Digital Creativity2000, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 65–74

1462-6268/00/1102-0065$15.00© Swets & Zeitlinger

Virtual life: self and identityredefined in the new media age

Teresa Wennberg

The Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

teresa@pdc.kth.se

Abstract

In this article, the author discusses her virtualreality installation The Parallel Dimension and goeson to explore the conflicts of identity experiencedwhen a person is confronted with VR as a totalimmersion. She suggests that the various questionsarising through this experience may lead us to amore ambivalent concept of the self.

Keywords: CAVE, identity, immersion, reality, virtualreality

I fell asleep and dreamt that I was a butterfly.Now I no longer know if I am Chuang-Tzedreaming that he is a butterfly or if I am abutterfly dreaming that he is Chuang-Tze.(Chuang-Tze)

In January 1998 I was invited to the Centre forParallel Computers at the Royal Institute ofTechnology in Stockholm (KTH) to create aVirtual Reality artwork for a so-called ‘CAVE’1.

The final result, the VR installation TheParallel Dimension, was presented to the publicduring December 1998.

The Centre for Parallel Computers is theSwedish centre for scientific calculations. It hasan important supercomputing network, which isamong the most powerful in Scandinavia.

The CAVE at KTH — or ‘VR Cube’ aswe call it — is a ‘total’ VR installation. All sides,including the ceiling and the floor are projectionscreens. Large video canons project the imagesfrom all sides through back projections and withthe help of mirrors. This means that theprojected images are not disturbed by theshadows of the visitors, permitting a completeimmersion in virtual space.

The images are projected in stereo toenhance the impression of depth. Each visitorwears LCD shutter glasses, which allow a viewin 3D (each eye sees only one of the twoperspectives). Glasses with special trackingsensors, as well as a pointing device or a gloveare given to one of the visitors (Figure 1).

In order to navigate in the VR Cube, oneperson must wear the special glasses which handover the direct tracking information to aseparate computer. This computer’s onlyoccupation is to calculate the x-y-z parameters

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in virtual space, thereby constantly updating theposition of this person in real time and of theprojected images.

If there are several people at once in theCube, those carrying ‘normal’ glasses get aslightly divergent point of view (hardly notice-able).

The construction measures 3 x 3 x 2.5metres, accommodating up to nine peoplesimultaneously, and thus opening up thepossibility for a simultaneous collective experi-ence. In order to allow back projection onto thefloor, the floor was raised 2.5 metres to providespace for projectors and mirrors. The floor ismade of 40 mm-thick acrylic glass and this glassis covered with the same fabric for projections asthe walls and ceiling. One of the Cube’s wallsserves also as a large door, which is hinged onthe outside and swings open to allow access tothe room.

The system is run by a special graphiccomputer: a Silicon Graphics Onyx2 withtwelve CPUs and 4 Gb of memory, 100 Gbhard disk and three InfiniteReality2 graphicpipes with two 64 Mb raster managers each.Each pipe manages two of the six surfaces.

The floor and ceiling are currentlyconfigured to run with a resolution of 1024 x1024 pixels at a frequency of 96Hz. The wallsrun at 1024 x 852 pixels to keep the pixelssquare and to keep the resolution constant alongthe edges.

Many steps and phases are involved increating a VR piece: technological innovation isa costly and complicated activity. Each discoveryis preceded by a long process of trial and error. Itis also an intellectual challenge to confront thisnew ‘reality’. For me, as an artist, the mostexciting aspect is the conceptual confusion withwhich VR confronts me. The total immersion ina virtually real environment has led to a numberof unknown sensations, out of which manyquestions arise. It has given birth to a stimulat-ing play of thoughts where the identity of selfneeds to be redefined.

In my VR piece, The Parallel Dimension, Iconcentrated on creating forms which lookrealistic while challenging our current way ofrelating to the conventional language ofform. For this, I used sophisticated texturemaps and unexpected constellations offorms or often perspectives of gigantic space(Figure 2). My artistic intention is always tostretch our concepts of reality. It is a chal-lenge to create situations which, for exam-ple, seem to abolish the law of gravity yetlook completely natural.

