10.54103/ai/19919
Most often, the concept of illusion has been interpreted in a negative way as a synonym for deception. However, a second, positive meaning has gained sometimes prominence according to which illusion does not necessarily imply any cognitive failure or distortion. As such, it can even play an important role in eliciting genuine aesthetic enjoyment. This introduction focuses on crucial aspects in the history and theory of aesthetic illusion, a notion that has resurfaced recently as a key aspect of the phenomenon of immersion, being regarded as a goal to be pursued by both the creators and the experiencers of virtual environments.
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Lambert Wiesing
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AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
Hallucination
On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between illusion and deception
Text.Serial.Journal
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2022-12-20
2023-05-16
AN-ICON
Lambert Wiesing
2022/12/20
10.54103/ai/19919
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
2785-7433
II
Hallucination
en
Wolf, W., “Illusion (aesthetic),” in P. Hühn et al. (eds.), Handbook of Narratology (Berlin-New York: de Gruyter, 2009): 144-160.
On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between illusion and deception
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/download/19919/17769
1
           On the razor’s
           edge: the (virtual)
image between illusion
and deception
by Pietro Conte and Lambert Wiesing
                    Immersion
                                      Presence
                                      Virtual reality
                                      Representation
                                      Hallucination




                           Issue №2 Year 2022
                           → Just an illusion? Between simulation,
                           emulation, and hyper-realism
                           Edited by Pietro Conte
                           and Lambert Wiesing
Introduction
On the razor’s edge:
the (virtual) image between
                       1
il usion and deception
PIETRO CONTE, Università degli Studi di Milano – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7128-2696
LAMBERT WIESING, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19919



                                    Illusion or delusion?

                               Were novelists and filmmakers right in fore-
                  shadowing the advent of 3D virtual worlds that would exist
                  parallel to physical reality, where people could interact with
                  each other through the full immersion of all their senses,
                  possibly losing awareness of the artificial nature of those
                  environments? Indeed, what has been imagined in count-
                  less science fiction narratives, dystopian movies, and TV
                  series seems to be turning into reality to an increasing




Keywords          Immersion                          Presence                         Virtual reality
                  Representation                     Hallucination
To quote this essay: P. Conte, L. Wiesing, “On the razor’s edge: the (virtual) image between illusion and
deception,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 4-21, https://doi.
org/10.54103/ai/19919


         1 This essay is the result of research activity developed within the frame of the project AN-
         ICON. An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images. AN-ICON has
         received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s
         Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. [834033 AN-ICON])
         and is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” of the University of Milan
         in the frame of the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2023-2027” sponsored by Ministero
         dell’Università e della Ricerca (MUR).

PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING                       4                                           AN-ICON
              degree: a pictorially generated environment that is not per-
              ceived as such.
                            A modern incarnation of René Descartes’s evil
              demon thought experiment, the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis
              famously describes a scenario in which a mad scientist
              might remove a person’s brain from the body, place it in a
              vat of life-sustaining nutrients, and wire it to a computer that
              feeds it with electrical stimuli identical to those the brain
              normally receives. In the words of Hilary Putnam, who in
              1981 made the story popular and provoked much heated
              debate among philosophers of mind, that would cause the
              individual “to have the illusion that everything is perfectly
              normal.” If, for instance, the person tries to raise her hand,
              the feedback from the machine will make her immediately
             “see” and “feel” the hand being raised. The evil scientist
              can cause the victim “to ‘experience’ (or hallucinate)” any
              situation he wishes. He can even erase the memory of the
              brain operation so that the victim will seem to herself to
              have been born and always lived in the digital environment.2
                            More recently, the idea of a simulation so pow-
              erful that people caught in it would take it for reality in
              the flesh has resurfaced in notions such as Peter Weibel’s
             “future cinema,” according to which the next coming cine-
              matographic apparatuses, thanks to miniature neural im-
              plants and interfaces that stimulate the brain directly, will
              be able to bypass the sensorium, thus acting immediately
              on the neural networks:

Instead of trompe l’oeil, the next step might be trompe le cerveau
[...]. There would be perception without the senses, seeing without
the eyes. [...] Advances in neurophysiology and cognitive science
give rise to the hope that future engineers will succeed in imple-
menting these discoveries in neuronal and molecular machines that
      2 H. Putnam, “Brains in a vat,” in Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge
      University Press, 1981): 1-21, 6.

PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING                 5                                        AN-ICON
transform the technology of simulation to deceive the eye into a
technology of stimulation that in turn deceives the brain.3
                            One is certainly free to disbelieve such proph-
              ecies and exercise healthy scepticism. And yet, given the
              unprecedented rapid pace of technological innovation, one
              cannot help but recall Louis Marin’s argument that every
              representation, in order to present itself “in its function,
              its functioning, and, indeed, its functionality” as represen-
              tation, must include a frame that keeps the image-world
              clearly separated from the real world: “The more ‘mimetic’
              transparency is manifested seductively, [...] the less the
              mechanisms are noticed, the less they are acknowledged.”4
                            The dream, or perhaps nightmare, of a medium
              achieving absolute transparency and of a user experiencing
              total immersion has yet to come true, and it will perhaps
              never do so. However, it is (certainly not only, but neverthe-
              less in a particularly powerful way) the new advancements
              in the field of simulation, illusion, and immersion that have
              contributed powerfully to determining the way we think
              about today’s media landscape. The evolution of technolog-
              ical equipment goes hand in hand with the evolution of the
              techno-cultural – which also means political – dispositif that
              supports and even guides them. One need only consider
              the way in which virtual reality is nowadays hailed as the
              last medium, capable of immersing the user in someone
              else’s shoes, teleporting her to some other place, making
              her feel as if she were really “there.”




      3 P. Weibel, “The intelligent image: neurocinema or quantum cinema?,” in J. Shaw, P. Weibel,
      eds., Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film (Cambridge MA-London: The MIT
      Press, 2003): 594-601, 599.
      4 L. Marin, “The frame of representation and some of its figures” (1988), trans. C. Porter, in
      On Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001): 352-372, 353.

PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING                   6                                          AN-ICON
                                Being there: debunking the rhetoric

                            Such “being there” has become the catch-
               phrase of virtual technologies, and it often goes along with
               an over-romanticization of the idea of immersion, according
               to which immersive environments would grant the experi-
               encer a perfect illusion by making the medium disappear.
               This would differentiate the new forms of illusion from tra-
               ditional trompe l’œil:

The concepts of trompe l’œil or illusionism aim to utilize represen-
tations that appear faithful to real impressions, the pretense that
two-dimensional surfaces are three-dimensional. The decisive
factor in trompe l’œil, however, is that the deception is always
recognizable; in most cases, because the medium is at odds with
what is depicted and this is realized by the observer in seconds,
or even fractions of seconds. This moment of aesthetic pleasure,
of aware and conscious recognition, where perhaps the process
of deception is a challenge to the connoisseur, differs from the
concept of the virtual and its historic precursors, which are geared
to unconscious deception.5
                           The concept of a virtual reality that could re-
               place the realm of physical existence has been criticized for
               resting upon an idealization of total immersion that would
               lead to an illegitimate equation of illusion with delusional
               hallucination. In particular, the assumption of a pictorial
               environment so hermetically sealed off from anything ex-
               traneous to the picture that the observer (or rather the ex-
               periencer) feels completely submerged in it is highly prob-
               lematic. Leading scholars in game studies such as Katie
               Salen and Eric Zimmerman have labelled this assumption
              “the immersive fallacy,” polemically referring to the idea that

       5 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge MA-London: The MIT Press,
       2003): 15-16.

PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING                  7                                        AN-ICON
               the ability of a media experience to sensually transport the
               participant into an illusory reality could reach a point where
              “the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that
               he or she is part of an imaginary world.”6 Emblematically
               expressed in the concept of the holodeck (a fictional tech-
               nology that made its first appearance in Star Trek: The Next
               Generation and consists in a holographic room where a
               simulation including sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste
               is indistinguishable from physical reality), the immersive
               fallacy encourages people to buy into new forms of magical
               thinking and overlook that virtual reality is but “a medium of
               representation that the brain will process in its appropriate
               cultural context, just as it has learned to process speech,
               writing, photography, or moving images.”7
                             Such warnings against a cyberpunk-flavoured
               idea of immersion point towards a different interpretation.
               As is made evident by the etymological presence of ludus
               in the Latin word inlusio, “illusion” originally refers to a
               lusory attitude. Being elicited by the perception of physi-
               cal representational artefacts, texts, or performances, the
               aesthetic illusion is to be distinguished from both halluci-
               nations and dreams. Moreover, it differs from delusions in
               that it is neither a conceptual nor a perceptual error, but a
               complex phenomenon characterized by “an asymmetrical
               ambivalence”8 that results from its positioning halfway be-
               tween the two poles of rational distance (i.e., disinterested
              “observation” of an artefact in its fictional nature) and im-
               mersion (or in Kendall Walton’s words, “participation”9) in
               the represented world:


      6 K. Salen, E. Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge MA-
      London: The MIT Press, 2004): 451.
      7 J. H. Murray, “Virtual/reality: how to tell the difference,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1
      (2020): 11-27, 20.
      8 W. Wolf, “Illusion (aesthetic),” in P. Hühn et al. (eds.), Handbook of Narratology (Berlin-New
      York: de Gruyter, 2009): 144-160, 144.
      9 K.L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts
      (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990): 240-289.

PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING                     8                                            AN-ICON
When we play a game, we feel engaged and engrossed, and play
seems to take on its own “reality.” This is all certainly true. But the
way that a game achieves these effects does not happen in the
manner the immersive fallacy implies. A game player does become
engrossed in the game, yes. But it is an engagement that occurs
through play itself. As we know, play is a process of metacommu-
nication, a double-consciousness in which the player is well aware
of the artificiality of the play situation.10

                             Contrary to David Hume’s conviction that all
               illusions should be given up to the flames,11 the contempo-
               rary immersive media and apparatuses make it necessary
               to disentangle the word “illusion” from its negative con-
               notation as “deception.” From this perspective, an illusion
               is about something that is present but not real: it marks
               the presence of something while at the same time making
               it appear as “unreal.” The key term for describing this di-
               chotomic phenomenon is conflict – a term that in image
               theory goes back to Hippolyte Taine and Edmund Husserl.12
               Every perception rests upon the awareness of being there
               and being present, but only image perception implies a
               self-relativisation of real presence: the perception of every
               image generates artificial presence. For what is visible in
               the picture – one may call it, using Husserl’s vocabulary,
              “picture object,” or in more analytical tradition “content” or
              “representation” – is relativised in its character of presence
               by a conflict (Widerstreit). This happens in two different
               ways: in the case of traditional images through the visibility
               of the grounding materiality of the image, the visibility of
               the real environment and, last but not least, through the


       10 K. Salen, E. Zimmerman, Rules of Play: 51
       11 D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), sect. 12, pt. 3. (Mineola,
       N.Y.: Dover 2004): 107.
       12 On this, see L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence. Philosophical Studies in Image Theory (2005),
       trans. N.F. Schott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010): p. 53.

PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING                    9                                          AN-ICON
              visible frame. These forms of perceptible conflicts tend to
              disappear when an image expands into its surroundings,
              thus becoming an artificial “environment.” Yet even in the
              case of simulations and hyperrealistic worlds, the condition
              for speaking of images at all is that here, too, there must
              be an experience of conflict. That is the point: in the case
              of immersive environments, the conflict is (or, if we are re-
              alistic, should be) given through the knowledge of being in
              a simulation. The knowledge that something experienced
              is “not real” creates image-generating conflicts, just as
              traditionally the frame did. This is grasped when it is said:
              images produce artificial presence.
                            This calls up numerous questions that the pres-
              ent issue of the AN-ICON journal aims to address: how is
              such a conflict between knowledge and perception to be
              explained, and is it to be regarded as a new form of aes-
              thetic illusion?13 On the one hand, it is necessary to distin-
              guish the conflict phenomena of the new forms of immer-
              sion formation empirically in their technology from those
              of traditional images. On the other hand, the various forms
              of seeing artificial presence must always be categorically
              differentiated and determined in their respective specificity.
              Is it a case of an unconscious illusion brought about by a
              false perception, or is it rather a matter of a lustful, playful
              attitude adopted in a special kind of illusory relationship?
              What is the difference between illusion, deception, and
              hallucination? How does an illusion become a delusion?
                            As if it were not complicated enough: the de-
              scription of a virtual environment faces the problem that
              it is a double form of illusion building. On one side, this is
              the mostly solely themed illusion that people in simulated
              and immersive virtual environments have a strong feeling
              of presence (place illusion) and react to what they perceive

