10.54103/ai/19767
This contribution investigates the notion of immersiveness in Laure Prouvost’s production, critically questioning the relationship between the environments designed by the French artist and the short film projected in them. More specifically, an attempt will be made to demonstrate how the activation of a sense of immersion depends on the fact that Prouvost’s hypermedia installations act as both environments (ambiente) and settings (ambientazione). This study demonstrates how the immersive condition that the artist’s film performance activates, while undoubtedly relating to the environmental context in which they appear, springs from a spectrum of strategies that Prouvost’s moving images orchestrate. These include the layered and plastic quality of the moving image; the relationships between word and image within intermediary storytelling; the montage as a critical tool; and, more precisely, bodies that are not necessarily human as the locus of sensitive knowledge. A theoretical framework that intersects the notion of the “system aesthetic,” Hugo Munsterberg’s prodromal psychological theory and multiple forms of haptic vision-resonance will define the guidelines of the argumentation, in parallel with tracing an inseparable art-historical genealogy to comprehend Laure Prouvost’s research.
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Valentina Bartalesi
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
Film studies
I wish we could grab your image and touch you: A Sensory Approach to Laure Prouvost’s Work
Text.Serial.Journal
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2023-12-29
2023-01-27
2023-12-29
2024-02-23
AN-ICON
Valentina Bartalesi
2023/12/29
10.54103/ai/19767
IULM University of Milan
2785-7433
II
Film studies
en
Youngblood, G., Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co, 1970).
I wish we could grab your image and touch you: A Sensory Approach to Laure Prouvost’s Work
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/download/19767/20008
2
            I wish we could
            grab your image
and touch you: A Sensory
Approach to Laure
Prouvost’s Laure
           Work
by Valentina Bartalesi
                 Prouvost
                         Immersion
                         New media
                         Haptic perception
                         Film studies




                     Issue №2                Year 2023
                     → Immersions and Dives:
                     From the Environment
                     to Virtual Reality
                     Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina,
                     Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello
I wish we could grab
your image and touch you :
A Sensory Approach to
Laure Prouvost’s Work
VALENTINA BARTALESI, Università IULM – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8596-4014
https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19767



Abstract                      This contribution investigates the notion of im-
                mersiveness in Laure Prouvost’s production, critically ques-
                tioning the relationship between the environments designed
                by the French artist and the short film projected in them.
                More specifically, an attempt will be made to demonstrate
                how the activation of a sense of immersion depends on
                the fact that Prouvost’s hypermedia installations act as
                both environments (ambiente) and settings (ambientazione).
                This study demonstrates how the immersive condition that
                the artist’s film performance activates, while undoubtedly
                relating to the environmental context in which they appear,
                springs from a spectrum of strategies that Prouvost’s mov-
                ing images orchestrate. These include the layered and plas-
                tic quality of the moving image; the relationships between
                word and image within intermediary storytelling; the mon-
                tage as a critical tool; and, more precisely, bodies that are
                not necessarily human as the locus of sensitive knowledge.




VALENTINA BARTALESI                            12                              AN-ICON
                              A theoretical framework that intersects the no-
                 tion of the “system aesthetic,” Hugo Munsterberg’s pro-
                 dromal psychological theory and multiple forms of haptic
                 vision-resonance will define the guidelines of the argumen-
                 tation, in parallel with tracing an inseparable art-historical
                 genealogy to comprehend Laure Prouvost’s research.




Keywords         Laure Prouvost                  Immersion                   New media
                 Haptic perception               Film studies
To quote this essay: V. Bartalesi, “I wish we could grab your image and touch you: A Sensory Approach
to Laure Prouvost’s Work,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 2
(2023): 12-37, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19767.

VALENTINA BARTALESI                              13                                         AN-ICON
When we move by night at the speed of desire				
With you at the wheel my limit goes higher					
Just turn me on, you turn me on							
You are my petrol, my drive, my dream, my exhaust.1
                                Introduction

                             In November 2022, French-born artist Laure
               Prouvost, born in 1978, inaugurated her solo exhibition
               Laure Prouvost: Above Front Tears Our Float at the Na-
               tional Museum in Oslo.2 As the exhibition constitutes an
               extraordinary summa of Prouvost’s practice, a brief anal-
               ysis of it allows one to enter the artist’s universe(s). Like
               many of Prouvost’s interventions, Above Front Tears Oui
               Float boasts a properly spatial dimension. Described as
               an “immersive installation containing film, sound, perfor-
               mance, sculptures, textile and text,”3 the exhibition takes
               up invading the Light Hall of the museum. Emerging from
               a dark corridor, the visitor enters an ethereal reinterpreta-
               tion of a 19th-century panorama with light-coloured floors
               and water vapour banks simulating the clouds’ rush. The
               dream of floating on the celestial vault is heightened by
               a herd of ornithological and marine sculptures blown in
               Murano glass and scattered among the clouds. A monu-
               mental tapestry celebrates the great theme of migrations,
               dear to Prouvost,4 while a painted zoomorphic cave offers




      1 L. Prouvost, https://www.reiffersartinitiatives.com/en/exposition/laure-prouvost-you-are-my-
      petrol-my-drive-my-dream-my-exhaust/, accessed September 20, 2023.
      2 Cfr. “Laure Prouvost. Above Front Tears Oui Float, November 5, 2022-February 12, 2023,”
      The National Museum of Oslo, https://www.nasjonalmuseet.no/en/exhibitions-and-events/
      national-museum/exhibitions/2022/laure-prouvost/, accessed May 3, 2023.
      3 “Laure Prouvost. Above Front Tears Oui Float,” NOBA! Access Art, November 2022,
      https://noba.ac/en/exhibition/laure-prouvost-above-front-tears-oui-float/, accessed May 3, 2023.
      4 The theme of migration underlies the environmental installation Deep See Blue Surrounding
      You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre presented in 2019 at the French Pavilion during the 58th
      edition of the Venice Biennale. See L. Prouvost, M. Kirszenbaum, Laure Prouvost: Deep See Blue
      Surrounding You: vois ce bleu profond te fondre (Paris: Flammarion-Institut Français, 2019).

