The mimesis of the on-screen interface and the essence of technology: a philosophical analysis

Pluzhnikova Natalia Nikolaevna ORCID: 0000-0002-4143-1216 PhD in Philosophy Associate Professor; Department of Humanities; Moscow Polytechnic University 140050, Russia, Moscow region, village. Kraskovo, Shkolnaya str., 2/3, sq. 98 pluzhnikova@bk.ru Other publications by this author

Saenko Natalya Ryafikovna ORCID: 0000-0002-9422-064X Doctor of Philosophy Professor; Department of Humanities; Moscow Polytechnic University Pavel Karchagin str., 22, Moscow, 107023, Russia rilke@list.ru Other publications by this author

The interface of modern screen devices reflects reality in accordance with the basic principle of the classical directions of traditional art, that is, mimetically. However, the syntax of reality reflected in the text, for example, classical paintings, largely does not coincide with the multilevel hypersyntaxis of virtual reality, with the space of which the user of the screen device communicates through its interface. This consideration raises the question of the possibility of confirming the coincidence of mimesis in the "classical" meaning of this concept, in which it is usually used in philosophical, or, for example, in art criticism discourse, with the mimesis of the interface of a screen device.

However, this difference is even deeper, since between the mimesis of the interface of modern electronic devices and the former "classical" mimesis lies a whole chain of ambiguous and complex transformations, within which the changes leading to the emergence and approval of each subsequent stage originated and formed within the previous stage. The postmodern revolution of the second half of the 20th century, even through a deep and radical revision (and subsequent rejection) of the basic foundations of the entire previous culture, could not break this chain, but on the contrary, actually contributed to a further increase in the number of links in it. Thus, the question of how and in what way the interface of an on–screen device reflects the space of virtual reality - mimetically, symbolically – this question is still not closed in its deep essence - and thus remains relevant. The last significant circumstance determines the relevance of this study.

The purpose of this study is to implement a comprehensive, philosophical and cultural discourse of revealing the content of the process of communicating the user of a screen device with the reality displayed in it, as well as discussing the features of this process.

Omitting numerous and extremely complex technical and technological aspects of creating the on–screen interface of a modern electronic device, on the one hand, and striving to pay tribute to the truth, as far as possible, on the other hand, it should be noted that the background and history of the types and patterns of visualization of the image displayed on the screen for the user in order to inform the latter, For the last century and a half, it has emerged in the bosom of visual genres of culture. Unlike classical painting, by forcing the image in the viewer's field of view to move, the art of the first cinema at the turn of the last century and the last century had an unpredictable effect on the viewer – it is known that at the first session of the "Arrival of the Train" in the cinema of the Lumiere brothers, some of the audience simply fled the hall in panic. The milestones of this path in its technological dimension are from cinema to television, to stationary video telephones, to the same mobile ones, and from them to modern screen devices.

However, behind this background of NTP achievements in the field of broadcasting a moving and time-varying image, a completely different and no less complex story was carried out, within which the mimetic and symbolic forms of representation of such an image constantly replaced each other. For the most part, this turned out to be associated with numerous intra–cultural processes, the essence of which (and, at certain stages, the only essence) was the change of prevailing types and forms of cultural stylistics. Turning to this story of the changeability of visual genres of modern and contemporary culture can clarify a lot about why we see the interface of our smartphone today, with a certain architectonics. For visual types of culture, as well as for established cultural technical means of reproducing a visual image, its representation is extremely important – methods, fundamental principles, technical capabilities, visibility, completeness, informativeness.

There is practically no disagreement among cultural and art historians about the fact that the appearance of art in the second half of the 20th century was prepared by art in the first half of the 20th century – it actually nurtured postmodernism on the basis of its own crisis. The emergence of a number of fundamentally new and revolutionary cultural styles and trends within the art of this period carried the features of demanding the most radical changes within the traditional stylistics of modernity, undergoing an almost total crisis of representation. Unlike previous crises that occurred in the history of culture before, the crisis of the beginning of the last century differed from them qualitatively – and as a result, could not be overcome by previous means. The problem was that art – at least in its pictorial forms – has always developed mimetically, while the artistic language that bases the dominant cultural stylistics as a means and as a tool could change, but art tried to relate to reality, changing only the ways of its reflection (representation), and this is the basic principle mimesis. At the turn of the XIX and XX centuries, the art of traditional Art Nouveau faced a crisis situation of this very fundamental principle. It became clear that the previous mimesis had exhausted itself meaningfully and representatively.

