The World Remains a Great Enchanted Garden

The Dream, a painting imbued with exotic fantasies of the tropics, was the swansong of French Post-Impressionism painter Henri Rousseau. This painting seemed to depict a shady corner of a broad-leaved forest. The lotuses in different colors cluster around the naked woman reclining in the burgundy sofa. A lion couple with dilated eyes lurk in the clearance between the leaves and the pedicles, and bunches of round plump fruits grow on the tree. Taking a closer look, you may notice a flute man hiding in the underbrush. Rousseau had never left France, let alone seeing any tropical forest for himself. What he had done was frequently visiting the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle and the Jardin des plantes de Paris. By virtue of his fertile imagination, he nevertheless created such a marvelous tropical world as bizarre as  indescribable. “I feel like being immersed in the realm of dream whenever I enter the arboretum’s glass greenhouse, where I often marvel at these exotic, peculiar tropical plants,” Rousseau stated in an interview.

“Dream” is a subjective experience, a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person’s mind during sleep. Interpretations of dreams have been thick on the ground since human prehistory. In addition to extensive philosophical and religious discussions of dreams, some fields of rational enquiry such as psychoanalysis and neuroscience have covered this subject, formulating and examining hypotheses through scientific experiments. Shrouded in the mists of scientific and unscientific accounts of dreams, artists exercise their imagination, managing to unfold a diversity of surreal fantasies in their respective works. A decade after Rousseau released The Dream, Surrealism, a cultural movement

based on Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, arose in France, and the following decade was marked by the efflorescence of this avant-garde movement in European art and literature. In that period, artists sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind unveiled by Freud, and tried to present the mysterious world of subconsciousness in physical forms. The flame of the surrealist movement thenceforth swept through the world and engulfed the global visual arts, literature, music and cinematography.

From the perspective of neuroscience, “dreams” tend to occur in REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement). Generating fast brainwaves, the neurons in REM sleep are as active as they are when one is awake. Dream 2.2, a performance installation by Australian artist group PluginHUMAN, was dedicated to the research of human brain activities in sleep. Inspired by the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty, this artist group employed spatial projection and musical sound to translate intangible dreams into an audio-visual space perceivable to the spectators who could ergo navigate the maze made of transparent plastic sheets carrying abstract patterns, as if they were situated in other peoples’ dreams. The translation of dreams was based on each spectator’s electroencephalogram (EEG), that is, the neuro-transmission triggered real-time reactions of the in-built algorithmic system and then generated a concatenation of abstract patterns, colors and musical sounds. While dreams in sleep are based on surreal projections or overlaps of the real world, Dream 2.2 represented a technology-based effort to concretize poetic imagination of dream into a real yet transcendental environment.

Following the EEG-based approach, Taiwanese artist Lin Pei-Ying created Kaleidoscope of the Universes, a work illuminated by the making of sand mandalas, a common practice in Tibetan Buddhism: on the occasions of large-scale ceremonies, monks tend to draw mandalas with colorful grains of sand, implying the construction of the holy realm of Buddhas. “Mandala” is a term transliterated from Sanskrit, literally a circular diagram for worship, which also reflects the Buddhist understanding of the truth about the universe. Lin firstly collected different microorganisms and turned their culture media into her canvas. Then she connected the brainwave sensor to the microorganism printer repurposed from a 3D printer. When the artist meditated with the sensor attached to her head, the printer thus printed the variation of her brainwaves onto the culture media. Influenced by different variables over the course of time, the visual results that the microorganisms yielded on these culture media were utterly unpredictable. According to the buddha-dharma, consciousness is a constantly changing state of mind that dictates every action of a sentient being, which is why each organism is completely one of a kind. The artist ingeniously harnessed the characteristics of different microorganisms and brainwave-driven printing, creating this scientific experiment-like bio-art work where objective environment and subjective consciousness had an encounter and co-existed in symbiosis. “Despite the application of scientific rigor to this creative process, the uncontrollability of the results openly questioned the precise description and induction enshrined by science. In the universe bristling with different life forms, unpredictability is actually the norm,” Lin claimed.[1] The constant element of unpredictability not only keeps all the life forms vigorous, but also questions the reality that cannot be judged by its appearance.

