The Virtual Space Theory

If you visited the section of this website which describes the book and went through its table of contents, you probably came across a peculiar word: contextography. This is a term which is introduced by The Virtual Space Theory in order to address some of the questions that inevitably arise due to its alternative approach to pictorial images and virtuality.

The Virtual Space Theory accepts digital technology’s victory in producing photorealistic images and therefore approaches the question of how to differentiate between pictorial images by shifting the discussion to virtual space itself. In other words, it proposes that all pictorial images present virtual places, whether they were made with a computer, a paintbrush, or a camera. The difference between various pictorial images, then, is not considered to be in whether or not what is seen in them is virtual, but rather in the context of the resulting virtual places.

For example, the following painting by El Greco from around 1610 shows the grim fate of Laocoön, the Trojan priest from the Homeric legend of Troy, who dared to defy the Gods and warn the Trojans of their impending doom:

This painting is also shown in the book as an example of architecture performing the role of the background of a painting – in this case, showing the city of Troy. And yet there is another painting which El Greco made in more or less the same period, and which looks very similar:

The second painting is a view of the city of Toledo in Spain, where El Greco lived and worked. Seeing this painting now raises questions as to the nature of the city we just saw in the first painting, doesn’t it? Indeed, the technique El Greco used in creating the city of Troy for his Laocoön painting was to stand on a hill across from Toledo and use it as a reference for the Troy of his resulting painting. Maybe El Greco even did this with some symbolic reference in mind to the people and city of Toledo, but this makes no difference to our discussion. The city we see in the first painting is not Toledo; it is Troy. Only the city in the second painting is Toledo.

To be more accurate, they are both virtual places, and despite their similar technique of production as well as similar visual content, they have totally different contexts. The context of the first virtual place is that of a reconstruction of a physical place which might have existed sometime in the distant past. In that sense, it has a very similar context as that of the film Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004) made some four hundred years later:

Returning the discussion to El Greco’s second painting, however, the context of the virtual place presented by it is rather that of a documentation of a physical place which existed at the time the image was made, and which the person making it was actually present in. In that sense, it has a very similar context as that of the following contemporary photograph of Toledo:

The Virtual Space Theory, then, approaches the study of the various contexts of virtual space by reinterpreting them in geographical terms – hence the term ‘contextography’. It proposes that each such context can be considered as a section or a zone within virtual space, inside of which the virtual places that share this context are to be found. In that sense, the virtual place of El Greco’s Toledo painting and the virtual place of the above photograph are close neighbors in virtual space, and both are located very far away from the virtual place of El Greco’s Laocoön painting.

What contextography provides is an alternative system for differentiating between pictorial images, in a way that is independent of their medium, visual content, or technique of production. The book elaborates this system far beyond the discussion in this post, and maps out nearly 20 such distinct ‘context zones’ and their relation to each other. That work may still be extended further someday, but at this stage I think it is quite detailed enough to make the point.

The previous post presented some of the varied uses of the term ‘real’ with respect to pictorial images. In this post I would like to focus particularly on the use of this term as a way of describing the technique by which an image was produced. In that sense, the term ‘real’ is often used to denote a pictorial image which was made with the technique of photography, as opposed to one which was made with some form of ‘special effects’– or in more recent times, by using computer graphic programs. In this context, then, to say that something in a pictorial image is real would be to say that we assume that the image is a photograph, and that there indeed was a corresponding physical object in front of the camera when that photo was taken.

Such an approach towards pictorial images seemed to work fine for many years since the techniques of making them could usually be quite easily discerned. As CG technology is improving, however, it is becoming increasingly difficult to truly figure out how an image was made, and the irrelevance of this notion of what’s real is becoming ever more obvious.

The approach of The Virtual Space Theory in this matter is that regardless of how a pictorial image might have been produced, what we see in it has its own independent existence as a virtual place in virtual space. In other words, it considers it to be irrelevant whether what we see in a pictorial image indicates what was in front of the camera, or whether it was achieved through some cinematic trick. Instead, The Virtual Space Theory focuses the discussion on the virtual place which has been created as a result.

