ART AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH TECHNOLOGY:

VIRTUAL REALITY

Michelle Sales
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro - RJ

RESUMO
O presente trabalho irá debruçar-se em questões específicas do uso do computador
no campo da arte além de historicizar a relação da arte com a tecnologia, refletindo
especificamente processos artísticos pensados para a Realidade Virtual, como os
trabalhos Rising, de Marina Abramovic, Rainbow, de Olafur Eliasson e Phryne, de
Jeff Koons.
Palavras-chave: arte, tecnologia, realidade virtual

ABSTRACT
This article focuses on specific questions of the use of computers in art while
historicising the relationship between art and technology, specifically reflecting artistic
processes designed for virtual reality, such as the works Rising by Marina
Abramovic, Rainbow by Olafur Eliasson, and Phryne by Jeff Koons.
Keywords: art, technology, virtual reality

1- INTRODUCTION

The relationship between art and technology is almost always described by art
and culture historians as an unavoidable meeting while socio-cultural transformations
develop in terms of representation and image creation.
This is not our starting point to expound on the relationship between art and the
limits of technology, but that of a dialogue permeated by tension, subversion,
appropriation, and deviation. We also do not intend to refer to any particular
technique, but those that emerged at the dawn of an industrial and urban world,
which have become mediators of the relationship between images and the fields of
art and culture.
Until the 19th century, craft production and technical skill dominated a given
“know-how” that was crucial for the image production connected to the fine arts
classical tradition, such as painting, drawing, and engraving. After a certain kind of
culture produced within an industrial/middle-class society, the creation process
began fragmenting and assuming new positions. With the arrival of optical equipment
 2

which enabled the creation of images that no longer depended on craft production,
sight became the quintessential sense in the creative process, alongside traditional
techniques already being questioned by the end of the 20 th century.
The questioning of traditional art-producing techniques prompted a profound
reflection about the material-product of a work of art. In the early 20 th century, there
was a break with traditional painting materials while elements of everyday life started
being incorporated onto the two-dimensional space of the canvas, unveiling a fruitful
path which culminated in the relationship between art and technology.
Therefore, it is necessary to begin in the 19 th century with the emergence of
photography and its relationship with painting. When photography appeared, as
Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, among others, remind us, there
was a disruption in the traditional arts. This disruption not only led artists to think
about the (new) status and the (new) social function of the work of art, as well as its
(new) producing materials, but also impelled a slow and profound reorganisation of
the arts which unfolded throughout the 20th century.
The emergence of photography not only changed the arts, since it provoked, in
painting (particularly in Impressionism), a desire to abandon figurative and/or
naturalist representation, but also embodied a transformation of the very nature of
art. This was the starting point for structuring a new production field of the sensitive
or aesthetic world, with technology occupying a new place. Both questions would
foster the debate concerning photography as a work of art and, consequently, of
cinema as an artistic medium for making and thinking.
Once again, photography raises new questions. On the one hand, it is a new
technique for image reproduction that is no longer connected to craft production, but
rather to the gaze and its technological reproducibility. On the other hand, the
technique of photography gives rise to the notion that it is the real which causes or
provokes the image, linking the photographic act with capturing the real.
Subsequently, the cinematographic gesture or the act of filming ended up
assuming the legacy of the photographic act. Concerning the nature of the
photographic/cinematographic image, in the article “Cinematography: The Creative
Use of Reality”, the artist Maya Deren argues the specificity of the real in the
photographic (and cinematographic) image of other images, particularly painting:
 3

A painting is not, fundamentally, a likeness or image of a horse; it is a likeness of a mental concept

which may resemble a horse or which may, as in abstract painting, bear no visible relation to any real
object.
Photography, however, is a process by which an object creates its own image by the action of
its light or light-sensitive material. It thus presents a closed circuit precisely at the point where, in the
traditional art forms, the creative process takes place as reality passes through the artist. 1

Besides suggesting a reflection on photography and cinema as language and

thought, we propose to discuss the emergence of a new area of image creation –
which we shall term art and technology – mediated by an apparatus (Jean Louis
Baudry) or by a conceptual device, or “devices of creation of meaning and
representation of the world,” as we will see when we analyse the concepts of the
philosopher Vilém Flusser.
In the essay Philosophy of the Black Box, Flusser draws attention to the nature of
the photographic camera, an optical device whose inside we neither access nor
programme – as common individuals – nor possess any knowledge on how to
assemble/disassemble the apparatus or determine which type of images this optical
device is able to produce.
In numerous essays, particularly in Art and Media, Arlindo Machado points out the
propositional nature of art. By approaching the technical device coming from the
industry, art subverts the essential function for which the device was initially created,
mechanically (or digitally) deconstructing it and aesthetically reconfiguring its
possibilities by subverting the type of images produced.

