AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]: Announcements
type: channel
description: The journal AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] is a peer-reviewed open access academic journal, stemming from the ERC Advanced project “AN-ICON. An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images”. The journal is officially recognized as a scientific for Area 10 (Antiquities, philology, literary studies, art history) and Area 11 (History, Philosophy, Pedagogy, and Psychology). The journal aims to set out a groundbreaking interdisciplinary research field addressing the key challenges raised by the rapidly evolving contemporary mediascape, focussing in particular on the emergence of what can be defined as environmental images, namely an-icons. The journal is indexed by ERIH PLUS and listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
language: en
items: Archaeologies of Immersion
items: Operational An-Icons
items: CLOSED - Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism
items: CLOSED - Immersed in the work. From the environment to virtual reality

Archaeologies of Immersion
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description: Download PDF Nowadays, virtual-, augmented-, and mixed-reality technologies produce images that ask to be experienced and inhabited more than viewed and observed. Should the sense of presence and immediacy they convey be interpreted as a radical novelty, or is it rather the result of a more ancient and fragmented history of perception? A media archaeological approach lets emerge new strategies to conceive the history of media techniques by highlighting discontinuities and non-linear paths, bringing into focus their material conditions of production as well as practices, discourses, and narratives that contribute to shaping these media's cultural identity. This archaeological perspective may also be complemented with a genealogical one, considering the governance strategies and the powers of subjectification played by past and present media dispositives. In different ways and to various degrees, immersive techniques can be traced back to precursors as ancient as Palaeolithic cave paintings. Later on, they range from trompe l’œil depictions to pre-cinematic devices such as panoramas, dioramas, phantasmagorias, and from stereoscopic films to holograms, to name a few. The Archaeologies of Immersion section aims to single outunknown continuities as much as ruptures and counter-tendencies. Accordingly, a special attention can be also devoted to the narratives that have marked the dawn of an-iconic dispositives and accompanied the history of their effect across the centuries: ancient mythologies portraying proto-immersants, chronicles of forgotten media practices, fictional tales on both realized and imaginary immersive technologies, obsolete scientific discourses foreseeing a multisensory and interactive consumption of the image. This section of AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images aims therefore to open a permanent space to investigate and discuss the genealogy of virtual environments. Especially, unconventional approaches on overlooked research objects are welcome. …
creator: AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
date: %2021-%05-%10

Operational An-Icons
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description: Download PDF A landscape painting hanging in a gallery represents reality; the image of a landscape offered by a drone monitoring a military area is an image that does something on reality. Since the tradition of the imagines agentes, up to the «operational images» described by Harun Farocki, scholars have sought to highlight in different ways the powers of images, their capacity to affect reality and to influence human reactions, but also to stare back at us and even to perform acts, in a word to single out the agency of images. An-icons are, as such, particularly well-suited to be operational, as they are actively engaged in operations that are meant to impact on and change reality. Virtual reality in particular affords the possibility to generate compelling, quasi-real, yet allegedly safe spaces in which to experiment with actual reality, and with subjects inhabiting it. Therefore, it proves of considerable practical advantage in those professional fields in which simulating reality constitutes a preliminary step towards modifying it. In addition to reproducing real environments, virtual reality allows as well to create new ones. Hence, it is valuable in those contexts in which actual reality has to be suspended and replaced by inhabitable virtual worlds. Technologies of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality have today multiple applications in several fields: design, architecture, and urban planning, where different solutions can be tested before being implemented; medicine, where surgical procedures can be designed and rehearsed on virtual patients; psychology and psychiatry, where individuals can learn how to overcome their disturbances by practicing coping strategies in virtual situations, or temporarily find relief in substitutive worlds; as well as education, marketing, training, the military field, the porn industry, and so on. As they become increasingly widespread, the practical usage of virtual environments and an-icons more broadly raise multiple and ur…
creator: AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
date: %2021-%05-%10

CLOSED - Just an illusion? Between simulation, emulation, and hyper-realism
type: item
description: Edited by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing Deadline for full articles January 31st, 2022 Characters/word count: 24.000-30.000 characters (spaces included), or 3.500-5.000 words. Download PDF Recent years have witnessed increasing debate on the notion of illusion in the contemporary mediascape and on its role within digital environments, in particular with respect to virtual-, augmented-, and mixed-reality technologies. Immersive environments can elicit in the user an intense feeling of being incorporated into quasi-real worlds. Consequently, and despite being traditionally given a negative value, the word “illusion” is more and more accorded a positive meaning as a key aspect of the phenomenon of immersion; as such, it is regarded as an important goal to be pursued by the creators of hyper-realistic and virtual environments. However, the concept of illusion is in itself plagued by ambiguities and even contradictions, and therefore in need of clarification. Does it imply an unconscious deception accomplished through a false perception, or is it rather a lusory attitude adopted in a peculiar kind of make-believe relation? What is the difference between illusion, deception, and hallucination? How does illusion turn into deception? How does deception become illusion? In simulated virtual environments, people experience a strong feeling of presence (place illusion) and react to what they perceive as if it were real (plausibility illusion) (Slater 2009; Hofer et al. 2020). At the same time, they remain perfectly aware that they are not “really” there, and that the events are not “actually” occurring. How is such conflict between knowing and perceiving to be explained, and is it to be regarded as a new form of aesthetic illusion (Koblížek 2017)? Moreover, virtual reality has the power to make the users feel as if they own and control a body (body-ownership illusion) that can look very different from their biological one. This can result into a transformation of self-repres…
creator: AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
date: %2021-%05-%10

CLOSED - Immersed in the work. From the environment to virtual reality
type: item
description: Immersed in the work. From the environment to virtual reality (2/I issue) edited by Roberto P. Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena e Sofia Pirandello deadline: 31/1/2023 In recent years we have witnessed a growing fashion which requires every experience to be “immersive”. This is, at least, what is suggested by the rhetoric of communication and marketing, promising immersions of various kinds, but with a common denominator which goes beyond a generic idea of attention as absorption (Wolf, Bernhart, and Mahler 2013): That of feeling physically enveloped and engaged interactively in a multisensory environment (Griffiths 2013; Liptay and Dogramaci 2016). Hence, we talk about immersive environments, immersive cinema and video, immersive exhibitions and installations and so on. Even though the term “immersion” has been used with some regularity only since the 1990s in reference to technologies such as virtual reality - – which at that time was being experimented for the first time outside the laboratories where it was developed in the late 1960s (Sutherland 1965;1968) - – some researchers have attempted to reconstruct a possible genealogy of immersive environments well before this date. Like an underground river, the immersive aesthetic experience would resurface in different periods, starting with cave paintings in the Paleolithic era and moving through to Pompeian frescos and trompe-l'œil, passing then from Baroque illusionistic ceiling painting to multimedia installations (Nechvatal 2009). A decisive moment for the design of these environments has been traced back to the 19th century, with particular reference to the 19th-century fashion of the ὅραμα (from the ancient Greek "view"), which saw the spread of devices such as the panorama, the diorama, the cosmorama, etc. (Grau 2003; Bordini 2006), as part of a wider “emotional geography” (Bruno 2000). However, one of the most significant moments in this history which has still not been sufficiently investigated in the debate (M…
creator: AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
date: %2022-%12-%28