10.54103/ai/19773
In contemporary understanding, a now normalized immersion continues to be associated with digitality and high-tech apparatuses, but is also seen as diffused into the lifeworld. Against this backdrop, the article focuses on two current artworks that extend the internal environmentality inherent in VR as a spatialized image into physical space by using strategies from installation and site-related art. These examples provide for an equation and nesting of work, environment and exhibition that is interpreted here as a potentiated environmentalization. The artistic VR-environments by no means negate their rootedness in imagery, but rather self-reflexively reveal the transitions between image and three-dimensionality, what gives them a special epistemic valence. It thus seems worthwhile to relate them to considerations of knowledge objects and exhibitions, but also to (queer) phenomenological theories of entanglement and becoming originating from the following of lines. Meanwhile, the epistemic value of their latent objects, disoriented paths, and impossible spaces is only revealed in the interaction with and embodied experience of the virtual space. The article thus participates in debates on how bodily immersion does not exclude, but enables action and reflection within aesthetic experience. With regard to two fundamental paradigms of immersion, it can show how, for this purpose, the artworks turn anew the strategies of de-distancing and de-differentiation.
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19773
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Annette Urban
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
De-distancing/de-differentiation
Mutual Transformations : Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitions
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon
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Thematic Section
2023-12-28
2023-01-27
2023-12-28
2024-02-07
AN-ICON
Annette Urban
2023/12/28
10.54103/ai/19773
Ruhr University Bochum
2785-7433
I
De-distancing/de-differentiation
en
Voss, C., “Das Museum als Medium der Kunst” in G.W. Bertram, S. Deines, D. M. Feige, eds. Die Kunst und die Künste: Ein Kompendium zur Kunsttheorie der Gegenwart (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021): 464-483.
Mutual Transformations : Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments and Exhibitions
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/download/19773/20025
2
             Mutual
             Transformations:
Unstable Relations between
VR-Works, Environments
and Exhibitio
by Annette Urban
         VR-art
                ns
                   Environmental immersion
                   Epistemic
                   Objects installation art
                   De-distancing/de-differentiation




                     Issue №1                Year 2023
                     → Immersions and Dives: From
                     the Environment to Virtual Reality
                     Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina,
                     Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello
Mutual Transformations:
Unstable Relations between
VR-Works, Environments
and Exhibitions
ANNETTE URBAN, Ruhr-Universität Bochum – https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19773

Abstract                     In contemporary understanding, a now normal-
                ized immersion continues to be associated with digitality
                and high-tech apparatuses, but is also seen as diffused into
                the lifeworld. Against this backdrop, the article focuses on
                two current artworks that extend the internal environmen-
                tality inherent in VR as a spatialized image into physical
                space by using strategies from installation and site-related
                art. These examples provide for an equation and nesting of
                work, environment and exhibition that is interpreted here as
                a potentiated environmentalization. The artistic VR-environ-
                ments by no means negate their rootedness in imagery, but
                rather self-reflexively reveal the transitions between image
                and three-dimensionality, what gives them a special epis-
                temic valence. It thus seems worthwhile to relate them to
                considerations of knowledge objects and exhibitions, but
                also to (queer) phenomenological theories of entanglement
                and becoming originating from the following of lines.




ANNETTE URBAN                                  112                           AN-ICON
                               Meanwhile, the epistemic value of their latent
                 objects, disoriented paths, and impossible spaces is only
                 revealed in the interaction with and embodied experience
                 of the virtual space. The article thus participates in debates
                 on how bodily immersion does not exclude, but enables
                 action and reflection within aesthetic experience. With re-
                 gard to two fundamental paradigms of immersion, it can
                 show how, for this purpose, the artworks turn anew the
                 strategies of de-distancing and de-differentiation.




Keywords         VR-art                Environmental immersion                           Epistemic
                 Objects installation art               De-distancing/de-differentiation
To quote this essay: A. Urban, “Mutual Transformations: Unstable Relations between VR-Works, Environments
and Exhibitions,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 112-138,
https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19773.

ANNETTE URBAN                                     113                                          AN-ICON
                                 De-Distancing and De-Differentiation:
                                 Contemporary Aesthetics of Immersion

                           Immersion is again attracting much attention.
              Film and media studies, art history, image sciences and
              narratology have all long participated in its theorization.
              More recently, theatre, performance and game studies,
              architectural theory and the history of knowledge1 have
              joined in, taking into account a whole range of everyday
              digital technologies and thus deferring questions of image
              aesthetics and image technology in favor of investigating
              body/media/environment relationships. Whereas some the-
              oretical contributions highlight the immersive aspects of a
              specific medium, there is also a broad tendency to deal
              with immersion as a prime symptom of today’s image cul-
              tures and media ecologies what is evidenced by collective
              terms such as immersive media,2 environmental images and
              iconoscapes. To speak more generally of immersive media
              deliberately goes beyond media-technical foundations of
              the concept by arguing with transmedial relevant opera-
              tions. These are already rooted in narratology, where the
              opening up and simultaneous closing of a fictional world
              is accomplished cognitively-mentally: Perceptual immer-
              sion is therefore seen to be necessarily complemented by
              imaginative immersion,3 which only ensures that the sen-
              sory stimuli of a medium are translated into a virtual world.4
              After the debate has been strongly linked to Virtual Reality
              since the 1990s, immersion continues to be considered
              under the premises of digital technologies, but at the same
              time is also discussed as nowadays’ conditio humana and
              condition of daily life. Lars C. Grabbe has proposed a new

      1 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: Zu einer Wissensgeschichte der Immersion
      (Baden Baden: Nomos, 2019). For Kasprowicz, the immersion concept can be retrieved from
      the “maelstrom of negative connotations as illusion and absorption” by being understood as
      a “media anthropological practice of de- and re-differentiation of the body [Körper und Leib] in
      mediatized environments.” Ibid.: 14.
      2 Cfr., among others, the Yearbook of Immersive Media 2011-2017, ed. by Institute for
      Immersive Media at Kiel University of Applied Sciences.
      3 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: 18, with reference to Marie-Laure Ryan.
      4 Cfr. T. Hochscherf, H. Kjär, P. Rupert-Kruse, “Phänomene und Medien der Immersion,” in
      Jahrbuch immersiver Medien 3 (2011): 9-19, 14, with reference to Matthew Lombard/Theresa
      Ditton.

