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April 27, 2010
Virtual reality usually refers to a system of computer simulations of three dimensional space within cyberspace or the space of software. Virtual realities are computer generated worlds that simulate key elements the dominate representation of real space such as dimensionality and relations of resemblance.
It is often argued that the ‘fabricated visual “spaces” of computer imagery are radically different from the mimetic capacities of film, photography and television’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We are, it is argued, ‘in the midst of a transformation in the nature of visuality probably more profound than the break that separates medieval imagery from the Renaissance perspective’.
This emergence of a computer-mediated virtual world displaces the realist/Enlightenment quest to represent reality accurately. It is the ability of digital virtual reality to recreate the appearance and sensations of first order reality that engineers its break from Enlightenment traditions of representation. It refers to a wide variety of applications commonly associated with immersive, highly visual, 3D environments: the development of CAD software, graphics hardware acceleration, head mounted displays, database gloves and miniaturization have helped popularize the notion.
In Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Real and Virtual Space, Liz Grosz argues that virtual reality ... is a constant phenomenon in art history when she writes that
The virtual reality of the computer is fundamentally no different from the virtual reality of writing, reading, drawing or even thinking: the virtual is the space of emergence of the new, the unthought, the unrealized, which at every moment loads the presence of the present with supplementarity, redoubling a world through parallel universes. (p.78)
This denies the sense if rupture that we experience a computer-mediated virtual world; a rupture with the past--the realist tradition of pictorial representation that started with the central perspective of the Renaissance.
Recent developments in communication technologies have thoroughly disturbed our assumptions about what is real and what is artificial, our understandings of the body and identity, of experience and presence, of space and time. Under the aegis of cyberspace and virtual reality, the age-old quest to distinguish between reality and its image, between the real and its representation, in fact seems curiously outmoded. What haunts contemporary concerns instead is the troubling question regarding the extent to which reality itself has become a technological simulation, a spectacle solely fabricated to entertain our senses and particularly our eyes.
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