The funny thing about our media or technologies of expression is that they are
partialized, that is, lacking an element or dimension. Film is not total
art. If sculpture lacks time, or music lacks a body, or painting sound,
and books everything else but imagination, film lacks three
dimensionality even with 3d effects. They're that exactly: effects. And
interactivity. Virtualized film is a step, but without real immersive
kinesics, still not total. Why? Life, the ideal horizon of totality, is
still not graspable totally. Only a God-object can be total, like an
infinity stone, or Aleph, or some magical object or realm like in Dr
Strange. God-objects are focus of worship for this capacity to hold, as
believed, the infinite. The sacred space is the total art. To make art
museums is to make altars. You go to church, that's total art because it
supposedly houses the infinite. Sacred architecture and places. Sacred grounds.
That's total art.
I'm not saying to become total artists you need to be
converted or become religious. The totality offered by the Sacred looks
good on paper, but as hypothesis requires a tall suspension of
disbelief. In some sci fi films or series, you get full immersive other
lives through various ways, from Westworld full simulations to drug or
machine induced trips, Total Recall, Matrix, Oblivion, etc. In other
words, the closer to total art, the less art is an object and more as
immersivity in heterotopias, with the option to never return. Is that
like the offer of Eternal Life? Exactly what we have in the Caprica
series. If the goal of art is its audience's contemplation of other
possible worlds and lives, immersivity is the full literal realization.
No more ''imagined'' possible ontologies, they're all too virtual. The
total art is the next life accessible today.
However, I'd put a
corollary argument here. Since total art is the analog of sacred space,
immersivity has as analog the artificiality of life itself. The
hyperreal, the cityscape, life designed for you. Like biopolitics,
biotopias are fantasy-driven environments to fulfill desire and
enjoyment of both physical and psychological pleasures and pain. The
mall, brothel, gym, tourist spots, park... Then there are theaters for
alternative worlds, or carnivals, anything less real to divert our
attention to the fact that it is the city itself which is built on
myths, or is artificial, designed, controlled, like any building or
territory.
The city is a narrative, already art, offering immersivity at
every corner. Despite some cities being called ''eternal,'' no city is
eternal. Like nations, cities are temporary topographies of time,
existing only by virtue of a law and the founding groups that keep it. Graffiti is vandalism because it reveals the graphic or semiotic
substantiality of the cityscape. All art must be framed in proper
places. Signs and nonsigns must sit apart. Art cannot be everywhere.
Isn't tax what we pay to enter and stay to enjoy the spectacle and
immersivity of the city-scene?
