[-empyre-] Immersion, pleasure, self-transcendence

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

Hola Joseph, Greg, et al

Thanks for bringing in Susanne K. Langer's great text Feeling and Form..

>> Curiously, in answering the question of how art
>> feels, Ms. Langer proposed that the symbolic space created in painting was
>> not real but virtual.

Reminds me of Baudelaire's in the Correspondances; and a half century later,
between the wars, when Benjamin looks back at the Parisian arcades in this
spirit of the virtual:  architecture as a dream or the moments just after
waking from a dream in which the content of an age has been condensed into a
series of gestures at thresholds, just at the edge of consciousness. The
19th century as a dream which the 20th c wakes up from, or to.

>> 
>> The emerging artist's work then is the electronically aided creation of
>> unfamiliar emotive abstractions of enjoyment.  ideals
>> of self-transcendence.
>

Would you talk a bit more about this quality of the unfamiliar -- the
incommensurate, the excessive...? Especially relative to the ideal of self
transcendence .
>> 
>> The fundamental change in aesthetic perception engendered by immersion, a
>> perception which is connected to the ideal of total-immersion in virtual
>> space, identifies certain shifts in ontology

Might we imagine that this new ontology is itself an immersion: it is the
subject? Perhaps feeling becomes metacontent within the phenomenologic
transaction between image=matrix and sensorium..so you don't know entirely
how to describe what you feel, that is, it is non logocentric; but the
immersive feeling is one of completion, totality and extreme specificity.

>> A primary subject of the emerging viractual arts is immersion then: an
>> experience identified as the indispensable characteristic of Virtual
>> Reality.
> -- 


 Are we speaking then of immersion as a cognitive field or zone? Can  the
potential  self-transcendence imagine itself (image itself!)as an occurrence
/  incident / total form that is superfluous, like Lacanian excess, the
excellent excessive, that god principle in Lacan?

Christina

-- 
Christina McPhee
<http://www.christinamcphee.net>
<www.naxsmash.net>