The appropriation by the arts of their contemporary technological devices differs significantly from that
by other sectors of society, such as the consumer goods industry. In general, devices, instruments,
and semiotic machines are not designed to produce art, at least not in the secular sense of the word,
as it happened in the modern world since approximately the 15 th century. Semiotic machines are, in
most cases, designed within a principle of industrial productivity, of the automatisation of procedures
for large-scale production, but never for the production of singular, simple, and “sublime” objects. 2

Concerning the notion of the new technique, when we mentioned above that the
relationship between art and technology can sometimes be fed by tension and by an
inverted appropriation, we wish to point out how, initially, neither photography nor
cinema were devices designed to think and produce art, and therefore, the
consolidation of a poetic language both in photography and cinema was established
in spite of art itself.
1
(Deren, Maya In: XAVIER, Ismail. O discurso cinematográfico. A opacidade e a transparência, São
Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2005, p.17).
2
MACHADO, Arlindo. Arte e Midia. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2012, p.10.
 4

Nevertheless, it is interesting to note how the emergence of these optical devices

caused some reflection in painting concerning their search for specificity as a
language. Since then, painting turned to the elements that constitute painting itself
(point, line, plane, according to Kandinsky). A similar issue reverberated in
photography and cinema, which in the early 20 th century were still considered two
separate media with their own languages and techniques.
It is only when photography and cinema decide to pursue the specificity of each of
their languages, at the height of the modern period in art history, that they are both
incorporated into art, not as languages that have replaced painting but as new areas
for reflection and creation.
We can point out the works Anémic Cinema, by Marcel Duchamp, Le retour a la
raison, by Man Ray or Le ballet mecanique, by Fernand Léger, three films directed
by painters in the first half of the 20 th century that maintain a profound relation with
the aesthetic aspects of painting: whether by the refusal of figurative representation
or by the structural desire for an abstract and “pure” visual thought.
The specificity of film language found in the movement-image its key element to
the vanguards or to an experimental cinema that emerged in the early 20 th century
different from the industrial and narrative cinema structured around the Hollywood
model.
The notion of time in cinema’s movement-image was structural for the
experimental cinema of the first decades of the 20 th century, as well as crucial for the
new ways of producing art, and a constitutive factor of the (new) nature and status of
the work of art. If with photography came the possibility to “embalm” time, with
cinema, and later with video, the idea of the manipulation of time became
fundamental for the arts. To rewind, advance, and create gaps. Refusing the
consensual narrative logic of a cause-effect type, and dealing with time as the matter
of cinema itself were the linguistic foundations of the films of Maya Deren, Andy
Warhol, Stan Brakhage, and Mário Peixoto, among many others.
In the 1960s, video art adopted time as the matter of art, using a new
technique which emerged with the recording of a TV signal. The first generation of
video artists collided with the aesthetics and the language of television, proposing the
deconstruction of the medium by revealing the fluid nature of the electronic signal
that generated the video image. Nam June Paik was the icon of this generation,
unveiling in his artistic multimedia profile new pathways for art.
 5

