Aesthetics of Play and Empathy

"What is cyberspace? Like most important questions, the answer depends very much on whom you ask. Cyberspace seems to be highly mutable; it wears different guises for divergent questioners, depending very much on what type of glasses they are wearing. And the computer certainly qualifies as a strange kind of mirror -- the more deeply they scry its virtual depths, the more enthralled many theorists become by its digitized mutual gaze. So vast is the quantity of information available on the Internet that attempts to master the big picture cannot help but become highly self-selecting. Yet most can agree that one of the standout characteristics of the new digital paradigm which fascinates theorists and practitioners alike is its apparent revolutionary character, its fundamental newness..."

"The aesthetics which I propose can aid us to see something fresh are an 'aesthetics of play and empathy.' These terms have longstanding associations in a psychoanalytic context, as well as in other cultural contexts including art history, Buddhist studies, feminism and the post-colonial, among others." From Building a Bridge to the Aesthetic Experience: Artistic Virtual Environments and Other Interactive Digital Art by Tobey Crockett, Intelligent Agent, Vol 5 No 1.