The Virtual Space Theory

The topics discussed in The Virtual Space Theory are often very theoretical, yet this does not mean that the discussion about them needs to remain detached or purely academic. Rather, its approach is – whenever possible – to reinforce the presentation of any theoretical idea with a matching visual example: a painting, a photograph, a video, etc.

For example, in the book there is a large section which addresses Western culture’s fascination with the possibility of experiencing other worlds that may lie beyond the physical world in which we live. This is a vast topic, which can be – and surely has been – debated on from various psychological, sociological, and philosophical points of view. However, in the book I chose to approach the topic from the point of view of how it has been expressed in popular culture, and particularly in film.

This method of presenting a theory provides challenging examples with which to question the discussion and drive it forward. In the particular case given here, it demonstrates the central role of the pictorial arts in this cultural dream of accessing other worlds, and leads to conclusions which might not have been arrived at otherwise. The following are film trailers for two of the films which are involved in this discussion.

The film The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1985) provides an example of crossing-over from a film into the physical world:

The film Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988) provides a curious example where a crossing-over from film into the physical world is not even necessary:

The approach of basing a theoretical discussion on visual examples has several reasons that support it. First of all – especially in the book – the visual contents form the counterpart to the theory anyhow, and are therefore just as relevant to the discussion. Second, as an author, following this approach makes sure that I do not get lost in the high spheres of pure theory, and that I keep The Virtual Space Theory anchored in what it was actually developed for: a theory of the pictorial image. Third, for the readers, it broadens the discussion from being just an abstract academic debate, thus inviting into it anyone who is interested in its subject matter – yet without compromising the depth of its analysis. And finally, it is simply much more fun.

The topic of virtuality and virtual space is one of the most confused fields in contemporary culture, to the point that, for many people, its elusiveness is considered to be an inherent part of its nature. From such a point of view, any attempt to define virtuality is considered to be pointless, since what defines it – so it would seem – is precisely that it cannot be defined. However, that is not the point of view of The Virtual Space Theory.

The Virtual Space Theory is based on the approach that our ability to understand anything (as opposed to experiencing it) is enabled by the language we have for describing it. Furthermore, any viable communication is dependent on the accuracy of the language as well. And so, if we experience confusion with respect to a certain aspect of the world or its phenomena, what we need is to first sort out the language we have for it. Therefore, the core of The Virtual Space Theory is the creation of a systematic language capable of handling the complexities of virtuality and the whole range of phenomena that are related to it. Once the language is sorted out in such a way, a clear understanding of what is going on follows it almost automatically.

The first step to creating a systematic use of language is a careful and consistent choice of words, down to their finest details. For example, an expression such as “a virtual place that is found in a painting” might seem completely harmless at first. However, in some contexts, it might actually defy the principles of The Virtual Space Theory: Since this theory proposes that a painting is a window to virtual space, then by definition nothing can be located in the painting. Rather, there are dabs of paint on the canvas, which create a virtual place that can be seen through the painting. The location of this place, then, is in virtual space. A major difference – arising just from the use of different prepositions: ‘in’, ‘on’, and ‘through’.

The second step to creating a systematic use of language is to define terms that might not have existed before, or to tighten the definition of relatively loose terms. For example, in many texts discussing similar topics, expressions such as ‘virtual place’, ‘virtual world’, and ‘virtual space’ are often used interchangeably as if their meaning were the same. According to The Virtual Space Theory, however, these are three distinct phenomena: A virtual place is the place you see through a particular pictorial image; A virtual world is a set of virtual places which are presented in a context which suggests that they are continuous with respect to each other (such as different scenes in a film); And virtual space is the overall visible space that contains all virtual places and all virtual worlds (whether they are continuous to each other or not).

Such a tight use of language sometimes leads to expressions that may sound a bit strange, or not quite ‘correct English’ at times. The point, however, is that the use of language in The Virtual Space Theory is not so much descriptive as it is generative. It is unlike most forms of writing, where the words are merely an approximate description of an essence that already exists outside of them. This kind of writing, in contrast, requires absolute precision, since the essence of what it discusses is formed by the words themselves. Consequently, when such a demanding procedure is successful, a clearly formed language can lead to a more clearly understandable world.

One of the basic approaches of The Virtual Space Theory is that it separates the discussion of pictorial phenomena from that of the technical procedures used to create them.

Let’s take the following TV commercial as an example:

A common reaction many people have when watching it, especially for the first time, is to immediately ask “How did they do that?” or “Is it real?” In other words, the improbability of seeing thousands of colorful balls bouncing down the sloped streets of San Francisco makes us wonder what it is exactly that we are seeing. Is it a filmed report of an actual event, or some computer-generated wizardry? Before I give the answer, let’s take a look at one more video:

As you might have guessed by now, the first video was filmed on location in San Francisco, and the technique which was used for it was to dump rubber balls from trucks located further uphill. The second video is computer-generated, demonstrating a real-time rendering application called Cryengine (‘real-time’ means that rather than preparing the images in advance, such software is capable of producing each frame of this video as it is viewed – or roughly in 0.04 seconds).

And yet, from the point of view of The Virtual Space Theory, the virtual places created by these videos are essentially identical. In both cases, what we see is a virtual space version of San Francisco with colorful balls bouncing down its streets [update 02/2010: The CG video originally discussed here is no longer available, so I replaced it with another version of it which shows bouncing teapots instead of balls, but the principle remains the same]. Just like in the case of the Eiffel Tower discussed in an earlier post, the fact that the first video was filmed in San Francisco, does not make the physical city of San Francisco somehow float behind your computer screen. In both of them, all you are actually seeing is a virtual place which looks like San Francisco. The only difference between them is in their techniques of production.

Now let’s extend the point further to also cover the phenomenon of motion, by using another example from the same series of TV commercials:

The question, this time, is whether or not there actually are colored plasticine bunnies hopping about sidewalks in New York City. The visual style of this video hints to us that it was made using the stop-motion technique, since the movement of the bunnies is continuous, whereas that of the passers-by and shadows is rather erratic. In the physical city of New York, then, what was actually there were pre-made models of bunnies in different poses, which were interchanged and moved around by the film crew in between the shootings of each frame. The hopping bunnies you just saw as a result, however, are not and never were in physical New York. These are virtual bunnies, and they exist only in virtual space – as part of the virtual New York City of this TV commercial.

Therefore, as you watch the following final video, see if you can look at it beyond the automatic tendency to ask “…but how did they do it?!” Instead, how about considering it to be nothing more than a visual Concerto for Paint and Apartment Blocks played out inside of a virtual place in virtual space. From the point of view of this discussion, then, you might find that the answer to your question about the technique is another question:

“Does it really matter…?”

For most people, whenever the word ‘architecture’ comes up, the first thing that comes to mind is buildings: Apartment blocks or luxurious villas, seats of power or places of worship, public monuments or hang-out places – along with any other kind of man-made place that makes up the physical world in which we live. Additionally, for anyone who is somewhat familiar with this field, the word ‘architecture’ also stands for anything that has to do with the process of making such places: The mental search for ideas, the experiments in sketches and scale-models, the production of plans, sections, and elevations, and the visual expression of the resulting vision in the form of pictorial images.

These, however, are not the kinds of architecture that this blog is about.

There is a whole other kind of architecture that is hardly ever discussed. That is the architecture that generates and inhabits the space we see through pictorial media. It is the kind of architecture that is to be found in images that are totally unrelated to the process of planning, building, or discussing physical architecture. It is a kind of architecture that is very familiar to most of us, except that we seldom stop think of it as being architecture.

At first glance, it might seem that to consider buildings in pictorial images as forming a distinct kind of architecture is a bit of an exaggeration. After all, if we look at the history of art, for example, aren’t the buildings we see in paintings nothing more than a copy of the buildings that the painter saw right in front of him?

The above painting by Gustave Caillebotte is surely architecturally rich, but isn’t the architecture in it actually a documentation of a particular place in 19th-century Paris? The mere posing of this question expresses our romantic notion of the painter standing in front of an easel somewhere in the outdoors with a brush and palette in his hand. However, from a historical perspective, this way of perceiving art and artists is less than 150 years old: It is a legacy of the Impressionist movement, of which this painting is a prime example.

Up until that time, painters were mostly confined to their studios, laboring at the creation of images worthy of the revered title of ‘Art’, and guided by a set of high ideals and accepted principles for achieving it. It was precisely the Impressionists who urged painters to go out into the open air and simply paint what they see. For centuries before that, painters usually had to generate the space of their paintings and their visual content completely on their own – including the architecture in them.

For example, the above painting by Sandro Botticelli is surely rich in architecture, but you would be hard pressed to find the particular place seen in it anywhere in Italy. Not because it has not been preserved through history – but because it has probably never even existed in the first place. Some of the architectural elements in it may be direct copies of existing physical places, but others are merely a free variation on a physical place, and some are altogether invented for the sake of the painting. They were then all joined into a single composition, designed as a suitable setting for presenting the story the painter wanted to depict. In the creation of this place, therefore, Botticelli was not only its painter, but he also assumed the role of its architect.

While this point was demonstrated here using the case of paintings, the idea that is proposed by The Virtual Space Theory is that the same applies also to any other type of pictorial image – photography, film, computer-generated imagery, and so on: The places that are seen through them, in many cases, could very well be considered to be works of architecture in and of themselves. After all, in order for us to even be able to perceive them in terms of space, such places must have first been mentally envisioned, carefully planned, and meticulously executed.

That is the kind of architecture this blog is about.