ANNETTE URBAN                                  114                                           AN-ICON
              cultural-theoretical figure of the homo immergens which he
              considers to be the equivalent of a culture of media hybrids:
              In succession or better combination of the human capaci-
              ties for symbol formation and image production, the homo
              immergens has become the creator of its own “multimodal
              and simulative environments”5 whereby the distance to
              the medial artifact is reduced and a worldly experience is
              generated.
                           Thus, recent insights of immersion research
              owe much to theorizing across media, on the basis of me-
              dia hybridity, as well as to inputs from other branches of
              scholarship. Within these multi-faceted approaches two key
              features emerge that I propose to summarize as a reduction
              of distance responsible for felt presence and as a reduction
              of difference. These two aspects cover both, the particular
              attitude of reception, which has been characterized as a
              way of submerging, of mental absorption, and bodily-emo-
              tional involvement, as well as the various forms of transfor-
              mative exchange or even assimilation that occur between
              the recipient and the object of contemplation – to put it in
              the classical dichotomy of aesthetic experience. Mean-
              while, the principles of de-distancing and de-differentiation
              unfold in numerous ways. They involve more-than-visual,
              bodily modes of experience, that can be interpreted as a
              re-centering of the world and the subject, but also as new
              forms of empathy and encounter. The latter may culminate
              in ideas of matter-flow inspired by Deleuze/Guattari and
              of leaving behind all subject-object dichotomies, which
              some suppose to be still at work in the quasi-objects of the
              philosophy of science.6 Or they remain – as with Grabbe’s
              term of representational convergence referring to the con-
              vergence of exterior and mental representations7 – closer
              to the realm of images whose unframing gives the beholder

      5 L. C. Grabbe, “Homo Immergens: Immersion as a Parameter for a Media and Cultural
      Theory of Medial Hybridity,” in J. Bracker, A. Hubrich, eds., The Art of Reception (Newcastle:
      Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021): 400-422, 400.
      6 Cfr. T. Ingold, “Drawing Together: Materials, Gestures, Lines,” in T. Otto, N. Bubandt, eds.,
      Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology (Chichester: Wiley-
      Blackwell, 2010): 299-313, 304-305.
      7 Cfr. L. C. Grabbe, “Homo Immergens:” 400.

ANNETTE URBAN                                  115                                         AN-ICON
              the feeling of being surrounded by them. This perspective
              on artificially spatialized images8 invites to focus on the
              transitions between images and illusionistic 3D-entities,
              and to a closer examination of the environmentalization
              inherent in it.
                            In the widely ramified discourse on environ-
              mentality, the art historical point of view still seems under-
              represented as far as the obvious link with the so-called
              Ausstieg aus dem Bild, with installation and site-related art is
              concerned. They equally mark a significant reference point
              for spatialization and meanwhile break down the status of
              art as distinct, object-like work. Instead, the art historical
              interrogation of environmentality has recently been deep-
              ened in reference back to screen media and the paradigm
              of projection: In her comprehensive study, Giuliana Bruno
              has illuminatingly interpreted the spatiality established by
              light projection in terms of materially transformative pro-
              cesses, transductive conversions of energy and the histo-
              ries of energetic environments. But while she emphasizes
              the ambulatory “non-linear movement in forms of trans-
              duction”9 and explicitly investigates inhabitable spaces of
              immersion, with her focus on the act of projection, however,
              environmentality remains tied back to a transitive gesture
              of transmission and transport.10 In a broader disciplinary
              context, its exploration ranges from the new non-visual
              environments established by sensor technologies, from
              biologically, autopoietically or systems-theoretically con-
              ceptualized relations between an organism/a system and
              its Umwelt, to the environmental concerns of new material-
              ism, anthropology and queer phenomenology, rewriting the
              Heideggerian irreducible world reference of the embodied
              self. Sara Ahmed’s approach is of particular interest here
              because it takes up the “bodily inhabitance of […] space”11

      8 Cfr. J. Schröter, “Die Ästhetik der virtuellen Welt: Überlegungen mit Niklas Luhmann und
      Jeffrey Shaw,” in M. Bogen, R. Kuck, J. Schröter, eds., Virtuelle Welten als Basistechnologie für
      Kunst und Kultur? Eine Bestandsaufnahme (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2015): 25-36.
      9 G. Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (Chicago-
      London: Chicago University Press, 2021): 109. See also ibid.: 111-112.
      10 Ibid.: 2.
      11 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University
      Press, 2006): 6.

ANNETTE URBAN                                   116                                          AN-ICON
              as a basic parameter of orientation, but in doing so opens
              up Heidegger’s familiarity with the world to other directions
              and objects that were not always already at hand. Similarly,
              in Tim Ingold’s anthropology, “joining with the togetherings
              of life”12 as drawn lines serves a better understanding of the
              particular environmentality of the lifeworld. In the following, I
              propose to combine art historical thinking about site-related
              installation aesthetics with phenomenological and episte-
              mological perspectives. They promise an understanding
              of bodily extension into space as an orientedness towards
              objects as well as towards others and simultaneously take
              account of an unstable objecthood. This offers an alterna-
              tive way out of problematic dualistic premises that so far
              often separate art historical genealogies of immersion and
              debates on aesthetic experience from knowledge-historical
              considerations that see subject-object dichotomies under-
              mined precisely by immersed bodies and their negotiation
              of environmental relations.13
                             As I want to show by analyzing two examples
              by Theodoulos Polyviou and Rosa Menkman, the de-differ-
              entiation between the work, its spatial surroundings and, by
              consequence, the exhibition display, is in particular rene-
              gotiated in recent VR-art. Its often closed imaginary worlds
              do not only present themselves as spatialized images, but
              simultaneously as an assemblage of things in space that
              reinforce the connection to installation art and display is-
              sues. As Christiane Paul remarked in 2003, VR does not
              only allow for the “full […] immers[ion of] its users in a
              three-dimensional world generated by a computer” but also
              for “an interaction with the virtual objects that comprise
              that world.”14 While the immersive environment thus means
              the withdrawal of the artwork as a singular (pictorial) object
              and counterpart of aesthetic experience, it simultaneously
              results in a multiplication of spatially arranged objects to
              which the visitor relates in an interactive, cognitive and – we
              might add – environmental or even (life) worldly way. This

      12 T. Ingold, “Drawing together:” 303. See also ibid.: 301-304.
      13 Cfr. D. Kasprowicz, Der Körper auf Tauchstation: 22, 24, 30.
      14 C. Paul, Digital Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003): 125.

