What Is VR?

To recap what I said in the previous entry: Virtual Reality is the tool whereby the painter of today creates language by reshaping reality. VR allows the 21st century artist to envision the language of tomorrow. Digital Information allows easy flow and manipulation of reality. Virtual Reality is the vision that guides the flow and manipulation process. It is up to artists to bring vision to the digitization and commercialization of reality. VR is the primary tool through which we achieve this.

And now let us proceed with this discussion. When we speak of VR, typically we think of computer generated images (CGI) for the movies. Nowadays, we are more expansive in our thinking because the Internet has expanded our view. Thus, images of creatures and consciousnesses trapped or carousing in our computers and on the Internet cascade through our minds. Virtual Reality is the domain of science fiction and movies. That’s changing. We talk of a virtual this and a virtual that, all seeming to be moving in the direction of AI – artificial intelligence – robots and androids. Virtual Reality is synthetic reality, a fabrication of the real stuff. The ultimate virtual creation is a virtual human: the android.

Am I suggesting that artists try as best as they can to duplicate reality? Is that what Virtual Reality is about? Is that what the vision of today’s artist is all about, recreating reality and duplicating as much as possible what’s out there, that is, the “real” world?
Not necessarily, though we all know that attempts to render nature through observation increase an artist’s skill. Any artist would find a difficult time of it attempting to make art without the training of having to render observed reality. The writer cannot only read books and go to movies and so on. The writer also has to actually observe life first hand, and so with musicians and painters and any other artists. One might say first hand experience of life is what gives life to the art, certainly gives it newness.

Indeed, all art is a form of VR, if not in the mind of the culture, certainly in the mind of the artist who created it. The artist has always taken whatever tools were available and used those tools to create an alternate world. The initial motivation may or may not be to create an alternate world. Regardless, that is what the artist ends up doing. If the art lacks this “other worldliness” it lacks vision and imagination. The painting recreates reality, as does any other form of art. Art is not simply the interpretation of reality. It is more than that. It is synthetic reality, VR, in other words. The ultimate drive of art is to create an altogether believable, synthetic reality that manipulates the experience of its audience. Why? For what purpose? For many reasons, all moving in the same direction, that of myth building. But also, that of language creation. Perception itself can become a method of communication. That is what art has been and will continue to be. In the future, this will become more apparent as VR becomes even more striking than it is now.

Visual art, one of the earliest forms of art – indeed all forms originated in images - stimulated language. It had to. We moved from grunts and gestures to words. Concurrently we moved from images to symbols to words. These two movements created language, spoken and eventually written. Did the cave dwellers believe that the drawings of bison were real bison? The images are even striking today. We can safely assume that our ancient ancestors believed that the drawings on the cave walls looked incredibly real, flickering as they did in the light of the evening fire. VR? Sure. And what direction did those drawings take? Images became symbols. Symbols became language. It did not happen that symbols came first. You might think that certain ancient images were too crude for the primitive to think the symbol was literally what it symbolized. But in studying ancient cultures, we find this to be true. Also, when we study primitives of today, we find this to be true. The symbols was first an image. That is, the picture was a literal depiction, not a symbol, however primitive and naïve the image might seem, that is, however like a symbol it might appear to us today. A circle with a dot in it was a depiction of the sun. In a way, it was the sun. And so the circle with a dot in it had magical properties. The artist was a shaman and a magician for his power to create the sun and other things with a piece of coal or a stick. Eventually, the circle with the dot in it came to mean sun without actually being the sun. In this way, we came to discover and create language, words, and literature.

If you wonder where technology came from, stop wondering. It came from art. Artists are the visionaries. They create new perceptions. These new perceptions evolve into language. VR and the Digital Information that fuels it allows artists even greater access to the ability to recreate reality and thus to create new language forms. We might not understand what it is, this new language we are creating. Nonetheless, that is what we are doing. We are using the tool of VR to create a new language. I will hazard a guess and say that the language we build today is for the telepaths of tomorrow. As with our current spoken and written languages, we will have variety and uniformity, grammar and slang, context and interpretation, shades of meaning, nuance, all that we have today and more, and it will be a language we can work with telepathically. A thousand years from now, our excursions into VR will have become the foundation of a telepathic language. Little did the bison artist in his cave have any idea what his art would become. So now do we have little idea what our art will evolve into. I have made a reasonable guess, that is all.