For the September issue of ARLIS/NA Reviews, Erin Dickey discusses At the Threshold of the Image: From Narcissus to Virtual Reality by Andrea Pinotti. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“In this wide-ranging, historically grounded analysis of humanity’s relationship to the boundary between reality and referent, philosopher of aesthetics Andrea Pinotti (Università di Milano) resists overarching explanations about the function of this cross-cultural urge to breach the threshold of the image. By the same token, he critically examines assumptions about the empathic potentials of “presentness” facilitated by virtual reality (VR) technologies. Instead, Pinotti traces and links a diversity of cultural forms and media—myth, literature, painting, sculpture, ocular technologies, cinema, video art, television, VR—invested in breaching perceptual limits, insisting on the specificity of their effects.”