ABSTRACT
Although written in the early days of digital simulation, artificial intelligence and design, the essay addresses the fundamental issue, still relevant. Aimed at the hypothesis that ‘corporeal involvement can be substituted by involvement in a virtual reality through skilful imitation of our intellectual abilities’, Vesely first treats the matter through the mathematical imagination (Gauss) and psychosomatics (inverted vision), and then proceeds to set technological or instrumental thinking alongside embodied knowledge, using architecture as his leading example. This leads to the speculation that the simulation of embodied spatiality represents technology striving to understand the conditions of its own possibilities, ‘the ambiguous nature of the technologically constructed illusion of wholeness’.