VALENTINA BARTALESI                             14                                          AN-ICON
               soft cushions for lying down sorrounded by a ceiling of soft
               stalactites and excrescences.
                            Two are the generating elements of this celestial
               ecosystem. The first is related to the already Freudian and
               Surrealist theme of the dream, which is not coincidentally
               among the topics most extensively treated in immersive
               experiences in virtual reality.5 The second coincides with
               the founding role of the short film projected onto a screen of
               imposing dimensions. The short film Every Sunday, Grand-
               ma (2022, 7’ 17’’) immortalises the flying experience of the
               elderly Celine. A similar phenomenon is reflected in the
               second environment of the exhibition-work. In a descend-
               ing movement, the viewer lands in an anthropic landscape
               marked by the slime of the sewage pipes from which the
               artist’s voice resounds. An archetypal lexicon of Prouvost’s
               work, consisting of buckets, pipes, serpentines, tentacular
               elements, metal grids, debris, glassy zoomorphic sculp-
               tures, and iPhone-headed anthropomorphic figures punc-
               tuate this cataclysmic space. At the dividing line between
               reality and fiction, a structurally blurred boundary in the
               artist’s production, paper baskets raised from the ground
               hold Virtual Reality headsets. Wearing them, the visitor
               would take over a duplicate of the Norwegian environment,
               now colonised by a banquet of sirens that invite levitation.
               With Celine, who does not fortuitously tell of dreams, the
               user floats in the ether from afar. However, this activation
               does not end in creating a “cinesthetic subject,” as Vivian
               Sobchack aptly put it.6 Instead, and this is precisely the

       5 For a recent and comprehensive essay on the subject see G. Grossi, La notte dei simulacri:
       Sogno, cinema, realtà virtuale (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2021).
       6 As Sobchack notes “We might name this subversive body in the film experience the
       cinesthetic subject – a neologism that derives not only from cinema but also from two
       scientific terms that designate particular structures and conditions of the human sensorium:
       synaesthesia and coenaesthesia. Both of these structures and conditions foreground the
       complexity and richness of the more general bodily experience that grounds our particular
       experience of cinema, and both also point to ways in which the cinema uses our dominant
       senses of vision and hearing to speak comprehensibly to our other senses.” V. Sobchack,
       Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley-Los Angeles-London:
       University of California Press, 2004): 67.

VALENTINA BARTALESI                             15                                         AN-ICON
              turning point of the discourse, the immersive dimension
              correctly highlighted in Prouvost’s work stems from a spe-
              cific mechanism. In particular, that of the spatial translation
              of the sense of immersion generated by the short film and
              materialised by a hypermedia and intermediary system of
              works that extends the limits of the projection screen.7

                                From ambiente to ambientazione:
                                Prouvost and “system aesthetic”

                             Numerous syntagms have been formulated to
              classify Prouvost’s research.8 This polysemy is undoubt-
              edly (and evidently) connected to the stratified nature of
              her praxis. From the second half of the 2010s, Prouvost’s
              research presents certain recurring characters, fully evident
              in Above Front Tears Our Float. These include: the environ-
              mental dimension of the work; the almost systematic use
              of elements that function as displays and allow the artist
              to organise the exhibition space in terms of visibility and
              invisibility; the use of short films, inserted in the form of
              screens or projections; the coexistence of pictorial, sculp-
              tural, graphic artefacts, and even architectural structures.
                             It is possible to describe Prouvost’s works in
              terms of multimodal, multimedia and possibly post-media
              environments.9 However, it is necessary to disambiguate
              the meaning attributed to each category, which has been
              pivotal since the late 1960s and even more systematically




      7 This issue, part of a very long tradition, was recently addressed by E. Modena, Nelle storie:
      Arte, cinema e media immersivi (Rome: Carocci, 2022): 31-32.
      8 Carlos Kong speaks about “immersive installation,” C. Kong, “Laure Prouvost, We would
      be floating away from the dirty past (Haus der Kunst, Munich),” esse arts + opinions 89 (2017):
      84-85.
      9 The reference is certainly to the “postmedial condition” as theorised by R. Krauss, A Voyage
      on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames & Hudson,
      1999).

VALENTINA BARTALESI                             16                                         AN-ICON
               since the 1990s. Consider the “Experiential Turn” codified
               by Dorothea von Hantelmann.10
                             First, by pointing out the meaning of the term
               environment, here adopting two distinct, though interre-
               lated, definitions. In its broadest sense, the noun environ-
               ment generically designates “the circumstances, objects,
               or conditions by which one is surrounded.”11 It is no coin-
               cidence that Oliver Grau, author of one of the first system-
               atic efforts to trace a genealogy of virtual art, claiming that
              “the suggestive impression is one of immersing oneself in
               the image space,” connected it with the experience of ac-
               cessing a variably enclosed artificial space.12 Immersion,
               a phenomenon punctually cited by Grau concerning the
               notion of the virtual, occurs first and foremost within an
               environment with its spatiotemporal coordinates, whether
               material or electronic. Entering an environment requires
               an act of immersion and surfacing, as Giuliana Bruno has
               extensively demonstrated in her latest research.13
                             In the environment, as with the “an-icon” the-
               orised by Andrea Pinotti, one enters and comes out with
               the body, crossing the “threshold of the image” in invert-
               ed directions.14
                             Adopting a lectio facilior, it could be said that
               the immersive potential of Prouvost’s works depends on
               their presenting a 360° environment that surrounds the
               visitor. Although correct, such an interpretation risks being
               biased, simplifying the artist’s discourse. Therefore, within
      10 According to von Hantelmann: “Every artwork produces some kind of (aesthetic)
      experience. But as I would like to argue, from the 1960s onward, the creation and shaping of
      experiences have increasingly become an integral part of the artwork’s conception.” H. von
      Hantelmann, “The Experiential Turn,” in On Performativity, vol. 1 (Vineland: Walker Art Center,
      2014), https://walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/, accessed May 5, 2023.
      11 “Environment,” in Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2023), https://www.merriam-webster.com/
      dictionary/environment, accessed on May 3, 2023.
      12 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003): 3. The
      topic has been highlighted in E. Modena, “Immersi nell’irreale: Prospettive an-iconiche sull’arte
      contemporanea dall’ambiente alla realtà virtuale,” Carte Semiotiche (2021): 71-72.
      13 G. Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (Chicago:
      University of Chicago Press, 2022).
      14 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Turin: Einaudi, 2021): xv,
      passim [my translation].

