The Virtual Space Theory

The kinds of images that abstract art creates are obviously quite difficult to define. Add to that the growing popularity of the elusive term ‘virtual’, and it becomes tempting to use this term to describe also the elusive nature of abstract images. And yet, according to The Virtual Space Theory, most forms of abstract art are actually not virtual at all. This may seem surprising given the popular use of the term, but this is quickly sorted out once the terminology is clearly defined.

In an earlier post I proposed a distinction between several uses of the term ‘abstract’ and their relation to the notion of virtuality. The main conclusion was that calling an image ‘abstract’ might just mean that its visual contents are distilled or hard to identify, yet it could still present them in visual terms of physical objects in a space. However, one of the most common uses of the term ‘abstract’ is to describe images that do not present a likeness of the physical world at all, but which are rather made specifically as a flat arrangement of matter on a surface. In other words, such an image is no longer pictorial, but rather a non-pictorial image.

Therefore, in order to address the relation of abstract art and virtuality, we need to first resolve the difference between pictorial and non-pictorial images in that respect. According to The Virtual Space Theory, whereas pictorial images can be interpreted as creating virtual places in virtual space, non-pictorial images can not. This does not mean that someone viewing such an image could not interpret its visual pattern in terms of space, but what is seen in it would only be the viewer’s personal interpretation. For example, given a painting of Jackson Pollock, one viewer might see a castle in its pattern of paint, while another might see an elephant (look at it long enough and you will see ones too ).

This is opposed to the visual contents of pictorial images, which are very similarly interpreted by anyone who has grown up in a civilization that makes common use of images. There can be no serious argument as to what is seen in the visual pattern of the following image by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. There might still be minor differences of interpretation, but surely not as many as in the previous case.

According to The Virtual Space Theory, then, the castle or the elephant of the non-pictorial image are confined to their viewer’s mental space, which is strictly private, and in sharp contrast to the public nature of virtual space – as demonstrated by the grand ancient forum of Piranesi’s pictorial image, which we can all see. In other words, pictorial images create virtual places, whereas non-pictorial images do not.

Now we can return to the question of abstract art. Since it is a form of art that is only marginally concerned with creating pictorial images, then as a general rule we could say that its contents are not in virtual space, and as such, they can not be considered to be virtual. They may be elusive, they may be non-concrete, they may be non-identifiable – but none of that necessarily makes them virtual.

There could be exceptions, of course. One of them is the particular area of interest created by the undefined field that lies between pictorial and non-pictorial images – which is the topic of the next post.

In the recent film Percy Jackson and the Olympians, a teenage boy in present-day New York City discovers that the Greek gods are more than just a myth: he is actually the son of Poseidon, and finds himself at the center of a godly dispute of apocalyptic proportions. The film did not receive much critical acclaim, but still presents an interesting case study for some of the principles of The Virtual Space Theory. The following film trailer shows most of what I find important in this film in 1:30 minutes:

What seems to have bothered many film critics is this film’s similarity with the Harry Potter films, and indeed, they do have much in common. Both are about a teenage boy who thinks of himself as a loser in the present-day world, discovers that a fascinating mythical world somehow exists in parallel to it, and that in that world he was actually born to be a hero. In both cases, the young boy then joins a school that prepares him for his newly found role, makes friends, finds magical artifacts, defies authority, and saves the day.

And yet, a key difference between the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson films is in their contextography – a core principle of The Virtual Space Theory which was introduced in an older post. Following this proposed principle, the revealed mythical worlds of these respective films have different contexts through which they relate to our physical present-day world as it exists outside of these films.

In the Harry Potter films, the magical world that is revealed is presented as if it were a part of the physical world which we were simply unaware of. Their premise is that the magical world of centuries past is not lost, but simply gone into hiding. The films present a ‘Ministry of Magic’ that is located underneath central London, and a special wizard-training school called Hogwarts, located somewhere in the far north of England – as well as many other magical places hidden within our everyday environment. From a contextographical point of view, then, these virtual places are presented in the context of a documentation of the present-day physical world. Even more specifically, their context is that of a ‘fabricated documentation’: places that are not part of our everyday world, yet presented as if they were.

