Immagini che ci modellano: una lettura mediantropica ed enattiva

In 1965 the father of virtual reality, Ian Sutherland, published an article which was supposed to solve any doubts about its full realisation: The Ultimate Display. In the perspective of its inventor, therefore, the screen to be mounted onto the head does not foresee new developments, if not merely technical: put simply, it is the instrument for accessing a new reality. After fifty years, virtual reality begins to be perceived as an artistic and ludic phenomenon, but it is still far from being the ultimate display that was promised at the origin. In this paper, we want to face this issue and analyse the alleged loss of borders, provoked by the disappearance of the frame. In the first part of the paper, we will start by asking how configures the activity of the contemporary user – thought as subject-object of his/her performance – in environments of augmented reality, where the exceeding picture can show itself as a continuum with the user. In this situation, the borders of both the user and the medium might solve in the immanence of the immersive experience. In the second part, we will offer an interdisciplinary reading of the concept of co-agentivity between bodies and things against a materialist background, to eventually contextualise these considerations within the cognitivist paradigm.