the copy that allows the spectator to become an active part in the production
of art. Virtual Reality will not perhaps help us to tell new stories although it
will certainly affect the way in which we tell them and the nature of
perception. Virtual Reality offers the opportunity for consumers to become
immersed in a world that looks simultaneously different from and similar to
the world in which we live. During this process we can become aware of not
being in our world and therefore our perception of artificiality is increased,
or we do not retain such a level of consciousness in this respect and therefore
it is the feeling of immersion that is increased. Interactive and Virtual Reality
technology is thus more effective if we believe we are immersed in the
virtual environment, and this situation is reflected in recent years in a
proliferation of films concerned precisely with the confusion of reality and
unreality within the Virtual Reality context. This is perfectly illustrated in
eXistenZ, a film with no real narrative resolution; a film where the actors and
audience constantly doubt if what they are living/watching is real or virtual;
and where virtuality is introduced into virtuality several times, reproducing
the old feeling of dreaming that we are dreaming, and the consequent
confusion/anxiety this evokes. eXistenZ represents both the potential
qualities of Virtual Reality and also our fears about it.
Virtual Reality is a fictional world constituted between a magical
reality and realism. It is a ‘technology of miracles and dreams that allow us
to play God’ (Dovey, 1996: 2). Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in Virtual Reality and a
‘techno-romantic’, explains that Virtual Reality is (imagined to be) ‘a
combination of the objectivity of the physical world with the unlimitedness
and the uncensored content normally associated with dreams or imagination’
(Lanier, 1990: 188). Nonetheless, behind the initial amazement produced by
Virtual Reality there is an unconscious or unconfessed fear; the fear of a
potential future in which artificially generated virtual worlds will offer
‘better’ realities, more in conformity with our desires and dreams, worlds
that people will choose instead of the real one. In this sense, Cesar in Abre
los Ojos elects to live the virtual life he could not live in the real world just
as Cypher (Joe Pantoliano) in The Matrix chooses, hedonistically, to be
immersed in the artificial virtual life offered by technology as the virtual
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