Welcome to the Virtual
Issue No. 3: Virtual
“Bad Dreams” by HOTTEA, Berlin, Germany. Used with permission.
I was having a conversation with my daughter the other day, in which she expressed, dolefully, the difficulty of ever being able to enact one’s “real” self in public. This led to a discussion about what exactly it is that makes something real. When we think of authenticity, reality, or actuality in this context, we are necessarily thinking virtually, not materially. While the material reality may be one’s physical body — the compilation of bone, organs, systems, and electrical impulses that make up the corporeal self— the real self is something far less tangible. What is real about us as individuals is purely immaterial, and in most cases, our most real version is something purely virtual, something we feel to be deeply true, but cannot, as yet, lay hold of; something potential and as yet unrealized. But how is it that we can conceive of the self as its most real in these imaginal terms, yet other imaginal things like dreams, words, and fantasies we categorize as “not real.”
The word “virtual,” in our current zeitgeist, has potent technological overtones. We interact with virtual worlds constantly via the internet. Our banking, our information sourcing, our love lives, our entertainment, our understanding of the world, our social interactions; all of these are taking place online in virtual spaces. This is to say nothing of VR technology, which has the potential to transform everything from medial procedures, to modern warfare, to our sex lives. Is it even possible anymore to say these things aren’t “real”? They take up a majority of our time, and affect our individual lives and the world at large (consider foreign influence via social media on the 2016 elections in the U.S., or individuals dying by suicide as a result of cyberbullying). Add to this the reciprocal effects our material lives have on the virtual, (consider, for example, how a brief conversation with a neighbor the other day about back pain, can trigger a wave of google ads for back braces, back pain medications, acupuncture, and even a sonic vest to help heal back pain through a series of finely tuned sonic vibrations), and we find ourselves inextricably entangled in a mesh of the physical and the imaginal. Our relationship with the Virtual, like virtuality itself, is difficult to pin down.
This becomes even more true when we think about the future. The future is a place that exists entirely virtually. It possesses no materiality, and yet it is the thing toward which everything else moves. We might say that the virtual space of the future has an immense gravity, pulling everything inescapably into itself. We, in fact — me, here, in my house under the cold December sky, you, wherever you are, with your hands on the keyboard, or scrolling a handheld screen with your thumb — are being pulled there ourselves at this very moment. Approaching constantly but never arriving. This is the virtuality, the hologram of the future.
Our endless approach without apprehension makes the future a virtual space, a space of the imagination. And in imaginary spaces we are free to shape and create. As Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future is wont to say, “The most wondrous thing about the future is that there are no facts about the future.” All is potential. All is shapable. And this is true, not only of our virtual spaces, but the virtual itself, the nothingness and immateriality out of which springs the material.
When we think of the virtual as a quality of literature, we see that Proust can take up a material madeleine one morning, and place it in his mouth, triggering the powerful imaginal spaces of memory. From these can spring ideas which can be transformed into words and written down into a book which is a material object that I, years later, and on a different continent, can hold in my hands and which, upon reading a certain word or phrase, can alter my own imaginal spaces, my virtuality, in a way that can in turn affect my material world. This is the material imagination. This is the virtual.
Slavoj Zizek in his essay Organs without Bodies; The reality of the virtual discusses Giles Deleuze’s theory of Virtuality, saying,
“…what matters to Deleuze is not virtual reality, but the reality of the virtual (which, in Lacanian terms, is the Real). Virtual Reality in itself is a rather miserable idea: that of imitating reality, of reproducing its experience in an artificial medium. The reality of the Virtual, on the other hand, stands for the reality of the Virtual as such, for its real effects and consequences.”
and subsequently,
"The genius of Deleuze resides in his notion of "transcendental empiricism": in contrast to the standard notion of the transcendental as the formal conceptual network which structures the rich flow of empirical data, the Deleuzian "transcendental" is infinitely RICHER than reality - it is the infinite potential field of virtualities out of which reality is actualized.”
This issue of CHARGE invites you to consider the inextricable enmeshment of the virtual and the actual, indeed their reciprocity, and in some cases, their interchangeability. How does the virtual impact your reality? And, perhaps more importantly, how can your use of the virtual impact and call into being a greater potential reality? The future— the coming reality— is yours to imagine.
As always we invite you to think of this issue as a gallery, and the contributions therein as doors leading each to their own idea of the virtual. Pull up the playlist, pick a room, and start exploring. You’ll notice at the bottom of most pages there is a section titled “Inquiry,” and that most pages are open for comments. We are delighted to encourage you to consider the lines of inquiry that each piece offers, and, if so moved, to share your thoughts, ideas, questions, and possibilities with us and with each other. Let us invoke the power of the virtual, let us open ourselves to its possibilities and to the transformations that may await. Facing the “infinite potential field of virtualities,” let us brave the actualization of the reality we sense to be true, to be ours; the fullness we long toward.
In this issue you can:
Dive into the life of a conceptual installation artist whose work engages with the ideas of symbolic and actual representation of time, space and memory through the use of color and textiles.
Check out our playlist and discover the music of plants, an inter-species experience made possible by Plant Wave technology.
Flip through a children’s book in translation and meet a young girl struggling to understand her adoption and origin story. Stolen from her parents who were disappeared by a corrupt government, Betina wrestles to reconcile her life with her virtual mother (Mama Wig, she calls her, because a wig is a kind of pretend hair that covers over your real hair ((or lack thereof)) and makes you look like someone else) with the opportunity for a life with her newly discovered biological grandmother.
Play a video game created to make you rethink your relationship with the natural, material world.
Delve into fictional relationships that long for real absolution via a virtual punisher, and imaginal poetic spaces that seek to create and destroy our ideas of virtuality.
Hear the story of an olympic athlete living and competing with a prosthetic appendage.
Think through the movie Blade Runner 2049 and its implications for hope and the realization of potential realities.
Sit with the idea of political representation, its virtual nature, and its potential to shape the futures of represented and unrepresented material bodies.
As always, we thank you for being here. For staying with the trouble. For existing with us on this material planet in this virtual space. May you find a vision here for the future, may you find hope. Let us leap, creating, into the dark unknown.