Putting the virtual back into VR

Firstly, I will suggest here that although there is now a common practice of associating VR with the theatre as a form of representation with stories, plots and characters, VR actually has more in common with performance (and here I mean performance art or ritual rather than the conventional theatre), music and the visual arts. This is because what we could call the ‘classical’ theatre establishes itself pretty much along conventional lines, within preordained forms of representation. It defers to the past. Performance art and ritual are about transformation and variation, about investigating the unknown and producing the new. Virtual Reality’s commonality with performance and art will therefore not be taken as its mimetic qualities its ‘representation of an action’, so much as its qualities of modulation; its realisation of the objectile, where an object is transformed into an event of “continuous variation” (Deleuze, 1993:19). Secondly, Virtual Reality will be discussed here in a way which is only slightly concerned with its current, specific technological form (that is, for example, a helmet, glove and a three-dimensional, digitally produced, navigable world). I