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

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AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images

The journal AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images is a peer-reviewed web-based academic journal, stemming from the ERC Advanced project “AN-ICON. An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images”.

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.

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CurrentVol 4, No I (2025): Virtual Sex: Pornography, Immersion, and Erotic Environments

Roberto Malaspina, Giovanna Maina, Ihsan Asman
Paola Zilioli
Xavier Petit
Sofia Torre
Massimo Clemente
Cristina Voto
Claudio Monopoli
Sveva Crisafulli, Attila Manfredi

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This issue approaches virtual sex as a privileged field for understanding how pornography is transformed by immersive technologies, digital platforms, and synthetic images. The contributions move between VR porn, video games, AI-generated erotics, webcamming, nineteenth-century photography, and early online environments such as Habbo Hotel, showing how erotic experience is continually reshaped by different media forms. Rather than presenting virtual sex as a purely contemporary phenomenon, the issue situates it within a longer history of technical mediation, pornographic imagination, and embodied spectatorship. What emerges is a reflection on how pornographic images change when they become environments to inhabit, interfaces for perceiving bodies, and infrastructures that stage and monetize desire.

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