ABSTRACT
We often walk into the future with the baggage of the past. This situation is true in life as much as when it comes to technology. We reinterpret one technological affordance or tool based on the one that preceded it. A digital screen (such as a smartphone screen) may reproduce the flat rectangular format of its predecessors. However, eventually, something different can happen. The screen is no longer a separation from, or reproduction of, the world in front of it. Instead, it is a tool for blurring the very same distance between observer and observed. Screens can become a hybrid formation of real and virtual (as in the case of augmented reality smartphone apps) or can become an attempt at blurring this distinction altogether (such as in virtual, mixed, and extended reality). At times, tools and technologies open the door for novelty. Yet they often also contain traces of a forgotten or marginalized past. This chapter offers a set of propositions for research on Virtual Reality formulated with the help of non-dualistic conceptual frameworks. As the authors argue, non-dualistic frameworks offer a space to unsettle the various dichotomies (i.e., novelty/continuity, disembodiment/embodiment, self/other) that underpin a large portion of VR scholarship.