ANNETTE URBAN                                117                        AN-ICON
              ultimately leads to a multiplied nesting of work, environ-
              ment and exhibition whose institutional and infrastructural
              conditions I will briefly consider at the end.

                                Normalized Immersion and the Epistemics
                                of Virtual Objects and Spatialities

                           The recent VR-artworks of Polyviou and Menk-
              man have been chosen for this study because, to some
              extent, they reinvest in immersive high-tech media arrange-
              ments similar to those of the 1990s and early 2000s. Cy-
              prus-born artist Theodoulos Polyviou resorts to calculated
              3D environments that reproduce existing spaces with ar-
              chitectural precision and make them individually explorable
              via head-mounted display (HMD) as well as on the desktop.
              Dutch artist and theorist Rosa Menkman uses the online
              walk-through spaces of the newart.city.org platform to host
              a collection of im/possible images in a specially designed
              artificial environment. At the same time, the two artists
              share the impulse to re-embed the virtual into a physical
              environment. Polyviou works with an elaborate recalibration
              of the virtual to the physical exhibition space, and Menk-
              man reintegrates the interactive experience of the website
              into an exhibition design she creates, which in its own
              way restructures the physical space. This shared concern
              with relocalization hints at a contemporary understanding
              of immersion that does not privilege computer-generated
              simulated worlds. Doris Kolesch has summarized it as “an
              increasingly everyday interaction not only with digital media,
              but also and above all, with designed spaces and spaces
              of experience.”15 Indeed, this now normal immersive con-
              dition is also elaborated in terms of architectural and ur-
              ban spaces that are in negotiation with images.16 However,


      15 D. Kolesch, “Ästhetik der Immersion,” in G. W. Bertram, S. Deines, D. M. Feige, eds., Die
      Kunst und die Künste: Ein Kompendium zur Kunsttheorie der Gegenwart (Berlin: Suhrkamp,
      2021): 422-441, 422 [my translation].
      16 Cfr. L. Bieger, “Ästhetik der Immersion. Wenn Räume wollen. Immersives Erleben
      als Raumerleben,” in G. Lehnert, ed., Raum und Gefühl. Der Spatial Turn und die neue
      Emotionsforschung (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag 2011): 75-95.

ANNETTE URBAN                                  118                                         AN-ICON
              “immersion as factual state description,”17 may primarily
               end in a World without Us, as Inke Arns points out, where
               invisibly working smart technologies create non-delimited,
               post-visual environments. Does VR still play a significant
               part in such a ubiquitous immersion?
                             While on the one hand the selected artworks
               explore the “specific experience and mediality of the
               body-environment relationship”18 stressed by Kolesch, on
               the other hand, in unfolding a virtually walkable environ-
               ment, they do not deny their rootedness in imagery and
               even expose their latent objecthood. They engage with
               environmental aesthetics by presenting themselves as an
               environment withholding any designated artwork or as a
               mere framework for other images. With the unstable ref-
               erences of their elements, they fully play out the role of
               virtual as epistemic objects and combine representation
               with operability. This approaches all the more the genre of
               knowledge exhibitions, as they invest in VR’s capacities of
               getting the user “immersed in reflection,”19 to quote Katja
               Kwastek’s term for reconciling the (inter)action-based mode
               of digital art with the traditionally contemplative aesthetic
               experience. Early installation art such as Lucio Fontana’s
               Ambiente spaziale already shows how physical spaces with
               the help of mirroring and lightning effects combine immer-
               sion with ontological speculation. Within VR-art, the latter
               is stimulated by oscillations between image and three-di-
               mensionality. And it is intensified by virtual spatialities that
               similarily become a theoretical object of epistemic value,
               not only because of the heightened disorientation in spaces
               freed from physical regularity, but also as a result of more
               or less pure calculation. This affinity to abstraction mostly
               escapes the attention to hyperrealistic 3D-design and in-
               stead sometimes refers back to the sublime in art where
               natural phenomena fluidly transition into intangible abstract

      17 I. Arns, “Qualityland, oder: Der Immersion begegnen,” Jahrbuch für Kulturpolitik, 2017/18:
      Welt. Kultur. Politik - Kulturpolitik in Zeiten der Globalisierung: 211-220, 212 [my translation].
      18 D. Kolesch, “Ästhetik der Immersion:” 422.
      19 K. Kwastek, “Immersed in Reflection? The Aesthetic Experience of Interactive Media Art,”
      in B. Dogramaci, F. Liptay, eds., Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media (Leiden, Boston: Brill
      Rodopi, 2016): 66-85.

ANNETTE URBAN                                    119                                           AN-ICON
              emptiness. In 3D-environments, straight lines serve as ge-
              neric framework of spaces, which, through texturing and
              mapping, also directly emerge from images.
                           Of particular interest is whether this linear ab-
              stractness is at the same time getting practicable in the
              course of the (manual) navigation through Polyviou’s and
              Menkman’s synthetic environments, enabled by the HMD
              with its tracking systems and hand-held controllers and
              by the maneuvers on the keyboard in the desktop-based
              versions. This passing through as the prevalent mode of
              VR-experience20 can be further clarified by (queer-)phenom-
              enological concepts of inhabiting space by taking directions
              and following lines, especially non-geometric entangled
              lines, giving high value to disorientation and turning toward
              objects as Sara Ahmed states.21 Insofar that this includes
             “lining ourselves up with the features of the grounds we in-
              habit, the sky that surrounds us, or the imaginary lines that
              cut through maps,”22 it already assumes a connection be-
              tween physical, expressly natural and virtual spaces which
              extends up to technically-based environments. In a similar
              vein, Tim Ingold explicitly considers lines as basic element
              of immersion responsible for an embedding into the life-
              world. For him, coming to life results from being “immersed
              in those generative currents”23 such as wind, for example,
              which also alters the state of man-made tools and techni-
              cal objects transcending a purely transitive use. Thereby
              Ingold’s concept of lines gains a potential for change and
              implies passages between the actual and the virtual.24 With
              their help, he problematizes objects understood as “dis-
              crete, finished entities” which he judges as a mere obstacle
              for drawing and “designing environmental relations.”25 Lines,

      20 I use the terms VR-experience, VR-environments and VR-works as broad concepts also
      including desktop-based virtual environments which have an immersive character on their
      own.
      21 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: 1-2.
      22 Ibid.: 6.
      23 T. Ingold, “Drawing Together:” 305.
      24 Ingold’s repeated recourse to Deleuze/Guattari’s concept of the line of flight (ligne de fuite)
      remains beyond the scope of this article, but is worth following in M. De Landa, Intensive
      Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005).
      25 T. Ingold, M. Anusas, “Designing Environmental Relations: From Opacity to Textility,”
      Design Issues 29, no. 4 (2013): 58-69, 58.

