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Simone Venturini
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Gravitational Fields. Attraction, Roundness, and Operationality of Immersive Images
Text.Serial.Journal
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Introduction
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2023-07-10
2023-09-22
2023-09-22
9-18
Cinéma & Cie
Simone Venturini
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10.54103/2036-461X/20554
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University of Udine
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en
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Zielinski, Siegfried. 2006. Deep Time of the Media. Towards an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gravitational Fields. Attraction, Roundness, and Operationality of Immersive Images
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                                                                                       Gravitational Fields.
                                                                                       Attraction, Roundness, and
                                                                                       Operationality of Immersive Images1
                                                                                       Anna Caterina Dalmasso (University of Milan)
                                                                                       Wanda Strauven (Columbia University)
                                                                                       Simone Venturini (University of Udine)




                                                                                       TOWARDS ATTRACTIONAL                                                                              Keywords
                                                                                                                                                                                  Media Archaeology
                                                                                       IMMERSIVE ENVIRONMENTS                                                                              Virtuality
                                                                                                                                                                                   Immersive Media
                                                                                         Immersive interactive environments have come to challenge contemporary                       Environments
                                                                                                                                                                                         Attractions
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                       spectatorship and audio-visual creation. The domains of the virtual seem to
                                                                                                                                                                                                DOI
                                                                                       become par excellence that which is able to absorb us and engage us. Even                   https://doi.org/
                                                                                       though they have a markedly distinct genealogy, the domains of “virtual”,                   10.54103/2036-
                                                                                       “immersive”, and “digital” gradually overlap and are almost assimilated in                      461X/20554
                                                                                       everyday language. The emergence of the World Wide Web during the 1990s
                                                                                       and the diffusion of digital devices are often referred to as a turning point for an
                                                                                       intense reception and participatory media experience (Rose 2011). But, in recent
                                                                                       decades, studies in different fields have endeavoured to show how immersive
                                                                                       environments are by no means an invention of the 21st century: immersivity is
                                                                                       not only clearly grounded in numerous optical devices of the modern age such
                                                                                       as the 3-D stereoscope, the “all-view” panorama, the frameless phantasmagoria,



                                                                                       1         The thematic issue n. 40 of Cinéma&Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal, titled
                                                                                       “Archaeologies of the Virtual. Materialities, Senses, Imaginaries” is the result of the
                                                                                       scientific research conducted within the ERC Advanced project “An-Iconology. History,
                                                                                       Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images”, funded by the European Research
                                                                                       Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation pro-
                                                                                       gramme (grant agreement No. [834033 AN-ICON]), hosted by the Department of Philo-
                                                                                       sophy “Piero Martinetti” (Project “Departments of Excellence 2023-2027” awarded by
                                                                                       the Ministry of University and Research).
                                                                                       The co-editors of the issue have discussed the development of the present text in sy-
                                                                                       nergy and they share its scientific scope. More specifically, the section “Towards At-
                                                                                       tractional Immersive Environments” can be attributed to Wanda Strauven, the section
                                                                                       “Towards an Immersivity of Roundness” to Anna Caterina Dalmasso, and the section
                                                                                       “Towards Operational Immersive Environments” to Simone Venturini. The section “Ma-
                                                                                       terialities, Senses, Imaginaries” has been collaboratively co-written.


