Aesthetics of the Virtual

Roberto Diodato, Justin L. Harmon

Description

Arguing that the virtual body is something new—namely, an entity that from an ontological perspective has only recently entered the world—Roberto Diodato considers the implications of this kind of body for aesthetics. Virtual bodies insert themselves into the space opened up by the famous distinction in Aristotle's Physics between natural and artificial beings—they are both. They are beings that are simultaneously events; they are images that are at once internal and external; they are ontological hybrids that exist only in the interaction between logical-computational text and human bodies endowed with technological prostheses. Pursuing this line of thought, Diodato reconfigures classic aesthetic concepts such as mimesis, representation, the relation between illusion and reality, the nature of images and imagination, and the theory of sensory knowledge.
Foreword by John Protevi
Introduction

1. Aesthetics of the Virtual Body

2. My Body in the Virtual Environment

3. Forms of Expression

4. Towards the Image

5. Metaphors of the Virtual

6. The Concept of the Virtual

7. The Virtual Actor-Spectator

8. For an Aesthetics of the Hypertext

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Esthétique et philosophie de l'art
• Película fotográfica
• Philosophy
• Philosophy of mind
• Visual culture
• Virtual world
• Electronic
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438444376
• Langue: English

Extrait

SUNY SERIES IN C ONTEMPORARY I TALIAN P HILOSOPHY
Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, editors

Aesthetics
of the
Virtual
ROBERTO DIODATO
Translated by Justin L. Harmon
Revised and Edited by Silvia Benso
Foreword by John Protevi

