Immersion

Immersive Stories. Virtual Reality, Post-Cinema and Storytelling

11 Aug , 2020 Call for papers,Immersion,Virtual Reality

In recent years, virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a new frontier of innovation and experimentation within what is known as “immersive entertainment” — gaming, art, museum exhibitions, TV and cinema. The proliferation on the market of new headsets (from the expensive HTC VIVE and Oculus to the popular Google Cardbox), the spread of platforms, apps and also VR cinemas around the world, and the inclusion of VR productions in international film festivals (e.g. Sundance, Tribeca, Venice) are trends demonstrating that VR is no longer just a fascinating 1980s-inspired literary or cinematic subject (from Tron to the Matrix trilogy, to the recent Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One). VR is also a new way of designing and creating an experience in which the spectator is more directly, immediately, and effectively involved and entertained through immersion and a strong sense of presence, i.e. the illusion of being part of an …

Lecturing in Groningen

26 Sep , 2019 Enaction,Immersion,Neurofilmology,Teaching

Leaving a vibrant Groningen after three intense and exciting days teaching a new theory of film and media experience and sharing ideas with the brilliant and demanding students of the international film studies program at Rijksuniversiteit. Many thanks to the Film and Media Studies research group (including Annie van den Oever, Annelies van Noortwijk, Julian Hanich and Miklos Kiss) for hosting my lecture in the Art, Medium and Moving Images Colloquim. I am especially grateful to Julian Hanich for the invitation, organization, insightful feedbacks, and friendship. #enactivemedia #neurofilmology

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Underwater Virtual Reality

20 Nov , 2018 Immersion,Virtual Reality

VR experience relies on a multimodal stimulation which goes far beyond audio-visual perception and involves also the senes of touch, prorpioception, thermoception, and equilibrioception Notions such as presence, empathy, and immersion – which are usually employed to describe immersion in the theatrical film experience – acquire an almost literal sense in VR, whose medium technology enhances (yet sometimes interferes with) the user’s psychic and physical agency and creates a multi-sensory experience. In this paper presented at the XXIV International Film Studies Conference From Spectacle to Entertainment Cinema, Media and Modes of Engagement from Modernity to the Present at Roma Tre University from November 21 to 23,) I take neo-cognitive epistemological tools and critically analyze and discuss a radical case of VR immersivity for entertainment: the use of VR headset set underwater. Differently from the use of aquatic environment as a representational virtual location (figurative immersion), special water-resistant VR headsets allow the …

Virtually Present, Physically Invisible

13 Aug , 2018 Empathy,Immersion,Relocation,Virtual Reality

The freezing cement stings my heels while, in total solitude, I find myself looking at a pair of sneakers, abandoned beneath a shiny metal bench. The bench sits against the wall of a tight and low space, almost like a container, which is illuminated by a cold, hissing neon light. They are a child’s shoes, thrown in a messy heap of other old shoes, covered with dust and abandoned in this space of suspension and waiting, the first direct reference to the hopeful yet desperate journey undertaken by many migrants across the border between Mexico and the United States, which I too, in a way, am experiencing. I too wait barefoot, in the reconstruction of a hielera in which the police have kept the migrants cramped up for days, for a red light and a siren that will tell me to go through a door. Once I pass the threshold, …

Virtualmente presente, fisicamente invisibile

12 Jan , 2018 Empathy,Immersion,Relocation,Virtual Reality

A piedi nudi sulla sabbia, indosso un visore per la realtà virtuale e comincio a muovermi nello spazio. Scorgo alcune luci all’orizzonte, tutt’attorno una scarna vegetazione, sono nel deserto. Tra i cespugli un gruppo di persone – migranti che cercano di varcare il confine tra Messico e Stati Uniti – si avvicina risalendo un dosso. La polizia piomba sul posto e un elicottero volteggia minaccioso sopra la scena. Vengo investito da un fascio di luce accecante, dal rumore assordante del motore e da folate d’aria fredda smossa dalle pale del velivolo. È il caos, i militari con i fucili spianati gridano ordini. Un uomo tenta di fuggire, ma viene colpito. Ci sono delle donne, un ragazzino, un neonato tra le braccia del padre. Sui loro volti la stanchezza e la disperazione. Dopo un secondo passaggio dell’elicottero, d’improvviso tutto tace. Ora i migranti siedono attorno a un tavolo; minuscole figure umane …

Gli agguati dello sguardo

24 Mar , 2015 Immersion

Viviamo ancora le immagini dell’acqua,
le viviamo sinteticamente nella loro complessità primaria
dando spesso loro la nostra adesione irragionevole.

Gaston Bachelard, Psicanalisi delle acque, 1987

Riferimento imprescindibile dell’invenzione cinematografica contemporanea, le inquadrature “acquatiche” che presagiscono gli agguati dello squalo sono il cuore dell’esperienza che lo spettatore ha compiuto nel 1975 e continua tutt’oggi a compiere di fronte a Jaws. Il film di Steven Spielberg (regia), Verna Fields (montaggio), John Williams (musiche) e Bill Butler (fotografia) sfrutta con grande efficacia le potenzialità visive e simboliche dell’acqua, coinvolgendo lo spettatore in una terrorizzante immersione. Da sempre del resto l’acqua nel cinema dà materia e sostanza ai desideri, ai sogni, alle ossessioni, ai traumi, alle paure consce e inconsce dell’uomo, trasfigurando sullo schermo i miti e gli archetipi dell’immaginario individuale e collettivo. Questo contributo, intitolato Gli agguati dello sguardo. Enunciazione della suspense in Jaws e inserito nello speciale sui 40 anni …

