CRDM 701

Week 9 - Nick

Virtual reality...the (next to) final frontier...these are the--

Wait.  That's the second Start Trek reference I've made, and I haven't even watched the show in years.  I should stop now.  But seriously, this concept that Hillis mentioned really stuck with me.  I have thought much in the past about how our conceptions of the world must be completely different from generations before when there was still territory to explore, some place that humanity has not seen (or humanity as one knows it).  The depths of the ocean still seem to offer some mystery, but that's about it considering outter space (that seems to be a loaded term after this week's readings...hmm) is still well beyond our reach.  I had not considered VR to be a frontier proper, and yet it really is.  We pour more energy into relentlessly improving computer technology than we do anything else including the space program, and the spaces that we create inside our screens have come to define us. 

However, is this newest frontier a simalcra as Baudrillard concieves of it?  Something that struck me about Baudrillard is that he really made a case for the simalcra becoming the real (if I understand him correctly) by producing all of the same side effects of the real and having nothing behind it.  To my mind, if that is the case is it even still a simalcra?  If there is nothing behind a simalcra and it produces the same effects as what it 'imitates' (if indeed it imitates anything), then it is the 'real'.  When does what is 'virtual' reality become reality?  I stare at the screen and realize that it stares back at me.  There is nothing behind it.  This is my world.  Or is it?  Is my virtual experience better than the real, or does it completely supplant it?  Is a virtual tourist any less of a tourist?

Bolter and Grusin consider that the idea that the purpose of the medium of VR is to disappear.  They actually go beyond VR and into certain types of painting as well.  To me, this is an interesting concept.  All technology seems to fade into the background at some point and it all shapes our reality.  Yet we will have a special relationship with VR should it become mainstream as it shapes our reality by radically shifting it.  Right now, we know what is behind VR but will we always?  I think of such dystopic movies as the Matrix.  There was something behind the simulcrum there, but most did not know it.  What would it mean if VR became, for all intents and purposes, just 'R'?  It is the old brain in the vat question, I suppose.

Posted at 03:52PM Oct 24, 2007 by nmtemple in General  |  Comments[4]