A Current Virtualization of Reality? N. Katherine Hayles: “We live in a virtual condition”

1. A Current Virtualization of Reality? • N. Katherine Hayles: “We live in a virtual condition” • Postmodern culture as being characterized by its virtualization of both reality and what has traditionally been seen as virtual? After virtualization, culture is potentialized in a certain way. • Pierre Lévy: A general virtualization of reality, i.e. virtuality as a general cultural condition

2. What is Virtuality? • The concept of virtuality in computer science: Virtuality as a set of levels of derived/”higher” languages of programming, e.g. BASIC, C • The popular sense of virtuality, culture, and computer media: The virtual as simulation or derivation/perversion, e.g. “a virtual romance”

3. Virtuality in Philosophy • The history of the concept of virtuality: - potentiality versus simulation/”fake” • (Lat.) virtualis: potentiality (deprived of existence) • Aristotle: in potentia vs. in actu • The Scholastics: a dialectical rather than a radically oppositional relationship between the virtual and the actual (e.g. virtuality as the seed of a tree)

4. Virtuality in Philosophy • The modern concept of virtuality: • The negative to the real; non-existent, not actual • Optically defined as an illusionary, ghostly existence • “To be a virtual dictator”: Almost like a dictator; yet not really a dictator • The virtual/the fake celebrated by Decadence owing to a mistrust of the “natural” • The virtual/fake in post-modernity taken for fundamental for aesthetic pleasure

5. Virtuality in Cyberculture Studies • Two fundamental positions in the study of cyber culture: The virtual as fake (“negative”) or the virtual as potential (“positive”) • Two reactions to the virtual as fake: • - 1. a generel rejection of the virtual as fake • - 2. scepticism as for the so-called “real life” (RL) and its claimed authenticity compared to “virtual life” (social intercourse in cyberspace)

6. Pierre Lévy: Virtualization Pierre Lévy: ”Rigorously defined, the virtual has few affinities with the false, the illusionary, the imaginary. The virtual is not at all the opposite of the real. It is, on the contrary, a powerful and productive mode of being, a mode that gives free rein to creative processes.”

7. Pierre Lévy: • Virtual/Actual/Actualization • 1. The relation of the virtual to the actual is one to many: There is no limit on the number of possible actualizations of a virtual entity. • 2. The passage from the virtual to the actual involves transformation, and is therefore irreversible. Lévy: “Actualization is an event, in the strong sense of the term”

8. Pierre Lévy: • Virtual/Actual/Actualization ... • 3. The virtual is not anchored in space and time. Actualization is the passage from a state of timelessness and deterritorialization to an existence rooted in a here and now. It is an event of contextualization. • 4. The virtual is an inexhaustible resource. Using it does not lead to its depletion.

9. Lévy: Possible/Real, Virtual/Actual 5. Lévy: ”The real resembles the possible. The actual, however, in no way resembles the virtual. It responds to it.” Matrix featuring the conceptualized dichotomies in Lévy (derived from Félix Guatarri: Chaosmose)

10. Lévy: Virtualization Lévy: ”Virtualization is not derealization (the transformation of a reality into a collection of possibles) but a change of identity, a displacement of the center of ontological gravity of the object considered” ”Actualization proceeds from problem to solution, virtualization from a given solution to a (different) problem.”

11. Lévy: Virtualization Lévy: ”The virtualization of a given entity consists in determining the general question to which it responds”. After virtualization, the ”entity … finds its essential consistency within a problematic field.” E.g.: ”The virtualization of the corporation consists primarily in transforming the spatiotemporal coordinates of work into a continuously renewed problem rather than a stable solution”

12. Virtualization of Place • Cyberplace as ethereal, or mediated place in cybergeography: - seemingly not a technical, but an epistemological and most likely also a cultural condition of place. • Cyberplace seen as already constituted epistemologically and phenomenologically and still something that is to be; a place which ”contains” its problematic of mediation

13. Virtualization of Place • Staged place in Superflex: A re-vitalized, but also re-constituted ”art place”: One finds oneself there again in the world being staged, or mediated by art. • Art place as already being constituted institutionally, yet still something that is to be; a place which ”contains” its problematic of culture