Narrative As Virtual Reality In Everyday Life
•••••••••••••••••• a thesis for design thinking ••••••••••••••••••
"The polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden conceives the literary work of art,
in its written form, as an incomplete object that must be actualized by the reader into an
aesthetic object. Text is like a musical score written in the past and waiting to be
performed in an immediate future."1
How do we perceive and understand reality when we narrate our experiences,
when we engage in this daily semantic exchange of telling, hearing and reading stories?
Do we design our understanding of this reality around us with our imagination? Is it all
virtual waiting to be actualized as a visual simulation based on personal knowledge? Or is
it all there only by virtue of how it’s being narrated, of how things are, as an all-powerful
unique meaning concerning a one single linear reality?
Narrative and Virtual Reality are concepts applied to written or spoken language,
concepts for semantics applied as well to visual and corporeal expression, which are
intrinsically and symbiotically connected to each other. I must begin by stating that
narrative as a recourse is present everyday in our life as part of the dynamic exchange of
ideas and experiences. The heart and soul of this thesis of mine is based on a research
adventure which combines:
(1) the exploration of narrative and virtual reality based on the fields of
interactive media, fiction literature and communication and philosophy theories applied
to technology;
(2) on the empirical application of these concepts to demonstrate that virtual
reality is present everyday in our life in the process of narrating a story, taking into
account that everyone has a very own personal cognitive experience;
(3) on the theoretical influence and inspirational sources of writer Mare-Laure
Ryan in her book (of the same name), Narrative As Virtual Reality: Immersion and
Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media.
Our brain is an associative engine constantly emerging meaning and connecting
ideas to stimulate creativity and the actualization of what could become real. We engage
in a very special thinking and creative operation when we talk and listen, designing our
thoughts to create all the possible worlds that make up this reality around us. Like a
bridge between our senses when we hear and read, imagination assists comprehension in
our brain, like a render engine that runs a code to simulate a 3D environment with all its
characters, interactive events and virtual life actions and reactions. "The function of
language is to pick objects in the textual world, to link them with properties, to animate
characters and to conjure their presence to the imagination."2 Now, how we endowed our
virtual characters, objects and spaces with properties is a matter of personal
interpretation. Thus, narrative as virtual reality becomes a very intimate and subjective
understanding process.
I see the understanding process between humans as an open source code and its
programming language as an arrangement of words and phrases in the many different
tongues we have access to. My purpose is to push the limits of the definition of virtual
reality as an "interactive, immersive experience generated by a computer"3 and transfer
its concepts of interactivity and immersion into the realm of daily life experience. We
become narrators when we communicate. To render this narration as virtual objects and
forms, as virtual bodies, in our neuronal network is a task involving a collective
organization of thought and a globalized array of convictions and popular beliefs achieved
through time and experience. Altogether, this holographic composition is able to build
brick by brick a virtual reality space in our heads with all its characters, interactive
events and virtual life actions and reactions.
Virtual reality emerges, is present in our perception, everytime we humans speak
to each other, everytime we express our feelings and emotions, everytime we read. We are
constantly receiving and giving information, when we travel in the train reading the
newspaper, when we listen to the radio in the car, when we talk with our mobile phones,
when we walk on the street reading the billboard advertisements we pass by, when we
have a meeting at work, when we talk with our friends. We communicate, we are social.
The fundamental idea of communication is that of the transmission of messages. We are
cybernetic, because we are organized and controlled through our dynamic nature of social
feedback. Cybernetics was originally theorized by Norbert Wiener as the science of control
and communication in animals, men and machines. 4 Cybernetics opened new doors of
analysis of how we humans behave and socialize. The communication process of everyday
life breaks down as synaptic elements cascading a flow of feelings and emotions, receiving
and perceiving words, playing them along and orchestrating a visual ouverture in our own
time and space to understand what is being narrated to us. Most of the time we believe in
what we are told, we believe in what we read. We, humans, create the real out of the
virtual.
