The Virtual as Precondition for Artistic Creation

Abstract

This article presumes that contemporary artistic practices relate in different ways to reality. Or, in other words, through their aesthetic compositions, they not only represent, but co-constitute different realities. Diverse examples of present-day artistic practices make us realise that there is neither one art nor one reality and no defined relationship of the two things to one another. Thanks to the application of digital media, but also the vast array of research methods, artistic practices today not merely combine aesthetic signs to futuristic heterogeneous time expressions, but actually produce time-creating or time-diversifying audiovisual articulations. They underline the time-dependent and metamorphotic character of reality. This is the reason why in certain philosophical readings of these art practices the term “utopian” is replaced with the term “uchronic” articulations. In order to provide a more general understanding of these time-diversifying artistic processes, the article aims at reintroducing the old philosophical concepts of “virtual” and “actual” reality as unfolded by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and later on by Gilles Deleuze.