The Parallel Dimension is a metaphor forthe human body, where every world repre-sents an imaginary part, filled with strangeforms, textures and light effects. I haveespecially worked with the idea of move-ment, particularly important in a virtualenvironment. I want the presentation of thiswork to be seen as a prolongation of themoving art forms, where the motion itself isan important expression of the artisticintention. Here the movement is three-dimensional and we can change the aspectof the forms and of the worlds at everymoment and also go forwards and back-wards in time. Thus the work is in constanttransformation, which is the first steptowards a new form of interaction.

The first and most important thingwhen we speak about virtual reality is the factthat we are no longer spectators in front of ascreen, we enter the virtual world as Alicestepped through the looking-glass. We are nolonger sitting passively in front of an alienatingglass wall, we are standing up or moving andtaking part in the action. Image has suddenlybecome space and we can move around in whatwe see.

We can approach all the objects as weplease, turn around them, even put our headthrough their seemingly impenetrable surfacesand see what’s inside. We can move aroundfreely in this space: go forwards, backwards,change pace, stop, start again. We are moving ina situation which is adapting itself in real time.

We stand in a room which isn’t a roombut more like a gateway, where the visible

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boundaries are illusory. The physical limitationof the walls of the cube are soon forgotten as weare introduced to this other space. The rectangu-lar shapes of the room dissolve into vast cathe-drals or faraway horizons. Distance appears as inthe real world, with the same relation toperspective: when things are far away they seemsmaller. A small point at the farend in a space is thus experi-enced as actually being very faraway — and physically it alsotakes a certain time to reachthat point.

Our visit to The ParallelDimension begins in a big,ochre-coloured oval room.The walls are covered withold-fashioned black-and-white pictures of the brain.This is The Brain Chamber,the central location, fromwhich every move isdirected. At each cardinal point, an animatedscreen is seen. If we come too close, it willabsorb us and hurl us off to one of the partsof this virtual body. We travel like littleparticles through thin twisting ‘veins’ to thedifferent locations: The Heart & Blood Room,The Thought Cabinet, The BreathingCathedral, The Flesh Labyrinth, and througha secret passageway down to The Dream

Cavern. Every world has an exit — visible orhidden — that the visitor must find in order toreturn to The Brain Chamber.

The brain is the centre of our body,where information about the surroundingsituation is received, synthesised, and revised. Isthe situation safe, or is it dangerous? Can werelax, or should we be on guard? Is it day ornight? How is the weather, the temperature?

In a ‘normal’ situation the brain proc-esses all this information, ignoring some signals,paying attention to others, reaching a conclu-sion and making decisions about behaviour andactions. In general, the input is processed in arelatively calm and orderly manner. We havelearned to behave rather well and to plan ourneeds in advance.

When we find ourselves in an unex-pected situation, however, glands swell, adrena-line floats. We are more alert and concentrated.If the situation really seems out of control, stillother aspects take over. We may react violently,sometimes even losing control over our actions,

making false moves, wrongdecisions. We easily go back tomore primitive behaviour withuncontrolled outbursts of fearand anger.

When we enter the VRCube and are confronted witha virtual experience, we canestablish that, from a physicalpoint of view, we are stillattached to earth. Our brainsubconsciously registers thatour feet are placed on solidground, the pressure on theskeleton and muscle fibres feels

‘normal’ and the body weight is distributed likeit usually is. If asked how our limbs are placed,we would probably answer, “I am standing up”.

At the same time other parts of the body— eyes, ears and subsequently nerves andmuscles in the head, neck and back — arebombarded with information about a different

Figure 1.The author inthe VR Cubewearing the‘leader glasses’and holdinga manualtrackingdevice.

(Image b ycourtesy ofthe author) Image has

suddenly becomespace and wecan movearound inwhat we see

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situation, for example: “I am flying at highspeed, at high altitude, over an unknownterritory”. This message is stronger than themessage telling us that we are standing on thefloor. The eyes win out over the extremities. Webelieve more in the information that our eyesare sending us than in the information from thenerve endings in our feet.

