The Cinematic Aesthetics of Digital Virtualism

This dissertation explores the cinematic ontology of digital virtualism in the context of the current trend to digitalisation. I define digital virtualism as the aesthetics of assemblage and configuration in the age of digital images. This definition implies that digital technology strengthens the complex tension between physical reality and imaginary illusion. Based on computer simulation and synthesis, the digital image intensifies the contradiction between cinematic materiality and immateriality. Digital virtualism is the aesthetics of historical hybridity and aesthetic complexity between the actual and the virtual, the indexical and the symbolic, the material and the immaterial, the real and the imaginary. In this context, this thesis examines the aesthetical relationship of filmic virtuality and the digital image. In particular, I assert that the digital image is the new form and expansion of filmic virtuality. While film is always the art of the virtual, that is, the aesthetic imbrication of actual indexicality and imaginary illusion, the digital image intensifies the contradiction of filmic virtuality between reality and illusion. On one hand, computer simulation reinforces the indexicality of film by the principle of perceptual realism. On the other hand, it attenuates the causality between the object and the image by digital manipulation. I argue that digital technology simultaneously intensifies both filmic reality and the manipulation of the imaginary. Thus, the digital image expands the expressive force and aesthetic potential of cinema. After examining the cinematic aesthetics of realism, modernism, postmodernism, and digital aesthetics after postmodernism, this dissertation investigates the aesthetical implications of Deleuzian virtuality in the age of the digital image. Deleuze presents the cinematic aesthetics of virtual conjunction in the monism of simulacra, which implies the indiscernible and inextricable imbrication of the actual and the virtual, original and copy, reality and image, and cinematic movement and time. Following the discussion of the aesthetical ontology of Deleuzian virtuality, this dissertation theorises the assemblage aesthetics of digital virtualism. Consequently, this dissertation proposes the subjective and practical task of digital ethics. Digital technology intensifies the spectacular attraction of images and the interactive participation of spectators in the cinematic process. In contrast, the digital image reveals technological fetishism and aesthetic commercialisation. Based on the ontological contradiction of the digital image, this dissertation articulates the configurative aesthetics and the subjective ethics of digital virtualism

The Cinematic Aesthetics of Digital Virtualism

This dissertation explores the cinematic ontology of digital virtualism in the context of the current trend to digitalisation. I define digital virtualism as the aesthetics of assemblage and configuration in the age of digital images. This definition implies that digital technology strengthens the complex tension between physical reality and imaginary illusion. Based on computer simulation and synthesis, the digital image intensifies the contradiction between cinematic materiality and immateriality. Digital virtualism is the aesthetics of historical hybridity and aesthetic complexity between the actual and the virtual, the indexical and the symbolic, the material and the immaterial, the real and the imaginary. In this context, this thesis examines the aesthetical relationship of filmic virtuality and the digital image. In particular, I assert that the digital image is the new form and expansion of filmic virtuality. While film is always the art of the virtual, that is, the aesthetic imbrication of actual indexicality and imaginary illusion, the digital image intensifies the contradiction of filmic virtuality between reality and illusion. On one hand, computer simulation reinforces the indexicality of film by the principle of perceptual realism. On the other hand, it attenuates the causality between the object and the image by digital manipulation. I argue that digital technology simultaneously intensifies both filmic reality and the manipulation of the imaginary. Thus, the digital image expands the expressive force and aesthetic potential of cinema. After examining the cinematic aesthetics of realism, modernism, postmodernism, and digital aesthetics after postmodernism, this dissertation investigates the aesthetical implications of Deleuzian virtuality in the age of the digital image. Deleuze presents the cinematic aesthetics of virtual conjunction in the monism of simulacra, which implies the indiscernible and inextricable imbrication of the actual and the virtual, original and copy, reality and image, and cinematic movement and time. Following the discussion of the aesthetical ontology of Deleuzian virtuality, this dissertation theorises the assemblage aesthetics of digital virtualism. Consequently, this dissertation proposes the subjective and practical task of digital ethics. Digital technology intensifies the spectacular attraction of images and the interactive participation of spectators in the cinematic process. In contrast, the digital image reveals technological fetishism and aesthetic commercialisation. Based on the ontological contradiction of the digital image, this dissertation articulates the configurative aesthetics and the subjective ethics of digital virtualism