VALENTINA BARTALESI                               17                                             AN-ICON
               a logic not of contradiction but of integration, the second
               part of the definition attempted above must be examined.
                            Consider the heterogeneous themes Prouvost’s
               work has been interrogating for at least a decade. It is cer-
               tainly no coincidence that the artist’s concerted settings
               probe the realms of dreams, water, flight15 and even cat-
               aclysm. In the heterogeneity of the phenomena enumer-
               ated, a presupposition unites them, making them optimal
               for tracing multiple genealogies of immersiveness.16 Those
               conditions ideally (or even concretely) envelop the users’
               body and simultaneously determine a significant variation
               in their perceptive and peripersonal sphere.
                            Secondly, it is fundamental to conceive them
               within the semantic shift, particularly effective in the Italian
               language, from the notion of ambiente (environment) to
               that of ambientazione (setting). The term “ambientazione,”
               coined in the early 1960s as a derivative of the predicate
              “ambientare,” designates “a narration or representation.”17
               Namely, it signifies the environment in which the story takes
               place, whether described verbally or artificially recreated.
               Prouvost’s environments function as enveloping devices
               insofar as they constitute settings or rather narratological
               systems.18 The sculptures, paintings, drawings, tapestries,




      15 In an orientation already entirely shaped by the invention of the Internet, Pierre Lévy
      already recorded the dual experiential level that characterises the experiences of immersion
      in water or flight: “Between air and water, between earth and sky, between soil and summit,
      the surfer or parachutist is never entirely there. Leaving the soil and its support, he rises into
      the air, slides along interfaces, follows vanishing lines, is vectorized, deterritorialized.” P. Lévy,
      Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age (New York-London: Plenum Trade, 1998): 43.
      16 For a survey of the topic in ideological terms, see: A. Giomi, “Immersion as Ideology:
      A Critical Genealogy of Immersivity in Digital Arts, Aesthetics and Culture,” Azimuth:
      Philosophical Coordinates in Modern and Contemporary Age 20, no. 2 (2022): 197-215.
      17 “Ambientazione,” in Vocabolario Treccani (2023),
      https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/ambientazione/, accessed May 3, 2023.
      18 On the relationship between narration, immersion and the hypertensive, we refer to one
      of the (revisited) classics of literature on the subject: M.-L. Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality
      2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: John
      Hopkins University Press, 2015).

VALENTINA BARTALESI                                18                                              AN-ICON
                objects, and the overall display that configure them operate
                as props or clues projected from the filmic narrative.
                             To understand the specificity of this aesthetic
                mechanism, it is not necessary to turn, at least in the very
                first instance, to the theorisations elaborated on Virtual
                Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality
                (MR) – media with which Prouvost has systematically ex-
                perimented. Instead, it should be assumed that the moment
                when the work of art as an environmental system was not
                only “invented” but most properly theorised represents a
                crucial research ground.
                              In this respect, the notion of “system aesthet-
                ics,” postulated by the art theorist Jack Burnham on Artfo-
                rum in September 1968, proves to be an excellent source
                for Prouvost’s practice.19 Although elements make Burn-
                ham’s proposal undoubtedly problematic – including the
                association initially proposed between such aesthetic and
                military strategies – two assumptions concerning immer-
                siveness must be highlighted.
                             The first relates to the configuration of such a
                system. In the wake of Austrian biologist Ludwig von Ber-
                talanffy’s formulation that a system represents a “complex
                of components in interaction,” Burnham writes:

the artist is a perspectivist considering goals, boundaries, structure,
input, output, and related activity inside and outside the system.
Where the object almost always has a fixed shape and boundaries,
the consistency of a system may be altered in time and space, its
behavior determined both by external conditions and its mecha-
nisms of control.20

       19 J. Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” Artforum 7 (1 September 1968): 30-35. Caroline A.
       Jones has already provided a precise analysis of the text and its evolution: C. Jones, “Caroline
       A. Jones on Jack Burnham’s ‘Systhems Esthetics,’” Artforum 51, no. 1 (1 September 2012),
       https://www.artforum.com/print/201207/caroline-a-jones-on-jack-burnham-s-systems-
       esthetics-32014.
       20 J. Burnham, “Systems Esthetics:” 32.

VALENTINA BARTALESI                              19                                           AN-ICON
                              For Burnham, the system is environmental inso-
               far as it reflects the action of the historical, socio-economic,
               and cultural framework in which the work arises, generates,
               and, at least partially, undergoes. The second point pertains
               to the condition, which can be qualified as embodied and
               multimodal, of such a system experience. Analysing works
               by Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Les Levine, Al-
               lan Kaprow and especially Hans Haacke, Burnham stated:
              “Sight analysis diminishes in importance for some of the
               best new work; the other senses and especially kinesthe-
               sis makes ‘viewing’ a more integrated experience”21 (the
               reference here is to Andre’s celebrated Floor Pieces). Al-
               ternatively, in this case referring to Levine: “Here behaviour
               is controlled in an aesthetic situation with no primary ref-
               erence to visual circumstances.” As Levine insists, “What
               I am after here is physical reaction, not visual concern.”22
                              It should be said that the immersive vocation
               of Prouvost’s works resides in their dual vocation as envi-
               ronmental systems: an enveloping space; a system of the
               individual units (artefacts, objects, and architectonic dis-
               play) that configure the system environment (ambiente) as
               a setting (ambientazione), a system whose logic transcends
               the material boundaries of the work, seeing its narrative
               core in the projections of short films set up by the artist.
               Unlike Burnham, in Prouvost’s hypermedia installations
               each component, albeit integrated into the system-environ-
               ment, also possesses its autonomous existence. Moreover,
               as already mentioned, a pre-eminence on the inventive
               exists. Indeed, the film performances shot and edited by
               Prouvost structurally shape her hypermedia systems, as
               this contribution tries to demonstrate.




