New posts to Scopic Regimes of Virtuality course blog
Andrea Fiore discusses mutual relationships and reciprocal interplays between space, time and money in virtual worlds. Saskia Korsten addresses melancholy and folding in Baroque and Postmodern art. Inge Ploum explores a dynamic concept of embodiment joining Mark Hansen’s understanding of perception as embodied experience and Katherine Hayles’s theories of posthumanism.
On the equation between space, time and money in second life, Andrea Fiore
In this post, I discuss a series of mutual relationships and reciprocal interplays between space, time and money in virtual worlds, as they emerge in Tom Boellstorff’s account of his ethnographic fieldwork in Second Life. I approach these relationships through the notion of machine space, which I borrow from the literature on cybergeography. By reading Boellstroff’s account through this notion, my post argues that an equivalence between space, time and money is inscribed within the major constrains that the virtual world of Second Life imposes to its residents’ building activities. Read the rest of this entry »
Stamatina Dimakopoulou couples the Baroque and the Postmodern with melancholy and the concept of the fold as mutual traits in her article ‘Remapping the Affinities between the Baroque and the Postmodern: The Folds of Melancholy & the Melancholy of the Fold’. The following quote at the beginning of her article summarizes her comparison between Baroque and the Postmodern most lucidly… “…The Baroque and the Postmodern find their most striking manifestations in forms and experiences that articulate intermediary spaces where tensions, antinomies and opposites remain unresolved. They perform tropes of the singular, and the multiple that resist the rationalist dualities of self and world, the universe and the particular.”1 Read the rest of this entry »
Various philosophical positions have interpreted the perceptual relations between bodies, minds and technologies. While representative realism holds that there is a world external to the mind that we do not and cannot perceive, phenomenal realism embraces the physical as the subjective reflection phenomena. Although both disciplines appear in a variety of forms, they mutually institute the dominant Cartesian dualistic tradition of the West. They restrict us from conceptualizing mind, body and technology relations as qualitative and intransitive and cling to arbitrary dichotomies in order to make sense of the world. To challenge these models, Mark Hansen proposes a ‘new philosophy’ to displace the empirical-transcendental divide (i.e., being versus becoming, mind versus body et cetera). In this article I will examine the ideas of Mark Hansen, focusing particularly on his understanding of perception as embodied experience. I will then argue that Hansen’s work could be read as a supplement to Katherine Hayles’s posthumanism, and propose a coalescent framework. Read the rest of this entry »