Image, Art and Virtuality

This book investigates the ontological state of relations in a unique way. Starting with the notion of system, it shows that the system can be understood as a relational structure, and that relations can be assessed within themselves, with no need to transform relations in elements. “Relations” are understood in contrast to “relational property”: without a relation there is no identity, therefore no existence. What allows us to do that without hypostatizing the relation, and without immediately taking it simply as a causal relation, can be better grasped, possibly, in reference to a few entities that make best display of their systemic nature, for example images, works of art, and virtual bodies.

This book shows how virtual bodies are ontological hybrids representing a type of entity that has never appeared in the world before. This entity becomes a phenomenon in interactivity and evades the dichotomy between “external” and “internal”; it is neither a cognitive product of the consciousness, nor an image of the mind. The user is well aware of experiencing anotherreality, also in the sense of a paradoxical reduplication of perceptual synthesis. The virtual body-environment is therefore simultaneously external and internal, with virtual bodies-environments to be seen as artificial windows to an intermediary world. In this intermediary world, the space itself is the result of interactivity; the world takes place in the sense or feeling of immersion experienced by the user; and the body, perceived as “other”, takes upon itself the sense of its reality, of its effectiveness, as an imaginary and pathic incision, as a production of desire and emotion, to the point that the feeling of reality conveyed by a virtual environment will rely significantly on how this environment produces emotions in the users.

Roberto Diodato is Full Professor of Aesthetics at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy, and at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Lugano, Switzerland. Interested in entangling the relationship between aesthetics and ontology, he has been studying the work of modern philosophers as well as some contemporary philosophical currents. His research also covered the relationship between aesthetics and cybertechnology. He is the author of several Italian books such Sub specie aeternitatis. Luoghi dell’ontologia spinoziana (Mimesis, Milan, 2012), Logos estetico (Morcelliana, Brescia, 2012), and Decostruzionismo (Editrice Bibliografica, Milan, 2016), and co-editor with A. Somani of the Italian book Estetica dei media e della comunicazione (Il Mulino, Bologna, 2011).  He is also the author of Aesthetics of the Virtual (State University of New York Press, Albany, 2012), The Sensible Invisible - Itineraries in Aesthetic Ontology (Mimesis International, 2016), and of Vermeer, Góngora, Spinoza: L'esthétique comme science intuitive (Éditions Mimésis, Paris, 2016).