       21 Ibid.: 34.
       22 Ibid.

VALENTINA BARTALESI                    20                              AN-ICON
                                 Participation or projection? Historical-
                                 artistic sources on a subtle dilemma

                            At this point, the theme of immersion and its
               phenomenology hinges. Prouvost’s production does not
               designate a stricto sensu interactive art since only in a few
               cases it involves complex interaction on the visitor’s part.
               Yet, and in terms that are in some ways all too general, it is
               also true that Prouvost’s practice shares those theoretical
               assumptions that Nathaniel Stern identified within inter-
               active installations, whereby “with enter, for example, we
               move-think-feel the making of bodies of meaning, togeth-
               er.”23 The plexus constituted by the predicates “move-think-
               feel” – which, however, could also easily be applied to the
               experience, for example, of a minimalist structure – captures
               the specificity of Prouvost’s discourse and, in this case, of
               its immersive vocation, based on a form of knowledge that
               is ideologically, as well as physiologically, corporeal.
                            Inscribing Prouvost’s research within the so-
               called participatory art framework requires clarifications
               closely linked to the question of immersivity. Undoubted-
               ly, a collaboration between the artist and the performers
               systematically occurs in her short films. However, the so-
               cial collaboration postulated by the relational aesthetics of
               Nicolas Bourriaud at the end of the 1990s24 and differently
               in the early 2000s by Claire Bishop25 seems to be trans-
               posed by Prouvost into the relationship between the living
               being (human or non-human) and image, mediated by the
               display device.
                            In this sense, Bishop’s observations on par-
               ticipatory art pondered in the wake of Jacques Rancière,


       23 N. Stern, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance (Canterbury:
       Gylphi Limited Book, 2014): 4.
       24 N. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998), trans. S. Plaesance, F. Woods (Paris: les presses
       du réel, 2002).
       25 C. Bishop, Participation (London-Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006).

VALENTINA BARTALESI                              21                                          AN-ICON
               would seem significant: “in calling for spectators who are
               active as interpreters, Rancière implies that the politics of
               participation might best lie, not in anti-spectacular stag-
               ings of community or the claim that mere physical activity
               would correspond to emancipation, but in putting to work
               the idea that we are all equally capable of inventing our
               translations.”26 It will be necessary to deepen the function-
               ing of such an unavoidable linguistic process that makes
               an enveloping environment (the hypermedia installation
               conceived by Prouvost) an immersive entity, starting with
               some art-historical observations.
                            The immersive vocation of Prouvost’s research
               must be connected to the anthropological and art-historical
               sources the artist refers to, directly or indirectly. Sources,
               moreover, which appear potentially numerous. It would
               not seem rash to claim that the most ancient precedent
               alluding to the dual “installation” and kinematic connota-
               tion of Prouvost’s work is the Upper Palaeolithic cave, a
               space extensively recurrent in her production. As a lith-
               ic sacellum, the prehistoric cave develops on an intricate
               geological plan delineated by a maze of halls, corridors,
               and diverticula. Of this proto-cinematographic apparatus27
               and immersive space ante litteram, Prouvost experiments,
               even unconsciously, with the dual dimension of enveloping
               environments and of immersion-producing devices. In the
               first case, the artist creates hypermedia palimpsests, in
               which graphic signs intersect pictorial, drawing, collage,
               objects and screens of various sizes. So, it is the case of
               the luxuriant caveat of Farfromwords, a reinterpretation of a
               19th-century Panorama resulting from the seductive short
               film Swallow (2013),28 or of the “rocky” wall with which the


       26 Ibid.: 16.
       27 Among the most pioneering readings on the subject see: M. Azéma, L’art des cavernes en
       action, 2 vols. (Paris: Errance, 2009-2010).
       28 L. Prouvost et al., Laure Prouvost: farfromwords: car mirrors eat raspberries when
       swimming through the sun, to swallow sweet smells ..., (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2013).

VALENTINA BARTALESI                            22                                         AN-ICON
               Venetian itinerary closed. In the second case, Prouvost
               exploits the agency of the moving image that is projected,
               or instead materialised, in a cohesive network of artefacts,
               entities and people (the performers and the public).
                             From a medium-archaeological perspective,
               which places one of its most remote anthropological sourc-
               es in the sanctuary cave, Prouvost’s practice finds in the
               19th-century Panorama and, above all, in the more modern
               halls equipped with seats and rows of screens a spectrum
               of different models united by a not dissimilar principle: that
               of defining a space of images acted out in movement and
               connoted on an atmospheric level. However, it would be
               misleading to assume that Prouvost’s primary reference
               lies in “installation art.”29 More precisely, Prouvost’s work
               places the spatialisation of filmic language (and video clips)
               as a systematic strategy since the early 2000s.30
                             In this case, the relationship between moving
               images and display present in numerous works by Prouvost
               would only be fully comprehensible with the filmic struc-
               tures realized by Nam June Paik, Dara Birnbaum and John
               Latham31 since the late 1970s. Particularly in the case of
               Birnbaum (a precedent not explicitly mentioned by Laure
               Prouvost), it is possible to find both the use of a light-
               ning-fast alternating montage punctuated by captioning
               on black backgrounds – in one of the frequent lemmas
               in Prouvost’s practice and style – and the construction of
               structures that intend the screen as a sculptural component

       29 According to Bishop, “An installation of art is secondary in importance to the individual
       works it contains, while in a work of installation art, the space, and the ensemble of elements
       within it, are regarded in their entirety as a singular entity. Installation art creates a situation
       into which the viewer physically enters and insists that you regard this as a singular totality.” C.
       Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate Publishing, 2005): 6.
       30 One of her first short films Abstractions Quotidiannes (2005) alternates frames of peripheral
       areas, monochrome backgrounds that shake the viewer’s sensorium by bursting lightning-
       fast and capturing objects whose surface values are exalte. See in this regard: L. Prouvost,
      “Abstractions Quotidiannes,” Lux, https://lux.org.uk/work/abstractions-quotidiennes/.
       31 The influence exercised by the British artist John Latham, a revolutionary spokesman
       for English conceptual art for whom Prouvost had worked as an assistant in South London,
       is expressed along multiple lines: L. Prouvost et al., Laure Prouvost: Hit Flash Back (Milan:
       Mousse Publishing, 2016): 32.

VALENTINA BARTALESI                               23                                             AN-ICON
               intended to activate the surrounding space. Presumably,
               Laure Prouvost’s attention to the filmic representation
               of the body agent sees a fertile breeding ground in the
               American research of the second half of the 1960s (think
               of Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Robert Morris and Lyn-
               da Benglis). At the same time, the artist’s familiarity with
               theories on expanded cinema and filmic experiments de-
               veloped in the feminist sphere is extensively noted on a
               philological viewpoint.
                             For those reasons, it is necessary to search for
               the origins of Prouvost’s approach within a similar line of
               artists whose formal and political reflection on the space of
               the work stems from the moving image. A tradition already
               historicised through the essay Expanded Cinema published
               by Gene Youngblood in 1970. And which spans from the
               seductive short film Fuses (1967) by Carolee Schneemann32
               towards the digital film Pickelporno (1992) by Pipilotti Rist,33
               passing through the homoerotic filmography of the femi-
               nist Barbara Hammer. In the wake of Godard, these artists
               have been constructing their narratives by extensively using
               close-up body parts in a lemma that was equally experi-
               mented with by Prouvost. In the case of Schneemann and
               Rist, the layered materiality of the film finds a further coun-
               terpoint in the construction of environmental installations
               aimed at rendering the experience of the film corporeal.
               Such a bodily vocation happens from an evocative point
               of view, for instance, with Schneemann’s installation Video
               Rocks (1986),34 which represents one of the most signifi-
               cant precedents of Prouvost’s practice. This environmental
               installation, comprising a series of televisions, an impos-
               ing painted frieze and a path of fake stones modelled in