Mythological Thinking versus Scientific Thinking[2]

French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss criticized that we remain wanting in philosophical reflection on science, even though the advancement of our scientific knowledge has reached an unprecedented level since the dawn of Common Era. However, scientific thinking that knows no boundaries may help us chart the unknown territories of the real world. By the same token, mythological thinking may reflect the feature of the world as well. “The myths that human beings fed on for so long may amount to the same thing: a systematic and never useless exploration of the resources of the imagination. Myths depict all sorts of creatures and events, absurd or contradictory when compared to ordinary experience, which will cease to be totally meaningless only at a level incommensurate with the level where the myths were first elaborated. It is because these myths are already inscribed — as a dotted line so to speak — in the mind’s architecture, which is ‘of the world,’ that one day or another the images of the world set forth by myths will prove to be adequate to that world and well- suited to illustrate aspects of it,” so stated Lévi-Strauss in his book.[3] As the world marches inexorably towards objectivity, subjective thinking has become a necessary commodity to the mapping of its true colors.

Being consumed by passion for science, art and religion, Chinese artist Lu Yang tends to create by skillfully interweaving mythological and scientific thinking, which was exemplified by her three-channel video artwork Wrathful King Kong Core, a perfect fusion of the three fields and a thought-provoking scientific illustration of mythology. To create this work, Lu appropriated the dharma characteristics of Dorje Phurba, a Tibetan Buddhist deity who has three heads, six arms and four legs. The three heads respectively cast the wrathful looks of Mañjuśrī, Amitābha and Samantabhadra, so as to subdue all pigheaded living creatures in the Dharma-Ending Age. The artist believes that abstract religious thinking and objective empirical science converge at the emotion of wrath. As the wrath-arousing signals travel via the thalamus down to the amygdala, the facial muscles of Dorje Phurba clench and expressions of wrath with glaring eyes appear on its faces. Mythology was thus personified in this work, in which Lu reduced the sui generis religious sublimity of this deity to a simple emotional reflex. She even showed the X-ray images of the deity’s “quality” on tablets, which fulfilled the disenchantment function of empirical science. The work Wrathful King Kong Core contained an AR interactive version which was not included in Customized Reality. In that version, the artist installed an iPad in a shrine without any Buddhist statue, and pointed its camera at the position where the Buddhist statue is supposed to be. The viewers could therefore see and interact with a virtual wrathful Vajrasattva shown on the iPad. This work showed an imbricating structure of digitally generated images in the 1990s and the concept of augmented reality. It was not until the popularization of mobile devices nowadays that the AR technology has come of age with a wide range of applications. It can be said that the AR-based interaction provided by this work roughly described the following scriptures of the Diamond Sūtra: “All things that have characteristics are false and ephemeral. If you see all characteristics to be non-characteristics, then you see the Tathāgata.”

Today’s VR technology enables us to perceive and experience these false and ephemeral characteristics in a more comprehensive fashion. Render Ghost, a mesmerizing unmanned VR immersive theater by NAXS Corp., was dedicated to the exploration of potential aesthetic narratives and senses based on the advancement of VR technology, as well as to the discussion about the corporeality in a virtual, networked environment. Each spectator of Render Ghost must wear a head-mounted VR display and fully covered protective clothing before entering the tent space. After the ritual-like preparations, the spectators were immersed in the virtual space as they began to climb the stairs in the virtual scenes shown on their head-mounted displays. While actually having their feet firmly planted on the ground, the spectators felt that they are elevated when they climb the stairs. The physical experience this work offered them is more than real, yet they had no way of seeing their bodies and limbs, as if they were in transition from death to rebirth through the bardo. No sooner did the consciousness reach the peak of this limited universe, than a sudden silence fell over this space. The spectators took off their head-mounted VR displays, only to find themselves in an extradimensional space and shrouded in a swirling mist bristling with colorful glares and bright stars. Here, the “real space” was in an artificial and unreal state, which bore more than a passing resemblance to Baudrillard’s definition of “hyperreality.”[4] Illusions thus completely replaced the real environment. As the boundary between the real and the virtual was blurred, the spectators had not only been enmeshed in this fabricated environment from which escape was nowhere on the horizon, but also mistaken the meticulously choreographed scenes for the real site they were physically located in.

