Aesthetics of the Virtual

Roberto Diodato, Silvia Benso, Justin L. Harmon, Silvia Benso

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781438444369, 9781438444352
• eBook ISBN: 9781438444376
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Art General

Arguing that the virtual body is something new—namely, an entity that from an ontological perspective has only recently entered the world—Roberto Diodato considers the implications of this kind of body for aesthetics. Virtual bodies insert themselves into the space opened up by the famous distinction in Aristotle's Physics between natural and artificial beings—they are both. They are beings that are simultaneously events; they are images that are at once internal and external; they are ontological hybrids that exist only in the interaction between logical-computational text and human bodies endowed with technological prostheses. Pursuing this line of thought, Diodato reconfigures classic aesthetic concepts such as mimesis, representation, the relation between illusion and reality, the nature of images and imagination, and the theory of sensory knowledge.

1

Aesthetics of the Virtual Body

By “virtual body” I mean in the first place an interactive digital image,¹ the self-phenomenalization of an algorithm in binary format arising in its interaction with a user-consumer. It is a function of writing that, in its sensible appearance, at the same time exposes and conceals the translation project through which it is constituted in its computational operations. As apparition of a grammar, such a language-image [immagine-linguaggio] implies a peculiar spectrality that affects the visible-invisible relation and structures the modalities of its fruition. From this point of view, the digital image—which can be multisensory—is not simply image-of; it is not only a mimesis of that of which it is image,² identifiable or not, and is therefore not essentially simulacrum.³ Nor, in any case, is it an icon⁴ or original image. On the contrary, it is a genetic-relational form that belongs to a multiple system of translation. The digital image is not, one could say, properly “image,” but image-body [corpo-immagine], since it is made of tidy sequences of binary units, or, in other words, strings of characters that develop at various levels of a syntax that constructs the coincidence between these strings and their sensible appearances, which currently are mostly sonorous or visual but in general are perceptible.⁵ Now, we know that discrete sequences translate also undulating and continuous events. Therefore, as subtle body of a noncontinuous world, as discrete world of point-data that manifest themselves as fluidities and densities and saturate perception, and as (from a computer science or formal perspective) programming language, the virtual body is certainly an electronic body and therefore an atomic aggregate (to use another metaphor). The process of digitalization renders it peculiarly light, though: as a complex made up of a sometimes remarkable amount of data transmissible with extraordinary speed (the greatest speed that is possible given physical limitations), it is open to multiple embodiments that are at the same time structurally identical and phenomenally diverse insofar as the virtual body is a hybrid entity, an image-body. Its appearance, its existence-as image, is in essence interactive. This is a delicate point we shall have to return to, but which at least for now allows us to exclude from the notion of “virtual body” those simply photo-graphic or televisual digital images that allow for a passive action not affecting the properties of their appearing and that above all, at a different level of the meaning of “virtual body,” do not permit a retroactive interaction with the structure of the computer memory, that is, do not permit an incision into the matrix.⁶ Obviously, the degrees of interactive operativity are numerous, and so is the sense of the notion of “virtual body.” Going deeper into the matter, we will now approach the robust notion of virtual body, which is of interest here due to the novelty of its ontological status.

From a simple, comprehensive, and primary point of view, “virtual body” is, for example, any visible image-object [oggetto-immagine] that is actually and most commonly visible on a computer screen and that allows for an interaction that can modify it, at least in the sense of activating it, of constituting it as a specific event. In most instances, the case is that of a certain type of graphic entity that, when related to another entity of the same kind, builds an environment with which the user can interact. It would be opportune to produce a phenomenology of such image-objects, which should presumably begin with a taxonomy of sites, understood as organizers of screenshots equipped with various purposes, and thus with specific problems. We are dealing here with a broad and growing field of research in which computer graphics, multimedia programming, and aesthetics of reception might collaborate. A rather interesting object in this field is the avatar,⁷ that is, the representation of a non-generic human body in a Networked Virtual Environment (NVE). The case here is that of the representation of a user and his or her behaviors, of his or her virtual alter ego. I, as a consumer of this specific environment, take shape within it and appear on the screen as a graphical representation of myself. In such an environment I act, and by means of appropriate instruments, my representation/virtual body carries out the tasks I command. What the avatar does has an impact on the virtual environment, and modifies it. Such an environment is connective; participating in it are various avatars capable of interaction.⁸ Especially interesting is the study of the proxemics of avatars and, in general, the attempts to reproduce the limits of the human body in a digital representation that, because of its nature, can do, within its own environment, (almost) everything (it can see or pass through objects, immediately move from one place to another, and so forth). For example, what “sense” of space can an avatar have (or, can I have through my avatar)? The human body does not have a homogeneous or merely geometrical sense of space, established only through measurable distances. Space for us is non-homogeneous, dense, and, like time, always qualitative. For programmers, this is a problem.⁹

