New technologies implied in art creation and exhibition are modifying the traditional landmarks on which aesthetics has always focused. In particular, Virtual Reality artworks call the body into question when it comes to living a bodily experience within exhibitions accessible through technological tools that expand the human body’s capabilities and motor potential. The body's status is challenged in its traditional unity, that of a subject of experience living in a world where the spatial configuration is relatively constant. Conversely, in Virtual (...) Reality, the spatial aspect is novel to our body which needs to adapt to unpredicted and disorientating motor schemas. Therefore, the Virtual Reality aesthetic experience takes place into a novel configuration for the human body: hybrid and split into the virtual realm. (shrink)

La potenza dell'arte è un richiamo che non si accontenta mai di rimanere inespresso. Mikel Dufrenne si fa interprete di questo richiamo nel tentativo di testimoniare l'origine, dove il mondo è ancora allo stato di possibile poiché non ha ancora ricevuto una forma. A questo luogo conduce l'arte, che instancabilmente sollecita l'uomo a non accontentarsi delle prassi consolidate. Questo libro racconta l'impresa filosofica di Dufrenne che elabora un'estetica attiva, in cui attraverso l'azione dell'uomo, l'arte arriva al suo vero compimento. Per (...) comprendere il linguaggio di Dufrenne e la ricchezza dei riferimenti presenti nelle sue opere, occorre mantenere un confronto continuo con le espressioni artistiche e i mutamenti sociali che costituiscono lo sfondo della sua opera. Ciò che rimane, leggendo questo autore, è la convinzione che la creatività e la bellezza, scoperte in ogni piega del mondo e della realtà, siano davvero generative non solo di una visione ma anche di un'azione, nuova e migliore. (shrink)

Visual perception of space and time has been shown to rely on context dependency, an inferential process by which the average magnitude of a series of stimuli previously experienced acts as a prior during perception. This article aims to investigate the presence and evolution of this phenomenon in early aging. Two groups of participants belonging to two different age ranges (Young Adults: average age 28.8 years old; Older Adults: average age 62.8 years old) participated in the study performing a discrimination (...) and a reproduction task, both in a spatial and temporal conditions. In particular, they were asked to evaluate lengths in the spatial domain and interval durations in the temporal one. Early aging resulted to be associated to a general decline of the perceptual acuity, which is particularly evident in the temporal condition. The context dependency phenomenon was preserved also during aging, maintaining similar levels as those exhibited by the younger group in both space and time perception. However, the older group showed a greater variability in context dependency among participants, perhaps due to different strategies used to face a higher uncertainty in the perceptual process. (shrink)