An approximation between art and life, blurring the boundaries between

genres, techniques, and languages, the interdisciplinary creation across several
artistic areas (music, dance, visual arts) from video art and from new creative groups
such as Fluxus,3 as well as new art schools (Black Mountain College,4 for example) in
addition to the idea of an area of integrated arts has begun to emerge more
powerfully and manifestly, evidencing more and more the use of technological
mediations in creative processes.
The advent of digital language expands and promotes even more these
processes of hybridisation and contamination across creative media and languages.
Meanwhile, if on the one hand, analogue media (photography, cinema, video, music)
conquered an almost immediate acceptance in the arts (though filled with tension),
on the other hand, the use of computers and digital language experienced some
resistance in the artistic media because of the anti-technological feeling of the 1970s
and 1980s, alongside ecological groups and antinuclear movements. It was only by
the end of the 20th century that structured artistic processes with an exclusively digital
language began to appear: collaborative network creation, projection mapping,
interventions in virtual environments, interactive works, among many others.
This article focuses on specific questions concerning the use of computers in
art, specifically reflecting artistic processes designed for virtual reality, such as the
works Rising, by Marina Abramovic, Rainbow, by Olafur Eliasson, and Phryne, by
Jeff Koons. From a technical point of view, in creations for virtual environments
(Virtual Reality) the work consists in the complete immersion of the user (we can no
longer talk about viewers) in a three-dimensional reality generated by a computer
and accessed via the use of an optical device (3D glasses) and/or accessories, such
as gloves, clothes, or joysticks. The three works mentioned above were produced
and exhibited by an art gallery in London which currently exhibits and debates the
use of technology in art, a research previously relegated to centres connected to
universities.
The main purpose of this article, besides aiming to discuss and historically
enhance the relationship between art and technology, is to think how, very recently,
art addressed the production of interactive virtual reality environments, confronting

3
Free group of artists who gathered around George Maciunas during the 1960s and 1970s.
4
Art college founded in 1933 in North Carolina, United States, considered revolutionary in arts
education.
 6

the use of technology to reflect not only on the limits of artistic creation but also of the
body and human condition.
Thus, contemporary technoscience or post-organic technoscience (Sibilia,
2002), when faced with the failure of the instrumental-rationality narrative of the
modern world, proposes an unrestricted conquest of the body and nature, without
limits or boundaries. In that movement, life sciences and their relationship with
technology undo the traditional metaphysical dichotomies: mind-body, spirit-matter,
subject-object, nature-artifice – searching to overcome the “human condition”, the
“failure of the organic body,” and the “space and time limits connected to their
materiality.” For the question is no longer the development of material conditions for
human existence or the mastery of natural forces, but the transcendence of human
existence via the desire for a post-organic, virtual, and immortal body.
On the assumption that art, by approaching technology, does so by deepening
disagreements and tensions, as well as subverting the programmed use of
machines, how should we consider the recent works of virtual reality by the artists
Marina Abramovic, Olafur Eliasson, and Jeff Koons within the current scenario of
contemporary technoscience and the new limits of the body, subjectivity, and matter?
Our aim is to expound on virtual reality not as a replacement for the real physical
world, as Paul Virilio defended, or as a reality programmed by a computer, but as a
metaphysical, spiritual, and transcendent existence, as a new dimension for human
reality that deem the old dichotomies body-mind and body-spirit unable to represent
or consider contemporary human existence. In general: how does the current human
condition feature and is discussed in the abovementioned works of art?

2- THE SPECIFICITY OF IMAGE: FROM CINEMA TO VIRTUAL REALITY

The analysis of the works of the artists Marina Abramovic, Jeff Koons, and
Olafur Eliasson brings us to a discussion about the language of virtual reality,
since the stereoscopic image seems to break with some aspects of the
audiovisual language, as we shall see.
Consolidated in a classical narrative model, according to Ismail Xavier, the
language of cinema maintains a direct relationship with the Renaissance
perspective model whose image construction finds expression by means of a
 7

window on the world. Concealing the filming and editing processes enhances the
identification and projection mechanisms of the audience towards the film.
Christian Metz, Edgar Morin, and others, focused on the notion of illusionism in
cinema and on the creation of realistic images via a naturalist cinema considered
to be that “window on the world.” Considering the cinema effect (Jean Louis
Baudry), the notion of cinema as a device consolidated a critical analysis on the
window-effect, not only concerning the characteristics of images but also the
psychic conditions of their reception.
Through this research project, we would like to consider the nature of the
image of virtual reality as one that breaks with the classical audiovisual
perspective model, since it establishes itself not as a window-image, but as an
image-presence, an image-game, whose interaction with the user is fundamental
to its establishment and production.
If cinema, by photographic legacy, adopts the relationship of the image with
the real, or the physical world, the virtual reality image, which already waives its
relationship with reality, adopts the numeric nature of an image-accident, an
online image, an open and ongoing image.
Besides its relationship with the physical world, the procedural nature of the
virtual reality image breaks with the classical time structure of cinema. If
time/movement is what guarantees the specificity of film language, in the virtual
reality image time does not obey the same notions of present-future. Instead, it is an
image of a multiple, expanded, and fragmented space-time, whose interest no longer
lies on the representation of the world but on the creation of a meaningful virtual
production.
One of the possibilities is discussing the nature of virtual reality as an image-
game, a post-cinema paradigm (Arlindo Machado), whose characteristics differ in
relation to the cinematographic image and its window-effect. Thus, we can also
consider the virtual reality mechanism as a device and explore the nature of its
image, language, technology, discourse, and recent appropriation by art.