Between Theory and Praxis: Art as Negative Dialectics

This paper takes up Adorno’s aesthetics as a dialectic between philosophy and art. In doing so, I argue that art provides a unique way of mediating between theory and practice, between concepts and experience, and between subjectivity and objectivity, because in art these relations are flexible and left open to interpretation, which allows a form of thinking that can point beyond itself. Adorno thus uses reflection on art as a corrective for philosophy and its tendency towards ideolog

Good Sense, Art, and Morality in Hume's ‘Of the Standard of Taste’

In his essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste,’ Hume argues that artworks with morally flawed outlooks are, to some extent, aesthetically flawed. While Hume's remarks regarding the relationship between art and morality have influenced contemporary aestheticians, Hume's own position has struck many people as incoherent. For Hume appears to entangle himself in two separate contradictions. First, Hume seems to claim both that true judges should not enter into vicious sentiments and that true judges should adopt the standpoint of an artwork's intended audience. But The Iliad, say, was obviously intended for an audience that shared Homer's flawed moral outlook. Second, Hume appears to claim that our moral sentiments are both highly resistant to change and extremely fragile. This essay defends Hume against these two objections by drawing increased attention to the role that Hume's aesthetics assigns to the faculty of good sense or sound reason

The Aesthetics of Evanescence in the Poetry of Octavio Paz

Creamos la estética de la evanescencia que contrastamos con lo que Peirce llama la Primeridad y con el concepto de infiniversión que hemos descubierto en la poética moderna. Reconocemos en poemas de Octavio Paz, especialmente, Ladera Este y Árbol Adentro, características de ésta estética, tales como: dispersión, elementalidad, alteridad, impermanencia, contradicción, vacuidad, etc. Y vinculamos con la misma estética los símbolos del espejo y el abismo.We create the aesthetics of evanescence as opposed to what Peirce calls Firstness and to the concept of "infiniversion" that we have discovered in modern poetics. In Octavio Paz's poems, specially "Latera Este" and "Árbol adentro" we recognize features of this aesthetics, such as: dispersion, elementariness, otherness, impermanence, contradiction, emptiness, etc. And we link the symbols of mirror and the abyss to this same aesthetics

La ironía crítica o los amantes de las ruinas: el esteta, el dandy y el flâneur

El ensayo examina el carácter crítico de la ironía romántica de Friedrich Schlegel siguiendo las consideraciones y apropiaciones de Walter Benjamin, Harold Bloom y Paul de Man. También, el ensayo pretende mostrar el paralelismo de la actitud crítica de la ironía con tres figuras literarias románticas: el esteta, el dandy y el flâneur. Estas criaturas, unidas por una fe profética en el arte, hacen de la ironía una profesión que se mueve entre la creación y la destrucción. La apropiación en el contexto post-estructuralista nos permite percibir a la ironía en una incomprensión radical, desarrollando un patrón estético que opera entre la creación y la aniquilación.This essay examines the critical character of FriedrichSchlegel?s Romantic irony, following its considerations and appropriationsby Walter Benjamin, Harold Bloom and Paul deMan. Likewise, it shows a parallelism of this critical attitude ofirony with three Romantic literary figures: the aesthete, the dandyand the flâneur. These figures, joined by a prophetic faith inart, make of irony a profession which moves between creationand destruction. Appropriation in the poststructuralist contextallows us to perceive irony in such a radical incomprehension,developing an aesthetic pattern that operates between creationand annihilation.Fil: Garnica, Naím. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Catamarca. Facultad de Humanidades; Argentin

Clueless: contradictions, malapropisms and tensions within a contemporary art practice

