Augmented virtuality: Emerging processes, art and digital media

During the last couple of years, many authors have written about problems arising from the Internet, Facebook, and new media as a whole. There has also been widespread criticism of digital art and the repetitive and baroque aesthetics of biogenetic artworks. Emergence and interactivity –both keywords of the digital artistic rhetoric– are simply simulacra, as the comparison to romantic picturesque will clearly show. The endangered relationship between nature and art, the pillar of romantic and technological kitsch, needs adapting in terms of both its aesthetic contradictions and computational problems. Incidentally, it is vital that the digital aspect is taken from simulation abstractions and placed in a new domain that could be defined as ‘augmented virtuality’. To achieve this, we will discuss the relationships between nature, art, artworks, and processes from a digital media point of view, considering the strong possibility of complexity and technical emergence, along with the struggle between freedom, required by interaction and the algorithmic determinism, and the epistemological problems of interfaces. This will involve delving into the deep meaning of traditional and ethnic visual culture (in our case, pre-Columbian), following the statements of the historic avant-garde. All this gives rise to the possibility of implementing a strategy to place digital media into a new social, creative and democratic domain. To sum up, we will show that string rewriting systems (such as L-Systems), grounded in generative grammar, can develop truly open and creative digital tools, where nature, tradition, art and technology can operate with accuracy and coherence.