AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
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).
publisher: Milano University Press
language: en
publication name: AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
issn: 2785-7433
items: Talking to Machines
items: The Algorithmic Age
items: Spontaneity on parole
items: Come On In
items: More than spectators, visionaries
items: Metaphors of Immersion. Stereoscopes, 3D Vision and Photography in O.W. Holmes’ Writings and Inventions
items: Images Like Me
items: Liberty on Parole? Challenges in Interactivity
items: Pretend play
items: Transformational Experiences. The Role of Immersive Arts and Media in Individual and Societal Change
items: Embracing Otherness?
items: You Are Not Alone
items: Imagining Sustainable Futures
items: The Problem of Empathy in Immersive Experiences on Global Warming
items: Cringe-watching
items: Immersive Encounters
items: Philosophy Through Unorthodox Means
items: Immersions and Dives
items: Allegories of Immersion
items: “Looking Glass:” Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts
items: From inside to outside (and vice versa)
items: Inhabiting the museum
items: How Digital Hybridization Creates New Performance Practices
items: Digital Heterotopias in the Metaverse
items: Con-Temporary
items: Art and Artifice
items: Mutual Transformations
items: On the razor’s edge
items: Immersivity as An-immersivity

Talking to Machines
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description: This article explores the implications of artificial conversation for teaching and Media Literacy. It does so by engaging with two theoretical frameworks: (1) Luhmann’s communication theory, to conceptualize artificial communication in human-dialogical system interactions, and (2) the semiotic Theory of Audiovisual Conversation (TAC), to analyze its distinctive features. From a Luhmannian perspective, Artificial Intelligence (AI) does not replicate human intelligence but rather human communication, prioritizing message comprehensibility over intentionality. TAC further clarifies artificial communication by outlining key elements such as knowledge transmission and enunciational attitudes, direct and indirect communication, the interplay of questions and answers, and the distinction between attending and participating in a conversation. These insights inform educational and media literacy practices, emphasizing the centrality of questioning, the role of prompt engineering, and the development of critical thinking, argumentation, and strategic communication skills as part of New Literacies.
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creator: Pier Cesare Rivoltella
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Pier Cesare Rivoltella https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-12-30
publication date: 2024-12-30
starting page: 17
ending page: 35
doi: 10.54103/ai/23944

The Algorithmic Age
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description: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and a panel of selected artworks by the artist Sougwen Chung are analyzed hereafter as paradigmatic and innovative case studies able to express a conception of interactivity intrinsic to the human-mediated relationship with our interconnected world. This paper investigates the manifestation of this feature as constitutive of an artistic practice based on collaboration. By integrating the latest artificial intelligence technologies into their methodologies, these practices become conceptually richer than in the past. The gradations that inform human-system interactions express an interactivity that enhances the creative process not only on a compositional level but also in terms of reworking content that, in their final form, exceed preordained operational mechanisms. I aim to discuss how these two case studies exhibit these traits within a theoretical framework where Visual Arts, mixed with philosophical questioning, are proposed as a preferred point of view to lead reflections and examine the new inquiries arising from the evolution of a technology deeply rooted in the environment we inhabit.
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creator: Martina Pace
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Martina Pace https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-12-30
publication date: 2024-12-30
starting page: 131
ending page: 148
doi: 10.54103/ai/24078

Spontaneity on parole
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description: In recent years, participation and interactivity have become two key words in the vocabulary of art criticism. It is not by chance that both these models insist on a form of performative spectatorship, based essentially on three concepts: presentness, immediateness and unframedness. The challenge posed by this type of spectatorship concerns a fundamental concept for aesthetics (already with Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment), and that is that of spontaneity. In fact, the creation of an “unframed” space and an immediate experience precisely at increasing the “spontaneity effect,” fuelled by the active involvement of a spectator “immersed” physically (and emotionally) within an environment/work that is programmed to welcome and receive its intervention. Except that spontaneity is, by definition, something that cannot be achieved if sought intentionally. This is precisely the challenge posed by interactivity.
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creator: Andrea D'Ammando
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Andrea D'Ammando https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-12-30
publication date: 2024-12-30
starting page: 56
ending page: 71
doi: 10.54103/ai/24079

