Conceiving Virtuality: From Art To Technology

In M. Warnke (Hrsg.), Kulturinformatik. (S. 379-388). Lüneburg: Universität Lüneburg, 2008

I hope this piece of writing would work for some people who are interested in witnessing the boundlessness of the world regardless they are studying science, art or philosophy and so on. Since the concept virtuality which is a main word through this dissertation is not a definition or explanation of a specific phenomenon but rather it is an attitude or flexible mind to approach many other concepts in the world. By sharing this collaborated idea from the different ages and places, I hope this tiny effort for collaborating the ideas would connect some relevant ideas beyond timespace because I also got influenced by the other people who have done this effort in various eras.

Human Choice and Computers, 1998

Global communication technologies need to go beyond intersubjective symbolic exchange toward supporting the engagement of people in their cultural context. Hence, what is needed is an understandingfor the way in which the efficacy of cultural contexts manifests itself. Mass media have been successful in including people in a cycle of cultural production and consumption, but this process is accompanied by increased standardisation. The interindividual forms of communication, on the other hand, lend themselves to customisation but are too text-based to leverage the cultural context for purposes of creative collaboration. Virtual reality, we claim, by propagating a form of interaction based on immersion, could become the means of addressing and operating with cultural contexts. But then it needs to comprehend their ontological status in a new way. We place the efficacy of the cultural in the domain of the virtual. Our short paper gradually develops and refines a notion of virtuality that will stand up to the demands of grounding a development in that direction. In the process we draw on philosophy, cultural and media studies, and psychoanalysis. L. B. Rasmussen et al. (eds.

andrew.cmu.edu

Reality as one of the most intrinsic matters of philosophy has been discussing from the Plato's Ideal world to the virtual environments of the cyber age. In a more speculative point of view, reality, had begun to extend within the invention of the alphabet. Alphabet and so the writing is a kind of extension of reality through the signs and metaphors. What forces the Lascaux's inhabitants to draw the walls of Lascaux shows an analogy within the people of the computer age who participate in computerbased communities. Whether it is a primitive drawing or hyper text of the digital age , the utmost relation between the human and his work should have similar relationship within the 'reality' of their time. But in a time when the reality is experiencing a division (or separation) at first within the language, it is difficult to cover the reality matter: The reality itself and the virtual reality as its extension. Should it be accepted easily as an extension or anything else? How can we approach to the reality which is not real but virtual? Reality that extends, transforms, evolutes is recalling the binary of the term non-real, fake or other synonyms. Virtual reality , as if stated within the traditional terminological approach, " is an event or entity that is real in effect but not in fact" 1 Human, as a part of the event or entity called virtual, experiences a paradoxical situation within the body he owns, and the time he realizes. The statement that every 'body' is a space and the spacing of the event makes the space matter a two fold important matter in the context of the reality which is virtual. From another point of view, Reality which is virtual is, according the forerunner of philosophical account , just a representation of the real world. Such an approach gives the chance to read the works 1 The definition of virtual reality taken from the Webster Dictionary.

UMI Dissertations A Bell & Howell Information & Learning, 2000

Virtual reality (VR) is examined in principle as an interface concept and in practice as computational communications media. A Delphi forecasting method is used to support a theoretical core of natural and critical philosophy. The virtual world is seen to be ideal for supporting an understanding of how we construct objects of consciousness. We actively construct these objects. Virtuality supports awareness of the active nature of perception and awareness that all experience is constructed. Virtuality suggests fluid boundaries and dissolution of difference, with a synchronous intermingling of inner self with outer world. Traditional categories are too limiting. Virtuality suggests a qualitative change in the environment of thought. A qualitative change in thought suggests a qualitative change in the nature of consciousness. Beneath a change of age lies a change of thought. Virtuality supports reflection upon intentionality and the role these new media play in supporting cognitive appreciation, or 'mindfulness,' of the connections between action and experience. Freedom and choice are seen to be foundational, with attendant accountability and responsibility attached. Seen in this light, everything is at stake. Virtuality is the intentional, technologically mediated effort to amplify, to extend, and to manifest intentionality by extending experience. Virtual objects are acts of volition. They are minded information. The teleology of virtual reality media is to point to the inscription of media as intention. The thrust towards experiential, tangible manipulation of virtuality aims to extend our understanding of the role of intentionality in the creation and apprehension of the subtleties of reality. Virtuality inscribes a novel re-presentation of the theoretical concepts of the natural philosophy of the early twentieth century. These created a profound paradigm shift in the intellectual and philosophical apprehensions of reality and consciousness. VR media embed this re-presentation into the collective mind. These principles condition basic assumptions of this age and take on global cultural significance. Virtuality provides dynamic indication and sensate feeling of the demise of a mechanistic, deterministic, and linear paradigm. i

