as you so well show, what we now call "simulation" is an atavic issue. Besides philosophy we could recall the famous challenge between Zeusi and Parrasio, narrated by Pliny the Elder in his "Naturalis Historia"). Humans always imitated nature in their representations and artefacts, although simulation is culturally and historically declined: the byzantine mosaics are very different from the Renaissance frescos, and I think it is pointless saying which is the "best simulation", because we simply don't know how that images worked in the byzantine culture, because what we now call "simulation" is tied to a particular culture and because in some cultures it was simply meaningless in the sense we intend it today).
In a study on the psychology of the comic Ernst Kris (psychologist and art historian) noted that in the Middle Age the gothic gargoyles frightened the people (which was their role indeed), in the Renaissance they had no effect and in modern culture they make people smile.
But nature and the behavior of the living, is simulated by robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life too... The living is the best model in making tools, machines, artefacts, devices, organisms, entities which must survive damages, errors, defects, viruses, and autonomously work in and adapt to many environments, which have to interact with unexpected situations and hitches, like the living normally does. The living is the best model because it has demonstrated its efficiency in the last four billions years of evolution. It already knows these problems because it has embodied them since the dawn of its evolution: the best strategy is inscribed in the organization, behaviours and strategies of the living because it has already experience of the world.
Best,
Pier Luigi
Il giorno 21/gen/2010, alle ore 16.13, wafa bourkhis ha scritto:
> Hello YasminersI wanted to thank Pier for his invitation to discuss about this interesting topic.In deed,as Pier said we had used to many kinds of spaces and representations with perspective, but i wanted to talk about the human behaviour from mimesis to simulation:When I hear the term simulation, I refer it to
> 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
>>
>>
>>
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> --
> Pier Luigi Capucci
> e-mail: plc@noemalab.org
> web: http://www.noemalab.org/plc/plc.html
> skype: plcapucci
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--
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e-mail: plc@noemalab.org
web: http://www.noemalab.org/plc/plc.html
skype: plcapucci
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