Andrea Giomi

Although Merleau-Ponty never directly addressed the question of technics, over the past three decades, some of the core concepts of his philosophy have profoundly informed digital media discourse, especially in the field of media arts. The problem of embodiment, in particular, represents a keystone for the understanding of the relationship between bodies and technology. This paper seeks to examine the ways in which some of the French philosopher’s key concepts– embodiment, body schema, presence, intertwining, and flesh – have been employed and re-elaborated in the context of media art theory and practice. The purpose of this study is to shed light on the main conceptual entanglements between Merleau-Pontian philosophy and digital arts and performances. Thus, four topics will be discussed: the virtual body, prosthetics, virtual presence, and digital intertwining of flesh. In the conclusion, I question these concepts and their possibility/ability to pave the way for a Merleau-Pontian philosophy of technology based on the wider paradigm of virtual embodiment.

During the Nineties, the diffusion of information and communication technologies allowed a dramatic transformation in art practices. Radically new aesthetic experiences, such as tele-presence, immersivity, responsivity, hyper-mediacy and multimediality, emerge in the framework of the digital arts and call into question not only the traditional status of the work of art but also the fundamental relation with the beholder. The aim of this paper is to define a conceptual framework for the ontology of digital arts by identifying some ontological features that are distinctive to digital idioms. Such an analysis tries to outline how aesthetic and technical innovations affect our cognitive and sensorial relationship with technological artifacts. In the first part, the relation between technogenesis and ontology, as well as the key topics of the ontology of digital arts are discussed. The second part deals with the notion of presence. Despite traditional understandings of digital arts, mainly focused on immateriality, simulation and mediation, my analysis demonstrate how the notion of presence can provide an original perspective in order to understand the ontological status of the mediatized artistic practices. In the last three decades the generalisation of information and telecommunication technologies has played a major role in the transformation of the arts, opening the field to important experiments in the domain of computer graphics, digital audio, robotics and motion capture systems… (Dixon 2007). Peculiar forms of aesthetic experience such as tele-presence, immersivity, responsivity, hyper-mediation and multimediality, progressively arise from digital arts and question not only the status of artwork but also, more generally, the foundational relationship between this latter and the recipient.