The Virtual Space Theory

What is a ‘virtual gallery’ or a ‘virtual museum’? Despite the widespread use of these terms, they rarely truly match what they attempt to describe. Commonly, the term ‘virtual gallery’ is used for regular websites that present a collection of works of art or some other form of images. The use of the word ‘gallery’ here is then a way of describing a service which displays visual content to the public, and the use of the word ‘virtual’ simply indicates that rather than doing so within a physical setting, it does so through the Internet instead.

However, according to The Virtual Space Theory, there is nothing virtual about that: ‘Virtual’ does not mean ‘digital’ or ‘Internet-based’, and it certainly does not mean ‘non-real’; Rather, the term ‘virtual’ describes visual objects that are located in virtual space, as opposed to being located in physical space or in someone’s mental space. Therefore, most of the so-called ‘virtual galleries’ are actually not virtual at all – they are simply online galleries (furthermore, we could even argue that they are not quite galleries either, but actually much closer to picture books).

So what would a real ‘virtual gallery’ look like, then? To begin with, we could say that if an online gallery does more than just present images in form of a regular web page, but actually also creates a virtual place in which the images are hanging on its walls, then we could also call it a ‘virtual gallery’. And yet, there is much more that is possible. Consider this very interesting example:

This video is called Peripetics and it was made by a team called Zeitguised using Computer-Generated imaging programs. It won the “Best Experimental/Abstract Animation” award at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, and the “Best 3D Animated Film” award at the Hyde Tube Festival in Paris.

From the point of view of The Virtual Space Theory, what I find to be most fascinating about this video is that it provides the unusual experience of visiting an art installation which is set in virtual space. Most of the six acts of this video are made to appear like a filmed documentation of a gallery space with works exhibited in it – except that it only exists in virtual space. Moreover, the virtual nature of this gallery is fully utilized just as well: The exhibits presented in each scene would hardly have been possible to produce as a physical installation in a physical gallery. The result is an art experience that would be quite unimaginable to achieve in any other way. Perhaps this art form should be called ‘virtual installation art’.

In addition to demonstrating a real ‘virtual gallery’, this example emphasizes a few further points. First, it shows that a virtual gallery does not necessarily need to be an interactive online service – in this case, it is rather realized as a video. Second, the contents of a virtual gallery do not have to be limited only to images – any object that could be created and put into the space of a virtual gallery could form the contents of an art exhibition in virtual space. And third, given the right context (as seen in some of this video’s acts), it might even be possible to present the content of such an exhibition also without the need for a virtual gallery as its setting.

The topic of virtuality and virtual space is one of the most confused fields in contemporary culture, to the point that, for many people, its elusiveness is considered to be an inherent part of its nature. From such a point of view, any attempt to define virtuality is considered to be pointless, since what defines it – so it would seem – is precisely that it cannot be defined. However, that is not the point of view of The Virtual Space Theory.

The Virtual Space Theory is based on the approach that our ability to understand anything (as opposed to experiencing it) is enabled by the language we have for describing it. Furthermore, any viable communication is dependent on the accuracy of the language as well. And so, if we experience confusion with respect to a certain aspect of the world or its phenomena, what we need is to first sort out the language we have for it. Therefore, the core of The Virtual Space Theory is the creation of a systematic language capable of handling the complexities of virtuality and the whole range of phenomena that are related to it. Once the language is sorted out in such a way, a clear understanding of what is going on follows it almost automatically.

The first step to creating a systematic use of language is a careful and consistent choice of words, down to their finest details. For example, an expression such as “a virtual place that is found in a painting” might seem completely harmless at first. However, in some contexts, it might actually defy the principles of The Virtual Space Theory: Since this theory proposes that a painting is a window to virtual space, then by definition nothing can be located in the painting. Rather, there are dabs of paint on the canvas, which create a virtual place that can be seen through the painting. The location of this place, then, is in virtual space. A major difference – arising just from the use of different prepositions: ‘in’, ‘on’, and ‘through’.

The second step to creating a systematic use of language is to define terms that might not have existed before, or to tighten the definition of relatively loose terms. For example, in many texts discussing similar topics, expressions such as ‘virtual place’, ‘virtual world’, and ‘virtual space’ are often used interchangeably as if their meaning were the same. According to The Virtual Space Theory, however, these are three distinct phenomena: A virtual place is the place you see through a particular pictorial image; A virtual world is a set of virtual places which are presented in a context which suggests that they are continuous with respect to each other (such as different scenes in a film); And virtual space is the overall visible space that contains all virtual places and all virtual worlds (whether they are continuous to each other or not).

Such a tight use of language sometimes leads to expressions that may sound a bit strange, or not quite ‘correct English’ at times. The point, however, is that the use of language in The Virtual Space Theory is not so much descriptive as it is generative. It is unlike most forms of writing, where the words are merely an approximate description of an essence that already exists outside of them. This kind of writing, in contrast, requires absolute precision, since the essence of what it discusses is formed by the words themselves. Consequently, when such a demanding procedure is successful, a clearly formed language can lead to a more clearly understandable world.