      13 T. Koblížek, ed., The Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts (London: Bloomsbury,
      2017).

PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING                   10                                          AN-ICON
               as if it were real (plausibility illusion).14 In doing so, however,
               they are fully aware that they are not “really” there and that
               events are not “actually” taking place. Yet as relevant as this
               illusion is, the attention it receives should not induce us to
               overlook the fact that, on the other hand, there is a second
               form of illusion formation that is not present in the many
               precursors of immersive images (such as the stereoscope
               and the panorama). This illusion of hyperrealism does not
               just concern what is seen, but also the one who sees. It is
               the change in the way the viewers experience themselves in
               relation to the image: virtual reality has the power to make
               users and beholders feel like they own and control a body
               (body ownership illusion) that can look very different from
               their biological one. Here, illusions are created that do not
               affect what one sees but rather the one who sees some-
               thing. One might want to think about whether there were not
               already precursor experiences in this respect in watching
               films, but it is only in the experience of virtual realities that
               this phenomenon seems to take on a radicality that brings
               about new forms of transformation of self-representation
               and changes in our attitudes to ourselves or to other peo-
               ple, which can be seen, for example, when implicit racial
               and gender biases are changed – in the best case reduced
              – in the experience of immersive virtual realities, or health
               problems and mental disorders are alleviated.15
                              Against this background, the present issue of
               the AN-ICON journal poses equally technological, aesthet-
               ic and decidedly moral questions. What are the limits of
               virtual reality and the possibilities it offers for empathising

      14 M. Hofer et al., “The role of plausibility in the experience of spatial presence in
      virtual environments,” Frontiers in Virtual Reality 1, no. 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3389/
      frvir.2020.00002; M. Slater, “Place illusion and plausibility can lead to realistic behaviour in
      immersive virtual environments,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological
      Sciences 364, no. 1535 (2009): 3549-3557.
      15 T.C. Peck et al., “Putting yourself in the skin of a black avatar reduces implicit racial
      bias,” Consciousness and Cognition 22, no. 3 (2013): 779-787, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
      concog.2013.04.016; F. Scarpina et al., “The effect of a virtual-reality full-body illusion on
      body representation in obesity,” Journal of Clinical Medicine 8, no. 9 (2019), 1330, https://doi.
      org/10.3390/jcm8091330.

PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING                    11                                           AN-ICON
              with others and fostering virtuous and socially adaptive
              processes of imitation? How can we debunk the rhetoric
              (which has ethical, social, and political significance) behind
              the celebration of virtual reality as the “ultimate empathy
              machine?”16 The field of these questions becomes all the
              larger and more unmanageable when it is noted that the
              new forms of digital immersion education, while not nec-
              essary, are also usually associated with new forms of in-
              teraction education. This raises questions that are often
              psychological. Is interactivity necessary to create illusion?
              Does the multisensory quality of the interaction affect the
              overall effect of illusion? Considering that immersive virtu-
              al environments are often inhabited by users’ surrogates,
              do avatars, in their extensive phenomenology, enhance or
              diminish the degree of illusion? What is the relationship
              between illusion and the “style” of the image? Is hyperreal-
              ism an important element to enhance illusion or, as Gordon
              Calleja claims,17 only an element among many others?

