HYPERREALISTIC BODY IN THE MODERN CULTURE

Abstract

The article analyzes the phenomenon of hyperrealistic body in the context of the phenomenological discourse of “corporeality”. In the non-classical aesthetics of the twentieth century, the interest in the body, considered as a philosophical category, was formed under the influence of phenomenologists of the second wave, and so the “corporeality” is remaining an actual problem of the postmodern discourse. Modern Western and Russian researchers strive for a synergistic synthesis of philosophy, neurophysiology and psychology, while analyzing the formation of subjectivity in the context of post-humanism trends growing. Especially important things are the understanding of the body category in the context of virtual reality’s influence on the modern man, the correlation of the virtual body and the real one, from which, in the opinion of the author, a new phenomenon of “hyperrealistic body” appears. On the one hand, virtuality is an impulse to the hypertrophied sensuality implemented by contemporary artists; on the other hand, it generates a “new vision” changed under the influence of virtual experience. Thus, the article considers the concept of “hyperrealistic body” in two aspects: as a phenomenon of consciousness, and as a genre of contemporary art — hyperrealistic sculpture. Due to the development of technology and the trends of post-humanism, the “hyperrealistic body” becomes a schizophrenic desire of hypersensitivity, a limit of the hypertrophied visibility of reality, a simulacrum and illusion of the integrity of the body without organs, a degradation of the perceiving subject’s imagination. From the perspective of futuristic cultural studies, it is a significant phenomenon, another key step in the aesthetic activity of humanity to create their own artificial reality; the next step of this will obviously be the animation of artificial body, which brings us back to the problems of post-humanism. The author concludes that the illusion produced by a robot simulating a natural body endowed with some artificial “I” can be quite naturally built into the perception of modern man.