Come On In
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description: In this paper I consider embodiment, spectatorship, and virtuality as they relate to aesthetic experience and how they can be understood through the interactive installation, Come On In (2020) by dancer, choreographer, and director Faye Driscoll. I argue that virtual reality need not include the use of VR technologies such as headsets, but rather that it is a mode of experience that blurs the boundary between fact and fiction through what Vittorio Gallese calls “embodied simulation.” In Driscoll’s installation, the visitor’s body is used to channel and enact the performance as they are seated or reclined while listening to a kind of guided meditation through headphones. The reclined body then, does not have to be viewed as passive, but rather as facilitating an embodied experience, a claim that is supported by Jacques Rancière’s theory of the emancipated spectator. Further, I look at vulnerability as a condition of cognition (made literal in the reclined body) through David Bates’s historical analysis of the evolution of artificial intelligence, linking the plasticity of cognition with the conception of embodied simulation and immersive experience, to point to the liberatory potential of art.
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creator: Agnese Cebere
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Agnese Cebere https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-12-30
publication date: 2024-12-30
starting page: 72
ending page: 96
doi: 10.54103/ai/24086

More than spectators, visionaries
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description: The paper aims to highlight theoretical reflections and project implications about technological interactivity within the artistic research of Studio Azzurro, setting them in a constellation of relations and affinities with the context of reference. The distinctiveness of the Milan-based collective, founded in 1982, has been shaped around the concept of “socializing interactivity.” This phenomenon stems from a design process that involves a constant negotiation between narratives, space, bodies and technologies, conceived as a system of relationships mediated by “natural interfaces.” The study traces the roots of this placement back to the counter-information experiences of the 1970s and the intersection with the experimental theatre of the 1980s, evolving through the language of cinema and video. At the same time, Studio Azzurro research remains constantly focused on the physical and sensitive properties of space, objects, bodies (both real and virtual), and the potentialities of montage – understood both as video editing and as spatial dramaturgy. The paper finally considers the socio-political implications of this form of art, bringing the attention on the creation of “spaces of relationships” that foster community and intersubjectivity. This investigation situates Studio Azzurro’s contributions within the broader context of technological interactivity and its potential to reshape human experience and communication.
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creator: Laura Marcolini
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Laura Marcolini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-12-30
publication date: 2024-12-30
starting page: 97
ending page: 130
doi: 10.54103/ai/25154

Metaphors of Immersion. Stereoscopes, 3D Vision and Photography in O.W. Holmes’ Writings and Inventions
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description: Esteemed physician and writer, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was also a leading figure in the stereoscope craze that swept the United States in the second half of the 19th century. He not only designed and promoted a particularly successful version of the stereoscope but also provided insightful commentary on its use and impact. This device, capable of producing a vivid illusion of three-dimensionality, had a significant influence on both technological advancements and cultural practices of the time. Adopting an interdisciplinary focus that intersects media archaeology and metaphorology, this paper will explore the rhetoric and material configurations of the stereoscope as designed and promoted by Holmes and Joseph L. Bates. The main objective is to show how the discursive communication surrounding this device, along with its ergonomic design, shaped both the identity and moral connotations of the technology, as well as the immersive practices it fostered. By focusing on two key essays published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1859 and 1861, this study will reconstruct Holmes’ complex metaphorology of technical reproduction and stereoscopic illusion, highlighting the central aesthetic, social, and political themes at play.
subject: Archaeologies of Immersion
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creator: Roberto Malaspina
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Roberto Malaspina https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-04-07
publication date: 2025-04-07
starting page: 151
ending page: 176
doi: 10.54103/ai/26638

