What is the virtual?Before pursuing the idea of the virtual museum, let's explore the meaning of the world "virtual."Philosopher Pierre Levy (1998) writes: "The word 'virtual' is derived from the Medieval Latin virtualis, itself derived from virtus, meaning strength or power. In scholastic philosophy the virtual is that which has potential rather than actual existence. The virtual tends toward actualization, without undergoing any form of effective or formal concretization. The tree is virtually present in the seed. Strictly speaking, the virtual should not be compared with the real but the actual, for virtuality and actuality are merely two different ways of being."In other words, a virtual museum is not merely a digital analog, so to speak, of a real museum. It must be something else. Although he does not touch directly on the idea of a virtual museum, Benjamin Woolley sheds light on this matter with his clear-eyed "Virtual Worlds (1992), in which he writes: "''Virtual' has a respectable pedigree as a technical term, going right back to the origins of modern science. It was used in optics at the beginning of the eighteenth century to describe the refracted or reflected image of an object. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, physicists were writing of a particle's 'virtual velocity' and 'virtual moment.' The word . . . has come a long way from its original use as the adjectival form of 'virtue,' in hte days when virtue itself meant to have the power of God. Echoes of that early meaning, however, survive in the excitable claims of virtual realists to have the power to create their own worlds. And it is appropriate that the word should resonate with a certain amount of divine significance, because the computing concept of 'virtual' is much more than a matter of mere technology. It means something that goes to the scientific heart of reality."What Woolley is referring to is the computer. "A computer is a 'virtual' machine--a virtual Turing machine, to be precise. It is an abstract entity or process that has found physical expression, that has been 'realized.'"In Levy's terms, "realized" would be "actualized," but the point is that the computer, stripped to its philosophical basics, is a universal instruction machine. It can carry out any set of instructions, but the ability to carry them out is virtual until actualized--until the program is run. A virtual museum, in this sense, would be an "architecture" that actualizes instructions--content. This is not necessarily an uninteresting idea. Could the modernist "white cube" be considered a virtual museum machine? Are the minimalist paintings just so many objects in storage until a curator provides an instruction set for programming the gallery walls, transforming "Bits & Pieces Put Together To Present a Semblance of a Whole"--a museum? But this is not the sense that most people use the phrase "virtual museum" at this time, by which they generally mean "artificial museum." |
Carl DiSalvo, Space Beyond Meaning Lawrence Weiner, "Bits & Pieces Put Together To Present a Semblance of a Whole", Walker Art Center Resources in Virtual Reality on the Net
"Clearly, the term "virtual" is utterly worn out, a kind of margarine that spreads on anything."
"Cyberspace is a vast media matrix of the actual and the potential that incorporates the activities of telephone conversations, data transfer, electronic mail, computerized financial transactions, ATM transactions, on-line information services, video conferencing, the new mass media, virtual reality and so on. The strangeness, power, ubiquity and potential of this phenomenon has prompted commentators to see cyberspace as a kind of world in its own right" |