                               The present issue

                           A first reflection on these topics is offered by
              Salvatore Tedesco in his essay “Imagination and Körper-
              zustand,” which provides a historical overview of how the
              concept of illusion was understood in the Eighteenth Cen-
              tury by Moses Mendelssohn. Through a critical examination
              of Johann Georg Sulzer’s analysis of the passage from the
              state of thinking [Nachdenken] to that of feeling [Empfinden],
              Mendelssohn elaborated further on the contrast between
              the state of the body and the faculty of knowledge – a
              contrast that led the German philosopher to define illusion
              not merely in terms of common deception, but rather as a

      16 C. Milk, “How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine,” TED conference,
      March 2015, https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_
      ultimate_empathy_machine.
      17 G. Calleja, In-Game. From Immersion to Incorporation (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2011).

PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING                 12                                         AN-ICON
               form of conscious illusion. This is made clear in the corre-
               spondence with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing on the nature
               of tragedy, where great emphasis is put on so-called “aes-
               thetic” or “poetic” illusion, considered as the instrument
               through which the dramatic poet is allowed to induce in
               the audience – contrary to what Aristotle and his modern
               followers maintained – even the most violent feelings, on
               condition that the reader or viewer is under the aesthetic
               effect of the illusion. The latter is characterized by a pecu-
               liar mismatch between sensitivity and the higher cognitive
               faculties: regardless of how deeply immersed one may be
               in sensory experiences, one still retains awareness of be-
               ing confronted with a virtual, fictional world. Precisely this
               contrast harmonization is the hallmark of aesthetic expe-
               rience as such.
                             The anthropological relevance of aesthetic illu-
               sion can be grasped by describing it in terms of play, and
               more specifically pretend play. By referring to both clas-
               sical and contemporary studies on play and playfulness
               by scholars from many diverse scientific fields (including
               among others Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Roger Caillois,
               Donald Winnicott, Lev Vygotskij, Gregory Bateson, Brian
               Sutton-Smith and William Corsaro), Anna Bondioli’s article
               offers a reading of illusion as a non-imitative form of play.
               Far from limiting themselves to reproducing the activities
               that adults undertake in the surrounding world, children
               distort reality in a creative way by performing actions that
               differ from those already seen and known. Children collect
               elements of the external world and use them in an inter-sub-
               jective process of co-construction of meanings in order to
               open up new possible worlds, without hallucinating: they
               know for sure that “this is play.”18 From this perspective, the
               semantic field of illusion shifts from the negative meaning
               of pretence as lying, mocking, or simulating, to the positive

      18   G. Bateson, The Message “This Is Play” (Princeton: Josia Macy Jr. Foundation, 1956).

PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING                  13                                         AN-ICON
              notion of pretending meant as a poietic activity of model-
              ling, building, and giving form. In play, the two cognitive
              frames – “this is the real world” and “this is the fictional
              world” – are not to be conceived as completely separate.
              Players move on the threshold between physical reality
              and the peculiar (un)reality of fiction. Play isn’t real – it is,
              indeed, “pretend” – but this does not mean it is false. If it
              were (that is, if it lost the link with the meanings that objects,
              actions, and events represented during the playful activity
              denote in the “real” context), it would lose its significance.
              Yet this is not the case: play (similar in this respect to the
              poietic use of language in the creation of metaphors) allows
              the participants to put together things that do not belong
              to the same category, thereby opening up the possibility
              to generate new references and meanings that go beyond
              the logical contrast between the “real” and the “imaginary,”
              between the “true” and the “possible,” between “believing”
              and “not believing.”
                            The ambiguity surrounding the notion of illusion
              has been made all the more evident by the theoretical re-
              flection on the nature and power of contemporary images.
              Vilém Flusser’s thought, which is the subject of Francesco
              Restuccia’s essay, provides an emblematic example. Illusion
              is first described as a form of deception, with dangerous
              and deplorable effects. This is especially true when tech-
              nical media – starting from photography – are employed
              in a way that aims to conceal their nature as artefacts.
              In this sense, the most illusionary images are those that
              appear transparent and present themselves as objective
              reality, thus bringing about a new form of “idolatry” or “hal-
              lucination:” “Instead of representing [vorstellen] the world,
              they obscure [verstellen] it.”19 This dangerous reversal of
              imagination happens when we do not recognize a medium,

