Technoetic Arts - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2011

It is clear that the visual representations of the so-called digital aesthetics are linked to social processes and institutional functions intrinsically, and they bring with them the following paradox antagonistically but not contradictorily. On the one hand, they oppose the coercion of the historical-social-cultural system, because they try to deal with the transformation of the reality in a critical way. On the other hand, they meet the growing of the world net of computers, which are becoming more and more invisible and captivating and are diluting the bond between culture and communication and the technological dimension in a subliminal way a lot of times. The aim of this article is to examine historically and culturally the emergence of so-called digital aesthetics. The article will also identify which mutations are related to this kind of aesthetics. It will not only examine the representation models that sustain the modern and the high-tech aesthetics but also the relations of power and knowledge that operate directly over the receiver in these two moments.

Interactive media arts offer us new approaches to the role of theatrical representation. Nowadays, digital technology allows us to explore self-representation in systems that cross over between installation art, theatre and performance. By confronting the subject with his or her own image, these devices question the mechanisms of identification and denegation. Both the theatrical creations and the interactive forms that are examined here invite the spectator to explore the relationship between identification and denegation. All the artistic productions that are studied in this article call for a virtual double that the immersant meets: Liquid Views (1992) and Rigid Waves ([1993] 2008) by Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, Telematic Dreaming ([1992] 2007) by Paul Sermon and Eux (2008) by the Crew company and Sensorama (2009) by the Andwhatbeside(s)death company. In all of these artworks, the participant is encouraged to give less importance to his or her cognitive senses in order to allow his or her sensations to create a representation of himself or herself. The overlap between identity and otherness is therefore to be found at the very heart of the sensitive body.

The micro blogging platform Twitter is actively used by millions of people. By using the geo tags of the messages sent a virtual landscape of online activity at a certain place is generated to visualize the interface between the real-world location and the virtual activity. These New City Landscapes (NCL) visualize the amount of activity as density surfaces with hills, peaks and valleys. Across a set of different cities from around the world the resulting landscape morphologies are compared and characterized as types. This article focuses on temporal narratives and how they travel through the urban fabric via the virtual landscape in different cities around the world. The findings are discussed as cross comparisons according to activity in time and space.

Man has built tools to extend his visual experience in order to explore reality beyond his sensory capacity, for example microscopes, telescopes, high shutter speed and infrared cameras. However he has yet to build a visual tool to fully explore visual realms beyond his ordinary cognitive faculties. With the development of computing, comes the possibility of creating a tool to explore the virtual forms/spaces of images that are ordinarily inaccessible. This article identifies how cognition is ordinarily limited and posits a way of going beyond those limits, by defining a computational model of how those virtual spaces might be explored. This definition is based on brief but repeated empirical experiences of ‘higher order’ manifestations.

The article expounds the concept of substance as a unified system in which all of its properties cannot be determined by its components parts alone. Instead the system as a whole verifies the notion of existence. Everything that exists, noetic and aesthetic, animate or inanimate, is governed by the fundamental status of substance. Hence, none of the parts (humans, angels, rocks, bacteria) can claim for absoluteness against the other. This idea goes back to Ancient Greek scholars, such as Aristotle, while it reaches its climax throughout the Byzantine Philosophy with John of Damascus theories. Accordingly and as the image is concerned, one can encounter this kind of ontology in various artworks, from the frescoes of Lascaux caves, to early Renaissance. Beyond the substance there is the un-substance, which is often confused with western philosophical duality course such as those of the matter and the idea, of the sensible and the intelligible, of the body and the soul and finally of the born and the unborn. Nevertheless, and as for the Byzantine philosophy, these entities are lodged into the unity of the substance irrespective of their tangibility because they all contain some kind of materiality at variance to the immateriality of the un-substance. The most representative version of this theory appears in archaic and late antiquity imagery, a type of imagery that has been scattering into early motion pictures and into late Technoetic practices.