The popular conception of virtual reality in our modern technological society and
its increasingly common use as a term started arguably in the late seventies, early
eighties, with the appearance of the word cyberspace and the 3D simulation applications
that were developed as technical aids for computer visualization later in the nineties,
mostly for commercial use: head mounted displays and data gloves for immersion into
computer-generated virtual worlds. Cyberspace is popularly related to the internet,
interactive computer interfaces, art media installations and contemporarily to
MMORPG(massive-multiplayer-online-role-playing-games). Nevertheless, cyberspace has
always been more related and applied to literature and fiction than to the tangible field of
technology or science. For the present purpose, cyberspace will be related to the
experience of creating a virtual space with the narration of stories.
The word cyberspace (deriving from cybernetic, which in greek means ‘good at
steering, good pilot’) was coined and popularized by science fiction author William Gibson
in his 1984 novel Neuromancer : "Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced
daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught
mathematical concepts. [...] A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of
every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in
the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data."5 While we read along, the
mind starts working this visual potential, rendering images and shaping meaning out of
the textual content; the process of transforming text, characters, descriptions of rooms
and things into virtual existence begins. Of course, the power of imagination depends on
the reader and this virtual existence is just the entrance to the halls of perception.
When you read a book, you create a sense of place, one may say it is even possible
to deal with poetics of space. Reading is part of our daily lives, and arguably we all read at
least chapters of a book either to our children or to ourselves once a week. It’s an
interactive engagement, although there is in reality no one physically to interact with, in
a make-belief act of reconstructing the lives and situations of the characters involved and
it’s only present when you let yourself go and immerse into the story; what takes place is
a transmutation of the signs of language into cinema for the mind. Magical realism, for
instance, is a powerful representative of this kind of immersive narrative. One distinctive
literary masterpiece, which breaks the traditional scheme of linearity and encourages the
imaginative participation of the reader, is Rayuela (Hospscotch) from Julio Cortazar: "I
touch your mouth. With one finger I touch the boundaries of your mouth. I am drawing it
as if it would originate out of my hand drawing, as if for the first time your mouth would
open and I only need to close my eyes to undo everything and start all over again."6
You visualize the narration. May it be drama, science fiction, terror, fantasy, any
literary genre lets you recreate the whole scene, lets you watch the story develop, even be
part of the possible outcomes and actualize what may be, what comes next. "The idea is
that you or any other reader must decide. The reader is the accomplice, he has to decide."7
This interaction with the characters and the plot and this make-believe effect, this
immersion capability, depends of course on the imagination of the reader as well as on the
immersive skills of the writer to be able to captivate and capture the reader’s attention.
Crime or detective fiction stories, for example, allow us to get involved easily in the plot,
to dive in and swim deep into this sea of identities and situations, extrapolating to a
virtual scene: "After a thorough investigation of every portion of the house, without
farther discovery, the party made its way into a small paved yard in the rear of the
building, where lay the corpse of the old lady, with her throat so entirely cut that, upon an
attempt to raise her, the head fell off. The body, as well as the head, was fearfully. To this
horrible mystery there is not as yet, we believe, the slightest clew."8 The same applies for
horror or mystery literary genres, although the necessary immersion to be able to believe
and reposition oneself in the darkness requires a great deal of mental effort: "The appeal
of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a
certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life."9
This virtualization of the text is possible by reading but also when you engage
yourself in an academical, profesional or friendly conversation. Any common
conversation taking place in a daily basis activates and nurtures this virtuality. You are
interacting not only verbally but also physically and you are narrating your own story,
telling it with gestures and body movement, creating a possible world that has to be
actualized in the receptor’s imagination. Socialize, interact, narrate and virtualize. Such
is the case of talking to the neighbor about the injustices of the world after reading the
newspaper, or retelling the adventure of how the dog chased the cat around the whole
house, rushing through tables and chairs, tumbling everything on their way. Banaly as it
may sound, these common daily interactions are exactly where virtual reality extends its
potential to become an instance of an imagined immersive space, a cyberspace. "There is
a sense in which cyberspace has become a new realm for the mind. In particular it has
become a new realm for the imagination; and even, as many cyber-enthusiasts now claim,
a new realm for the ‘self’."10
So the narrator and its tale potentiate a possible virtual environment deep inside
the self, where imagination rules the senses and not the other way around, the senses of
the self governing and demanding the attention and participation of imagination to render
words into images. Here the signifier is the key to immersion. Thus, imagination is
confronted with the virtual of the idiomatic expression: a potential to understand by
internally projecting an image of a possible world. This possible world is the context of the
story being listened to. It’s like learning to speak a foreign language and trying to link the
signifiers of the recently learned words with the correspondent stored image of those
words in our own language. Therefore, we attempt to assign a visual object to a new word
in order to remember it and be able to use it anytime it’s recalled in our mind. As a result
to this mental projection, like projections on head-mounted displays or on the walls within
an interactive installation, a collection of words connected to visual representations is
assembled; sort of virtually managing data space in our neuronal hard drive to constantly
update a vocabulary network that is supported by pictures to understand the context of a
narration. Sight is the predominant sense of all the human senses. Hence, the need to
always prefer a mental image: a picture is worth a thousand words they say, for which an
image is at the same time a visual narration. Seeing with the mind is an inviting way to
get to know how we think. This assertion of mine is in no sense a definition of what occurs
on everyone’s head when hearing a narration or reading a story, but a pure hypothesis of
what I believe happens in my own mind according to my own cognitive experience.
