the cinema is always accompanied by the articulation of “inner speech” in the spectator’s mind. So, the cinematic experi- ence has to proceed via a constant integration of image and language planes, more akin to a process of reading than a prolonged and guided form of contemplation.27 Returning to the parallel with Freud’s reflection on the figures of the dream-work, we could say that, in films, the autonomous expressive and pathemic resources of the image come to- gether in a constant relationship with the broader cognitive resources accessed by linguistic thought. Remaining largely on the wavelength of Eikhen- baum’s theories, Sergei Eisenstein pushed himself even further forward in the same 1920s’ time-frame, especially from a design perspective. In short, he believed that the discursiveness of cinema could function as a device that takes the spectator into close contact with the semiotic op- erations that enable the imagination to give sensible content to concepts. That is, it could explore the key imaginative performance that Kant called “schematism”. A performance that, unsurprisingly, we have already referred to regard- ing its relationship with dream-work. Eisenstein called this cinema “intellectual” because, from the political perspec- tive that excited him at the time, the cinematic experience promised to considerably alter the spectators’ “power of judgment” (to use another Kantian term), training them, for instance, in dialectical thinking, as we read in one of his notes for the planned film adaptation of Marx’s Capital.28 Although Eikhenbaum and Eisenstein’s the- ories cannot be generalised, we can agree on the fact 27 On the complex intermedial nature of reading, see S.B. Trasmundi, S.C. Cowley, “Reading: how readers beget imagining”, Frontiers in Psychology 11: 531682 (2020), doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.531682. 28 On this subject, see an important work by E. Vogman, Dance of Values. Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital project (Zurich-Berlin: Diaphanes, 2019). PIETRO MONTANI 166 AN-ICON  that, throughout the silent film period, the treatment of cinematographic images largely adhered to the general Bilderschrift principles discussed here, and often invented new figures of them. We can also agree that, whatever its strengths and weaknesses, this trend was destined to un- dergo a marked shift after the introduction of sound, which could inevitably be expected to produce – and Eisenstein was one of the first to denounce this29 – a strengthening of the reproductive and illusionistic effects of the film image and an ensuing increase in the naturalistic understanding of the film. From that moment on, the cinema pursued different paths which we cannot follow here although it may be interesting to ask what transformations would have been seen in the “scriptural” direction I discussed briefly at the start of this section.30 We must instead ask ourselves, and I shall do so rapidly below, whether the fundamental principle embraced by this direction, namely the activation of a critical countermovement physiologically correlated to the regressive nature of the image, reappeared elsewhere. And how it could also concern VR where the regressive movement, as mentioned at the beginning, reaches the extreme condition of a hallucinatory event. Before proceeding we should again stress the relational, and more precisely intermedial, nature of the critical countermovement which accompanies the regres- sive process of the imagination – and thus also presumably its extreme outcomes in the hallucinatory version of VR. Against this backdrop, I shall conclude by touching on two different spheres of exemplification. The first concerns the spontaneous practices of syncretic writing in use on the Web for about 20 years now and which are increasingly widespread among its users. In the second, I shall pres- ent some brief comments on how the intermedial device 29 See S.M. Eisenstein, “Buduščee zvukovoj fil’my. Zajavka”, in Id., Izbrannye Proizvedenija v šesti tomach. II (Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1963-1979): 15-16. 30 I have done so partially in P. Montani, Emozioni dell’intelligenza (Milan: Meltemi, 2020). PIETRO MONTANI 167 AN-ICON  has been managed in two remarkable recent installations: Carne y arena by Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu (2017) and VR_I by Jilles Jobin (2018).31 It is a fact that the birth of the interactive Web supported the emergence of a form of syncretic writing that does not merely combine image, word and sound but also very frequently exploits their reciprocal relations to obtain significant effects of meaning from this interme- dial confrontation – for the moment predominantly tuned into a playful, ironic and paradoxical register (I am thinking of all the “meme” forms). As well as not excluding signifi- cant evolutions and further differentiations, this aspect in itself already guarantees great (and spontaneous) reflexive control of the semiotic material manipulated.32 I have sug- gested calling this practice “extended writing”, adding that significant innovation might develop in the technologies of human expression. Indeed, the first thing to do is to study the internalisation processes and feedback on the imag- inative and cognitive conduct of those using it (but it is a mass phenomenon).33 I am keen to stress here that the regressive values linked to the image in extended writing are placed in a constant, systematic and plastic relationship with several critical and intellectual distancing practices, often of a distinctly intermedial nature. That is to say, they are conceived to exploit the effects of meaning ensuing from the re-mediation and comparison of different media. The two installations mentioned above are im- portant not only for their uncommon design complexity but also and primarily for their intermedial tone (i.e. distanced and reflexive), albeit diversely interpreted in the two cases. In 31 The two installations could be visited at the Fondazione Prada in Milan (2017) and the Istituto Svizzero di Roma (2018), respectively. 32 See P. Montani, “Materialità del virtuale”, Agalma. Rivista di studi culturali e di estetica 40, no. 2 (2020): 11-18; and “Apology for technical distancing. But beware the feedback!”, IMG: Interdisciplinary journal on image, imagery and imagination 3 (2020): 264-281. 