Following a similar approach of representing the stream of consciousness, Liao Chi-Yu created his two-channel video artworks Sanssouci Park and River with the stage settings of romantic, gorgeous scenery commonly seen in early-period photo studios in Taiwan. The stage settings featured the European-style buildings and streetscapes that exist only in the artisan-painters’ imagination. In the two video artworks, the male and female protagonists stand in front of the hand-drawn stage settings, gazing into the distance with nostalgic yearning. “Images usurped the throne of reality, an argument savoring of post-modernism. Instead of revolving around it, Liao’s video artworks posed a query regarding the sentimental or rational foundation for the ambiguous entanglements between humans and images,”[5] Wang Sheng-Hong commented. The artist also installed stage settings, park benches and streetlamps alongside the videos. The appearance of quotidian objects brought a touch of wild fantasy to the minimalist and inanimate exhibition room, which was strongly reminiscent of the fairy tale-like surreal world unfolding in Rousseau’s paintings.

By simulating and representing reality, the participating artists in Customized Reality gently guided the visitors into the unique space-time they created with digital instruments. Treating vision as the extension of human consciousness and physical body, these artists either offered the visitors unparalleled experiences, or rekindled their memories of déjà vu, or refreshed their understanding of the taken-for-granted scenes, as if the old phantoms returned and the world was again enchanted. In this speculative space created with the extension of consciousness, the real was no longer the opposite of the virtual. Artistic creation put an end to this binary opposition, and turned it into a brand new reality. We thus become able to contemplate the raisons d’être/existential propositions of humanity and other objects in the digital era. Let me summarize this essay with art historian Gordon Graham’s account of the ability of visual arts in re-enchanting the society: “The history of visual art since the mid-nineteenth century is the story of a rapid sequence of movements that arose in the struggle to find a distinctive role that would capture and vindicate both the value of art and its autonomy—the Pre-Raphaelites, the Impressionists, the Cubists, and so on. But of all these movements, it is most plausible to see the Surrealists (and to some extent their American successors the Abstract Expressionists) as self-consciously engaged in a sustained attempt to do what Arnold expected poetry to do—namely, to re-enchant a world that had been de-sacralized by science.”[6] New media artists have tried to spatialize, auditorize and visualize dreams and consciousness, resurrecting primitive senses in the form of illusion. Employing their respective closed systems of creative language with dexterity, these artists weaved their sui generis contexts of reality, which is nothing if not hyperreal in the Baudrillardian sense.

[1] Lin Pei-Ying, “2015 Overseas Residency Project: ‘Universe · Mandala’,” in Digiarts. Full text available at http://www.digiarts.org.tw/DigiArts/HistoryPage/88988724317024/Chi,

retrieved on May 22, 2018.

[2] Claude Lévi-Strauss, Nous SommesTous des Cannibals, trans. Hui-Ying Liao, Taipei: Flâneur, 2014.

[3] Ibid., p. 151.

[4] Yhe Yu-Tian, 2015, “The Concept of the Hyperreal in Jean Baudrillard: His Views on the Problem of Representation in Contemporary Art and the Structure of Reality,” Journal of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, no. 29, p. 127.

[5] Wang Sheng-Hong, 2017, “The Wallpaper Is an Uncrossable Ocean: Chi-Yu Liao Solo Exhibition—River Still, River Goes,” in ARTalks, Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture. Full text available at http://talks.taishinart.org.tw/juries/wsh/2017093007, retrieved on May 29, 2018.