      19 V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), trans. A. Mathews (London:
      Reaktion Books, 2000): 10.

PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING                 14                                       AN-ICON
              especially a visual one, as such. In this sense, technical
              images are the most deceiving, because their mechanical,
              automatic production seems to grant a “noninterventionist
              objectivity”20 freed from human and cultural interference.
              But this objectivity is deceptive, because technology is
              a human product, therefore always culturally biased. In
              Flusser’s work, however, a second interpretation of illusion
              is given that unveils its possible use as a precious artistic
              and epistemic tool. In Filmerzeugung und Filmverbrauch,
              the notion is introduced to understand the filmic experience
              as a modern version of Plato’s cave. While sitting in the dark
              space of the movie theatre, people ignore the world outside
              the “cave.” They do so not because they are deceived by
              the moving images projected on the screen in front of them.
              On the contrary, they choose to abandon themselves to the
              fascination of the medium. They do not want to be freed
              from the enchantment: their illusion is voluntary, self-im-
              posed, like a specific form of fiction or make-believe play.
              When illusion is conceived in a positive way as a practice of
              sense-making, Flusser replaces the German term täuschen
              (“to deceive”) with vortäuschen (to simulate, to feign). In this
              sense, simulation is not about producing a copy [Abbild],
              it is about shaping a model [Vorbild]. Technical media can
              allow for a new, “experimental” approach to image making:
              one inserts a certain input, sees what the outcome is, and
              then changes the input so as to achieve a different result.
              According to Flusser, this is the greatest potentiality of vir-
              tual simulations: they allow us to experience what until now
              we were only able to calculate; and vice versa, they allow
              us to calculate and control experiences that until now we
              could only vaguely imagine.
                           The peculiar experience that contemporary vir-
              tual environments grant access to lies at the core of Fran-
              cesco Zucconi’s essay, which follows an anachronistic path

      20   L. Daston, P. Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING                  15                             AN-ICON
              through art history and theory by taking some of Caravag-
              gio’s paintings as an anticipation of the invention of gyro-
              scope technology that made possible the first immersive
              experience in the history of Western painting. Building on
              Frank Stella’s interpretation of the Italian master’s “realistic
              illusionism”21 and reformulating Michael Fried’s concepts
              of “absorption” and “theatricality”22 through the categories
              of “immersion” and “specularity,” Zucconi focuses on the
              double effect of attraction and distancing as the funda-
              mental structure of the experience of virtual reality cinema.
              On the one side, as I put on a VR headset, I find myself
             “teleported” to the simulated environment: I feel “there.”23
              On the other side, there is always something that reminds
              me that I am just inhabiting a digital milieu: a bodily, cog-
              nitive, and affective frame brings me back to the “here” of
              physical reality. Such experience of bilocation24 is most
              often conceived of as a negative aspect of even the most
              sophisticated (and expensive) immersive apparatuses cur-
              rently on the market – a limitation that, according to many
              techno-deterministic enthusiasts, will be overcome in some
              unspecified future, when total immersion will be eventually
              achieved. Arguing against this view, Zucconi maintains that
              such ambivalent and even paradoxical coexistence of at-
              traction and distancing should be better understood as an
              intrinsic quality of cinematic virtual reality experiences as
              such. This medium-specific trait, in turn, can help debunk
              the bombastic rhetoric that hails virtual reality as the “ul-
              timate empathy machine” capable of making the user not
              only understand but also directly experience someone’s

      21 F. Stella, Working Space (Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 1986): 11.
      22 M. Fried, Theatricality and Absorption: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot
      (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
      23 See among others M. Lombard et al., Immersed in Media. Telepresence Theory,
      Measurement & Technology (Cham: Springer, 2015); M. Lombard, Th. Ditton, “At the heart of it
      all. The concept of presence,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3, no. 2 (1997),
      https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997.tb00072.x.
      24 A. Pinotti, “Staying here, being there. Bilocation, empathy and self-empathy in virtual
      reality,” Bollettino Filosofico 37 (2022): 142-162, https://doi.org/10.6093/1593-7178/9657

PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING                 16                                         AN-ICON
             other pain and worries. Through reference to Susan Son-
             tag’s critical theory of photography, Zucconi challenges
             the simplistic use of notions such as those of “empathy,”
            “compassion,” and “immersion” which accompanies the
             launch of many virtual reality projects, holding instead that
             the (alleged) absolute transparency of the medium is not
             only unattainable but not even desirable. From this perspec-
             tive, the co-presence of illusionistic and counter-illusionistic
             effects is not to be interpreted as a weakening of the expe-
             riential and testimonial value of immersive experiences. On
             the contrary, it paves the way to a conscious ethical and
             political approach to virtual reality, according to which the
             most interesting aspect of such technology is precisely its
             capacity to produce both identification and estrangement,
             thus making viewers feel at the razor’s edge between pres-
             ence and absence, between “here” and “there,” between
             empathizing with others and being aware that we can never
             truly walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.
                           If virtual reality as it exists today struggles to
             make us experience things from the perspective of another
             human being, can it allow us to feel what it is like to be a
             non-human creature? Philippe Bédard’s article tackles this
             question by critically examining the fundamental anthropo-
             centrism of virtual reality’s dominant mode of experience.
             Designed as it is around a technological apparatus such
             as the head-mounted display, which is tuned to the human
             sensorium, and more in particular, to the subjective qualities
             of human vision (its binocularity, its “egocentric” perspec-
             tive, and the individuals’ ability to move their point of view
             through six degrees of freedom of movement along three
             dimensions), the medium of virtual reality is also intrinsically
             anthropocentric. This, in turn, seems to rule out from the
             outset the possibility of bypassing our perceptual habi-
             tus by using immersive virtual environments as a tool for

PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING        17                              AN-ICON
              exploring and understanding how non-human (or post-hu-
              man) beings exist in, and make sense of, a version of the
              world that is completely different from ours: as Ian Bogost
              puts it, “when we ask what it means to be something, we
              pose a question that exceeds our own grasp of the being
              of the world.”25 This does not mean, however, that virtual
              reality cannot help us imagine what the world might look
              like to a different being. In Bédard’s essay, nonnormative,
              artistic uses of immersive technologies are described that
              encourage the user to imaginatively explore what the Um-
              welt of a mosquito, dragonfly, or even a tree might appear.
              Particular attention is paid to the fact that the induction
              of illusory ownership of, and agency over, a virtual body
              does not require a fake, hyperrealistic appearance of the
              avatar; factors like first-person perspective, sensorimotor
              coherence, multisensory feedback, and the possibility to
              interact with the virtual environment play a much greater
              role.26 This opens the door to artistic experimentation with
              bodies that do not have human (visual) appearance. The
              illusory ownership over implausible digital bodies makes
              it possible for virtual reality artists to produce immersive
              experiences that facilitate the users’ (temporary) engage-
              ment in a foray into non-human worlds, notwithstanding
              the fact that they remain perfectly aware of the impossi-
              bility to perceive the environment differently from what our
              sensorium gives access to.
                            The idea that analogue and digital immersive
              devices could be used to expand our sensory knowledge is
              key for their commercial success. As Marcin Sobieszczans-
              ki shows, marketing strategies that pass off virtual reality
              as the perfect machine to make dreams come true are
              common. After being applied to cinema, such “oneiric”

      25 I. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University
      of Minnesota Press, 2012): 30.
      26 M. Slater et al., “Inducing illusory ownership of a virtual body,” Frontiers in Neuroscience
      3, no. 2 (2009): 214-220, https://doi.org/10.3389/neuro.01.029.2009.

PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING                   18                                           AN-ICON
              interpretation now tends to assimilate the immersive expe-
              rience granted by increasingly sophisticated head-mounted
              displays to hallucinatory phenomena.27 By sketching out a
              history of some classical theories that have drawn a com-
              parison between dreams and the “unreal” dimension of
              the image, Sobieszczanski concentrates on the scientific
              debate around the nature of illusory phenomena in order
              to disclose the heuristic potential of the metaphor of vir-
              tual reality as hallucination. Highlighting both similarities
              and dissimilarities between the cognitive mechanisms un-
              derlying perception (or perception failure) in hallucinatory
              states and perception in immersive environments provides
              an interesting intellectual tool to make a cultural practice
              evident that is deeply rooted in the human understanding
              of image-making as the attempt to cross the boundaries
              that keep the physical world separated from the pictorial
              world.
                           One of the biggest challenges this attempt must
              face is providing, within the virtual environment, multisen-
              sory and synaesthetic experiences comparable to those of
              everyday life. Traditionally, so-called distal senses (vision
              and hearing) have often been considered more suitable
              than proximal senses (touch, taste, and smell) to experi-
              ence images, due to the assumption that genuine aesthetic
              experience would necessarily imply distance and disinter-
              estedness. Yet the new digital and immersive mediascape
              calls for going beyond a merely visual or audio-visual way
              of experiencing the image: when pictures turn into environ-
              ments, a reorganization of the whole sensory experience
              is required. Valentina Bartalesi and Anna Calise’s contribu-
              tion deals with this issue by examining the current struggle
              to include haptic technologies within immersive projects
              developed by different cultural institutions. Indeed, touch

      27 On this, see G. Grossi, La notte dei simulacri. Sogno, cinema, realtà virtuale (Milan: Johan
      & Levi, 2021).

PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING                   19                                          AN-ICON
             seems to resist virtualisation: being the sense that, histor-
             ically and theoretically, has carried the burden of proof on
            “true reality,” it appears a priori unsuited for illusory environ-
             ments. Proof of this would be that, while haptic technolo-
             gies are certainly useful to allow users to “touch” – if only
             virtually – precious artefacts that could not otherwise be
             touched, they nevertheless present both a qualitative and
             quantitative deficit compared to the human haptic sensitiv-
             ity in physical reality: the illusion of touch would be in fact
             better described as an illusionary touch. However, haptic
             technologies do not need to be designed to mimic the
             original functions of touch. Rather than merely attempting
             to make them replicate the touching experience, program-
             mers and developers can exploit their illusory potential in
             non-hyperrealistic ways, focussing on the power of haptics
             to elicit emotions. By reviewing some recent case studies,
             Bartalesi and Calise show how haptic technologies can
             enrich our cultural and aesthetic experience of artefacts,
             offering medium-specific opportunities that neither physical
             objects nor printed replicas – no matter how accurate they
             may be – could elicit.
                           The blurring of the threshold between physi-
             cal reality and virtual reality is also at the centre of Yizeng
             Zhang’s essay, where the case study of digital fashion is
             investigated in its function of giving birth to a completely
             new form of materiality. While creating their clothes, fashion
             designers have been limited so far by the available fabrics
             (and their price), the manufacturing technologies at their
             disposal, and, of course, the laws of physics. The so-called
             metaverse is in this respect a game changer. Using virtual
             avatars and models to sell clothing and accessories made
             of code instead of cotton or wool, designers are free to
             imagine any type of garment or fabric and to “manufacture”
             products never seen before. Given that our everyday lives
             have moved online so much that a new term “phygital” was

PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING        20                               AN-ICON
             coined to indicate the increasing blending of digital experi-
             ences with physical ones, it is a safe bet that digital fashion
             will become a vital category for every brand’s business
             model, being more and more sold as NFTs, showcased on
             virtual catwalks and in virtual showrooms, or worn by both
             physical and virtual influencers on social networks. Under
             the auspices of Gernot Böhme’s philosophy, Zhang takes
             on the notion of atmosphere to reflect on the “stage values”
             of digital fashion, that is, on its ability to emancipate from
             the material function of garments and to produce new forms
             of self-presentation. Digital garments are thus intended
             as experiences whose value arises from the atmosphere
             they are able to generate. By tracing such atmospheric
             production across three sites of its exhibition (the e-com-
             merce website, social media, and the runway show), Zhang
             shows how digital fashion contributes to the construction
             of a new kind of affective milieu. If the generation of such
             atmospheres can be said to be just an illusion or, rather, if
             the illusion itself can be conceived of as providing access
             to a new reality, is a question that fits well into the thematic
             section of this issue of the AN-ICON journal.




PIETRO CONTE, LAMBERT WIESING        21                              AN-ICON
AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON.
The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan.



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