The brain cannot combine these dia-metrically opposed signals. And so it is confusedand our co-ordination falters. We can comparethis experience to the feeling generated by asensory deprivation tank, where the body isafloat in a salt solution, which rapidly makesone lose contact with one’s extremities. Thereare no visual stimuli. The brain becomes afloating, humming centre, an isolated receptionunit for the feeble and confused informationthat comes from our limbs. This is also a‘separate reality’ where the brain is fooled.

Apparently the brain is easy to mislead.Is virtual reality more like a waking dream forthe brain than a ‘true’ reality? In fact, we do findourselves in a state that can be compared to thatof a dream: we can fall, but do not hurt our-selves, we can advance with great speed but arenevertheless standing still. Contact with the‘known’ world is broken in as much as we acceptour presence in this new world. Of course, wecan end the experience at any moment, open thedoor and return to our ‘true’ reality, but as longas we are in the Cube we accept the informationgiven as valid. And the illusion is perfect:horizontality/verticality, depth/closeness,hardness/softness, transparency/opacity, surfaces,colours, light effects… all exterior attributes ofthe forms look right according to our customaryvisual norms.

Through the animated screen for TheHeart & Blood Room we are sucked into avirtual vein and conducted in high speed to acompletely red room. Blood is dripping andrunning on the walls. In the middle, anamorphous mass is laboriously moving,twitching, moaning. There is a throbbingsound. One is startled, curious, a little

disgusted perhaps.From The Heart & Blood Room, we travel

back to The Brain Chamber by penetratingthis metaphor for a pumping heart.

It is an interesting mental exercise to tryto define this spatial confusion. Which reality isthe true one? (What is ‘truth’?) Does it dependon physics, or on what I experience with mysenses?

Obviously, nerves don’t ‘think’, theytransmit. The eyes relay information about lightwaves and frequencies that the brain haslaboriously learned to analyse and interpret in aspecial way. Exactly how it transforms thesesignals into images is a complex procedure thathas yet to be explained.

But what is really interesting in the VRCube is that when we are given two sensoryinputs — “I am standing up” versus “I amflying”— the false one seems more real than thetrue one. The brain is simply not as clever as welike to believe.

In his notebook, Zettel, Wittgensteinasks:

How would it be if somebody seriously told methat he (really) doesn’t know whether he isdreaming or he is awake?

Can this situation exist: Somebody says “Ithink I am dreaming now”; in fact he wakes upjust after this, remembers this uttering from hisdream and says: “So I was right!”

Imagine an unconscious person saying (forexample under anaesthetics) “I am conscious” —would we say “he should know that”?

And if somebody in his dream would say “Iam sleeping”, would we say “He is perfectlyright”?

Is a person lying if he says to me: “I am notconscious”? (And is he telling the truth if he saysthis being unconscious?)(Wittgenstein 1967 85)

In The Breathing Cathedral we fly into anenormous … cathedral? … spaceship? …world?

A star-filled galaxy, with a great number of

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multicoloured semi-transparent spheres ofvarying size, gives an overwhelming sensa-tion of infinite space. A sound is heard,difficult to define, but rather pleasant andwell-suited to this strong impression ofimmensity. (Many visitors claimed having ametaphysical or ‘near-death’ experiencewhen moving softly through this calm andimmense world.) We float in space … or inthe womb. A mixed feeling of freedom andapprehension as we advance majesticallyamong the multitude of distant lights andpassing transparent planets.

In the far end of this space, an eye-likeshape appears. As we approach, the ‘retina’turns out to be a narrow cone-like corridorthrough which we are squeezed into thecentre and then swirled back to The BrainChamber.

To go a bit further with this discussion,we can attempt to separate our concept of realityinto different layers.

To begin with, there is the ‘objectivereality’, which Kant referred to as Das Ding anSich (the thing itself ). This is the reality behindour reality, a realm which we cannot observe,where the objects might live their own life. Thisreality exists beyond the human capacity tomeasure in terms of time or space. We can knownothing about this reality, we can only supposethat it exists.

Then we have the ‘known reality’, the so-

called measurable reality. It is the reality werelate to in our everyday life and neverthelesshardly ever define. Here a chair is simply a chair,with no deviations to bring the matter intodispute. A generalised and superficial use of thelanguage is sufficient for referring to the objects.

