Virtual Reality (VR) Essay Example

The computer monitor has been an apparatus for the public exchange and exhibition of art since the early 1970s. For example, when the first publicly accessible bulletin board system, Community Memory, was launched in Berkeley California it was not long until the digital sharing of computerized creative expression took hold. After almost fifty years, it may come as a surprise that a majority of art galleries and institutions only recently, and due to the forced hand of SARS-CoV-2, collectively scrambled to adapt to virtual, public exhibition. With multifarious projects, webpages, and organized shows to learn from, galleries and museums at large instead resorted to ubiquitous OVRs, or “online viewing rooms”.

Often displayed as flat, glorified e-commerce pages, OVRs only helped to emphasize galleries as luxury goods retailers, despite the visceral, intimate frisson an individual may personally experience when they feel connected to a particular configuration of materials and ideas. How can objects intended to live in the “real” recreate the reflexivity of shared space while also scaled down and represented as a thumbnail in a row of other thumbnails waiting to be clicked? OVRs came to represent inaccessibility–a reminder that the glass, glowing screen is a mediator that blocks the corporeal experience of standing among an object with weight and dimension. And simulated, 3D-modeled virtual environments for art exhibition, which also have a multi-decade history could not save anyone from the fate of isolation, as it could never be a satisfying replacement for sudden absence of fleshy, biological presence that the world had to face.

With not much choice, in April 2020 The New York Times began highlighting online exhibitions on Sundays, such as those hosted by bitforms or Silicon Valet, which successfully broke from the standard OVR configuration. And although many of these shows were thoughtfully organized, they still failed to address flattened, screen mediated experience that was no longer a choice but an obligatory compromise. The arts needed to reconcile reversion and isolation from the picture plane as flatbed but there was little interest in addressing the emotional and corporeal loss that came with inaccessibility to the tactile or haptic experience of embodiment, space, and its relationship to tangible material. Like most of the working world, arts workers were also spending more time in front of the screen on video conferencing software. The most intimate, bodied experience one could have was through a webcam in real-time.

Although translated to ones and zeros, the webcam has the capacity to create a portal into “real” space beyond the screen, a space that doesn’t exist in polygon modeling but organic compounds. Access to another’s brick and mortar interior has the capacity to psychologically break through the flatness and connect onlookers to the “other side”.