Nevertheless, image and mind are scientifically proven to be interconnected and to work
as a collective: Magnetic Resonance Imaging technology (MRI) provides dynamic scans of
the human brain in action, revealing that when people visualize a specific thing, patterns
of activation occur on the surface of their visual cortex, and these cortical patterns
preserve most of the geometric properties of the object being imaged. 11
Plato was an engaged and active teller of the classical greek time and many, if not
all, of his teachings and philosphical foundations are based on dialogues, which
correspond to a narrative form. He uses the sun as a metaphor for the source of
illumination in “The Republic”. On “The Allegory of the Cave” he envisioned the idea that
humans only see the shadows of what is real. "Imagine human beings living in an
underground den which is open towards the light; they have been there from childhood,
having their necks and legs chained, and can only see into the den. At a distance there is a
fire, and between the fire and the prisoners a raised way, and a low wall is built along the
way, like the screen over which marionette players show their puppets…and they see only
the shadows of the images which the fire throws on the wall of the den…Suppose now that
you suddenly turn them around and make them look with pain and grief to themselves at
the real images; will they believe them to be real?"12 According to Plato, knowledge is
contained within the intersection of that which can be both true and believed. If we then
apply Plato’s philosphy to the field of interactive media environment, or at least try to fit
it in, we end up entering a virtual reality environment. Thus, Plato was the first to create,
what we now know as, a virtual interactive space: the cave = the installation space; the
prisoners = the visitors , spectators or users; the screen = the medium projected; the
marionette players = the artists, performers, designers; the puppets = the animated
characters. And it is virtual because it never really physically and tangibly existed, no
stage, no actors, no solid objects to touch, see or play with. It began as a narration and
now it’s all written. A narration ignites a virtual experience that has to be actualized in
the mind, as a possible world recentered in existence according to your perspective,
relation and power of immersion.
The theory of possible worlds has been used to describe the logic of fictionality and
has been adapted to narrative semantics by Umberto Eco, Thomas Pavel and Lubomír
Dolezel.13 PW theory is a very controversial philisophical discourse and postulates the
possibility that the reader may be transported to the virtual reality of a textual world.
Moreover it proposes that the actual world is one of many possible worlds that exist. It
involves the idea that something is about to be but no one knows beforehand what it will
be. There is an objective reality and inside its boundaries actual worlds exist. These actual
worlds correspond to individual representations of reality, that means each one of us
contribute to the recontruction of how we perceive this objective reality and interact with
each other exchanging the bits of information we absorb from this objective reality. It’s a
whole universe where nonactual possible worlds gravitate around this objective reality,
but are still accessible if we push our imagination further enough to transport ourselves
outside this objectiveness. Consequently, we could say, immersion can be a method for
transportation. What PW theory indulges is the art to make believe, to give birth to a
recentered fictional universe. "The center is the actual world and around are satelites
conceived as merely possbile worlds. For a world to be possible, a so-called accessibility
relation must link it to the center. Impossible worlds cluster at the periphery,
conceptually part of it, since the possible is defined by contrast with the impossible."14
Without another to limit and define it, the concept of fiction loses its identity. That
is why for someone to cross the limits of what is actual and objective, to render virtual
worlds in our minds out of the information we collect and perceive, it is necessary to have
a solid and concrete referent. This referent must be true, authentic and original. There
has to be an opposition of virtual to actual, two sides of the coin, in order for human
knowledge to imagine what’s beyond, so that we know our position within the structures
of the system. But at the same time we strive to extrapolate our position outside the limits
to achieve the freedom of the mind, like the prisoners using their imagination on Plato’s
cave.