Our daily life is based on relativeassumptions about time, space and the objectsin them. In order to live in any community, weneed to subscribe to a great number of commonexpressions which we cannot constantly ques-tion, even if they often are based upon vague oreven false references. A complex system ofrelativisation, used by all our fellow humans,creates the symbols we need on a daily basis.Everything has (and must have) a name, even ifwe question its meaning at times.

And now this new state, this new reality,this magic room where objects, though lookingfamiliar, have yet another character. This roomis closed but endless, and time exists far beyondthe scanty restriction imposed by a watch. It’slike entering a giant brain (Figure 3). VR is amind expander. It confronts us with an extradimension, that really exists. And here is thehook. In an instant, reality turns multiple,transcendental, vertical, non linear. We could beapproaching a new philosophy of perceptionand of life: the relation to One could break upand thus a fundamental foundation of Westernreligion. Back to multiple gods?

In The Thought Cabinet we enter what atfirst seems to be a colourful forest. The treeslook as high as the giant seqouias ofNorthern California. Soon we realise thatthese trees are in fact gigantic lettersforming words and phrases. They are placedin such a way that we can wander betweenthem, beside them, even walk right throughthem. Again, this sensation of being verysmall in a gigantic space affects the specta-tor, who soon discovers that the phrases arefragments from the famous monologue ofHamlet.

A soft voice reads the sentences with ahumming sound. The exit is a golden arch at

Figure 2.View from theVR installation‘The ParallelDimension’(1998)by TeresaWennberg.This imagedepicts amovementbetween‘The BrainChamber’ and‘The ThoughtCabinet’.We aretravelling athigh speedinside avirtual nerve.

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the opposite end of the room.Time is an important basis of our mode

of perception. Einstein taught us that time isrelative, depending on where we are and how wemeasure. It is also very personal: one minute is ashort unit, but a minute can subjectively seemlike an eternity. Depending on the amount ofsense data we receive during sixty seconds, ourexperience of this period can be totally trans-formed.

When we find ourselves in a newenvironment, information intake is multipliedand our attention is at a high level (especiallysince we have a tendency to compare everythingto our known world and search for our prefabri-cated definitions). In a situation where the bodyproduces extra adrenaline and our senses are inpeak performance, brain activity is much greaterthan it is when dealing with a familiar situation.We lose our normal apprehension of ‘timepassing’. This diverts our concept of reality andagain time appears to be an elastic variable.

The difficulty in giving a correct analysisof this experience can be seen as a reflection ofthe difficulties in finding the language to explainwhat we are apprehending. Having the meaningbefore our minds is by no means a guarantee forbeing able to explain anything.

Here is where the conceptual crisisbegins: I know that I am standing in a projec-tion room and that the images and forms whichare projected in the room are betraying mysenses. I know that this is a virtual material andI know that it is created by a computer, thus isnot what we can call ‘concrete’ reality. I knowthat I can turn off these images and go back tothe other existence.

‘I’ am not fooled. But perhaps my brainis. Is that the same thing? Is my brain playing agame with me? Am I the one who is changing?Who am I?

This is an interesting question to pursue:what is the ‘I’?

This question has been treated by mostof the great thinkers. Perhaps David Hume

comes the closest to an up-to-date interpretationwhen he claims that the ‘I’ is a long string ofexperiences — a great number of differentapprehensions following one another withinconceivable speed, constantly changing andconstantly in motion. Like a Buddhist, Humesees consciousness as a kind of theatre, whereimpressions appear and mix with each other intoan endless multitude of positions. We have nounderlying ‘personality’ behind these moodsthat come and go — we are movement (Hume1962).

Similar thoughts are also evoked byFlusser:

That what we call ‘I’ is a knot of relations,which, when unpeeled, reveals itself to have nohook on which these relations may hang…(Flusser 1994)

In virtual reality, common sense maydoubt part of the information, but some of themost important physical means we possess forcollecting information from the exterior worldare totally fooled. Shall we write off all thisinformation as mental chimeras and sophisti-cated brain ghosts? Maybe, but ‘I’ believe them.