ANNETTE URBAN                                   120                                            AN-ICON
              in contrast, as exemplified by the inseparable correlation of
              a river and its banks, are emblematic of correspondences
              and engender a different kind of thinking: “to correspond
              with [the waters] is to join this awareness with the flow.”26
              They privilege an intransitive mode of “joining with” rather
              than “joining of.”

                               Putting VR-Art on Exhibition

                            When contemporary art today is testing the
              potentials of VR as an artistic medium, its borrowings
              from installation art are not exclusively motivated by the
              pragmatics of exhibiting in art museums. Many artists use
              this necessity for initiating ontological speculations on the
              continuum between virtual reality and the shared here and
              now in the museum. They intertwine the setting up of the
              interior pictorial world with the installative anchoring of the
              VR-experience in the exhibition space, thus producing their
              own form of potentiated environmentality connected to
              quite different strands of installative and site-related art.
              Here, only a brief comparison can point to how, in Banz &
              Bowinkel’s work Mercury (2017) (Fig. 1) for example, the
              filigree pavilion architecture that creates a second artificial
              habitat high above Planet Earth in the VR, extends into a
              metallic display for the processor and the second screen
              in the exhibition. And to another German VR-artist, Flori-
              an Meisenberg who chooses an illusionistic backdrop, as
              known from photo and film studios, to illusionistically em-
              bed the gesticulating wearer of the HMD into the abstract
              grid landscape of Superstudio’s 70s planetary architectural
              utopia. In both examples, the environments also serve to
              house other artworks. But instead of activating the institu-
              tional or archival concerns of installation art, they extend
              the artificially generated, often fictionalized world within
              the VR into the exhibition context which is more in line
              with the staging of illusionistic worlds by means of props in

      26 T. Ingold, Knowing from the Inside: Correspondences, (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen,
      2017): 41.

ANNETTE URBAN                                121                                        AN-ICON
                  cinema and cinematographic installation art. The VR-works
                  by Polyviou and Menkman persue the reverse path and
                  thus tend to the originally anti-immersive institution-reflex-
                  ive branch: Their freely designable VR-worlds conversely
                  borrow from physical exhibition spaces and their conven-
                  tions of presenting items of cultural value which is worth
                  questioning as another symptom of immersive normality
                  and life worldly virtuality.27




Fig. 1a                                               Fig. 1b
                                        Fig. 1a and 1b. Banz & Bowinkel, Mercury, 2016. VR installation,
                  screen capture and installation shot, DAM Gallery, Berlin, 2017. Courtesy of the artists.

                                    Theodoulos Polyviou: Drifting, Browsing,
                                    Cruising (2021)

                               Besides the issues of art presentation in the
                  pandemic, that influenced both selected artworks, I ask
                  more generally about the role of environmental virtuality in
                  Polyviou’s and Menkman’s action-based and visual-spatial
                  strategies28 of getting the recipient immersed in their work
                  and thereupon re-perspectivize the question of institutional
                  embedding. The first striking feature of Drifting, Browsing,
                  Cruising created by Theodoulos Polyviou together with Eleni
                  Diana Elia at the Centre for Art and Media, ZKM at Karls-
                  ruhe/Germany, is certainly the ground plan true modeling of
                  a computer-generated world based on a specific location

          27 Cfr. S. Rieger, A. Schäfer, A. Tuschling, eds., Virtuelle Lebenswelten: Körper - Räume -
          Affekte (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2021).
          28 Kwastek stresses that the action-based experience not necessarily needs visual-spatial
          illusion (Cfr. “Immersed in Reflection?:” 69), but both aspects are closely united here.

ANNETTE URBAN                                      122                                          AN-ICON
              within the museum. In summer 2021, visitors wearing HMD
              moved in situ through this doubled environment (Fig. 2-3).
              Since then, the work can be visited as only desktop-based
              VR on the online exhibition site fantastic confabulations, that
              reuses the digital replica of the space for further exhibitions.
                            Contrary to enabling “spatiotemporal transpo-
              sition,” Polyviou uses VR for evoking a “hyper-awareness of
              the viewer as to where they are, and what they are doing.”29
              That’s why he is re-situating VR-technology by establishing
              site-related connections to architecturally and historical-
              ly distinct places. But how is this intended sense of pres-
              ence, which implies situatedness and agency, created in the
              site-specific VR-installation at the ZKM? In contrast to many
              other of his works,30 any direct citation of a third auratic place
              and its cultural heritage is missing here. Polyviou obviously
              aims at the recognizability of the original museum space in
              3D – the alignment of pillars typical of the former industrial
              building, the balustrade and the staircase leading to the open
              atrium as well as the glass partitions to the adjacent spaces
              are all faithfully reproduced. This makes the absence of the
              expected distinct artworks all the more noticeable. What one
              encounters inside, first of all appears as extensions of the
              serving architecture. The replicated pillars with spotlights
              are complemented by semicircular, half-height partitions as
              known from exhibition design. While these virtual supple-
              ments turn the clear cubic exhibition space into a cluttered
              and mysterious site, their freely curving floor plan lines re-
              appear as vinyl stripes on the ground of the physical space.




      29 Th. Polyviou in A. Urban, “Virtual Spaces for Transformative Encounters and Vast
      Reciprocity - An Interview with Theodoulos Polyviou and Jazmina Figueroa,” in L. Nolasco-
      Rózsás, ed., Beyond Matter, Within Space: Curatorial and Art Mediation Techniques on the
      Verge of Virtual Reality (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2023): 429-443, 432.
      30 See for example the installation Transmundane Economies (2022) at Künstlerhaus
      Bethanien in Berlin, with references to the ruins of the Bellapais monastery in the north of
      Cyprus.

