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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 urgent questions. How are simulations or brand-new realities precisely built? To what degree and under which conditions do we find them persuasive? What does it mean to be exposed to virtual situations that nonetheless are conceived to impact on our actual self? What perceptual and cognitive processes do we undergo as we experience operational an-icons? And what ethical and/or political issues do an-icons pose in their operational life?

This section of An-Icon. Studies in Environmental Images solicits contributions that monitor and critically reflect upon the applications and practical usage of an-icons as a new and sui generis kind of operational images. Methodological variety is key to this section. Therefore, in addition to theoretical works, we welcome empirical works that adopt the standpoint and research tools of empirical aesthetics and phenomenology, cognitive sciences, cognitive psychology, neurosciences, as well as sociology and ethnography.

In this perspective, Operational An-Icons encourages proposals related to the following frameworks:

• State-of-the-art scholarship and further directions in the practical usage of an-icons.
• The technical mechanisms underlying the practical usage of an-icons.
• The experiential mechanisms elicited by the practical usage of an-icons.
• The social, ethical, and political impact of the practical usage of an-icons.