Emerging, Filtering, Symbiosing: Experiences in Augmented Art

In this paper we offer a theoretical overview of contemporary an-icons, namely images which tend to present themselves as environments or parts of them, negating their iconic nature. Here we focus mainly on those generated by Augmented Reality (henceforth, AR), making a comparison with Virtual Reality (henceforth, VR) images. Both VR and AR are considered to be Extended Reality technologies. Still, while VR environments invite the user to literally dive into them through an experience of immersion that substitutes the actual world with an iconic one, AR digital entities emerge popping up in front of us in the physical environment. We suggest this opposition ‘immersivity vs. emersivity’ should more adequately be understood as a polarity, whose extremes (immersion and emersion) define a scale for VR and AR devices, accordingly to their gradient of unframedness, presentness, immediateness, inter- activity. Starting from these premises, we consider a series of New Media Art projects often conceived for social networks such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Tik Tok. Specifically, we propose to consider AR filters as a phantasmagoric and para-hallucinatory presence with which the user interacts in a performative way. AR, and AR art in particular, seems on the one hand to inherit some aspects of collective cinema projects, such as Vertov’s and Garcia Espinosa’s; on the other hand, it can be considered one of those “techniques of the self” aimed at fixing, maintaining or transforming one’s identity (from a bodily, social, and gender perspective). Whether they question the political and identity dimension of the community or that of the single subject, such operations often choose playful communicative strategies to highlight expressive potentialities and repressive criticalities intrinsic to contemporary technologies.