Is there a difference between the halucinations of a confined imagination and virtual reality?
This is one thread in Richard Powers’ brilliant historical fiction about 80s VR and politics, Plowing the Dark. Two narrative threads are intertwined in this book: an artist recruited to develop compelling demos for a VR cave being developed at Seattle R&D lab in the mid-80s; and a Lebanese-American who is kidnapped after going to Beirut to teach ESL. The artist reaches back through the history of art (Rousseau, Lascaux cave paintings, and the Hagia Sophia of Byzantium) to create sites for the VR cave. The kidnapped man reaches back through memories until an ex-girlfriend becomes present. Powers reaches back to that moment in the 80s when VR technology was going to be the next paradigm shift.
The first Gulf war brings all this to an end. The war that may have been virtual in popular imagination.
Some of the themes:
1. The Green Line between Islam and Christianity that has been such a site of conflict and imagination. Is this Powers responding on Orientalism?
2. Art, imagination and virtual sites. Is VR just another technology of imagination that has is roots in the mind. Do we really need anything other than imagination? Isn’t the most sophisticated “cave” the mind or the darkness of consciousness? Do these toys (from paint to VR) simply reflect a desire to return to the dark?
3. Can art change us? Or is it just a demo for mercantile technology?
4. The recent history of information technology, especially the buzz around VR.
See The Cave of Lascaux.