The Virtual Imagination: Early VR Development and the Construction of Digital Subjectivity

“The Virtual Imagination: Early VR development and the Construction of Digital Subjectivity” investigates the history and historical influence of Virtual Reality (VR) technology of the 1980s and ’90s, when the growing computerization of everyday life inspired cultural narratives in which social life would migrate to online “cyberspace,” material goods would be replaced with digital copies, and even reality itself would eventually go “virtual.” VR was the holy grail of this fantasy, a medium purporting to allow its users to transcend their bodies and enter immaterial, virtual worlds. This fantasy, however, was belied by the crude, limited applications of that era’s actual VR devices, leading to a disconnect between VR’s actual capabilities and the cultural fantasies that emerged around it. Each chapter of this dissertation examines this disconnect, and the impact it has had on the cultural influence of VR from the early 1980s to today, from a different historical and theoretical perspective. The introduction, “Prepositioning the Virtual,” traces a cultural narrative that was borne from VR discourse, a belief that VR will inevitably usher in the next technological revolution, a sci-fi scenario come to life in which digitally simulated worlds will be indistinguishable from physical reality, but without physical reality’s limits. This narrative is invariably accompanied by a belief that “virtual reality,” or “cyberspace,” will be accessed by quitting one’s body, transcending the actual world, and penetrating to the other side of the screen. I call this belief virtualism, and in this introductory chapter I argue that, as it has taken hold in the popular imaginary, it has shaped the ways that the VR community has told its own story, as well as the ways that critical media scholars have attempted to critique it. I argue, however, that because the discourse on VR has primarily existed at this imaginary and ideological level, the material history of the technology, as a cultural symbol and a set of actual technical objects, has been left largely uninterrogated. The goal of this project is to rewrite both historical contingency and material history into the discourse on VR. The first chapter, “Realizing Virtualism,” seeks to historicize the impact that the rhetoric of virtualism has had from the 1980s to today, paying close attention to the ways that the term “virtual reality” has been conceived as a way of describing not only the particular technology called “VR,” but the theoretical infinitude of the broad concept “virtual reality.” In this chapter, I juxtapose a rhetorical analysis of the term “virtual reality” with the historical circumstances in which the term emerged and circulated in the VR community at the end of the twentieth century. Whereas much of the critical scholarship on VR from the 1980s and ’90s has focused on VR’s pernicious futurism, the second chapter, “The Ballad of Morton Heilig,” focuses instead on its collectively constructed past. In this chapter, I investigate one of the VR community’s most prominent myths: that filmmaker and inventor Morton Heilig developed an analog VR system in the 1950s, but failed to receive public recognition for his invention because few at the time understood the importance of his vision. Juxtaposing a careful look at the ways this myth was constructed by the VR community and the material facts of Heilig’s life and work, I show how the story of his life functioned not only to pay retroactive homage to a figure that many in the VR community considered to be a visionary before his time, but also to legitimize and justify the project of VR itself, by appropriating Heilig’s story to give the technology its own sense of teleological progress. The third chapter, “A Man Before His Time,” takes a closer look at the aesthetic philosophy of Morton Heilig, in order to reframe the mythology that grew up around him. In this chapter, I ask: rather than a moment of frustrated teleological progress, what if Heilig’s approach to simulation represented instead a unique moment of entanglement between the twentieth century cultures of (analog) mass media and the simultaneously emergent digital zeitgeist? Through a close reading of Heilig’s aesthetic philosophy, developed and published and unpublished essays, I argue that new technologies of aesthetic representation and immersion were possible, and show how Heilig’s aesthetic philosophy reflected a series of concerns over industrial production and social decay that were shared by the parallel movements of cybernetics and information theory. The fourth chapter, “There and Back Again,” focuses explicitly on the development history of VR, beginning with Ivan Sutherland’s famous speech “The Ultimate Display” and his work on the colloquially named Sword of Damocles head-mounted display in the late 1960s, and continuing through to development discourses on the questions of embodiment, presence, and mediation that were prominent in development discourses in the 1990s. Tracing a genealogy of VR development in which the technical constraints and affordances of various VR configurations served to influence the ways that digital embodiment and space were conceptualized, I show how the imagined role and function of the body in the apparatus of VR changed over time, and how the body went from something to augment to something to regulate in order to achieve the experience of “virtual reality.” Across all the chapters, my reading of VR’s cultural and development histories rests on a fundamental claim: that the “virtual reality” of VR is best understood not as an object, but a ground. The ultimate promise of VR, I argue, is identical to the promise of the digital in that the power of each is predicated on the theoretical capacity for infinitude—the simulation and representation of anything. The fundamental goal of VR and therefore the digital, in other words, is not to simulate any particular type of experience (though of course it does that); it is to simulate experience itself. The cultural legacy of VR can be interpreted as a series of reactions to that theoretical infinitude. Thinking specifically in terms of misrecognition, contingency, and myth in VR’s early history, I argue, illuminates the wider cultural condition that has influenced how we conceive of the relationship between the embodied human subject and the computer. I call this phenomenon the virtual imagination.

Advisor: Bates, David