Aesthetics of the Virtual

7 The Virtual Actor-Spectator

101 7 The Virtual Actor-Spectator As we have seen, the virtual has the peculiarity of being an intermediate entity between object and event, thing and image: “Virtual space is no longer an intelligible substrate. It is an object of modeling and constant interaction with other modeled objects. Virtual space, insofar as it is experienced, is therefore an image (the image of a model) and not a substantial reality.”1 I do not think, as I hope to have shown, that the contraposition suggested by Quéau can be simply accepted.2 It is important to remember , though, that virtual bodies are a metaxu,3 intermediary entities that make up a hybrid, interactive world, visualizable as an image of syntheses , immersive, engaging the corporeality of the user, who mixes up with the image of the virtual body: “There occurs,” Quéau correctly writes, “a deep hybridization between the body of the actor-spectator and the virtual space in which he or she is immersed.”4 It is time, then, to reflect on the idea of the actor-spectator.5 Now, it is obvious that the idea of “spectator,” which is always internal to a theory, carries within itself the world, that is, a representational system, taste, social conventions, and philosophical convictions, in a word: culture. It carries not only all this, however, but also that which offers itself as a greater resistance to historical changes, such as sense perception and the emotional properties that cultural strategies seek to interpret. Above all, the theme of “the spectator” includes forms of the arts and their techniques, their ineluctable materiality, their evolution . The viewer of a painting is certainly not the same as the viewer of a photograph, as these are productions that lead, as do any artistictechnical type, to a different spatiotemporal plexus that affects the figure of the spectator. What does the spectator of a photograph expect 102 Aesthetics of the Virtual from the ossification of passed time in the spatial plane of the now if not, as Barthes claims, the affective vision of an irrecoverable spectrum, and thus the pain of an impossible return? Conversely, paintings always seem to introduce a new game, less oriented to the confusion between reality of the past and truth, and more intended toward the imaginary of simulation and the modeling of the gaze in the closed spatial appropriation of temporal becoming. In the play of similarities and differences it is perhaps the analogy with cinema, because of its multimedia aspects, that allows us to approach the figure of the virtual spectator. In fact, new media are in general operations of remediation, or even “remediations of remediations” capable of displaying in a clear and amplified manner the tension between immediacy and hypermediacy: an immediacy, or transparency and removal of mediation that, in the maximum case constituted by virtual reality, is the result of a sophisticated process of hypermediation, which tends to conceal itself as such. every new medium re-founds, re-mediates, the media that make it up in relation to the level or stratum of remediation that they produce. Hence, the cinema-virtual reality analogy highlighted by Bolter and Grusin exactly in relation to a specific spectatorial look: “one way to understand virtual reality, therefore, is as a remediation of the subjective style of film, an exercise in identification through occupying a visual point of view.”6 of course, this is only a partial similarity. In a virtual environment , the spectator is the point of view, the eye of the camera, so to speak, and seems to have the power to decide what movements to perform with his or her eye. In reality, the eye, or better, the body, the mind-body complex is even in this case at least partially other-directed, but for now this is not the point. The point is to exploit the analogy in an effort to bring to light the differences by taking as our point of departure a field of research that has already been largely explored. We are, above all, dealing with a simple, and I believe quite acceptable set of resemblances: like the cinematic image, the virtual imagebody is the result of a complex mental process in which perception is never the simple recording of an external stimulus. But what we might call with Souriau the “spectatorial plane,”7 that is, the place of realization of a specific view that is structured through interaction with certain data, is realized according to various modalities. to this...