Iconophilia: Perpetual Morphosis

(Zone Books, Princeton University Press.)

“Unframedness. Presentness. Immediateness. It is under these three titles — intimately related — that we now experience the image by means of those devices that constitute image-making strategies: virtual immersive environments.”

Andrea Pinotti

The title of this breathtakingly insightful book by Andrea Pinotti, At the Threshold of the Image: From Narcissus to Virtual Reality, should be taken quite literally. Consider it what rightly amounts to a veritable biography of the Image: its history, both overt and covert in all our lives, and as both a secret story communally shared and also an unimaginable one taunting us to keep going towards what used to be called the future. The book’s image-archive extends from a time long before any recorded history even existed, right through to a time after which history, at least as we once regarded it, may also have vanished. And perhaps owing to the sheer acceleration and amplification of our lives, the future of the real and recognizable image itself might even have ceased to exist at all. The most succinct and accurate synopsis of At the Threshold of the Image is equally breathless: this is an exploration of the impact of immersive experiences on visual practices from cave painting to virtual reality.

The liminal realm, where we ourselves become the actual content of the spectacle itself: that is the zone being investigated here. Now that we have seemingly crossed the Rubicon, no longer just a river in Rome but also a mental river flowing through all our minds, and embraced the baleful possibility of synthetic intelligence holding us hostage – after we allowed the machine to colonize us when we weren’t looking – we have even entertained the disconcerting notion that we’ve already been living in a kind of virtual reality stage set all along, as implied so forcefully by Philip K. Dick among others. The time is right, then, to examine the more covert history of the image, the one that is so embedded and embodied in our post-Neanderthal circuitry that we barely notice the subtle continuity at play in our relentless search for new images with which to illustrate the old story. The time, in other words, for pausing at the threshold of the image, if only to catch our mental breath, before trudging on again.

In order to do so, Pinotti, a professor of aesthetics at the University of Milan who is also the author of Empathy: A History of an Idea from Plato to the Posthuman, takes us all the way back to the cave. There we find the basic allegory within which we have persisted to dwell, despite the radical changes and enhancements afforded us by our rapid advances in technology while we were being occupied by its phantoms: the shadows reflected and refracted on the cave’s walls. Some were placed there accidentally by the flickering campfires of our antecedents and mistaken for real, others we placed there ourselves by painting animal images on the cavern’s roof and imagined that they could be real if we wanted them to be. It was the first stone museum, a museum of dreams, and we still visit it daily without even realizing it, whenever we watch a film or turn on our computer screens.

One of the many pleasures of this book is the manner in which the author examines the consequences of the primal desire of human beings to actually enter an image, not just to observe or even be absorbed by its potential beauty or powers but to literally erase the boundary between ourselves and the image we so admire that we want to be in it totally, to live in it. Cinema provides something of the germ of this desire, and in quite a majestic manner, but still people wanted more, and Pinotti studies what that more might consist of and how it propels up forward into a future where something like the concept of the popular film The Matrix might no longer be fictional. The main crux of his proposition here is that every culture has already attempted to realize this salient desire of absorption by whatever technical means were available to it at the time: rocks with paint or digital screens with pixels, or VR headsets.

The cave drawings at Lescaux, dating circa 20,000 BCE.

Along the way, by virtue of his expert guidance across a territory customarily traversed in the dreams (or the nightmares) concocted by poets, storytellers, artists and musicians, Pinotti demonstrates with ample skill how we eventually manufactured our own caves high above ground, within which we could even wear mobile virtual reality gear in order to further fuel the fires within. But it all commences at the water’s edge. After emerging from the cave, where we were entranced by dark shadows on dark walls some twenty millennia ago, Pinotti commences his trek through time outside in the blazing sunlight of Greek mythology, a mere two millennia past, where we first encounter the enigmatic emblem of our passion for self-indentified images: the watery surface that hypnotized Narcissus into an endless loop of doomed personal adoration.

