Enactive media

A walk suspended in mid-air, a fall at breakneck speed towards a fatal impact with the ground, an upside-down flip into space, the drift of an astronaut in the void… Analysing a wide range of films, this book brings to light a series of recurrent aesthetic motifs through which contemporary cinema destabilizes and then restores the spectator’s sense of equilibrium. The 'tensive motifs' of acrobatics, fall, impact, overturning, and drift reflect our fears and dreams and offer embodied forms of transcendence of the limits of our human condition along with an awareness of their insurmountable nature. Adopting the approach of 'Neurofilmology'—an interdisciplinary method that puts filmology, perceptual psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience into dialogue—this book implements the paradigm of embodied cognition in a new ecological epistemology of the moving-image experience.

This introduction to the monographic section on "VR Storytelling" aims to outline some of the principal transformations that VR is imparting to audiovisual language and experience, with a particular focus on the impact of these innovations on storytelling. The essays of the section span a variety of theoretical approaches and backgrounds, argumentative styles and case studies (e.g. documentaries, games, art), but all of them share a similar rhetorical attitude: underscoring the potential and novelty of VR but, at the same time, identifying a series of remediations and limitations. In particular, they will show that most of the contemporary discourses on VR need to be reframed critically in order to reflect more objectively on complex notions and dynamics such as screen, interactivity, immersion, presence, embodiment, illusion and empathy.