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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.
2018
Slyce contributes an essay to this volume–deriving from the 2018 Verbier Art Summit with the theme More Than Real: Art in the Digital Age–that analyses our moment and its infatuation with the technological sublime. He examines drives towards Virtual Reality in light of both an earlier moment of technological innovation through Walter Benjamin’s writing on 19th century photography and then signal examples of 1960s practices coming out of post-Minimalism and Conceptualism that explored new technologies while not succumbing to their forces or distanced modes of production. Starting with two signal cultural products of the 1980s in a song by the avant-rock band Pere Ubu and then David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Slyce considers the conditions of making and the experience of virtual reality as art now, some five years before it is imagined–at least by the corporate powers standing behind VR–when ‘we’ will all own at least two such devices. The book, published by Koenig Books, was launched a...
Beyond Trompe l’Oeil Realism: Redefining the ‘Readymade’ in the Post-Digital Age
2017
In an exhibition-catalog essay for the 2012 exhibition “Lifelike” at The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, curator Siri Engberg suggested that “the utterly mundane reimagined through an artist’s careful hand or sly recontextualization can appear striking, even radical.” Thus, the Walker claimed that the meticulous, studied trompe l’oeil realism of the work in this exhibition aspired to make the familiar unfamiliar. While this is one approach to defining the goal of contemporary “hyper-realism,” another might include the reclaiming of the everyday “non-art” objects of Marcel Duchamp’s “readymade,” only to render them an extremely well-crafted form. For instance, Tom Friedman’s Untitled (2001) presents a convincing, realistically scaled bee made of clay, wire, hair, plastic, and paint. Only instead of fleeing the bee, viewers are encouraged to approach the insect as it sits quarantined and still in its vitrine, and to inspect the object at great detail. Friedman’s bee is refined and m...
Drawing the Digital: From 'Virtual' Experiences of Spaces to 'Real' Drawings
Drawing Futures: Speculations in Contemporary Drawing for Art and Architecture (UCL Press), 2016
Over the latter half of the twentieth century the proliferation of images has affected deeply the way we approach and engage with our surroundings, contributing to an increasingly mediated experience of reality. We ‘place’ ourselves in this world not only through real but also through simulated spaces and representations. In the emergence of architectural space as a space of congested representations and the privileging of the image as simulation rather than representation, architectural drawing conventions are faced with the inadequacy of their codes in articulating new perceptions of spaces. Most importantly however, what is challenged is the operation of drawing as not image or object, but as a distinct projective spatiality that mediates between the tangible reality of figuration and the projected spatiality of speculation. The increasing shift from physical experience to visually consumed impressions¬¬ of spaces can be traced back to the explorations and technological advancements of early modernity that brought to the fore the interrelation between space and time. In this context it can be considered as derived not by the digital mediations and manifestations of spaces but rather by a wider visual culture which can be, through Gilles Deleuze’s writing on cinema (Deleuze, 1983, 1985), as well as Jonathan Beller’s concept of the ‘Cinematic Mode of Production’ considered as ‘cinematic’ (Beller, 2002). As both Deleuze and Beller suggest, the cinematic does not simply entail the production of imagery but also the consequent production of consciousness and perception as ideology, challenging thus the interrelation between notions of reality, language and virtuality. This paper will look into the ways that the effects of virtuality that emerge in, and are operative for, the performativity of drawing as a ‘space of representation’ (Dorrian and Hawker, 2002) are contested by the effects of virtuality produced out of the cinematic, as the former seem to facilitate while the latter seem to bypass the production of spatial concepts. In light of the range of representational, recording, image and form producing possibilities offered by digital media – described by Beller as successors of the cinematic – this paper considers the current ‘digital turn’ of architecture as the architectural counterpart of the representational experimentations of modernist artists. This turn is situated in relation to the Cartographic and Geographic turns of architecture and architectural representation, as introduced respectively by Mark Dorrian (2005) and David Gissen (2008). In these latter turns, the pressure initially exerted upon architectural practice by the so-called crisis of representation, drawn out of the philosophical and political debates of the 1960s (Tschumi, 1996) is considered through opposing strategies of representation and simulation. The chapter finally argues that what is at stake in the digital not-yet-turn but challenge of architecture, is neither the skeuomorphic imitation of drawing’s analogue techniques, nor the production of iconic imagery, but rather the ‘domestication’ (Ingraham, 1998) of the medium as a new field of performance for architectural thinking-through-drawing through the (re)consideration of convention as a ground capable of facilitating both semiotic integrity and performance.
Photography & Culture, 2019
All portraits play host to a number of antithetical tensions, such as “private” and “public,” “real” and “ideal,” without which they would be reduced to a type of unassuming identification of subjects. Whereas in pre-modern times the artist was subject to the demands of the commissioner, after modernism the representational desires of the sitter began to clash with the creative intentions of the artist. Prior to the introduction of digital formats, this clash of subjectivities manifests itself in photography during the production of the work, the shooting of a portrait. Digital photography and post-production editing have expanded the methods for idealizing external appearance, a desire stimulated by the recent technological acceleration of production and circulation of more “manipulated” portraits than ever. In what ways, therefore, does the introduction of digital post-production editing and composite images affect this double clash in portraiture, between the real and ideal, and the desires of the sitter against the intentions of the artist? Moreover, how does the evolution of self-portraiture in the “selfie” affect the epistemological character of the genre? As such, is conceptual and aesthetic subservience a matter of technological possibility or creative determination?
Between Real and Virtual-A Study on the Artistic Potentialities of Virtual Reality Systems
2020
Just as photography and film went through periods of experimentation and doubts between scientists and artists until they were consolidated as artistic media, virtual reality headsets (VR) will also have their natural time until they find their own ways of artistic creation. Although experiments with VR systems are still subject to uncertainties among artists in relation to their authenticity as a form of artwork creation, it is possible to perceive that the technology presents potential to bring new aesthetical possibilities, by its elements of immersion and interaction. On the other hand, as this is a recent digital technology, it is necessary to explore its totality to understand its creative limits. Based on some examples, this work promotes a brief discussion about the aesthetical and technical potentialities that VR systems can offer artists in the creation of aesthetic and immersive experiences.
ART AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH TECHNOLOGY: VIRTUAL REALITY
Journal of Modern Education, 2019
This article focuses on specific questions of the use of computers in art while historicising the relationship between art and technology, specifically reflecting artistic processes designed for virtual reality, such as the works Rising by Marina Abramovic, Rainbow by Olafur Eliasson, and Phryne by Jeff Koons. Keywords: art, technology, virtual reality