Images Like Me
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description: The intention of this article is to analyse some of the different ways in which the interactivity of inanimate objects has been discussed, with particular reference to images. In this context, it will be also proposed to consider a type of images, here called imagin-actions, which have specific characteristics different from those already considered in the debate. There is an extensive literary tradition according to which agency has since time immemorial been attributed to inanimate objects. Indeed, thanks to the imagination, human beings naturally relate to objects, and this would in fact constitute one of the fundamental elements for the development of the human mind. Now, with the advent of digital technologies, the actions of objects and images have acquired an operational quality, since they are capable of acting directly and concretely on the living world, and also of determining specific imaginative processes that entail the responsivity of things. However, in addition to having their own agency and operativity, imagin-actions do something more: they keep users in constant motion. By responding to a series of requests, they ask for something in return, intensifying the level of interactive exchange between people and things and inevitably reconfiguring human creative processes.
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creator: Sofia Pirandello
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Sofia Pirandello https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-04-07
publication date: 2025-04-07
starting page: 36
ending page: 55
doi: 10.54103/ai/26646

Liberty on Parole? Challenges in Interactivity
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description: Interactivity permeates AI, virtual reality and augmented reality, affecting sensory-motor experiences and creative processes. However, this pervasiveness comes with constraints, as virtual interfaces simultaneously enhance and restrict user freedom. This leads to philosophical reflections on user emancipation and the interplay between freedom and structural constraints in interactive relationships with digital technologies. The dynamic landscape raises important questions about the development of freedom in a digitally mediated world.
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creator: Pietro Montani
creator: Andrea Pinotti
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Pietro Montani, Andrea Pinotti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-12-30
publication date: 2024-12-30
starting page: 4
ending page: 16
doi: 10.54103/ai/28433

Pretend play
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description: The contribution focuses on pretend play, a kind of play that is found in children of all cultures and is easily recognizable by adults. The expression with which this type of play is labelled presents, in the common sense, a semantic aura that refers to a series of terms with a negative meaning such as falsehood, deception, error, illusion. Starting from the assumption that the understanding of the meaning of pretend play must be based on a distancing from the idea of truth as a reflection of reality, I’ll present and discuss some play theories which show, on the contrary, the necessity and the productivity of the “as if.” In line with this perspective, infantile pretend play will be considered as the prototype of an essential human experience to which particular attention should be paid, to be promoted with sensitivity and delicacy, and not to be used improperly as an instructional tool.
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creator: Anna Bondioli
rights: Copyright (c) 2022 Anna Bondioli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2022-12-20
publication date: 2022-12-20
doi: 10.54103/ai/17464

Transformational Experiences. The Role of Immersive Arts and Media in Individual and Societal Change
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description: We live in times of humanitarian and environmental crises. The effects of climate change add to the economic, physical, and mental suffering caused by social discrimination, in the form of gender, class, and race inequalities. Encounters with and creation of arts have been suggested as a potential remedy, allowing to stay with the trouble rather than running from it, and imagining a different future rather than manifesting the past. But what are the concrete chances that all this really happens? Similar questions can be raised in relation to immersive media. The latter have been claimed to possess an unprecedented prosocial potential. However, what are the appropriate strategies to ensure that such potential is actually expressed? For this issue of AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, we selected diverse contributions investigating the role of the arts and media in rethinking (and acting upon) societal and environmental problems, focussing on immersive experiences in particular.
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creator: Federica Cavaletti
creator: Katrin Heimann
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Federica Cavaletti, Katrin Heimann https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-04-07
publication date: 2025-04-07
starting page: 4
ending page: 10
doi: 10.54103/ai/22423

