The Ramifications of Digital Seduction: Virtual Reality or Virtual Culture

By:

Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard seem even more relevant in the digital age than they did in the 1960s and 1980s. “The global village” and “hyperreality” extended beyond their time to describe an era of unprecedented communicative power. It is easy to laud the indisputable benefits of digital technology, but what happens when the Internet’s lack of editorial authority joins forces with an insatiable appetite for passive entertainment? What price do individuals and their cultures pay for entry into a seductive yet sterile digital world beyond anything television could offer? Do the illnesses that afflict the sedentary youth of the developed world have intellectual or aesthetic analogs? Will the new culture of rhizomes choke the Western Canon or reinvigorate it with new ideas? Does the Internet expand the promise of democracy or crush it with the freedom of an empty voice, and what will that mean for the visual arts? This paper will address these questions in an effort to find a middle ground between utopian promises and reality.

Stream: Arts Theory and Criticism

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

I was born in Cuba in 1956 and spent my childhood in Europe and the United States. I hold a master of fine arts degree in painting from Virginia Commonwealth University where I currently teach drawing, art theory and the history of visual communications. My theoretical interests derive from an earlier career in advertising as well as my multinational upbringing and my fluency in French and Spanish. The Cuban Revolution, the Cold War and the upheavals of the 1960s also had a profound effect on both my intellectual inquiries and my approach to drawing and painting. I became very interested in the conflict between words and images in the 1990s when we Americans began to describe our national divisions as a “culture war.” The events of September 11, 2001, merely internationalized the issue. I currently participate in regional and international exhibitions, and my work is represented in corporate collections and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.