[6] Gordon Graham, The Re-Enchanted World: Art versus Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 61.

真實何以定製？─ 世界仍是座幻術花園 

撰文／官妍廷（本展策展人）

何謂數位時代中的真實？而真實可被製成嗎，真實又何以定製？展覽「定製真實：數位藝術之魅」將以此提問為開端，透過錄像、裝置及虛擬實境裝置與跨域展演等創作形式，企圖呈現藝術家以數位媒體再現或擬造近似真實的意識狀態，並對於物質和意識世界乃至宗教神話的存在等當代議題之探究所提出的回應，並藉以探討當代以科技技術型塑的理性世界中，數位藝術何以將世界再度魅化。

客製化的真實

當進入現代社會，我們憑藉科技工具和技術翻轉傳統社會生活，能以科學儀器檢驗的經驗或實物，成為判斷真實的依歸，並使生活除去各種自史前以來因神話及宗教信仰而生的重重魅影。德國社會學家、哲學家馬克斯‧韋伯（Max Weber）將現代生活的俗世化（secularization）稱之為「除魅」（disenchantment），並以「世界仍是座幻術花園」（the world remains a great enchanted garden）來形容尚以理性化過程排除生活中神秘不可算計之力量的集體思維模式。然則除魅化並非現代社會發展的單向趨勢，在視覺藝術的範疇中，我們早已身處全面被影像統治的奇觀時代，藝術家靈活操用數位媒體的互動性及以影像創造虛擬空間之企圖，使觀者獲得真實感知和情緒。換言之，「眼見為憑」已不再適用於高度數位及虛擬化的當代現實，布希亞聲稱我們的時代已「過度真實」（hyperreal），而新媒體藝術之創作，及其得以創造出令觀者身歷其境的感受，正是揭示真實，進而僭越真實並以混種現實（hybrid reality）擬造時空新現實的展演形式。本展亦試圖呈現藝術家如何在理性思維和科學工具至上的現代生活中，以媒體工具重造魅影幢幢的視覺世界。一如學者逐漸歸納及演繹出，即便人類脫離蒙昧狀態，現代世界並非全面性地除魅，新媒體藝術家使用具除魅化功能的理性工具創作，卻又以虛實交雜的情節和影像創造另一種混成現實，藉以扭轉我們一貫的思維模式，彷若再度為社會生活施下幻術

本文將探討本次參展作品呈現了何種數位時代中所謂的「真實」，並探究在理性社會中，以科技技術創作之數位藝術內涵，如何讓世界重新魅化。「夢境與意識」自古以來，乃是文學及藝術創作中不斷討論的議題，正因為人類對自身心智活動的高度興趣和關注，當科技媒體成為創作工具後，藝術家將如何憑藉科技技術進一步探討自身意識問題，並將不可見的意識透過媒體工具轉譯為具體的感知。也正因媒體工具可挑動我們的一切視覺、聽覺和身體觸覺，透過各種藝術性的敘事語彙，藝術家得以打造一個虛實難辨的「想像時空」，當我們進入作品的敘事脈絡，即是進入藝術家創造出來的時空之中。客製化的「真實」於焉誕生。

世界仍是座幻術花園

法國後印象派畫家亨利‧盧梭（Henri Rousseau）人生中的最後創作是充滿熱帶異國奇想的〈夢境〉（The Dream），畫中似乎是闊葉叢林的某處角落，叢生的蓮花高大而挺拔，顏色各異，簇擁著斜躺在紅色沙發上的裸身女性。樹葉和花莖的縫隙之間，有瞪大雙眼的公獅母獅、有圓潤飽滿的鮮豔果實，再更仔細看，你會猛然看見，草叢中還有一個吹笛子的男人。從未離開過法國，也從未親眼看見叢林景觀的盧梭，僅是經常性地參觀法國自然史博物館和巴黎植物園，就依憑著自己的想像，創造出如此怪誕疏離，也難以形繪的熱帶世界。在一次的訪談中，盧梭告訴記者，每當他進到植物園的玻璃花房，看見這麼多來自異國的奇特熱帶植物，彷彿走進夢境中一般。

