SemioNerd

Underwater

Scrolling a meme website I stumbled upon this wonderful picture by Louis Boutan, the first underwater photographer:

My first though, went to the film "Tale of tales" (Mattero Garrone, 2015) in which John C. Reilly with a similar suit had to fight against a water dragon...

 The underwater fight, although not really epic, was rather enjoyable, mainly thanks to its aesthetics.
Boutan's picture, however, puts together many different aesthetics and ends up looking ancient, mysterious and somehow magic all at a time. The historic value of his photograph and its unusual subject both pale in comparison to its astonishing and marvellous appearance, capable of evoking unattainable sensations in an infinite semiosis whose interpretant remains hidden and unclear.

If, on the one hand, today video games have almost attained a pure photorealism, on the other hand it becomes more and more evident that the future of the media will be aesthetic regimes that will differ more and more from reality and exploit the true potentialities of non-photorealistic aesthetic regimes and of the technologies they employ.

If wonderfully looking games like Future unfolding and Cuphead are already about to happen, I wonder what we'll see when we will be finally able to integrate neural system's Deep Dreams into complex, eye-candy (and somewhat creepy) dreamlike games.