A while ago, I came across this amazingly prescient, and beautiful article by Michael L. Benedikt, “Physics for Phantoms,” that evoked for me the enormous creative potential of virtual worlds, and I thought of it as my camera explored (why do I want to say “as I crawled though”?) an underground piece by Bryn Oh on Immersiva (see my not-so-graceful video below):
This is possible in a virtual world: to pass into the space under a table or in a cabinet or vase, and there discover spaces teeming with life and larger than the room from which they were entered. Within these, in turn, there may be smaller spaces–things with interiors like photo albums or lanterns–which turn out to contain worlds vaster yet…and so on and on, ad infinitum, in a Borgesian chain of spaces which grow larger as they are more tightly contained and which may curve back on themselves, so that the final entry into the deepest of deep spaces (no matter which) precipitates us back to where we began, or part of the way back, where we may dive again by another route into inexhaustible innerness. This is a journey through a dimension at once spatial and not; a circle made in an impossible plane; a direction followed which lies at right angles to all others. Is it the fabled fourth dimension? Perhaps. For here some Law of Scale is broken the way only children, madmen, and dreamers know it can be.
This too is possible in a virtual world: an object as round and full as a pillow which can be seen through like a window, and this from any and all directions simultaneously. Each viewer who looks through the pillow, whose contour is the shape of the pillow seen in this room, sees a pillow-cut view of another place, another room, occupying the same space as this one. This pillow/window is nothing more or less than a plump and movable hole, a rotund vacancy, transgressible from all quarters and from both rooms, one into other, back and forth as we please. In our world, the real world, windows have no volume and holes have sides. What Law of Physics is broken here that we might regret?
This too is possible in a virtual world: clouds whose shadows set the earth aflame; chairs that are not chairs but someone in Utah, watching; objects that pass through each other like ghosts or that follow you like the moon; surfaces that can be approached forever but can never be touched, like planets we cannot land on, looming, ever revealing of more detail; a salt shaker which, upon each turn, turns into a figurine, then a tobacco pipe, a crystal log, a hot dog, a laughing bat, a crooked hat, a button-hole maker, and then the salt shaker. Again. Where will the phantasmagoria end? And what is different here from the routine and ritual flauntings of the laws of physics found in fairy tales and Saturday morning cartoons? What is different here that we should take this whole question seriously at all? How important is it that Pacman could disappear on the left of the screen and reappear on the right, or disappear on the bottom to reappear at the top, instantaneously, without it troubling us that the actual corners of Pacman’s world-surface cannot be joined in any physically realizable topology whatsoever?