For many people, the word ‘virtual’ instantly brings computers to mind, and the term ‘virtual space’ conjures images of a vague mix of the Internet, cyberspace, and Virtual Reality. Indeed, computers have introduced countless abstract and intangible phenomena into our lives, and the media hype around them has stirred our imagination as to what they might mean, and what the future may bring. In such discussions, the word ‘virtual’ tends to come up quite often. And yet, this blog is not about any of these. In fact, the common linking of virtuality to such phenomena is precisely one of the views that this blog sets out to challenge.
What this blog is about are pictorial images. From paintings and drawings, to photographs and films, to video games and the unending new technologies, The Virtual Space Theory proposes an alternative way of seeing what pictorial images are. This is clearly expressed in its sub-title ‘an alternative theory of the pictorial image’.
According to The Virtual Space Theory, whenever you look at a pictorial image of any kind, your eyes may be looking at a physical object in the physical world, but what you are seeing through this object is not part of the physical world. For example, when you look at the photograph on the right, your eyes are staring at your computer screen and its colored pixels, which are part of the physical world in which you live. And yet, the tower that you are seeing is not in the physical world: Even though there may be a tower just like it which is physically built somewhere, the particular tower in front of you at this moment does not occupy physical space in the sense that it is hovering behind your computer screen. So, where is it then?
The Virtual Space Theory proposes that what you see in a pictorial image is located in a space which we could call ‘virtual space’. This virtual space is not just the space of that particular picture, but rather the overall space of all pictures, and of all pictorial mediums. This is quite a far-reaching idea, and it is the task of this blog to address the multiple aspects of this idea and the questions that it brings up.
When adopting such an interpretation of what pictorial images are, one of the topics that naturally comes up is the role of computer graphics technologies. So in that sense, yes, absolutely, computers will be mentioned in some of the posts: One of the categories that are already planned for this blog is called ‘digital technologies’. Yet the central topic of the blog remains pictorial images themselves, and the space that is made available to us through them.
