Perhaps surprisingly, the digital virtuality industry today often emphasizes its naturalism and realism; it is an industry that currently sells itself less on its ability to abstract than on its increased high-focus representational resolution.
In other words, digital virtuality's initial promise to create the new, to reify the imagination, has often led rather toward more reification and objectifiction than expanded imagination. This is not only visible in some digital technology (for instance, "motion capture" in which actual human motion is the original data for "realistic" animation) and in the leagues of advertising copy in the vein of "never seen before," "digital reality creation," "zero defect," "and everyone's invited," but also in the recently prominent quasi-surveillance of home videos and "reality TV"...
I hope that it is clear therefore that I am using virtuality in the widest sense to include any kind of interactive digital cultural products, or any artifacts that utilize digital technology (from miniature cameras to computer games to films to internet web pages). Moreover, I am arguing that virtuality is not confined to technology, but involves a wider set of cultural practices that tend to rework the "real" in the service of commodification. I want to call these cultural practices the "postmodern archaic" because they use the enablements and blandishments of digital technology to test and ratify current notions of virtuality and reality by comparison with a version of the past.
How are we to understand this plethora of digital products and practices, all raising in some way reality and realism and the relationship between them?
jpp G.Gaylard.
