La realtà virtuale come spazio di un’èkphrasis digitale [Virtual reality as a space for digital ekphrasis]

The essay aims to examine the concept of digital ekphrasis in virtual reality environments. The emergence of immersive narrative worlds, both in videogames and artistic expression, requires a reflection on the rela9onships between traditional narrative forms (literature and painting, as well as photography and cinema) and the possibilities that technological development brings to the evolution of artistic and expressive languages. Starting from the analysis of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s virtual reality installation "Carne y Arena", the essay questions the continuity/discontinuity relationship with the semiotic and aesthetic universes conven9onally summoned by ekphrasis. The transforma9on of the medium, which places the viewer immediately within the work, abolishes not only the distance between the involved expressive media, integra9ng them intermedially, but also the distance between work and spectator, according to a paradigm of aesthe9c experience minority within aesthe9cs, aMributable to a theore9cal line that combines Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. The resonance between forms of expressiveness significantly radicalizes the scope of ekphrasis, as visual discourse is no longer transposed to a discursive level, as traditionally occurred, but into other forms of the visual and the sensible that continually set the semiosis of the work in motion.