At the Threshold of the Image

From Narcissus to Virtual Reality

Andrea Pinotti

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Hardback

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English

Zone Books
16 September 2025

Philosophy: aesthetics; Cultural studies; Media studies

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.

By: Andrea Pinotti
Imprint: Zone Books
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9781945861024
ISBN 10: 1945861029
Pages: 282
Publication Date: 16 September 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

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

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

""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