Figure dell’acqua

1 Jul , 2013 Immersion

Il nuovo numero di Segnocinema (il 182) contiene uno Speciale, da me curato, sulle Figure dell’acqua, ricognizione non scientifica sulla relazione simbiotica fra il cinema e l’acqua. L’ispirazione proviene dalla suggestione dell’opera del filosofo francese Gaston Bachelard, che proprio ai quattro elementi ha dedicato i suoi studi sulla rêverie e la letteratura: un sogno a occhi aperti nelle forme e nei simboli dell’immaginazione poetica. Nella sua Psicanalisi delle acque (1942) Bachelard ha già segnalato la molteplicità dei significati e degli usi dell’acqua a cui attinge la letteratura. La poesia per prima ha scaturito dal sogno acque tanto placide e trasparenti quanto torbide e tumultuose, così che l’acqua è simbolo di bellezza e generatrice di vita almeno quanto sostanza fatale e gorgo mortale.

Nell’immaginazione cinematografica la relazione con le immagini, i suoni e l’acqua è persino più intima e di reciproca e profonda implicazione: una relazione simbiotica e osmotica, perché …

Film in Depth

16 Dec , 2012 Immersion

The pupil is made of water.
Aristotle, De Anima, III

The true eye of the earth is water.
Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves , 1942

Ménilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanov, 1924), L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934), Le Tempestaire (Jean Epstein, 1947)

My essay Film in Depth. Water and Immersivity in the Contemporary Film Experience has just been published in Acta Universitatis Sapientiae – Film and Media Studies, the international scientific journal of Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania. In this essay I argue that since its beginnings, cinema has recognised that water can visually give matter and meaning to human desires, dreams and secrets, eliciting suspense and fear. Using different aesthetical and technical strategies, contemporary cinema shows immersed and drowning bodies to represent and express intimacy and protection, suspense and fear, obsession and depression, state of shock, past or infancy trauma, hallucinations and nightmares, etc. The case of enwaterment (i.e. “waterembodiment”) is significant because of …

Sonoluminescent Art

21 Mar , 2012 Immersion

Next Sunday, I will be presenting a paper entitled Sonoluminescent Art. Transmutation of Sound into Light and Immersive Spectatorship at the X MAGIS – International Film Studies Spring School in Gorizia. The paper is part of my research project on immersive spectatorship and focuses on a series of contemporary sound and video artworks that explore and reflect upon the phenomenon of sonoluminescence. Sonoluminescence (literally ‘light from sound’) is a phenomenon caused when ultrasound waves excite a liquid, creating tiny bubbles which emit light when they collapse. It was first discovered by scientists who were attempting to accelerate the process of developing photos, in the early 1930s.

Camera Lucida (Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, 2007)…

Screen Attachments

12 Dec , 2011 Immersion

The Special issue of Screening The Past on “Screen Attachments” has just been released. My essay Waterbodies: Moving-image installations at Termemilano Spa is presented as follows in the Introduction by issue curators Paola Voci and Catherine Fowler:

“With Adriano D’Aloia’s essay we shift locations once again, from the home, art spaces and the Internet to health spas. The example of moving image installations in Italian Spa’s is used to provide an original examination of what Casetti has called the relocated filmic experience. Just as Ng re-examined interactivity, so D’Aloia re-visits scholarly work on immersion and, to a lesser extent, absorption. The moving image installations he explores act as a hinge that joins the classical viewing experience in a movie theatre with the relocated experience outside of that familiar space. More importantly, D’Aloia argues, “the spa moving image experience helps us to reframe both the theatrical and relocated dimensions of the …

Atonement

5 Nov , 2009 Immersion

For with earth do we see earth, with water water,
with air bright air, with fire consuming fire,
with Love do we see Love, Strife with dread Strife.

Empedocle (B 109)

Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007) – a water-based film that calls for a water-based (immersive, liquid, aquatic) spectatorship.…

Enwaterment

6 Mar , 2009 Immersion

I am presenting a draft of the first step of my investigation on drowning bodies and cinematic experience at the Emergent Encounters in Film Theory. Intersections between Psychoanalysis and Philosophy international film studies conference, hosted by the King’s College Film Studies Deparment in London on the 21st of March.

Keynote Speakers: Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University), Vicky Lebeau (University of Sussex)

Interdisciplinary approaches to the theoretical discussion of the cinematic medium have often engaged with philosophical or psychoanalytic perspectives. While philosophy and psychoanalysis are by no means opposed schools of thought, the potential to develop new ways of understanding film remains an opportunity to be explored. In seeking out further lines of enquiry, the study of intersections between cinema/philosophy/psychoanalysis, seems most pertinent to our generation of ‘film thinking’, to invoke Daniel Frampton’s concept of the ‘film mind’, whose future still stands, to some extent, in the shadow of psychoanalysis. Recent philosophical models …

Drowning Bodies

16 Nov , 2008 Immersion

And what about drowning? Cinema has immediately recognized that water could visually represent the substance of human dreams and desires. Water can connect or separate conscious and onyric worlds, arousing the spectators’ actual response (lack of breath, sense of choking, menace…). I’d like to figure out if and how the representation of drowning body in contemporary cinema could be a strategy to engage a corporeal relation with the spectator’s psychic dimension, in terms of 1) depth: from the reflective and narcisist surface to the dark profundity; 2) consistency: from the transparent swimming-pool to the opaque and cloudy lake; 3) expressive forces: from the quite, though threatening, ocean to the impetuous river. Here you have a collection of snapeshots captured from “water-based” movie (What Lies Beneath, The Sphere, Jaws, Minority Report, The Hours…).

Altra “figura esperienziale” interessante: l’annegamento, il corpo sommerso… …