Escultura digital: para uma nova declinação da matéria e do tacto

Virtual sculpture, digital sculpture, or cybers culpture emerge in the actuality of digital art as the new and promising impact of technology on contemporary sculpture. Considering that the traditional value of sculpture is deduced on the basis of space, the factor of presence and its imminent physicality, the digital has presented the latter in a mould that is, in final analysis, merely numerical, mathematical, and luminous. This digital articulation introduces sculpture into immateriality, evanescence, and a permanently temporal actualisation. Taking into account the advantages that the new medium brings in terms of freedom for artistic creation (absence of gravity, of resistance to solids, of dependence on materials, etc.), we ought to reflect on its new articulations with substance, its interactive and aesthetic potentialities, as well as attentively analyse that which may be its greatest advantage: the aestheticisation of the virtual world. We ought to increasingly assume the role of recognising the importance of the presence of aesthetics (and its diffe rent arts) in the programming of the virtual world. Alongside the success of cybergalleries of digital structure, of the biennials of virtual sculpture (Intersculpt, etc.), and of new technologies of 3D modellation which have affirmed themselves in the enveloping framework of cyberaesthetics, there is the necessity of integrating the user’s body in this new context and, namely, his senses through a denominated «artificial tactility». The latter has been promised through touch and manual modellation, the sense of weight, sound, amongst others, conferring the sculpture with an extra visual dimension that allows for liberation from its modernist condition.