Embracing Otherness?
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description: “Embracing the otherness” is a phrase that is borrowed from Morehshin Allahyari’s virtual reality artwork She Who Sees the Unknown: Kabous, the Right Witness, and the Left Witness (2019). In this article, I am using this phrase to question the figuration of self and other as staged by Allahyari in her work. By deploying an overwhelming effect of immersion specific to the technological features of VR, Allahyari establishes a physical as well as an emo- tional relationship to the other. But instead of encouraging a sense of closeness, which is likely to be connected to the idea of “embracing otherness” as well as to the vision of VR as “empathy machine,” this immersive experience has the opposite effect. I argue that it weirdly plays with the appropriative mechanisms of othering, unsettles the viewer’s sovereignty, and thus initiates a rather “strange encounter.” In this sense, I will examine Allahyari’s use of VR’s immersiveness as a “body hack” and elaborate how I read her artwork as a critical commentary on the debate of the transformative potential of VR as “empathy machine.” Cover caption: Morehshin Allahyari, She Who Sees the Unknown: Kabous, The Right Witness, and The Left Witness, snapshots from VR video, commissioned by The Shed, image courtesy of the artist, 2019.
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creator: Manischa Eichwalder
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Manischa Eichwalder https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-07-31
publication date: 2024-07-31
starting page: 119
ending page: 132
doi: 10.54103/ai/23206

You Are Not Alone
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description: This article focuses on the use of virtual reality (VR) in the context of “impact campaigns.” Distinct in many ways from publishing a project on a digital storefront, im- pact campaigns assume a more carefully designed experi- ence, starting with the exhibit itself. Rather than considering VR as an end in itself, my goal is to situate this unique type of mediated experience within a larger network of social activism. Key to this project is an understanding of the role documentary films have played within societal movements. By learning from the larger history of impact production, this article seeks to highlight some of the shortcomings with VR as it has been used until now in socially minded projects. By extension, my goal is also to emphasize the things VR creators can learn from impact producers to make sure their projects reach the right audiences and affect them accordingly.
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creator: Philippe Bédard
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Philippe Bédard https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-07-31
publication date: 2024-07-31
starting page: 11
ending page: 35
doi: 10.54103/ai/22528

Imagining Sustainable Futures
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description: This essay examines the transformative im- pact of Green Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) experiences designed by artists to spread environmental literacy and societal change. Through methodologies like Critical Dis- course Analysis (CDA) and Lars Elleström’s framework, it analyzes the immersive artwork Of Hybrids and Strings (2021) by Lauren Moffatt to investigate if and how Green IVR challenges existing structures of thought while fos- tering alternative modes of being. By immersing users in multisensory virtual environments and incorporating in- termedial connections with tangible artifacts, experiences prompt participants to reimagine their relationship with the natural world and envision more sustainable futures. Ultimately, the study highlights Green IVR as one of the catalysts for environmental literacy and societal change, emphasizing its role in shaping collective imagination and inspiring meaningful engagement with ecological issues.
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creator: Eleonora Stacchiotti
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Eleonora Stacchiotti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-07-31
publication date: 2024-07-31
starting page: 74
ending page: 99
doi: 10.54103/ai/22526

The Problem of Empathy in Immersive Experiences on Global Warming
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description: My paper focuses on the problem of empathetic response in immersive experiences concerning global warm- ing issues. Following a rich scientific production, which points out the idea of virtual reality as both “the ultimate empathy machine” – as firstly stated by filmmaker Chris Milk – and a promising tool to promote ecological awareness, my essay presents, in the first place, the main characteristics of immer- sive experiences concerning the issue, showing how viewers interact with the environment from the perspective of presence, and body ownership. As describing potentials and limits of empathetic response in virtual environments, I draw attention to the fact that now it is impossible to build virtual reality expe- riences that fully embody the essence of global warming, as it is intrinsically an hyperobject – a term I take from Timothy Morton’s philosophical approach towards environmental issues. In this framework, the purpose of my essay is to uncover the impossibility to represent global warming faithfully if we keep on conceive immersive experiences in the way we are doing now. What I propose is a radical change in our idea of virtual reality when it comes to represent global warming.
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creator: Shannon Magri
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Shannon Magri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-07-31
publication date: 2024-07-31
starting page: 58
ending page: 73
doi: 10.54103/ai/21984