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© Estetica del virtuale by Roberto Diodato (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2005) © 2012 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
[Estetica del virtuale. English]
Aesthetics of the Virtual / Roberto Diodato ; Revised and Edited by Silvia Benso ; Translated by Justin L. Harmon ; Foreword by John Protevi.
pages cm — (SUNY series in contemporary Italian philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4435-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Virtual reality—Philosophy. 2. Art and technology. 3. Virtual reality in art. I. Benso, Silvia. II. Title.
BD331.D5613 2012
776—dc23
2011052052
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Foreword
W e philosophers have a number of animal self-images, almost a bestiary of who we are and what we do. It is as if the images of the human were too limited for what we have accepted as our calling. Thus, one of the great challenges and privileges of philosophy is to take up again the gadfly's task and to ask questions of the everyday. It is not that Socrates did not have to deal with a changing Athens, but questions of pace and tempo of change are of the utmost importance today in contemporary philosophical practice. So for us, it is not just innovations on ancient practices that need questioning; we must also attend to the questionability of what was once not so long ago a novelty but has passed too quickly into the mundane taken-for-granted. It is as if the owl of Minerva—to call upon another of our self-images—were to fly at a technological dusk that has fallen too quickly.
It is fitting that we call upon some of these self-images in introducing Roberto Diodato's Aesthetics of the Virtual , for the production of the self-image is at the heart of his endeavor. For a number of years we have lived with virtual reality, the ability to produce and to inhabit a computer-generated environment of images, including, with the avatar, the image of one's own body. How are such image-bodies generated, and once produced, what does it mean to inhabit such a body in such a reality? What are we seeing when we see not only images, but the image of ourselves, and not only that image, but that image seeing and interacting with all the other images of that realm?
The philosophical content of the book, one might say, is as old as our tradition and as new as could be. What are perception, imagination, representation, and many other traditional philosophical categories when applied to the realm of the virtual image? And perhaps most importantly and most strangely of all, what are we feeling when we feel these images interact, when we feel our avatar interact with other images? How is it even possible to feel something in these instances? What is virtual affect? Or, how does virtual affect come about?
Roberto Diodato's incisive book takes us on a tour of these themes, probing the fundamental human experiences of illusion, dreams, imitation, and presence. It could even be said that Diodato is interrogating the possibility of a theory of seeing in the virtual realm. Now, if theory is that which is oriented to the sight of the truth, we have to ask what does “theory” mean when our philosophical vision, our veridical vision, is aimed at the truth of the realm of virtual reality? How do we see the truth of illusion, when that illusion aims to pass itself off as reality?
The ultimate stakes of Diodato's work are thus, I believe, reflexive. What is philosophical practice when it considers the virtual? What becomes of the gadfly, the owl, and other philosophical avatars when they are turned back to consider the everyday avatars of the digital world? Densely referenced to contemporary and classical works, Aesthetics of the Virtual will serve for some as an introduction to these issues and for others as a challenging treatment of the phenomenological and ontological complexities found therein.
J OHN P ROTEVI
Introduction
Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singling black, pressure on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data he had nearly become …
And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all that dark, there came a point where the dark could be no more , and something tore.
The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case's consciousness divided like beads of mercury, arcing above an endless beach the color of the dark silver clouds. His vision was spherical, as though a single retina lined the inner surface of a globe that contained all things, if all things could be counted.
And here things could be counted, each one. He knew the number of grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a number coded in a mathematical system that existed nowhere outside the mind that was Neuromancer). He knew the number of yellow food packets in the canisters in the bunker (four hundred and seven). He knew the number of brass teeth in the left half of the open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket that Linda Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset beach, swinging a stick of driftwood in her hand (two hundred and two).
“But you do not know her thoughts,” the boy said, beside him now in the shark thing's heart. “I do not know her thoughts. You were wrong, Case. To live here is to live. There is no difference.”
M any will have recognized this page from William Gibson's Neuromancer . In it is described an experience of virtual reality, an immersion into a world of numbers that appears in forms, images, and sensations. It is a possible experience: not actual, but possible, as it was possible to travel by submarine during Verne's time. 1 If it is a possible experience, however, and it will perhaps happen that one will live in such a world, then it is not true that there is no difference. These possible differences make up the theme of this little book. It is entitled Aesthetics of the Virtual because it deals with bodies that are images, with the interactions between our body—weighed down but at the same time lightened by inorganic prostheses—and those images, and with the interactions between images of our body (our avatar ) and those image-bodies. Thus, we will look for the meaning of the conceptual constellation that rests between body and image, that is, perception, representation, simulacrum … in order to see if and how the sense of these words changes when one uses them to describe an experience of virtual environments. We will attempt to think the paradoxical notion of virtual image-body [ corpo-immagine ] and the interweaving of activity and passivity that characterizes the spectator-actor of the virtual world. We will try to distinguish the experience of the virtual from dream experience, to stabilize the difference between the virtual and the possible, and to express the particular potentiality that marks the virtual. All of this will lead to a thinking of the structure of the virtual world as essentially relational, or if one prefers, as a place that exists only in an encounter.
I have always been struck by an assertion by Robert Delaunay (quoted by Merleau-Ponty in “Eye and Mind”): “I am in Petersburg in my bed. In Paris my eyes see the sun.” 2 To me, this seems simply true and also a profound opening. Virtual worlds, if I had to condense the meaning of the present work, have do with this truth.
1

Aesthetics of the Virtual Body
B y “virtual body” I mean in the first place an interactive digital image, 1 the self-phenomenalization of an algorithm in binary format arising in its interaction with a user-consumer. It is a function of writing that, in its sensible appearance, at the same time exposes and conceals the translation project through which it is constituted in its computational operations. As apparition of a grammar, such a language-image [ immagine-linguaggio ] implies a peculiar spectrality that affects the visible-invisible relation and structures the modalities of its fruition. From this point of view, the digital image—which can be multisensory—is not simply image-of; it is not only a mimesis of that of which it is image, 2 identifiable or not, and is therefore not essentially simulacrum. 3 Nor, in any case, is it an icon 4 or original image. On the contrary, it is a genetic-relational form that belongs to a multiple system of translation. The digital image is not, one could say, properly “image,” but image-body [ corpo-immagine ], since it is made of tidy sequences of binary units, or, in other words, strings of characters that develop at various levels of a syntax that constructs the coincidence between these strings and their sensible appearances, which currently are mostly sonorous or visual but in general are perceptible. 5 Now, we know that discrete sequences translate also undulating and continuous events. Therefore, as subtle body of a noncontinuous world, as discrete world of point-data that manifest themselves as fluidities and densities and saturate perception, and as (from a computer science or formal perspective) programming language, the virtual body is certainly an electronic body and therefore an atomic aggregate (to use another metaphor). The process o