In the words of Lucas Manovich:Throughout human history, representationaltechnologies have served two functions: to deceivethe viewer and to enable action, i.e. to allow theviewer to manipulate reality through representa-tions.(Manovich 1997)

Jean Baudrillard suggests that massmedia operate in a manner contrary to the waythey present themselves: they do not inform,they impose. They give out information, butpeople cannot respond. It is a non communica-tion, an ongoing soliloquy which puts us in astate of insecurity concerning our personalchoice.

Nevertheless, the contemporary citizenbases most of his visions of the surroundingworld and its matters on televised images. Sincetelevision entered our homes in the 1950s, wehave become visual slaves to its message: seeing

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is believing. When we turn on the evening news,we see electronic images of something that ishappening far away from home, maybe on theother side of the planet. The truly fascinatingthing is that television has created an absolutecredibility with the concept of ‘live’ transmission— that the situation is going on simultaneouslyin the TV studio or on the war field. But if wereally think about it, there is nothing whatsoeverproving to us that it is neither ‘live’ nor ‘true’.We just see a lot of images on a screen. What isrevolutionary is that so many people are lookingat these images simultaneously and talkingabout them as being part of a collective truth(which could be considered a collective halluci-nation). It is as easy to manipulate an image as itis to create one. But television has acquired suchcredibility that we accept the information itoffers without questions. Will VR affect us thesame way once it becomes an everyday experi-ence?

The Flesh Labyrinth takes us to a con-

struction of pinkish membranes as high as athree-floor building where we move mostlyvertically. Virtual pieces of flesh obstruct thepassage; the sound when touching themsuggests a blow. This is a slightly claustro-phobic experience. How do we get out? Findthe hidden exit which is encapsulated in ablue ball, coyly avoiding an encounter…

So how come we are aware of thevirtuality of these realistic visions and yet reactas if they were really part of our external world?We are exposed to an increasing intrusion intoall areas of life of the uncertainty andunreliability of the real, with an increasingdifficulty to determine where to put the lath.The Swedish philosopher Gunnar Svensson goeseven further:

Is there really an external world? The questionmay seem rather silly at first. The sceptic,however, asks for a justification of something weare all sometimes deceived by, viz. our senseexperience. What guarantees that it is not alwaysdelusory? Common sense? Logic? God? Clearly,there is no obvious answer. Doubting theexistence of an external world does not seem sosilly after all. Why, indeed, accept that there isone?(Svensson 1981)

Or, as G.E. Moore put it:In order to prove my premises I should need toprove one thing, as Descartes pointed out, that Iam not now dreaming. But how can I prove Iam not? I have, no doubt, conclusive reasons forasserting that I am not now dreaming; I haveconclusive evidence that I am awake; but this isa very different thing from being able to prove it.(Moore 1953 149)

Perhaps the answer is that there aredifferent levels of consciousness and differentforms of the ‘I’, which all make up a part ofwhat we would call our personality and ourreality. Here we have the well-polished surface,the secret thoughts and the repressed instincts,the thief and the sex maniac, the liar and theflatterer, some kept down, some broughtforward. But these various qualities all spring

Figure 3.Birds-eyeview o f theVR Cube atThe RoyalInstitute o fTechnology ,Stockholm.This con-struction,which usesall four w allsplus theceiling andfloor asprojectionscreens, isthe first inthe world topermit totalimmersion.

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from the same brain.We could think of our brain as a vessel

receiving a constant information flow. The ‘I’could be seen as the recollection of this informa-tion, depending on our individual memory.‘Reality’ is the interpretation we give to thisinformation at every moment.

If then the brain decides with a majorityof neural votes that we are flying — in spite ofthe fact that we are not — is it then so? Appar-ently we can no longer trust our classic brain-body-spirit concept. We are facing a majorcognitive shift, where we will have to introducea new way of conceiving our world, admittingthat a double reality — or several simultaneousrealities — can exist and be accepted as valid.Our bodily functions will not change, but ourconsciousness will.

Having tried all four visible doors, we’reback again in The Brain Chamber.

