Image (mathematics)

Visual arts

Iconology

Computer science

Computer vision

Iconography

Screen

This essay describes the evolution of what I term the 'environmentalization' of the image, especially in the context of various historical instantiations that have culminated in the contemporary virtual dispositif known as the head-mounted display (HMD).As soon as users don one of these helmets, they lose a simple yet crucial freedom of which they were previously unaware, namely the liberty to focus on an 'offimage', beyond the borders of the picture.This could be seeing the frame of a painting when deciding to look at the fire extinguisher hanging beside it, or the limits of the cinema screen when choosing to orient the gaze towards the 'toilet' or 'exit' signs, or the edges of one's laptop when grabbing the coffee mug.Conversely, once immersed in the virtual environment offered by a head-mounted display, one can only see images: the iconic landscape incessantly and continuously unfolds in 360 degrees, regardless of the orientation of vision.This perceptual condition of the total image goes hand-in-hand with the intense feeling of presentness that is elicited by virtual immersive environments. 1Such presentness is to be understood in the double and correlated sense of the presence of the user in the virtual environment (someone who, by virtue of the increasing multi-sensory implications of such environments, becomes more an 'experiencer' than a visual or passive observer), and the presence of the virtual objects in the real environment.Once the threshold between image and reality has been contested, and ideally erased, what was previously a border becomes instead a highway that allows for a two-way flow, thanks to the dossier 1 Wijnand IJsselsteijn, Fabrizio

Towards an-iconology: the image as environment