The IFIP WG9.5 "Virtuality and Society" International Workshop on
Images of Virtuality: Conceptualizations and Applications in Everyday Life
April 23-24, 2009
Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
images of virtuality: a descriptive metaphor*
We use the metaphor of an Image to characterize the perceptual experience of virtuality. Images of Virtuality come in different, unfamiliar forms and shapes: technological, artistic, or metaphysical. At their first sight, they are experienced as something new, time-space distanciated, or even an awkward simulacra. They are persistent or even sometimes 'selfish'. They challenge our familiar habitualised reality and taken-for-granted practical knowledge of our everyday life.
Virtuality as technology
Almost every technological artifact establishes a new, different, virtual way of acting in the world. Especially the Information Technology and its inherit capacity to transform information flows and representations, can supply our everyday life with new trajectories and velocities.
An implementation of the 'Hello World' program using JAVA
The picture above illustrates one of the simplest program possible in a computer language. Every new student in computing cross this step: to command the machine to 'say' the phrase 'Hello World'. A trivia question: who 'says' hello to whom? The programmer to the machine's world, or to the non-virtual world through the machine? Or is the programmable and ready-to-interact machine that now can say hello to the non-virtual world? Actually, it is a matter of perspective. It is a matter of shifting our experience of that Image of Virtuality, yet from a logical point of view.
virtuality as art
Beyond the functional dimension of every technological artifact, lies the aesthetical dimension. That is, what the very artifact as a narrative reflects to its observers in terms of emotions, imaginations and make-believe fantasies. The technology then becomes a palette of polysemic signs, the very scheme upon which the observer can experience an Image of Virtuality away from the here-and-now.
"Underground Park" by Costas Tsoklis (click image to enlarge)
The picture above was taken from the Metro station of Ethiki Amyna at Athens. It shows the artwork named UNDERGROUND PARK by Costas Tsoklis. It is a synthesis of oil trees and mirrors in the middle layer of the station, just below the Messogion Avenue. (Two more images of this artwork can be found here and here). The stairs at the middle lead to another underground (in reference to the park) level: to the platforms.
virtuality as metaphysical singularity
What are the Images of Virtuality? Are they 'real' (enough)? What is their substance? Where do they reside? In a desynchronised and deterritorialized space or in a non-space at all? And, above all, do we really need to know the answers to similar questions like those above in order to experience an Image of Virtuality? Or do we just tilt at windmills in a lost dimension?
"Don Quixote" by Pablo Picasso
The meaning of the concept of singularity points back to cosmology and the agony for mathematical explanation and representation of the universal laws of the cosmos. It is used here as an oxymoron. The Images of Virtuality do not only lack on descriptive autonomy, but they demand an observer in order to make them 'real', a transcendental, yet a taken-for-granted part of our world. They are meaningful and coherent pieces of human civilization only through acting upon them.
________________________________________________________________ _
* The ideas hereafter reflect the thoughts of the workshop's organizers and they are not necessarily part of the collective IFIP 9.5WG's views on virtuality and society. They are briefly presented here in order to stimulate a fruitful discussion on the conceptualization of the term 'Virtuality' but also to contextualize - if not legitimize- the workshop's title.