At the Threshold of the Image: From Narcissus to Virtual Reality

by Andrea Pinotti

Overview

An exploration of the impact of immersive experiences on visual practices from cave painting to virtual reality

In this groundbreaking book, philosopher Andrea Pinotti explores the impacts of a desire that has motivated human beings since prehistory: the desire to enter an image. He proposes that over the centuries, every culture has tried to realize this wish with whatever visual resources were available at the time, and today’s virtual reality technologies seem close to fulfilling it. The image in VR becomes an immersive 360-degree environment and the frame that used to confine it to a world apart disappears. Even the physical medium in which the image materializes appears to be transparent. However, Pinotti insists that once the border between the real world and the iconic world becomes permeable, we are faced with a troubling two-way passage: we penetrate the world of the image, but the image floods into our world. The desire for being encompassed by the image, he shows, is accompanied by fear of this overflowing. In its analysis of this desire/fear, At the Threshold of the Image takes the reader on an extraordinary journey from the myths of Narcissus and Pygmalion to contemporary VR headsets, passing through the pictorial traditions of trompe l’oeil and living sculptures, the mirrors in Alice in Wonderland, illusionistic architecture, panoramas and phantasmagorias, and 3D cinema.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945861215
Publisher:	Zone Books
Publication date:	09/16/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	40 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Andrea Pinotti is Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Milan. He is author of Empathie: Histoire d’une idée de Platon au post-humain and Nonumento: Un paradosso della memoria.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Andrea Pinotti offers readers a rare gift: an intellectual history of immersive visuality that is wide-ranging and delightfully erudite. At the Threshold of the Image takes a vertiginous ride through visual arts and techniques, myths and history, proving that contemporary immersive virtual environments have been prefigured by a centuries-long history. While revealing how each visual culture, in every epoch, has explored the threshold between inside and outside, this impressive book sheds light on the aesthetic, theoretical, and political implications of our current experience of images.”—Giuliana Bruno, Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University

“What are the implications of inhabiting rather than viewing the world of images? Andrea Pinotti’s At the Threshold of the Image traces a sweeping transmedial history of the human urge to craft figurations that are sectioned off from the realm of embodied experience only then to sunder that very divide and open up bidirectional pathways between the real and the imagined. From pictorial illusionism to immersive VR, the book gracefully walks the tightrope between apocalyptic fears regarding the collapse of reality and techno utopian dreams of transcendence, sketching out the foundations for a new iconological science of images that deny their ontology as images.”—Jeffrey Schnapp, Carl A. Pescosolido Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature, Harvard University

“An enthralling book by one of the most distinguished philosophers of visual images, this work explores the threshold between image and reality in the age of virtual reality and immersive digital environments. Andrea Pinotti traces the myths underlying virtual reality, from Narcissus’s fatal attraction with his own reflection and Pygmalion’s desire for his mirror image to Alice’s passage through the looking glass, Eisenstein’s fears of crossing the image-reality threshold, and Ridley Scott’s fusion of human and android in Blade Runner. Written with wit, intelligence, and remarkable erudition, every page brims with fresh insights. No one interested in the status of images in the modern era could afford to miss this outstanding work.” – David Freedberg, Pierre Matisse Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, Columbia University

Editorial Reviews

"Fascinating and rangy. . . . It is our appetite for feeling, for navigating, for discovery, and for conquest that leads us not only to create works of unreality—which expand and multiply our reality—but also to long for the real potentials of those unrealities. History evinces that standing at a threshold never means turning back, it means forging on. Even if, as Pinotti so artfully and expertly illustrates, we have to invent somewhere to go."—-Xiao Yue Shan, Asymptote

From the Publisher