Virtuality is perhaps one of the most buoyant and phenomenal topics frothily surfacing to the whirlpool of social knowledge in recent times. Nearing the intellectual equivalent of the Valley Girl modifier “like”, “virtual” has virtually become the buzzword of the past decade, denoting some advanced quality of reality or some new and improved way to experience life. This being said, virtuality is like “really” nothing new. Actually, tracing back through the history books, or rather prehistory books, it appears that, “…[a] tension existing between the material and the virtual has existed for the last 40 millennia”. That’s about as long as any other [modern] human related idea. Although this may seem a rather extreme statement, it is widely acknowledged and supported throughout the academic anthropological and sociological community, (Lommel, Gosden, etc.) that the notion of virtuality is in fact “as old as dirt”. Looking back through out the ages, the virtual and its various phenomena can be found in a variety of cultural practices, on many individual and social levels. However, while as old as virtuality may seem, it never ceases to insight and inspire new interpretations, agencies, and channels for its (pseudo)existence. Looking to the burgeoning plethora of vehicles that technology, namely information technologies, and new media are manifesting today, we see new, amended forms and functions of the virtual; new ways to experience the world afforded by the state of virtuality. Delocalization and disembodiment Virtual reality and telematics open up the opportunity for…( Incomplete). New cybercultures are popping up on every virtual corner of cybersociety. With an ever-increasing role of virtual experience and virtual being in cyberspace, there is also an increasingly resonant impact on the constructs and the composition of social reality within this continuum. From virtual death to telegardens, the virtual is transforming the way we live and exist in “somewhere-nowhere”. Part of the reason virtuality seems to be such an widely used anthropological concept is because of its paradoxical and pluralistic nature. Depending one who you ask in what context, the term ‘virtual’ can allude to potentiality or possibility or it can contrast and oppose the actuality and/or reality. While there is no steadfast absolute, it becomes critical to understand the idea of virtuality on its various phenomenological, ontological, and epistemological terms. For the context of this research I will use virtual in the context of Gilles Deleuze. Clair Colebrook offers a concise summary of the basis for Deleuze’s virtuality: Deleuze, like many writers of the twentieth century, regarded western thought in general as being dominated by the dogmas of common sense and representation (Deleuze 1994). The very concept of thought as representation assumes that there is some objective, present, real and external world that is then re-presented by thought, as though there were a passive picture or copy of the world. There would be an actual world (the real), and then there is a virtual and secondary copy. Both the actual and the virtual are real, and the virtual is not subordinate to the real. On the contrary, the virtual is the univocal plane of past, present, and future; the totality of all that is, was and will be. It is therefore an open totality or whole, never fully given or completed. The virtual can then be actualised in specific forms (Colebrook 2002, p. 1). From this perspective, the virtual is not opposed to the real, but a possibility within the real. The virtual can encompass imagination, dreams, myth, and story. Also the virtual can become a potential state or plane. In this way virtuality can encompass digital media and other coded structures of information or knowledge that exist in abstract form. It is important to emphasis that virtuality is not a representative code in itself, as its manifestation in virtual reality systems or interfaces may preclude. Rather, it is the space-state that allows for the fruition and development of these ideas (codes, symbolisms, languages, structures, etc. ). For the purpose of this research I will focalise around virtuality as it is exhibited or actualised by new media. In particular I will look more towards the affect of virtuality via new media, rather than the specific instances such as the Internet and virtual reality, to define how virtuality implicates contemporary aesthetics. However, it is still important to understand how specific media such as the Internet operates in the transcodification of aesthetics via virtuality.
References:
Colebrook, C. (2002). Understanding Deleuze. Crows Nest, Australia: Allen & Unwin.
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press.