The radicalization of the renovationist cultural processes at that time led to the emergence of such styles as Cubism, suprematism, Fauvism, Dadaism, and a number of other, less radical ones. On the canvases, in sculpture and in the creative compositions of these "new artists", there was no place left from mimesis in its former traditional sense – reality disappeared from there, replaced by its more or less successful symbolization in terms of reflecting this signified. Thus, the traditional mimesis, which did not survive this crisis, was replaced by a very unconventional semiosis. There was a need to organize and aesthetically verify the very process of representing these new forms, and after that, a community of experts defining the principles of demarcation of this new "art" and "non-art".

The post-truth procedure established in the modern media mass culture as an expert assessment of information is entirely based on the same principles, but at that time it was a significant step towards expanding the very concept of representation as a new opportunity to interpret not only the artistic text itself, but also the creative act of its creation, which became an important link in the correspondence dialogue between the artist and the viewer. Now the same principle of complementarity is implemented in the screen field of the interface of modern electronic devices at a level understandable to their user – if this were not the case, navigation inside the screen, instead of creating convenience for users, would become redundant for many.

In addition, the same changes in the sphere of the actual abolition of the previous mimetic norms made it possible to move from reality to its symbolization and schematization within the framework of the above-mentioned directions of the cultural avant-garde of the first half of the XX century. The opinion of critics of the early twentieth century was due to the fact that the activity of this artistic direction (for example, Dadaists) is aimed at reflecting the changed reality of post-war Europe, and directly criticizes the social deformities and deformations that arose inside it against the background of the cultural crisis. This opinion surprised the Dadaists a lot, since their program did not include plans or criticism. Creation in the world of the absurd and, as they believed, according to the laws of the absurd, gave them the right to embody in their own cultural objects the principles of artistic composition corresponding to the absurd.

On the basis of this rebellion and denial of the previous style, as well as against the background of the desire to present reality to the viewer as it is, such structurally forming principles as "collage", "assemblage", "bricollage", etc. are emerging and consolidated in the depths of the Avant-Garde. In compulsively assembled compositions, heterogeneous individual mimetic elements begin to combine with symbolic elements. Moreover, avant–garde figures who create such compositions categorically do not accept reproaches that they thereby "go beyond" the artistic text, or that it is "not actually a text". On the contrary, they insist on the organic nature of this connection, and even on the perceived inner harmony ("coherence") between the two. They insist only on the grounds that if they see it that way, then others can see it exactly the same way ^[1]. This is important because the same principles will continue to be used in the organization of the on-screen interface of a modern smartphone or tablet, and these devices are not just mass-produced, but have a global prevalence today.

There is actually no contradiction between the "old" and "new" schools of European art of the first half of the last century, because, despite the fragmentary use of mimetic elements, in the field of artistic text of the works of representatives of the rebellious and avant-garde trends of the "new Europe" of that time, reality imperceptibly disappears, replaced by a new cultural phenomenology, the generalized name of which will be given later, hyperreality, and this term will be established only in postmodern philosophy. After the Second World War, cultural postmodernism, inspired, apparently, by the directness and even brutality of such artistic texts, polished and further developed these same approaches in its fundamental principle of deconstruction ^[2].

According to this principle, the way to create a new one does not lie at all through the creative act of searching for a new aesthetic image, since it is important not to symbolize aesthetically, but to display. In the world of postmodern narratives "canceled", the place formed after such a cancellation had to be filled or replaced with something. This became possible only after the onset of historical time, which V. Benjamin later called "the era of technical reproducibility of a work of art" ^[1]. By this time, advertising, glossy magazines, television, posters, posters and catalogues of art exhibitions, museums and galleries seemed to be gaining a "second wind" in the space of post-war Europe. It becomes possible to display not reality itself, but its images, or compositions of such images, already transformed by the mass media, that is, previously "deconstructed" reality and, implementing the principle of deconstruction to the stage of its completion, to compose, combine from an arbitrary set of such images a fundamentally new cultural phenomenon, which later J. Baudrillard will call it "hyperreality", the distinguishing feature of which from real reality, in his opinion, is the collection of the structure of this phenomenon not from images, but from simulacra ^[2]. Nevertheless, making a significant concession towards the adequacy of the representation of reality, through the adoption of the deconstruction rule, it was possible to overcome the next crisis of representation in turn, which, as it turned out, had very far-reaching consequences for visual forms of culture. The interface of a modern smartphone willingly, but selectively assimilated the principles of composition corresponding to hyperreality, since simulacrum links (i.e., they only have the appearance of links) are extremely rare in its on–screen hypertext, since the user, as a rule, does not approve of this. The fact that these hyperlinks do not always and do not fully reflect physical reality is accepted between the creator of the smartphone and its user at the level of an unspoken, but understandable to both parties convention ^[3].

