Long Live the Screen
The Victorian roots of virtual reality
At first there was the world, and that was all. Then someone drew a picture, and the image—a porthole into a plane just beyond ours—was born.
But the realer our virtual worlds get, the less real our native one seems. This inkling of ontological uncertainty was there from the beginning. Shakespeare’s famous declaration that “all the world’s a stage,” published in 1623, immortalized an artistic mistrust of reality that dates back at least to Petronius in the first century. Even longer ago, in the allegory of the cave, Plato imagined the real as light and shadow dancing on a blank wall. And while William Gibson is credited with popularizing the notion of cyberspace in the ’80s, René Descartes was 300 years ahead of him.
