The Virtual Space Theory

What kind of urban experiences can TV commercials present beyond what we may normally come across? This series of posts on the architecture and spaces of TV commercials began with cases where wholly new worlds are created, and now continues with ones that involve rather regular urban environments – but with a twist. In such cases, a TV commercial presents an urban environment which is either reinterpreted or readjusted in an uncommon way, while suggesting that the advertised product is the magic factor that made it all possible.

The first example is somewhat related to the previous post’s discussion on car commercials, but this time advertising the Esso oil company. In this commercial, cars rushing along urban roads are at the center of attention, but it suggests a totally alternative approach to what is actually driving the cars:

The second example uses the approach of visual metaphor to advertise a service which is supposed to make urban life much smoother and easier for customers using it. This is demonstrated by the addition of a highly unlikely structure into the dense fabric of a city, combining interiors and exteriors in a wide variety of contexts, all made to cater to the personal needs of customers and the fun they can have using it – as well as to the fun we can have watching it.

The following example presents a series of interventions that are neither too complex nor too absurd to actually happen in the physical world. But what does make them unlikely, in this sense, is that these interventions took place precisely because they were part of the production of a TV commercial. It presents urban environments that are undergoing a transformation, and where the advertised product is directly what is making it happen:

The final example presents a whole series of urban interventions that propose to extend the experience of a city’s physical space altogether. In this case, it would be easier to discuss the commercial after seeing it:

This commercial builds on the centuries-old tradition of illusionism in painting: paintings that are made to seem as if what is painted in them is actually physically right there. In the terms of The Virtual Space Theory, such paintings create virtual places that are an immediate extension of the physical places in which the paintings are located. In this commercial, illusionism is now implemented at the level of dynamic images, and their powerful effect is demonstrated in the various urban locations which they redefine.

The unlikelihood of such an attempt succeeding, however, serves precisely the point of this commercial: to propose that its advertised product somehow holds in it the magic that artists – and observers – have been seeking for centuries. It might be an unprecedented product, and it is surely a fun as well as unusual urban intervention, but whether such attempts can ever fully succeed is at the heart of the discussion of my book “The Architecture of Virtual Space”.

TV commercials (including viral videos for that matter) can provide interesting examples for discussion in this blog, and this post is the first in a series that will explore various aspects of this topic. When a combination of imaginative agencies, creative talent, daring clients, and substantial production budgets occurs, the result can be the creation of fascinating virtual worlds that serve to promote a certain product or brand.

Car commercials represent a particular type of commercial that may involve the creation of inventive worlds. One of the ways to evoke a desirable image of a car is to show the kinds of environments that such a car can handle: challenging, varied, fascinating – suggesting that you would be able to explore them yourself if only you buy the advertised car.

The first example is a commercial for the Citroen C5, which shows the range of road and weather conditions it can handle by presenting the landscape it drives through as made of a series of huge domino blocks. Each such domino block consists of a different type of landscape in a different season, yet they all fall perfectly into place just as the car is about to cross over from one to the other:

The next example follows the same approach of showing the variety of road conditions the car can handle – this time a Land Rover – but expresses it in a very different way. Instead of making the impossible look realistic, the whole world it presents is made of continuously transforming clay. As the car rides along, the road, houses, landscape, trees, animals, and people playfully shift form to create ever new environments:

An alternative approach occasionally used in the making of car commercials is to use the car parts as raw elements from which to create something entirely new. In the following Subaru commercial, this approach is mixed with that of inventing new worlds, resulting in the creation of a virtual world which is made up of car parts – including the buildings, roads, water, plants, and animals – while the car itself is hardly ever seen, but rather implied:

The final example, advertising a Honda motorcycle this time, makes a conscious reference to the car commercial approaches discussed in this post. Thus, instead of trying to create a convincing new world, it invites us to witness the construction of an illusion of such a world – suggesting a stop-motion animation of a continuously changing wall painting surrounding a parked motorcycle:

What might a blog called “The Virtual Space Theory” actually be about? The range of expectations raised by such a name is extremely wide: The Internet? Computer technology? Social networks? The growing culture around them? Online 3D worlds? All forms of 3D graphics? Imaginary worlds in general? The realm of human imagination? Human perception? Human consciousness? Collective consciousness?

