After a short stint away from facebook, I am now back to the usual discomforted interaction with these virtual characters on a regular basis.  I’m not quite sure what my aim was in trying to sever my ties to what seemed to be an unnatural web of connected forms, but it bordered in the area of my incessant need for originality and my belief that facebook merely projected unoriginal sentiments people thought they felt, and magnified conformed thoughts into those sentiments.

I escape to this blog to try and release authentic thoughts that I cannot bring myself to express on facebook.  What I have learned to maintain a sane connection with so many acquaintances is that what is ‘proper’, a euphemism for conformity, is all that is acceptable.  This does not suggest that one cannot be genuine on facebook, but that one cannot maintain his sanity were he to continue down that path.

There is a sense in which discovery lies in the path of solitude.  Whether anything can be discovered from introspection is a subject one may validly contest, but authenticity can only be revealed when outside influence ceases to hinder the natural desires we all possess.  Sure there is the element of how we have come to possess those desires in the first place, being a product of our interaction with the outside world, but there in lies a distinction that requires further distinction.

The Cartesian principle of self-doubt to acquire any genuine knowledge begins with an introspective process (ignore the fact that Descartes is a part of the outside world we use as a reference for the moment).  What is discovered is that the things we imagine must come to us by something external to us.  For even what we imagine to be unreal, in our already imaginings of reality’s unrealness, things like unicorns, are mere compilations of things we believe to be real — horses and horns.

But what is further required to make distinct is the division in external things, as other minds like our own and everything else.  It is not everything else that impinges on our originality, but rather, the other minds that do.  When Van Gogh paints a bouquet of sunflowers, he does not create an imitation of what already is, he paints an original and authentic perception of how he views the sunflowers.  And were he to have been the subject of constant impositions to conform, he may not have created such wonderfully unique paintings.

However, Van Gogh was influenced by other artists.  He writes in letters to his brother Theo of the beauty of brushstrokes in his contemporary French painters.  Even so, I believe these comments to be a result of his early years while studying art.  As Van Gogh further isolated himself from the sneer of his peers, the more he discovered the enchanting beauty of what his eyes, and his eyes alone could see.

Rene Girard comments on how Proust developed an appreciation for art through an uninformed gentleman who raved about the Opera.  This suggests the opposite.  But is Proust’s appreciation of the Opera, an original sentiment, or is there an underlying desire that is the basic authentic desire that informs his desire to conform?  I believe it is his desire to live in a society with others.  Since we are incapable, doubtless ever capable, of living on our own, conformity expresses our desire to live.  And not just to live, but to thrive.

That is why Van Gogh sought isolation and solitude, because he had no such undergirding desires.  He committed suicide at the age of 37.  Shooting himself in the chest in the middle of the field where he painted the landscapes of Southern France.  But what does this suggest?  Is there something we can discover from this melancholic state that seems to afford the afflicted with such originality?

Perhaps the dispossession of the desire to live, the lack of want, is what clears the mind to see something that is wholly original.  For our existence is wholly tied to the ‘correctness’ of behavior and thought of society that receives its thrust from our desire to live.  This, unfortunately, is not an original thought.  The Buddha made similar comments in what he termed as enlightenment.

It is when we let go of our desires, even that basic desire to live, that we are enlightened.  And when we are enlightened, we allow ourselves to be original.  I do not suggest that we dispossess our desire to live to be more authentic.  Au contraire.  I merely suggest that we remove ourselves a bit from our absolute possession of the derived desire to live.  The desire to conform.  That desire seems to be epitomized by our recent obsession with social media.

Take a break.  A long break.  You might discover some authenticity in your life.  And authenticity is all we can expect to know in regard to truth.

I hadn’t addressed the role of mimesis within the context of social media when it has such a profound impact on the reformation of relationship norms.  According to my post from June, the nature of facebook’s structure, in the way it organizes relationships, leads to a sort of Platonic sense of mimesis, where the popular suggestion by electronic publishing pundits is to censor your impulses lest you diminish your public image.  It has also led to a kind of Aristotelian sense of mimesis where there are rules and guides to managing that public image.  Therefore, the mimetic theory of social media engendered by facebook is nothing more than the ancient sense of art, as imitation, a sort of conformity to the thoughts of meticulously managed thoughts of others.

