The disappearance of the referent in digital art and its implications

Abstract

Digital art again raises the question of the reference. From the origins of philosophy and theory, the referent and representation have been the two ends of the tension between them were discussed the issues of the nature of the imitation. Plato and Aristotle on the one hand, the Church, Peirce, Benjamin and many others have debated the capacity of the image to imitate reality. With the advent of the technological image, representation has been competing ever more with the reference, doing that slowly be replacing him. The indiciality –rather than the iconicity– is that the boundaries are becoming blurred increasingly. From the mid-1980s, the games between encountered images and purely iconographic images have begun to turn the reference into a possible substitute. In the last years of the 20th century, the digital image has come to play between reality and virtual reality, to the extent that several countries as United States made of this issue, in the field of the pedopornografy, a legal debate, accepting the idea of virtual crimes amounted to actual crimes. These debates do that every day more virtual reality will replace reality.