DIGITISATION AND MATERIALITY FORUM Material Object, Virtual Spaces
George P. Landow · 2008
To the question, ‘What happens to the properties of the material object in a virtual space?’ one has to reply, ‘Why nothing, of course’, because properties of the material object can never literally, physically, enter a virtual space; by definition they’re material (physical, hard), and virtual space — if it is in fact best described as a space in the way we usually use that term — is virtual, a matter of what Diane Balestri called softmedia, a matter of ‘as if’. I begin with this act of pedantry because to do so reminds us of how language — with its built-in assumptions about the nature of reality — often leads us astray when we come to discuss computer-based digital text, sound and images. Of course, we’ve been living with the virtual for a very long time — long, long before Babbage. The Oxford English Dictionary defines virtual as ‘that [which] is so in essence or effect, although not formally or actually; admitting of being called by the name so far as the effect or result is concerned’, and in terms of computers it means ‘not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so from the point of view of the program or the user.’ Our uses of the term virtual and virtuality derive from optics, in particular from the distinction between real and virtual images. The Encyclopaedia Britannica article on optics explains that ‘virtual images are made by rays that do not actually come from where the image seems to be’, so virtuality, in other words, is independent of place, location independent (which should make it, by definition, independent of space). It should, perhaps, be independent, but in fact we have long created impossible spaces (and lived with them) because they serve a purpose — that is, they serve a particular ideology or echo conscious and unconscious assumptions about the way the world should be. Take for example, Raphael’s The Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Nicholas of Bari (c. 1505), which depicts three adult figures and the child Jesus in a physical space that not only obeys the laws of perspective but also deploys cast shadows, anatomical correctness, and other details that are realistic in the