Mix all of the above and you get a rough idea of the problematic common notion of the ‘virtual’, as well as an overview of some of the topics that are confounding contemporary civilization – all strangely expressed in one vague multi-purpose word. The aim of The Virtual Space Theory, then, is to try to bring clarity to this field and to propose a particular understanding of it.

If we observe the matter closely, we find that most of the uses of ‘virtual’ fall under a few specific categories. Furthermore, we discover that most of these categories actually have an existing word that conveys their meaning much more clearly and consistently. This will help us narrow down the possible meanings of ‘virtual’ in search of the essence of what this term might most accurately be used to refer to.

Virtual as meaning ‘digital’

Computers. Digital devices. Internet technology. Online services. In such contexts, referring to anything as being ‘virtual’ is usually just a way of saying that it is created and facilitated by digital means. As detailed in a separate post, this is not what this blog is about. Besides, the term ‘digital’ addresses such cases much more directly.

Virtual as meaning ‘metaphysical’

Non-real. Non-existent. Abstract. ‘Virtual’ has become a blanket term for referring to all kinds of phenomena and ideas that somehow seem to exist, though on some other level they actually do not. This is quite a complex matter which is discussed in a separate post, and much better covered by the term ‘metaphysical’.

Virtual as meaning ‘mental’

The human mind. The imagination. Dreams and visions. We can visualize them, we can experience them, but they are not part of the world ‘out there’. It is a topic thoroughly discussed in my book “The Architecture of Virtual Space”, and mentioned also in an article derived from it. In short, the point is that calling them ‘virtual’ is rather inaccurate – the term ‘mental’ captures their essence far more precisely.

Virtual as meaning ‘perceptual’

This is a much more elusive use of the term ‘virtual’, since it seems to combine several of its common uses into yet another distinct meaning. In that sense, it is a way of referring to things that may have an independent existence of their own, but used when we wish to express how the particular way we experience them might be different from what they actually are. This is the topic of a current research project of mine which will be published in the future, and which the term ‘perceptual’ covers with much more accuracy.

Virtual as meaning ‘what we perceive through pictorial images’

3D Worlds. Video games. Film special effects. 3D graphics creation tools. In that sense, ‘virtual’ is used to describe what we see in images of a particular kind: These are images which present pictorial content, which were produced and presented digitally, which we experience as presenting things that are outside of our immediate world, and which are often the product of their creators’ imaginations.

And yet there is something ‘virtual’ about them beyond any of the meanings of ‘virtual’ discussed above: It is not only ‘digital’, it is not quite ‘metaphysical’, it is not just ‘mental’, nor is it ‘perceptual’. Rather, it is the experience that what we see through such an image is not merely a flat pattern of light and color – but a living, existing, and visually accessible place.

The Virtual Space Theory, therefore, proposes that the key to clarifying the term ‘virtual’ is to arrive at an understanding of it as meaning ‘what we perceive through pictorial images’. And to achieve this, the inevitable path goes way beyond digital techniques, and requires a thorough exploration of the experiences given by former techniques and the traditional theories that support them.

For this reason – and despite the multiple meanings typically associated with ‘virtual’ – the central themes of this blog are pictorial images, on one hand, and the use of architecture as a means of creating an experience of place through them, on the other. The common uses of ‘virtual’ will obviously still remain – at least metaphorically – but The Virtual Space Theory complements them with a coherent, systematic, and well-defined meaning as a proposed point of reference.

This is the last in a series of posts that discuss the paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme from the point of view of The Virtual Space Theory. This time, we will look at them using the Theory’s principle of contextography.

A Short Intro to Contextography

To demonstrate The Virtual Space Theory’s principle of contextography, let’s first look at the following two images. One is Gérôme’s painting Pollice Verso, the most famous of his series of paintings showing events in the ancient Roman Colosseum. The second is a contemporary photograph of the ruins of the Roman Colosseum.

