The New Virtuality:A Creative Website on Blurred Boundaries Between the Real and Unreal

Our project, “The New Virtuality” (thenewvirtuality.com), is an online multimedia work which explores the implications of highly realistic images that appear, interact, and socialize with human users, often seemingly “live” in real time. Such realism of and engagement with the image prompt reconsideration of the relationships between reality and visuality. How, then, to understand this media that so freely and near-seamlessly mix virtual and actual realities? How to place this phenomenon in media’s long history of blurred environments, while still appreciating their distinctive newness and challenges? What are the impacts of the new virtuality on our apprehensions and constructions of realities? How might this mediated reality relate—as code, as language, as consciousness—to the wider contexts of information that color contemporary times?