Cringe-watching
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description: This paper scrutinizes the deployment of immersive media, particularly, virtual reality (VR) in the context of climate change education, focusing on the case study of EduXperience Biosphere VR (2021). The analysis challenges the assumption that such technologies inherently promote desired social trans- formations, arguing that they can also perpetuate colonialist narratives and fail to provoke meaningful action. By examining the visual strategies, sound, scripts and para-texts employed in Biosphere VR’s documentaries, the paper shows how these el- ements can reinforce problematic tropes of the so-called Global South as “the frontier.” While VR holds promise for experiential learning (especially with glitches and similar unintentional ef- fects that break down the point of view), specific forms of com- munication tend to prioritize simplistic moralizing over nuanced albeit critical engagement with complex socio-environmental issues. Drawing on critical theory in visual and spatial studies, the paper calls for further approaches to the representation of climate change, globality, space, communities, places and sites that could better prioritize social justice and models of terrestrial, reciprocal interdependence.
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creator: Mariaenrica Giannuzzi
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Mariaenrica Giannuzzi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-07-31
publication date: 2024-07-31
starting page: 100
ending page: 118
doi: 10.54103/ai/22481

Immersive Encounters
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description: This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the Helsinki Biennial 2023, focusing on its thematic explo- ration of contemporary environmental issues, artistic medi- ation, and the intersection of art with ecological and social concerns. Drawing from a range of artworks exhibited at the biennial, including installations, sculptures, and video pre- sentations, the analysis explores themes of contamination, regeneration, and agency within the context of contemporary environmental discourse. The article highlights the immersive nature of the biennial, both in its physical setting on Vallisaari Island and in its conceptual framework, which encourages visitors to engage deeply with the environment and the art- works. Through a nuanced examination of selected artworks, the article elucidates how artists employ various media and methodologies to convey complex narratives about the in- terplay between human-nature relationships, environmental justice, and the urgent need for collective action in the face of global environmental challenges.
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creator: Silvia Lavanco Livreri
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Silvia Lavanco Livreri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-07-31
publication date: 2024-07-31
starting page: 36
ending page: 57
doi: 10.54103/ai/21929

Philosophy Through Unorthodox Means
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description: An overwhelming scientific consensus confronts us with the need to radically transform our habits to cope with the climate crisis in which we are living. The production of data – in addition to the re- lated flow of information and images regarding the threat to our survival and ecosystems – is not enough to activate our pro-environment actions. To set radical change in motion, it is necessary to design imaginative interventions based on the knowledge gained in embodied cognitive science so that interventions are directed not at disembodied minds but at situated indi- viduals enacting within a rich landscape of affordances. By way of experimenting with philosophy through unorthodox means, I will present a concrete artwork, Infinity Pool, whose purpose is to enact tangible invitations addressed to a situated community through a monstrous education of attention, that is, through an imaginative invitation that offers an opportunity to bring attention to aspects of the environ- ment usually ignored.
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creator: Antonio Ianniello
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Antonio Ianniello https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-07-31
publication date: 2024-07-31
starting page: 133
ending page: 150
doi: 10.54103/ai/21837

Immersions and Dives
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description: The present volume Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality of the journal AN-ICON: Studies in Environmental Images is divided into two issues, each one dedicated to a specific thematic analysis, originated by the same conceptual core. The volume reflects on the concept of immersivity, which has become increasingly prominent in many different fields, including contemporary art. The constant reference to immersive experience is redefining the boundaries of artistic practice and fruition, highlighting the complex relationships between art, environments, and human perception.
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creator: Roberto Paolo Malaspina
creator: Elisabetta Modena
creator: Sofia Pirandello
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Roberto Paolo Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, Sofia Pirandello https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2023-12-29
publication date: 2023-12-29
doi: 10.54103/ai/22449

