reality itself. Technology has created the concept of ‘no-space’ (Castells,
1999), the non visible space where institutions, social status and relationships
are not observed under social criteria. Nowadays, the act of meeting
somebody, even at an intimate level, does not necessarily imply a ‘face to
face’ relationship. The new space that the Internet has opened through chat
rooms, e-mails, on-line videogames, instant conversations and even on-line
dating has caused our faith to ‘become blind’. It is ‘blindly’ how many people
manage to build effective or professional relationships, reading characters on
a screen or observing images sent to them. In such situations, confidence in
the other person becomes a matter of pure faith. These ‘technological
relationships’ are almost exclusive to the current time. Nowadays, we know
and deal with more people remotely than we actually interact with
personaly. The result, when our knowledge about something or someone is
entirely based on faith, is the evocation of doubt; doubt about the
information we have and about the reality of certain social relationships.
Faith and doubt are confronted in virtual relationships and consequently we
have been increasingly obliged to pause and reconsider the reality of certain
experiences (Loader, 1997: 27).
In this sense, Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, an SF film based on a virtual
game which is connected to the nervous system and that has the ability to
reproduce reality with total fidelity, is an intriguing case study. With this
film, he hyperbolizes the present incapacity to separate reality and fiction in
a schizophrenic labyrinth of the mind set up by technology and which reveals
the potential threats of such confusion. eXistenZ fictionalizes a deep
confusion between reality and virtuality: within the overarching game the
characters play, they play further successive games that remind us of the old
sensation of dreaming that we are dreaming, of the immersion of unrealities
inside unrealities. Thus eXistenZ illustrates technology’s active role in the
provocation of our disorientation. Indeed, how do we know then when we are
awake? As occurs in Luna, when we really wake up, there are brief moments
when we cannot differentiate dreams from reality: we rub our eyes, we touch
the walls, we look at the clock, but nothing provides a definitive answer to
our confusion. If we were dreaming in our dreams, how could we know for
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