The two images have some things in common as well as some obvious differences. If we were to describe them using the common terminology for discussing such matters, what would we say? We might start by saying that one is a painting and the other is a photograph. We would probably regard the photograph as being ‘real’ and proceed to question the nature of the painting in that respect. For example, the hand gesture with the thumb pointing down had never been seen in an image before Gérôme made this painting, because the ancient records of it are only verbal and do not provide an accurate enough description (which also means that Gérome’s contribution to our lives extends even to the form of the Facebook “like” icon). So does this mean that the painting is imaginary, or is it an authentic representation? As another example, we also know that this painting was the direct inspiration for the making of the film Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000). So does this mean that the film is a copy and that the painting is the original?

The Virtual Space Theory approaches such questions by discussing them from another angle altogether. Before anything else, it considers the visible contents of any pictorial image as being located inside of virtual space. Does this mean that all images are equal? Of course not. But instead of discussing the differences between the images themselves, The Virtual Space Theory shifts the discussion to the differences between the places that are seen through them.

In the above examples, once we can consider both as showing virtual places, we will see that what sets them apart is their context: One virtual place is a historical reconstruction of a particular physical location (with arguable accuracy), and the other virtual place is a contemporary documentation of the same physical location. Using the same terms, we could proceed to discuss the virtual place seen in the film Gladiator, and discover that it shares nearly the same context as that of the place seen in the painting.

The Virtual Space Theory proposes that virtual places that share similar contexts can be considered to be ‘neighbors’ in virtual space, or in other words, to be located inside of the same ‘context zone’. Accordingly, virtual places that have different contexts – even if their images are otherwise similar – can be considered to be located in completely different parts of virtual space. Contextography, then, is The Virtual Space Theory’s principle for determining what the contexts of virtual space are and mapping the relative locations of virtual places inside of it. This topic is further explained in another post, and fully elaborated in my book “The Architecture of Virtual Space”.

A Contextographical Dispute

The Virtual Space Theory’s principle of contextography provides another facet to an understanding of the historical conflict between the Impressionist and Academic approaches to the making of paintings. From this point of view, one of the main disagreements between the two rival sides was in determining which contexts of virtual space are worthy of having virtual places made in them.

In that sense, the virtual places made by the Impressionists were all neighbors in virtual space, since they belonged to one single context: Virtual places that are an interpreted documentation of physical places. The Impressionists, despite their non-committal approach to technical accuracy, clearly stuck to existing physical locations from which to create their virtual places – which gave them all a very particular as well as consistent context.

Academicism, on the other hand, and Jean-Léon Gérôme in particular, took the exact opposite approach. The virtual places he made belonged to a wholly different set of contexts: Some of his virtual places were free reconstructions of places from the past, and some were fabricated documentations of a non-existing present. Despite his fervent dedication to utmost accuracy in his painting technique, when it came to contexts he intentionally created virtual places that do not have an equivalent in the physical world – which puts them in another context altogether, and thus in another part of virtual space.

Gérôme’s argument with the Impressionists, then, can be seen simply as a matter of where inside of virtual space virtual places should be created. A painting worthy of the title of ‘Art’, he believed, should create a richly detailed virtual place, and should be made for the sections of virtual space which have only a partial relation to the everyday world in which we live.

Succeeding generations of painters did not agree – but filmmakers surely did.

Following the previous post, this post proceeds to discuss the paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme from the point of view of The Virtual Space Theory. Discussing the two together is particularly interesting since the Theory sheds light on some of the unique aspects of Gérôme’s work:

Constructing from photographs

The academic art which Gérôme stood for considered classical antiquity to be its ideal model of reference, and thus one of the only worthy settings for a painting. Yet rather than just imagining ancient Greek or Roman settings in his studio, Gérôme’s way of following this program was to travel to the Orient in search of living cultures that still embodied some of what ancient Greece or Rome might have been like. With a photographer as his travel companion, he documented places of interest and then returned to his Paris studio. There, he combined chosen elements from various photographs following his own constructed vision of a place, and made his paintings based on the results of that process. To his audience he may have seemed to present a documentation of the Orient, yet the places which he showed were very much his own creation – a romanticized and mythicized image of the Orient for Western eyes, which exists only as a virtual place in virtual space.

