CHArt Twenty-First Annual Conference

Hamid van Koten , University of Dundee, Scotland.
The Digital Image and the Pleasure Principle: The Consumption of Realism in the Age of Simulation.

Digital technology has rapidly become the dominant provider of mass entertainment. Digital animation, CGI feature film, digital gaming.. the photorealistic, all immersive environment lies just ahead of us.

This paper will seek to examine the social and philosophical implications of the digital environment with reference to Marshall McLuhan's notions of 'hot and cold' media, and drawing upon the works of Baudrillard, Lacan and Gerbner.

Rather than adopting an 'effects theory', this paper will bring together these highly diverse approaches to understanding the digital environment, and explore the complex interrelationship between the producers, distributors and the consumers of the digital media product. What are the forces at work in the production and consumption of these digital environments? What makes these products so popular? What are the narratives and representational issues involved and what can these tell us about our culture?

Specifically, the paper will seek to uncover two themes: pre-modern narrative and realism as the dominant form of digital representations in terms of production, and the Lacanian notion of the Imaginary as the dominant drive towards the consumption of these representations.

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