Una percezione macchinica: realtà virtuale e realtà aumentata tra simulacri e protesi dell’enunciazione

In this work I argue that technologies such as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (referred to as RVA) are based on the simultaneous presence of two different logics: one of the simulacrum and one of the prosthesis. Indeed, they allow us to perceive things that otherwise it would be impossible to grasp without the embedded technological prosthesis and, at the same time, they are able to simulate the enunciative situation inside the enunciate with an impression of reality which is actually without precedent in every previous technology. For this reason, from a semiotic perspective, VR and AR must be understood through a theory of enunciation. I thus start by outlining the specificity of a logic the simulacrum and of a logic of the prosthesis inside a theory of enunciation and then make an archaeology of the “machinic perception” representing the precursor of RVA in the theory of audiovisual media. Passing through Vertov’s “kino–eye”, Pasolini’s “free indirect subjective camera”, the cognitive semiotics of Buckland and Eugeni, Gallese and Guerra’s embodied simulation and Pinotti’s “an–icon”, I then delineate the genealogy of RVA and, in the conclusions, I highlight their semiotic specificities as simulacral prostheses.