The replacement of the culture of an industrial society with the information culture of a post-industrial society initiated and then channeled the development of new directions in the development of technology in the field of telecommunications, technical, technological and engineering design solutions within which allowed to transform almost all visually representable genres and directions of modern culture. The principles of deconstruction and hyperreality have been replaced not by a principle that cancels them, but by a technically and technologically modifying principle of screen quality ^[4]. The emergence of the phenomenon of virtual reality space, in which the user looks through the interface of the screen of his smartphone, naturally gave rise to a culture of virtual reality, among the fundamental principles of which is the principle of onscreen ^[5].

The laws of its functioning and representation operating in virtual reality, which differ from similar laws of the physical world, impose a number of profound differences on the mimetic features of its representation, the presence of which gives every reason to assert the non-identity of the mimesis of the screen interface to the mimesis of traditional cultural forms. The multilevel structure of the hypersyntaxis of the interface screen, corresponding to the hyperreality of the virtual space, assumes an inter-level hierarchy of hyperlinks in terms of importance, the subordinated nature of the order of their disclosure, the widespread use of not only hypertext, but also intertext ("uncompressed" links ^[6]) in general, as well as the use of visually understandable extragraphemics and iconic symbols used to save on a space-limited screen. As a rule, all of them are hyperlinks, not just inactive descriptors ^[7].

The history of the world of fine art is known for such techniques – as, for example, P. Brueghel sometimes on some of his canvases, depicting some palace hall full of noble gentlemen, almost imperceptibly painted somewhere in the corner of this hall far from the viewer some small man from the servants, who clearly settled down there to relieve himself. The master of surrealism, S. Dali, in one of his paintings, using the world-famous masterpiece of Vermeer Delft "The Girl with the Letter", again in the shadow and on the wall farthest from the viewer, almost imperceptibly depicted a portrait of Velasquez. However, in the history of the former painting "before the electronic era" such examples are rare.

A modern smartphone gives its user the opportunity to activate on the screen both the image of the little man in Brueghel's paintings and the portrait of Velasquez in the same kind of Dali painting and then give him all the information about this that he can find in the virtual space.

The latter means that the smartphone interface and its user react to each other in the "touch-screen" mode, which has never happened before. The user goes deep into hyperlinks, and the interface unfolds to him a screen image corresponding to the link on which the user himself stopped. Previously, this required the attentiveness and imagination of the viewer of the painting, able to find the key to interpretation. Now, for this, the user needs to have just basic skills of navigation in the hyperreality of the screen.

Modern society can be defined as a society of transition from technology to "technology technology". In particular, the phenomenon of rationalization and ordering of human behavior. To study these aspects, one can turn to the views of such theorists of science as E. Biglehol ^[8], L. Bernard ^[9], M. Crozier ^[10], D. Fried ^[11], L. Goodman ^[12]. The study of screen and visual culture allows us to enter into a broader research problem – the study of the essence of technology as a whole, considering it not only as a result of the development of human culture, but also as an integral socio-cultural education, as indicated by the research of W. Dugger ^[13], R. Hassan ^[14], S. Garner ^[15], E. Bach ^[16], M. Bambruch ^[17], N. Critchlow ^[18], F. Dassauer ^[19].

The analysis of screen culture allows us to consider technology as a unity of three components:

1. The technological component. It is impossible to imagine screen culture today without engineering development and technology. Technologies are becoming a crucial and fundamental characteristic of modern society, through the study of which it is possible to determine the complex human attitude towards technologies themselves.

2. The socio-cultural component of technology, which manifests itself in its dependence on the level of development of society's culture: from the development of screen culture, clip thinking, the speed of perception and processing of information, values and socio-cultural attitudes, Technological progress, expanding human capabilities in influencing natural processes, entails socio-cultural changes.

3. The anthropological component of technology and screen culture consists in studying the influence of these phenomena on a person and his being ^[20]. In addition, the technique contains samples, standards, and projects that modern man follows. Mechanical technology, by improving or enhancing human physicality, has become the standard of a healthy lifestyle and the success of a human personality. Screen culture, using a variety of ways and technologies to influence a personality, forms the structure of its needs, motivations and attitudes. The "screen person" is characterized by the acquisition of personal and social identity through screen images, as well as the blurring of the ontological boundary between constant (cash-material) and virtual forms of reality.

Thus, the analysis allows us to conclude that there is no reason to assert the presence of mimesis in its traditional form in this case, but there is also no crisis of representation (in the same form), eliminated through previously unimaginable possibilities of modern technology, the boundaries of understanding which as an integral phenomenon are significantly expanding today.