Confusion and ambivalence about virtual reality predominate in the dance community with standard reactions ranging from skeptical, apprehensive and proudly ignorant to intrigued, excited and hopeful. We need to address our assumptions about the field of emerging technologies so that we can distinguish well-founded suspicions from misguided fears and reasonable hopes from absurd expectations. Virtual reality is both a technology and a way of thinking and the two are linked. Some of our suspicions about technology in general has to do with its associations to ecological destruction, weapons of war, mindless entertainment, escapism and failed promises. Here's the deal.
Reality has toxic waste spills, transmission overhauls and bad hair days.
VR, on the other hand, has nothing but totally fun games played in a strange yet stylish headgear. Although the ad is meant to be funny, it nevertheless reflects an attitude that the VR industry is trying to capitalize on. In the pledges the VR industry makes to seduce us -extending and augmenting our physical body, heightening our senses, traveling in exotic and impossible worlds, flying, 'morphing' with other people, animals and objects, transforming our identity, intensifying our sexual experience, freeing ourselves from our body, living out all our fantasies, etc. It is selling us the fantasy that we can have control over our destinies and that we can escape our conflicted lives all without consequences on our real bodies and on our real lives. In our interaction with most computers, we use very little of our body's muscular and sensory potential.