ANNETTE URBAN                                  123                                          AN-ICON
Fig. 2a                                               Fig. 2c




Fig. 2b                                               Fig. 2d

      Fig. 2a, 2b, 2c and 2d T. Polyviou, Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, 2021. Site-specific VR installation,
      in cooperation with Eleni Diana Elia, installations shots and VR captures (details), ZKM, Karlsruhe
 2021. Courtesy of the artists. © Eleni Diana Elia and Theodoulos Polyviou © Center for Art and Media
Karlsruhe (ZKM), photo by Tanja Meissner. Produced in the framework of the Beyond Matter Residency
                                                                             Program at ZKM | Karlsruhe.


                                This interplay between paradoxical emptiness
                  and spatial density not only subverts the usual aesthetic
                  experience in art museums with its orientation towards
                  a singled-out art object. The directionality of the space
                  image as an action image, theorized by Stephan Günzel
                  in the context of gaming, where only objects centered in
                  the field of vision can become the object of action,31 also
                  remains unexploited. Instead, the environment privileges
                  spatial exploration and confronts with the paradox phys-
                  icality of its virtual architecture that, like the impermeable
                  built world, diverts the users’ bodies. Without any avatarial

          31 Cfr. S. Günzel, “Vor dem Affekt: die Aktion - Emotion und Raumbild,” in G. Lehnert, ed.,
          Raum und Gefühl: Der Spatial Turn und die neue Emotionsforschung (Bielefeld: transcript-
          Verlag, 2014): 63-74, 67-68.


ANNETTE URBAN                                      124                                           AN-ICON
              representation, their self-perception entirely depends on
              bodily correlations with the labyrinthine environment, that
              additionally applies sensory stimuli and atmospheric im-
              mersion32 including artificial billowing fog on the floor, a
              sound backdrop and hall lights converted into dramatic
              illuminations. Thus, the functional architecture that sublim-
              inally remains perceptible through its calibration with the
              virtual space, shifts to a fictionalized, suspenseful backdrop
              that awaits its narration. Priority has the increased intensi-
              ty of experience typical for spatial-immersive installations
              and one-sided de-distancing. But the artificial environment
              here also requires an action- and reflection-based attitude
              thanks to the latency of its speculative and operable ob-
              jects and thus enacts a highly sensuous, performative form
              of site-related institutional critique. This comes into action
              when the foggy atmosphere transforms the built-in walls
              into jagged rock formations, thereby unifying different mate-
              rialities in one unstable image-object, or when the flashing
              spotlights and the variable angle of view instantly turn a
              black surface into a three-dimensional hide-away (Fig. 3).
                             In addition, the windows that in fact only sepa-
              rate the next exhibition space, virtually open onto an equally
              artificial purple exterior, imitating a dramatic skylight. Its
              emptiness suspends the virtual exhibition space with its
              balustrades and staircase in an indefinite void, so that the
              emphasized inside-outside difference gives this VR-topos
              of floatation an institution-critical side. While Polyviou’s en-
              vironment is housed/hosted by the museum, it also nests
              there as an invisible counter-place that virtually undermines
              the physicality of the institution.33 And by penetrating the
              interior of the virtual environment, the shadows of the grid
              windows cite the linear structure of computed space. But
              this space loses the evenness secured by optical projec-
              tion when the grid lines synthesize the floor with the pillars
              to one continuous surface. It thus foreshadows a virtual

      32 Cfr. also R. Eugeni, G. Raciti, eds., “Atmosfere mediali,” VCS Visual Culture Studies. Rivista
      semestrale di cultura visuale, no. 1 (November 2020).
      33 Cfr. Th. Polyviou in A. Urban, “Virtual Spaces for Transformative Encounters and Vast
      Reciprocity:” 430.

ANNETTE URBAN                                   125                                          AN-ICON
Fig. 3a                                               Fig. 3c




Fig. 3b

       Fig. 3a, 3b and 3c T. Polyviou, Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, 2021. Site-specific VR installation, in
cooperation with Eleni Diana Elia, VR captures (details), ZKM, Karlsruhe 2021. Courtesy of the artists. ©
Eleni Diana Elia and Theodoulos Polyviou © Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), Produced in the
                                framework of the Beyond Matter Residency Programat ZKM | Karlsruhe.


                  substantiality beyond the clear differentiation of distinct
                  things and deprived of the stability of usual grounds.
                               This exacerbates the insecurity of the orienta-
                  tion-seeking users who navigate their invisible body through
                  the confusing narrowness of fixtures, pseudo-functional
                  handrails and hall lights. However, this staged reduction of
                  distance is not simply overwhelming. The ambiguous virtual
                  objects also ensure that, by “gather[ing] on the ground,” –
                  as Sara Ahmed has noted – “they create a ground upon
                  which we can gather.”34 Indeed, the mixed environment
                  unites online as well as HMD users whose actions in the
                  physical terrain marked with stripes are simultaneously
                  observed by the museum visitors. Even without direct
                  references to sacred architecture, Polyviou thus links the

          34 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: 1.

ANNETTE URBAN                                      126                                           AN-ICON
              VR-typical passing through with a quasi-ritualized use of
              space. Alison Griffith has already tied back a counter-his-
              tory of immersive spectatorship in the museum not only to
              the panorama, science museum, and planetarium, but also
              to the cathedral.35 In Drifting, Browsing, Cruising, mnemonic
              mental images ensure the combination of action-based with
              cognitive immersion, because the disoriented wandering
              takes place through the comparison of constantly shifting,
              remembered spaces. When Polyviou decisively theorizes
              this ritualization as base for a “queer togetherness,”36 this
              reconnects to the lines printed on the floor. Through their
              interference with the dense environment inside the VR, they
              emancipate themselves from the clear legibility as object
              contour and ground plan. They thus contribute to the cru-
              cial entanglement that, according to Ingold, gets the “living
              being […] as a bundle of [the] lines” 37 of its movement im-
              mersed in its lifeworld. Polyviou therefore stimulates bodily
              practices of losing oneself in artificially induced passions.
              The choreographed searching movements inside give the
              museum space an improvisational openness, while the
              calibration with the physical pillars and ground makes the
              VR-experience literally tangible. Environmental immersion
              here goes hand in hand with a reduction of difference that
              de-differentiates virtual and physical spaces, bodies and
              objects.

