Aesthetics of the Virtual

Introduction

ix Introduction Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singling black, pressure on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data he had nearly become . . . And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all that dark, there came a point where the dark could be no more, and something tore. The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case’s consciousness divided like beads of mercury, arcing above an endless beach the color of the dark silver clouds. His vision was spherical, as though a single retina lined the inner surface of a globe that contained all things, if all things could be counted. And here things could be counted, each one. He knew the number of grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a number coded in a mathematical system that existed nowhere outside the mind that was Neuromancer). He knew the number of yellow food packets in the canisters in the bunker (four hundred and seven). He knew the number of brass teeth in the left half of the open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket that Linda Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset beach, swinging a stick of driftwood in her hand (two hundred and two). “But you do not know her thoughts,” the boy said, beside him now in the shark thing’s heart. “I do not know her x Introduction thoughts. You were wrong, Case. to live here is to live. There is no difference.” Many will have recognized this page from William Gibson’s Neuro­ mancer. In it is described an experience of virtual reality, an immersion into a world of numbers that appears in forms, images, and sensations. It is a possible experience: not actual, but possible, as it was possible to travel by submarine during Verne’s time.1 If it is a possible experience, however, and it will perhaps happen that one will live in such a world, then it is not true that there is no difference. These possible differences make up the theme of this little book. It is entitled Aes­ thetics of the Virtual because it deals with bodies that are images, with the interactions between our body—weighed down but at the same time lightened by inorganic prostheses—and those images, and with the interactions between images of our body (our avatar) and those image-bodies. Thus, we will look for the meaning of the conceptual constellation that rests between body and image, that is, perception, representation, simulacrum . . . in order to see if and how the sense of these words changes when one uses them to describe an experience of virtual environments. We will attempt to think the paradoxical notion of virtual image-body [corpo­immagine] and the interweaving of activity and passivity that characterizes the spectator-actor of the virtual world. We will try to distinguish the experience of the virtual from dream experience, to stabilize the difference between the virtual and the possible, and to express the particular potentiality that marks the virtual. All of this will lead to a thinking of the structure of the virtual world as essentially relational, or if one prefers, as a place that exists only in an encounter. I have always been struck by an assertion by Robert Delaunay (quoted by Merleau-Ponty in “eye and Mind”): “I am in Petersburg in my bed. In Paris my eyes see the sun.”2 to me, this seems simply true and also a profound opening. Virtual worlds, if I had to condense the meaning of the present work, have do with this truth. ...