ABSTRACT
I will suggest here that although there is now a common practice of associating virtual reality (VR) with the theatre as a form of representation with stories, plots and characters,VR actually has more in common with performance (and here I mean performance art or ritual rather than the conventional theatre), music and the visual arts.This is because what we could call the ‘classical’ theatre establishes itself pretty much along conventional lines, within pre-ordained forms of representation. It defers to the past. Performance art and ritual are about transformation and variation, about investigating the unknown and producing the new.1Virtual reality’s commonality with performance and art will therefore not be taken as its mimetic qualities – its ‘representation of an action’,2 so much as its qualities of modulation; its realization of the ‘objectile’, where an object is transformed into an event of ‘continuous variation’ (Deleuze, 1993: 19). Virtual reality will be discussed here in a way which is only slightly concerned with its current, specific technological form (that is, for example, a helmet, glove, and a threedimensional, digitally produced, navigable world). I am more interested in VR as a more general emergent series of cultural phenomena – a machinic phylum. In this latter context, technological developments such as hypertext, the Internet, and the World Wide Web can be seen as the first flowerings of a ‘virtual age’ (Stone, 1995: 17).The attempt here will be neither to valorize this age, nor to condemn it.3 Rather it is to seek out its characteristics and the modulation of the notion of modulation it performs; the way in which, as a concept,VR allows us to modulate our transformation of objects into objectiles, to shift the gears on the thresholds of perception, operation, and expression more powerfully than ever before.
