FROM THE PICTORIAL SYMBOLS OF THE THEATRE TO THE VIRTUAL SYMBOLISATION OF THE REAL (original) (raw)
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Gramma. Journal of Theory and Criticism, 2012
The present text investigates the dialectics of reality and materiality in cinema theory and practice. It attempts an epistemological and meta-semiotic approach. Based on Louis Hjelmslev's model of sign-function, it reformulates both the haunting of cinema by reality and the avant-gardes' focus on materiality as problematising the relation of cinematic semiosis to the exo-semiotic realm. It starts by laying down the philosophical background of the issues investigated. It then explores the epistemological and ethico-political parameters of the debate over aesthetic realism. Finally, it discusses avant-garde cinema's techniques of drawing attention to the expression-plane, attempting their provisional systematisation. It suggests that avant-garde interest in materiality constitutes a stance against the ideology of realism, proposing an alternative relation to reality.
Virtual Reality - Theodore Grammatas
The problem of the existence or not of a reality, which outside the dimension of the intelligent subject, that is, the relationship of the subjectivity of conscience and the objectivity of the world, comprises an issue lending itself to a multiplicity of approaches and dimensions such as ontology, gnosology, psychology and metaphysics, neurophysiology and sociology. The questions posed and the answers given appear in philosophical and literary texts, scholarly studies and artistic creations, directly or indirectly linked to notions suck as “utopia” and “science fiction”, “temporality” and “reality”, “futurity” and “metaphysics”.
VIRTUALITY AND REALITY: AN INTERTWINING MOBIUS
andrew.cmu.edu
Reality as one of the most intrinsic matters of philosophy has been discussing from the Plato's Ideal world to the virtual environments of the cyber age. In a more speculative point of view, reality, had begun to extend within the invention of the alphabet. Alphabet and so the writing is a kind of extension of reality through the signs and metaphors. What forces the Lascaux's inhabitants to draw the walls of Lascaux shows an analogy within the people of the computer age who participate in computerbased communities. Whether it is a primitive drawing or hyper text of the digital age , the utmost relation between the human and his work should have similar relationship within the 'reality' of their time. But in a time when the reality is experiencing a division (or separation) at first within the language, it is difficult to cover the reality matter: The reality itself and the virtual reality as its extension. Should it be accepted easily as an extension or anything else? How can we approach to the reality which is not real but virtual? Reality that extends, transforms, evolutes is recalling the binary of the term non-real, fake or other synonyms. Virtual reality , as if stated within the traditional terminological approach, " is an event or entity that is real in effect but not in fact" 1 Human, as a part of the event or entity called virtual, experiences a paradoxical situation within the body he owns, and the time he realizes. The statement that every 'body' is a space and the spacing of the event makes the space matter a two fold important matter in the context of the reality which is virtual. From another point of view, Reality which is virtual is, according the forerunner of philosophical account , just a representation of the real world. Such an approach gives the chance to read the works 1 The definition of virtual reality taken from the Webster Dictionary.
The Relationship Between Virtual and Actual Reality: Phenomenological-Ontological Approach
The article addresses the relationship between virtual and actual reality as the external world of users. The objective is to study the relationship between two realities: virtual reality and actual reality in their ontological uniqueness and distinctness. The set objective implies that virtual reality should be seen as a specific conditional reality. The applied methodological principle incorporates concepts of ontological/ functional/ artistic conditionalities. The development of modern VR technology contributing to the formation of cyberculture is shown to bring the functional conditionality to the forefront, putting into action and emphasizing the leading part of an individual, the importance of his or her self-subject position (as the Participant or the Observer) in social construction of reality. The specific nature of the boundaries of conditionality as well as their penetrability/ impenetrability (characterizing openness or closeness of realities) make it possible to draw a demarcation line between the actual reality and other realities. The comparative analysis given in the article revealed a number of distinctive features inherent in virtual realities. Due to these features, virtual realities can be differentiated both from the actual reality and the realities (mental, artistic) generally referred to as virtual by a number of scholars. As defined, the actual reality, as long as its social and regulatory pressure is imperative and unconditional, can compete with virtual realities, which, on the other hand, due to their interactivity can have such an impact on the actual reality that any concept of two autonomous worlds makes no sense.
Matter-Reality in Cinema: Realism, Counter-Realism and the Avant-Gardes
2012
The present text investigates the dialectics of reality and materiality in cinema theory and practice. It attempts an epistemological and meta-semiotic approach. Based on Louis Hjelmslev's model of sign-function, it reformulates both the haunting of cinema by reality and the avant-gardes' focus on materiality as problematising the relation of cinematic semiosis to the exo-semiotic [1] realm. It starts by laying down the philosophical background of the issues investigated. It then explores the epistemological and ethico-political parameters of the debate over aesthetic realism. Finally, it discusses avant-garde cinema's techniques of drawing attention to the expression-plane, attempting their provisional systematisation. It suggests that avant-garde interest in materiality constitutes a stance against the ideology of realism, proposing an alternative relation to reality. [1] "Exo-semiotic" means "outside of the semiotic". For the exact use of the te...
