イメージ・プロセッサとしての身体――『デイヴィナ・コメディア』（1991）――

抄録

The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the various functions of our body as a kind of image processor. To this end, I attempt to analyze Divina Commedia: Praxis for Death, held in Kobe Xebec Hall in 1991, and compare it with virtual reality in light of Henri Bergson’s philosophy. While being inspired by virtual reality, which became widely known in Japan in 1991, Divina Commedia searches for another reality as if to keep step with Near Death Experience Research.

Mark B.N. Hansen, for example, proposes to call the entire process by which information is made perceivable the "digital image". Digital images are materially dynamic micro movements and as such become images through the body. From this perspective, we can argue that in this digital era, we are image processors before we are spectators or observers. However, the act of our perception or memory does not concern only the generation of digital images, nor does it always stay constant. It changes dramatically by the condition of our body. Divina Commedia artificially simulates a particular kind of body condition in the participant, and such a condition directly affects the generation of recollection-images. That is to say, this experimental work is an image generation system, including floating bodies as image processors, and seeks to access the “virtual” (in Bergson’s terminology) past.