Art critics as well as historians still have their problems with simulated worlds. While being used to the interchanging relations of mathematics with painting or sculpture for centuries, they still suspect the impudent surfaces generated from algorithms. Established art history tries to usurp the new phenomenon within international art with a trick by claiming that artists working with advanced technical products don’t really create something new, but dress up well known images. Paintings you can virtually dive into, virtual reality – what a ridiculous concept! Michelangelo Buonarroti thought about this in his ceiling fresco of Sistine Chapel at the Vatican half a millennium ago and made it perfectly!
This mainly serves art critics and historians as self-assertion. During the 1990ies they missed the experimental art, which passed them nearly unnoticed. Thus they fell behind. They just had had to cope with the fact that photography was accepted as an artistic medium. And now images were created, which in principle didn’t need any reference to the outer world, that didn’t even need any common material to be present for others. A monitor, a fleeting projection were sufficient. They tried to cope with the future by using old aids like propagating iconic turn or image science as a new master discipline responsible for all what is visible in two, three or four dimensions.
Art working with advanced media always has a discoursive character. It is always also about understanding art and its perception. (Just as every good film will always deal with cinema and will add to its current history.) This is also valid for Miao Xiaochun’s work. Therefore I added this extremely shortened remark on the present status of the new images and their reception as an introduction. THE LAST JUDGEMENT IN CYBERSPACE finds itself in the middle of this discourse.
The artist states already in the title that his artificial world has at least three