디지털 상호작용예술에서 재현과 해체의 문제- 아르토와 데리다의 관점에서 보기 -

Abstract

This is a study to critically reexamine the aesthetics of chance,emergence and transformation of forms typical in digital interactive artand artificial life art. Anton Artaud's notion of "Theatre of Cruelty"and Jacques Derrida's deconstructionist explanation of it are the maintheoretical base to consider that question. Following most theories on digital media art and culture, the interactiveart allows the spectator to participate into the art work andtransfigure or dismantle the fixed narrative and representation of images;such is the essential difference with regard to the traditional artbased on physical medium. In this study, I will try to criticize suchpoint of view defining it as a romantic view aiming at a"transcendence beyond the border", and will propose a new point ofview based upon the notion of Theater of Cruelty by Artaud andDerrida. Through the radical experimentation of Theatre of Cruelty,Artaud tried to cut across the boundary of the classical theatre imprisonedin a predetermined representation, but he ended by realizingthat it was impossible. Derrida recommented and deepened Artaud'sidea in his own deconstructionist perspective. He concluded that artand theatre is doomed to be imprisoned in representations; the closureof representation is a fate. The repeated attempt to get out of thefixed narrative, meaning and form is necessarily imprisoned in itsown representation. Destruction and resistance are not an explosion ortranscendence toward the outside but an implosion inside the limit ofthe cruel authority representation. Reconsidered in such point of view, the effects of destruction,chance, and emergence simulated in the digital interactive art and artificiallife art might be nothing but effects of theatrical representation;simulated representation of non-representable. In this situation, the only possible way to resist is the meaningless but endlessly repeated destructionas in the case of the Theatre of Cruelty. Therefore, the digitalinteractive art may not be understood as an aethetics of romanticresistance, but as an "aesthetics of paradox" or "aesthetics of transgression"envelopping the construction and the destruction of form andrepresentation at the same time.