Immersions and Dives
type: item
description: The present volume Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality of the journal AN-ICON: Studies in Environmental Images is divided into two issues, each one dedicated to a specific thematic analysis, originated by the same conceptual core. The volume reflects on the concept of immersivity, which has become increasingly prominent in many different fields, including contemporary art. The constant reference to immersive experience is redefining the boundaries of artistic practice and fruition, highlighting the complex relationships between art, environments, and human perception.
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creator: Roberto Paolo Malaspina
creator: Elisabetta Modena
creator: Sofia Pirandello
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Roberto Paolo Malaspina, Elisabetta Modena, Sofia Pirandello https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2023-12-28
publication date: 2023-12-28
doi: 10.54103/ai/22448

Allegories of Immersion
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description: Fish Night, an episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS (S01E12, 2019) based on a 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, can be interpreted as an allegory of the impossibility of immersive experience: if real, it is deadly, because the images are no longer such or ghosts but living beings present in a shared environmental habitat, acting with but also against the subject, in turn no longer a spectator. Comparing the story and film, and ancient ekphrastic literature, I discuss, in a trans-medial imaginary genealogical perspective, the symptoms of this cultural topos and of the regressive desire for immersion and for transparent immediacy that shapes and drives it, dwelling in particular on the ambivalent phenomenological and ontological relations between living bodies, pictures and media as deep time-bending.
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creator: Filippo Fimiani
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Filippo Fimiani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2023-12-28
publication date: 2023-12-28
doi: 10.54103/ai/19910

“Looking Glass:” Reflections on Mirrors and Transparency as Devices for Representation in Visual Arts
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description: Today the locution “looking glass” survives almost exclusively thanks to the extraordinary success of Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking-Glass. This expression underlines the ambiguity between the glass surface intended as a device through which we can see the world or as an actual object to be “looked at.” Apparently, the early Renaissance perspective window, thanks to the mildness of the Mediterranean climate, did not need any panes. And certainly, even when glass panes are there, they are usually not reproduced in painting. The glass main virtue is its transparency, which makes it almost invisible. Something similar happens with other “glasses” specifically made to look through them: the drinking glass and the lens. Glass panes appear to sight only when different practical needs come into play, as in perspective drawing machines, or when its transparency is contradicted by a precise action that compromises or denies it: when panes are broken, as in this enigmatic portrait of early XIX c., or voluntarily covered, like for a blackout, as in Duchamp’s Fresh Widow. Looking through the glass, looking at the image reflected in the mirror and, finally, looking at the glass itself, as a device for presenting and representing spaces, are three recurring attitudes in the work of Italian artists of the late 20th century, like Lucio Fontana and Luciano Fabro.
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creator: Giorgio Zanchetti
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Giorgio Zanchetti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2023-12-28
publication date: 2023-12-28
doi: 10.54103/ai/19956

From inside to outside (and vice versa)
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description: This contribution will focus on some aspects of the roots of environmental art in Italy, with reference to works created between the 1950s and 1960s by Lucio Fontana, to environments designed by members of Gruppo T and other artists (Giulio Paolini, Luciano Fabro) in the 1960s, and through reflections on the different uses of space that were defined with the exhibition Lo spazio dell’immagine held in Foligno in 1967. The approach is not, however, that of a historical review of well-known events, but of an investigation into the way to understand the relationship between outside and inside, the sense and value of the “passage,” the conception of the modifying factors, starting with light, which have acted on the definition of space as an element to be perceived, rather than a place to be in, emphasising the dynamics that define a dialectical, if not antithetical, relationship with respect to architectural and design qualities in the proper sense, leading to reading the environmental art intervention as an invitation to follow a path.
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creator: Francesco Tedeschi
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Francesco Tedeschi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2023-12-28
publication date: 2023-12-28
doi: 10.54103/ai/20002

