The New Prometheus: The Two Sides of Iron Man and the Imaginary of Spatial Computing

Contemporary augmented reality (AR), increasingly referred to as spatial computing, is commonly presented as a technology capable of seamlessly integrating digital information into physical space, empowering users through smart and responsive environments. This article argues that such a vision is sustained by a technological imaginary centred on the American figure of Iron Man, whose superheroic model of technological enhancement has become a recurrent reference within mainstream AR. To interrogate the assumptions embedded in this imaginary, the article brings it into dialogue with Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, two fictional figures that foreground the material, affective, and political dimensions of technological embodiment obscured by the dominant narrative of frictionless empowerment. Drawing on media theory, philosophy of technology, and Gothic materialism, the article argues that Iron Man-Tony Stark can be understood as an «Augmented Prometheus»: a figure that embodies the aesthetic and ideological horizon of contemporary spatial computing while recalling the Promethean ambition – and its limitations – already embodied by Victor Frankenstein. As such, he naturalizes a particular political conception of technical embodiment while obscuring alternative ways of imagining the relationship between human and technical bodies.