Narrative As Virtual Reality In Everyday Life

•••••••••••••••••• a thesis for design thinking ••••••••••••••••••

"The polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden conceives the literary work of art,

in its written form, as an incomplete object that must be actualized by the reader into an

aesthetic object. Text is like a musical score written in the past and waiting to be

performed in an immediate future."1

How do we perceive and understand reality when we narrate our experiences,

when we engage in this daily semantic exchange of telling, hearing and reading stories?

Do we design our understanding of this reality around us with our imagination? Is it all

virtual waiting to be actualized as a visual simulation based on personal knowledge? Or is

it all there only by virtue of how it’s being narrated, of how things are, as an all-powerful

unique meaning concerning a one single linear reality?

Narrative and Virtual Reality are concepts applied to written or spoken language,

concepts for semantics applied as well to visual and corporeal expression, which are

intrinsically and symbiotically connected to each other. I must begin by stating that

narrative as a recourse is present everyday in our life as part of the dynamic exchange of

ideas and experiences. The heart and soul of this thesis of mine is based on a research

adventure which combines:

(1) the exploration of narrative and virtual reality based on the fields of

interactive media, fiction literature and communication and philosophy theories applied

to technology;

(2) on the empirical application of these concepts to demonstrate that virtual

reality is present everyday in our life in the process of narrating a story, taking into

account that everyone has a very own personal cognitive experience;

(3) on the theoretical influence and inspirational sources of writer Mare-Laure

Ryan in her book (of the same name), Narrative As Virtual Reality: Immersion and

Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media.

Our brain is an associative engine constantly emerging meaning and connecting

ideas to stimulate creativity and the actualization of what could become real. We engage

in a very special thinking and creative operation when we talk and listen, designing our

thoughts to create all the possible worlds that make up this reality around us. Like a

bridge between our senses when we hear and read, imagination assists comprehension in

our brain, like a render engine that runs a code to simulate a 3D environment with all its

characters, interactive events and virtual life actions and reactions. "The function of

language is to pick objects in the textual world, to link them with properties, to animate

characters and to conjure their presence to the imagination."2 Now, how we endowed our

virtual characters, objects and spaces with properties is a matter of personal

interpretation. Thus, narrative as virtual reality becomes a very intimate and subjective

understanding process.

I see the understanding process between humans as an open source code and its

programming language as an arrangement of words and phrases in the many different

tongues we have access to. My purpose is to push the limits of the definition of virtual

reality as an "interactive, immersive experience generated by a computer"3 and transfer

its concepts of interactivity and immersion into the realm of daily life experience. We

become narrators when we communicate. To render this narration as virtual objects and

forms, as virtual bodies, in our neuronal network is a task involving a collective

organization of thought and a globalized array of convictions and popular beliefs achieved

through time and experience. Altogether, this holographic composition is able to build

brick by brick a virtual reality space in our heads with all its characters, interactive

events and virtual life actions and reactions.

Virtual reality emerges, is present in our perception, everytime we humans speak

to each other, everytime we express our feelings and emotions, everytime we read. We are

constantly receiving and giving information, when we travel in the train reading the

newspaper, when we listen to the radio in the car, when we talk with our mobile phones,

when we walk on the street reading the billboard advertisements we pass by, when we

have a meeting at work, when we talk with our friends. We communicate, we are social.

The fundamental idea of communication is that of the transmission of messages. We are

cybernetic, because we are organized and controlled through our dynamic nature of social

feedback. Cybernetics was originally theorized by Norbert Wiener as the science of control

and communication in animals, men and machines. 4 Cybernetics opened new doors of

analysis of how we humans behave and socialize. The communication process of everyday

life breaks down as synaptic elements cascading a flow of feelings and emotions, receiving

and perceiving words, playing them along and orchestrating a visual ouverture in our own

time and space to understand what is being narrated to us. Most of the time we believe in

what we are told, we believe in what we read. We, humans, create the real out of the

virtual.

