Because virtual reality technologies offer the most radically manipulable operations on visual experience, they will be central to a digital visual poetics. With these operations come problematizations of subjectivity and agency that literally enact the “postmodern problem.”
VR is the material problem of the postmodern, the machine that came along to test not only our prophesied disappearance into the Great Simulacrum, or the endless play of différance, but also the conditions under which theorists may plausibly claim authority for such prophecy. Landow, Bolter, and others have noted the nihilism in Baudrillard’s insistence that “we” can no longer perceive the differences between surface and depth, the simulated and the real. (Bolter 1999, 20-22) (Landow 1992, 20-22) What is most puzzling in the alarmism of VR opponents the conviction that an average “cybercitizen” will inevitably utilize a mimetic technology mimetically—that is, in further flight from “real,” not virtual, reality, in further flight into something that is, however convincing, still an illusion. For their part, “practitioners”—poets and artists—grow estranged from an abstraction that they may come to see as irrelevant to their material labor or craft-based interaction with machines, and correspondingly they neglect the possibility that we may not only be bodies, in just the sense hinted at so powerfully by virtual reality.
VR is the material problem of the postmodern, the machine that came along to test not only our prophesied disappearance into the Great Simulacrum, or the endless play of différance, but also the conditions under which theorists may plausibly claim authority for such prophecy. Landow, Bolter, and others have noted the nihilism in Baudrillard’s insistence that “we” can no longer perceive the differences between surface and depth, the simulated and the real. (Bolter 1999, 20-22) (Landow 1992, 20-22) What is most puzzling in the alarmism of VR opponents the conviction that an average “cybercitizen” will inevitably utilize a mimetic technology mimetically—that is, in further flight from “real,” not virtual, reality, in further flight into something that is, however convincing, still an illusion. For their part, “practitioners”—poets and artists—grow estranged from an abstraction that they may come to see as irrelevant to their material labor or craft-based interaction with machines, and correspondingly they neglect the possibility that we may not only be bodies, in just the sense hinted at so powerfully by virtual reality.
