10.54103/ai/17909



Dream images, anticipations of the future, memories of the past, perceptual distortions, delusional hallucinations, cognitions intoxicated by alcohol and drugs have always inhabited the visual representations of paintings, comics, films, television series, videogames and, more recently, virtual reality installations. We call them “altered states of consciousness”, meaning any perceptual state other than ordinary human perception 



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Introduction: the image between presence and absence
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Introduction: the image between presence and absence
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1
          Introduction:
          the image between
presence and absence
by Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti
                   Altered states
                                         Dream
                                         Hallucination
                                         Filmic representation
                                         Immersive media




                                   Issue №1 Year 2022
                                   → Altered states
                                   Edited by Giancarlo Grossi
                                   and Andrea Pinotti
Introduction:
the image between
              1
                  presence
and absence
Giancarlo Grossi and Andrea Pinotti

Altered states Hallucination Immersive media Filmic representation
Dream

                                   A visual history of alteration

                              Dream images, anticipations of the future,
                 memories of the past, perceptual distortions, delusional
                 hallucinations, cognitions intoxicated by alcohol and drugs
                 have always inhabited the visual representations of paint-
                 ings, comics, films, television series, videogames and, more
                 recently, virtual reality installations. We call them “altered
                 states of consciousness”, meaning any perceptual state
                 other than ordinary human perception.2
                              When they are expressed in a visual form, we see
                 a material picture which represents a mental image.3 While
                 a picture is completely experienced by the senses, mental
                 imagery is ordinarily conceived of as a quasi-perceptual
To quote this essay: G. Grossi and A. Pinotti, “Introduction: the image between presence and absence”,
AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 4-16


        1 This essay is the result of research activity developed within the frame of the project
        AN-ICON. An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images. AN-ICON
        has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s
        Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. [834033 AN-ICON]),
        and is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” of the University of Milan
        into the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2018-2022” attributed by Ministero dell’Istruzione,
        Università e Ricerca (MIUR).
        2 For a rigorous psychological definition of the concept of “altered state of consciousness”,
        embracing mental states occurring in sleep, meditation, hypnosis or while using drugs, see
        Ch.T. Tart, Altered States of Consciousness (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1972).
        3 The distinction between the materiality, objectivity and prevalent visual character of the
        image intended as picture and the immateriality, subjectivity and multisensorial aspect of the
        mental image is perfectly explained by W.J.T. Mitchell in “What is an Image?”, New Literary
        History 15, no. 3 (1984): 503-537.

GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI                4                                           AN-ICON
               experience that occurs in the absence of external stimuli.4
               What makes these pictures recognizable to us as such? We
               cannot, in fact, compare them with the reality of the mental
               image, which we know only in the first person, trapped in
               the secret of individual experience. And yet, it seems that
               the visual has always elaborated strategies, codes, and
               arrangements to ensure that, within a visual narrative, an
               image is interpreted as absent, because it is present in
               a mental space or as a perception of an altered state of
               consciousness.
                             These representations are historically and cul-
               turally determined, depending on the way a mental image
               is conceived in each era and geographical context. The
               French historian Yannick Ripa, for example, has distin-
               guished an “ancien régime du rêve”, in which the dream
               is thought of as an external and metaphysical entity from
               the modern conception that leads it back to the universe
               of an inner subjectivity.5
                             At the same time, the medium that delivers
               these mental visions also contributes to differentiating cul-
               tural codes and shared representations that shape them. In
               Füssli’s The Nightmare (1781) or in Goya’s El sueño de la
               razón produce monstruos (1797), the oneiric emerges from
               a juxtaposition of the sleeping body with its nightmares,
               co-present in the same visual box. Differently, comics such
               as Winsor McCay’s Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend (1904-1913)
               and Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905-1927), represent
               altered states and especially dreaming in a visual regime
               that combines simultaneity and succession.6 The result is
               a progressive escalation of bizarreness that can only be
               interrupted by the last vignette, when the dreamer usually
               falls off the bed.
                             Cinema, ever since Méliès, has used particular
               fades such as cross-dissolves to signal the passage from
               physical to mental presence, be it in memory, imagination,
      4 A. Richardson, Mental Imagery (London: Routledge, 1969).
      5 Y. Ripa, Histoire du rêve. Regards sur l’imaginaire des Français au 19e siècle (Paris: Olivier
      Orban, 1988).
      6 T. Gunning, “The art of succession: reading, writing, and watching comics”, Critical Inquiry
      40, no. 3 (2014): 36-51.

GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI              5                                           AN-ICON
               or dream. Another peculiar case is given by the extreme
               instability of the camera with which the alterations caused
               by indigestion, drunkenness, and drug consumption are
               rendered since early movies. Jean Epstein’s comparison
               between alcohol and cinema is thus significant to define the
               multiform, fluid, and malleable perception of the universe
               introduced by the medium.7
                             However, none of these codes is fixed: cultural
               contexts and historical fractures introduce radical differ-
               ences within each mediascape, and the same happens
               if we consider processes such as hybridization, conver-
               gence, and remediation of the different media. Nevertheless,
               a dreamlike or hallucinatory image remains immediately
               recognizable to many viewers. It is a representation that
               indicates its absence rather than its presence.

                                 The altered states of film theory

                            The way in which cinema not only records ob-
               jective reality but also visualizes mental processes has al-
               ways been one of the most hotly-debated questions in film
               theory. In 1916, Hugo Münsterberg’s important essay The
               Photoplay. A Psychological Study laid the foundations of
               the question: the cinematic image is never merely objective,
               since the movement and depth that the spectator perceives
               in the film do not exist in themselves, but are the product of
               the cooperation of the images with the spectator’s mental
               activity.8 Moreover, in the film a series of techniques ex-
               ternalizes and makes materially visible on the screen cer-
               tain mental processes: attention is recreated by the zoom
               and the close-up; memory is expressed through the use
               of flashbacks; imagination, conceived as the capacity to
               anticipate future events, is portrayed through what contem-
               porary film grammar would call flashforwards. The relation-
               ship between film and mind thus appears analogical, based


      7 J. Epstein, “Alcool et cinéma” (1949), in S. Keller, J.N. Paul, eds., Jean Epstein: Critical
      Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012): 395-404.
      8 H. Münsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study (1916) (New York City: Dover Publications, 1970).

GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI               6                                           AN-ICON
               on the similarity of the respective cognitive processes.9 A
               further peculiarity recognized by Münsterberg is that of
               visualizing what the characters “see in their own minds”,10
               images belonging to memory and dreams whose transi-
               tion is reported by “soft-focus images, lighting variations,
               superimpositions”.11
                              In the same wake, in his famous essay devoted
               to Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures (1934), also
               Erwin Panofsky remarked that “the movies have the power,
               entirely denied to the theater, to convey psychological ex-
               periences by directly projecting their content to the screen,
               substituting, as it were, the eye of the beholder for the
               consciousness of the character”.12
                             The metonymic and metaphoric relationship
               between film and mind – to use Christian Metz’s semio-
               logical terminology –13 are the basis of the aesthetic spec-
               ificity of cinema, which succeeds in materializing mental
               operations with greater effectiveness than the previous arts.
               Sergej Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, with its adherence
               to thought faculties such as analogies and oppositions, en-
               hances this hallucinatory and oneiric power of the movie. It
               is no accident that in his Non-indifferent Nature (1945-1947)
               the Soviet director and theorist analyzes mental visualiza-
               tion techniques such as those used in Loyola’s spiritual
               exercises being interested in the artistic achievement of
               ecstasy and pathos.14
                              In many theories cinema takes on the charac-
               teristics of a mind objectified in material images and sounds:
               a magical double of the self-produced by processes of

      9 N. Carroll, “Film/mind analogies: The case of Hugo Münsterberg”, Journal for Aesthetics
      and Criticism 46, no. 4 (1988): 489-499.
      10 J. Moure, “The cinema as art of the mind: Hugo Münsterberg, first theorist of subjectivity
      in film”, in D. Chateau, ed., Subjectivity: Filmic Representation and the Spectator’s Experience
      (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011): 23-40, 39.
      11 Ibid.
      12 E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures” (1934), in Three Essays on Style
      (Cambridge MA: The Mit Press, 1995): 98.
      13 Ch. Metz, “Metaphor/metonymy, or the imaginary referent”, Camera Obscura: Feminism,
      Culture, and Media Studies 3, no. 1 (1981): 42-65. See also L. Williams, “Dream rhetoric and film
      rhetoric: metaphor and metonymy in Un chien andalou”, Semiotica 33, no. 1-2 (1981): 87-103.
      14 S. Eisenstein, Non-indifferent Nature (1945-1947), trans. H. Marshall (Cambridge-New York
      City: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 171. See also M. Lefebvre, “Eisenstein, rhetoric and
      imaginicity: towards a revolutionary memoria”, Screen 41, no. 4 (2000): 349-368.

GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI              7                                           AN-ICON
               identification and projection for Edgar Morin among oth-
               ers;15 a brain endowed with perceptions, actions, and affec-
               tions according to Gilles Deleuze;16 a narcissistic regression
               analogous to dreaming in the perspective of Jean-Louis
               Baudry and Christian Metz.17 Metz in particular underlines
               some radical differences between cinema and that partic-
               ular form of mental image constituted by the dream: the
               awareness of being at the cinema versus the unawareness
               of dreaming; the impression of reality of the film versus the
               illusion of reality of nocturnal visions; the real exteriority of
               images and sounds perceived in the cinema versus the inte-
               riority of the “hallucinatory psychosis of desire”; the logical
               consistency of the film versus the bizarre discontinuity of
               dream images. Yet a profound analogy remains in the half-
               way states of both cinema and dream: when spectators are
               so engrossed that they interact with the characters on the
               screen and gesticulate like sleepwalkers, or when, thanks
               to the activation of defensive attention, the dream becomes
               more lucid and conscious.
                             Returning to the problem of the representation
               of altered states of consciousness, it is necessary to con-
               sider how this has a history that is linked to the evolution of
               the moving image. In Gilles Deleuze’s cine-philosophy, for
               example, it is clear that the emergence of an image capable
               of questioning the subjective/objective distinction is linked
               to the emergence of modern cinema. In this historical con-
               text, in fact, a radical disorganization of the action-image
               takes place, with a prevalence of a pure optic-auditory sen-
               sation over its motor extension and narrative actualization.
               In this way, recollection-images, mental visualizations, hal-
               lucinations, and dreams take on a new centrality, in the form
               of virtualities that remain suspended and non-actualized,

      15 E. Morin, The cinema, or the Imaginary Man (1956), trans. L. Mortimer (Minneapolis MI:
      University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
      16 G. Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image (1983), trans. H. Tomlinson, B. Habberjam
      (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Id., Cinema 2. The Time Image (1985),
      trans. H. Tomlinson, R. Galeta (Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
      17 J.-L. Baudry, “Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus” (1970), trans. A.
      Williams, Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974): 39-47; Id., “The Apparatus” (1975), trans. B. Augst,
      Camera Obscura, no. 1 (1976): 104-126; Ch. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and
      the Cinema (1977), trans. C. Britton et al. (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1982).

GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI             8                                          AN-ICON
                typical of a crystal-image in which temporalities are reflect-
                ed simultaneously.18 Thus the dream-image assumes a par-
                ticular centrality. Following Henri Bergson and his famous
                discussion on dreams, Deleuze refers to the panoramic
                character of dream-images, which is also typical of near-
                death experiences in which the whole of life suddenly ap-
                pears before one’s eyes.19 What is created is a weak link
                between the optical or auditory sensations and this pan-
                oramic view of the whole. There are in fact two procedures
                common to the dream-image of cinema:


One proceeds by rich and overloaded means [...] dissolves, super-
impositions, deframings, complex camera movements, special ef-
fects, manipulations in the laboratory [...]. The other, on the contrary,
is very restrained, working by clear cuts or montage-cut, making
progress simply through a perpetual unhinging which “looks like”
dream, but between objects that remain concrete.20
                              Both recollection-images (flashbacks) and dream-
                images are virtual, but in different forms. The recollection-im-
                ages are actualized past events, while the dream-images are
                rooted in an image that refers itself to another virtual time, thus
                activating an infinite path of references. The result is a motor
                process very different from the concreteness of action, which
                is described by Deleuze following a conceptual apparatus
                taken from Ludwig Binswanger, as a movement of the world,
               “the fact of being inhaled by the world”.21 This is a virtuality and
                immersivity of the image which cinema proposes in its repre-
                sentations, but which the new digital media we know today
                have the power to realize at a technical level, with the user’s
                perception absorbed and enveloped by the virtual image.
                             The recollection-image and the flashback have
                also been the subject of further theoretical investigation


       18   A. Powell, Deleuze, Altered States and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
       19   Deleuze, Cinema 2: 55-67.
       20   Ibid.: 58.
       21   Ibid.: 291.

GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI               9                                          AN-ICON
              since Deleuze. One example is Maureen Turim’s work,22 in
              which the flashback is considered as a structural device of
              film that is fundamental for understanding the non-linear
              development of film history itself. This process is particular-
              ly visible in the comparison between the representation of
              memories in melodrama and that presented by modernist
              cinema. At the same time, in the flashback emerges the
              strategy through which cinema represents the intersection
              between the individual dimension of memory and the so-
              cio-political dimension of history.
                             More recent approaches to the relationship be-
              tween cinema and altered states of consciousness see the
              medium as a technological extension of a mind-body plexus
              to be rediscovered, above all, starting from the media-ar-
              chaeological investigation of 19th century sciences of the
              mind. This is in fact the episteme that witnesses the emer-
              gence of the cinematic experience. Along these lines, we can
              quote the genetic relationship between hypnosis and cinema
              identified by Ruggero Eugeni,23 Stefan Andriopoulos,24 and
              Raymond Bellour;25 the investigation into the relationship
              between cinema and hysteria proposed by Rae Beth Gor-
              don,26 Emmanuelle André,27 and Mireille Berton;28 and the
              link between the psychological mapping of gesture and the
              rise of the cinematic apparatus theorized by Pasi Valiaho.29




      22 M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (London: Routledge, 1989). For a
      discussion on the relationship between the time of new media devices and the time
      represented within them, see G. Stewart, Framed Time. Towards a Postfilmic Cinema
      (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
      23 R. Eugeni, La relazione d’incanto. Studi su cinema e ipnosi (Milan: Vita & Pensiero, 2002).
      24 S. Andriopoulos, Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of
      Cinema (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
      25 R. Bellour, Les corps du cinéma: hypnose, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L., 2009).
      26 R.B. Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford:
      Stanford University Press, 2001).
      27 E. André, Le choc du sujet. De l’hystérie au cinéma (XIXe-XXIe siècle) (Rennes: Presses
      Universitaires de Rennes, 2011).
      28 M. Berton, Les corps nerveux des spectateurs. Cinéma et sciences du psychisme de 1900
      (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 2015).
      29 P. Valiaho, Mapping the Moving Image. Gesture, Thought, and Cinema circa 1900
      (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010).

GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI            10                                          AN-ICON
                               From hallucination to virtual realities

                            In all these theoretical perspectives it becomes
              evident how cinema, by representing altered states of con-
              sciousness, often reflects on its own affinity with dreams
              and hallucination. More precisely, on its identity as a ma-
              terialization of mental visualization processes. Ken Rus-
              sell’s film Altered States (1980), which also gives the title
              to this monographic issue of AN-ICON. Studies in Envi-
              ronmental Images, can be considered paradigmatic in this
              regard. In this film, the psychiatrist Edward Jessup (William
              Hurt), loosely based on the real-life figure of the neurosci-
              entist John Lilly, carries out a series of experiments with
              the help of an isolation tank and the ingestion of halluci-
              nogenic mushrooms. His aim is to understand at first hand
              the subjective experience of schizophrenic patients, achiev-
              ing a hallucinatory and dream-like perception that belongs
              to primitive mental states. The film echoes a number of
              ideas related to the redefinition of consciousness typical of
              1970s-80s counterculture. Julian Jaynes’s essay The Origin
              of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
              (1976) is an example of these theories.30 In this book, the
              subjective perception of schizophrenia is presented as an
              activation of an evolutionary state prior to the emergence
              of consciousness, the “bicameral mind”, in which the right
              hemisphere of the brain was allocated the function of com-
              municating through visual and verbal hallucinations, and
              the left hemisphere had the task of obeying and executing.
                           The film plays on two visual registers: one in the
              third person, that of the scientific community observing the
              experiment, and one in the first person, where the subjec-
              tive hallucinations of the protagonist emerge in fragments.
              The hallucination is thus presented as a repeatable experi-
              ment, through the insertion of the body in a device suitable
              for the production and reproduction of altered states. But
              what kind of medium does this device really resemble? The

      30 J. Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)
      (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).

GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI          11                                        AN-ICON
             body is immersed in water which, being at the same tem-
             perature as the body, cancels all sensory perception and,
             with it, all distinctions between inside and outside, tactile
             and external input. In this radical absence of the world, the
             mental image takes full shape, enveloping the person and
             becoming the only sensory horizon that can be perceived.
             Not only that: the mental image presents itself as a real
             space, and the effects of the hallucination seem to modify
             the user’s own body (in the movie, transforming him into an
             Australopithecus). This hallucination represented in cinema
             takes us forward to another device, which, like a halluci-
             nation, does not allow any escape from the image, but a
             radical symbiosis with it. This is virtual reality.
                            In virtual reality, unlike cinema, it is not so easy
             to distinguish between objective and subjective shots.
             Firstly, because the virtual frame is always in some way sub-
             jective, since its source depends on the movements of the
             viewer’s gaze to which it adheres, saturating the field of
             vision. Secondly, precisely because of the powerful sense
             of presence and feeling of being there produced by virtual
             reality, in immersive digital environments it becomes more
             difficult to represent the estrangement from actual percep-
             tion that a previous medium like cinema obtained through
             cross-dissolves and other visual strategies. Is it therefore
             possible to portray altered states in immersive media? Can
             the tyranny of the sense of presence eliminate the images
             of absence, or do we just have to investigate new strategies
             of representation?
                            In fact, some virtual reality installations pres-
             ent themselves, directly, in the form of memories, dreams,
             hallucinations, mental visions. Examples are virtual reality
             experiences such as Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (Ar-
             naud Colinart, Amaury LaBurthe, Peter Middleton, James
             Spinney, 2016), in which the user can experience the in-
             ner perspective of the blind theologian John Hull; The Key
             (Céline Tricart, 2019), which portrays the dreams of an Iraqi
             migrant; Porton Down (Callum Cooper, 2019), in which the
             user becomes the guinea pig in hallucination tests per-
             formed using LSD; Cosmos within Us (Tupac Martir, 2019)
GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI   12                                AN-ICON
             dedicated to the temporally and spatially unregulated per-
             ception of an Alzheimer’s patient; finally, the mystical and
             lysergic journey of the Amazonian shamanic ritual repro-
             duced in Ayahuasca - Kosmik Journey (Jan Kounen, 2019).

                           The present issue

                          These are problems that the first issue of AN-
             ICON. Studies on Environmental Images aims to investigate.
             A peculiar attention is devoted to the comparison between
             two media systems: an analogue system, dominated by
             the altered states of cinema, and a virtual one, where new
             experiential possibilities of virtual, augmented, and mixed
             reality emerge. The problem that runs through this com-
             parison is essentially whether the possibility of presenting
             perceptively distorted states belongs more properly to the
             cinematic image, or whether it is still at the center of the
             new digital and immersive mediascape.
                          Barbara Grespi’s and Giuseppe Previtali’s con-
             tributions are directly related in their common purpose to
             search for a status of the virtual image in cinema in some
             nodal moments of film theory that interrogate the repre-
             sentation of mental states. Grespi’s essay starts from Wim
             Wenders’ Until the End of the World (1991) and from the
             capability of the imaginary device represented in the movie
             to exteriorize and prosthesize subjective experiences such
             as visions and dreams. The fictional medium, halfway be-
             tween cinema and virtual reality, allows Grespi to reflect on
             the filmic access to mental states. This issue is investigated
             through the recovery of the first, but lesser-known, of the
             two volumes of Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma (1963-
             1965) by Jean Mitry. This is a pillar of film theory, analyzed
             by Grespi in its unacknowledged Husserlian roots. Thus,
             the technical and psychic concept of “projection”, under-
             stood as a specific form of actualization, “an effect in which
             the perception of physical image intersects with mental
             envisioning”, becomes especially central to introduce a


GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI   13                           AN-ICON
             possible comparison between the cinematic forms of the
             visible and those that emerge in virtual experiences.
                           Cinematic altered states, however, undergo
             radical transformations in history: this is what Previtali’s arti-
             cle discusses, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of cinema
             and examining the differences between the movement-im-
             age of classical cinema, in which dreams and memories
             are also expressed as physical realities intertwined with
             the world, and the time-image of modern cinema, capable
             of adhering to the dynamics of thought. For Previtali, an
             example of this process is Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Straw-
             berries (1957), where recollection-images are not real flash-
             backs, but rather virtual mixtures of memory, imagination,
             and dream, as evidenced by the fact that the protagonist
             relives the past moments of his childhood and youth while
             remaining as old as he actually is in the present.
                           Still anchored to Bergman’s cinema, Luca Ac-
             quarelli’s investigation into the emergence of hallucination
             within the cinematic diegesis is grounded in the semiotic
             analysis of a further incursion: that of the photographic
             still image within the equidistant flow of the film’s moving
             frames. This can be seen in Bergman’s Persona (1966),
             but also in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) and
             Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), the latter consisting almost
             entirely of still images. In these moments a new balance
             is established between dream-states and the testimonial
             power of the image, seen through André Bazin’s conception
             of photography as “true hallucination”.
                           Enrico Terrone, in a different perspective, con-
             siders cinema in terms of a disembodied experience, or-
             ganized in a space that has our sight but not our body as
             its own center. Because of this condition, cinema is able
             to approximate to non-perceptual attitudes such as mem-
             ories and dreams, but not completely emulate them. On
             the contrary, this emulation would be a concrete possibility
             for virtual reality precisely thanks to its adherence to the
             gaze and body of the spectator coupled with a potential


GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI   14                               AN-ICON
             for manipulation and alteration that it is impossible to find
             in another embodied experience such as that of theater.
                            But how are altered states expressed in the new
             immersive and digital mediascape? Is it possible in virtual
             reality to make a distinction between the representation of
             a real state from that of an exclusively mental state? First
             of all, we need to investigate how the digital radically trans-
             forms the very ideas of visual perception and image. This is
             evident in Antonio Somaini’s contribution, devoted to new
             artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning
             and machine vision. In fact, their non-human perceptual
             functions appear in some cases as altered states that pro-
             duce dreamlike images, similar to those found in computer
             programs such as the one called, significantly, Google Deep
             Dream. Thus, it becomes necessary for Somaini to study
             the artistic practices that exploit the productive potential
             of machine learning in a creative and revolutionary way,
             such as in the artworks of Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and
             Grégory Chatonsky.
                            The perceptual dimension is also at the center
             of Claudio Paolucci’s contribution. From the point of view of
             cognitive semiotics, Paolucci investigates the hallucinatory
             character of ordinary perception, always shaped by the in-
             tervention of imagination, to analyze the way mental states
             are represented in virtual and augmented environments.
             If perception can be defined in terms of a hallucination
             controlled by the world, what changes in immersive envi-
             ronments is only the simulated character of the world itself.
             The states of imagination, memory, and hallucination are
             then reproduced in virtual and augmented reality following
             two possible strategies: either in a pan-perceptual modal-
             ity, exploiting the full sense of presence produced by the
             immersive devices, or following the audiovisual strategies
             inherited from previous audiovisual languages with which
             virtual and augmented reality share the same formal appa-
             ratus of enunciation. To exemplify this double expressive



GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI   15                            AN-ICON
              possibility, Paolucci analyzes the immersive videogame
              Resident Evil 7: Biohazard.
                           At this point, it becomes necessary to under-
              stand what the specifically dreamlike and hallucinatory
              character of virtual reality consists of and how it differs
              from other established media. The joint paper written by
             film theorist Martine Beugnet and new media artist Lily
              Hibberd focuses on the role played by darkness, which in
              the new immersive media takes on a completely new po-
              tential compared to cinema. In fact, it becomes an intrinsic
              component of the environmentalized image of the former
             – coupled with the illusion of depth and the replication of
              motion. If the darkness of the traditional audiovisual dis-
              tinguishes states of self and otherness, in virtual reality it
              envelops the users depriving them of the sense of distance
              and leading them back to a state of radical loss, in which
              they are haunted by sporadic sounds and visions, faithful
              to the dynamics more proper to memory and dream.
                           Pietro Montani’s essay then becomes the ef-
              fective conclusion and synthesis of all the questions raised
              by this issue. The dreamlike character of virtual reality con-
              sists for Montani in a precise work of oneiric imagination,
              capable of distancing itself from linguistic thought without
              getting trapped in a pure hallucination, but finding its proper
              status in what Freud defines as “Bilderschrift” (pictographic
              script), a syncretic relationship between images and writ-
              ing functions, both pre-linguistic and performative, which
              can also be read in the Kantian terms of a schematization
              without concept. An expressive condition which resurfaces
              in early cinema and especially in Eisenstein’s film theory
              of the 1920s and which today finds a specific declination
              in immersive virtual installations such as Carne y Arena
              (2017) by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and VR_I (2018) by
              choreographer Gilles Jobin, where different participants
              can share a collective lucid dream. In fact, new media do
              not merely represent altered states of consciousness: they
              take on their performative power.


GIANCARLO GROSSI AND ANDREA PINOTTI   16                             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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