Inhabiting the museum
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description: The present contribution wants to investigate how the use of technology is redefining the performative role of visitor bodies within museum environments. It will address the topic of the physical body of museum goers as an experiential tool and discuss to what extent its active, at times performative, use across museum settings has been and is considered as an important element of the cultural experience. This research offers a storeographical account which begins from visitor engagement in the early 17th to 19th century museums, continues with an account of the ‘disappearance’ of the visitor body in modern museums (Candlin, 2004), and proceeds analysing the revival of a more systemic and bodily understanding of these spaces (Howes, 2014), with technologies playing a very important role in incentivizing and characterizing this shift. The case for the positive interplay between museums and technological artistic experience towards a performative engagement of the visitor’s physical presence will be made through the case study of the Nxt Museum, in Amsterdam. The specific project that will be here analyzed is the Shifting Proximities exhibition, which explores human experience and interaction in the face of social and technological change. Through this last institutional account the research will complete its itinerary through performative action across museum experiences in time and space, arguing for the relevance that technological media can play in transforming visitors’ relationship with art through their bodies.
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creator: Anna Calise
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Anna Calise https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2023-12-29
publication date: 2023-12-29
doi: 10.54103/ai/19907

How Digital Hybridization Creates New Performance Practices
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description: In this paper, we examine a new set of hybrid ludic practices utilizing cross-media narration that emerged with the rise of the Internet commonly called Alternate Reality Games. However, we propose to coin the term Alternate Virtuality Games (or AVG) as a way to distinguish these digital practices from their real-life counterpart. Viral online AVGs like This House Has People in It (Resnick, 2016) or Ben Drowned (Jadusable, 2010) are emblematic of a horizontal relationship between work and spectator, as well as performance outside of art institutions. The immersiveness of AVGs is unbound by the space and time of a specific happening, and is rather experienced by a multitude of agents at different times and places. This characteristic of being an extra-individual experience as well as being independent from institutions also places AVGs within liminal experiences such as studied by anthropologist Victor Turner. As such, we analyze these hybrid games as a mean for the 21st century spectator to overturn societal status quo through newfound agency. These performing agents get into a subjective state where they can experience and criticize our relationship to digital devices in a society of information and control, without being subjected to it.
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creator: Anthony Bekirov
creator: Thibaut Vaillancourt
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Anthony Bekirov, Thibaut Vaillancourt https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2023-12-29
publication date: 2023-12-29
doi: 10.54103/ai/19908

Digital Heterotopias in the Metaverse
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description: At a time when the umbrella term “metaverse” seems to have monopolised the discourse on online social presence, this paper aims to explore the possibility of constructing interactive online spaces that challenge the hegemonic structures of heteronormative society. Before describing the metaverse as a futuristic scenario that catalyses technophobic fears, perhaps we can turn our attention to existing metaverses: one example is the sandbox video game Minecraft, which is characterised by great interactivity and manipulability. Therefore, by analysing the immersive and interactive artwork g(Ender Gallery) by artist Cat Haines, which was created entirely on Minecraft in 2021, I will explore how the platform can be used to build a playful ground and at the same time a critical arena of gender norms and a deep reflection on trans experience.
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creator: Margherita Fontana
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Margherita Fontana https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2023-12-29
publication date: 2023-12-29
doi: 10.54103/ai/19764

Con-Temporary
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description: The paper focuses on exhibition practice, taking exhibitions as the key to contemporaneity. I will make a strong plea for the mutuality between past and present, the encouragement of visitors becoming participants through soliciting affective empathic attitude, and the accommodation to make this possible thanks to the enticement of durational looking. I will do this through the theoretical analysis of what exhibiting means and does, and through a consideration of my recent video installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances. One episode of this project will be the hook on which to hang my view of art-making as, not an illustration of but a method of cultural analysis.
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creator: Mieke Bal
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Maria Gertrudis Bal https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2023-12-28
publication date: 2023-12-28
doi: 10.54103/ai/19939