The popular conception of virtual reality in our modern technological society and

its increasingly common use as a term started arguably in the late seventies, early

eighties, with the appearance of the word cyberspace and the 3D simulation applications

that were developed as technical aids for computer visualization later in the nineties,

mostly for commercial use: head mounted displays and data gloves for immersion into

computer-generated virtual worlds. Cyberspace is popularly related to the internet,

interactive computer interfaces, art media installations and contemporarily to

MMORPG(massive-multiplayer-online-role-playing-games). Nevertheless, cyberspace has

always been more related and applied to literature and fiction than to the tangible field of

technology or science. For the present purpose, cyberspace will be related to the

experience of creating a virtual space with the narration of stories.

The word cyberspace (deriving from cybernetic, which in greek means ‘good at

steering, good pilot’) was coined and popularized by science fiction author William Gibson

in his 1984 novel Neuromancer : "Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced

daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught

mathematical concepts. [...] A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of

every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in

the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data."5 While we read along, the

mind starts working this visual potential, rendering images and shaping meaning out of

the textual content; the process of transforming text, characters, descriptions of rooms

and things into virtual existence begins. Of course, the power of imagination depends on

the reader and this virtual existence is just the entrance to the halls of perception.

When you read a book, you create a sense of place, one may say it is even possible

to deal with poetics of space. Reading is part of our daily lives, and arguably we all read at

least chapters of a book either to our children or to ourselves once a week. It’s an

interactive engagement, although there is in reality no one physically to interact with, in

a make-belief act of reconstructing the lives and situations of the characters involved and

it’s only present when you let yourself go and immerse into the story; what takes place is

a transmutation of the signs of language into cinema for the mind. Magical realism, for

instance, is a powerful representative of this kind of immersive narrative. One distinctive

literary masterpiece, which breaks the traditional scheme of linearity and encourages the

imaginative participation of the reader, is Rayuela (Hospscotch) from Julio Cortazar: "I

touch your mouth. With one finger I touch the boundaries of your mouth. I am drawing it

as if it would originate out of my hand drawing, as if for the first time your mouth would

open and I only need to close my eyes to undo everything and start all over again."6

You visualize the narration. May it be drama, science fiction, terror, fantasy, any

literary genre lets you recreate the whole scene, lets you watch the story develop, even be

part of the possible outcomes and actualize what may be, what comes next. "The idea is

that you or any other reader must decide. The reader is the accomplice, he has to decide."7

This interaction with the characters and the plot and this make-believe effect, this

immersion capability, depends of course on the imagination of the reader as well as on the

immersive skills of the writer to be able to captivate and capture the reader’s attention.

Crime or detective fiction stories, for example, allow us to get involved easily in the plot,

to dive in and swim deep into this sea of identities and situations, extrapolating to a

virtual scene: "After a thorough investigation of every portion of the house, without

farther discovery, the party made its way into a small paved yard in the rear of the

building, where lay the corpse of the old lady, with her throat so entirely cut that, upon an

attempt to raise her, the head fell off. The body, as well as the head, was fearfully. To this

horrible mystery there is not as yet, we believe, the slightest clew."8 The same applies for

horror or mystery literary genres, although the necessary immersion to be able to believe

and reposition oneself in the darkness requires a great deal of mental effort: "The appeal

of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a

certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life."9

This virtualization of the text is possible by reading but also when you engage

yourself in an academical, profesional or friendly conversation. Any common

conversation taking place in a daily basis activates and nurtures this virtuality. You are

interacting not only verbally but also physically and you are narrating your own story,

telling it with gestures and body movement, creating a possible world that has to be

actualized in the receptor’s imagination. Socialize, interact, narrate and virtualize. Such

is the case of talking to the neighbor about the injustices of the world after reading the

newspaper, or retelling the adventure of how the dog chased the cat around the whole

house, rushing through tables and chairs, tumbling everything on their way. Banaly as it

may sound, these common daily interactions are exactly where virtual reality extends its

potential to become an instance of an imagined immersive space, a cyberspace. "There is

a sense in which cyberspace has become a new realm for the mind. In particular it has

become a new realm for the imagination; and even, as many cyber-enthusiasts now claim,

a new realm for the ‘self’."10

So the narrator and its tale potentiate a possible virtual environment deep inside

the self, where imagination rules the senses and not the other way around, the senses of