Now, I don’t disagree with the comments of the pundits to manage your public image on facebook.  Afterall, the kinds of updates I would receive from the slurry of fetizens were at times too personal and awkward, and quite frankly revealingly negative towards what might be perceived as faults.  These uncouth remarks are better left in your group of friends.  But one cannot help but fall subject to the faux pas trap facebook inherently creates by not properly managing friends based on types of relationships.  These include the kinds of privacy features that facebook has deliberately chosen not to develop because they count on what Plato would refer to as the servile part of our souls — the stalker.  The stalker spends countless hours on facebook, and Zuckerberg would have it that way.  Less privacy = More shared content = More stalkers (users) = More advertising dollars.

But there’s a problem.  The Platonic ideal of mimetic content is that such irrational behavior be censored.  I’ve heard some suggest that facebook is artistic.  It doesn’t seem to mold to the ancient mimetic theory of art, where we’re given the kind of platform to create what is good.  Because what is good is relative to the groups with which you share.  My authentic thoughts that are appreciated by close friends would be quite inappropriate and may even disgust others in my network.  Therefore, this sense of censoring the imitation of bad qualities of the ancient era is relative to the context in which such imitation is performed.  If we are imitating the act of being genuine amongst friends, and that genuine act happens to be quirky and weird to the point at which it disturbs others, then in relation to its being performed within the privacy of close friends, it is good.  And in relation to its being performed for everyone in my network, it may be bad.

Facebook had begun to blur the social lines in which we understood for centuries when it was necessary to be appropriate and when we could be authentic.  I believe this to be a basic human need and since social media is beginning to usurp the role of physical social interaction with web-based social interaction, this basic human need of being genuine in the domain of web-based relationships needs to be maintained.  Fortunately, Google+ has come along and is taking the needs of complex social organization to the Aristotelian step by creating better rules of web-based social engagement.  I’m not sure how successful their attempt will be, but I’m hoping for the best.  But in this infancy of virtual social interaction, we need to consider the human aspect of this scientific intervention.  We have computer scientists determining the structure of societal norms, and that can be problematic.  We are much more complex than a hierarchy of rules and algorithms, and these multi-billion dollar corporations could afford to hire a handful of professionals with degrees in the humanities or social sciences to help manage their impact.  In fact, they can’t afford not to.

-Albert Camus, The Stranger

I haven’t finished the book yet, but I loved this story the protagonist, Meursault, manages to find in an old scrap of newspaper hidden between his mattress and bed planks in his cell while awaiting his murder trial.  What caught my attention was what he says after telling the story,

I must have read the story a thousand times.  On the one hand it wasn’t very likely.  On the other, it was perfectly natural.  Anyway, I thought the traveller pretty much deserved what he got and that you should never play games.

Don’t you just love his stoic inference?  Aside from that, let’s concentrate on the middle two sentences.  ”On the one hand it wasn’t very likely.  On the other, it was perfectly natural”.  Meurasult/Camus doesn’t seem to state a preference for which makes for a better tragedy.  In other words, he doesn’t defer to content.  Aristotle, on the other hand, suggests in Poetics, that “[a] likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility”.  What does that even mean?

(I believe Walton made a similar comment in Mimesis as Make-Believe, though I lack the initiative to find it at the moment)

Camus’ story within his story fits in to the unpreferred Aristotelian method — an unconvincing possibility.  Not being very likely being equivalent to what is unconvincing.  And what is perfectly natural being equivalent to an event’s possibility.  But what in the world would this story look like if it were portrayed in the preferred Aristotelian method — as a likely impossibility?

Would the story consist of martians or impossible modes of death and resurrection?  Okay, maybe I’m not utilizing my imaginative capacity to its full potential, but the story sounds strikingly familiar doesn’t it?  Jorges Borges brings out the unlikely possibility in this traditional story in The Gospel According to Mark.

I personally prefer the unlikely possibility to the likely impossibility in this particular instance because it serves to teach us something new.  It opens up new worlds to us.

I hope I haven’t delved too much into the content of art, and haven’t argued in lethargic detail the irrelevant particularities I have been protesting against.  But it wouldn’t be philosophy if you didn’t have to think a little.

