APIE NUKŪNYTĄ KŪNIŠKUMĄ, ARBA KOKIA PRASME VIRTUALI REALYBĖ YRA REALI?

For long centuries the efforts to embody the imagination and to escape to a different and controllable reality have promoted technological development and progress. Today the virtual reality equipment grants the possibilities to include corporeal experiences into increasingly virtual forms of reality. The paper employs the semiotic approach in order to reflect on the descent of virtual reality, its links to imagination, mimetic art and its techniques. The semiotic concept of the effect of reality is used in an attempt to understand how a disembodied reality might be treated as a real one. These reflections upon the efforts to grant corporeality to imagination, construct a controllable reality and find the ways of operating within it, as well as the relations of different forms of reality to corporeality are summarised in the semiotic square of the forms of reality. Since submersion and interaction are intrinsic to all forms of reality, each type is described in terms of substance, corporeal perception and the kind of space in which the body acts. The corporeal reality is the reality of presence, the experience taking place here and now and related with the dimension of the world perceived by the senses. Both the subject and the space are physical, and any activity is possible to the extent the limits and potential of a body permit. This kind of reality is self-contained, unmodelled and uncontrollable; imagination is the incorporeal dimension of this reality that can be exteriorised by material artistic means. This corporeal reality is the source, foundation and starting point for all the other forms of reality. The non-corporeal reality is a heterogeneous medium, a hybrid of physical and digital worlds, when the experiencing subject is submersed into a simulated reality and has a possibility to change it. An augmented physical or digital reality in which the subject 'acts' is modelled and controlled, situations can be started at one's free will, repeated, saved and shared. This kind of experience could be called 'now and somewhere', and the reality is the one of telepresence, where the 'avatar' of the subject is the subject itself. The reality of telepresence is the real VR, because the valid time and space of perception here is the one of the corporeal subject, but perception is taking place by bodily means, i.e. by the senses (often synaesthetically) interacting with a disembodied, digital or hybrid space. It is the exteriorised imagination with the possibilities of interaction that causes bodily reactions. When a virtual avatar acts in a virtual space, we have a case of the digital reality of avatars (homogenous, absolutely incorporeal media existing only in the mode of algorithms). The digital reality is an artificial virtual world with its own time, laws and, although modelled, no longer controllable 'life', so it would be correct to treat it as a selfcontained reality. The digital reality of avatars is recordable and can be copied; however, it is not controllable, as if it were imagination living on its own terms where participation is possible by way of multiplying oneself by avatars rather than by direct sensory experience. The non-digital reality is a heterogeneous medium, but unlike in the reality of telepresence, the body rather than the space is the altered element. The prosthetic body is a physical one, but through technologies it can 'perceive' or 'manage' a much larger space or the microlevels of substance, unreachable for a non-technological body. The prosthetic reality of telecommunication is a mediated physical presence, recordable and reproducible, but it cannot be modelled or controlled since the prosthesis is a strengthened, in a way 'augmented' corporeality with more possibilities of manipulation. In this case 'now' is the now of the corporeal experience, but 'here' is at the same time 'there' as well - somewhere out of reach of the usual experience provided by the senses. So far described in general terms, these forms of reality could provide a starting point for the further investigation of interaction between the corporeal and incorporeal media and the influence of the new modes of experience on the way bodyness and the body-related identity is perceived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]