the self governing and demanding the attention and participation of imagination to render

words into images. Here the signifier is the key to immersion. Thus, imagination is

confronted with the virtual of the idiomatic expression: a potential to understand by

internally projecting an image of a possible world. This possible world is the context of the

story being listened to. It’s like learning to speak a foreign language and trying to link the

signifiers of the recently learned words with the correspondent stored image of those

words in our own language. Therefore, we attempt to assign a visual object to a new word

in order to remember it and be able to use it anytime it’s recalled in our mind. As a result

to this mental projection, like projections on head-mounted displays or on the walls within

an interactive installation, a collection of words connected to visual representations is

assembled; sort of virtually managing data space in our neuronal hard drive to constantly

update a vocabulary network that is supported by pictures to understand the context of a

narration. Sight is the predominant sense of all the human senses. Hence, the need to

always prefer a mental image: a picture is worth a thousand words they say, for which an

image is at the same time a visual narration. Seeing with the mind is an inviting way to

get to know how we think. This assertion of mine is in no sense a definition of what occurs

on everyone’s head when hearing a narration or reading a story, but a pure hypothesis of

what I believe happens in my own mind according to my own cognitive experience.

Nevertheless, image and mind are scientifically proven to be interconnected and to work

as a collective: Magnetic Resonance Imaging technology (MRI) provides dynamic scans of

the human brain in action, revealing that when people visualize a specific thing, patterns

of activation occur on the surface of their visual cortex, and these cortical patterns

preserve most of the geometric properties of the object being imaged. 11

Plato was an engaged and active teller of the classical greek time and many, if not

all, of his teachings and philosphical foundations are based on dialogues, which

correspond to a narrative form. He uses the sun as a metaphor for the source of

illumination in “The Republic”. On “The Allegory of the Cave” he envisioned the idea that

humans only see the shadows of what is real. "Imagine human beings living in an

underground den which is open towards the light; they have been there from childhood,

having their necks and legs chained, and can only see into the den. At a distance there is a

fire, and between the fire and the prisoners a raised way, and a low wall is built along the

way, like the screen over which marionette players show their puppets…and they see only

the shadows of the images which the fire throws on the wall of the den…Suppose now that

you suddenly turn them around and make them look with pain and grief to themselves at

the real images; will they believe them to be real?"12 According to Plato, knowledge is

contained within the intersection of that which can be both true and believed. If we then

apply Plato’s philosphy to the field of interactive media environment, or at least try to fit

it in, we end up entering a virtual reality environment. Thus, Plato was the first to create,

what we now know as, a virtual interactive space: the cave = the installation space; the

prisoners = the visitors , spectators or users; the screen = the medium projected; the

marionette players = the artists, performers, designers; the puppets = the animated

characters. And it is virtual because it never really physically and tangibly existed, no

stage, no actors, no solid objects to touch, see or play with. It began as a narration and

now it’s all written. A narration ignites a virtual experience that has to be actualized in

the mind, as a possible world recentered in existence according to your perspective,

relation and power of immersion.

The theory of possible worlds has been used to describe the logic of fictionality and

has been adapted to narrative semantics by Umberto Eco, Thomas Pavel and Lubomír

Dolezel.13 PW theory is a very controversial philisophical discourse and postulates the

possibility that the reader may be transported to the virtual reality of a textual world.

Moreover it proposes that the actual world is one of many possible worlds that exist. It

involves the idea that something is about to be but no one knows beforehand what it will

be. There is an objective reality and inside its boundaries actual worlds exist. These actual

worlds correspond to individual representations of reality, that means each one of us

contribute to the recontruction of how we perceive this objective reality and interact with

each other exchanging the bits of information we absorb from this objective reality. It’s a

whole universe where nonactual possible worlds gravitate around this objective reality,

but are still accessible if we push our imagination further enough to transport ourselves

outside this objectiveness. Consequently, we could say, immersion can be a method for

transportation. What PW theory indulges is the art to make believe, to give birth to a

recentered fictional universe. "The center is the actual world and around are satelites

conceived as merely possbile worlds. For a world to be possible, a so-called accessibility

relation must link it to the center. Impossible worlds cluster at the periphery,

conceptually part of it, since the possible is defined by contrast with the impossible."14