In this game of propositions of what is the real and what is the virtual, children
have the keys to the kingdom. Because the virtual does not really mean fake in the sense
that is not true, or that it doesn’t have a value, or even that it doesn’t exist. Fake is
opposed to authentic just as simulation is opposed to nature. Both (fake/authentic,
simulation/nature) exist nevertheless in objective reality because they need each other to
delimit their essence and know where one begins and the other ends. Children are genuine
artists faking identities by always playing this game of make believe, for they need to
learn by creating a world in which to play. And what is play if not a simulation? "To
simulate is to feign what one hasn’t. It implies an absence. Simulation threatens the
difference between true and false, between real and imaginary."15 They like role-playing
games, they assume the role of superheroes, fictional cartoon characters, even the role of
their parents, and the joy and hapiness is real because they transport themselves between
the real and the imaginary, they are free to laugh and not afraid of what is true and what
is false. It’s like they know that these virtual possible worlds are out there waititng to be
explored and imagined. Furthermore, kids energize their talent of becoming someone else
when they listen to bedtime stories. This is where they enter virtual reality. Emotions
increase when the good guy is about to fall in the trap of the bad guy or when the princess
is finally rescued by the hero. Children admire these ideal identities and sympathize with
the characters. Fictional narratives can elicit the same spectrum of emotional reactions
as real life situations: empathy, sadness, relief, laughter, fear. Hence the child recenters
his identity in this fictional universe because they easily let themselves go and immerse in
the plot as if it was happening in the moment it’s being narrated, they are there. They lose
track of time. This immersion is atemporal for they like some stories so much that they
want to hear them over and over again. They reproduce in their heads their favorite
characters and the complete cast of friends and foes if they are listening to the narration,
for that is the stimulus required to begin the act of imagination, the mental simulation.
Once the highlights of the narration find a steady position in memory, children can relive
the narrative experience whenever they want to. Repetition is a rhetorical device and also
a very important element in this virtual creation and codification of visual symbols.
The repetition of the code: "The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it
is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. At the limit of this process of
reproductibility, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always
already reproduced."16 According to Baudrillard, if I may dare to invite him to join my
discourse, simulation is ruled and controlled by the code, and that is where we live now: a
never-ending reproduction of images, objects of desire, information and even reproduction
of human rights (we have to buy a code in our passports to move from country A to
country B). The last phase of the evolution of the image is the present one: a reproduction
with no relation to any reality whatsoever, a commercialized non-stop consumption of bar
codes on a trip to the supermarket, or to be more contemporaneous, a one-click-away
purchase and a string of data is sent and instantly received confirming the shipment of
yet another product just like the many others stored on the shelves. The same occurs with
narration and the stories we like too much, we like to hear them over and over again, we
then tend to buy it, download it or simply copy it. Nevertheless there is also another way,
which is to remember what has been narrated to us and by means of photographic
memory render the words as images. Take for instance places we know. Once we have
visited Berlin or New York, we can teleport ourselves back anytime by buffering in our
memory an image that represents an intense personal experience of being in that city.
Thus, we visually narrate to ourselves the events that occurred in a linear fashion. We
begin to remember people’s faces, names of bars and restaurants, new words in the
vocabulary that we learned, flavours and odors. Most of the time that is what happen, we
relive the past in the present by remembering the succession of activities as a narration of
something that is not quite real and tangible but that we are sure existed because we lived
it. Hence, we contemplate here the empirical application of the narration in action as a
medium for the virtual creation of possibilities.
