The lifeworld of contemporary humans is increasingly distancing itself from direct material experience, moving instead into the realm of semiotic and symbolic structures. Whereas in previous centuries humans interacted with objects as immediate components of material reality, today their experience is mediated through images, symbols, digital codes, and media flows. Reality gradually ceases to exist as a lived world, transforming into a space of form, image, and representation. However, this shift is not solely the result of conscious human choice; it is also a consequence of the development of technological civilization. Technologies, by transforming the production of objects and modes of interaction, also reshape human sensibilities and structures of perception. As a result, humans find themselves in an environment that is intrinsically coded according to aesthetic principles. The surrounding world is no longer perceived as an external reality but as a self-reproducing symbolic narrative, where “being” is gradually replaced by “appearing”. In other words, humans live not through the presence of the world but through its representation, where reality and representation often intermingle, and the value of objects and relations is measured less by their intrinsic existence than by their imaginative and performative significance. The aim of this article is to analyze how technological and aesthetic transformations reconstruct contemporary human perception of the world and shape new social and cultural practices, in which reality becomes mediated, symbolic, and aesthetically structured.
