The Virtual Space Theory

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.

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.

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.