Still in the attempt to come closer to a hard concept of virtual reality, a second exemplification of virtual body is offered by so-called immaterial sculptures. They are not digital images visible on a computer screen, but rather space-environments that take form in interaction with users, that is, virtual robots that appear in 3-D as holographic and holophonic organisms almost capable of “learning” data that are supplied by users and of changing in relation to them. The possibility of interaction is given through the construction of a virtual space V, resulting from the mapping of a highly singular external space E such that, through video cameras and sensors, any physical change in E can modify the state of V. A virtual sculpture is therefore perceptible as a tridimensional form luminous and sonorous in movement, and mutating in relation to the users' gestures; it can, for example, turn itself over, change direction, and disappear.¹⁰ Such relations of mutation become more and more complex, giving rise to a metamorphosis of the virtual sculpture, to the possibility that it assumes different perceptible forms relative not only to consumers' movements, but also to their emotional states. Conceptually, the problem of an interactive metamorphosis concerns neither the possibility of registering psychophysical mutations in users (which would depend on both the quality of the sensors and a basic reductionist hypothesis), nor even the management on the part of a computer of a data bank of morphologies connectable to them. Instead, it concerns the type of relations that are instituted between the alterations of users and the generation of visible and sonorous forms. It is possible to plan, through an outline of interfaces, a system of precise translation that gives rise to a system of variation/substitution of the sculpture-configuration. Organizing a system capable of making the forms of a work evolve in relation to the interactions of users is more difficult: there is a clear divide between a type of interaction that develops within the prefixed limits of an already given materiality, in our case a data bank of remarkable dimensions, and an interaction that can shape (sculptural metaphor) the programmed matter, causing it to evolve into new, unpredictable states. Such a clear divide opens up a space in which various mediations are possible, mediations which the development of technologies and, in particular, research in evolutionary electronics, are concerned with inspecting.¹¹

We can now come even closer to an approximation of the specific notion of “virtual body” by first clarifying preliminarily the qualities of the experience of the virtual, then by defining the concept of “virtuality,” and finally the concept of “virtual reality.” First of all, the experience of virtual reality is multimedial and interactive,¹² where “multimediality”¹³ indicates a peculiar “representational wealth of a mediated environment,”¹⁴ thinkable in its turn as constituted out of two factors: amplitude (quantity: number of senses simultaneously involved) and profundity (quality of perceptions, or sensorial information). Interactivity designates “the users' level of participation in modifying the form and content of a mediated environment,”¹⁵ and can itself be specified in (at least) three factors: velocity (the time that it takes every datum to be assimilated into the mediated environment); range (the number of possible actions in a given environment); control (“the ability of a system to verify its own controls within a mediated environment in a natural and predictable way”).¹⁶ There exist, therefore, varying levels of multimediality and interactivity, and the experience of virtual reality will be more immersive depending upon the depth of such levels. One can thus maintain with Oliver Grau that “virtual realities … are in essence immersive”¹⁷ while considering at the same time, however, the paradoxicality of such an affirmation insofar as physical and mental immersiveness, which implies the suspension of disbelief, and the identification of the body with the medium do not coincide with, and indeed in certain aspects stand opposed to simulation. In other words, I claim that insofar as it is immersive, “virtual reality” should not and cannot be confused with a basically perfect simulation of reality, with a simulation that annuls similarity in identity (and therefore cancels itself as such), or with a teleologically definitive transparency of medium. Immersiveness can occur, and does occur, but as quality of an experience that cannot be confused with that which we hold to be “real.” To justify this position, one can examine the same question from the genetic-constituent point of view: the generation of “virtual reality” means the generation of the possibility of the experience of an environment (characterized as “environment” by a set of “virtual bodies” that are not bodies of the environment or in the environment but coincide with it) capable of producing perceptual experiences in its users. By “generator of virtual reality” we can therefore mean a machine capable of making users have the experience of such an environment, of translating an environment into a situation. Thus, a generator of virtual reality could be conceivable as a generator of possible sense perceptions, and, more precisely, as a generator of sense perceptions¹⁸ (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactive, and so on) capable of simulating an environment/situation that pre-philosophically we would define as “real,” as having sufficient faithfulness [fedeltà].¹⁹ In short, a generator of virtual reality would simulate that “perceptual belief” seemingly presupposed in our everyday commerce with the world. I think, however, that what we have here provided is a restrictive and, all things considered, minimally interesting definition of environment and, therefore, of the virtual body, insofar as it tends to equate virtual reality and simulated reality, and therefore considers the virtual as an aspect of simulation or of a mimetic project. I think this for the following reasons: an environment that is defined as “virtual” because of its capacity to simulate a real situation results in being faithful [fedele] insofar as it is capable of responding in the desired way to every possible action of a user; therefore, its faithfulness does not depend only on the experiences that the users actually have, but also on those that they could have.²⁰ Now, the valuation of the “sufficiency” of faithulness is problematic: Is it possible to simulate a reality without variation, or to construct a “perfect illusion”? Supposing that the user has the possibility of making free choices in the sense of a freedom of indifference, the simulation is impossible because such choices are not computable. Limiting ourselves to other metaphysical hypotheses, that is, assuming for simplicity's sake that the choices are the result of a causally infinite series (where the same idea of series is reductive and inadequate), the simulation of reality will be that much more efficacious the more the processor is able both to calculate the possible actions and reactions of the user and, consequently, to preconstitute the potential interactions on the part of the virtual body-environment.²¹ Therefore, the virtual environment will simulate the real environment to the extent that such calculations stretch infinitely and, consequently, to the extent that such algorithms will be phenomenalizable. From this point of view, the virtual environment is an imperfect Spinozian machine, that is, an apparatus of relations that constitute a tendential coincidence between freedom and necessity, a coincidence that would be actualized only in a causal network of infinite thickness, essentially incomputable.²² It follows that the virtual environment tends to produce the experience of an immersion pervasive and persuasive but at the same time relatively aware of its own particular ontological status: it appears as a tendential simulation and not as a perfect reproduction. In my opinion, it is this limit, this void, and this lack that open up the artistically relevant possibilities of the virtualization of the imaginary.²³