Without another to limit and define it, the concept of fiction loses its identity. That

is why for someone to cross the limits of what is actual and objective, to render virtual

worlds in our minds out of the information we collect and perceive, it is necessary to have

a solid and concrete referent. This referent must be true, authentic and original. There

has to be an opposition of virtual to actual, two sides of the coin, in order for human

knowledge to imagine what’s beyond, so that we know our position within the structures

of the system. But at the same time we strive to extrapolate our position outside the limits

to achieve the freedom of the mind, like the prisoners using their imagination on Plato’s

cave.

In this game of propositions of what is the real and what is the virtual, children

have the keys to the kingdom. Because the virtual does not really mean fake in the sense

that is not true, or that it doesn’t have a value, or even that it doesn’t exist. Fake is

opposed to authentic just as simulation is opposed to nature. Both (fake/authentic,

simulation/nature) exist nevertheless in objective reality because they need each other to

delimit their essence and know where one begins and the other ends. Children are genuine

artists faking identities by always playing this game of make believe, for they need to

learn by creating a world in which to play. And what is play if not a simulation? "To

simulate is to feign what one hasn’t. It implies an absence. Simulation threatens the

difference between true and false, between real and imaginary."15 They like role-playing

games, they assume the role of superheroes, fictional cartoon characters, even the role of

their parents, and the joy and hapiness is real because they transport themselves between

the real and the imaginary, they are free to laugh and not afraid of what is true and what

is false. It’s like they know that these virtual possible worlds are out there waititng to be

explored and imagined. Furthermore, kids energize their talent of becoming someone else

when they listen to bedtime stories. This is where they enter virtual reality. Emotions

increase when the good guy is about to fall in the trap of the bad guy or when the princess

is finally rescued by the hero. Children admire these ideal identities and sympathize with

the characters. Fictional narratives can elicit the same spectrum of emotional reactions

as real life situations: empathy, sadness, relief, laughter, fear. Hence the child recenters

his identity in this fictional universe because they easily let themselves go and immerse in

the plot as if it was happening in the moment it’s being narrated, they are there. They lose

track of time. This immersion is atemporal for they like some stories so much that they

want to hear them over and over again. They reproduce in their heads their favorite

characters and the complete cast of friends and foes if they are listening to the narration,

for that is the stimulus required to begin the act of imagination, the mental simulation.

Once the highlights of the narration find a steady position in memory, children can relive

the narrative experience whenever they want to. Repetition is a rhetorical device and also

a very important element in this virtual creation and codification of visual symbols.

The repetition of the code: "The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it

is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. At the limit of this process of

reproductibility, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always

already reproduced."16 According to Baudrillard, if I may dare to invite him to join my

discourse, simulation is ruled and controlled by the code, and that is where we live now: a

never-ending reproduction of images, objects of desire, information and even reproduction

of human rights (we have to buy a code in our passports to move from country A to

country B). The last phase of the evolution of the image is the present one: a reproduction

with no relation to any reality whatsoever, a commercialized non-stop consumption of bar

codes on a trip to the supermarket, or to be more contemporaneous, a one-click-away

purchase and a string of data is sent and instantly received confirming the shipment of

yet another product just like the many others stored on the shelves. The same occurs with

narration and the stories we like too much, we like to hear them over and over again, we

then tend to buy it, download it or simply copy it. Nevertheless there is also another way,

which is to remember what has been narrated to us and by means of photographic

memory render the words as images. Take for instance places we know. Once we have

visited Berlin or New York, we can teleport ourselves back anytime by buffering in our

memory an image that represents an intense personal experience of being in that city.

Thus, we visually narrate to ourselves the events that occurred in a linear fashion. We

begin to remember people’s faces, names of bars and restaurants, new words in the

vocabulary that we learned, flavours and odors. Most of the time that is what happen, we

relive the past in the present by remembering the succession of activities as a narration of

something that is not quite real and tangible but that we are sure existed because we lived

it. Hence, we contemplate here the empirical application of the narration in action as a

medium for the virtual creation of possibilities.

