WHAT LEFT IS SHAPE 

        Faced with the articulation of such a vast self-embedded immersive concept I  have to start somewhere. Let us start with the word "magnanimous." The word calls to mind an ever increasing magnitude and the thought of animation or rays of light. Magnification, and animus; life, magnified life. Well, that is sort of the meaning. What strikes me about this word is the Noah Webster Dictionary of American Language's definition of it.  

MAGNANIMITY, n. [L. magnanimitas; magnus, great, and animus, mind.]  that elevation or dignity of soul, which............prompts him to sacrifice personal ease, interest and safety for the accomplishment of useful and noble objects.[2]> 

Echo: for "the accomplishment of useful and noble objects." What are Noble Objects? Why do we love and create them as well as creating the tools to make them? Do buildings count as "noble objects"? Is a video a noble object? 

For humans objects are far more than objects. Objects are symbols. Objects are like the suffixs of a language. The english language often has trouble grappling with "things" the "stuff" of the world, "matter" "material" "reality" and even "life" without immediately falling back on terms that assess this "stuff" as "things".   For example, we have three pronouns for gender. He, she and IT.  It seems that anything not defined, outside of a binary or unknown, is reverted to being defined by an object word. This is very evident in astronomy, Unidentified Flying Object, and other acronyms which end in "Object."  The word object concretizing and unifying into a set whatever field of unknown-ness.  

They are even spiritual entities. As made very clear by Brenna Murphy's work. She calls her 3D creations "entities." We create them, whether in Design, Art, or even Architecture because they take on a life, they are a magnification of life. And yet they are lifeless? How can a human give an object such a life? Are humans that psychotic? Are we projecting some element of ourselves?

In a way yes, however the situation makes sense. In the process of objectifying our own bodies we find ourselves at a confusing break. Where does the line between life and object, is my body something I own? Do I have a body or am i my body? Where is my identity within, on the surface of or hovering around this body? This colonized symbol? Is the soul located in the neck, or spinal chord; where the nerve ending's between mind and body meat? (meet) 

 (below from wikipedia) 

"C. S. Lewis, in his book The Abolition of Man, refers to the chest of man as the seat of magnanimity, or sentiment, with this magnanimity working as the liaison between visceral and cerebral man.[6] Lewis asserts that in his time, the denial of the emotions that are found in the eternal, the sublime, that which is humbling as an objective reality, had led to "men without chests"."

In the web and intricacies of these kinds of questions it is evident that by experiencing "the life of an object" which is to say, experiencing an object as a an "entity" or "symbol" the projection of aesthetic or meaning onto an object we are enacting the need to understand ourselves as both material and mind. 

Although Object-relations psychologists like Melanie Klein have other theories, the tipping point from my perspective is this obsession among contemporary artists with 3Dimensional simulated space and the spiritual as well as an ever increasing use of model simulations in many fields of the sciences.

 3D virtual space also offers a us a new object-relationship dynamics. By creating a virtual object which is both an "object" and an ethereal "entity" we are doing something which is possible a deep reaction to the process of "objectification" which has occurred over time via capitalism. What a virtual object offers to it creators and viewers is an object which is re-endowed with spirituality or a kind of majestic other-worldliness. When we return this kind of spirituality we are giving these objects subjectivity in  a way. We are re-subjectifying things.  Typically in 3D software, you are also not only engaging with an object but also with it's environment; you set up a "scene", with lighting and set up a texture and a topology of the object determining how much this object takes in its environment or not. You create the visual "feeling" of an imagined "touch. 

Many people have questioned virtual reality and its potentially terrible impact on culture at large, it's contribution to extreme disembodiment. But I don't think it has to be this way. Although I only have small ideas about the kinds of set ups that would change this.

Somehow this disembodiment is, to me, an important phase in our transforming of how we think of space and being. Perhaps we need this dis-embodiment to be able to reconstruct what "space" means to our bodies. We must re-iterate over and over that, playing around as a different body in virtual reality or online in cyber space does in no way eliminate the identity-politics of being a body in the real world. But by increasing this distance between identity and body there is a potential to offer a third space in which we are manifesting ourselves still as spacial bodies, still as subjects within our bodies, but through the mind as a vessel not the other way around. This switch is very very important.