3 - Virtual Reality: Confinement and Engulfment; Replacement and Re-placement

Summary

Abstract

This chapter explicates Virtual Reality (VR) as the first instantiation of the post-screen. Specifically, it interrogates VR's sense of immersion via two vectors in the post-screen's “forgetting” of screen boundaries – confinement of a viewer's visual field with restricted viewing devices; and engulfment by being surrounded with large screens. The chapter's key idea is its alternative expression of VR's relations of reality as an immersive media form, which it argues shifts from the critical paradigms of replacement to re-placement. Through theoretical critique and readings of various applications of VR, the chapter argues for re-placement as a more ethical and generative space for thinking through VR's relations of the real. In turn, where and how the actual and the virtual is re-placed informs the very purpose of media itself.

Keywords: virtual reality; replacement; re-placement; immersion; simulacra; totalization

“Multitudes of Amys”

Multitudes of Amys

Ev’rywhere I look

Sentences of Amys

Paragraphs of Amys

Filling ev’ry book

∼ Stephen Sondheim

The lines above are lyrics from a love song. Written by Stephen Sondheim for the acclaimed 1970 Broadway comedy musical, Company, “Multitudes of Amys” was to mark the moment the protagonist, a bachelor named Robert who had been unable to commit to a relationship, realizes he is in love with Amy. What is interesting for our purposes is how Robert sings of his love not as an emotion but an omnipresence – his being in love is to be surrounded by “multitudes,” or to see and hear his object of affection everywhere he looks. The grand emotion of love replaces Robert's everyday reality with sights of Amy – “I see them waiting for the lights, running for the bus, milling in the stores” – and sounds of her: “choruses of Amys, symphonies of Amys, ringing in my ear.” Robert is not only in love, he is also in love, as if sunk into a vat of it. He is immersed.

Conceptually, the sentiment of “Multitudes of Amys” is miles from the experience of Virtual Reality (VR) as the focus of this chapter. Yet it might appear that love and VR bear surprising similarities – VR, too, is an immersion in, we can say, multitudes of virtual reality, or reality that is real yet fabricated.