What is Virtuality
Mirzoeff defines virtuality as;
“an image or space that is not real but appears to be”
Needs to have some link to the real.
If you were watching film where you couldn’t believe images you see on screen. if you cant believe they are plausible – most films will show us characters in situations we recognise as being real. Even Sci-fi films – you still enter virtual space and go along with it as enough of it is plausible and has a connection to reality.
“……virtuality can be understood as the transformation of space away from the exterior three-dimensional reality to the poly-dimensional interior world of the self”.
Talking about imagination. If you watch horror film you know you are safe and don’t accept that the film is real but you project yourself into the film for the hour and a half its on and move into the poly-dimensional reality.
Virtuality is a ‘place’ or ‘space’ that exists in our perception, but isn’t really there.
(i.e. phone call – there is no place that conversation is taking place – exists in the virtual).
It is a thing that exists between realities. It exists, but not in the tangible reality.
e.g. the part ‘in between’ two people sending mails to each other. When the email is being sent, it is part of virtuality.
Virtuality and Imaging Technologies
This being ‘in-between’ could happen when someone looks at a painting and feel as if they are transported into another world.
This concept of virtuality led to a series of on-going advances in creating greater degrees of virtuality, through image making technologies (later combined with audio).
The desire to be transported into another world has been around for long time.
E.g. reading stories etc, you can be completely absorbed by narrative and time goes faster as you drift off into virtual world.
We can see these advances evolve through panoramic paintings/landscapes, stereoscopic photography, radio, cinema, television, and then the internet.
Our exposure to virtuality is a global phenomenon that allows people to escape reality momentarily to a place that connects your-self to ‘another reality’.
THE HAGUE PANORAMA
Virtual Antiquity – being somewhere else ‘in the picture’
Mirzoeff addresses virtuality as a concept that is neither new nor contemporary burt rather any image or space beyond the real.
The difference with contemporary virtuality is its interactive nature, or the ability of the perceiver to manipulate his or her experience of the virtual.
When Mirzoeff refers to non-contemporary virtuality, he speaks of virtuality of the past or virtual antiquity.
“Virtual antiquity” seems like it is an oxymoronic term because of the tendency to associate virtuality with futurity.
A better way to understand what Mirzoeff is alluding to is the experience of feeling transported to another time or space, and not necessarily the space itself.
The feeling is the in-between a suspense and a removal from the current surroundings into one that exists separate from the physical world.
The ‘Virtuality’ of the Cinema Screen
What is the position of the spectator with respect to the film?
Christian Metz, in his seminal study of cinema as The Imaginary Signifier (1982) has tackled the problem within a psychoanalytical framework. his analysis starts with the notion of perception.
“The Cinemas signifier is perceptual (visual and auditory).”
Metz goes on to distinguish the cinema from other arts inscribed into the perceptual register (such as painting, sculpture etc). by stating that cinema is “more perceptional”, involving more perceptional axes.
Cinema more than any other art forms affects our emotions. The soundtrack hightens the emotions. Have diegetic and non-diegetic sound. Diegetic is sound coming from film (characters talking etc) and non-diegetic are voice overs ad sounds for us as audience that characters in film can’t really hear.
Far more for our senses to pick up – thus far more perceptional. Levels of virtuality much higher.
Compared with other types of the ‘spectacle’, such as the theatre this apparent superiority, however, is thwarted by the fact that in the cinema, the spectator and the spectacle do not share the same, space, the diegetic reality of film as an illusion. To do with suspension of disbelief. You know the film is a copy of reality – not real.
You know when you start watch its fake/an illusion of the real world, yet it still has the capacity to draw us in and produce genuine real emotional responses within us. The reason is because we have a desire to explore stuff through illusionistic imagery – things we cant do in normal life.
Metz stated that:
“The unique position of the cinema lies in this dual character of its signifier: unaccustomed perceptual wealth, but at the same time stamped with unreality to an unusual degree.
Best fake reality to involve us in this experience – yet we know it’s still a fake reality – which can sometimes prevent fully being immersed.
Metz thus defines the position of the spectator as basically voyeuristic.
The relation of the spectator to the film he called ‘suture’. being mainly a medical term, suture means both ‘seam’ and the process of stitching a wound.
Everyone involved in cinema – it is their job to make reality go away. Sew you into the plot and immerse you into film – stitched you into the narrative.
In the film theorist Jacques-Alain Miller’s definition of suture, the concept of suture denotes the:
“Procedures by means of which cinematic texts confer subjectivity upon their viewers” (Subject of Semiotics).
So we can identify the operation of suture with certain filmic techniques, especially the shot/reverse shot which facilitates (and directs) the spectator’s identification with a certain gaze (I see as a protagonist sees).
Virtuality or Virtual Reality
The modern use of the word virtuality tends to correspond to the notion of the image of virtual reality, as here virtuality is of a different order than the actual world (as it can be fantastical, an ‘other world’).
This notion of virtuality is a virtual founded in a stable concept of reality in that it retains recognisability (thus it functions as an illusion of an exterior reality).
The modern, technology-driven conception of the virtual can be divided into two equally apt definitions;
The first
connects the virtual with its “real” counterpart by means of a visual similarity made manifest technologically, via various apparatuses that construct interactive sensory experiences (e.g. prosthetics, usually a helmet display and a haptic interface of some type such as a hand controller or glove).
The second
Is model of the virtual that uses an enclosed room, the walls of which are composed of display screens onto which high resolution virtual imagery is projected.
This creates a virtual space that is less obviously mediated by technology (in other words our senses, sight, hearing and touch are not augmented).
The technologies present in both of these definitions of the virtual are aimed at providing an illusion of the human body made present in a virtual space.