We live in simulacra because we live in our own mental models of reality. The
world is nothing more than an image perceived by me, by you and by everyone else. This
virtual image has no strict definition, overcomes its relationship to the false and to the
illusion. This virtual image does not oppose the real because it does not have to compete
with it nor resist it. On the contrary, it is a fertile source and powerful mode that enhances
the creation process, opens up the paths to a future that can be, and mediates the
understanding of what is ordinary and what is exceptional. The simulation of these
images we render in our heads is an acknowledgement of an abstract and spectral
telepresence of the things we collect with our senses. Opposed to the concrete and the
corporeal, a deterritorialization takes place in this mental simulation of apprehending the
components and the meaning of a narration. Virtuality is not nailed in time and space.
Actualization is a vessel moving from timelessness and deterritorialization to an
existence embedded in a here and now. Narrative as virtual reality is an event of
contextualization where humans reproduce the dissapearence of the real. "Syntax and
semantics have dissapeared – there is no longer apparition, but instead subpoena of the
object, severe interrogation of its scattered fragments – neither metaphor nor metonymy:
successive immanence under the policing structure of the look."17
A narrative exists when it promotes a credible, apparently autonomous and
language independent reality, when the fictional presentation of the personalities’ mood
and setting of the environment captures an aura of presence, when the reader is
imaginatively participating in the narration and senses that there is more to this world
than what the narrative portrays. Narrative, generally applied to our daily lives, is
ubiquitous and omnipresent; it exists because we are interactive beings who demand
attention and feedback to our expressions, to our emotions. To share is to destroy
loneliness. We like to share experiences, therefore we have evolved artistically and
pursued this technological apparatus in order to abandon the desert of einsamkeit and be
able to get interconnected. The propagation of forums and community websites, bred on
the simulated ecology of the Internet’s devil backbone, constitute the ultimate
globalization achievement in the breaking of political and physical borders; a mediated
sharing of opinions, reviews and discourses that enable multiple roundtrip destinations to
virtual places in the vast and open interconnectedness of avatars and anonymity.
In the standard Internet navigation structure, to click a hyperlink is to be
teletransported. One dissapears from one virtual space to abruptly appear in another
different one. A relevant comparison is to be online as opposed to be offline, it’s like
becoming virtual flatliners in cyberspace, crossing the borders of life and death whenever
we wish to. As we chat we extend our thoughts and messages beyond the reality of the
keyboard into the realm of binary conformity, and so we enter the narrative prose. As we
post new threads on our blog we extend the immediacy of ephimeral image making. As we
upload pictures and comment flash videos à la Web 2.0 we establish a semiotic chain of
multiple interpretations. "Semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse
modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different
regimes of signs but also states of things of different status. […] A semiotic chain is like a
tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic,
gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic
universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages. There is no
ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community.
[…]"18 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari introduced the philosophical approach of the
‘rhizome’ in A Thousand Plateaux as a complex interrelationship of all things changing
over time and their constant multiplicity condition in dimension and space. Diversed and
complicated as it may appear, the rhizome approximation of Deleuze and Guattari has
multiple ideologic applications in the fields of virtual space creation and new media. The
implications, as I see them, towards narrative as virtual reality are focused on the idea
that the conventional structures of language and the traditional idea of subject and object
are nowadays interchangeable and of multiple interpretations. They are being blurred by
the abstract and the personal perception of how a story can be fragmented, freely
interpreted, and from fragments multiply itself to be renewed in the imagination. It’s the
death of the author proposed by Barthes, supported by Foucault and imagined by Borges.
"Such blurring of boundaries between role and self present new opportunities to
use the role to work on the self. You are the character and you are not the character both
at the same time."19 To play a videogame is just like a child simulating a game of make
believe when he plays with his toy, narrating while moving the figure with his hand how
he is going to kill the bad guy and save the world. There has to be narrative in videogames,
because games are based on a reward system of goal achievements where the player
advances in the story by completing levels and quests. The player reads signs, clicks on
links and navigates around a world of possibilities to reveal the end of the story. It’s like
reading a book, only that the chapters in the book represent the levels in the game. The
act of playing virtualizes the experience of multiple destinations, teletransportation and
telepresence: recenterable possible worlds, as we immerse inside a narration, provide the
possible assumption that we are the identities involved in the plot of such narration.
