For many people, the word ‘virtual’ stands for anything that is seemingly unreal, elusive, or intangible, yet maintains some kind of existence on some other level of reality. In other words, it is something that exists on a metaphysical level. This can be related to the idea of alternative realities parallel to ours; or to the view that the world in which we live might be nothing more than a figment of our imagination; or to any of a series of philosophies that question the way we understand the world.
Many of the other uses of the word ‘virtual’ have a somewhat metaphysical sense as well. For example, ‘virtual’ is sometimes used to describe the level of existence of things that are experienced through sound, or the type of reality we experience when we read a book. In quite a similar way, ‘virtual’ is commonly used to describe our experiences when we browse the web, send an email or a text message, or even speak on the phone.
In all these cases there seems to be some other dimension in which the contents of these experiences exist – beyond the vibrations in the air, the printed letters on the paper, or the electric signals running through computers – and we don’t quite have a name for it. So the word ‘virtual’, with its inherent ambiguity, often satisfies us as a faint replacement for a more accurate description of what is actually going on. This is how the whole notion of the ‘virtual’ ended up being entangled with both computers and metaphysics, and how computer technology became perceived as the source of yet another metaphysical phenomenon.
While all these topics may be related to the discussion of virtual space, they are not at the core of what this blog is about. What this blog is about are pictorial images.
The simple fact that we can look at an array of pixels on a screen (or blotches of paint on canvas) and see a visible world through it is already an astonishing phenomenon in itself. It is precisely that phenomenon that The Virtual Space Theory considers to be the essence of virtuality. By using the term ‘virtual space’, then, what is referred to is the notion of an overall visible space that is created by the sum of all pictorial images, of all mediums.
Some readers might feel that this very definition of virtual space is in itself already a metaphysical statement. Maybe. But I doubt that it will grant me admission into the Metaphysicists’ Club. 
After all, for a metaphysical idea, its contents are too empirical, too measurable, and too tangible. Yet that is exactly what The Virtual Space Theory is proposing: Let’s bring the idea of virtuality out of metaphysics, and let metaphysics deal with metaphysical ideas.