「夢」是一種主體經驗，是人在睡眠階段時，所歷經的影像、聲音、思想或知覺。自史前時代以來，就開始有許多關於夢境的詮釋，除了哲學和宗教對於夢境的多所討論之外，精神分析和神經科學等理性研究之領域，也將人類作夢的行為作為研究主題，並設下假說，進行實驗並反覆辯證。在各式對於夢境的科學、非科學辯論的迷霧之中，藝術家憑藉著自身想像，將超現實的奇想表現在創作中，盧梭發表〈夢境〉後十年，以佛洛伊德精神分析學說為背景的文化運動─ 超現實主義濫觴於法國，並在往後的十年間，盛行於歐洲的文學和藝術界。藝術家追求由佛洛伊德所揭示的個人的夢境與幻覺，並企圖探索潛意識世界的真實呈現。此後超現實主義運動向外擴張，影響力更觸及全球視覺藝術、文學、音樂和電影。

從腦神經科學的角度來看，「夢」產生在睡眠狀態中的快速動眼期（REM, Rapid Eye Movement），此時大腦神經元的活躍程度與清醒時相同，並呈現快速的腦電波傳遞活動，澳洲藝術團體PluginHUMAN即以表演裝置作品〈夢境2.2〉（Dream 2.2）探討人類睡眠時的大腦活動。本作品靈感來自童話故事《睡美人》，藝術家以空間投影及樂音聲響將夢境轉譯為觀者得以感知的視覺及聽覺空間，觀者得以在展間中以繪有抽象圖形的透明塑膠片圍出的迷宮中遊走，彷彿置身於他人的夢境之中。而夢境的轉譯方式，即是以腦電波技術偵測體驗者當下的腦波活動，腦神經的電波訊號傳遞將會觸發系統即時運算，進而生成一系列抽象的圖形、色彩及樂音變化。若睡眠時經歷的夢境是基於現實世界的某種超現實投射或疊合，那麼〈夢境2.2〉則設法從對於夢境的詩意想像出發，以科技工具將詩意想像具體化為超乎日常經驗的現實環境。

同樣以腦電波技術作為創作方法的還有臺灣藝術家林沛瑩，其參展作品〈生之曼陀羅〉（Kaleidoscope of the Universes）靈感來自藏傳佛教中的曼陀羅繪製傳統：每逢大型佛事，僧侶便會以彩色沙粒創作曼陀羅沙畫，描繪奇異的佛國世界。曼陀羅（mandala）一詞來自梵文，意指集合禮拜的壇場，亦映射了佛教所見的宇宙真實。藝術家採集不同微生物，製作成培養基畫布，並以腦波偵測裝置連接至以3D印表機改製而成的微生物列印機，當藝術家戴上腦波儀進行冥想儀式時，微生物列印機將會把腦波變化繪製在培養基上，依據不同應變變因，培養基上的微生物隨著時間推移，將形成無法預測的視覺成果。在佛法中，意識本是不斷改變的心理狀態，牽動著有情眾生（sentient being）的每一個行為舉止，也正是每個生物體之所以不同的根本差異。藝術家巧妙運用微生物不同的生長特性，以及經由腦波驅動的繪製行為，透過近似科學實驗的生物藝術創作，讓客觀環境與主觀意識於此交會共生。藝術家提及，「儘管整個過程使用高度的科學投入，結果的不可控制性直接質疑了科學所宣稱的對於事物的精確描述與歸納，其實在充滿生物的宇宙中仍有極高的不可預測性」[1]。這樣的不可預測性，不僅是生物的原始生命力展現，亦對於無法以表象判斷的真實提出詰問。

神話思維與科學思維[2]