I would agree with what McKee writes in his book ‘Story‘; that people who shun theory by saying it is just a way of creating by-the-numbers, dull works, are doing so in the same way an every teenager shuns to the rules of society around them. They do so, not because these rules are wrong, or need changing, but because they are unsure about their identity as a newly fledged adult (or writer), and trying to move away from the established way of doing things is the easiest way for them to identify themselves as an individual worthy of attention. And just like becoming a mature adult, becoming a mature writer is accepting that things are generally done a certain way because that is the best way to do them.

I suppose my deepest contention with Aristotle’s structure for tragedy was that he was so certain of the value of drama based on its content. In my inquiry into notions of absolute value, things like the notion of justice or notions of the good, I have always had difficulty in accepting any absolute assertion of such qualities, be it Plato’s tripartite distinction of the soul as a derivative analysis of justice or Aristotle’s eudaimonia as a path to happiness. There always seemed to be a method of refuting such claims, be it through logical refutations or through the prose of poetry to incite the raw sensibilities of an individual.

As I write this quasi confession, I am making an effort not to use the following dichotomy of terms: reason/rational/mind vs. passion/emotional/heart. The reason for this is that I often see this sort of terminology being used to somewhat misappropriate what we are truly trying to express. We do so, first of all, because we use those terms in many different ways, and it is easy to misuse them. Take for instance my use of the term reason in the second sentence of this paragraph. I use reason as a tool to communicate. But my purpose for the use of the term is wholly contingent on my interaction with others. Therefore, reason is not a need to support truth I may possess, but a tool to force my notion of truth upon others and more importantly, a tool for others to force their notions of truth onto me.

The second sense of reason is related to the first but differs in our appropriation of the term as being derivative of our minds, of our selves. When we say that our minds tell us one thing while out heart tells us something else, what we are really saying is, society is telling me how to live my life, but I know what I want. So now this division of reason with emotion is not wholly contained and sustained by an individual but is contingent upon an aggregation of individuals. Thus, reason is merely the compromise of a collection of emotions from disparate individuals in the present, and the past, which is embodied in tradition.

So, when I oppose interpretation in art, I do so in tantrum-like fashion from my authentic self. Reason, as a collective compromise, suggests the norm of taste. For artists that have made a profession of catering to the norm, to the masses, they possess a need to perpetuate that structure, the rules of making their art, to make a living. It would seem then, that true artists possess knowledge of these structures, while possessing a healthy dose of irreverence for those rules.

I am tempted to infer from the lives of great artists to make a point, but hesitate in the knowledge that my opinion of their greatness and that of most people is informed by this collective compromise we are calling ‘reason’. But I proceed with the caveat that we look back on their greatness, while their lives were inconsequential, or unrecognized by the elite of their time, they have proven to be prescient in what has developed as reason.

We often attribute reason as a method of discovering atemporal truth, but as Hilary Putnam points out in Reason, Truth and History, reason is temporal. It changes over time. What was reasonable in the past, may not be reasonable today. And what is reasonable today, may not be reasonable tomorrow (well, maybe not that quickly). But what makes art art is its prescience. Perhaps it is the projection of the subjective in to the future as the objective (if we are to interpolate what I have said in typical analyses of philosophy). But that too falls short of what I am trying to convey.

I must admit, my lack of maturity in the appreciation of art has played a role in my opposition to theory. It was not because I understood it and renounced it to discover a new set of rules or method for proceeding with art. But I am still resistant to assertions of absolute rules for the content art. Perhaps my stance will change over time (which if you’ve been keeping up with my posts you know it happens rather frequently).

I can see why such rules exist when I see the filth that most people watch on youtube, I wonder if they consider it to be artistic. What then is art? Does it depend on time? What happens when art of antiquity or even of the period of enlightenment is appreciated through this sense of ‘reason’ — as collective compromise? Is it still art? Or merely an historical artifact? Is there a period in which art is art? That hazy period when art breaks away from accepted rules and begins to incite individual emotional reactions? Does art become an artifact when it no longer incites an authentic emotional response and our appreciation of it is more a result of reason?

Perhaps my deepest complaint with certain forms of interpretation is in their lack of artistry.  It would seem that the best way to preserve works of art is to do so artistically.  And what I think I have been calling for is an art of criticism, and a discarding of scientific criticism.  I mentioned something in this regard in my previous post, where Plato, however critical of mimesis, did so mimetically, in an ironic, quasi self refuting way.  I think Plato and Goethe’s method of criticism in the form of narrative is the ideal to which we are to strive in order to retain the value of the works of art we cherish.

