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Themesicon: navigation pathAesthetics of the Digitalicon: navigation pathEndo-Aesthetics
 
Simulationsraum – Mosaik mobiler Datenklänge (Knowbotic Research), 1993
 
 
 

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Although a rainbow can be photographed, it cannot be photographed stereoscopically, and least of all if the two cameras are set up far apart in order to obtain a special stereoscopic image quality. In other words, one can see the rainbow in the natural world, even photograph it, but one cannot reproduce it three-dimensionally, since in reality its nature is not objective.

This thesis is illustrated by «Simulation Room – Mosaic of Mobile Data Sounds» (1993), an interactive installation produced by the interdisciplinary group KR+cF (Knowbotic Research). Real and virtual spaces are superimposed over each other in this installation. Although the internal observer (interactor) is physically located in the real world, he contributes to the creation of an artificial model world in which he participates, while external observers watch his actions in real time. The internal observer interacts with the data—statements sent over the Internet—received from external participants, whose presence is such that they become virtual agents within the data realm of the installation. On the basis of the data received the internal observer (interactor)

 

creates new data sequences—sound groups—that can be heard as compositions in the acoustic space. Accordingly, internal observers and external participants are both inside a virtual space in which they exchange messages in order to generate new communication structures that become constitutive elements of the simulated world.

The application of endo-physical models in aesthetic theory is demonstrated by this work: in a simulated world the internal observers have access to certain actions and interventions of which the effects allow them to draw conclusions for their own environment. This possibility must be ascribed to the existence of the interface between observer and space (real and data space). Internal and external observers co-exist in a simulated world of that kind.

The observer-dependent reality, the definition of the world at the interface between the observer and the world, and the distinction between internal and external observer phenomena furnish crucial reflective stimuli for the developments of aesthetics of self-reference, of virtuality (the immateriality of the constitutive elements of the virtual world), of

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