       32 See in this regard: C. Schneemann, Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable (London: Black
       Dog Publishing Limited, 2015).
       33 Cfr. L. Castagnini, “The ‘Nature’ of Sex: Para Feminist Parody in Pipilotti Rist’s PickelPorno
       (1992),” Australian and New Zeland Journal of Art 15, no. 2 (2015): 164-81.
       34 C. Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge MA: MIT
       Press, 2003): 267.

VALENTINA BARTALESI                              24                                           AN-ICON
              ceramic by the artist, places its narrative fulcrum in the con-
              tent transmitted: the bodily crossing of the stones. Although
              not verifiable on a documentary level, the knowledge of the
              environmental experiments on cinema conducted by the
              Dutch artist Jeffrey Shaw must be included.
                            Consider the monumental PVC dome of Corpo-
              cinema (1967), on which surface films were projected from
              the outside and visible from the inside. The underbelly of
              such an intracorporeal hall was saturated by the injection
              of inflatables, fumes, and smells, making the experience of
              watching audio-visual content altogether multimodal.35 It
              would appear to be a similar tradition, and not necessarily
              one connected to the creation of practicable spaces – from
              Walter De Maria’s earthy rooms to Gianni Colombo’s Spazio
              Elastico (1967) or Franco Mazzucchelli’s giant inflatables
              and Piero Manzoni Placentarium (1961) – which interests
              Prouvost. Although the influence exerted by one of the
              founding figures of digital art such as Hito Steyerl, should
              in no way be underestimated, it should not be overlooked
              that while Steyerl’s immersive installations attest to a po-
              litical component, Prouvost’s counterparts, where present,
              introject it on a sensory – and hence different – level.
                            Therefore, Prouvost’s research can stand at a
              crossroads between interactive, participatory, and relational
              art, only partially fitting into each category. The impression
              of being immersed in her works is determined by the pe-
              culiar phenomenon whereby, at the same time, Prouvost’s
              interventions act as environments and as settings for a
              narrative that happens elsewhere. According to the logic of
              the aesthetic systems mentioned above, this elsewhere has
              a fully recognisable positioning: that of the moving image.
              Experimenting with that pun so recurrent in Prouvost’s work,
              the dissimilarity between the notions of environment and
      35 Cfr. J. Shaw, et al., CORPOCINEMA: Photographic, Diagrammatic and Textual
      Documentation of This 1968 Artwork Presented in the International Exhibition “Discoteca
      Analitica” (Fribourg: Fri Art Kunsthalle, 2019).

VALENTINA BARTALESI                            25                                        AN-ICON
                setting reveals itself to be substantial. If the short film were
                not projected and the viewer was to access the environ-
                ment, she or he could likewise grasp its meaning. There is
                thus a bodily and sensorimotor immersion. The visitor en-
                ters an atmospherically connoted environment, as Böhme36
                and Griffero37 put it, experienced by walking, sitting, lying
                down, listening, smelling, eventually touching.
                              For such an immersion to rise from being an
                eminently spatial affair to an aesthetic system of interacting
                components, the action performed by the moving image is
                pivotal. In this case, the storytelling provided by the short
                films, as will be seen below.

                                  Theoretical Framework: in the (fictitious)
                                  wake of Münsterberg

                             Prouvost’s storytelling has codified characters
                closely related to the artist’s biography.38 As Fanny Fetzer
                has already pointed out, in the events narrated by Prouvost,
                the boundary between reality and fiction, document and
                joke, becomes dangerously (and even ironically) blurred.
                Nevertheless, the proprium of her narrative does not lie in
                its content. More precisely, what Prouvost is interested in
                about the process of semiosis and its transmission pertains
                to the filmic configuration of the sensations of such a nar-
                rative, materialised in hypermedia settings. In this respect,
                storytelling constitutes an eminently sensual and sensory
       36 G. Böhme, Atmosphäre: Essays zur neuen Ästhetik (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2013).
       37 T. Griffero, Atmosferologia: Estetica degli spazi emozionali (Milan: Mimesis, 2017).
       38 Laure Prouvost was born in 1978 in Lille, France. Winner of the French Pavilion at
       the Venice Biennale in 2018, contrary to the national approach of the prestigious award,
       Prouvost is first and foremost a European artist. Indeed, her French residence is limited in
       time, having moved to Belgium at thirteen and been academically trained in London. This
       apparently marginal information is helpful to highlight how, even for biographical reasons,
       language plays a crucial role in Prouvost’s practice. Francophone by birth and Anglophone in
       adulthood, Prouvost systematically exploits her status as a bilingual subject, experimenting
       in an irreverent and humorous manner with the rhetorical figures of homonymy, homophony,
       alliteration, jet de mot, false friends, and grammatical error. See in this regard: Z. Pilger, “The
       Sun on Your Face,” Frieze, no. 166 (September 24, 2014): https://www.frieze.com/article/sun-
       your-face, accessed May 3, 2023; L. Prouvost, K. Archey, E. Coccia, Laure Prouvost: “ring,
       sing and drink for trespassing” (Paris: Les press du réel, 2018).