Virtual identities are avatars in cyberspace, virtual realities in MUD’s and MMORPG. If we
compare the role-playing game phenomenon with the narrative phenomenon, we end up
realizing that there isn’t much difference between the two experiences at the core of how
they are originally established. There are characters, friends and foes, places and objects
and a story to be experienced, to be played. Now, how this story develops, depends
completely on the reader, this reader being the player. Players create avatars to destroy
real life inhibitions and insecurities. This way, without complexes, they are able to talk
with other people and socially interact with their avatars in this virtual world. A
reconstruction of the self in virtual reality comes into being. The player favors the
immersion in this ideal identity instead of the complications of real identity. All the
eventual fears and restrictions of failing in real life dissappear. It’s a fragmentation of
identities, in the case of hard-core players, that end up spending more time playing online,
interacting at the virtual level, than playing offline, interacting at the actual level: the
physical-mechanical world of real identities versus the electronic world of virtual
identities.
The concept of play is traditionally associated with the creative power of
imagination and the capability of immersion into possible worlds, possible feelings and
emotions. Creating a wellness state inside our bodies narrated by emotions is possible.
These same emotions that we create when we go to a funeral of a dear one, or when we cry
because of suffering or pain, are the emotions of a virtual process involving positive and
negative energies that actually affect the mood and health of a human being. There is
positive and negative feedback in every system exchanging information, thus in every
communication process like a narration, in theory of course, because that depends on the
subjects, objects and the entropy of the enviroment involved in such a process.
The power of suggestion as a medical therapy to help heal by immersing oneself
into thoughts of wellness and positive thinking is nowadays a common strategy practiced
in some hospitals but mostly in alternative healing centers. The healing power of the
imagination is a very controversial theme for conventional old-school medicine. In spite of
that, it has been proven through MRI and scientific research that when the doctor
receives a patient smiling, establishing a good connection, being friendly and, of course,
narrating how the treatment and the pills are going to effectively work in the body and
cure the disease, that’s when the patient starts believing in the words and virtualizes the
healing effects of the drugs. A biochemical respond in the brain is truly activated, or
rather stimulated, after a positive narrated diagnostic. The feeling of being healthy
manifests itself in certain cerebral regions when the doctor influences the patient with a
positive suggestion, and through this, the human body fights against illness and stress.
Whereas the placebo effect improves the healing of the immune system, the nocebo effect
aggravates the immune system. It’s like having the choice between being pessimistic or
being optimistic, no matter what the real consequences are, and this is when actualizing
the ‘feeling good’ or ‘feeling bad’ comes into play. The success of homeopathy, for example,
strongly depends on the healing belief and positivism of the patient, for which it highly
contrasts modern pharmaceutical treatment and has been thereon categorized as a
placebo treatment. On the other hand, there are patients that develop certain symptoms
out of reading the side effects of the drug they have to take without even really taking it,
therefore creating a nocebo effect in their organism out of imagining that it can be
dangerous.
To be or not to be healthy is often regarded as possesing weakness or strength in
the spirit, and spirituality is a matter of believing, of believing what we are told and what
is written. Religion is the best example of imagination, immersion and narrative as virtual
reality. Humans immserse in prayers and believe in gods, just like repositioning oneself in
possible fictional worlds when reading a book or hearing a story, empathizing with
characters and imagining that they exist. The Bible, The Coran, The Bhagavad Gita, The
Teachings of Buddha, they are all narrations, books that need to be experienced, they will
tell you, not only read. The spirit is intangible and invisible, but is after all part of what we
are as human beings, is part of our need to believe in something beyond our
understanding. The beyond is only attainable by total dettachment of reality, of entering
this trance state and letting oneself go from objective thinking and rationality, just like
truly enjoying and immersing in a narration. Spiritual matters are those involving
humankind's ultimate nature not merely as material biological organisms but as beings
with a unique relationship to that which is beyond both time and material existence.
