VIRTUAL REALITIES

Virtual worlds, spaces, objects, environments, realities, selves and identities, abound in discourses about new media. Indeed, in many of their applications, new media technologies produce virtualities. While the term ‘virtual’ (especially ‘virtual reality’) is readily and frequently used with respect to our experience of new digital media it is a difficult and complex term. In this section we make some initial sense of the term as a characteristic feature of new media.

In terms of new digital media we can identify a number of ways in which the virtual is used. First, throughout the 1990s, the popular icon of ‘virtual reality’ was not an image of such a reality itself but of a person experiencing it and the apparatus that produced it. This is the image of a head-set wearing, crouching and contorted figure perceiving a computergenerated ‘world’ while their body, augmented by helmets carrying stereoscopic LCD screens, a device that monitors the direction of their gaze, and wired gloves or body suits providing tactile and positioning feedback, moves in physical space. Equally powerful have been a series of movies, cinematic representations of virtual reality, from the early 1980s onwards, in which the action and narrative takes place in a simulated, computer generated world (Tron: 1982, Videodrame: 1983, Lawnmower Man: 1992, The Matrix: 1999). The ‘virtual reality’ experienced by the wearer of the apparatus is produced by immersion in an environment constructed with computer graphics and digital video with which the ‘user’ has some degree of interaction. The movies imagine a condition where human subjects inhabit a virtual world which is mistaken for, or has replaced, a ‘real’ and physical one. Second, alongside these immersive and spectacular forms of virtual reality, another influential use of the term refers to the space where participants in forms of online communication feel themselves to be. This is a space famously described as ‘where you are when you’re talking on the telephone’ (Rucker et al. 1993). Or, more carefully, as a space which ‘comes into being when you are on the phone: not exactly where you happen to be sitting, nor where the other person is, but somewhere in between’ (Mirzoeff 1999: 91). As well as these uses, the ‘virtual’ is frequently cited as a feature of postmodern cultures and technologically advanced societies in which so many aspects of everyday experience are technologically simulated. This is an argument about the state of media culture, postmodern identity, art, entertainment, consumer and visual culture; a world in which we visit virtual shops and banks, hold virtual meetings, have virtual sex, and where screenbased 3D worlds are explored or navigated by videogame players, technicians, pilots, surgeons etc.

Increasingly we also find the term being used retrospectively. We have already noted the case of the telephone, but also the experience of watching film and television, reading books and texts, or contemplating photographs and paintings are being retrospectively described as virtual realities (Morse 1998; Heim 1993: 110; Laurel in Coyle 1993: 150; Mirzoeff 1999). These retrospective uses of the term can be understood in two ways: either as a case of the emergence of new phenomena casting older ones in a new light (Chesher 1997: 91) or that, once it is looked for, experience of the ‘virtual’ is found to have a long history (Mirzoeff 1999:Shields 2003). As Shields has pointed out (2003: 46) in the digital era the meaning of ‘virtual’ has changed. Where, in everyday usage, it once meant a state that was ‘almost’ or ‘as good as’ reality, it has now come to mean or be synonymous with ‘simulated’. In this sense, rather than meaning an ‘incomplete form of reality’ it now suggests an alternative to the real and, maybe, ‘better than the real’. However, some older meanings of ‘virtual’ still find echoes in modern usage. One of these is the connection between the virtual and the ‘liminal’ in an anthropological sense, where the liminal is a borderline or threshold between different states such as the carnivals or coming of age rituals held in traditional societies. Such rituals are usually marked by a period in which the normal social order is suspended for the subject who is passing from one status or position to another. The more recent interest in virtual spaces as spaces of identity performance or places where different roles can be played out appears continuous with older liminal zones (Shields 2003). The rise of the digital virtual (the virtual as simulation and as an alternative reality)

For a view which challenges the idea that the Internet is a space, or should be thought of as a space at all, Chesher (1997): 91) the experience of acting remotely via robotics on a simulation can more accurately be described as telepresence. While telepresence is often subsumed as a kind of VR, see Ken Goldberg, ‘Virtual reality in the age of telepresence’, Convergence (1998) for a fuller discussion of the difference led to interest in philosophical accounts of the virtual. Here, particularly in the thought of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, we are urged to see that the virtual is not the opposite of the real but is itself a kind of reality and is properly opposed to what is ‘actually’ real.

Conclusively; this is an important argument as, in a world in which so much is virtual, we are saved from concluding that this is tantamount to living in some kind of un-real and immaterial fantasy world. In networked, technologically intensive societies we increasingly pass between actual and virtual realities; in such societies we deal seamlessly with these differing modes of reality . There is a common quality to the two kinds of virtual reality with which we started above (that produced by technological immersion and computer generated imagery and that imagined space generated by online communications). This is the way that they give rise to puzzling relationships between new media technologies and our experiences and conceptions of space, of embodiment (literally: of having and being conscious of having bodies) and identity.

BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA

BAPRM III - 42686