                               Rosa Menkman: The BLOB of Im/Possible
                               Images (2021)

                          Rosa Menkman’s VR-experience also brings the
              categories of artwork and exhibition nearly into congruence.
              But, instead of eliminating distinct artworks, Menkman, for
              this purpose, departs from a veritable collection assembled
              under the title of Im/Possible Images (Fig. 4). She stores

      35 Cfr. A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View
      (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
      36 “Drifting, Browsing, Cruising,” Fantastic Confabulations,
      https://fantastic-confabulations.beyondmatter.eu/drifting-browsing-cruising/index.html,
      accessed December 29, 2022.
      37 T. Ingold, “Drawing Together:” 300.

ANNETTE URBAN                                127                                         AN-ICON
                                                                                              Fig. 4

     Fig. 4. R. Menkman, The BLOB of Im/possible Images, 2021. Desktop-based virtual environment,
                                     accessible on the platform New Art City. Courtesy of the artist.


               this collection on the widely used VR-art platform New Art
               City where she designed a complex desktop-based virtual
               environment that shows an enclosed grayish scenery with
               a staircase, a huge resolution-chart, a humanoid figure and
               a second free-floating structure pierced by diagonals. Ini-
               tially hidden from view, the collected images are sheltered
               inside this amorphous cloud, revealing themselves when
               one navigates through the permeable sheathing. The nest-
               ed structure alludes to the titular BLOB with its polysemy of
               digital blob architecture, the single-celled, ‘intelligent’ su-
               per-organism and Binary Large Objects as a technical term
               for databased image processing. And the exhibits that visi-
               tors have to deal with in this environment are mainly objects
               of knowledge accessible only through representation, so
               a reference to their theorizations by Hans-Jörg Rheinberg-
               er and Susan Leigh Star/John Griesemer is suggested.38
               Menkman thus borrows from the realm of scientific images,
               which has been a central field of debate and self-defini-
               tion for digital art from the very beginning. She delegates
               the act of imagining and selecting them by realizing a sur-
               vey during her Arts at Cern/Collide Barcelona-Residency,
               asking the researchers what image of a relevant object or

      38 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2015): 19-58.

ANNETTE URBAN                                      128                                              AN-ICON
              phenomenon they would capture if “limits of spatial, tem-
              poral, energy, signal/noise or cost resolutions”39 were irrel-
              evant. In other words, this variability of resolution results
              in products of imagineering and touches on phenomena
              that are decoupled from humans’ experience, escaping
              their commonly perceived environmentalities. But these
              phenomena can be mediated by virtual body-environment
              relations, which conversely force a changed understanding
              of (aesthetic) experience, as discussed by Roberto Diodato
              with reference to John Dewey.40 The choice of the nuclear
              physicists as experts in im/possible images endow the
              virtual as epistemic objects with a specific latency and
              scientificity. The referents of their proposed images mostly
              elude the objecthood familiar to mankind and have nothing
              in common with the medium-sized “things of the earth’s
              surface” as characterized by the Gestalt psychologist Fritz
              Heider.41
                            Two important aspects shared with Polyviou’s
              example promise additional insights into the workings of
              environmental immersion. Firstly, this concerns the embed-
              ding into abstractness, which goes along with a space that
              loses its conventional categories and thus favors immersion
              through the withdrawal of the usual parameters of orienta-
              tion. This not only stems from the arbitrary laws of physical-
              ity in VR, but also from a different kind of world reference in
             ‘virtual bodies environments’, which Diodato emphasizes:
             “In this intermediary world space itself is the result of inter-
              activity.”42 In Menkman’s case, the intensified experience
              is generated not so much by a condensed, labyrinthine
              spatiality as by the enhanced self-reflexivity of navigation
              itself. Both, the VR-environment The BLOB of Im/Possible
              Images and the related video-work Whiteout showing a
              tour in Harz mountains in heavy snow, deal with the ex-
              perience in a markerless space tending to exceed human

      39 R. Menkman, “The BLOB of Im/possible Images”
      https://newart.city/show/menkman-blob-of-im-possibilities, accessed December 30, 2022.
      40 Cfr. R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: Towards an Aesthetics of Relations (Cham:
      Springer, 2021): 56.
      41 Cited after G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 38.
      42 R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: 61.

ANNETTE URBAN                                129                                        AN-ICON
              senses and erase most thingness. Second, the comparison
              with Drifting, Browsing, Cruising is based on the re-phys-
              icalization of the VR-works in the exhibition format. Rosa
              Menkman conceived a carefully designed exhibition display
              for a 2021 group show at Munich where she reconnected
              the VR-experience to the physical space with the help of
              lines. While in Polyviou’s example the plotting of isomorphic
              virtual and physical elements onto a planimetric floor plan
              retains a relative object character, Menkman starts from
              abstract lines as axes of graphs and coordinate systems.
              They guide the exploration of the virtual world inside and
              also mark the thresholds of iconic representation. Touching
              on signal spectra, digital states and im/material energetic
              flows, they bring forth what Ingold sees otherwise negated
              by the regime of solidified things.
                            Within the VR, the resolution chart erected
              next to the figurine is particularly telling of how Menkman
              translates resolution into space, taking advantage of the
              orthogonality of digital as “rasterized […] images” based
              on a “grid of picture elements or pixels,”43 that, according
              to Francesco Casetti and Antonio Somaini, also possess
              a specific plasticity. By mapping the gray structure of the
              internal blob with the diagonals and its one black anchor
              point, the resolution chart pretends to guide the VR-user
              searching to enter this enclosure. Yet, despite the lines
              piercing the amorphous volume, the chart does not reveal
              any information about the interior. The charted scales and
              frequency ranges unmistakably mark this second blob as
              an image-object of the same digital fabric as the abstractly
              textured body of the figurine besides, Menkman’s Angelus
              Novus emblematic for the reversal of gaze regimes. This
              co-presence of image-objects and -subjects made of dis-
              torted black-white stripes strongly signals the de-differ-
              entiation of most diverse entities. The appearance of the
              things is flexibilized to such a degree that their self-identity


      43 F. Casetti, A. Somaini, “Resolution: Digital Materialities, Thresholds of Visibility,” NECSUS.
      European Journal of Media Studies 7, no. 1 (2018): 87-103.