Therefore, we can speak of the spirit as a virtual disembodiment. Something that cannot
be completely proven by science or technology but that somehow is permanent in the
human mind as an ultimate resource and relief when the material is no longer meaningful.
At the end of the humankind spiral for this quest of knowledge, there lies spirituality, a
virtual reality accessible through imagination and immersion by the many religions and
faiths of the world.
So what is Narrative As Virtual Reality at the end? Is nothing more than
everything in anything: the narration of a lifetime, an online adventure in the digital
jungle of a videogame, the act of sharing a story because you are happy, falling in love
with the female character of a fictional novel, writing a web blog posting tales of how to
dress for carnival, explaining to the police how you got robbed while you were sleeping in
the train, telling lies about your age to a stranger in a bar, reading a script in front of a
casting agent to play the main role in a movie, saying hello to the neighbor while eating
breakfast, reading a manifest out loud on the streets, listening to the radio on a foreign
language, reading poetry at the top of a mountain, hearing an old man story of how he
survived war, hearing your grandmother complain about the prices in the supermarket,
listening how your sister talks for hours on the phone, chating online your best friend
about the first time you had sex, planing a football strategy on how to win the game with
your teammates, presenting the storyboard for a new commercial to the client, reading
the newspaper while you wait at the bus stop and it’s raining outside, giving directions to
a turist in a city where you are also a turist, teaching your daughter how to build a sand
castle, screaming to your wife why you came late last night, reading the instructions on
how to disconnect a bomb without pictures, reading a cooking recipe on how to bake
apfelstrudel without pictures, reading the critic reviews of a movie that you will never go
to see.
Narrative As Virtual Reality represents a conceptual approach to the social
understanding of how technology is becoming more and more invisible and embedded in
our daily life interaction with people, not just with machines or digital characters on the
screen of the computer. Narrative As Virtual Reality points to the signifier and its many
interpretations, not the actual meaning of things. Narrative As Virtual Reality becomes
what will be experienced when we try to understand what the other is saying to us.
Narrative As Virtual Reality is giving and receiving mental images. Narrative As Virtual
Reality is being anyone in the narration. Narrative As Virtual Reality is traveling in a
book, going to different places and enjoying the reading as we immerse in it. Narrative As
Virtual Reality is using the imagination in any textual context or spoken situation to
render all the possible spaces and perspectives that can exist based on the words we read
or hear. Narrative As Virtual Reality is being creative and playful in knowing how to use
your imagination in order to actualize the other possible realities around your reality.
Narrative As Virtual Reality is forgetting about the digital world and the technology
surrounding it, to fully immerse into a world of possibilites in the very own landscape of
the mind.
1 Ryan, Marie-Laure, Narrative As Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and
Electronic Media, Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
2 Ibid.
3 Pimentel, Ken and Teixeira, Kevin, Virtual Reality: Through The New Looking Glass, New York:
Windcrest, 1994.
4 Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine,
Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1948.
5 Gibson, William, Neuromancer, New York: The Berkeley Publishing Group, 1984.
6 Cortazar, Julio, Rayuela, Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1968.
7 Interview conducted in Saignon, France, 10-13 July 1973, excerpted from Evelyn Picon Garfield's
book, Cortazar por Cortazar, Mexico: Universidad Veracruzana, 1978.
8 Allan Poe, Edgar, The Murders In The Rue Morgue, New York: Modern Library, 2006.
9 Lovecraft, H.P., Supernatural Horror in Literature, A Project Gutenberg of Australia (eBook), 2006.
10 Wertheim, Margaret, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet,
London: Virago, 1999.
11 Kosslyn, Stephen M., Sensorium: embodied experience, technology and contemporary art (edited by
Caroline A. Jones), Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006.
12 Plato, The Republic (translated by Benjamin Jowett), The Project Gutenberg Etext:
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext98/repub11.txt, 1998.
13 Ryan, Marie-Laure, Narrative As Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and
Electronic Media, Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
14 Ibid.
15 Baudrillard, Jean, Simulations, New York: Semiotext, 1983.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1980.
19 Turkle, Sherry, Constructions and Reconstructions of The Self in Virtual Reality (from the book Electronic Culture – Technology and Visual Representation), New York: Aperture, 1996.