The setting for my essay is the digital era starting in the second half of the 20th century, when the industrial–organic society transfers into the information/cultural system as an effect of the emergence of new science and technology as well as inherent shifts in what cognitive and social relations are concerned. The aesthetic and philosophical reaction is one where perception becomes complexly mediated (and re-mediated), while the systems of knowledge and the notion of reality are relocated into the matrix of virtuality or its discursive match, hyperreality. My paper will try to discuss how reality actuates within the informational era, what its means and message might consist in and how digitization restructures the artistic poesis.
Do excuse my pathetism, but so was the switch from mechanic phone dialling to digital phone-dialling. a switch of media and of biometics which makes all the difference both in (tele)communications and perception.
Virtual Theatre will try to recreate the images that have either been impossible to render by material, non-numerical media, or those which, paradoxically, have never existed.
Imagine the artificial environment like a virtual studio, a hollodeck (for those nice fans of Star Treck where we get holograms and) in which we re-learn to place ourselves, feel, develop locomotion, and re-learn all perceptions, all over again. Virtual theatre is the next stage of evolution.
One example of enhanced sensorial exparience could be the virtual scene of
"The Multisensory Art Gallery which offers patrons the opportunity to process an art gallery experience through multiple senses, and provides inclusive learning opportunities for persons of all ages, with or without disabilities. Gallery goers encounter works of art adapted as 3-D tactiles or as 'living portraits', the latter using costumed actors posed within human-scale frames surrounding replicated scenic backgrounds. Actors may interact with viewers, expressing the kinetic energy and inner dynamism of these art works. Music, sound, scent and taste sensations may be integrated into the renderings. The gallery visit is audio described.
The Multisensory Art Gallery was inaugurated in State College, Pennsylvania, by Penn State University's Arts and Health Outreach Initiative (AHOI) in collaboration with the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts, the SightLoss Support Group of Central Pennsylvania and 'Feel the Art' project tactiles created by Miami-Dade County Public School students."
It is one stage of the Virtual Theatre re-treatment of reality and I salute it.
The danger and likelihood of its becoming “real”:
As Slavoj Zizek observes, comparing audio-visual (to enjoy) to immersive (to be):
In the case of interpassivity, I am passive through the other--that is, I accede to the other the passive aspect (of enjoying), while I can remain actively engaged (I can continue to work in the evening while the VCR passively enjoys for me...).... [T]he so-called threat of the new media lies in the fact that they deprive us of our passivity, of our authentic passive experience, and thus prepare us for... mindless frenetic activity". (Zizek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997. pp 115, 122, original emphasis).
Shortly, Zizek presents an ominous outlook of a massive externalization of an already “formatted” subjectivity, a shift from an internally virtualized subjectivity to an externally virtualized one that is effectively deprived of self-hood or agency, being the mere host of the symbolic order. What do we lose then on the way? The subjectivity, maybe, if Zizek’s prediction is inescapable and true, that we can read virtual reality back onto our own social reality, and see that it, too, is a Symbolic Order that shares this same virtual logic, but a Symbolic Order whose virtuality has been heretofore forgotten. The same oblivion (concerning its fictional status) may affect the “meta-reality” of virtual era and then the spectacles will not be simulacrums anymore.
This may be the bliss and the curse of virtuality, and it has to be regarded lucidly: it is a measure of the maturity of human mind. Is it wise enough for its toys?
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