The final visit is executed through thesemi-transparent pillar in the middle of theroom. One must discover this oneself; thereis no exterior indication of it. But once we getthe idea to penetrate the pillar, we are takenby an invisible elevator down to the lastworld: The Dream Cavern.

Dreams are images, sounds and strangesensations that bring us back and forth inour subconscious memory. Here, the imagescome sailing through the winding cave andthe walls are made of more images, imageseverywhere and voices whispering mysteri-ously. Written messages float in the air. Weread the word ‘KEEP’, which is almostinvisible, then turn around another bend andread ‘YOUR ILLUSIONS’ …

At one point in this hallucinatory butfascinating universe we see a burning circle,like the ones felines jump through in thecircus. Inside the flames the word ‘JUMP’ iswritten. Of course we jump. And we return toThe Brain Chamber.

Two simultaneous realities? One plus oneequals one? Which life, which reality willeventually be referred to as the ‘true’ one? And— does it matter?

Over the past generation, virtual avatars

of ourselves have multiplied ceaselessly. In thefinancial world there is a constant exchange ofvirtual money at the same time as film andphotographic art portray scenes that never tookplace between people who never met. MUDsand similar worlds on the Internet are just oneaspect of a metaculture which encouragesdifferent models, personalities and roles.Hundreds of thousands of people are creatingvirtual personas, living in groups of virtualsocieties with multiple identities, underminingthe Cartesian idea of the unique subject.

The computer and the television havebecome machines of reproduction instead ofproduction. Our culture is tainted by theappearance of a new absence of depth, bysuperficiality in the most literal sense of theword. We are experiencing the dissolution of theindividual and a decentralisation of the subject— and the object.

In a very short lapse of time,Scandinavian cyberlife has increased incredibly.Sweden is a forerunner in the use of advancedelectronic media, mobile phones, personalcomputers, and public use of the Net. Surfing ishighly encouraged. In fact, Swedish daily life ismore and more depending on computerisedservices. There are very few companies who donot work with computers in one way or another.We can order pizzas and do all sorts of bankerrands, pay our bills, study all the way up to aPhD, make legally valid orders and, of course,correspond by e-mail with our friends andcolleagues. The art of writing letters by hand isbecoming obsolete and the Swedish post office iseliminating more of its customary services everymonth.

Anders Hector, research scientist at theInstitution for Technology and Social Change atthe University of Linkoping is working on athesis about information habits. In a recentarticle, he mentions an American study whichfound that the risk of loneliness and depressionis increased if one surfs on the Net for even justone hour per day.

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Hector says:Life in cyberspace is after all abstract and realityis concrete. The Net does not offer the samewidth of interaction with smells, tastes andfeelings. To surf on the Internet does not give thesame feeling of social repletion as physicalencounters between people.(Hector 1998 11)

Of course, Hector is referring to asituation which, in nine cases out of ten, meansaccessing a two-dimensional Internet service ona small home computer. The impenetrablescreen mirrors a communication, but is notreally communicating. This is why the possibil-ity of interfering with the forms, or affecting agiven situation, is perhaps themost important part of a VRexperience and where most ofthe research and developmentare focusing.

In this new reality, weare not only immersed, but wecan interact with it — we arereal-time actors and the role weplay is that of a decision maker,a secondary creator. Dependingon the programming — whichwill soon include the possibilityof travelling within the Net —we can intervene in the scenarioand change it to better suit ourneeds or wishes. We can moveexisting objects, add new ones,we can meet with and talk to others althoughthey are not in the same room. In fact, we cantotally change a given situation in a matter ofseconds. This is a major change from passivelyonlooking at a closed scenario and it is perhapsthe most revolutionary shift in computer-basedcommunication. In the VR Cube, there is alsothe simultaneous collective and physical sharingof an experience (which has nothing to do withlooking at the eight o’clock news).

But also here we confront a lot ofintricate questions. When I place a secondary

‘me’ in a virtual board meeting — an aliasrepresenting my body and my opinions — whois the person moving in this new room? Is it myusual me? Have I divided myself into two? Is it a‘mental clone’? Is it all of me? To what degree isit responsible for its actions? Are its actions to beconsidered mine?