I must admit, however, that it is difficult to find examples to refute Aristotle’s rules as a guide to narrative.  However comprehensive his analysis, it would’ve been great if he turned that guide into a dialogue like Plato does with all of his works.

To provide a historical context of art, I refer to the works of Susan Sontag in her essay, Against Interpretation, and various works of Martin Heidegger.  Their thought into the state of what has become of art, and their view of its temporality, will set the stage for distinguishing its various concepts, but more importantly, thrust into prominence its value.  For the sake of contrast Kendal Walton’s work, Mimesis as Make-Believe, will be presented to compliment the contemporary debate.  And since the topic of content is crucial in Sontag’s resistance to what has developed in response to mimetic theory, Aristotle’s comments on mimesis in Poetics, and Plato’s critique in The Republic will also be presented.  Goethe’s comments in, On Realism and Art, will also be considered as a proxy for aesthetic theory.

In the first chapter of Against Interpretation, Sontag writes,

[a]ll Western consciousness of and reflection upon art have remained within the confines staked out by the Greek theory of art as mimesis or representation.  It is through this theory that art as such – above and beyond given works of art – becomes problematic, in need of defense.  And it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call “form” is separated off from something we have learned to call “content,” and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory (Against Interpretation, 1)

Plato began this separation of mimesis from form to content, quite literally.  His analysis of the negative value of mimesis, which is a result of his ontology, forces him to explore mimesis as content.   In laying out his metaphysics in chapter VII of The Republic representations are analogized as shadows of artifacts.  And the prisoners of the cave, that only see those shadows, believe truth to be nothing more than those shadows (Republic, 514c).   Thus the content of mimesis in the form of poetry or painting produces work that is inferior in respect to truth because it is mere representation.  And since mimesis is inferior, it appeals to the inferior part of the soul – the arational (R, 605a-b).

We see here the beginning of a mimetic theory that not only reduces the value of mimesis to something that is in need of control by the rational, and thus in need of interpretation, but also something that usurps the role of art as an end, with the role of art as a means.  Thus means must be justified, and here we begin our defense of art, which finds its way into contemporary times with a methodical analysis of the content of art.

Art, as content, is something subjective, waiting for interpretation.   And as it is projected in a subjective manner and further received subjectively through interpretation, art loses its value.   But art as form, as truth, is what Heidegger advocates for in his essay, The Origin of the Work of Art.  What he refers to as gestalt or figure is the fixed placement of truth within the strife of earth and world (Poetry, Language, Thought, 62).   But Heidegger’s account of art as an occurrence of truth also needs further explanation in terms of his metaphysics.

The mistake of traditional ontology, as Heidegger sees it, is that it begins with a subject-object relation of the world.  This view however, derives from a more basic and primordial way in which we engage with the world.  And it is when that practical engagement with the world breaks down that we become aware of this subject-object relation with the world (Being and Time, 73).  Take for instance a bicycle.  We ride it merrily with no consideration of the present as it guides us into the future.  But when it breaks down, we are stranded.  We suddenly become aware of this subject-object relation of us standing before this broken object, and the “now” becomes frighteningly apparent.

The concept of being is the pre-ontological basis upon which Heidegger’s philosophy of phenomenology is grounded.  And being is founded on this meaningful analysis of human experience as temporality.  This is the way in which Heidegger recommends we encounter works of art – in a fundamentally meaningful activity of being.  Here we see the value of art emerging as an end.  Not necessarily as something objective, because Heidegger avoids such traditional analyses of truth.  Rather, Heidegger views art as truth by way of an opening from concealment, earth into world.  As an opening, in terms of founding, art is a self-sufficient beginning that creates new worlds and allows humanity’s understanding of being to unfold historically.

Released in the late sixties, The Graduate was a marker of the times; of the prevailing counterculture that sought to resist authority and all the moral vagaries of dogmatism.  And yet, it still carries with it, a mimetic quality that is reflective of a more basic characteristic of human nature — our desire to maintain our independence within the social norms in which we live.

Freud termed this duality as the battle between the id and the super-ego.  Whatever you call it, it seems intrinsic to human nature, and as a culture we seem to value independence over conformity, while at the same time expecting conformity.  We expect conformity, because it allows us to express our independence more if the other conforms to the expression of our authentic selves.