法國人類學家李維史陀認為，縱使今日科學知識發展到達西元紀年以來前所未有的高峰，我們仍缺乏對於科學的哲學反思，但是天馬行空的科學思維，卻可以反映真實世界尚未被揭發的層面，同理可證，神話思維亦可反映世界的面貌，李氏認為「為何人們常有以來皆沉浸於神話：有系統的想像力並不是無用的。將神話中顯得荒誕的創造物與事件，放到沒有固定衡量標準的原始思維時，它們就不再完全沒有意義。並且，因為神話所提出來的世界意象，被銘記在『屬於世界』的思想結構當中，因此在日後的某一天，它們能顯得契合於這個世界，並且可以被用來展現其面貌。」[3] 當世界一直朝向客觀世界發展時，我們還是需要主觀意識的思維作為映射世界的真實面貌。

中國藝術家陸揚在作品中即織縫了神話思維和科學思維，她對於科學、藝術和宗教深感興趣，結合三者討論的三頻道錄像作品〈忿怒金剛核〉（Wrathful King Kong Core）即是將神話以科學圖解的頗令人玩味之作。作品中借用了藏傳佛教神祇普巴金剛（Dorje Purpa）的法相（dharma characteristics），普巴金剛具有三頭、六臂和四足，分別顯現文殊菩薩（Manjushri Bodhisattva）、阿彌陀佛（Amitabha Buddha）和普賢菩薩（Samantabhadra Bodhisattva）的忿怒相（wrathful look），以降伏末法時代（Dharma Ending Age）冥頑不靈的芸芸眾生。憤怒此一情緒被藝術家視為抽象宗教思維與客觀實證科學的交會點，當觸發憤怒情緒的訊號進入大腦，一路從丘腦傳遞至杏仁核，便轉化為憤怒的動作表達，也就牽動著怒目金剛的面部肌肉，使之瞪大雙眼。陸揚將神話人格化，用單一的反射系統約化神佛在宗教中的崇高獨特，甚至以X光射線透視神佛的「相」（quality）僅為平板的表象，正是客觀科學的除魅功能。〈忿怒金剛核〉亦有本次尚未展出的AR擴增實境互動版本，藝術家在沒有佛像的佛龕上放了一台iPad，將iPad鏡頭對準本該放置佛像的龕上，體驗者將會在iPad上看見眼前實景所沒有的忿怒金剛相，並與之進行遊戲互動。在上個世紀九零年代提出的，以數位形式生產的虛擬影像，疊加在現實環境之擴增實境概念，直至行動裝置普及的今日，其技術才臻於成熟並廣泛運用。在這件作品透過擴增實境的互動機制中，正可以表淺粗略地將《金剛經》（Diamond Sūtra）中的法句以科技媒體示現：「凡所有相，皆是虛妄，若見諸相非相，則見如來。 」（All things that have characteristics are false and ephemeral. If you see all characteristics to be non-characteristics, then you see the Tathāgata.）

這種虛妄之相，透過今日另一媒體技術─ VR虛擬實境更能讓我們全面性地體驗、覺知。由藝術團隊NAXS Corp.製作的無演員虛擬實境沉浸劇場《Render Ghost》試圖探索虛擬實境技術發展下的美學敘事及感官的可能性，並討論虛擬化、網路化環境中的身體處境。作品體驗者需穿著防塵衣，戴上VR頭戴顯示器，經過一連串儀式性的準備後，體驗者的視域將被切換至顯示器中所播送的虛擬空間，體驗者將隨虛擬空間的場景拾階而上。在虛擬場景中，體驗者腳踏在真實的地面上，卻感覺自己隨台階一步一步升高，身體感真實常在，卻看不見自己的身體和四肢，彷彿是中陰身在虛空河道上的徒步行旅。當意識爬升到有盡蒼芎的至高處，突然一片寂靜虛無，脫下VR顯示器所見，竟是一個煙霧氤氳，各種顏色的強光散射，空中飛舞著白色星芒的異次元空間。此時的「真實空間」進入一種人造而非真實的狀態，如同布希亞所提出的「超真實」概念[4]，虛構的幻象儼然已經取代真實環境，透過真實與虛擬邊界的抹除，體驗者無法自拔地陷入創作者所製作的環境中，並把創作者悉心建構的場景當作是身體實際所處的真實之境。

