VIRTUAL POETICSForum: Digital Mind
davide
One of the poetics of the digital medium is expressed by an absolute lack of "assumptions". Metaphorically, it can be described as a primordial void equally prone to be filled by any type of truths and laws. This degree of abstraction diversifies the digital medium from the physical reality, the reality of matter, which is subject to intrinsic natural laws. Such laws indirectly constrain the mind too: no matter how vast may be the potential of our immaterial thought, whenever it interacts with or expresses itself through an external phenomenon - that is physical, space and time remain inviolable premises. In the last decades this panorama of virtual creations has been more and more present in visual arts. Two examples that come up in my mind are: Bill Seaman's "passage set", an interactive installation in which the viewer is allowed to press "hot spot" (hyperlinks or highlighted text) that bring to further texts and images resulting in the unfolding of a fragmented poem; "galapagos" by Karl Sims, now a permanent installation at the Inter-Comunication Centre in Tokyo, consists of 12 monitors with a computer-generated three-dimensional "creature" visible on each of them. the monitors are arranged in semi-circle, with a footpad attached to each of them. the viewer can decide which creature will keep growing by stepping on its pad and erasing all the others. After that, random mutations of the chosen creature appear on the monitor and continue transforming into new generations of genetic images. Both works were made in 1995... just a coincidence. Anyway, indulging in further speculation, we could also refer to the breaking of traditional perspective done by cubism (i have found in my notes a quote from a book... but don't know which one): "its simultaneous vision - the fusion of various views of a figure or object into a single image - can be seen as a codified and arbitrary system to convey a multiplicity of information on the flat surface of the canvass." 'Arbitrary system' is the key concept, or so it seems to me. The question now could be: how can all this relate to choreography? After all this fascination had a certain influence on my choreographic work, even though it is not necessarily about "virtual minds". More than the content it has influenced the methodology - arriving to the development of non-linear choreography, and later to my definition of 'choreographic landscapes'.
james j
quote:
God has only been created through assumptions - so to lament their nullification is just not right. Otherwise you would have to lament assumptions in mathematics, too. The digital medium can be the stepping stone - enabler - for assumptions...otherwise we wouldn't be here assuming.
davide
quote:
That is an interesting assumption you are making james j. Of course, my circumstantial (I am an atheist) assumption was that God created human kind, rather than the opposite. Not that it deeply matters after all, it was a game of words and nothing more. I think there have been a few misunderstanding: the metaphor of God was used in place of that inexplicable "something" from which our physical reality was created and by virtue of which it is regulated. In the following sentence I mentioned 'natural laws', intending the fundamental laws of physics to which we too are subjected, and those are the assumptions that I refer to. Leaving metaphorical or fictional Gods aside, we could more correctly assume that, somehow, these natural laws introduced themselves. As they define our space and time, we have to confront them not only through the physicality of our bodies but also through the psycho-physiology of our brain - let's face it: they must have something to do with the way we think and therefore with our intellectual limitations. |