One place, multiple paintings

As part of his approach to the creation of places for his paintings, Jean-Léon Gérôme did something that I am not aware of having been done by traditional painters before him, at least not as systematically: Once he had created a place, he actually presented that same place in several different paintings. To use the terminology of The Virtual Space Theory: Throughout the history of art, for the vast majority of paintings the virtual place that was seen through a particular painting was unique to that work of art, which therefore served as the only available window to it. That is, whenever a painter made a new painting, he also created a new place that served as its setting. Gérôme, however, on more than one occasion, used the same place for several paintings, thus emphasizing that its existence is not bound to the canvas – or in other words, that its actual location is in virtual space.

The most obvious example of this is his virtual place that stands for the Colosseum in ancient Rome. To begin with, it is not a fully accurate historical record but rather his own creation, combining elements from the original arena and other locations in Rome, as well as featuring the Athenian Acropolis in the background. But he did not make only one painting of the event he wanted to present, but rather two paintings: One to show the moments leading up to the event, and another to show the moment after it. And not only that, he used this same place again in order to stage yet another event altogether, making two paintings of this second event as well, using the same dramatic effect of before and after – while all of them occur inside of one single virtual place. The following examples show one scene from each of these two events:

Another aspect of Gérôme’s work from the point of view of The Virtual Space Theory will be the topic of the next post.

Which of the following names sounds more familiar to you?

1. Jean-Léon Gérôme

2. Claude Monet

You don’t necessarily need to be an art lover to have at least heard of Claude Monet, to probably know that he was a painter, and maybe even to know that he was one of the main figures of the Impressionist movement. But unless you have a particular interest in art and its history, you have probably never even heard of Jean-Léon Gérôme, let alone become familiar with his paintings.

The difference between the two painters’ current level of renown is due to one of the most dramatic struggles to have ever taken place in the history of art, the aftermath of which raised one side to lasting fame, and dropped the other into relative obscurity. Both painters lived and worked in Paris in the second half of the 19th century, both were exceptionally talented, and both had highly productive careers – but they represented two approaches to art that were directly opposed to one another. This is clearly demonstrated in the following examples:

The Impressionist movement consisted in a group of painters who sought to break free from the centuries-old artistic traditions that were mandated by state institutions, or what was known as ‘the academy’. Gérôme was a key member of the academy, and though he did stretch its rules as well, he was nevertheless one of the fiercest defenders of the highly valued principles for which the academy stood, and he spared no effort to block the Impressionists. Following some thirty years of turmoil, the Impressionists eventually won, Academicism lost, and the art world as we know it today is still at the effect of this quintessential event.

The Musée d’Orsay in Paris recently held the first monographic exhibition of Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris in over a hundred years. As they were careful to emphasize, this was not an attempt to rehabilitate him but only to revisit his work in view of our own times (after all, it is a major museum of Impressionist art). And indeed, although his work may be very classical and academic, it does reveal aspects that kept up with its time and foreshadowed the art of the 20th century – though not the art of painting, but rather the art of film.

Gérôme’s paintings, perhaps more than those of most painters before him, actually look like snapshots taken from excessively produced Hollywood movies – except that they were painted at a time when movies did not yet exist. Accordingly, some of the most iconic movie scenes of the following century were taken directly from Gérôme’s paintings (Ben-Hur, 1959; Gladiator, 2000) and his dramatic sense of organizing space has influenced many other films as well. Additionally, as the comparison between his painting to the right and the video game image below might suggest, his influence seems to have extended even to present-day video games.

From the point of view of The Virtual Space Theory, Gérôme can be considered to be first and foremost a master-builder of virtual places. His paintings are rich in architecture, and the places he creates are carefully constructed to serve the characters and the events taking place in them. Yet in addition to his ability to create places and produce highly detailed paintings through which to make them accessible, he also pioneered new approaches to the making of the places themselves, which will be discussed in the next post.