In contrast, in the Percy Jackson film, the physical world, as we know it, is left mostly unaltered: yes, there are mythological creatures in it, but not so many places in it which we were previously unaware of. In fact, it rather uses well-known ordinary places such as Las Vegas and the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee as the settings for some of its events. The major exceptions are the visits to the underworld and Olympus, yet even these places are not presented as a part of the physical world.

When Percy Jackson visits Olympus, he does not go to the physical Mount Olympus in Greece – he goes to the metaphysical residence of the mythological gods. His access to it, as seen in the clip above, may be through the Empire State Building in New York, but the final destination of its elevator is not in the physical world. The context of the virtual place of Olympus in this film, then, is rather that of an invention of a place that exists beyond the physical world. More specifically, its context is that of a ‘physical-like invention’: a metaphysical place that is made to appear like a physical place yet which has no location in the physical world.

These differences in context between Hogwarts and Olympus may be a bit difficult to grasp at first, yet they can still make intuitive sense. Of course both are seen in films, and as far as we are concerned, neither is part of our everyday world. But whereas you could take a map of England and wonder where exactly to go to if you wanted to try and find Hogwarts, you could not do the same with the metaphysical Olympian residence. The detailed discussion of contextography in the book, then, provides a systematic approach to the study of such differences between virtual places.

A TV commercial that aired recently is yet another good example of the irrelevance of the popular notion of trying to determine what’s real in pictorial images:

This commercial’s success in creating a buzz, apart from its considerable humor, wit, and boldness, comes from the fact that it also sparks a discussion among its viewers regarding the inevitable question “How did they do that?” or, more specifically, “Is it real?” As already discussed in two earlier posts, the answer will challenge our notion of what’s real once again.

Among the many events that are packed into this commercial, I would like to focus on its continuous transition between three locations: a bathroom, a boat deck, and a beach. According to The Virtual Space Theory, since we see all these places through a pictorial image, they are all virtual places in virtual space – regardless of whether they might have an equivalent in the physical world or not. Therefore, in such a context, one part of the question “Is it real?” is whether these virtual places truly reflect physical places in the physical world, or whether they were computer-generated. The other part of that question is whether the visual transition between such physical places indeed happened while the commercial was shot, or whether it was stitched together after filming.

The answer is that – apart from the transformation of objects in the actor’s hand – everything you see happened in front of the camera in one shot: this whole commercial was filmed in a single physical location. Its production crew built a section of a full-scale boat on a beach, along with a mock-up of a bathroom suspended from above by a crane, as well as a hidden mechanical system for sliding the actor onto the back of a horse. These were then all set in motion as the camera was rolling, and after three days of repeated shooting, they finally managed to get it all to work properly in one continuous sequence (you can check it out for yourself in an interview with the people who created it).

What this means, in popular terminology, is that “Yes, it’s all real!” And yet, there’s a catch. If we expand our notion of what’s real by just a bit, we realize that to seriously consider what we see in this commercial as being real is actually quite absurd. Even though the places we see in this commercial do exist in the physical world, the beach is the only one of them that is real. The bathroom has a physical existence, but it is not a real bathroom – it has a missing wall, and it is not part of any real house. The boat has a physical existence, but is not a real boat either – it is only half-built, and it can neither float nor sail.

The point is that what actually interests us in watching this commercial is not to see bathroom mock-ups hovering over half-boats, but to observe a virtual world where a man can seamlessly switch locations to match his mood and speech. Our curiosity may make us wonder how it was made in the physical world, but only because we were charmed by what we saw in virtual space. Therefore, in that sense, the only real bathroom, real boat, real beach, and real transition between them are the virtual bathroom, virtual boat, and virtual beach in virtual space – as seen in the virtual world of this TV commercial.