An obvious characteristic of the virtual body, one that distinguishes it with respect to the generation of other types of digital images, is its special kind of interactivity: the virtual body is an entity that is phenomenalized through interaction. Interactivity is in certain aspects a characteristic that the virtual body has in common with any other body, but is in other respects a peculiar condition. In order to comprehend such peculiarity, that is, in order to bring oneself closer to the ontology of the virtual, it is necessary to reflect on the concept of the virtual and on the difference between the virtual and the possible. Certainly, in fact, in a general sense “the virtual is a state of the real and not the contrary of the real. There is something virtual within the real: the essences, the forms, the hidden causes, the aims that will be realized, and so on. The virtual is the active principle, the discloser of the hidden potential of the real. It is that which is at work in the real.”²⁴ Still more in general, the “virtual” set can be considered without a doubt part of the “real” set; in fact, we use without difficulty the expression, “virtual reality.”²⁵ However, the concept of the virtual can be better defined by means of its difference with respect to the concept of the “possible”: unlike the possible, conceivable as a constituted entity that waits to be realized, the virtual is configured as a problematic complex, a node of tendencies that imposes a process of actualization. Clearly, from this point of view, the virtual-actual process is not identical with the process of realization of the possible, if the latter is conceived of as the mere bestowal of matter upon a preexistent form, and, on these lines, as constitution of substance, however dynamic it may be. On this matter, Pierre Lévy writes: “The real, substance, the thing, subsists or resists. The possible harbors nonmanifest forms that remain dormant: Hidden within, these determinations insist. The virtual … is a way out, an exit: it exists. The actual, however, as the manifestation of an event, arrives, its fundamental operation is occurrence.”²⁶

Now, the opposition to the (albeit trivialized) notion of the possible allows us to clarify the interactive quality of the virtual. To the extent that the virtual environment develops in the interactivity of its consumers, the virtual signifies a dynamic configuration of forces that have an intrinsic tendency to actualize themselves in not entirely pre-constituted forms.²⁷

The virtual environment in question, with its complex of perceptible qualities (color, sound, density, tactility, and so forth), that is, the environment in which I have the feeling of being immersed, is nothing else than the actualization of the content of a digital memory, the staging of an algorithm processed in a binary system.²⁸ This presses the question concerning the relation between aisthesis and noesis. We find ourselves in fact confronted with the possibility of a reduction of aisthesis (as sense perception) to computational terms, a reduction which however implies neither the reduction of secondary qualities to primary qualities nor even the possibility of reducing the world to number.²⁹ Rather, it speaks of an original and reversible solidarity between aisthesis and noesis that expresses itself in an operational arc one of whose extremes is constituted by a digital description in computer memory and the other by a body endowed with technological prostheses, with nonorganic extensions of the senses. The body of the user in a virtual environment is a complex structure, a subject-object resulting from a technological project; it is a quasi-cyborg body,³⁰ similar to what is thought of and experimented with by some artists,³¹ a body that translates itself into an emine...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword by John Protevi
• Introduction
• 1. Aesthetics of the Virtual Body
• 2. My Body in the Virtual Environment
• 3. Forms of Expression
• 4. Toward the Image
• 5. Metaphors of the Virtual
• 6. The Concept of the Virtual
• 7. The Virtual Actor-Spectator
• 8. For an Aesthetics of the Hypertext
• Notes
• Bibliography