后人类视域下的数字艺术与三种虚拟身体观念

Digital Arts and Three Notions of Virtual Body from the Perspective of Post-humanism

在后人类视域中,数字艺术的媒介特征与传播规律都是直接关乎身体的,且许多科幻艺术作品也在借助叙事来完成对虚拟身体的想象。通过重新考察著名思想实验“莫拉维克构想”与“缸中之脑”,可以发现身体观念在后人类演进想象中的关键地位,并可提出关于虚拟身体的三种理解范式。首先,数字游戏、虚拟现实均是构造“代码身体”的代表性艺术形态,它们以人的身体形式为蓝本,在特定维度上建立数据化、编码化的模型,从而大幅简化了生命表征,同时也是我们对人工智能与虚拟数字人进行身体化想象的重要手段。其次,“隐喻身体”以互联网为数字时代下的典型代表,它虽不具备也无意仿制传统肉身的形式,但显著地重构着人们的感官,更是深刻影响了数字艺术的大众传播。最后,“肉身仿拟”追求数字空间内的身体表征与人类肉身的一致性,尽管它迄今仍是一种技术神话,是某些科幻艺术作品乐于想象的“未来身体”,却也值得艺术界警觉与反思。

In the post-humanism perspective,the medium characteristics and communication patterns of digital art are directly related to the body,and many science fiction works are narrative imagination of thevirtual body.By re-examining"Moravec's Experimentation"and"Brain in a Vat",two well-known thought experiments,this paper revealsthat the idea of"the body"has a pivotal role in the post-human evolutionary imagination and proposes three different paradigms about understanding the virtual body.Firstly,digital games and virtual reality are representative art forms of constructing the"coded body".They use the human body as a blueprint to establish a coded,digital model in certain dimensions,thus greatly simplifying the representation of human life.It is also an important approach for us to envision artificial intelligence and digital humans in a physical form.Secondly,the"metaphoric body"on the internet-based digital age,does not possess or intentionally imitate the form of the traditional physical human body.But it significantly reconstructs people's senses and has a profound impact on the mass communication of digital art.Thirdly,"flesh emulation"pursues the consistency between the body representation in cyberspace and the human physical body.At the moment,it remains a technological myth,a"future body"that sci-fi works are keen to imagine,but it also warrants vigilance and critical reflection in the art world.