AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]

Immersions and Dives

2024-02-02T11:37:27+00:00

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.

I wish we could grab your image and touch you

2023-03-08T17:13:34+00:00

This contribution investigates the notion of immersiveness in Laure Prouvost’s production, critically questioning the relationship between the environments designed by the French artist and the short film projected in them. More specifically, an attempt will be made to demonstrate how the activation of a sense of immersion depends on the fact that Prouvost’s hypermedia installations act as both environments (ambiente) and settings (ambientazione). This study demonstrates how the immersive condition that the artist’s film performance activates, while undoubtedly relating to the environmental context in which they appear, springs from a spectrum of strategies that Prouvost’s moving images orchestrate. These include the layered and plastic quality of the moving image; the relationships between word and image within intermediary storytelling; the montage as a critical tool; and, more precisely, bodies that are not necessarily human as the locus of sensitive knowledge. A theoretical framework that intersects the notion of the “system aesthetic,” Hugo Munsterberg’s prodromal psychological theory and multiple forms of haptic vision-resonance will define the guidelines of the argumentation, in parallel with tracing an inseparable art-historical genealogy to comprehend Laure Prouvost’s research.

How Digital Hybridization Creates New Performance Practices

2023-04-04T14:45:40+00:00

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.

Inhabiting the museum

2023-04-14T15:01:38+00:00

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.

Digital Heterotopias in the Metaverse

2023-04-03T09:03:32+00:00

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.

Techniques and Poetics of the Submarine in Film

2023-03-06T17:01:05+00:00

Water, whether surface or depths, recurrently appears in cinema as a motif and a material. The great symbolic importance this recurrence of the aquatic bears within film leads to calling its different uses into question, especially when it comes to the subaquatic. Addressing the question of the submarine allows going beyond water as a simple surface, and thus to move towards a real habitability of water. Making a history of underwater cinema that includes precinematic devices such as the public aquariums of the late 19th century enables the identification of an aesthetic community, as well as that of a common desire to stage a totalizing perceptive experience of the aquatic element and, in that way, of the image materiality. In line with the various cinematic underwater devices conceived to that end during the 20th century, virtual reality, as a total experience generator, also resorts to the subaquatic as a pretext to immerse the user in the work of art. The recurring fascination for the subaquatic throughout the ages, even more so with the rise of new media, demonstrates how water is a central feature to better define and archeologize the concept of immersion.

Laure Prouvost’s Deep See Blue Surrounding You

2023-03-08T17:22:55+00:00

This paper aims to demonstrate how Laure Prouvost’s artistic practice requires an immersion of the viewer in intermedial installations composed of objects from the most disparate spatial and temporal origins. Since the early 2000s, the French artist has intentionally created surreal mise-en-scenes which, by blending video, painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance, can be understood as compositions or collages made of visual references taken from different contexts such as pop culture, the web, and private photo albums. Prouvost’s works are “unstable visual entities,” made of images that aggregate in heterogeneous configurations, generating eccentric atmospheres and cancelling every hierarchical order between the observer and the observed. Viewers are encouraged to fill the space by becoming objects among other objects.
By using the Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) as philosophical and methodological support, this paper will focus more closely on the analysis of Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre (2019), the project Prouvost produced for the French Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. On this occasion, her work They Parlaient Idéale (2019) – a video documenting the Mediterranean Sea journey that brings her to the Venetian lagoon – was the cornerstone of a multifaceted environmental installation.
Assuming a critical and analytical approach, this contribution then discusses the role Deep See Blue Surrounding You plays as a “hyper-enactment:” it is a mise-en-scene that consists of interrelationships between “things/images” that aggregate as objects, but it is also a composition in which the viewers are “viscously” asked to generate their personal, non-linear narration.

What to do in /with images? The (virtual) hand in augmented and virtual reality.

2023-03-08T16:57:39+00:00

This paper focuses on the concept of acting with and in images in the context of recent AR and VR artworks. The thesis is that the (virtual) hand plays a significant role in an immersive experience. Referring to Doris Kolesch’s relational concept of immersion as one that considers not only the status of being evolved but also the process of getting inside, three forms of actions in and with images are discussed: the hand as stage, the hand as a symbiotic contact zone, and the hand as a designing hand. With artworks by Jeremy Bailey, Aristarkh Chernyshev, Rachel Rossin, and Florian Meisenberg, this contribution aims to contour the forms of action in which the (virtual) hand, in particular, allows an immersive experience by interaction with the virtual sphere and knows how to combine distance with nearness.

I Stalk Myself More than I Should

2023-02-22T11:47:43+00:00

Today we find ourselves immersed in digital environments made available by centralised social media platforms on a daily basis. While these platforms did provide users expanded connectivity and visibility, they also confined the same user in an economic system focused on collection and commodification of personal data for profit, and in return used them as resources of free labour. In light of this analysis, is it possible to carry out an artistic practice within centralised social media platforms, therefore take an active part in them, while remaining critically engaged, in the attempt to highlight some of the structural dynamics and problems of these realities?
In this paper some fundamental aspects of the aforementioned channels will be discussed through the analysis of selected works and two methods utilised by the author to avoid the culture of interveillance.

...Or We Will Do Without the Theatre. Challenging the Urban Space, Drafting a New City Map Through Performances.

2023-01-27T18:29:35+00:00

The article discusses the evolution of urban mapping and innovative urban design. It explores the transition from functional urban planning to more creative approaches inspired by artists such as Guy Debord, Yoko Ono and others. It suggests that the city is a stage for events, similar to Antonin Artaud’s vision. The central question is how the city can be transformed into a theatre through practical design rules. The paper presents two experiments. The first involves random map rearrangement, encouraging new exploration of familiar neighbourhoods. The second experiment introduces guidance and unpredictability, reflecting the uncertainties of architectural projects. These experiments aim to apply theatrical concepts to urban design. The article seeks to develop a manual for dramatic urban navigation, highlighting the inherent dramatic structure of the city and promoting innovative design regulations.

THE ITALIAN JOB - Job N. 3, Lazy Sunday (2022)

2023-02-19T18:47:01+00:00

Lazy Sunday is the third work in THE ITALIAN JOB series. Started in 2014, straddling the distance between Italy and the United States, this series intends to highlight the hidden structures behind themes such as artistic legitimacy, virtuality, immaterial labour and 2.0 relationships between artists and curators. Lazy Sunday takes shape after an invitation to participate in a virtual residency within the spaces of the 12th Atelier of Casa degli Artisti in Milan. The artist accepts the invitation, overturning the assumptions of the residency: instead of participating at a distance, Vavarella transforms his point of view into an open space for the virtual participation of other people. The work consists of a 12-hour film made with a 360° camera and shot continuously on August 8 2021, on an ordinary day. Starting at 9:40 a.m., Emilio Vavarella filmed the events of one of his summer Sundays, recording his every activity, from waking up until the evening. The film has been shown in the space set up in the Casa degli Artisti, where visitors took on the point of view of the artist using a Virtual Reality headset.