Beautiful Untrue Things

Art has never been a mere mirror up to nature, yet as in no other medium has it been so easy to create a simulacra of reality as with digital technology: a 'heterocosm', both simulating the familiar while deconstructing it. This talk will explore how mimesis might be used as a paradigm from which to explore the relationship between digital surrogates and their analogue counterparts; how familiar terms like object, imitation, copy, original function in the digital realm; and the notion that a digital representation may be more appropriately termed a simulacral identity, reflecting, not the object itself, but our beliefs and conventions about it. This talk will also briefly touch upon mimesis from the viewpoint of digital representations as conscious fashionings of hyper-reality or in Wildean terms, employing the unreal and non-existent to recreate the material world in unexpected, fresh, or subversive ways.