If my alias signs a contract — is it valid?Can somebody else direct this avatar of mine?Will we face different degrees of existence, oneabsolute and others more relative, with variousdegrees of personal responsibility? Of course, itis nothing new to have a personal representativeor substitute. What could be intricate is if andwhen these aliases become autonomous and

start making decisions on theirown.

We will certainly haveto invent new definitions oflegal and moral order.

Virtual space is aboutto transcend the capacity of thehuman body to localise itself,to perceptively organise itssurrounding and to produce acognitive map of its position ina recognisable, outer world. Wewill rely more and more onelectronic communication,which also means that we willbe more vulnerable in case of abreakdown. If the line isdisconnected, we will be lost

and retarded. And perhaps without memory.The ultimate amnesia.

But even this may just be a small point.The main criticism of three-dimensional virtualreality could in fact be its lack of physical touch,of flesh and blood or solid matter, so fundamen-tal to us human beings. This lack could indeedcontribute to the aforementioned feeling ofemptiness in cyberspace. Even with the dataglove we cannot really touch the forms, howevervisually convincing they may be. We can travel,act and inform ourselves, but as long as there is

People like tomeet physically,to look at eachother face toface, to shakereal hands andfeel, sense andsmell each other

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no real physical encounter there will eventuallybe a feeling of unfulfillment due to the ephem-eral quality of the experience.

Touch — is that the final step betweenthe virtual and the physical world? BothMichelangelo’s portrayal of God and Adam inthe Sistine Chapel and Spielberg’s film ET,where a divine finger reaches out to the mortalhuman, offers us a metaphor for the importanceof physical touch. Most encounters, chats andbusiness deals on the Net either end up with apersonal rendezvous at some point — orwhither. People like to meet physically, to lookat each other face to face, to shake real handsand feel, sense and smell each other. It is afundamental need for us to be with otherpeople, it is part of our genetic heritage.

So, how do we solve this problem? Eitherwe invent a new definition of the idea of‘touching’ or we manage to create virtualsubstitutes that are as impressive as the visualand auditory information is now. The mostinteresting thing now is to see what kind ofavatars we can come up with.

Can we manage to create virtual substi-tutes as impressive as a human being? Like inGibson’s Idoru, where the hero falls in love witha virtual girl, who only exists inside the compu-ter (Gibson 1996).

My tip is that we will become so alien-ated from this harsh reality that we will eventu-ally prefer the ephemeral company of virtualcreatures and the timeless pleasure of virtuallives. Touch is a sensual experience, on a parwith seeing but communicating with othercentres in our brain. So far the computerexperience is mainly a visual one. Will seeingovertake touching? Can we become so depend-ent on our eyes that other senses are reduced toa secondary position?

Time will show.

Notes

1 ‘CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment’, atechnique for projecting three-dimensional pictureson several walls of a room, originally developed byCarolina Cruz-Neira and Tom DeFanti at theUniversity of Illinois in Chicago.

References

Baudrillard, J. (1995) The Gulf War did not takeplace. Trans. Patton, P. Power Publications, Sydney.

Flusser, V. (1994) On memory (electronic orotherwise). Art/Cognition. Cyprès/Ecole d’Artd’Aix-en-Provence.

Gibson, W. (1996) Idoru. Norstedts Förlag, Stock-holm.

Hector, A. (1998) Svenska Dagbladet 19.9.1998, p.11.

Hume, D. (1962) A treatise of human nature. Bookone. William Collins, Glasgow.

Manovich, L. (1997) To lie and to act: Potemkin’svillages, cinema and telepresence. ISEA 97.

Moore, G.E. (1953) Proof of an external world. InMoore, G.E. Philosophical papers. George Allen andUnwin, London.

Svensson, G. (1981) On doubting the reality of reality.Almquist & Wiksell International, Stockholm.

Wittgenstein, L. (1967) Zettel. Trans. Anscombe, G.and von Wright, G. Blackwell, Oxford.

Teresa Wennberg is a visual artist, working withpainting, video and computer animation. Herinstallations combining all of the above has beenshown in galleries and museums throughout theworld. Since 1998, she has been attached to TheRoyal Institute of Technology (KTH).Web site: http://www.nada.kth.se/~teresa