PDF - The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality - University of Exeter

a computerized dimension where we move information about and where we find our
way around data. Cyberspace renders a represented or artificial world, a world made
up of the information that our systems produce and that we feed back into the system.
Just as a chessboard sets up the checkered game space of its own world of rooks and
knights, pawns and bishops, so too the computer interface holds its field of moves,
hierarchy of files, places to go, and relative distances between points of interest. We
inhabit cyberspace when we feel ourselves moving through the interface into a relatively
independent world with its own dimensions and rules. The more we habituate
ourselves to an interface, the more we live in cyberspace, in what William Gibson calls
the "consensual hallucination." 1
As the interface shades into cyberspace, the dark atmosphere of George Segal’s
sculpture seeps in. This interface brings with it a troubling ambiguity. The term interface
originated with the mundane hardware adapter plugs used to connect electronic
circuits. Then it came to mean the video hardware used to peer into the system. Finally,
it denotes the human connection with machines, even the human entry into a
self-contained cyberspace. In one sense, interface indicates computer peripherals and
video screens; in another, it indicates human activity connected by video to data. The
double meaning makes us pause: How peripheral is the human? How much of the system
do we own when we enter the door of cyberspace? Where are we when software
architects shape the datascape into endless mazes of light attracting us like moths to
a flame? The very idea of an interface points to an impending future that may be our
fate, even fatal. The cover of Time floats like an afterimage.
Cyberspace can cast a spell of passivity on our lives. We talk to the system, telling
it what to do, but the system’s language and processes come to govern our psychology.
We begin as voyeurs and end by abandoning our identity to the fascinating systems
we tend. The tasks beckoning us to the network make us forget our elemental loss in
the process. We look through the interface unaware as we peer through an electronic
framework where our symbols—words, data, simula-
1 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), p. 51; Gibson, Count Zero (New
York: Ace Books, 1986), p. 38.
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