3- VIRTUAL REALITY AND ART

The advent of digital language expands and promotes processes of

hybridisation and contamination across the creative media and the languages that
 8

transformed art and artistic processes. Meanwhile, if on the one hand, analogue
media (photography, cinema, video, music) conquered an almost immediate
acceptance in the arts (though filled with tension), on the other hand, the use of
computers and digital language experienced some resistance in the artistic media
because of the anti-technological feeling of the 1970s and 1980s.
This feeling, alongside a significant militancy of ecological groups and antinuclear
movements, for example, caused that only by the end of the 20 th century were there
structured artistic processes with an exclusively digital language, such as
collaborative network creation, projection mapping, interventions in virtual
environments, interactive works, among many others.
This article focuses on specific questions concerning the use of computers in
art, specifically reflecting artistic processes designed for virtual reality, such as the
works Rising, by Marina Abramovic, Rainbow, by Olafur Eliasson, and Phryne, by
Jeff Koons.
From a technical point of view, the creations for virtual environments (Virtual
Reality) consist in the complete immersion of the user (we can no longer talk about
viewers) in a three-dimensional reality generated by a computer and accessed via
the use of an optical device (3D glasses) and/or accessories, such as gloves,
clothes, or joysticks. The three works mentioned above were produced and exhibited
by an art gallery in London, the Acute Art VR, which currently exhibits and debates
the use of technology in art, a research previously relegated to centres connected to
universities.
Numerous recent transformations in the fields of science and technology have
altered human condition, for, as Paula Sibilia claims, contemporary technoscience or
post-organic technoscience (Sibilia, 2002), when faced with the failure of the
instrumental-rationality narrative of the modern world, proposes an unrestricted
conquest of the body and nature, without limits or boundaries.
In that movement, life sciences and their relationship with technology undo the
traditional metaphysical dichotomies of mind-body, spirit-matter, subject-object,
nature-artifice, searching to overcome the human condition, the failure of the physical
body, and the “space and time limits connected to their materiality.” The question is
no longer the development of material conditions for human existence through
technological progress or the mastery of natural forces, but the transcendence of the
human condition via an upgrade.
 9

On the assumption that art, by approaching technology, does so by deepening

disagreements and tensions, as well as subverting the programmed use of
machines, how should we consider the recent works of virtual reality by the artists
Marina Abramovic, Olafur Eliasson, and Jeff Koons within the current scenario of
contemporary technoscience and the new limits of the body, subjectivity, and matter?
Our aim is to expound on virtual reality not as a replacement for the
real/physical world, or simply as a reality programmed by a computer, but as a
metaphysical, spiritual, and transcendent existence, as a new dimension for human
reality that deem the old dichotomies body-mind and body-spirit unable to represent
or consider contemporary human existence. In general: how does the current human
condition feature and is discussed in the abovementioned works of art?

4- JEFF KOONS, OLAFUR ELIASSON, MARINA ABRAMOVIC

At the end of 2017, the London gallery Acute Art VR 5 announced the programme
of the company, which intends to be a pioneer in the art market, launching renowned
names of contemporary art in the universe of virtual reality. 6 Claiming to be a gallery
without walls and exhibiting VR works around the world, the gallery launched with the
works of the artists Jeff Koons, Olafur Eliasson, and Marina Abramovic using the
language of virtual reality. Meanwhile, new works have been produced in 2018. 7
The work of the American artist Jeff Koons, Phryne, allows the user to interact
with a ballerina who, according to the artist himself, “teaches you to enjoy being
human.” Phryne is a metallic ballerina whose movements were mapped from the
work of a real ballerina of the New York ballet. The metallic surface of the ballerina
reflects the body who watches her, signalling that “your presence is real, you exist,”
according to Koons. The metallic body dialogues with other materials used by Jeff
Koons (considered by the critics as a neo pop artist) throughout his trajectory.