We live in simulacra because we live in our own mental models of reality. The

world is nothing more than an image perceived by me, by you and by everyone else. This

virtual image has no strict definition, overcomes its relationship to the false and to the

illusion. This virtual image does not oppose the real because it does not have to compete

with it nor resist it. On the contrary, it is a fertile source and powerful mode that enhances

the creation process, opens up the paths to a future that can be, and mediates the

understanding of what is ordinary and what is exceptional. The simulation of these

images we render in our heads is an acknowledgement of an abstract and spectral

telepresence of the things we collect with our senses. Opposed to the concrete and the

corporeal, a deterritorialization takes place in this mental simulation of apprehending the

components and the meaning of a narration. Virtuality is not nailed in time and space.

Actualization is a vessel moving from timelessness and deterritorialization to an

existence embedded in a here and now. Narrative as virtual reality is an event of

contextualization where humans reproduce the dissapearence of the real. "Syntax and

semantics have dissapeared – there is no longer apparition, but instead subpoena of the

object, severe interrogation of its scattered fragments – neither metaphor nor metonymy:

successive immanence under the policing structure of the look."17

A narrative exists when it promotes a credible, apparently autonomous and

language independent reality, when the fictional presentation of the personalities’ mood

and setting of the environment captures an aura of presence, when the reader is

imaginatively participating in the narration and senses that there is more to this world

than what the narrative portrays. Narrative, generally applied to our daily lives, is

ubiquitous and omnipresent; it exists because we are interactive beings who demand

attention and feedback to our expressions, to our emotions. To share is to destroy

loneliness. We like to share experiences, therefore we have evolved artistically and

pursued this technological apparatus in order to abandon the desert of einsamkeit and be

able to get interconnected. The propagation of forums and community websites, bred on

the simulated ecology of the Internet’s devil backbone, constitute the ultimate

globalization achievement in the breaking of political and physical borders; a mediated

sharing of opinions, reviews and discourses that enable multiple roundtrip destinations to

virtual places in the vast and open interconnectedness of avatars and anonymity.

In the standard Internet navigation structure, to click a hyperlink is to be

teletransported. One dissapears from one virtual space to abruptly appear in another

different one. A relevant comparison is to be online as opposed to be offline, it’s like

becoming virtual flatliners in cyberspace, crossing the borders of life and death whenever

we wish to. As we chat we extend our thoughts and messages beyond the reality of the

keyboard into the realm of binary conformity, and so we enter the narrative prose. As we

post new threads on our blog we extend the immediacy of ephimeral image making. As we

upload pictures and comment flash videos à la Web 2.0 we establish a semiotic chain of

multiple interpretations. "Semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse

modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different

regimes of signs but also states of things of different status. […] A semiotic chain is like a

tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic,

gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic

universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages. There is no

ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community.

[…]"18 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari introduced the philosophical approach of the

‘rhizome’ in A Thousand Plateaux as a complex interrelationship of all things changing

over time and their constant multiplicity condition in dimension and space. Diversed and

complicated as it may appear, the rhizome approximation of Deleuze and Guattari has

multiple ideologic applications in the fields of virtual space creation and new media. The

implications, as I see them, towards narrative as virtual reality are focused on the idea

that the conventional structures of language and the traditional idea of subject and object

are nowadays interchangeable and of multiple interpretations. They are being blurred by

the abstract and the personal perception of how a story can be fragmented, freely

interpreted, and from fragments multiply itself to be renewed in the imagination. It’s the

death of the author proposed by Barthes, supported by Foucault and imagined by Borges.

"Such blurring of boundaries between role and self present new opportunities to

use the role to work on the self. You are the character and you are not the character both

at the same time."19 To play a videogame is just like a child simulating a game of make

believe when he plays with his toy, narrating while moving the figure with his hand how

he is going to kill the bad guy and save the world. There has to be narrative in videogames,

because games are based on a reward system of goal achievements where the player

advances in the story by completing levels and quests. The player reads signs, clicks on

links and navigates around a world of possibilities to reveal the end of the story. It’s like

reading a book, only that the chapters in the book represent the levels in the game. The

act of playing virtualizes the experience of multiple destinations, teletransportation and

telepresence: recenterable possible worlds, as we immerse inside a narration, provide the

possible assumption that we are the identities involved in the plot of such narration.

