By now the virtual reality mantra is familiar: the dematerialized body,
immersion in an artificial or alternate world, and the notion of a
living machine or cyborg that "mirrors" the emotional responses of
actual human beings. In fact, the virtual/actual dichotomy provides a
readymade theoretical outline for any lecturer to provide his or her own
examples of how a technified world will either create alienating
displacements that further estrange us from our emotions and sensations
of physical touch, or more hopefully, provide us with cautionary tales
of how we can maintain a sense of physical authenticity and willed
agency in a world shifting toward extrinsic information as clues to our
humanity. Margaret Morse, Professor of New Media at the University of
California at Santa Cruz presented "Virtualities: Body Fictions," as
part of UC Berkeley's "Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium,"
attempting to describe VR as a "fiction of presence" with its own rules
differing from those of theater, film, and the novel.

What Morse forgot to do is gauge the level of the series' discourse
based on the previous lecturers. Julia Scher of the MIT Visual Studies
department delivered "Predictive Engineering & the Cult of
Surveillance," while Carlo Sequin of the UC Berkeley Computer Science
department presented "Mathematics Based Virtual and Real Sculpture."
Clearly, this series was not designed for the uninitiated, but what
transpired was the equivalent of being the keynote speaker at a
Sega/Nintendo convention and heralding the innovations of Pong.

Morse's stuttering, scattered style resembles the sliced and spliced
sampling of turntable wizard DJ Shadow, which is not to say that her
rhymes flow. Skipping incoherently from visuals of a dancing Stelarc in
a skeletal datasuit, to Derrida's essay "Archive Fever" where he
elaborates on Freud's notion of the memory as the mystic writing tablet
(implying that e-mail has created a compartmentalized archive of memory)
Morse had people scratching their heads and groping for connections. The
idea of the memory as archive is hardly revolutionary, no more so for
Derrida's having pointed it out. This example however, perfectly
illustrates Morse's reliance on artist's and other theorist's works as
if they had some inherent, talismanic quality that excused her from
elaborating further and weaving them into a cohesive idea.

Morse is careful to provide visuals from the 70's, 80's, and 90's as
well as high and low culture. We see Spock shot into cyberspace in Star
Trek Voyager as a utopian sci-fi metaphor for the collective
unconscious, alongside Peter Campus' "Three Transitions," whereby he
gouges out his own bluescreen image murkily acknowledging some
transcendent point on self-erasure and the mirror image vs. the
replicated image–or for Blade Runner fans, the replicant. Morse
briefly invokes Lacan's words on the "body as a whole in the mirror
stage" and then mumbles something offhandedly about the inversion of
narcissism. Confused? You should be. Morse goes on to describe a
joystick controlled jigsaw puzzle of the globe operated by two people
from remote locations as an "erotic dance" because after all, what
lecture on art would be complete without a passing nod to the erotics of
cyberspace and the politics of desire.

When Morse describes two blue screen beds that are blended together on a
monitor creating the stage for a "virtual courtship," we get closer to
understanding the dynamic between the felt body vs. the seen body. As
fingers approach each other we can imagine the real embodied sensation
of a phantom limb, expecting it to resonate like the crackling eroticism
of the Sistine Chapel-a slowly rising libidinal tug, the weightless
euphoria of erotic anticipation. This is the spectral world of the
imagination, where romantic longings and urges strain to find release.
Instead, Morse abandons literary metaphors and bombards us with
unsubstantiated labels like "personal biosphere," "skin ego," and
"movement personality," using a jargon that flatters and protects the
notion of her expertise in this nascent field.

When discussing aerobics, a topic Morse has addressed in her writings on
popular culture, she makes the analogy between multiple personalities
and multiple bodies. She's right at home describing the warped,
unnatural alignment of the aerobicized body created by counterintuitive,
repetitive movements that limit the self-expressive mechanics of the
body. By monitoring one's progress in a mirror, moment to moment, the
constant reinforcement of a flat, 2-D image leads to a kind of
depthless, disjointed body-a schizophrenic break with the real. The
immersive euphoria of the 3-D virtual world actually leads to the
sensation of a more connected body. Picture yourself floating through
the ether rather than bouncing up and down to Janet Jackson and you'll
have an idea of what she means.

One wishes she would have begun her discussion with this example rather
than recasting the VR debate in the terms of early 90's body art, and
digressing into the, by now, rote differences between information
society and cyber culture. For me, the pairing of Captain Picard and
Nauman's "Corridor" along with a collage of other images doesn't
convince me that fictional representations of VR are ubiquitous, or that
the high/low divide has suddenly become more permeable–nor should it.
Like all fictions, virtual or otherwise, I'm looking for an organizing
existential principle-one that recognizes that works of art will always
lack cultural transparency, existing as they do as compensatory guides
for our prodigal desires, but which casts light on the hidden regions of
my emotional life.

+ + +

David Hunt (davidhunt@ap.net) is a San Francisco-based writer whose work
can be found in Flash Art, Sculpture, World Art, Wirednews, and Artweek.
The lecture "Virtualities: Body Fictions" was given last week as part of
UC Berkeley's Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium.