The multiple worlds of virtual reality
Histories of virtual reality routinely tell a story of progress, in which early attempts to simulate the real are trumped first by photography, then film, and now by the digital. This is perhaps why digital VR is often quarantined from its non-digital doubles - photography and film, but also literature, painting, theatre, and architecture. This seminar series will highlight this diverse repertoire of virtual realities, focusing on the exchanges between digital and analogue, and on the relations that contemporary virtual realities have, or may have, with their pasts.
This seminar series is presented by the Digital Studio in partnership with Research Unit for Enlightenment, Romanticism Contemporary Culture.
Banner image: Model Room, 2003, by Olafur Eliasson in collaboration with Elnar Thorstein. Photo: Peter Otto, Tate Modern, London.