ANNETTE URBAN                                   130                                           AN-ICON
                 is disposable and their recognition depends on the user’s
                 bodily action (Fig. 5).




                                                                                        Fig. 5a




                                                                                        Fig. 5b

      Fig. 5a and Fig. 5b .R. Menkman, The BLOB of Im/possible Images, 2021, Desktop-based virtual
environment, accessible on the platform New Art City, screenshots by the author. Courtesy of the artist.




ANNETTE URBAN                                    131                                          AN-ICON
                            As soon as the user has traversed the opaque
              but permeable grayish membrane of the blob, the envi-
              ronment transforms into a dark sphere with mystic sound
              where the im/possible images are scattered in an unmea-
              surable distance. When the wandering user is attracted by
              small luminous dots that, up close, turn out to represent
              the Pale Blue Dot aka Planet Earth, taken by Voyager 1 in
              1990 for example, or a Quantum Vacuum, quarks inside of
              a proton, a shadow of a black hole and a body scan of the
              interior of a wrist, she/he is once again less guided by the
              affordances of gaming. To remind Günzel, its “fixed-par-
              anoid perspective” turns objects into action carriers by
              shifting them to the center of the image; but here, only the
              paranoid dimension of permanent searching seems to en-
              dure “through which the objects in the virtual off must be
              transferred into actualization.”44 As Roberto Diodato notes
              with reference to Bernard Stiegler and Richard Grusin, in
              view of the prevailing premediation techniques and an al-
              ready thoroughly hypermediated world, it is necessary for
              the techno-artistic creation of virtual spacetime environ-
              ments to break the merely adaptive behavior pattern of
              supposedly active cognitive agents.45 Beyond the gaming
              attitude running into the void, it is the habits of museum
              spectators that help surprisingly well – right down to the
              work texts that pop up on approach. But, of course, the
              concept of the mimetic image is challenged here by the
              assembled nuclear- and astrophysical phenomena at the
              limits of what can still be captured by light or other wave-
              lengths. Menkman succeeds in staging the uncertain status
              of such objects of knowledge, which only move into the
              rank of the existent through new technologies of detection,
              by making use of the peculiarities of virtual objecthood. This
              starts with the all-round perspectivability and resulting form
              variance of the virtual exhibits already known from sculp-
              ture, joined here by their free scalability and permeability

      44 S. Günzel, “Vor dem Affekt:” 68.
      45 Cfr. R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: 64-65.

ANNETTE URBAN                                   132                 AN-ICON
              in direct interaction with the user navigating their invisible
              bodies through space. The skinned wrist, for example, hits
              the viewer in powerful plasticity or just hangs in space as
              flatware, depending on the point of entry into the enclosure
              of the im/possible images, the viewing angle and proximity
              to the item. This form of distance reduction self-reflexively
              combines seeing and (inter-)acting. The less complete im-
              mersion of desktop-based VR is compensated for by the
              tactility of maneuvering with arrow keys or touchpad, which
              transfers its sensation of handling to the virtual objects.
              Menkman experiments here with re-introducing into art the
              more immersive displays of the natural history museum,46
              whose never-broken connection to science is recalled by
              Christiane Voss’ reflections on the medium of exhibition,47
              and appropriates the knowledge exhibition format. In this
              setting, barely tangible phenomena such as black holes,
              dark matter and other galaxies become manageable as in
              a laboratory that, in terms of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, only
              brings epistemic things into existence.48
                            The nested spatial structure of the BLOB in-
              creases this epistemic valence because it invites for re-
              peating those transformative immersive crossings from one
              internal sphere to the next. Outside the encapsulated image
              collection, the latency of objects is provided by the poly-
              gon meshes patterned with black/whites lines reminiscent
              of military dazzle camouflage49 that acts as de-distancing
              tool precisely by preventing its correct estimation. Instead
              of simulating natural light conditions, as it often serves to
              catalyze the atmospheric immersion of a perfected VR, the
              moiré reveals another form of apparitional fluidity. Con-
              stantly changing with the user’s movement, the texture
              shows a pulsating im/materiality that already withdraws
              at the surface. It seems close to Ingold’s and Ansusas’s
              notion of infrastice that includes “all manner of electrical,

      46 Cfr. A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine.
      47 Cfr. C. Voss, “Das Museum als Medium der Kunst,” in G. W. Bertram, S. Deines, D. M.
      Feige, eds., Die Kunst und die Künste: Ein Kompendium zur Kunsttheorie der Gegenwart
      (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021): 464-483, 474.
      48 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 35.
      49 My thanks go to Manuel van der Veen for this reference and the exchange about the text.

ANNETTE URBAN                                133                                         AN-ICON
      Fig. 6 R. Menkman, The Im/possible BLOB, 2021. Installed at Temporal Stack: the Deep Sensor
                    in Guizhou, China, curated by Iris Long und HE Zike, 2021. Courtesy of the Artist.


              chemical, and mechanical workings […], energies, gases,
              and fluids”50 and resists the useability of surfaces solely
              understood as interfaces.
                           Finally, the artist also uses these textures, as
              well as the abstract lines of graphs as vehicle for transfer-
              ring the virtual into physical space. For a presentation of
              The BLOB at Gizhou/China (Fig. 6), the dynamic black/white
              pattern has been transformed into a wallpaper. This exhi-
              bition design attaches more to the cinematically inspired
              strategy of extending the fictional-scenic image space in-
              side the VR into an overall immersive installation. But there,
              without the operability of latent virtual objects, it tends to
              unrealize the museum with its psychotic pattern. In con-
              trast, for a group exhibition in Munich that combined the
              VR-experience and the video Whiteout with works by Memo
              Akten, Susan Schuppli and others, Menkman materialized
              the abstract lines from inside the BLOB (Fig. 7). They es-
              tablished a 3D-framework in physical space whose white,
              green, red, yellow and blue diagonals traversed the floor
              and walls of the exhibition hall,51 thus slightly removing it
              from orthogonality. As these lines are imagined to shift the

      50 T. Ingold, M. Anusas, “Designing Environmental Relations:” 58.
      51 Cfr. L. Gross, R. Menkman, L 13: Reader NR 4 im/possible images (München:
      Lothringer 13 Halle, 2022) https://beyondresolution.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/
      Catalogues%2Fimpossible_L13_READER.pdf, accessed April 25, 2023.