VALENTINA BARTALESI                                26                                            AN-ICON
               strategy. It is certainly no coincidence that Prouvost’s writ-
               ings are punctuated by references to the unattainable desire
               to set up universes of “pure sensations.”39
                             In the history of Western philosophy and aes-
               thesiology, the subject boasts an illustrious tradition stem-
               ming from the 19th-century notion of empathy.40 An early
               attempt to systematise the imaginary sensations of con-
               tact arising from the experience of the representation of
               movement in the static, specifically pictorial image, is to be
               found between the second and third quarters of the 1890s
               with Bernard Berenson. Berenson’s theories, for which it
               remains complex to establish a direct derivation from the
               works of Wölfflin and Lipps, had however a declared refer-
               ence to the Psychology of William James.41 A lustre before
               Gertrude Stein, Bernard Berenson had been a student of
               James at Harvard University. Not coincidentally, it was at
               the Harvard Psychology Laboratory, founded by James in
               1875 and rehabilitated in 1893,42 that the first systematic
               reflections on sensory perception, attention and emotions
               were developed.
                             From 1892, while the science of haptics was
               being invented on a theoretical and empirical level, Hugo
               Münsterberg was called upon to run the laboratory, one
               might say, an immersive space. In the rooms subdivided ac-
               cording to senses, as Giuliana Bruno has already punctually



       39 Among the themes extensively investigated by Prouvost, there is an attempt to “grasp”
       the real in interacting and configuring through a body that feels. On several occasions, the
       artist asserts that she is not interested in processes of representation or “re-presentation”
       but instead in creating a world of pure sensations for the viewer, including, for example,
      “that sensation of sun or sensation of swallowing or walking” (L. Prouvost, Z. Pilger, “The
       Sun on Your Face”). In this sense, as the artist emphasizes in conversation with Fetzer, her
       environmental filmic performance invites us to critically rethink the tangible world that the
       individual inhabits (L. Prouvost, F. Fetzer, Laure Prouvost and the Concept of Fantasy: 208).
       40 For a recent contribution on the subject see: S. Lanzoni, Empathy: A History (New Heaven;
       London: Yale University Press, 2018).
       41 W. James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications,
       2012).
       42 R.B. Evans, “Haptics in the United States before 1940,” in M. Grunwald, ed., Human
       Haptic Perception: Basic and Applications (Basel-Boston-Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2008): 70-71.

VALENTINA BARTALESI                             27                                         AN-ICON
              investigated,43 the empirical study of sensory perception
              was parcelled out in a registry of sensory rooms equipped
              with special instruments and measuring protocols.44 In 1916,
              twenty years later, Münsterberg published one of the cor-
              nerstones of psychological theory on cinema, organising
              it around the four categories of “depth and movement,”
             “attention,” “memory and imagination” and “emotion.”45
                            It is unlikely to assume Prouvost’s knowledge
              of the thought of Berenson, James, Stein or Münsterberg.
              Yet, it is suggestive to recognise a similar laboratory meth-
              od in the analysis of the modes of the subject’s perception.
              A century later, Prouvost seems to return to the principles
              of film and its experience to immerse the visitors in their
              own narrative. Münsterberg had already revealed himself
              fully aware of one of the main perceptive problems con-
              nected to the filmic experience. Specifically, that relates to
              the “difference between an object of our knowledge and
              an object of our impression” in an awareness consequent
              to the presumed evidence that “the photoplay consists of
              a series of flat pictures in contrast to the plastic objects
              of the real world which surrounds us.”46 Concerning the
              question raised by Münsterberg, for whom “we may stop
              at once: what does it mean to say that the surroundings
              appear to the mind plastic and the moving picture flat?,”47
              Prouvost seems to render this perceptual issue “systemic,”
              generating a short circuit in the statute of the image.
                            By turning on the environment, the viewer en-
              ters physically the setting of the short film. Here, Prou-
              vost’s hypermedia systems fulfil the desire, first pictorial
              and then cinematic, to give body to movement and depth.

      43 G. Bruno, “Film, Aesthetics, Science: Hugo Münsterberg’s Laboratory of Moving Images,”
      Grey Room 36 (2009): 88-113.
      44 See in this regard: D. Parisi, Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from
      Electricity to Computing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2018).
      45 H. Münsterberg, The Photoplay. A Psychological Study (New York-London: D. Appleton
      and Company, 2016).
      46 H. Münsterberg, The Photoplay: 53-54.
      47 Ibid.: 54.

VALENTINA BARTALESI                          28                                        AN-ICON
               The characters of the film performance, whether a fish, an
               iPhone, or a painted frieze, being reified in a sculpture sys-
               tem, act as projections of the moving image. Nevertheless,
               they occupy physical space mainly in a semi-static manner.
               The dormant status of such settings composed of rotating
               sculptures and sculptures that act as fountains, makes
               them resemble huge dioramas or photograms borrowed
               from a dream. What instead allows for a relevant exchange
               between the planar image transmitted by the screen and
               the environmental system in which it is projected are the
               rhythms of the body.
                            On this point, moreover, Munsterberg’s early
               20th-century observations prove prodromal. The Hungarian
               psychologist had identified three levels characterising the
               sphere of attention and its threshold. The first is related
               to the nature of attention, which is always embodied and
               multimodal. Two further stages, however, are implicitly as-
               sociated with the notion of immersion. “If we are fully ab-
               sorbed in our book,” Münsterberg notes, “we do not hear
               at all what is said around us, and we do not see the room;
               we forget everything.”48 This phenomenon of evasion from
               reality and immersion in the fictitious narration for Münster-
               berg depends on specific psychological mechanisms. In
               describing them, the psychologist provides a pseudo-phys-
               iological (and intermedial) reflection on the experience of
               immersion. According to Münsterberg, as well as to Prou-
               vost, the core of the experience of the work, be it a book, a
               sculpture, or a film, lies in the phenomenon and awareness
               according to which “we feel that our body adjusts itself to
               the perception.”49 In this regard, the psychologist compiles
               a practical reflection that can be applied to Prouvost’s film
               performances and her settings:


      48 Ibid.: 93.
      49 Ibid.

VALENTINA BARTALESI                   29                             AN-ICON
Our head enters into the movement of listening for the sound, our
eyes are fixating the point in the outer world. We hold all our muscles
in tension in order to receive the fullest possible impression with
our sense organs. The lens in our eye is accommodated exactly
to the correct distance. In short, our bodily personality works to-
ward the fullest possible impression. But this is supplemented by
a fourth factor. Our ideas and feelings and impulses group them-
selves around the attended object. It becomes the starting point for
our actions while all the other objects in the sphere of our senses
lose their grip on our ideas and feelings.50
                           From a psychophysiological issue, when read
               in Prouvost’s work, attention becomes an immersive strat-
               egy through which the environment is rendered a sensorial,
               active, and immersive setting.