Antirealism and the Visual Media (On Virtual Grounds # 6)
This paper examines the objections leveled by semiologist and theoreticians of the visual media against the widely held belief that photographic and cinematographic images may act as realist maps of the extradiscursive world on the basis of their intrinsic features. It is argued that Saussurean semiology, as well as, to a lesser extent, Peircean semiotics, do not support the concept of photographic images as unchallengeable signs. Saussurean semiology, in particular, deals with photographs as with any other arbitrary sign. This semiological skepticism, the paper points out, informs the analysis of still photographs, cinema, and computer-generated images. Against these uncompromisingly antirealist claims, the paper sketches out a theoretical framework by means of which visual evidence may be reclaimed for realism. The argument suggests that, more than a matter of semiological analysis, what is at stake here is an axiomatic judgment about the consistency and stability of the lifeworld. This paper is the sixth instalment of a book-length study provisionally entitled On Virtual Grounds: A Blueprint for a Postmimetic, Dialogical Realism. Previous instalments—entitled respectively “Toward a Dialogical and Postmimetic Realism,” “Classic Realism, the Nostalgic View,” “Modernist Antirealism: Existential Alienation and the Solace of Form,” and “The Thingless Sign: The Structuralist and Poststructuralist Challenge against Referential Illusion,” and “The Politics of Mimesis”—are also available on Academia.edu.
This paper proposes that the generation of successful virtual environments relies on better understanding of how we conceive virtual and physical realities in our consciousness. In particular, to recognise that our conception of these realities is more importance than our perception of them. The failure and success of certain virtual environments are explained as the failure and success of the application of these phenomena. Firstly, making use of philosophical phenomenology, our understanding of physical reality is considered in terms of phenomenal conception and it is shown that objective perception is only one part of our relationship to physical environments. Secondly, the other point of view is considered and virtual environments are argued to be just as valid phenomenal conceptions as their physical counterparts. Finally, the translation of phenomenal conceptions between realities is considered, providing a different way of considering how we think about and design all types of reality. Several interesting potential avenues of investigation are identified and examples of the emergence of this approach are presented.
Ekphrasis, 2010
From the earliest forms of artistic expression and from the first philosophical debates, the relationship between body and its representations was a constant preoccupation for theoretical discussions. Be it the "tomb for the soul", as it was for Plato, a mechanism governed by Reason and obeying the rules of the Reason, as it was for Descartes, or, as in the case of the phenomenology of the body, who equates the body with a mirror of the surrounding world, the Western intellectual world has debated the relationship between body and the reality of the world, or between the bodily existence of the world and the (un)Real. One fundamental question that derives from this debate is that of the relationship between humans and non-human beings (mechanical, artificial or imagined) in cinema. Using the correlation from Čapek's work, who is the "slave" and who is the "master" in this relationship between the represented and the representation, and how does this centuries old debate can be transformed into cinematic art and the theory of cinema? The fundamental question becomes, in terms of cinema theory, what is "real" and what is "illusion" in movies? In this article the basis for interpretation are three movies considered to be selfreflexive and directly addressing the nature of cinema: Solaris by Andrey Tarkovsky, Artificial Intelligence by Steven Spielberg, and Surrogates, by Jonathan Mostow.
CONTEMPORARY ART AND REALITY OF SUBJECTS: TURNING FROM SIMULACRA TO ACTUAL BEINGS
Contemporary art is aesthetically very attentive to subjects of different nature. We can watch this aesthetic attention both in following the ways of traditional genres and in discovering some new ways to express human meanings of things. Since times when ready-made objects were fully institutionalized as creations of art traditional and newly discovered modes of creativity in relation to things were set as equal within the artworld. Painting and graphics are dealing with different surfaces creating their new visual qualities with lines and colours, sculpture is doing the same with volume, ready-mades and installations are doing the same changing regimes of human contacts with classes of artifacts. When mixed and combined in the whole of contemporary art as aesthetic experience this relation to subjects turns reflection on subiectum esse, the only reality of actual existence possible to be ruled by a human subject. Subjective reality of artifacts turns the analogue of subjective reality of a human being that contemplates subjective mode of existence in its ontological qualities compared with mentally revealed concepts and signs dealing with being itself, esse tantum. This presentation is dedicated to limits ad unlimitedness of possible meanings of subjects in contemporary art.