At a recent gallery opening of the work of Terry Atkinson, I got talking to an artist friend, ‘M’, and both of us were singing the praises of a certain mutual acquaintance, ‘D’ who happened to be ‘cropping up’ all over the place, in shows, in magazines, in his writings, even his teaching was being talked about. It was a genuine pleasure to see our friend doing so well but when my other friend ‘M’ made the point that ‘D ‘was really focussed and knew what he was doing’, and added wistfully, ‘I wish I did, I haven’t a clue most of the time’, I felt an immediate sense of empathy and it seemed entirely appropriate that we would have this conversation within the context of work by Atkinson who has recently described the art world as a ‘swamp’. Like my friend ‘M’, I too mostly seem to be little lost in my practice, but it’s a waywardness I seem compelled to cultivate in a far more profound manner than a simple inability to focus, yet something about this apparent lack of direction seems to indicate back to me an absence of something altogether more serious, of a sustainable intellectual argument perhaps, leading to the further academic threat of the loss of peer esteem or even more withering, the accusation of a shortfall of artistic ambition. When asked to describe my work I often still stumble like a first year art student on his or her first viva. However I know its not that I’m not articulate, it’s that I’m not able to articulate a practice, which I have steered all over the place, precisely in order for it to be un-speakable. David Bohm, in On Creativity suggests that we must ‘give patient and sustained attention to the idea of confusion’. My argument for my contribution to ATINER was be for a rethinking of practice, particularly within the contexts of research driven agendas of the Art and Design Institutions, in order to create conceptual space for this confusion and complexity to exist as aesthetic tensions, which are attempting to exist outside of the realm of the essentialising commodification of the art market whilst being implicitly sceptical of the progressive drive towards knowledge of the contemporary research culture. In the words of Jacques Ranciere, ‘Aesthetics is the ability to think contradiction’. I proposed to explore an argument that refused to isolate waywardness as a lazy or uncritical approach, and indeed, to suggest that such an approach is deeply engaged, politicised and recognises contradiction as an aesthetic force. It may be possible to argue that this impossibility of classification, this refusal (or inability) to ‘focus’ is in itself a highly charged and even ideologically informed approach, having its routes in libidinal forces, which, at their centre promote a deeply profound and necessary critical distance and attempt at detachment from what could be seen as the atomising effects of the confusion and manipulation of everyday media orientated life, presenting another model of confusion, in which tensions and stresses, contractions and disturbances have an aesthetic and dynamic dimensions which may experienced as a form of pleasure. I did this by drawing attention to my own practice within my collaborations of Dutton and Swindells and The Institute of Beasts, but I will also referred to the work Art and Language, Terry Atkinson, Fischli and Weiss, Arakawa and Gins, Liam Gillick as well as some emergent artists within the UK (Andy Spackman, Brigid Mcleer) and the thinking of David Bohm, Claire Bishop, Jaques Ranciere, Grant Kester and Elizabeth Grosz

Cultural Tourism: Authenticity, Engagement, and the Everyday

As renown, one main aim of everyday aesthetics is to widen the scope of traditional Western aesthetics beyond the realms of fine arts and nature, so as to uncover the aesthetic potential of the varied phenomena that constitute people's daily life. Tourism and traveling, however, have so far received comparatively little theoretical treatment in the everyday aesthetics literature. This paper attempts to make up for this lack by presenting tourism as a proper object of aesthetic research. Unearthing the aesthetic motivations that animate so-called cultural tourism, it shows that, while searching for 'authenticity' in the visited destination tourists remain trapped in their own, detached, 'tourist gaze'. In order to reconcile this contradiction, we appeal to the theoretical tools provided by everyday aesthetics. After discussing and discarding approaches based on defamiliarization and distancing, we exploit strategies that rely on the adoption of an engaged aesthetic attitude. We conclude by suggesting that the engagement paradigm turns the tourist gaze into a mindful and embodied relation to the visited environment or cultural habit, thereby offering the visitor a chance to appreciate the place's quotidian life while at the same time ensuring aesthetic fulfillment