Communication and Technology-Handbooks of Communication Science, 2015

This chapter examines the concept of virtual reality (VR) as an advanced telecommunications medium that transcends all that has gone before, forming, in essence, a new and advanced metamedium we term virtuality. Virtuality, due to its tightly coupled interactions with our perceptual and cognitive systems and the inclusion of an embodied self, blurs any distinctions between simulation and reality, creating in essence new levels of reality. By acknowledging the porous boundaries between the simulated and the "real", virtuality constitutes a phenomenological structure of "seeming", where the computer-constructed reality delivered through advanced, interactive telecommunications systems feels experientially authentic. However, our direct awareness of the merging of the physical and the virtual precipitates a radical shift in our understanding over previous forms of media. As background, we present a brief history of developments in VR, from both technological and more philosophical viewpoints. We explore the complementary concepts of the computer system as an active participant, and the embodiment of the human actor within the simulated reality and discuss how the concept of virtuality serves to fuse these potential dichotomies. Finally, we examine a future where such systems become so tightly coupled to our selves that they form an indivisible whole, contributing to the evolution of the human condition of being in the world.

Based on a brief overview of the history of ontology and on some philosophical problems of virtual reality, a new approach to virtuality is proposed. To characterize the representational (information, cognitive, cultural, communication) technologies in the Internet age, I suggest that Aristotle’s dualistic ontological system (which distinguishes between actual and potential being) be complemented with a third form of being: virtuality. In the virtual form of being actuality and potentiality are inseparably intertwined. Virtuality is potentiality considered together with its actualization. In this view, virtuality is reality with a measure, a reality which has no absolute character, but which has a relative nature. This situation can remind us the emergence of probability in the 17th century: then the concept of certainty, now the concept of reality is reconsidered and relativized. Currently, in the descriptions of the world created by representational technologies, there are two coherent worldviews with different ontologies: the world is inhabited by (absolute) actual and (absolute) potential beings—or all the beings in the world are virtual.

Open Journal for Studies in Philosophy

The digital technology and the world of a virtual space by projecting them cardinal changed the face of the world. This widespread in varying degrees digital-virtual technology in modern society for nearly thirty years now, radically changed the society on a planetary scale, in various economic, political, social, legal, ethical, cultural, etc. perspectives. Indeed, to this day the world turns into a possible "togetherness" (with all possible "for" and "against" globalization)-the catalyst for this is digital, technical and technological boom. The whole boom in turn raises many questions mostly related to the source, which builds digital-technology "body" and its "life"-the human. What happened to his purely human body senses and what possible virtual or imaginary worlds hovers it? Here are a few thoughts as sketched lines in the first person singular, an essayistic-philosophical perspective on human senses and virtual. The "imperfect concurrency" ... for which we do not speak or do not think, but actually it is constituted direct and intentional phenomena of "stuff" into, within and out of the world. Moreover, we, humans, experience the world in narrow barriers of time in which there remains no reflects not seen, or rather not take very much of what happens in it. For virtual, fantasy and sensuality in touch for life. Unfortunately the humans in their existence increasingly trying to "numb themselves" rely on their eyes and ears, and to distance itself from their non-visual senses. For the loss of this ability or the need for feeling, for example, a touch of liveliness helps-contributes comparison of human, with residence and his communication in virtual space. The virtual creates the false illusion of a public (free-for-all) world, that is "with" and "together" us.

2021

This paper is a review of the XIX MAGIS International Film and Media Studies Spring School and focuses on some of the topics that were at the centre of different talks: virtual reality, materiality and immateriality, and the notion of medium. Those themes are considered in a media-ecological and media-archaeological framework. In addition, some of the conceptual tools proposed in the talks are being used for reflecting upon the special context in which this edition of the MAGIS Spring School happened.