Virtual Reality – Tautological Oxymoron

Abstract

227-236 This essay continues my theoretical examination of the implications of digital systems for the structure and practice of cinema. My previous work in this field (see my anthology of collected essays in ‘Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age’ BFI Publications 2001, ISBN 0-85170-873-0) has mainly attempted to define some fundamental characteristics of the computer and digital technologies, testing a media based, modernist approach to its limits. This chapter takes this examination into a new field, the specific issues posed by simulatory virtual reality. It examines philosophical and aesthetic questions linking representational conventions like perspective, the extension of sensory factors, movement, sound and tactility when incorporated into the new representational technologies. It further examines the interactive response of the user/viewer as an additional dimension and effect in the sensory realm. It discusses various implications of these sensorially expanded methods of simulation for our understanding of ‘the real’ and its distinction from illusion. It proposes a new basis of definition of reality testing through the concept of an ‘arena of irreversible consequence’ replacing the notion of testing ‘reality’ through matters of sensory presence. The research for this essay has since formed part of the basis of a Key-note address ‘Colour Abstraction – Painting – Film – Video – Digital Media’ in a conference on Synaesthesia entitled’ Empfindungsraume – Zur synasthetischen Wahrnehmung’ at the Akademie der Kunste, Berlin, 13 - 15 April 2007. see: [http://www.adk.de/raum/index.php?id=programm_april].