This, can then be translated into concepts of freedom where positive and negative liberty clash.  However many translations an analysis of The Graduate may take on, its mimetic quality is not in its imitation of objective facts, but on what Husserl might call the super temporal transcendental ego (prejudices aside, the example is meant to show what I have found comes closest in defining objectivity through subjectivity).

Consider a sense of positive and negative objective morality (not particularly Husserlian).  If such a thing exists, objective morality in the positive sense would consist of what we value as good and the negative as bad.  So, The Graduate, with all its incestual intonations, would be, I believe, an approved form of Platonic mimesis because the underlying message reduces any argument in resistance to its attempt to uncover desires of authenticity, as a misunderstanding of the need for contrast.

So what am I getting at?  Well, what makes a movie like The Graduate different from, say… a movie like Fast Five, is that it speaks to the positive morals of man, while Fast Five speaks to the negative.  Fast Five is moral pornography.  It also appeals to our hatred of authority but does so without layers of discovery and metaphor.  It’s somewhat instructional.  Watch and masturbate.  There is no foreplay, no teasing to get to a fulfilling sensation.  In fact, it downright tells you to hate authority, where The Graduate ambiguates the idea with the scene where Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross drift off in a school bus, only to become the authority they sought to resist.

Marcel Proust makes a rather insightful comment in In Search of Lost Time, regarding the value of mimesis,

In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.  The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself.  And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of it’s veracity.

And so, the ‘veracity’ of representational work is a reaction that is a result of engaging in mimetic exploration.  This veracity cannot be experienced through instruction because if it is, it is merely a conformity to the reaction of the other.  And no matter how insightful that thought may seem to be, if it is not engaging enough to, first of all, be reflected upon (which most instructional works are) nothing will be learned.  And second, it is merely a replication of thought, and therefore, nothing new is learned.  Perhaps what is painful about learning through instruction is the necessity to submit our initial reaction on topics of mimesis to others who rationalize its concepts.

And for my final, I was thinking of tackling Aristotle’s comment that learning should be painful in his reference to what role music plays in education in Politics.  He also states in Poetics that one can learn through mimesis.  Does that suggest that there are painful and painless forms of mimesis?  Does one have to experience pain in order to learn?  Proust also seems to think so.  I’m ambivalent.

First, there is a distinct difference in the pedagogical methods of Plato and Aristotle.  Plato’s works are elegantly literary while Aristotle’s works are much more rigid and defined.  Both are philosophical, yet Plato manages to capture culturally relevant themes within a mimetic canvas that has the quality of being distinctly philosophical.  What is distinctly philosophical you say?  If we adopt Aristotle’s view, poetry is more philosophical because it deals with the nature of universals rather than of particulars.  What I am uncertain of, is what the nature of universals is.  Is it simply a culturally shaped conception that exists if we all agree on something as being true, or, are there genuine universal truths?  Perhaps these questions are representational of the divide between mimesis and epistemology, of emotion and reason, of passion and rationality.  The cultural significance of truth lends an attitude-dependent value system to the conception of universals and subjects it to a kind of relativism.  Now, this is a hard pill to swallow for analytic philosophers because relativism would obviously undermine the validity of the universal claims it purports to contain, but that’s only if logic is, in fact, a tool that provides epistemic access to genuine universal truths.  On the other side of the coin, the dilemma in the uncertainty of truth makes a great case for irony, which is best explored through mimetic mediums.

Aristotle has a tendency to nitpick topics to death, and although Socrates does this in Plato’s works as well, it is mimetic, and so it carries with it the associative value of irony. Aristotle’s work carries a sort of lifeless, dare I say, “rational” character to it that is so scientific that it has a tendency to dwell on particulars.  Although the nature of Aristotle’s methods are intentionally specific in an attempt to be impartial, there is a sense in which I want to disagree with it because his interpretation of tragedy and the like are just that — “his” interpretation.  The goal of impartiality is lost, and his opinions are expressed without the aid of mimesis and the possibility of the alternative — relative cultural truth — is lost as well.

Plato on the other hand, is quite clever in going over the analytic process while appealing to our sense of truth mimetically at the most basic level.  Plato, in doing so, gets the best of both worlds and, I suppose, comes closer to the “nature of universals” through his methods than does Aristotle.  I wonder if Plato thought all forms of mimesis were at the tertiary level of his metaphysics since most (all?) of his works are literary.  Perhaps forms of mimesis that received the Platonic nod of approval are for him, “Forms”, and the forms of mimesis that are not accurately representational are the “shadows” of sensory particulars.