ANNETTE URBAN                                  134                                          AN-ICON
                                                                                Fig. 7d




Fig. 7b




                                                     Fig. 7c




Fig. 7a

        Fig. 7 a-d. Views of the Exhibition Im/possible Images, at the Lothringer 13 Halle, Munich, 2021,
  curated by Rosa Menkman. Photo by Dominik Gigler. Courtesy of the artist and of Lothringer 13 Halle.

ANNETTE URBAN                                     135                                          AN-ICON
              spectra of resolution – a borderline to “low fidelity images”
              was inscribed on the floor –, the artist transformed the built
              into a “latent image space.”52 Similar to the VR, I would
              add, the solidity of its objects becomes doubtful, when
              variable parameters of the perceptible and representable
              always help other visualities and entities to emerge. With
              this kind of environmentalization, Menkman de-hierarchizes
              an ever-higher resolution, that regulates access to more
              and more details and therefore, according to Casetti and
              Somaini, raises the power question of control.53 In the Mu-
              nich exhibition, some of the im/possible images from the
              BLOB (re-)materialized as exhibits, among them a photo
              of the skinned hand scan or a newspaper clipping with an
              x-rayed hand from 1896. But, by placing them along the
              resolution lines, theses factual images remain suspended
              in an abstract space of potentialities. In sum, the exhibition
              display was activated as an integral component not princi-
              pally distinguished from what is constitutive for the ‘work.’

                                Potentiated Environmentalization

                           As shown so far, the multiplication of environ-
              ments inherent in VR-art results from its genuine blurring of
              the differences between work and environment. This gen-
              erative logic of further nesting necessarily brings the whole
              institutional and curatorial ecosystem of VR-art into view.
              And the extension of the internal installation aesthetics not
              only counteracts its technically-based encapsulation. It is
              also essential for not missing the togetherness54 – to cite
              Mieke Bal – of an exhibition which, according to Christiane
              Voss, is the medium that establishes the works’ mode of
              existence as art in the first place.55
                           The Blob of Im/Possible Images, commissioned
              by the HeK Basel, was produced with the infrastructure of
              newart.city.org that provides a “virtual exhibition toolkit”
      52 Cfr. R. Menkman, “Im/possible Images@Lothringer 13, Munich”
      https://beyondresolution.info/im-possible-images-1, accessed December 29, 2022.
      53 Cfr. F. Casetti, A. Somaini, “Resolution:” 89.
      54 Cfr. M. Bal, Exhibition-ism: Temporal Togetherness (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020).
      55 Cfr. Voss, “Das Museum als Medium der Kunst:” 464.

ANNETTE URBAN                                  136                                         AN-ICON
              with “built-in tools to manage artworks and space layouts.”56
              Menkman takes up its claims for a non-hierarchical co-cre-
              ation and invites the submission of further non-expert im/
              possible images. Later on, the work has been embedded
              into a virtual, but spatial exhibition curated by Lívia No-
              lasco-Rózsás and Giulia Bini for the ZKM in 2021, which
              pushes the tendencies towards nesting and de-differen-
              tiation even further: Spatial Affairs. Worlding is inhabited
              by artworks, an exhibition display and visitors sharing the
              same organic-abstract shape. One can only distinguish
              the non-humanoid avatars of other visitors from exhibits
              through distance-reduction and the object-related action of
              a mouse click. The latter then turn into pink and, via an info
              window and links, lead the web-user to the works stored on
              artists’ website or platforms. By interpreting environmental-
              ization in terms of worlding, the curators participate in the
              posthumanist renewal of the phenomenological critique of
              the world as sum of objects. The multi-user online world
              with its identical, modular entities first hides the exhibition
              behind the supposed affordances of gaming and chats.
              However, the transitions between the environmental exhi-
              bition and environmental works are designed less immer-
              sively – like portals in gaming or falling down the rabbit-hole
              known from literature – than through paratextual framings
              operated by non-natural manual interfaces.
                            The online exhibition site fantastic confabu-
              lations that hosts Drifting, Browsing, Cruising was also
              conceived by Polyviou together with Jasmina Figueora as
              artists in residence of the same research project Beyond
              Matter. Instead of nesting spaces, it deals with the gener-
              ic, serial tendency of self-continuation by inviting to reuse
              the initial 3D-reconstruction of the ZKM balcony for sub-
              sequent projects such as realized by Figueroa who mod-
              eled her spoken words and sound scores by the visitors’
              movements through the virtual site. Following Ahmed, this



      56 Cfr. “About New Art City,” https://info.newart.city/about, accessed December 28, 2022.

ANNETTE URBAN                                 137                                        AN-ICON
             implies not only a model for self-determined curation, but
             also a form of environmental co-habitation.
                          Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás argues for the museum
             in the virtual condition as a “cognitive system”57 including
             non-human actors, thereby reaccentuating the pioneering
             thought exhibitions [Gedankenausstellungen] initiated by
             Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour. Polyviou’s example gets by
             without its strong archival underpinning. In the functional
             architecture, his staging of an atmospherically condensed
             counterworld aims at releasing a different bodily knowledge
             of possible encounters and envisions a counter-physicality
             for transcending the otherwise hard-to-move institution.
             The curved lines on the ground echoing the paths inside
             the VR offer their own transformative knowledge of entan-
             glement that is experienced and produced environmentally.
             In comparison, Menkman directly invests into the potential
             of virtual as epistemic and aesthetic objects. Their robust-
             ness and simultaneously plasticity reminds the capability of
             Star’s and Griesemer’s boundary objects to make agents of
             different groupings,58 in this case those of art and science,
             meet. What Doris Kolesch has in mind with a normalized
             immersion in not only technologically-enclosed but every-
             day spaces, can also be true for VR-based environmental-
             ization. De-differentiation and de-distancing are then not
             contradictions to but catalysts of immersive reflection.




      57 L. Nolasco-Rózsás, Y. Hofmann, “The Museum as a Cognitive System of Human and Non-
      Human Actors,” The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums & Culture, no. 3 (2021): 1-15.
      58 Cfr. G. Roßler, Der Anteil der Dinge an der Gesellschaft: 33-34.

ANNETTE URBAN                               138                                       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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