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 40 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                          9
     and the multifarious forms of peep media culture, it can even be traced to
     some extent to the architectural trompe l’œil of the Renaissance and Baroque
     periods, frescoes from Roman times, and as far back as the earliest forms of
     human expression, such as Palaeolithic cave paintings (Huhtamo 2013, Grau
     2003, Nechvatal 2009).
        Against the background of a rich and multidisciplinary scholarship, the role
     played by media archaeology (Huhtamo Parikka 2011, Parikka 2012) lies not
     only in questioning the newness of “new” media, and thus debunking the idea
     that immersive environments and experiences may be unprecedented, but also
     in providing different frameworks for a critical exploration of the process of
     virtualisation of the environment, which exceeds the state of present-day media
     technology. To understand this overarching techno-cultural movement, we need
     to take into account the entanglement between the devices and practices which
     elicit a transformation of our experience of images, the infrastructures and
     architectural spaces of reception, which are designed to become the catalyst
     of immersive spectatorship, through multisensory stimulation and interaction,
     as much as the epistemic and imaginary constructs which foster the material
     concretisation of media.
        By triggering our bodies to respond as if the experiences they convey were
     real (Slater 2009), virtual interfaces can offer us intense thrills, feelings
     of awe, or goosebumps. Featuring roller-coasters, wanderings in outer
     space, flight simulators, and so forth, many of the contents that are offered
     to contemporary immersive users remediate the exotic fascination raised by
     travelogues, “impossible voyages”, and other curiosities in the early phases
     of cinema history (Bolter and Grusin 1999, for the notion of remediation.) As
     André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning have argued, the “cinema of attractions”
     at the turn of the century was characterised by a driving force that, instead of
     focusing primarily on storytelling, solicited spectators’ attention, inciting visual
     curiosity and providing pleasure through an exciting spectacle (Gaudreault
     & Gunning 1989, Gunning 1990, Strauven 2006). Likewise, nowadays, virtual
     immersive experiences renew an emphasis on spectacle and monstration over
     narrative, since what becomes most engaging for the audience is the disruptive
     sensorial impact of medium and technology and the staging of the apparatus
     itself (Golding 2019).
        Yet, by entering CAVEs and wearing head-mounted displays, spectators are
     brought back not so much to the first film projections, but rather to the individual
     viewing devices of penny arcades, like the Kinetoscope and the Mutoscope, or
     even better to the embodied 3-D viewing experience of the Holmes stereoscope,
     which came with a hooded face cover enhancing the virtual reality effect of
     the stereoscopic images. In terms of collective immersive experiences, it is
     relevant to mention here the vanishing of the frame—both as the border of
     vision and the delineation of the image—epitomised, for instance, in Robert
     Barker’s panoramas where the spectators standing on a central platform are
     literally surrounded by an “all-view” painting, or in Étienne-Gaspar Robert’s
     (aka Robertson’s) phantasmagoria shows where both the lanternist and the



10                                   Dalmasso, Strauven, Venturini, Gravitational Fields
phantascope are hidden behind the screen, projecting frameless ghostly images
towards the audience, with sound and smoke effects.
  Indeed, in virtual technologies, the construction of iconic space no longer
relies on the apparatus of the frame (Conte 2020, Pinotti 2021), resulting in a
blurring of the threshold between physical reality and the virtuality of the image.
However, despite the apparent unframedness of immersive environments,
framing persists as a symbolic, psychic, aesthetic, or semiotic threshold.
Instead of disappearing, the very perceptual function of framing is rather
assumed by the experiencer’s body and embodied gestures, acting like a virtual
frame (Dalmasso 2019, Ng 2021), being constantly tracked by the sensors of the
interface (Grespi 2021). The frontality of the frame is, thus, replaced by a world
that is organised around the percipient (reminiscent of Barker’s panorama), the
experiencer’s body becomes the pivot of a process of reciprocal performative
negotiation of a shared agency between the human and the technological:
between the experiencer and the constant operation of sensing and tracking
ensured by the media environment.



TOWARDS AN IMMERSIVITY OF ROUNDNESS
  The virtual mediascape draws our attention to another dimension of
“attraction”, as that which creates a gravitational field: it does not merely
emphasise the dimension of shock and sensorial disorientation, but points to a
reconfiguration of spectatorship as essentially interactive. What does it mean
for creators to design an environment to be experienced (rather than an image
to be seen), and for the experiencer to become the “centre of attraction” of the
image-making process?
  Organising themselves around this fulcrum, virtual environments give rise
to “self-centred worlds” (Catricalà and Eugeni 2020), which are articulated
according to the percipient, by delimitating or augmenting their cognitive
capabilities, featuring different forms of “exocentric images” (Bédard 2022),
that is, images produced by a camera attached to the body of an actor which,
paradoxically, generate the impression of an immobile body in a moving
world. Thus, by entering the virtual space, the experiencer accesses subjective
perceptive bubbles similar to those described by the ethologist Jacob von
Uexküll, to identify the way in which each species appears to be enclosed
within an environment (Umwelt) made up of its own perceptual and operational
possibilities, as in a “soap bubble” (Pinotti 2021).
  Whether they provide access to a hermetically sealed illusionistic environment
(virtual reality), or to a space which allows the superimposition of data and
elements over the surrounding environment (mixed and augmented reality),
extended reality media need to be reframed as the barycentre of what Hito
Steyerl has called “bubble vision” (Steyerl 2017): an aesthetics that characterises
not just the experience of digital media but also informs digital technoculture
as such. As the artist argues, on the one hand, this trope hints at a condition of


Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 40 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                     11
     isolation and deceit, as suggested by so-called “filter bubbles”, which create a
     parallel universe of information across media platforms and networks, and, on
     the other hand, it is a metaphor for globalisation and complexity, as we speak
     for instance of “real estate bubbles”, triggering the constant fear of economic
     collapse, burdening the destinies of an interconnected society. Besides, the
     isolation enacted by the figure of the bubble has recently found realisation in
     the global confinement imposed by the Covid-19 lockdowns, during which the
     accessibility to the “real” has been mediated worldwide by virtual and digital
     technologies.
       Hence, the metaphors of circularity and roundness, whose emblem is the
     spherical figure of the bubble, feature a twofold structure, being suspended
     between a centripetal and a centrifugal movement. If the use of circular all-
     encompassing images grants a privilege to the observer as the centre of
     representative space, similar to that constructed by the tradition of Renaissance
     perspective, at the same time it also encloses the percipient in a regime of
     surveillance and subjugation, condensed by the dispositive of the Panopticon,
     but also presaged by the process of a capitalistic and military possession and
     mapping of space, historically strengthened by the different forms of aerial view.
     Furthermore, roundness is also a figure for the eye, an organic shape opposing
     the geometry of the frame, which stands in contrast with the orthogonality of
     the Albertian quadrangle. Even before the eye as organ of vision, circularity
     indicates the hypnotic power of the eyespot (Caillois 1984), as it may precede
     the function of vision, constituting itself as a pole of attraction.
       Then, although the constraints it imposes on the observer’s agency, the
     bubble provides at the same time a safe operating space, able at once to
     foster an organic engagement of the subject (Berleant 2010) and to work as
     a “disorientation device” (Ahmed 2006) or a means of “de-automatisation”
     (Deikman 1972). In this perspective, the bubble also offers a way to challenge
     the stable position of the subject: its topology comes to displace and even to
     reverse the model of the Panopticon, to turn it inside-out, showing the subject’s
     effect on the surface, letting them resurface and interrogating them in a world
     that co-constitutes with them, to force them to recognise that every movement
     performed necessarily affects the surrounding environment.



     TOWARDS OPERATIONAL
     IMMERSIVE ENVIRONMENTS
       The contemporary tension towards immersivity inherits and preserves a
     deep time (Zielinski 2006). Several “topological” devices of the early modern
     age and the 19th century place the role of the human subject in relation to a
     “real” increasingly articulated and challenged by mediatised environments. The
     “sites of reality” (Crary 2002) established by immersive media infrastructure
     of modernity aim to overcome the limits of subjective vision and thus support



12                                  Dalmasso, Strauven, Venturini, Gravitational Fields
and help the progressive inadequacy of the human subject with respect to the
technological a priori. Mixed, augmented, and virtual environments and images
unfold a long-term training and negotiating ground of the conditions of existence
of subjects, media, and their reciprocal and intertwined relationships.
   Such relationships, therefore, draw attention not only to the form of roundness
per se, but to a processual, operational roundness in terms of circularities,
recursiveness, and feedback (Johnson 2011), constantly at work in augmented,
virtual, immersive, interactive worlds and their media infrastructure. As a
result, the narcissistic and reflexive background of these centric worlds is
characterised by a continuous solicitation of the subject to take in information,
provide and receive feedback, interact, thus corresponding to a hybrid training,
and constantly operational environment.
   Such ambivalence inherent in the roundness of immersive and interactive
environments lies, on the one hand, in generating a utopian vision; while, on the
other hand, from a “historico-pragmatic” perspective, circularity challenges and
disorients the subject, proving to be close to the “perverse” and heterotopian
practices already known and experienced by cinema itself, which found
experimental and training settings in the scientific, medical, surveillance,
military, and sensor-monitoring fields—the so-called S/M practices of the
cinematic apparatus (Elsaesser 2005). As the environmentalisation of images,
stimulated by virtual and immersive technical devices, challenges their
representational status, immersive images become closer and closer to the
recursivity of operational images, thus working in harmony with the processes
of transformation from a visual to an invisual culture (Parikka 2023).
   An apparently paradoxical convergence between the environmental and the
operational framework ceases to be so if we consider immersive media and their
images as the result of continuous oscillations between media transparency
and opacity. Within the broad and productive scholarly debate generated by
the successful definition coined by Harun Farocki in the early 2000s, Thomas
Elsaesser was perhaps the most effective in relating “operational images” to
the concepts of simulation, mimesis, and trompe l’œil. Since “‘mimesis has
become a matter of generative algorithms’ […] operational images are images
that no longer function like a ‘window on the world’, they point the way to a new
definition of what an image is.” (Elsaesser 2017: 216 and 219).
   As is well known, trompe l’œil is a recursive key concept and deep pattern for
immersivity, described in terms of “excessive mimesis” (Marin 2001) and “optical
illusion” (Grau 2003), for its belonging to the order of hallucination (Marin 2001)
or sacredness (Balke, Siegert and Vogl 2015). But as far as we are concerned
here, the field of cultural techniques and the framework of operative ontologies,
and within them the genealogy of trompe l’œil unfolded by Bernard Siegert,
provide a more useful viewpoint. Here, the trigger of immersivity emerges
“from margins, edges, and borders [...] constantly reinterpreted as represented
objects […] It is this oscillating between the transparency of the imaginary [...]
space and the opacity of the material carrier, and more importantly, it is the
re-entry of the latter into the former, that keeps generating the trompe l’œil”


Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 40 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                     13
     (Siegert 2015, 191).
       While the institutionalisation of a specific media infrastructure testifies
     the “taming” of a techno-cultural environment and the weakening of media
     competitions, on the contrary, the contemporary oscillation between framedness
     and unframedness, visual and invisual, representational and operational into
     the interactive, virtual, and immersive worlds is an indication of an ongoing
     negotiation in the struggle for the environmentalisation of images. Therefore,
     immersive media show an entangled historicity of their visual and material
     infrastructure (Parks and Starosielski 2015), where augmented, extended,
     and virtual images retain traces of their own operational modes and chains
     of construction, superimposing and overwriting several cultural techniques,
     such as tracking tools, diagrams, grids, or the 20th-century cinema and media
     imaginaries and narratives.
       Through the different narratives and imaginaries unfolded by historical
     media, we can catch archaeological and discursive glimpses of the a priori
     of contemporary immersivity, which appears in this perspective as an
     intensification and articulation of a long-standing process. It is an imaginary
     that continuously challenges material, historical, and subjective temporalities,
     aesthetics and formal representations, and psychic-sense-motor principles
     of (de-)automatisation and (de-)individualisation of the subject in a circular,
     operational, and immersive media environment.
       In the end, as Barthes noted almost fifty years ago (Barthes 1975), the co-
     presence in the proto-immersive space of the movie theatre of an image-oriented
     narcissistic body and a fetishistic body oriented towards material excesses and
     margins, can be traced back to how virtual immersivity in narcissistic terms
     can lead to the loss of the crucial freedom to orient the gaze towards the edges
     (Pinotti 2020). An archaeology of the virtual has therefore a critical research
     objective, aimed at exploring the shift between a narcissistic unframedness,
     presentness, immediateness, and a fetishistic operational perverseness in
     immersive worlds, and at ensuring that the “edges” and “margins” of virtual
     environments will retain their fundamental role of negotiating and balancing
     the relationships between materialities, senses, and imaginaries.



     MATERIALITIES, SENSES, IMAGINARIES
       The different contributions in this thematic issue investigate the notion of the
     virtual, and the present state of the art of virtual technologies, by delving into
     the deep time of cinema and media history and by developing the ambiguity of
     the spherical figure, which is treated both as a metaphor, a topology, a material
     condition of technological devices, a cultural technique, and an epistemic and
     imaginary dispositive.
       The opening essay by Élise Jouhannet offers the theoretical framework of
     the immersive roundness and the circularisation of the image, as opposed to
     the classical rectangularly framed film image and media screen. Through the