Virtual identities are avatars in cyberspace, virtual realities in MUD’s and MMORPG. If we

compare the role-playing game phenomenon with the narrative phenomenon, we end up

realizing that there isn’t much difference between the two experiences at the core of how

they are originally established. There are characters, friends and foes, places and objects

and a story to be experienced, to be played. Now, how this story develops, depends

completely on the reader, this reader being the player. Players create avatars to destroy

real life inhibitions and insecurities. This way, without complexes, they are able to talk

with other people and socially interact with their avatars in this virtual world. A

reconstruction of the self in virtual reality comes into being. The player favors the

immersion in this ideal identity instead of the complications of real identity. All the

eventual fears and restrictions of failing in real life dissappear. It’s a fragmentation of

identities, in the case of hard-core players, that end up spending more time playing online,

interacting at the virtual level, than playing offline, interacting at the actual level: the

physical-mechanical world of real identities versus the electronic world of virtual

identities.

The concept of play is traditionally associated with the creative power of

imagination and the capability of immersion into possible worlds, possible feelings and

emotions. Creating a wellness state inside our bodies narrated by emotions is possible.

These same emotions that we create when we go to a funeral of a dear one, or when we cry

because of suffering or pain, are the emotions of a virtual process involving positive and

negative energies that actually affect the mood and health of a human being. There is

positive and negative feedback in every system exchanging information, thus in every

communication process like a narration, in theory of course, because that depends on the

subjects, objects and the entropy of the enviroment involved in such a process.

The power of suggestion as a medical therapy to help heal by immersing oneself

into thoughts of wellness and positive thinking is nowadays a common strategy practiced

in some hospitals but mostly in alternative healing centers. The healing power of the

imagination is a very controversial theme for conventional old-school medicine. In spite of

that, it has been proven through MRI and scientific research that when the doctor

receives a patient smiling, establishing a good connection, being friendly and, of course,

narrating how the treatment and the pills are going to effectively work in the body and

cure the disease, that’s when the patient starts believing in the words and virtualizes the

healing effects of the drugs. A biochemical respond in the brain is truly activated, or

rather stimulated, after a positive narrated diagnostic. The feeling of being healthy

manifests itself in certain cerebral regions when the doctor influences the patient with a

positive suggestion, and through this, the human body fights against illness and stress.

Whereas the placebo effect improves the healing of the immune system, the nocebo effect

aggravates the immune system. It’s like having the choice between being pessimistic or

being optimistic, no matter what the real consequences are, and this is when actualizing

the ‘feeling good’ or ‘feeling bad’ comes into play. The success of homeopathy, for example,

strongly depends on the healing belief and positivism of the patient, for which it highly

contrasts modern pharmaceutical treatment and has been thereon categorized as a

placebo treatment. On the other hand, there are patients that develop certain symptoms

out of reading the side effects of the drug they have to take without even really taking it,

therefore creating a nocebo effect in their organism out of imagining that it can be

dangerous.

To be or not to be healthy is often regarded as possesing weakness or strength in

the spirit, and spirituality is a matter of believing, of believing what we are told and what

is written. Religion is the best example of imagination, immersion and narrative as virtual

reality. Humans immserse in prayers and believe in gods, just like repositioning oneself in

possible fictional worlds when reading a book or hearing a story, empathizing with

characters and imagining that they exist. The Bible, The Coran, The Bhagavad Gita, The

Teachings of Buddha, they are all narrations, books that need to be experienced, they will

tell you, not only read. The spirit is intangible and invisible, but is after all part of what we

are as human beings, is part of our need to believe in something beyond our

understanding. The beyond is only attainable by total dettachment of reality, of entering

this trance state and letting oneself go from objective thinking and rationality, just like

truly enjoying and immersing in a narration. Spiritual matters are those involving

humankind's ultimate nature not merely as material biological organisms but as beings

with a unique relationship to that which is beyond both time and material existence.

