The text - The Virtual and the Real by David Chalmers
Chalmers discusses the existence and value of Virtual Reality (VR) and whether our experiences in VR are just an illusion, despite the object being real or fictional, and compares these with the real world, questioning whether these experiences are truly real.
He also talks about VR as a digital object and mentions the film The Matrix, in which all our ordinary beliefs are tables of computational objects. He argues that VR today is almost as real and as valuable as physical reality, and that VR is beginning to be superior in some respects.
As I was reading this our critical dialogue lesson on memory came to mind. To me, possibly because I have a background in IT, I’m conscious that the digital world is based on a repository of data, rather as the real world is stored in our brains. And in the case of our brains this data/information is processed based on experience and our inner nature – our capacity to perceive things in a way which can be called our brain’s algorithms.
I think the digital world is indeed becoming similar to our brains, and the advances in neuroscience are able to decode the algorithms of our ways of thinking, though computers have the advantage of being able to store much more information than our brains can. And as algorithms and processes for VR became ever more sophisticated they will increasingly interact with our physical reality.
The Video - The Reality of the Virtual by Slavos Zizec
In the video, rather than exploring VR, as in the text – the digital reproduction of our experience of reality, Zizeck, explores the virtual as the effects of something that doesn’t yet exist, the reality of the virtual, which can be explored in many different ways.
He starts with the Laconian three Categories: the imaginary – how we interact with another person who isn’t there, the symbolic – authority or beliefs which affect our behaviour, and the real, and he goes into many other subjects, all which have an influence on the creation of an alternative modernity.
He also argues that modernity depends where you are, and that there are different types of modernity - in western countries or Africa or South America for instance. And he goes on to capitalism and communism and the effects of modernity in different ways, neither of which have the universal truth, which I agree, as they are both idealistic extremes - Utopias
I think the message lies in the last five minutes of the video, where he says that we should take advantage of the freedom that we have to reinvent Utopia -
1. The classical one in which we imagine something that it will never be realised - a dream - more recognised in Communism
2. The capitalist Utopia, based on people’s desires and the assumption that the duty of society is to provide the means of satisfying those desires
3. A more radical one - to free your imagination to invent something new which cannot be done otherwise. Not a matter of the future, but something that has an inner urgency. To dare to create the impossible - I think he was daring us, appealing to our creativity to reach this new universal truth.
Hotel Happiness - curated by Paul Chapellier, Beverley Gadsden and Miriam Naeh
Paul Chapellier is a French Artist based in London whose practice spans photography, sculpture and installation to examine the intertwining of ideology and aesthetics in relationship to material culture. Beverley Gadsden is a British Artist, and Miriam Naeh, is an Israeli based in London who studied art at the Musrara School of Art in Jerusalem.
Hotel Happiness (HH) is an interactive exhibition video of a virtual hotel in a retro style containing art works, where the viewers are invited to see it as if they were actually guests at the hotel. The art works are arranged in different spaces such as a ‘hotel retreat’ from an executive penthouse, a Honeymoon love suite, and a nature retreat as if they were hotel rooms from around the world.
HH has a navigation facility enabling the viewer to tour the hotel in the form of an audio guide for potential guests, and it mimics the experience of browsing round, navigating through the rooms, listening to absurd dialogue between the virtual host and the potential guest. This makes the experience somehow surreal but powerful – though it doesn’t quite match up to the name ‘Hotel Happiness’.
The exhibition has works by 22 artists in various mediums, ranging from video, painting, photography, sculpture and fictional writings, so the viewers, (hotel guests), are presented with a variety of works and can see each one in detail by clicking on the piece.
Given the restrictions of lockdown on art exhibitions and the hotel industry this virtual exhibition is a timely reminder of the value and importance of the online world.