Introduction

Immersivity and interactivity in virtual environments have enabled the production of pictures that elicit in the user an intense feeling of being incorporated into a quasi-real environment. These pictures aim to attain immediateness (concealing an extreme technological mediateness), unframedness (bypassing the traditional separateness between image and reality and between images and spectators), and presentness (simulating a lack of referentiality). In doing so, they paradoxically challenge their status as images-of, that is, as icons: they are veritable ‘an-icons’.

The lecture presents some of the main issues addressed by the ERC project ‘AN-ICON’ (2019–2024), exploring ‘an-iconology’ as a new paradigm able to address the challenging landscape of contemporary image production and consumption. Subjects relating to an-icons are no longer visual observers in front of images isolated from the real world: they become experiencers living in a quasi-world that offers multisensory stimuli and allows sensorimotor affordances and interactions. These new forms of image experience require a new understanding, as they are bound to radically change human relations to images. Andrea Pinotti is professor of aesthetics at the Department of Philosophy of Università degli Studi di Milano. He recently was EURIAS Senior Fellow at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (2017–2018) and received the Wissenschaftspreis of the Aby-Warburg-Stiftung (2018). His main research interests include aesthetics, art theory, art history, the morphological tradition, image theories, and visual culture studies, memory studies, and theories regarding empathy. He is currently in charge of the ERC-funded project ‘AN-ICON — An-iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images’.

Digital technologies not only enable new forms of experience but are also radically changing the human relation to images and visuality as such. Theorists and artists are becoming increasingly aware of the inadequacy of existing concepts and paradigms addressing the aesthetic, epistemological, political, and social implications of the current production and consumption of digital images.

If today people increasingly face an augmented reality in their everyday life, how will this regime of artificial intelligence affect human perceptions of time, reality, space, the body, and alterity? Can operational images performing specific tasks independently of human control or pictures created by algorithms still be considered by themselves? What about digital media environments that no longer represent anything but are designed to stimulate a multisensory and interactive experience: aren’t they perhaps closer to ‘an-icons’, that is, images that tend to negate themselves as images? And how can one envision the future of images at the crossroads of Internet and Post-Internet art? The workshop will delve into questions concerning the ‘nature’ and role of digital images.

Mitra Azar (aka Emanuele Andreoli) is a video-squatter and ARThropologist with a background in aesthetic philosophy. For the last ten years he has been investigating crisis areas in some of the most controversial places through the lens of visual art, filmmaking, and performance. He is currently a PhD candidate at Aarhus University, as well as part of the Geneve2020 think tank (Institute of Research and Innovation, Centre Pompidou). He currently is a visiting scholar at Duke University and the University of California, Berkeley. His work has been featured in academic and exhibition contexts at, among others, Cambridge, NYU, MOMI NY, Spectacle Cinema NY, the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong, Goldsmiths, the Havana Biennial, The Influencers, Fotomuseum Winterthur, the Venice Bienniale, the Transmediale, Macba [Sonia] Podcast, and the Berlinale.

Jacob Lund is associate professor of Aesthetics and Culture and Director of the research programme ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and Technology’ at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark. He is also editor-in-chief of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics. Lund has published widely within aesthetics, art history, critical theory, and comparative literature. Currently he is finishing a four-year collective  research project called ‘The Contemporary Condition’, which focuses on the concept of contemporaneity and changing experiences of time (www.contemporaneity.au.dk). His publications as part of the project include The Contemporary Condition: Introductory Thoughts on Contemporaneity and Contemporary Art(2016, with Geoff Cox) and Anachrony, Contemporaneity and Historical Imagination (2019).

Marisa Olson is an artist and media theorist who performs research in the history of technology and its cultural and environmental affects. She is responsible for coining the term Postinternet Art in 2006. Her work has been presented at the Whitney Museum, the New Museum, Venice Biennale, Fotomuseum Winterthur, C/O Berlin, National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens, Tate Modern + Liverpool, British Film Institute, PS122, Performa Biennial, Samek Museum, and Bard CCS.