Thomas Hänsli essay: PARRHASIUS'S CURTAIN:VISUAL SIMULATION'S MIMESIS AND MEDIALITY

This essay deals with the concept of mimesis from its origins to explain its end or what Hänsli calls the autonomy of visual representation.

Mimesis, the fundamental relationship between art and reality, according to Aristotle, imitating of nature as the main goal of art which is clearly expressed by Pliny the Elder tale about Zeuxis of Heracle and Parrhasius of Ephesus (the grapes that birds deceive with reality and the curtain that Zeuxis deceive with reality)

Imitatio Naturae as a category in the modern understanding of art – the art of the Renaissance devoted itself to depicting reality as faithful as possible, the transformation of Italian painting from meddle age to Modern era.The rationalization of mimesis; Alberti's Finestra aperta, a window open in the space, as Alberti descrives perspective effect.

Baroque art, which made use of painting's illusionist potential and effects of deceptive illusioriness on the beholder, would also ground it theoretically teaching perspective and geometry as a way of deceiving the beholder. As the main example Andrea Pozzo's Apotheosis of Saint Ignatius(1688-94)

In recent years, philological research has assigned a further semantic field to the original concept of mimesis that goes far beyond the understanding of mimesis as pure imitation in the sense of a copy that doubles reality(Thomas Metscher Mimesis Enciclopedia of Philosophy Hamburg 1999).

"This render the concept operable once again within today's aesthetic art-theoretical discurses. It proves productive – largely against the backdrop of an increasing mediatization of architecture and image of architecture – as the conceptual definition of architecture's visual simulation.

The goal of visual simulation, from an artistic perspective, is no longer simply the imitative reproduction of architecture in the sense of a faithful copy of reality. Instead, the artist faced with a flood of medial representations of architecture in film, photography and television, is forced to create a picture of a picture of reality, as it is depicted by the media.

This transformation can be recognized in the example of contemporary architectural photography, as artist Thomas Struth states, contemporary architectural photography has meanwhile "... established itself more between art and other realities that classical disciplines a picture of a picture of reality"(Ludger Derenthal "Skeptische Architekturphotographie" in: Ansicht, einsicht, aussicht 2000 Düsseldolf).

Photography as a representational medium has attained an autonomy distinct from the depicted reality of the represented architecture. AS photographer Thomas Ruff has so aptly surmised, the artist no longer creates pictures of reality, but now only "a picture of a picture of reality" Thomas Hänsli, SIMULATION – PRESENTATION TECHNIQUE AND COGNITIVE METHOD by Andre Gleiniger and Georg Vrachliotis