Talking about mirrors, I remember Jorge Luis Borges's fantastic tale "*Animals
That Lives in The Mirror*". Looking for this text online, I didn't' find the
text, but I found a film about Borges that has the curious title 'The Mirror
Man':
http://www.in.com/videos/watchvideo-jorge-luis-borges-the-mirror-man-16-4226779.html
(I
suggest you watch 'time: 5:20' of the The Mirror Man - 1/6) ... Borges. A
man with a strong sense of fantasy…
I'll type an excerpt of the tale about the '*Animals That Lives in The
Mirror*' here:
"In those days, the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they
are now, separate and unconnected. They were, moreover, quite different from
one another; neither the creatures nor the colors nor the shapes of the two
worlds were the same. The two kingdoms – the specular and the human – lived
in peace, and one could pass back and forth through mirrors. One night,
however, the people of the mirror invaded this world. Their strength was
great, but after bloody battles, the magic of the Yellow Emperor prevailed.
The Emperor pushed back the invaders, imprisoned them within the mirrors,
and punished them by making them repeat, as though in a kind of dream, all
the actions of their human victors. He stripped them of their strength and
their own shape and reduced them to mere servile reflections. One day,
however, they will throw off that magical lethargy. The first to awake shall
be the fish. In the depths of the mirror, we shall perceive a faint, faint
line, and the color of that line will not resemble any other. Then, other
forms will begin to awaken. Gradually they will become different from us;
gradually they will no longer imitate us; they will break through the
barriers of glass or metal, and this time they will not be
conquered.(Borges, 2005, p.18-19)"
When you, Pier Luigi, mentioned the 'presence of the referent', it makes me
remember the Bill Viola's work '*The Reflecting Pool*':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_urrt8X0l8 . I think this video is
interesting to illustrate the considerations you mentioned of Roland Barthes
in the book 'La chambre claire'.
And now, I'll sleep thinking that, maybe, because the imaginary beings
that lives imprisoned in the mirrors are not happy repeating "[…] as though
in a kind of dream, all the actions of their human victors" the *thing* that
is reflected, will never be, despite the perfection of the mirror, or the 3D
software modeling and animation, artificial intelligence, and nanorobotic,
virtual or mixed realities technologies, as *subjective *as we are.
Clarissa//
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2010/2/5 Pier Luigi Capucci <plc@noemalab.org>
> Dear Clarissa,
>
> thank you so much for your post introducing the topic of the mirror in
> Foucault. Yes, the "virtual space" exists, and it is in someway real as the
> space where we are. Through that space we can control our appearance and
> many other aspects of our life, and maybe for the first time we can see
> ourseves as others.
>
> The mirror could be considered the progenitor of the optical techniques to
> achieve images (photography, video, cinema, and so on in their historical
> roots). I called them "referential" technologies, because, as in the mirror,
> the images are produced only because of the presence of the referent (from
> the latin "res ferens", that is "that carries the thing"), which is the
> subject, object or phenomenon that can reflect or produce light. Their
> presence during the image making process is mandatory in order the image is
> formed (emerges). In photography, for instance, recalling Roland Barthes [La
> chambre claire: note sur la photographie (Paris: Cahiers du
> cinéma/Gallimard/Seuil, 1980)], in front of a photo I can never deny that
> the represented subject, object or phenomenon has been there, for some
> occurrence, in some time of its existence, in front of the photosensitive
> plate. The image is generated by that presence (being there) during the
> image making process, it is some sort of emanating made by the light action
> and the chemicals and/or the physics.
>
> One more aspect which could be interesting is that the images in the
> mirror, have a meaning only for humans (not babies) and other 8 species (
> http://www.livescience.com/animals/061030_elephant_mirror.html). Only 9
> species are able to recognize themselves - to recognize their image, that is
> themselves as others - in the mirror; for the other living beings these
> images are pointless. I don't know if a similar research has been
> intensively made on the referential images, but I think it would be
> interesting.
>
> Best,
>
> Pier Luigi
>
> Il giorno 03/feb/2010, alle ore 02.54, Clarissa Ribeiro Pereira de Almeida
> ha scritto:
>
> > Around simulation... around utopia and heterotopia. Foucault in the text
> > "Des *Espace Autres*" (1967) consider that between *utopias *-
> fundamentally
> > unreal spaces –, and *heterotopias* – a kind of effectively enacted
> utopia
> > in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found
> within
> > the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted –,
> > there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the
> *mirror
> > *:
> >
> > "In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual
> > space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am
> > not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that
> enables
> > me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the
> mirror.
> > But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in
> reality,
> > where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy.
> From
> > the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I
> am
> > since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it
> were,
> > directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the
> > other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to
> direct
> > my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The
> > mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place
> that
> > I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once
> absolutely
> > real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely
> unreal,
> > since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point
> > which is over there." (FOUCAULT, 1967)
> >
> > http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html
> >
> > Clarissa Ribeiro//
> >
> >
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > 2010/2/2 Pier Luigi Capucci <plc@noemalab.org>
> >
> >>
> >> Il giorno 25/gen/2010, alle ore 12.17, c.tron@voila.fr ha scritto:
> >>
> >>> There is another new think in the art, that is simulation don't imitate
> >> the appearence of reality but by recomposing phenomena's acts like the
> >> reality. So we can say that we are in front of a new type of artifice,
> that
> >> changes the whole conception representation.
> >>> And, the big paradox of simulation seems to be that, even if the model
> is
> >> reality, the process of simulation is to modelize the reality in order
> to
> >> reproduce its behaviour, and to be able to produce new results from
> >> theorical tests and calculation.
> >>> During these operations reality is evacuated and the simulated
> >> representation is finally an autonomous artifice.
> >>> The relation to the reference has been ejected and virtual world can
> >> exist by itself.
> >>
> >> Sorry for this late post, but in the last days I had some troubles in
> >> following the discussion ;-(
> >>
> >> Colette,
> >>
> >> this is a good point, "simulation as a behaviour". Behaviour of what? Of
> >> the light, of the appearance of the matter, of the movement and so on, a
> >> simulation which imitates the information we detect with the senses
> (sight,
> >> hearing, smell, taste, touch, and so on). But I'll set up a further kind
> of
> >> simulation which imitates the dynamics of the things more than their
> >> appearance, their image, for instance the simulation of a living being's
> >> behaviour in an artificial life entity or in robotics.
> >>
> >> I also would go back to some posts which dealt with the idea of reality,
> >> where reality seems intended as absolute, "concrete" and unchangeable.
> Apart
> >> the theories which consider reality as a construction, I would stress
> that
> >> anyway reality is a cultural concept, since it is determined by our
> >> interpretation (cognitive, cultural, technical), so its shape is
> >> continuously evolving. For the people living in, let's say 1700, the
> idea of
> >> "physical reality" was different from ours: for instance - to do two
> >> examples - it did neither comprehend the small dimension (bacteria,
> viruses,
> >> microorganisms and so on) nor the outer space.
> >>
> >> Best,
> >>
> >> Pier Luigi
>
> --
> Pier Luigi Capucci
> e-mail: plc@noemalab.org
> web: http://www.noemalab.org/plc/plc.html
> skype: plcapucci
>
>
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