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| '''!!! FINGERKRIEG !!!''' <br>
| | http://pzi.here-you-are.com/rwrm/FingerKrieg_JulieBoschatThorez.pdf |
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| In the 5th century BC, there was a disagreement over who was the best painter in Greece. The two potential electives were Parrhasius and Zeuxis. To solve the matter, a contest was set up between the two. Zeuxis came with a still life depicting some grapes, so well executed that birds tried to peck at them. Parrhasius had brought a curtain so realistic that Zeuxis, all boasted by the birds' sentence, asked for it to be pulled so the painting could be seen. Zeuxis then admitted his defeat with great humility, acknowledging that Parrhasius didn't just fool the birds but also the eyes of a fellow artist. This story, brought to us by Pline the Elder ''(Historia Naturalis, 1AC''), is at the core of the discussion around the subject of the mimesis.
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| In the antique era, Greek Art was trying to imitate the nature and address perceptions. Plato was in disagreement, he stood firmly against illusion in representation. To him, the sensory world was a pale copy of the intelligible world, with a lower level of reality. He thought that this was nothing but seduction, taking man away from truth. Nevertheless, Plato respected Egyptian Art because it was made clear that it wasn't trying to trick the eye but a perfect simulation but was formally presenting itself as a pictorial translation of reality, clearly exposing its mechanisms. Then came Aristotle, who associated mimesis with the pleasure of the contemplation of an idealised reality. He also thought that these images of an alternative sensorial reality could have a cognitive function.
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| Taking back principles from the Antique at the dawn of the Italian Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti edited some rules that would prevail in Art from the 15th century onwards ''(Della pittura, circa 1436)''. The canvas as a window was born through the use of geometric perspective. The artwork was supposed to perceptively proceed in an extension of the viewer's space. The canvas was the interface between where the viewer stands at and a parallel potential reality (even though it wasn't formulated exactly in these words).
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| In the 17th century as the quarrel between the Poussinists and Rubenists bursted out within the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. On one hand, the Pussinists were attached to Plato's ideal objects, present in the mind, that could be reconstructed in a concrete shape through the use of reason. On the other one, the Rubenists argued in favour of the deceptive effect of colour on the eye of the viewer, stating that this was approachable for a wider audience, making Art less of a matter of experts. At the time, Charles Le Brun declared: ''“the function of colour is to satisfy the eye, the one of drawing is to satisfy the mind”''
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| In 1925, in ''the Dehumanization of Art'' Jose Ortegat y Gasset pleaded for the virtues of the Modern Vanguard artists, asking for realism and romanticism to be abandoned. He distinguished Modernism and Realism through the metaphor of the window. Realism would asks the viewer to appreciate what's on the other side, forgetting about the frontier delimited by the glass surface (attempting to be forgotten), while Modenism would ask us to focus on the window itself, its properties and its capacity to reframe reality within certain modalities.
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| This dichotomy is fundamental in the way we apprehend media within the Western world. A lot of disputes were articulated within the same geometry. By media I include paintings, films, photographs and User Interfaces, as they all mediate information to the viewer, whatever their purpose is.
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| In the 21st century, we have become very acquainted with Graphic User Interfaces. Recently, there has been an tendency to favour “User friendly Interfaces”. Rather than having to adapt and be aware of the technological functioning of the machines we use, those machines should adapt to us. The idea to make it intuitive comes from a wish to make interfaces easier to use, even forgettable. Gestures from the tangible realm have been readapted so they could enable us to perform actions in the extended space behind the screen. Therefore the prolongation of in space throughout the screen can be operated (just like it has been with the geometrical perspective).
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| Ideology dictates how we digest reality, it is superimposed onto our sight. It is all about the way we process signs from reality, which differs from an intuitive perception of reality. With the digital being nothing but a space of information. Everything is highly political, and interfaces directly mediate our relationship to content. We are always facing the window of the screen. There has been an effort made to naturalize our gestures towards the screen. Clicking is a non-natural gesture, learnt idiomatically which requires precision. It remains a visible apparatus. Swiping is more like pulling mini curtains with our finger tips, it camouflages the interface within the physical space by mimicking the interaction we have with it. The making of invisible interfaces, the camouflage of the screen, the attempt to expand the space of the presence of the world to us is in the lineage of Alberti's window, the Rubenist painting, the realist canvas, and Parrhasius' curtain.
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| That we plead rather for a frame that remains distinguished from the sensible reality or that we want it to integrate tangible reality, we are still aiming for one ideology or another.
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| The game we made a prototype is perhaps revisiting this very old dichotomy through human machine interfaces and the choices made regarding their design. There could be a declination of the ranking aspects like precision, but for ease we have simply assessed rapidity.
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| ''“The function of swiping is to satisfy the hand, the one of clicking is to satisfy the mind”''
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| http://pzi-gestures.rubenvandeven.com/game/index.php | |
