What you see is what you feel
April 4, 2009
An interviewer once asked Pablo Picasso why he paints such strange pictures instead of painting things the way they are.
Picasso asks the man what he means.
The man then takes out a photographfrom his wallet and says, “This is my wife!” Picasso looks at the photo and then says: “isn’t she rather short and flat?”
An essay by KOERT VAN MENSVOORT.
PhD Thesis, Eindhoven University of Technology. ISBN: 978-90-386-1672-8 .
Here Van Mensvoort aims to increase our understanding of simulations and their impact on our notion of reality. Following on some observations regarding the dominant role of visual representations in our culture, I will argue that we are now living in a society, in which simulations are often more influential, satisfying and meaningful than the things they are presumed to represent. Media technologies play a fundamental role in our cycle of meaning construction. This is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it entirely new. Yet, it has consequences for our concepts of virtual and real, which are less complementary, than they are usually understood to be.
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