Style is a music video for a song taken from the Tamil (India) film Sivaji: The Boss (Shankar, 2007) with Rajnikanth in the lead role.
It was filmed in Spain and features several contemporary projects of famous architects. Among them are Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Musem in Bilbao, Santiago Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, and Rafael Moneo’s Kursaal Congress Center in San Sebastian.
There are also a few others… anyone recognize them?
What is a ‘virtual gallery’ or a ‘virtual museum’? Despite the widespread use of these terms, they rarely truly match what they attempt to describe. Commonly, the term ‘virtual gallery’ is used for regular websites that present a collection of works of art or some other form of images. The use of the word ‘gallery’ here is then a way of describing a service which displays visual content to the public, and the use of the word ‘virtual’ simply indicates that rather than doing so within a physical setting, it does so through the Internet instead.
However, according to The Virtual Space Theory, there is nothing virtual about that: ‘Virtual’ does not mean ‘digital’ or ‘Internet-based’, and it certainly does not mean ‘non-real’; Rather, the term ‘virtual’ describes visual objects that are located in virtual space, as opposed to being located in physical space or in someone’s mental space. Therefore, most of the so-called ‘virtual galleries’ are actually not virtual at all – they are simply online galleries (furthermore, we could even argue that they are not quite galleries either, but actually much closer to picture books).
So what would a real ‘virtual gallery’ look like, then? To begin with, we could say that if an online gallery does more than just present images in form of a regular web page, but actually also creates a virtual place in which the images are hanging on its walls, then we could also call it a ‘virtual gallery’. And yet, there is much more that is possible. Consider this very interesting example:
This video is called Peripetics and it was made by a team called Zeitguised using Computer-Generated imaging programs. It won the “Best Experimental/Abstract Animation” award at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, and the “Best 3D Animated Film” award at the Hyde Tube Festival in Paris.
From the point of view of The Virtual Space Theory, what I find to be most fascinating about this video is that it provides the unusual experience of visiting an art installation which is set in virtual space. Most of the six acts of this video are made to appear like a filmed documentation of a gallery space with works exhibited in it – except that it only exists in virtual space. Moreover, the virtual nature of this gallery is fully utilized just as well: The exhibits presented in each scene would hardly have been possible to produce as a physical installation in a physical gallery. The result is an art experience that would be quite unimaginable to achieve in any other way. Perhaps this art form should be called ‘virtual installation art’.
In addition to demonstrating a real ‘virtual gallery’, this example emphasizes a few further points. First, it shows that a virtual gallery does not necessarily need to be an interactive online service – in this case, it is rather realized as a video. Second, the contents of a virtual gallery do not have to be limited only to images – any object that could be created and put into the space of a virtual gallery could form the contents of an art exhibition in virtual space. And third, given the right context (as seen in some of this video’s acts), it might even be possible to present the content of such an exhibition also without the need for a virtual gallery as its setting.
The approach of The Virtual Space Theory is to present a different way of thinking about familiar topics, as well as to bring together topics that might otherwise be considered mostly unrelated. This theory, however, is neither true nor false – it is simply a model of thought. Its goal is to provide a tool with which it might be possible to understand and explain phenomena that might not be explainable by other ways of thinking.
To clarify what I mean by the term ‘a model of thought’, a useful analogy is that of the different ways physicist have developed for explaining various phenomena. For example, from my secondary school days, I clearly remember studying the challenge of classical physics with regard to determining what the phenomenon of light might actually be: is it a wave or a particle? On one hand, some behaviors of light (such as interference or polarization) suggest that it can only be a wave: the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. On the other hand, the fact that light has energy and momentum (such as in the photo-electric effect) suggests that it can only be a particle: a flow of photons.
So which is it, then? I do not have the conclusive answer, and as far as I know, neither do physicists. The point of this example is not to try to engage you in the study of light in physics, but rather to demonstrate the power and value of having alternative models of thought to choose from.
In the case of The Virtual Space Theory, the subjects being tackled are pictorial mediums and virtuality. Its opening conditions are: A wide range of mediums – old and new – each with their separate theories, and the widely undefined topic of virtuality. Its tasks: To present an alternative model of thought that would be equally applicable to all pictorial mediums, as well as provide a consistent definition of virtuality.
The cost? In its proposed model, The Virtual Space Theory marginalizes the importance of technique, and disregards matters of style, meaning, or the social role of pictorial images – which happen to be at the heart of most existing media theories (as well as the main dividing factor between mediums). However, even though this theory does not address such issues, it does not necessarily negate them either – it rather recontextualizes them.
For example, let’s take the matter of the meaning of symbols in pictorial images, and demonstrate it using Arnold Böcklin’s symbolist painting The Isle of the Dead from 1883:
Now, let’s also consider the following video:
These two examples are from different mediums, and as such, they might normally require very different theories in order to discuss them. Yet from the point of view of The Virtual Space Theory they are just two types of windows towards the same virtual place. Therefore, whatever the symbolic meaning of the cypresses you see, it is no longer associated with the art object of the painting or the video, but is rather to be found inside of virtual space. Deciphering what such symbols might mean, however, is a task that is left to other existing theories.