廖祈羽兩件雙頻道錄像作品〈忘憂公園〉（Sanssouci Park）與〈河〉（River）同樣充滿意識流動的環境再現，是以早期臺灣相館慣以手繪的浪漫美景作為棚拍布景，布景中可見畫師們想像中的歐式建築和街景，但這些景物街道並不真實存在。影像作品中，男女主角在手繪布景前追尋遠方想像和回憶，誠如王聖閎所言，「影像僭越了現實，讀來頗為類近後現代理論中常見的論調，但廖祈羽的錄像並沒有停留在這上頭打轉，而是具體探問著：人們與圖像∕影像之間的曖昧糾纏，究竟是圍繞在何種感性或理性基礎上建構的？」[5]藝術家也在展場中放置了布景和路邊常見的公園椅及路燈，在簡潔冷冽的展場中，日常物件的出現也增添幾許荒誕奇想，不禁讓人回想起盧梭畫中童話敘事般的超現實世界。

參與本展的藝術家，皆透過擬造及再現真實的手段，引領觀者進入其以數位工具創造的時空中，以視覺作為人類意識與身體的延伸，或提供觀者未曾有過的感知經驗，或喚起一段似曾相似的記憶，或顛覆我們早習以為常的日常景象，宛如魅影重生。而在意識延伸後開展的思辯空間中，真實與虛擬不再對立，透過藝術創作之手段消弭其間的二元性，並成為一種新的現實，我們亦得以思索人和其他客體在數位時代中的存在本質。在此以藝術史學家高登‧葛拉漢（Gordon Graham）對於視覺藝術得以復魅的能力作為小結：「自十九世紀中葉以來的視覺藝術史，是一連串快速興替的藝術運動，這些運動都是在尋找能夠捕捉及證明藝術的價值及其自主性的獨特定位的過程中誕生─ 前拉斐爾主義藝術家、印象派藝術家、立體派藝術家等等。但在所有藝術運動中，可見超現實主義者（及其繼承者，美國抽象表現主義藝術家）最具自我意識地嘗試參與阿諾德（Matthew Arnold）對詩性寄予的厚望─ 也就是在一個已被科學去神聖化的世界中復魅。」[6] 新媒體藝術家透過夢境與意識的空間化、聽覺化和視覺化，讓原始的感知以一種幻覺的形式再度出現，正如布希亞所主張的超真實時代，藝術家透過封閉的創作語彙系統，建構自成一路的真實脈絡。

[1] 林沛瑩著，〈2015 國外駐棧創作：林沛瑩《宇宙‧曼陀羅》〉，《臺灣數位藝術》，載於http://www.digiarts.org.tw/DigiArts/HistoryPage/88988724317024/Chi，2018年5月22日。

[2] 克勞德‧李維-史陀著，廖惠瑛譯，《我們都是食人族》，台北：行人。

[3] 李維史陀，頁151。

[4] 葉郁田著，〈尚‧布希亞的超真實觀點：其觀點與當代藝術創作的再現問題─ 真實性的建構〉，現代美術學報，29期，頁127。

[5] 王聖閎著，〈那張壁紙是永遠跨不過的海：廖祈羽的個展「河不停流」〉，《台新銀行藝術文化基金會》，載於http://talks.taishinart.org.tw/juries/wsh/2017093007，2018年5月28日。

[6] 出自The Re-Enchanted World, art versus religioin一書，原文為：The history of visual art since the mid-nineteenth century is the story of a rapid sequence of movements that arose in the struggle to find a distinctive role that would capture and vindicate both the value of art and its autonomy—the Pre- Raphaelites, the Impressionists, the Cubists, and so on. But of all these movements, it is most plausible to see the Surrealists (and to some extent their American successors the Abstract Expressionists) as self-consciously engaged in a sustained attempt to do what Arnold expected poetry to do—namely, to re-enchant a world that had been de-sacralized by science.