The story of Narcissus and his inaccessible lover Echo is one of the most enduring fables from Greek mythology, with its binary tale of self-love and unrequited love providing a recursive template for thousands of years. Narcissus was a handsome youth from Thespiae who was told by the blind seer Tiresias that he would lead a long life as long as he did not “know himself,” a prophecy which was ironically opposite to the philosophical maxim inscribed on the Temple of Apollo in the ancient precinct of Delphi. “Know thyself” might well have benefitted from a subtitle: but don’t get carried away.

Narcissus, Caravaggio, 1597.

His beauty was of such magnitude that he fell in love with his own reflection in a pond, eventually drowning and being transformed into the flower that bears his name. Echo, meanwhile, was an Oriead nymph in Boetia who also fell in love with Narcissus and admired him from a distance, but she had been cursed by the goddess Hera for her dalliance with Zeus and was left without a voice of her own, except to repeat whatever was called out to her. Thus when Narcissus asked, “Who is watching me?” all he heard back was that same phrase over and over again. And from this simple admonition against solipsistic self-absorption Pinotti launches the trajectory of his fascinating conjectures, first pondering how naïve we need to be unable to differentiate between our self and a mere reflection of that self. Pinotti also artfully differentiates the two Narcissuses, the naïve and the self-aware:

“A story that has been capable of deeply molding the imagination of the West for many centuries, a myth in which at stake is not only the origin of the image, but also the transgression of the boundaries between reality and representation. Returning again today to this myth may allow us to unleash its unexpected potentialities: regarding not so much the origins of painting but its extreme outcomes, which we experience today in the form of immersive virtual environments, in the form that is, of environments in which the transgression of the boundaries between reality and representation is configured, as we shall see, as a peculiar form of narcissism.” Indeed, it is of such a complex variety that it has remained lodged in our psyches long past the 20th century, even though the means of transmitting its images has mutated dramatically across acres of time.

Invention of Drawing, Joseph Suvee, 1793.

We move adroitly from cave walls to obscura shadow boxes, to photographs and films, to digital domains leading right up to VR equipment inaugurating a 360-degree immersive environment (albeit a simulated one) in which the frame that used to contain it separately from the real world vanishes entirely. This new, or latest, technology, of course, renders the physical medium which used to house the image, and is now either transparent, porous, or both. But Pinotti also hastens to draw our attention to at least one of several dangers inherent in these new image delivery systems: once the borderline between the real world and the domain I often refer to as the “Iconosphere”  disappears, not only can we enter fully into the image, but the now penetrated image also comes pouring into our actual world and lives amongst us. To my mind, it therefore colonizes us. As Pinotti explores both the desire to vanish into images and the existential dread of images subsuming our own reality, he brilliantly touches lightly upon the terrains of myth, drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, panoramas, phantasmagorias, and also the original primitive creative origins of VR itself, 3-D cinema.

Origins of Painting, Louis Ducis, 1808.

Stranded on the desert island of the self, the forward march of images of mythical otherness continues apace, unabated even as it arrives in our own drastically solipsistic postmodern world. But as Pinotti stipulates:

 

If, as has been observed, every age deserves its own Narcissus, it would be impossible to do justice here to the history of its iconography, which is indeed characterized by the prevalence of the self-aware type, but will never definitively erase the polarity between naivety and image consciousness. The myth of Narcissus contemplating his reflected image at the spring is inexorably linked to the theme of the mirror and its complex symbolism. The same with immersive virtual environments (VR): how they are transforming our experience of images.

His utterly earnest query is simple and yet profound, as he identifies the ambiguous profile of immersiveness (in what I have often referred to as the Neo-Baroque) as a true two-faced Janus: the loss of the boundaries of the actual self in the indistinguishable interzone between reality and a fused image-representation. In other words, the complete collapse of a border between the spectacle that is perceived and what is imagined. Until that woeful time, though, we can still revel in what Musil’s enigmatic character of Ulrich, in his appropriately titled The Man Without Qualities, referred to as “borderline experiences.” And today they abound more than ever, as we occupy a zone almost exclusively devoted to ever more porous borders.

Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Salvador Dali, 1937

Such a liminal perceptual zone, it occurs to me, is precisely what we have already witnessed in the cinematic art of David Lynch, and especially in the hyper-personalized at-home experience of his one-of-a-kind subversive narrative television series Twin Peaks in 1990 (written with Mark Frost). Lynch and Frost became the new corporate brand for entertainment as immersive as it could possibly be while still situated in a two-dimensional medium. One shudders to think what it might have felt like in a VR tech delivery system.

The waking dream-world of hyper-reverie that was Twin Peaks.

My favourite chapter in Threshold is Number Six, “In/Out,” where Pinotti gets down to the brass tacks of his core thesis: “The journey through immersive optical devices in the nineteenth century has led us to the advent of the cinema and the various strategies for modulating the gaze that moving image technology can offer in order to promote an osmosis between reality and representation.” And what a long strange trip it’s been. He then puts forward his analysis of what he terms exemplary cases in the history of cinema that have focused on the dual “in/out” moment of entering (immersion) and exiting (emersion) the image. Identifying them as strategies, of course, also implies that they will never end, at least not until the Wachowskis’ fiction The Matrix has come to pass in all its sinister glory. For me, some of the most profound media works exploring the erasure of inside and outside the image have been not in the entertainment industry per se but rather in the customarily more rarefied atmospheres of the fine art world. The best examples that come to mind are touched upon by the author with the gravity they truly deserve as what the he feels are “exemplary cases.”

The Swimmer (1984) by Studio Azzunno.

The Swimmer is part of an installation by an artists’ workshop in Milan featuring a 1984 video environment in which a swimmer swims his laps nonstop through a sequence of synchronized screens, while appearing to break through the frames of twelve side-by-side monitors. An additional monitor showing the moving image of a clock in an overall blue-lit space saturating the ambience with the sensation of an underwater world is supplemented by the sounds of water and music. The room containing the installation is also itself designed to simulate an indoor swimming pool.

Bill Viola, Surrender/Double Negative (2001).

Surrender/Double Negative (2001), shown in Gloucestershire by American video artist Bill Viola, emphasizes that ‘transcendence and the desire for human connection are integral to our condition.” It consists of a diptych of double-plasma split-screen displays presenting a woman and man in what appear to be moments of anguish which could just as easily be ecstasy. Each is a reflection of the other, submerging in water and then re-emerging with a powerful gasp of breath, with a dominant theme being untouchable desire, and potentially also unreachable aims.

Vanessa V., Apnea (2016).

Apnea by Vanessa V., (2016), is an interactive and immersive open documentary about migrants at sea with a poetic focus on what she calls “the eternity of absence.” Realized in Lampedusa while exploring the emotional dimension of those who venture outward toward sanctuary, she also proposes what she calls “an inner itinerary that we can all recognize: a cartography of feelings and fears mapped using interactive immersive technologies and an exhibition of objects salvaged from the sea.” In addition to sharing the sensation of being lost/found on the water in search of deliverance, the audience itself goes on a VR voyage which plunges it into a shared experience of sensory displacement.

In his book’s epilogue, Pinotti sums up his aesthetic enterprise as a philosopher of images perfectly while referencing the notion of binding/unbinding as constitutive acts of human beings, calling them “the bordering creature who has no border.” He stipulates that the blurring of image and reality is potentially averted by the traditional art framing device (something which I, and he, and a conceptual mentor he identifies as the “philosopher of separation,” Georg Simmel, all firmly believe in), largely because that connecting tissue of the classical frame holds the two operations of image and reality in a bond of intimate dialectical embrace: 

“Threshold” is the name of this embrace. A boundary line between the inside and the outside, the interval between the iconic and the real, it is both a bridge and a door between these two worlds. At the very moment when the image establishes itself as an island, desire is irresistibly triggered to throw a bridge across the moat, to conquer that island. Each visual culture, employing the technologies available in its time and in its own iconic strategies, has interrogated that threshold in its own way.

And those of us who share this feeling of “iconophilia,” the deep love of images, will always hope that the threshold sustains its historical prominence, because in that way we can maintain the necessary emotional distance (the zone where Benjamin’s aura erupts) required to continue being conscious of the fact that we are indeed still savoring both the image and its threshold, and not merely ourselves.

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.