the imitation of the real life, space and behavior of human, body, life and
appearance.
Since Plato's theory about the mimesis of the
art as imitation of real and ideal beauty, the artist wants to represent the
world where he lives such as fine artists and comedians.
The first subject which took the artists to
imitate this ideal beauty was the human body and this by the painting and the
sculpture. They used fictional comedies and tragedies to imitate life's
situation and especially human behavior or action such as said Aristotle.
Michael Davis, a translator and commentator of Aristotle writes: "At
first glance, mimesis seems to be a stylizing of reality in which the ordinary
features of our world are brought into focus by a certain exaggeration, the
relationship of the imitation to the object it imitates being something like
the relationship of dancing to walking. Imitation always involves selecting something
from the continuum of experience, thus giving boundaries to what really has no
beginning or end. Mimesis involves a framing of reality that announces that what is contained
within the frame is not simply real. Thus the more "real" the
imitation the more fraudulent it becomes"[1]
When painter works on human body and he
represents all gestures he do and all facial expressions and positions of the shapes,
he imitates the model's one, especially when he describes graphically this
body. So he tries also to imitate all light's behavior on this body and on all
the objects in the spaces around it.
This meaning of mimesis takes us to the resemblance;
model can be identified in this painting such as in sculpture or other fine art
that took the material to make all kind of bodies to produce beauty.
By using rules of the perspective's techniques,
all artists worked on the imitation of different human positions and movements;
such as in the baroque era. Illusion has been integrated also in theatre scenes
to give the fiction all senses of imitation of reality and give the mirror of
human lives.
According to Aristotle, Mimesis doesn't mean
only the imitation of the forms or the representation of the real, but his "Poetics,
defines the theater as a "imitation (mimesis)" of the «people in
action ", " by means of an action ", and not of a narrative, as
in the epic, for example.. Even if, defined so, the notion seems vague, it
emerges from it all the same that she can use as well linguistic and textual
signs (the tragic verse) as those, the not linguistic, a representation
(decoration, space, actors). The mimesis is thus at first the manufacturing of
a new object, autonomous with regard to its model, real. Now sometimes we
reduced her to be only a copy of the reality, sometimes we spread its
specificity beyond the limits fixed by Aristotle."
By this definition of the mimesis given by
Aristotle, we can understand the appeal of the artists to the mime that tries
to imitate gestures and movements and expressions of face as well as sounds
independently of the text, and dialogue in the theater. The art of puppetry has
marked the history of theater to imitate the lives of human beings as small
machinery for their lives and tell their stories.
With the advent of the photography and the
cinema, the imitated human behavior took another way, it becomes more realistic…
The theater of mime becomes then the silent movies and little by little the
artists returned towards the scenario to look for new aesthetic values of the
human behavior. Since the invention of the Computer, the artists tried to
imitate the reality and to try to develop the technologies to reach more and
more their wanted realism.
So artists, Scientifics tried to imitate humans
by invention of all kinds of robots - physical or virtual ones- to see how works
the human body in touching objects, talking,
etc.
In instance they created Virtual Reality to
imitate the human behavior and create other worlds to try how works the human
body in them.
Harold Cohen said " The machine interests
me for the only reason: she allows modeling certain aspects of the human brain.
What interests me it is the way the human beings work. The running of machines
imports me little."
(To be continued...)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis#cite_ref-1
--- En date de : Jeu 21.1.10, Pier Luigi Capucci <plcapucci@gmail.com> a écrit :
De: Pier Luigi Capucci <plcapucci@gmail.com>
Objet: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] Around Simulation-simulation and everyday life
À: "YASMIN DISCUSSIONS" <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Date: Jeudi 21 Janvier 2010, 13h32
Beautiful examples, indeed!