                                 Activating immersion: 						
                                 a world of pure sensations

                            To be surrounded by the environment and to be
               swallowed up by the work and its space: the objects and
               artefacts that generate Prouvost’s intermediate installations
               (ambientazioni) catalyse the attention and the sensorium of
               the visitor by constituting three-dimensional projections of
               the filmic narration.51 By inhabiting them, the viewer inhabits
               the meta-space of the film. More specifically, he covers it
               by adopting a logic of content fruition hypothetically based
               on Augmented Reality. In what terms does this happen?
               Due to a mechanism activated by the close relationship
               between the screen and the environment-environment (am-
               biente-ambientazione) derived from moving pictures. By
       50 Ibid.
       51 M. Roman, Habiter l’exposition. L’artiste et la scénographie (Paris: Manuella Éditions,
       2019): 231; G. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1970).

VALENTINA BARTALESI                              30                                          AN-ICON
               experiencing Prouvost’s short films, the visitor stands on
               the threshold of the image.52 The audio-visual document
               introduces us to the artist’s universe and to storytelling that
               represents the substratum of her practice.
                            The extension of the digital image distinctive of
               AR must be understood from this relationship. The logical
               principle probed by Prouvost seems to emulate the goals of
               the most futuristic “spatial computing technologies,” which
              “assist our transition from a current flat or small-scale global
               data network to an emerging immersive global data ecosys-
               tem with spatial awareness and characteristics, conferring
               virtual properties to physical objects and vice versa, and
               augmenting our sensing and execution capabilities.”53
                            The short film represents the inventive motor of
               Prouvost’s work. What conveys the transition from the mov-
               ing image to three-dimensional space, acting precisely as
              “spatial computing technology,” is the system of artefacts,
               objects and displays which, directly or indirectly exhibited
               by the filmic narration, materialise in the exhibition space.
               For this correlation to achieve the value of an “aesthetic
               system” and not of a static display, it is necessary for the
               setting to stage what Prouvost’s short films aim to convey.
               That is an embodied conception of the relationship between
               image, storytelling, and user. In attempting to determine
               how this can happen, it will emphasise how this synesthetic
               dimension finds its place of invention on the screen and its
               place of multimodal projection in the setting.
                            Here we argue that the immersive matrix of
               Prouvost’s filmic performances can be understood as aris-
               ing from a plexus of factors, including the dual function of
               the screen; the editing of images; the typology of shots;



       52 Cfr. A. Pinotti, Alla soglia delll’immagine (Turin: Einaudi, 2021).
       53 S. Mystakidis, V. Lympouridis, “Immersive Learning,” Encyclopedia of Social Science 3, no.
       2 (2023): 396-405, https://doi.org/10.3390/encyclopedia3020026.

VALENTINA BARTALESI                            31                                         AN-ICON
               the selection of subjects; the linguistic element; the sound
               component.
                             The screen boasts in Prouvost the dual mean-
               ing of “interface,” according to Giuliana Bruno a “surface”
               that connects,54 and of an Albertian window. Not a window
               hinged on a mono-focal perspective, but a mobile opening
               that, almost like a GoPro or the eye of a bird (an archetypal
               figure in the artist’s practice), frames reality, producing a
               kaleidoscope of views. The window screen leads into Prou-
               vost’s sensorial universe. Shooting in the first person, first
               with a camera and since 2007 with an iPhone, Prouvost
               has made amateur films, editing her stylistic lemma.55 The
               fact that the footage is often shot subjectively, with medi-
               um or low-quality frames, and changes in manual framing
               orientation heightens the remote participation of the viewer.
               Not only (and not so much) because according to McLu-
               han’s meteorology and otherwise Laura U. Marks’ “haptic
               criticism,”56 such an image must be integrated perceptually
               by the viewer.
                             More specifically, through embodied simulation
               mechanisms, the visitor tends to activate a form of ges-
               tural simulation concerning the artist’s movements. The
               movements of the artist and the characters immortalised
               in the films – human and non-human beings touching and
               being touched, walking, crawling, dancing, jumping, lick-
               ing, eating, swallowing, and swimming – are simulated on
               a neuronal level by the viewer.57 This procedure is crucial




       54 G. Bruno, Surfaces. Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: The Chicago
       University Press: 2014): passim.
       55 L. Prouvost, F. Fetzer, Laure Prouvost and the Concept of Fantasy: 208.
       56 L.U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of
       Minnesota: 2002): IX-XVII.
       57 Cfr. V. Gallese, M. Guerra, The Empathic Screen: Cinema and Neuroscience (2015), trans. F.
       Anderson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020): 145-180.

VALENTINA BARTALESI                            32                                         AN-ICON
              to feeling immersed, on a perceptual plan, not in the envi-
              ronment but in the narrative.
                            The extensive use of close-ups of living beings
              and things with a specifically connoted texture favouring a
             “haptic” or “tactile” gaze to use two expressions of Rieglian
              ascendancy by Marks and Barker, respectively, respond
              to this objective.58 Close-ups of touching fingers, devour-
              ing lips and teeth, pressing feet, as well as enlargements
              on the fleece of large cattle, shelled eggs, oozing viscous
              substances, and the smooth screens of smartphones – in
              a series of recurring frames in Swallow (2013) and A Way
              to Leak, Lick, Leek (2016) – reflect similar premises. Never-
              theless, Prouvost’s aim is not to make the image’s content
              (i.e., the subject) better seen but rather to make it felt by the
              body. In this sense, the sequences of enlargements return
              a motor circumnavigation around the object. In the wake
              of Maya Deren and Gertrude Stein’s verbal “cartographies,”
              Nevertheless, Prouvost’s aim is not to make the image’s
              content better seen but to feel it by the body.”59
                            The fact that the lemma of hands making things
              occupies a predominant role in Prouvost’s iconology rein-
              forces the impression that the entire narrative is built on the
              mechanism of embodied simulation – for which, let it be
              remembered, the activity of the hands is a fundamental in-
              dicator. In the words of the prehistoric anthropologist Hellen
              Dissanayake, the “hands-on” ability constitutes one of the
              earliest faculties developed in the Sapiens species, linked




      58 L.U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media: passim; J. M. Barker, The
      Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley, University of California Press:
      2009).
      59 A. Michelson, “Bodies in Space: Film as a Carnal Knowledge,” Artforum 7, no. 6 (February
      1969): 55-63.

