Virtual Reality (VR) is a common thread throughout many spheres of academia. In Science Fiction, Cyberpunk visionary William Gibson has two paradigms for his novel, Neuromancer – “simstim,” a special type of VR that allows users to experience sensations not readily available to themselves in the real world (such as eating a virtual chocolate bar), and “the matrix,” which represents an entire alternate reality in which users can exist and accomplish tasks using the large amounts of information available to them in this virtual world they “jack into.” In the 4 articles I read alongside Gibson’s Neuromancer, I see similar threads of this theme.
I’d like to point out some elements of Oliver Grau’s “Into the Belly of the Image” that relate to VR and show that the Virtual is a concept that existed long before computer technology was created. The latter is an interesting piece of art history analysis that tells of how virtual reality is something that humans have been striving for since long before computers became popular For, you see, VR can entail an area of ritual action where people gather to perform some sort of common action in order to celebrate or accomplish something within a spiritual ceremony, or a place where political power can be exercised when politicians, military or governmental leaders decide to exert their influence through a particular type of device that conveys the images that fully engulf the viewer. The connection between virtual reality and art extends through art history into the modern in Grau with the description of Osmose, which is a virtual reality installation where a person can glide through a virtual landscape of “glinting dew, translucent swarms of insects, and the thickets of dark woods.” In a sense, the Osmose installation is like the “cyberspace deck” that Case uses in Neuromancer to maneuver his way through the matrix & cyberspace. Any interface that intimately nestles itself into the senses of a viewer and causes an intense immersion into the art or imagery being used can be considered a virtual reality device (VR), and thus by weakening that viewer’s sense of psychological distance between image and reality, puts the relationship between art and consciousness into question (Grau, p.366).
To continue on this thread of contemplating the nature of virtual reality and its crossover into history, virtual reality goes beyond simply just art and technology. In Rob Shield’s writing “the Return of the Virtual,” we learn that virtual reality’s history extends into the realms of ceremony in religion, art and even politics. In religion, there is the debate between the Catholic Church and the burgeoning Protestant movement of the time of the Reformation over the Virtual nature of the Eucharist. The Catholics persecuted those who questioned the nature of the holy sacrament, but one of Reformation Theologian Martin Luther’s largest qualms in his major document, the “99 Theses” was, in fact, that he felt that the Eucharist was not in fact the transubstantiation of Christ, but just a piece of bread like any other. Luther claimed that the Eucharist was only “virtually real.” Likewise, according to Shields, the Hague in the Netherlands, among other places, has a panoramic piece of art called the Mezdag Panorama, which allows one the sensation of being at a place called the Mezdag, a seaside resort in which the creators attempted to best reality by creating an experience that would immerse the viewer, even bringing real sand to the edges of her feet to complete the illusion. The article also goes into the concept of marriage ceremonies as being “liminoid virtualities” such that couples who go through a marriage ceremony pass through a liminal barrier – a threshold – that is created virtually by society to allow them to pass on to a new type of relationship – that of the married couple. Indeed, virtual reality, according to Shields, can be present in many activities involving changes in nature or society through art, technology or religion, politics and such.
So, why is virtual reality so ubiquitous in our lives, our art, our technology and our ceremonies? The answer to this question can be found in a way in S. Paige Baty’s article “e-mail trouble.” In this article, Paige details how she became an e-mail addict as a professor at Williams, and she equates her e-mail trouble to female trouble, such that she thought of e-mail as being in the “matrix,” a place where she could reproduce in a virtual sense by writing streams of words to her fellow friends and colleagues. You see, her desire to get caught up in the Internet, stems from her inability to give birth as a woman because of her endometriosis that caused her to bleed excessively such that she needed to have menopause triggered early so that she could survive albeit without the ability to conceive. Thus, she continually refers to the Internet as “the matrix” because the definition of the matrix is womb, uterus, or cave, a place of birth! In this sense, Paige is both looking for the things she is missing in her life while at the same time, escaping from reality, which are two very important reasons why people turn to virtual reality in the first place whether it be in the form of art or technology or whatever. This is similar to how Case attempts to escape from reality again and again by turning to drugs and alcohol after he is rendered unable to return to the matrix, and how he ultimately is brought into the “matrix” in its original definition, according to Paige, when he has sex with Molly shortly before Armitage gives him the ability to return to the, well, Internet-like matrix to complete the missions for Armitage of finding Wintermute.
Ultimately, the last article is a counterpoint to the last few articles which show the wonders of VR and how its many forms let us escape and enhance reality. In the article “Attack of the Zombie Computers” by John Markoff, we learn that today in the real world, sinister hackers use spyware, program loopholes and such to commandeer computers in an attempt to create swarms of malicious computers called “botnets” that are capable of committing dozens of Internet crimes at once. According to Rick Wesson of San Francisco-based Support Intelligence, the counter-measures being taken “are losing the war badly,” and that “even our technology vendors understand that we are losing this war.” In a sense, we see that now that the VR world has grown, thanks to technology, to become as sophisticated as our real world, we see that it is now like the Wild West or the 1920s era of gangsters and such in that now the virtual world has become full of crime and is no longer just an independent threshold or art work or e-mail server or any lovely escape into the ether. Thus, VR has become more than just a phenomenon in science fiction, art or religion, but as William Gibson says in Neuromancer, “a consensual hallucination believed by millions daily.”
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