The recent release of the film Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) makes this point perfectly evident. In this film Cameron created a virtual world called ‘Pandora’, complete with richly detailed landscapes, vegetation, and life-forms. When watching it there is no way you could distinguish the line between what was physically present in the studio and what was generated using computer graphics. They completely blend together in the creation of a continuous and consistent virtual world. The following video is a documentary-like presentation of that world:

The visual achievements of Avatar clearly demonstrate many of the principles of The Virtual Space Theory, as well as emphasize the irrelevance of trying to decipher how an image was made. James Cameron himself actually explains these issues very clearly in the following interview (starting at 00:37):

One of the common approaches to understanding pictorial images, especially in photography and film, is to consider them in terms of how real they are. Following the release of the film Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), this series of posts will explore this idea and the way it is being challenged by the recent achievements in image-making. The idea of what’s real has many aspects and layers to it, and has been a recurring topic in philosophical debates for millennia. These posts will obviously not get into all of them, yet it is interesting to try and observe what might be behind the contemporary everyday usage of this term with respect to pictorial images.

When we look at a pictorial image and say that what we see in it is real, there are several things that we might mean by that. For one, it could be a way of saying that we consider that what we see in it has an equivalent in the physical world. Also, it could be a way of saying that the technique used for making the image was that of photography. In some cases, it could be a way of saying that what we see in this image is consistent and believable enough to be considered as something that could have existed in the physical world, even though it might not.

For example, the cathedral in Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s painting Cathedral over a Town may indeed seem very real. Not because the painting looks like a photograph, but because its visual contents are quite convincing and believable. However, in the sense of having a physical equivalent, that cathedral is not real because there is no (and never has been) such a cathedral in the physical world – it is Schinkel’s own invention which he made specifically for the painting.

The following example, however, challenges these notions of what’s real quite a bit. It is a video which presents several famous buildings using advanced computer graphics, combined with unmistakable personal talent. Called The Third & The Seventh, it was made by Alex Roman in homage to the arts of Architecture and Cinema. This beautiful video runs 12 minutes long, and it is highly recommended to watch it in full-screen view:

In the context of our discussion, the contents of this video are visually very convincing, and in this sense they surely seem real. Additionally, the places we see in it are also real in the sense that buildings just like them indeed exist also in the physical world. And yet, in the sense of ‘real’ as meaning ‘photographed’, what we see in this video is not real at all: Even though it looks as if this video was filmed on location, everything in it is computer-generated.

One of the most common techniques for producing a virtual place for the medium of film is to shoot the film in an already existing physical place. In cinematic terminology, this is called filming ‘on location’. If we follow The Virtual Space Theory’s principle of distinguishing phenomena from techniques, however, we will discover that knowing where the camera was rolling does not necessarily tell us much about the nature of the virtual place which was created as a result.

Let’s start with straightforward cases first. The music video for the song Style, which was mentioned in the previous post, was clearly filmed on location: One of its ways of conveying its rock-star style was indeed to film it in stylish places designed by contemporary star architects. Similarly, though with a completely different attitude, the film Der Himmel über Berlin (or in its English-language title, Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders, 1987) was also filmed on location in the city of Berlin, before the fall of the wall. As mentioned in the book, the story of this film may be fictional, but the virtual place of the city of Berlin as presented in it clearly reflects the physical city in which it was shot, as it was at that time.

In sharp contrast, another film which was shot in the city of Berlin is the film Æon Flux (Karyn Kusama, 2005). Even though this film ended up disappointing many fans of Peter Chung’s original animated TV series which inspired it, the result nevertheless remains an interesting one from a design point of view. The story it tells takes place in ‘the last city’ in a post-apocalyptic Earth several centuries in the future. For the creation of this virtual place the filmmakers chose to film it mostly on location in a series of specifically selected sites in the city of Berlin. Yet when shown together in the film, it resulted in the creation of a virtual place that is not Berlin at all.

Some examples of filming locations which can be seen in this film trailer are the House of World Cultures by Hugh Stubbins Jr., the Spandau Lake Bridge by Walter A. Noebel, and the Mexican Embassy by Teodoro Gonzaléz de Léon and Francisco Serrano Cacho. A list of filming locations is available here.

Another example of a film which was shot on location yet resulted in a virtual world that is very different from the physical places in which it was made is the film The Fall (Tarsem, 2006). This film revolves around a story which is told by a man to a little girl, and what is shown in the film is the mental vision which the girl generates out of her storyteller’s words.

To create this virtual world, the filmmaker carefully selected numerous beautiful places from 28 countries all over the globe as his filming locations, which were then filmed over the course of 4 years. A list of these filming locations is available here. And yet, the way these places are presented together creates a separate virtual world of its own which is clearly distinct from our world and any of the physical locations it was actually filmed in.