ABSTRACT
The term “virtuality” is ambiguously located between the concreteness of computer interface technologies and the philosophical abstraction of a set of qualities from this technology (or alternately, the argument that virtual reality technologies only literalize and instantiate a preexisting set of qualities, such as fluidity, becoming, or possibility itself). The key term mediating between these two definitions is cyberspace, variously defined as the “three-dimensional domain” of computer simulation within which “cybernetic feedback and control occur” (Walker 1990: 444) or the imaginary “space” on the other side of the computer screen (by analogy with the virtual space on the other side of a mirror).