VALENTINA BARTALESI                           33                                        AN-ICON
               to a dynamically embodied and even emotional knowledge
               of the surrounding environment.60
                             It should also be emphasised that, in Prouvost’s
               practice, such a process of body simulation is also acti-
               vated by the image and its rhythms. Prouvost’s montages
               often present a pounding rhythm. Generally, the narration
               alternates frames with black screens, often occupied by
               direct statements. Visitors must calibrate their attention to
               the qualities of these moving images as if they were holding
               an iPhone in their hands. This happens firstly by aligning
               oneself with their rhythm, as aforementioned above; sec-
               ondly, by confronting the images of agent entities that act
               and wish to act on their user, as Gell61 put it. In this regard,
               the video installation We Know We Are Just Pixels (2014)62
               proves crucial in showing how this dynamic of control and
               immersion takes on a disturbing tone. Exploiting the well-
               known alternation between moving images and utterances,
               the artist directly addresses her viewer, assuming the binary
               unit’s point of view: the panoptic pixel would like to meet
               us, replace us, touch us, weigh us, and grasp our image.
               Additionally, Prouvost, who works primarily on and with
               digital images, frees the latter of their acting as mimetic
               imago. The black frames with statements – from which
               the artist derives paintings based on the same logic – do
               not display anything on a strictly iconographic level. The
               propositions transcribed in capital letters (the predeces-
               sors here are Birnbaum and On Kawara) announce actions
               that, being denied on an iconic level (they are substantially
               black monochromes), must be imagined by the viewer. At
               the same time, the sound component of the short films, in
               which the artist whispers stories of doubtful veracity, builds
               the discourse on consciously incorrect use of grammar and

       60 E. Dissanayake, Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (Washington: University of
       Washington Press: 2000): 99-128.
       61 A. Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
       62 L. Prouvost, F. Fetzer, Laure Prouvost and the Concept of Fantasy: 208.

VALENTINA BARTALESI                             34                                         AN-ICON
               syntax, elaborates periods based on the crasis between
               French and English words and addresses her viewer in the
               first person, all contribute to the creation of storytelling that
               fulfils the main character of immersion. In this sense, in the
               words of Katja Mellmann, “The fundamental characteristic
               of aesthetic illusion is the mental state of ‘immersion’, that
               is, of having one’s attention caught by a stimulus which is
               not co-extensive with the actual situation but, for instance,
               only with a single object or action, or the content of one’s
               own imagination.”63

                                 Conclusion

                             The combination of the phenomena enumerat-
               ed contributes to immersing the visitor in the storytelling
               unfolded by the short film. Prouvost composes three-di-
               mensional settings triggered by the audio-visual image for
               this immersion process. From an observer of the film, the
               visitor becomes the protagonist of its environment setting.
               The factor linking this transition is the spectator’s synes-
               thetic participation. How to describe it?
                             It is no coincidence that, although Prouvost’s
               environmental installations are always practicable on a sen-
               sorimotor level (and sometimes, as we have seen, pres-
               ent components with which one can also interact tactilely),
               these settings remain essentially projections – hence the
               difficulty in framing their practice in the realms of partici-
               patory, interactive, or relational art. By materialising it, they
               extend the projection plane of the moving image. They
               represent the environment in which, for immersion to occur,




       63 K. Mellmann, “On the Emergence of Aesthetic Illusion: An Evolutionary Perspective,” in W.
       Bernhart, A. Mahler, W. Wolf, eds., Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and
       Other Media (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013): 65-88, 72.

VALENTINA BARTALESI                              35                                           AN-ICON
               the viewer must make an effort to imagine being part of
               the narration.
                              In an eloquent statement to this effect, Prou-
               vost argued to Bina von Stauffenberg: “I am not showing
               you something, you have to imagine it.”64 The multiple strat-
               egies aimed at soliciting the viewer’s embodied imagination
               are subject to what constitutes, to all intents and purposes,
               the immobile engine of Prouvost’s practice: desire, whose
               activation mechanisms the artist explores from a medial
               and multimodal point of view. In an interview with Natasha
               Hoare in 2017, the artist argued that “voice and seduc-
               tion” do not represent tools but rather a “method to let you
               come into the work.”65 By simultaneously listening to and
               reading conflicting subtitles, the visitor actively immerses
               himself in the performance’s storytelling: employing “their
               voice to articulate” and decode it, they finally “become the
               protagonist.”66 This linguistic dimension is exacerbated by
               the latent will to satisfy the visitor’s egotistical drives: “my
               works are seductive,” Prouvost points out, “in the way they
               pretend you’re the only one they want to talk to.”67
                              At the same time, Prouvost demonstrates her-
               self completely aware of how integrating the plane of art
               with life constitutes a strenuous, if not even impossible,
               purpose. As the artist confessed to Zoe Pilger in an inter-
               view issued in 2014: “I know that I’m never going to fully
               grasp life in my art.”68 Nonetheless, Prouvost identifies spe-
               cific aesthetics and technical strategies capable, if not of
               fulfilling, at least of approaching such a utopian aim. It is
               precisely on this point that an immersive hypothesis hinges
               on moving images whereby “you can hint at the smell of

       64 L. Provost, B. von Stauffenberg, “Laure Prouvost. An Interview:” 41.
       65 N. Hoare, “Laure Prouvost on Seduction, Language, and Bodily Provocations,” ExtraExtra
       Magazine (2017), https://extraextramagazine.com/talk/laure-prouvost-seduction-language-
       bodily-provocations/, accessed May 3, 2023.
       66 Ibid.
       67 Ibid.
       68 L. Prouvost, Z. Pilger, “The Sun on Your Face.”

VALENTINA BARTALESI                           36                                        AN-ICON
              lemons in a film with the image of a lemon being cut. The
              brain is capable of connecting elements quite quickly, es-
              pecially with video.”69
                          This perceptual mechanism, as well as hav-
              ing been the subject of analysis in neuroscientific circles,70
              appears consciously by Prouvost herself. The “video” rep-
              resents for the artist an “amazing tool” precisely because
              of its “amplifying human sensations” innate aptitude, ex-
              ploiting the “sensory memory” of the percipient subject
              and the reactivation of the “smells of our childhood.”71 Not
              only to amplify, but also to spatialise human sensations:
              this represents the secret factor of immersion in Prouvost’s
              ambienti-ambientazione.




      69 Ibid.
      70 A. Leaver, “Perception and Association of Visual Information in the Imagery of IT, HEAT, HIT
      by Laure Prouvost,” in I. Leaver-Yap, ed., 8 Metaphors (because the moving image is not a
      book) (London: Lux, 2011): 71-73.
      71 L. Prouvost, Z. Pilger, “The Sun on Your Face.”

VALENTINA BARTALESI                            37                                          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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