The Virtual Space Theory

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.

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.

For most people, whenever the word ‘architecture’ comes up, the first thing that comes to mind is buildings: Apartment blocks or luxurious villas, seats of power or places of worship, public monuments or hang-out places – along with any other kind of man-made place that makes up the physical world in which we live. Additionally, for anyone who is somewhat familiar with this field, the word ‘architecture’ also stands for anything that has to do with the process of making such places: The mental search for ideas, the experiments in sketches and scale-models, the production of plans, sections, and elevations, and the visual expression of the resulting vision in the form of pictorial images.

These, however, are not the kinds of architecture that this blog is about.

There is a whole other kind of architecture that is hardly ever discussed. That is the architecture that generates and inhabits the space we see through pictorial media. It is the kind of architecture that is to be found in images that are totally unrelated to the process of planning, building, or discussing physical architecture. It is a kind of architecture that is very familiar to most of us, except that we seldom stop think of it as being architecture.

At first glance, it might seem that to consider buildings in pictorial images as forming a distinct kind of architecture is a bit of an exaggeration. After all, if we look at the history of art, for example, aren’t the buildings we see in paintings nothing more than a copy of the buildings that the painter saw right in front of him?

The above painting by Gustave Caillebotte is surely architecturally rich, but isn’t the architecture in it actually a documentation of a particular place in 19th-century Paris? The mere posing of this question expresses our romantic notion of the painter standing in front of an easel somewhere in the outdoors with a brush and palette in his hand. However, from a historical perspective, this way of perceiving art and artists is less than 150 years old: It is a legacy of the Impressionist movement, of which this painting is a prime example.

Up until that time, painters were mostly confined to their studios, laboring at the creation of images worthy of the revered title of ‘Art’, and guided by a set of high ideals and accepted principles for achieving it. It was precisely the Impressionists who urged painters to go out into the open air and simply paint what they see. For centuries before that, painters usually had to generate the space of their paintings and their visual content completely on their own – including the architecture in them.

For example, the above painting by Sandro Botticelli is surely rich in architecture, but you would be hard pressed to find the particular place seen in it anywhere in Italy. Not because it has not been preserved through history – but because it has probably never even existed in the first place. Some of the architectural elements in it may be direct copies of existing physical places, but others are merely a free variation on a physical place, and some are altogether invented for the sake of the painting. They were then all joined into a single composition, designed as a suitable setting for presenting the story the painter wanted to depict. In the creation of this place, therefore, Botticelli was not only its painter, but he also assumed the role of its architect.

While this point was demonstrated here using the case of paintings, the idea that is proposed by The Virtual Space Theory is that the same applies also to any other type of pictorial image – photography, film, computer-generated imagery, and so on: The places that are seen through them, in many cases, could very well be considered to be works of architecture in and of themselves. After all, in order for us to even be able to perceive them in terms of space, such places must have first been mentally envisioned, carefully planned, and meticulously executed.

That is the kind of architecture this blog is about.