14                                  Dalmasso, Strauven, Venturini, Gravitational Fields
metaphor of the bubble and the transhistorical imaginary which springs from
it, the author proposes to rethink the materiality of virtual reality in terms of
transparency and elasticity, tracing an alternative genealogy, both historically
and symbolically, from the first hot-air balloons to the inflatable “bubbles” of
expanded cinema.
   The next two articles look into site-specific immersive dispositives and
their materialities. VR technologies are commonly presented and understood
as a dematerialisation of human experience, which is in contrast with the
hypermediation of virtual interfaces and in particular with the fact that the
gestures and bodily movements of the spectator are precisely the source of
the actualisation of the virtual image. This is already somehow embedded
in “topological” devices of the early modern age, as explored by Matteo
Citrini in relation to the toposcope and by Maja-Lisa Müller in relation to
early modern choir stalls. Both authors focus on the material conditions of
an immersive experience, respectively in the Alps and in the architectural
spaces of the church. Citrini traces the non-linear and heterogeneous history
of the toposcope, a panoramic device consisting of a (semi)circular table with
topographic information about the surroundings. Originally designed for the
detection of fires, the toposcope was repurposed into a tourist attraction during
the 19th century, offering to the mountaineer an experience of in situ virtuality.
Similarly, the inlaid decoration and trompe-l’œil imaginary of the wooden choir
stalls discussed by Müller placed the clergy in a virtual space, a space within a
space, or rather a hybrid space at the intersection of virtuality and actuality. For
this purpose, Müller revisits Brunelleschi’s experiments in central perspective
pointing out the importance of situated vision and the connection between the
spheres of depicting and depicted.
   Then follow two contributions that focus on the sensorial immersivity of cinema,
centred around two key figures of the early-20th-century debate on the senses
of cinema: Aldous Huxley and Frederick Kiesler. Huxley’s parody of the talkies
through the “invention” or imaginary medium of the feelies is critically analysed
by Giancarlo Grossi from a media-epistemological perspective. Furthermore,
by reconnecting the feelies to the cultural history of olfaction, Grossi suggests
how the mediatisation of this repressed sense is connected to the colonisation
of subjectivity, a fact which reveals a clearly dystopian scenario for the author
of Brave New World but which is at the same time essential for the further
(theoretical) development of virtual reality. Anna Franceschini, on the other
hand, places Kiesler’s work in a media-archaeological perspective, highlighting
the Austrian-American architect’s visionary intuition of cinema as a totalizing
and virtualizing experience. Therefore, Franceschini’s contribution is focused
on the sensoriality of Kiesler’s stage productions, window displays, and movie
theatre architecture, which she discusses in terms of spatial virtualisation.
   The issue closes with two contributions articulating two complementary
imaginary archaeologies which underpin this process of virtualisation of space,
by addressing, on the one hand, the history of virtual reality installations, and,
on the other hand, the moving image in one of its most essential forms. While


Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 40 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                      15
     George Themistokleous’ contribution analyses Osmose (1995), the pioneering
     work by Char Davies which marked a turning point in the artistic explorations of
     the virtual medium, the essay co-written by Barbara Le Maître, Natacha Pernac,
     and Jennifer Verraes outlines a mise en abîme of the immersive condition by
     drawing on Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). Themistokleous focuses on the
     unique bodily experience designed by Osmose to reveal how virtual reality can
     engender a “de-automatisation” of sensibility, that is, an ungearing of one’s
     habitual perception, from which can spring the potential for present-day and
     future VR works. In the analysis developed by Le Maître, Pernac, and Verraes,
     the complex narrative and the paradoxical temporality articulated by the
     science fiction of La Jetée act as a prefiguration of immersion through memory
     and time-travel, culminating in a decoupling of the position of the subject,
     who, suspended between fetishism and narcissism, negotiates a peculiar co-
     existence between the virtual and the real.
       The different approaches to virtuality, articulated by the contributions collected
     in this thematic issue, reflect as many ways to “think media archaeologically”
     (Strauven 2012 and 2013), that is, different perspectives towards conducting
     research in media archaeology, from studying the recurring motif or topos
     of the bubble to tracing discontinuities in the history of the toposcope, from
     reading the classical history of Renaissance perspective against the grain to
     conceptually (re)enacting the discursive media invention of the feelies, from
     uncovering the new in the old within the writings of Kiesler to imagining the
     future of VR and time-travelling by analysing complex narrative structures.
     Through these diverse contributions and media archaeological approaches,
     which both look back into the past and forward into the future, the thematic
     issue as a whole aims at shedding new light on the contemporary mediascape
     and at stimulating the ongoing debate about virtuality and immersivity.




16                                   Dalmasso, Strauven, Venturini, Gravitational Fields
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18                                                            Dalmasso, Strauven, Venturini, Gravitational Fields