5
See https://www.acuteart.com/about
6
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVHiWqIw3J4&t=103s
7
https://www.acuteart.com/artwork
 10

Image 1: Jeff Koons, Phryne

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVHiWqIw3J4

Rising, by Marina Abramovic, establishes a direct relationship with the

performance work of the artist. In the performance, Abramovic’s body is converted to
an avatar which then interacts with the body of the user, inspiring emotion and
empathy, according to the artist.
Marina’s avatar explores the limits of the post-organic body (Sibilia, 2002)
whose existence transcends the limits of physicality and conventional performance.
According to Marina, the work explores the human condition and the relationship with
nature, because it relates to environmental issues and the future of mankind
regarding this problem.
In both of these works, countless issues surrounding the body and the
production of subjectivity raise questions about the human condition and its
relationship with technology.
Marina Abramovic’s avatar and Jeff Koons’s ballerina enhance the spectre of
performance actions. The human body is caught between life/death, past/future,
body/spirit, aspects it cannot transcend. In both works, the post-organic body seems
to explore the new limits of a human condition that maintains a crucial relationship
with technology.
 11

Image 2: Marina Abramovic, Rising

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVHiWqIw3J4

The work Rainbow, by Olafur Eliasson, consists in exploring perceptive

behaviour, making the user interact visually with the virtual reality platform “as he
searches for light.” The research for Olafur’s work involved a study about the physical
behaviour of water in contact with light and what happens to the gaze when it sees a
rainbow. According to the artist, the challenge was to physically create the real world
on a virtual reality platform. The core of the work is light, something that “is there and
not there at the same time,” instigating us to reflect on the dichotomies
physical/metaphysical, real/virtual, matter/spirit.

Image 3: Olafur Eliasson, Rainbow

 12

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVHiWqIw3J4

The analysis of the works of art of the artists Marina Abramovic, Jeff Koons, and
Olafur Eliasson also brings us to a debate about the language of virtual reality, since
the stereoscopic image seems to break with some aspects of the traditional
audiovisual language, as we shall briefly note.
As pointed out in the article “O Específico Fílmico e a Realidade Virtual” (“Filmic
Specifics and Virtual Reality”), 8 VR seems to establish a post-cinema paradigm
(Arlindo Machado) whose characteristics differ from those of the cinematographic
image and its window-effect (Jean Louis Baudry).
Ideally, the VR device is an immersive system in which the user interacts with
a computer interface via the use of gloves, helmets, glasses, or other accessories
with sensors. The immersive aspect is the first characteristic of virtual reality,
although VR may also include non-immersive interactive systems that do not use
these accessories and in which the user manipulates the virtual environment via an
input device such as a simple keyboard or a mouse. According to Michael Rush,

The term “virtual reality” refers to a three-dimensional experience in which

the “user” (we can no longer use simple terms such as viewer, visitor, or
even viewer/participant), with the help of devices mounted on the head,
datagloves, or jumpsuits (containing fibre optic cables), experiences a
simulated world that seems to react to his movements. 9

8
SALES, Michelle (in the press). O específico fílmico e a Realidade Virtual In: Anais da 8o encontro da
AIM, Aveiro, Portugal, 2018.
9
RUSH, Michael. Novas Mídias na arte contemporânea. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2006, p. 202.
 13

In general, we perceive virtual reality as a completely immersive virtual system

whose images are processed in real time (online) and experienced via the use of
stereoscopic glasses. In the analysed works by Jeff Koons, Marina Abramovic, and
Olafur Eliasson, the user is invited to wear the glasses and to interact physically,
manipulating the virtual environment.