Art and Artifice
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description: Art in general, more than other fields, appears to lie at the heart of immersivity. As argued by Oliver Grau, it is art that still deploys a considerable genealogy with examples that resonate with the immersivity as proposed in contemporaneity. It is the current immersivity that constructs “constellations” which, as Benjamin put it, dynamically enact “the history of art [as] the history of prophesies […] which can be written only starting from the point of view of an immediate present,” where “every present is determined by those images that are synchronous to it: each now is the now of a given knowability.” In the art history field, however, it is almost mandatory to re-evoke a fully mannerist ambience where “painting” creates – without the aid of particular instruments – the near-total immersion, acting fully on the passional dimension. The case in point is the Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, made by Giulio Romano between 1532 and 1536 in Palazzo Te in Mantua. A stunning illusionist artifice that catapults the viewers into the heart of the ongoing event, to produce in them a sense of awe and estrangement beyond the “frame.”
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creator: Lucia Corrain
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Lucia Corrain https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2023-12-28
publication date: 2023-12-28
doi: 10.54103/ai/19938

Mutual Transformations
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description: In contemporary understanding, a now normalized immersion continues to be associated with digitality and high-tech apparatuses, but is also seen as diffused into the lifeworld. Against this backdrop, the article focuses on two current artworks that extend the internal environmentality inherent in VR as a spatialized image into physical space by using strategies from installation and site-related art. These examples provide for an equation and nesting of work, environment and exhibition that is interpreted here as a potentiated environmentalization. The artistic VR-environments by no means negate their rootedness in imagery, but rather self-reflexively reveal the transitions between image and three-dimensionality, what gives them a special epistemic valence. It thus seems worthwhile to relate them to considerations of knowledge objects and exhibitions, but also to (queer) phenomenological theories of entanglement and becoming originating from the following of lines. Meanwhile, the epistemic value of their latent objects, disoriented paths, and impossible spaces is only revealed in the interaction with and embodied experience of the virtual space. The article thus participates in debates on how bodily immersion does not exclude, but enables action and reflection within aesthetic experience. With regard to two fundamental paradigms of immersion, it can show how, for this purpose, the artworks turn anew the strategies of de-distancing and de-differentiation.
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creator: Annette Urban
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Annette Urban https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2023-12-28
publication date: 2023-12-28
doi: 10.54103/ai/19773

On the razor’s edge
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description: Most often, the concept of illusion has been interpreted in a negative way as a synonym for deception. However, a second, positive meaning has gained sometimes prominence according to which illusion does not necessarily imply any cognitive failure or distortion. As such, it can even play an important role in eliciting genuine aesthetic enjoyment. This introduction focuses on crucial aspects in the history and theory of aesthetic illusion, a notion that has resurfaced recently as a key aspect of the phenomenon of immersion, being regarded as a goal to be pursued by both the creators and the experiencers of virtual environments.
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creator: Pietro Conte
creator: Lambert Wiesing
rights: Copyright (c) 2023 Pietro Conte, Lambert Wiesing https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2022-12-20
publication date: 2022-12-20
doi: 10.54103/ai/19919

Immersivity as An-immersivity
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description: The title of this project, “An-icon,” refers to “images that deny themselves.” Virtual reality may be viewed as a typical, though not exclusive, case able to illustrate this kind of image: we know we have crossed the threshold of an environment that consists of images (ontologically), but we experience it (phenomenologically) as if it were a real environment. Something similar can be said about immersivity, but reversing the perspective: we are (ontologically) immersed in reality (virtual or non-virtual), but (phenomenologically) we know and say we are, and for this very reason we reject the idea that we are simply immersed in an environment. This applies first and foremost to our experience in general, regardless of the status of the experiences we gain through virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR). And yet, within this very general condition, human beings have over time created environments and works that carve out zones of “special immersivity,” so to speak, dedicated to immersion. What are we looking for in VR immersivity? Are new immersive technologies merely refinements of older techniques, or can they affect our relationship with ourselves, reality, and others in novel ways? What are artistic practices called on to do when faced with such new technological practices?
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creator: Stefano Velotti
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Stefano Velotti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2023-12-28
publication date: 2023-12-28
doi: 10.54103/ai/19726