This brings me to the point I might agree with Plato on in the censorship of certain kinds of mimesis.  When plays, movies, advertisements, and other types of media represent the world through the ethnocentric and bourgeois point-of-view of its established institutions, it fails to speak to the higher universal qualities of mimetic form.  And that could be detrimental to the health of any society.  But what happens when the established institutions do not have the intention of misrepresenting? They are merely representing what actually is.  But maybe what ought to be is the form of representation within mimesis that Plato accepts and is, perhaps, what he was referring to in his conception of “Forms”.

(The reader should note that Aristotle wrote exoteric works, most of which did not survive.  Most of the works that did survive are esoteric.  Unfortunate.)

*featured image borrowed from http://markplain.com/funnies.aspx*

I raise this point because a thoughtful post forced me to consider what role interpretation plays in mimetic exploration.  It seems that most of the class, based on the blog entries, agrees that mimesis involves an arational quality and yet an attempt is made to analyze and rationalize works of art.  If we attempt to extract meaning through reason, it would seem that we merely observe the obvious and the meaningless.  When an artist attempts to convey truth as it were, if she does so from a fundamentally subjective point of view, it would seem that the only way to properly interpret the artist’s work is to feel it at an almost unconscious level.

Rene Girard, on the other hand, on speaking of the Proustian experience suggests that the mythical edifice of belief is what is artistic.  That the actual experience may fail to elicit an emotion, but through the “other” we gain the aesthetic experience.  And the mimetic engagement is derived from this imitation of the “other”.

I’m curious to explore the concept of mimesis within the context of digital art.  I recently, and unsuccessfully, made the attempt to crash a course in the DMA department with the hope of doing just that.  Although there was no room in the class for this worn out senior, I grew ever more fascinated with the idea.  Other than doodling for a couple of hours (it was assigned, I swear!), I was exposed to wild applications of software made for the visual arts.  More and more, the digitization of everything we do is amplifying the way we experience the world.

We interact somewhat numbingly through the virtual spectrum of code and it seems to add complex layers of mimetic interpretation.  Everyday tools are made for individuals to share their perspective in a multitude of mediums instantaneously —   some profound, but mostly rants in the hope of finding an audience (which the internet is sure to provide the most eccentric of characters).  I’m uncertain of what the implications are within the context of mimesis, but we’ll chug along and see if we can’t discover something.

The piece you see above was written with the Processing software co-developed by one of our very own, Casey Reas.  I edited some of the code to expand the canvas.  Everything on this website was made to provide the user with a unique visual and interactive experience.  And now a novice has the capacity to control how precise he wants to communicate his idea to the world within a tangible experience that utilizes senses we might not have appealed to in the analog world.

To steal a paragraph from Reas’ syllabus:

In reference to the emerging media of his time, the eminent media theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote:”Today we’re beginning to realize that the new media aren’t just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.” Writing code is one gateway into these “new and unique powers of expression.” Learning to program and to engage the computer more directly with code opens the possibility to create not only tools, but systems, environments, and new modes of expression. It is here that the computer ceases to be a tool and becomes a medium.

I’m curious as to how much influence symbolic logic had in the development of code.  If significant, could what Frege, Meinong, and Russell had been engaged in be construed as a form of mimetic exploration that was perhaps only available to the few who could empathize?  There seems to be an indirect meta-mimetic attribute that makes what involves mimesis a bit unclear to me.  I understand that many of you have a firm view on what involves mimesis, and more so, what doesn’t constitute mimesis, and although I sympathize, I’m not convinced.  I don’t even know what mimesis is exactly (necessary and sufficient conditions anyone?).  If it’s merely a matter of taste that is not universal, and I find the blank wall in front of me to be beautiful (you have to make an effort to suspend disbelief here, philosophy thought experiments are usually this stale), it is unclear what actually constitutes mimesis.  I mean isn’t there a story in everything, if we dig deep enough.  Is mimetic exploration restricted to a superficial experience of what we engage with?  I hope not.

Also, here’s a site made with Processing.  It mines the web for feelings and scatters them Pollack-like across the screen.

Also, a virtual choir with one on steroids coming out soon.