“…Similarly, taking his cue from Heidegger and Brown, Glenn Peers reads the icon as a "thing" and puts emphasis on the fact that the viewer is in fact a "dividual," a porous, non-discrete being. Icons, connecting the human and the divine, have a transformative and active power; in turn, the act of vision as conceptualized by the Byzantines is an act of engagement and energy exchange with the thing seen (Peers, 2012(Peers, , 2013. On the one hand, the observer cannot be considered as an individual, given such a constant exchange, while on the other hand, objects are, in fact, "quasi objects," ontologically ambiguous, given their ability to act on the user/viewer (Peers, 2021).…”