Therefore, we can speak of the spirit as a virtual disembodiment. Something that cannot

be completely proven by science or technology but that somehow is permanent in the

human mind as an ultimate resource and relief when the material is no longer meaningful.

At the end of the humankind spiral for this quest of knowledge, there lies spirituality, a

virtual reality accessible through imagination and immersion by the many religions and

faiths of the world.

So what is Narrative As Virtual Reality at the end? Is nothing more than

everything in anything: the narration of a lifetime, an online adventure in the digital

jungle of a videogame, the act of sharing a story because you are happy, falling in love

with the female character of a fictional novel, writing a web blog posting tales of how to

dress for carnival, explaining to the police how you got robbed while you were sleeping in

the train, telling lies about your age to a stranger in a bar, reading a script in front of a

casting agent to play the main role in a movie, saying hello to the neighbor while eating

breakfast, reading a manifest out loud on the streets, listening to the radio on a foreign

language, reading poetry at the top of a mountain, hearing an old man story of how he

survived war, hearing your grandmother complain about the prices in the supermarket,

listening how your sister talks for hours on the phone, chating online your best friend

about the first time you had sex, planing a football strategy on how to win the game with

your teammates, presenting the storyboard for a new commercial to the client, reading

the newspaper while you wait at the bus stop and it’s raining outside, giving directions to

a turist in a city where you are also a turist, teaching your daughter how to build a sand

castle, screaming to your wife why you came late last night, reading the instructions on

how to disconnect a bomb without pictures, reading a cooking recipe on how to bake

apfelstrudel without pictures, reading the critic reviews of a movie that you will never go

to see.

Narrative As Virtual Reality represents a conceptual approach to the social

understanding of how technology is becoming more and more invisible and embedded in

our daily life interaction with people, not just with machines or digital characters on the

screen of the computer. Narrative As Virtual Reality points to the signifier and its many

interpretations, not the actual meaning of things. Narrative As Virtual Reality becomes

what will be experienced when we try to understand what the other is saying to us.

Narrative As Virtual Reality is giving and receiving mental images. Narrative As Virtual

Reality is being anyone in the narration. Narrative As Virtual Reality is traveling in a

book, going to different places and enjoying the reading as we immerse in it. Narrative As

Virtual Reality is using the imagination in any textual context or spoken situation to

render all the possible spaces and perspectives that can exist based on the words we read

or hear. Narrative As Virtual Reality is being creative and playful in knowing how to use

your imagination in order to actualize the other possible realities around your reality.

Narrative As Virtual Reality is forgetting about the digital world and the technology

surrounding it, to fully immerse into a world of possibilites in the very own landscape of

the mind.

1 Ryan, Marie-Laure, Narrative As Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and

Electronic Media, Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

2 Ibid.

3 Pimentel, Ken and Teixeira, Kevin, Virtual Reality: Through The New Looking Glass, New York:

Windcrest, 1994.

4 Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine,

Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1948.

5 Gibson, William, Neuromancer, New York: The Berkeley Publishing Group, 1984.

6 Cortazar, Julio, Rayuela, Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1968.

7 Interview conducted in Saignon, France, 10-13 July 1973, excerpted from Evelyn Picon Garfield's

book, Cortazar por Cortazar, Mexico: Universidad Veracruzana, 1978.

8 Allan Poe, Edgar, The Murders In The Rue Morgue, New York: Modern Library, 2006.

9 Lovecraft, H.P., Supernatural Horror in Literature, A Project Gutenberg of Australia (eBook), 2006.

10 Wertheim, Margaret, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet,

London: Virago, 1999.

11 Kosslyn, Stephen M., Sensorium: embodied experience, technology and contemporary art (edited by

Caroline A. Jones), Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006.

12 Plato, The Republic (translated by Benjamin Jowett), The Project Gutenberg Etext:

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext98/repub11.txt, 1998.

13 Ryan, Marie-Laure, Narrative As Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and

Electronic Media, Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

14 Ibid.

15 Baudrillard, Jean, Simulations, New York: Semiotext, 1983.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1980.

19 Turkle, Sherry, Constructions and Reconstructions of The Self in Virtual Reality (from the book Electronic Culture – Technology and Visual Representation), New York: Aperture, 1996.