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Since the Greeks to the 18th century A.C, the relationship of men to the world around him was understood as a kind of integrated block that united all the senses and related one to the other, and even all of them to larger models (mainly mathematical) of nature and the Universe. Marshall McLuhan, for example, referred to the (oral) pre-literate world of the Medium Age as "magical" and "synesthetical". Through all radical changes carried through and after Renaissance, this sensory integrated bias survives. In the 19th century, however, the triumph of classical science, symbolised in the industrial revolution, gave birth to modern physiology and the consolidation of a thought paradigm that glorified notions of power and control through fragmentation of reality. This lead to the fragmentation of man both in sciences and philosophy that developed a notion of separation and specialisation of the senses, which evolved and have been dominant until the end of the 50s decade of the 20th century.

The specialisation of the senses opened room for the so-called modernism in arts, which looked for specificity in each art field, this being very clear, for example, in both visual arts and music - the former searching for the autonomy of the image in relation to the external world and the latter searching for the autonomy of the sonic experience.

By the 60s decade, this model both expanded largely the semiotic universe of each field, but had already showed its impossibility. So a general quest for hybridisation, contamination and multi-sensorial artistic production has started to take place, along with a new technological revolution - the computer. Digital processing has, since ever, been understood as a means to duplicate, simulate - we can even say: clone - reality, as a means to preview, to understand and to control it. Also, sometimes, to expand it.

It´s interesting to notice, however, how this digital models - starting with visual 3D digital models - work as a technological support that reiterates models of sensorial perception of the world which re-unite explicitly the once separated senses - for example, tactile and vision placed as complementary one to the other in the understanding of the space and objects by military apparatus. This is also clear in the strong trends in digital arts to develop synestethical and imersive works that both envelop us in virtual environments and search for correspondences and complementarities between the senses, as much as for "magical" and "spiritual" experiences of the real world.

It´s also valuable to verify that those perceptual experiments offer impressive coherence with descriptions of synesthetic experience offered by phisiologists of 18th and 19th centuries and contemporary neurologists.

It´s possible, then, to talk about a digital perception, a synesthetical model of understanding reality which employs notions of perception of reality abandonned in the 18th century, but now under a technological support.

Biography

Sergio Roclaw Basbaum was born in São Paulo, Brazil, 1964. He teaches video, cinema and visual arts in PUC- São Paulo, and is writing his PhD thesis, about synesthesia and digital arts. He´s released a book about Synesthesia, Art and Technology (2002) and is also a composer and professional musician.