Thematic Section

Allegories of Immersion

Author(s)

  • Filippo Fimiani

    University of Salerno

Keywords
  • Allegory
  • Ekphrastic fear
  • Media imaginary
  • Materiality
  • Elemental media
Abstract

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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Published

28 December 2023

DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19910
How to Cite
Fimiani, F. (2023). Allegories of Immersion. AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433], 2(I). https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19910
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Issue
Vol. 2 No. I (2023): Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality

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