5- About the human condition and the use of technology

In the description of his work, Jeff Koons claims that of all the fascination that
technology can exert, the best aspect is the possibility, as a creator, to be able to do
anything. Concerning his work Phryne, Jeff Koons explains:

You enter into this space. Phryne is there, as a metallic ballerina. She
interacts with you and she teaches you to enjoy being human. (…) One of
the most important things to be able to experience is affirmation. Once you
have your own existence affirmed, then you’re able to go on and deal with
the affirmation of other things. The whole idea is to try to create something
special. Now, I gave her a metallic surface to bring in affirmation. You realise
your own reflection. From that point, you can go off into abstraction. Your
presence is real, you exist.10

One of the contradictions inherent to the work proposed by Jeff Koons is the
idea that technology can guide and advise us not about technique but about human
condition itself.
We can infer from Phryne the idea that the power of machines may also be
the power to guide human beings in order to improve their own human experience. If,
up to this point, the relationship man-machine has been contaminated by images,
films, and science fiction predicting the overcoming of the physical/organic body, or
pointing to man’s replacement by faster and more productive robots or cyborgs, or
even discourses advocating the predominance of an artificial intelligence at the
expense of the human mind, works such as Phryne and Rising seem to tell us
otherwise.
The final description of the work Rising, by Marina Abramovic, was made
available on YouTube at the beginning of 2018. In one of them, 11 the artist comments
that the work presents users with the opportunity to save lives in contemporary urban

10
Excerpt from the presentation of Phryne, by Jeff Koons, in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=gVHiWqIw3J4&t=103s
11
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6uDOC8u03s
 14

landscapes that have been radically altered by flooding caused by the melting ice
caps, a consequence of global warming. To Marina,

Performance is all a process. I can push my body limits as far as I can go.
We are in the 21st century. Things have changed. I’ve been introduced to
virtual reality. I understood that the possibilities were enormous. Whatever
you can do with your body, you as an avatar can actually do endlessly. (…)
Some predictions say that even in a hundred years our human race will not
exist on this planet. I want to address these issues. You’re saving human
beings and you’re saving the planet or you’re not saving the planet and you
make human beings die. And the choice is only yours. 12

In Rising, there is a pursuit that seems to correspond to the most contradictory

concerns of a scientific thinking which largely merges with the philosophical current
known as posthumanism, as exemplified below:

With virtual reality technology, players will be immersed in a dystopian world

that seems increasingly likely to be the future of our planet. I hope to explore
the questions: if immersive playing will increase empathy for the present and
the future victims of climate change; and how will this experience affect
players’ consciousness and energy. In real life, when someone rescues
another person or offers aid of any kind there is a transfer of energy. The
recipient of the help and the provider of aid are both affected by the
experience. Will the same happen in a virtual reality?13

This excerpt seems to clarify not the celebratory character of technology in

Abramovic’s work but a critical bias seeking to direct or enhance the use of
technology for the benefit and understanding of mankind. The question is not human
resilience, as posthumanism suggests, but how can technology mediate essentially
human feelings and affection in the future.
In the interview about Rainbow, Olafur Eliasson wonders: “How do we arrive at
art? I drew a lot when I was a child. It was a way of touching the world. As I grew up I
was very interested in how I could propose that ephemeral quality, also art. Light
became this amazing material, which is kind of there and not there at the same time.”

Eliasson’s programmer points out a few aspects about the work:

We had the challenge that we had to recreate the physics of the real world in
the virtual world. We had to research the behaviour of the water droplet and

12
Excerpt from the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6uDOC8u03s
13
Excerpt from the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6uDOC8u03s
 15

what happens when a light particle hits it, refracts, and the effect of the
rainbow that gets created.14

To conclude, Eliasson claims that

Neural and muscular interfaces are what made virtual reality so exciting for
me. And the relationship between my brain and my physical activity. The VR
gave a really radical answer to a physical relationship with your own body
and its interface. The work encourages the user to become active and
produce his own world.15

In conclusion, what these works all have in common is the ability to activate a
human component or experience through the use of technology. By relating the
physical/muscular activity of the user with his neural activity during a virtual reality
game, Eliasson traces a new and disruptive gaze in order to rethink the old
dichotomies mind-body, physical-metaphysical, suggested in the beginning of this
article.
The VR’s virtual data is processed and converted to neural/muscular activity,
physically activating the users who interact with this interface. Either to suggest
empathy, as Abramovic hopes, to awaken the consciousness of existence, as Jeff
Koons envisages, or even to think about the connections between Eliasson’s real
and virtual worlds, experiments with this language seem to be at an early stage in art,
as well as in science.

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Video available in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVHiWqIw3J4
15
Idem.
 16

HUOTARI, J., 2004, “Integrating uml views with visual cues”, In: Second International
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Videos
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