We could add, remaining in theme, the renaissance perspective, which set up the "order" of the representation (behind the painted surface) and the "order" of the space where the viewer is (the space before the surface, that in general we call the "real" space). Indeed, in order to see a scene at its best we have to view it from a precise viewpoint or a limited area, and moving away from this position we loose information.
Today we are immersed in simulations through many media which use perspective: from photography to cinema, to video, to computer animations, virtual reality, until the 3D videogames and the metaverses. Perspective, which is a mathematical, cultural, historical... issue, became a "natural" part of our way of representing, and especially of viewing, the world.
Pier Luigi
Il giorno 21/gen/2010, alle ore 05.30, r buiani ha scritto:
> ...continued
>
> I can't help but noticing how simulation reflects sociocultural and technological tendencies that we can observe in almost all human transactions today. this, I find, happens in a very subtle, imperceptible way.
>
> here are some examples to get us thinking about simulation in everyday life:
>
> 1) the process of choosing a piece of technology: we are drawn to a Mac or a Ipod or a Iphone, not a computer, a portable music device, or a cellular phone. aspects concerning the design, the aesthetics, or the coolness that these tools symbolize usually take the front seat.
>
> 2) thinking about sound, I am drawn to the idea behind the MP3 format: substantially, it is a simulation of the original sound, compressed, re-packaged and brought to us according to psychoacustic principles that eliminate "useless" noise, or frequency that our ear can't normally perceive. (see the work of Jonathan Sterne on Media Culture and Society - 2006- on MP3 for a more comprehensive discussion. I can send the specific article to those who are interested)
>
> 3) the fantastic worlds we see in blockbusters movies such as the very recent Avatar exhibits an imagery that is simultaneously photorealistic (that is, it shows some "serial" resemblance to objects and landscapes that we can find in the real world) and hyperreal (all objects exhibit literally some "extra" elements that make them more real than real and yet imagined). In particular, I have to thanks Pier Luigi for directing my attention to the Pandorapedia (http://networkedblogs.com/p23720729)I was surprised to see how the whole ecosystem articulated in the movie has been imagined and constructed according to ethological/anthropological/botanical principles, carefully classified and taxonomized in a "Linnaean" style, and in its smallest details. In this regard, I would be interested in knowing some commentaries: is this a way to legitimize this hyperreal world?
>
>
>
> rb
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Yasmin_discussions mailing list
> Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
> http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions
>
> Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin
>
> HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: click on the link to the list you wish to subscribe to. In the page that will appear ("info page"), enter e-mail address, name, and password in the fields found further down the page.
>
> HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: on the info page, scroll all the way down and enter your e-mail address in the last field. Enter password if asked. Click on the unsubscribe button on the page that will appear ("options page").
>
> HOW TO ENABLE / DISABLE DIGEST MODE: in the options page, find the "Set Digest Mode" option and set it to either on or off.
--
Pier Luigi Capucci
e-mail: plc@noemalab.org
web: http://www.noemalab.org/plc/plc.html
skype: plcapucci
_______________________________________________
Yasmin_discussions mailing list
Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions
Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin
HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: click on the link to the list you wish to subscribe to. In the page that will appear ("info page"), enter e-mail address, name, and password in the fields found further down the page.
HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: on the info page, scroll all the way down and enter your e-mail address in the last field. Enter password if asked. Click on the unsubscribe button on the page that will appear ("options page").
HOW TO ENABLE / DISABLE DIGEST MODE: in the options page, find the "Set Digest Mode" option and set it to either on or off.
_______________________________________________
Yasmin_discussions mailing list
Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions
Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin
HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: click on the link to the list you wish to subscribe to. In the page that will appear ("info page"), enter e-mail address, name, and password in the fields found further down the page.
HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: on the info page, scroll all the way down and enter your e-mail address in the last field. Enter password if asked. Click on the unsubscribe button on the page that will appear ("options page").
HOW TO ENABLE / DISABLE DIGEST MODE: in the options page, find the "Set Digest Mode" option and set it to either on or off.
