Conclusion

Summing up the chapters, it is suggested to assert without reservation that the sensory presentation is crucial for the interaction of the audience. Simulation iconicity, as an interface, and as a zone of communication, fundamentally designs the user's interventions in the midst of itself and thus, moreover, also what is fed back into the underlying mathematical model. What arrives there is processed again and wrapped in a sensuous dress. The iconicity (broadly understood) thus has a regulating effect in both directions – towards the audience and towards the program – without exhausting itself in this mediating role. Simultaneously, however, the iconicity that comes with interactive simulations is always installed in the position of privilege.

Iconicity and Dynamic

Within real-time simulations, the calculated simulation dynamic is only one movement-generating instance. There exist further and other movement-generating elements of a sensorial nature. Typically, the simulation program encompasses many diverse processes – internal and external ones – taking place simultaneously. Several artificial life applications are analysed with respect to the multi-layered dynamics and with a special focus on how the sensorial levels contribute motions not present in the simulation dynamics itself. Computer simulations also have the potential for deception (some applications aim at exploiting the suspense of disbelief), but surprisingly it is located in their domain, in the process and reaction or consequence design. The optical level follows other logics. Being aware of this fact with all its consequences is crucial for a critical and responsible attitude towards computer simulations.

Approaches to a Concept of Simulation

It can be shown that the different conceptions of ‘simulation’ (the one of culture critique on the one hand and the denomination of technical applications on the other) that seem to be incompatible with each other can be reconciled on a single spectrum. Its basis in models, its replacement of reality, its lack of reference and of precession of the referent are some pejorative characteristics often emphasized in media philosophy with regard to simulations, for which the sciences applying computer simulations have no use for. It helps crossing over the views that first seem opposite to each other, but that turn out to be compatible if its root in reality is recognized and thus the representational logic is accepted at least according to the intention. The chapter combines ideas of the 'simulacrum' retrieved in the natural sciences with traces of cybernetic thinking in media studies. The whole study builds on a definition of computer simulation in the technical sense as the involvement with and the act of execution f a dynamic mathematic or procedural model that projects, depicts, or recreates a system or process.

Iconicity and Interactivity

Frank Popper roughly discriminates between two kinds of computer-based works: The ones built on data bases administer a collection of digitized material, and the ones of interest here that provide interactive real-time-based image worlds that are generated instantaneously. Whereas in the first versions the kind of transition is rarely linked to what is shown in the iconic scenery, the second image worlds undergo transformations, which can be afforded by an instantaneous generation of the sensuous impulse. The works based on permanent calculation processes are characterized by first making the transitory flow available to the interaction and second explicitly depicting the actions of the users instead of occluding them with pictorial metaphors. The granularity of the means of depiction facilitates a motive-oriented flexibility within these worlds. These are articulated elements that are related to the signified because the latter represent something mutable.

Characteristics of the Iconicity of Simulations

Computer simulations are centered around events and come to the fore where prefabricated paths are avoided. However, these calculated constructs have nothing to do with phantasies of limitless possibilities. In order to frame the repertoire of available actions in a real time scenery, 'purpose filters' are built in. If a situation can be described as allowing only a limited set of events, then situationality is a major feature of simulations. Some further apparent characteristics are manifold variability, the provision of co-presence and simultaneity of the occurrences, a certain 'flatness' of events or uniformity of the whole constellation, as well as its interruption with montage-like cuts on the surface and substrate. These characteristics contribute to a better understanding of which kind of design set is at stake with simulations, where their borders and their strengths lie. What design strategy is to be adopted in order to provide an iconicity capable of contributing and constituting an instantaneity and flexibility?

The Perspectivation of Simulations

Computer simulations are introduced as processes shaped according to the ‘systems perspective’. This expression is a parallel to central perspective. While the latter is a specific medium to form space, the former organizes dynamics. There exist various attempts to reformulate a kind of perspectivation in the domain of new media. They differ from the proposed as they are not elaborated with respect to the rules of its construction logic. In order to assimilate the new, for the ‘systems perspective’, the eye point is compared with parameters or variables, the vanishing point with the aspect of the real time, and the cut through the visual pyramid with the phase space. A first critique of the simulation dynamic is conveyed with the argumentative help of Jean Baudrillard. It touches the generalization through laws, the discretization of dynamic, and the specific mode of communication.

Introduction

Interactive, dynamic computer simulations hold a unique position between test environment and explicit design. They serve a broad variety of applications, from scientific knowledge production to education, training, therapy, and recreation. Although the process by which simulations are produced is also taken into view, the foreground is devoted not to mathematical and technical components as explored in computer science or computational visualistics, but rather to the sensory aspects of the realization. The focus is on the aspects of simulations that can be experienced by the senses: in the optic, acoustic, haptic, or, more broadly, sensory-motor impressions. For the most part iconicity plays a dominant role in these interactive configurations that require a complex, transformable '(re)acting' object beyond mere navigability.

Modeling and Iconization

Informed with how modelling practices take place, positions in model theory have revised too simplistic syntactic or semantic views. Analogously, it is now necessary to recognize that also the relationship between the data from the computational models and their sensualization is non-trivial either. ‘Visualization’ is often praised, but naturalized and thus overlooked in its structuring or creative potential. The present approach reveals the complex situation in ‘visualized’ simulations; there is no such thing as a simple equivalent between the calculated data and its depiction. Especially for the scenic rendering of the process it is necessary to develop relationships between the dynamics and the form in the first instance. The reason why the form is needed lies in the simple fact that dynamics have to be embodied in order to be perceivable. On a very basic level we can say that time and space enter into negotiations.