Aesthetics of the Virtual

Notes

119 Notes INtRoDUCtIoN 1. See Amihud Gilead, “How Many Pure Possibilities are There?” Metaphysica. International Journal for Ontology and Metaphysics 5, no. 2 (2004): 89–90; precisely, the “submarine” described by Jules Verne in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is to be considered a “possible.” Gilead is thus in debate with Nicholas Rescher, “Nonexistents Then and Now,” Review of Metaphysics 57 (2003): 359–81. 2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “eye and Mind,” in The Merleau­Ponty Reader, ed. Leonard Lawlor and ted toadvine (evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 375. CHAPteR 1. AeStHetICS oF tHe VIRtUAL BoDY 1. For a deep presentation of this notion, see the forum on digital images in the online magazine Kainós (www. Kainós.it) coordinated by Vincenzo Cuomo. Many interesting reflections on the topic of multimedia art, and numerous monographs from the magazine Ligeia 45–48 (July-Dec. 2003), edited by M. Costa and G. Lista, can be found here. 2. on this point, see Mario Costa, Il sublime tecnologico (Rome: Castelvecchi, 1998), 71. 3. If one means by “simulacra” a mimetic relationship in which the object is portrayed as infinite, then the structure of the simulacrum is built on the structure of mimesis: a deferment lacking in 120 Notes to Chapter 1 originality, but in which the origin or model remains as absent, without negating the idea of origin or the relation to the origin as a model. 4. Unless the icon is thought of as a kind of threshold, relational place, transit, or exchange. 5. on the structure of synthetic images, see Michael Porchet, La pro­ duction industrielle de l’image. Critique de l’image de synthese (ParisBudapest -turin: L’Harmattan, 2002), esp. 95–115. 6. Pietro Montani has opportunely insisted on this hard type of interactivity in a contribution to the meeting on “estetica & Design” (Palermo, September 27, 2003), promoted by the SIe Laboratory of Industrial Design, directed by Luigi Russo. obviously, interaction with the matrix is conceivable according to different modalities in relation to the type of virtual bodies with which one is interacting. 7. See Ralph Schroeder, ed., The Social Life of Avatars. Presence and Interaction in Shared Visual Environments (London: Springer Verlag , 2002); t. K. Sapin, I. S. Pandzic, N. Magnenat-Thalmann, and D. Thalmann, Avatars in Networked Virtual Environments (Chichester-New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999). 8. An evolved example that demonstrates the potential in using avatars is Gulliver’s Box, an interactive game system designed by research groups from the University of Singapore and the University of osaka in collaboration with Futurelab of electronic Arts, presented to the 2003 electronic Arts Festival in Linz. The game is a kind of Mixed Reality application that generates a recreational environment . It allows entrance into the narrative world of Gulliver’s Travels, where one chooses a persona and moves it within the scene through a glass cube placed on a table: the actions of the persona (Lilliputian, Brobdingagian), are reproduced on the display and set in a world of 3-D fantasy visible through an appropriate viewer; the characters can interact with one another in various movements and modify the point of view of the scene. What is thus realized is a perceptual experience in which the interaction between user, avatar, virtual environment, and physical environment produces engrossing combinations. 9. They should keep in mind Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Per­ ception (New York: Routledge, 1989). 10. An immaterial sculpture prototype whose development was Notes to Chapter 1 121 initiated by the Polo didattico e di ricerca di Crema at the University of Milan (coordinated by Gianni Degli Antoni) is described by Diana Danelli, Per una scultura digitale a bassa densità, in Nel foco che li affina. Quattro studi per Francesco Piselli (Milan: Prometheus, 2000), 23–44. 11. Perhaps immaterial sculpture can be considered a momentary point of arrival and a current place for researching a recognizable tendency in the electronic arts, which is made apparent in the catalogues of the electronic Arts Festival in Linz. one is reminded, for example, of Karl Simms’s at this time rather old (1993) Genetische Bilder, and of Simulationsraum­Mosaik mobiler Datenklange­SD­ MK of the group KR+cF, or of Jeffrey Shaw’s famous Golden Calf. It is likely that the more significant developments in digital art are to be found in the intersection between art on the Internet and art offline. For a general panorama of digital...