The Nature of the Virtual Experience
Marcos Novak’s “Transarchitecture” attempts to prepare for the ascendancy of virtual space as our principal architecture. He notes that the “alien” used to be experiences that were outside of a community; the ability of virtual reality to spatially manifest our ideas means that “we will discover the alien that is so near as to be outlandish. We will become citizens in the spaces of our varied consciousnesses.”20
N. Katherine Hayles describes the phenomenon as the ascendancy of pattern over presence. She describes the posthuman as a “coupling so intense and multifaceted that it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the information circuits in which it is enmeshed.”21 Frances Dyson explores aurality and the phenomenology of sound as a tool for understanding virtual reality’s interest in immersion. Like sound, VR enables the consideration of nondualistic, non-Cartesian modes of experience:
Like virtuality, the phenomenal invisibility, intangibility, multiplicity, and existential flux of sound challenges an understanding of the real based upon the visible, material, and enduring object. Sound cannot be held for close examination, nor can it be separated from the aural contin- uum and given a singular identity. In a constant state of becoming, sound comes into and goes out of existence in a manner that confounds ontological representation. Similarly, being both heard outside and felt within, sound blurs the distinction between the interior and exterior of the body, annihilating the distance between subject and object, self and other.