Aesthetics of the Virtual

3 Forms of expression

35 3 Forms of expression MIMeSIS? there is no crisis of mimesis except the one occurring on the surface .1 We know of the semantic amplitude of the term, which cannot be reduced to a process of imitation, and which, in certain theoretical frameworks, has come to mean the fundamental structure of human desire.2 Mimesis is at the crossroads of mechanical and creative representation, and it traverses the meanings of similarity and expression , simulation and assimilation. Mimesis is the territory in which the process of the aestheticization of the world is currently being played out, triggered by uncontrollable currents of mimetic desire and the discovery—and sometimes the protection and caretaking—of novel resemblances that open up horizons of meaning. Mimesis is now a field of hybridization between the sciences, from anthropology to technology , from the human sciences to ethology, and in this connection what is here interesting is the further mutation brought about by the novelty of the virtual body. As has been noted,3 mimesis is not only a cognitive process, but is also a doing/producing that involves the participation of the body, which appropriates the world in a particular way through the mimetic process. Therefore, this process is resistant to theory and open to a double historicity related, on the one hand, to the becoming of the organic body as reorganized in its perceptual and cognitive potentialities through inorganic prostheses, and on the other, to the becoming of the object that makes itself virtual as synthetic image. This means that the field of the virtual can be seen as a relational environment, that is, as a set that includes mimetic processes, because of its intrinsic 36 Aesthetics of the Virtual character of internal-external process, of construction of intermediary space. The notion of mimesis can thus become an interpretive tool of the virtual environment and the interactions that constitute it.4 The process of making-itself-similar (to reproduce, imitate, or represent), which constitutes the meaning of the mimetic act already in pre-Platonic sources, yields to a dynamic of nonconciliatory synthesis between production of meaning and fiction, between believing and make-believing, between being and making it be. Now, the virtual body is a product, a thing or object, that potentially can be mistaken for something analogous but with different characteristics. Such an analogue may be the object of imitation, so that the virtual body can serve the function of deception or deceptive fiction. Yet, as virtual object, it has its own characteristics that cannot be reduced to the result of a deceptive imitation, but that rather configure it as a form of mimetic modeling, that is, as production of a symbolic model based on a relative isomorphism with respect to its analogue. So, if a relation of resemblance belongs to any mimetic class, it is the relation between similarity and difference that distinguishes such specific classes; virtual bodies, due to the peculiarity of this relation, constitute a class of their own. one can say, from the point of view of the aesthetic and artistic properties of the virtual body, which for now we leave undetermined, that a mimesis capable of adhering fully to the paradigm such that it disappears into it in complete participation is not a good one. Nor can we say that the alternative between good mimesis (figurative) and bad mimesis (fantastic) can be determined through the relinquishment (or lack thereof) of the awareness of the character of appearance of one’s own being, that is, of the awareness of one’s being mimesis; the virtual body is both original and copy, and in no case a forgery of the truth of the original. And if it creates an illusion, such an illusion is still not far from the truth. In other words, the virtual body is not a mere copy even when it originates from processes of disclosure in synthetic images of non-virtual bodies. This is so because [the virtual body] is not to be understood in relation to that which it represents, its meaning is not a re-identification with the original, it does not suppress itself as if it were a means, it does not amount to being a means, it does not exist for self-effacement; rather, it exists so as to act as an entity endowed with a particular relational structure capable of opening up new perceptive , imaginative, and cognitive possibilities. Forms of...