33 The issue of “extended writing” should be included in an extensive case study of technological aesthetics, as well illustrated recently by V. Gallese, “The aesthetic world in the digital era. A call to arms for experimental aesthetics”, Reti, saperi, linguaggi 9, no. 17 (2020): 55-84. PIETRO MONTANI 168 AN-ICON  both, visitors realise that the VR is simply a part of a broader experience that can internally implement in various ways what I have just described as a critical countermovement. I shall conclude by indicating the essential coordinates below. Carne y arena is a journey in four stages, the second of which contains a VR installation. Here, the visitor – alone and free to move around – finds him/herself spend- ing six minutes in a desert zone with a group of Mexican refugees trying to cross the US border but being violently driven back by an American army patrol.34 In the first space, visitors are asked to remove their shoes and socks and place them in a locker from which they will collect them later. This is a key strategic move because during their mobile permanence in the virtual environment their bare feet will make them constantly proprioceptively aware of an essen- tial split (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible is the instal- lation’s astute subtitle). A walkway awaits when they exit the “arena”, after retrieving shoes and socks, from where the visitors can catch a glimpse of what is happening in the semi-dark space of the virtual simulation by looking, if they so wish, through the gaps between the wooden planks of a wall. This is a further distancing from the powerful en- gagement just experienced. The walkway leads to a final room where, free to decide how long to stop at each one, they can watch video clips of the migrants narrating details of the episode to which the visitors have been invisible witnesses and what happened to them afterwards. Their 34 I dwelled more analytically on the Iñarritu installation in P. Montani, Tre forme di creatività. See also F. Casetti, A. Pinotti, “Post–cinema ecology”, in D. Chateau, J. Moure, eds., Post– cinema. Cinema in the Post-Art Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 193- 217; A. D’Aloia “Virtually present, physically invisible: virtual reality immersion and emersion in Alejandro González Iñarritu’s Carne y Arena”, Senses of Cinema 87 (2018) http://www. sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/virtually-present-physically-invisible-virtual-reality- immersion-and-emersion-in-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritus-carne-y-arena/. For an important discussion of the “empathic” effects attributable to experiences in VR see A. Pinotti, “Autopsia in 360°. Il rigor mortis dell’empatia nel fuori-cornice del virtuale”, Fata Morgana 39 (2019): 17-32. On the aesthetics of’ “unframed” images see P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan- London: Mimesis International, 2020). PIETRO MONTANI 169 AN-ICON  faces appear in high definition on small screens placed in niches around the walls of the room. The important point here is that the VR is just one of the many elements in the installation and the overall experience stimulates visitors to engage in an intermedial reflection that invests them literally from head (equipped with visor and headphones) to toe (bare). The truly striking and forceful realism of the simulation thus finds its meaning within a complex narrative device. I shall add that even the patchy recollection of the six-minute VR simulation men- tioned at the start of this article finds interesting justification within the context of this complex cognitive and pathemic experience. VR_I is an all-VR installation and far more playful than Carne y arena. The artist is primarily a choreographer and paid particular attention to the fluidity of movement of the five dancers who inhabit the virtual space and define it with their performance. They take on very different sizes in the various phases of the event: gigantic and objectively threatening at the start but miniaturised and observable later on, almost as if in a lab experiment on a small quadrangular platform, and finally life-size. Five people enter the virtual space and each visitor’s avatar can interact with the other four, not only on a haptic and sensorimotorial level (the hands have sensors) but also linguistically thanks to phono-acoustic equipment. The visitors find themselves in a metamorphic space resembling that of dreams: sometimes a boundless desert, at other times an urban landscape or a mountain-top loft with sweeping views down over a wide valley. The envi- ronments are always clearly identifiable and their subsequent development follows the rhythm of the dancers and the spa- tial harmony created by their movements. It is also significant that famous paintings (Matisse, Bacon) are hung on the walls of the loft interiors. Basically, the whole encourages visitors to let themselves go in an experience constantly tuned to a free PIETRO MONTANI 170 AN-ICON  reflexive register and they quickly realise that the rhythmic play between the different spatial dimensions is one of the core themes of the choreographic flow they are engaged in, as too is the doubling of the performance (the dancers giant or miniaturised, the paintings), the comparison between the dimensions and the free exchange of dialogue about what is seen and happening. We could perhaps describe VR_I as a lucid intermedial dream which can be realised without any forcing by an embodied imagination fundamentally recon- ciled with its less docile partner: language. Conclusions ■ The hallucinatory immersiveness of VR must, just like that of dreams, be understood and studied against the backdrop of the network of significant relations it can entertain with other per- formances, for example inferential, of an embodied imagination. It seems inadvisable to isolate it from this broader context.35 ■ The regressive aspect characterising the specific halluci- natory immersiveness of dreams must be understood primarily in terms of the neurophysiological functions (synaptic pruning, plas- ticity, resetting of inferential devices) attributable to the movement which allows the brain-mind to return to the situation in which the work of the imagination autonomously conducted cognitive performances that would, in a subsequent phase, be guided by linguistic thought. ■ It is in this regressive sphere36 that, remaining with Freud, we see the particular resources of a significant link between im- age and writing (a Bilderschrift). It is a link that very early cinema 35 A critical-genealogical investigation into the life of media conducted in terms of the assemblages or true ecosystems, in which each time they assume a structural positioning and a cultural meaning, characterises the work of Francesco Casetti. See lastly and also for some significant analogies with the issue of immersiveness, “The Phantasmagoria: an enclosure and three worlds” (forthcoming). 36 A “regression in the service of the ego” we could say, using a fine expression introduced by E. Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), but the issue should also be addressed from a broader disciplinary perspective in terms of the adaptive and evolutionary advantages ascribable to the work of the dream imagination. PIETRO MONTANI 171 AN-ICON  interpreted predominantly as an intermedial comparison, i.e. a comparison-integration of different media (starting with image and verbal discourse) such as to combine a critical and reflexive countermovement constantly and systematically with the natu- ralistic and quasi-hallucinatory reception of the film. ■ This same countermovement is perceived today in the spontaneous phenomenon of extended writing which can be re- corded on the Web and in the design of some major installations in which VR features, in various ways, as a component of a more complex and “scriptural” narrative device in the broadest sense. PIETRO MONTANI 172 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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