Imaginary living worlds – A treatise on the Aesthetics of the future

Abstract

The paper deals with the issue of changeability of, on the one hand, primarily sensory and, on the other hand, specifically aesthetic perception of the world, resulting immediately from the media-technological transformation of ‘the living world’. In parts of the highly technological world  humankind will, to a great extent, live in imaginary living worlds, which will serve to us as a certain partner in communication and a source of information, with us, more than ever, observing the world and reality through the prism of machine media. It will no longer be possible to interpret ‘the living world’ in a sensory-immediate way by means of physical closeness of objects in the sense of the ancient notion of φύσις. On the contrary, it will experience the charge that surpasses the presence of the sensory. The physical closeness to objects implies the mediation of machines which, as such, will not be recognizable any longer. The very definition of the aesthetic perception in the future will not be possible by merely pronouncing the sensory element but, above all, by specially reflecting the perception. The feature of the aesthetic perception will not be mere self-reference, closeness and temporal focus on the given, but perception of the machine-established mediation in the reflection that goes beyond the given. The artistic notion of ‘the living world’ may be forced to uncover the untruth of the seemingly immediate, it will have to keep at distance there where there is seeming closeness.