The New Virtuality:

A Creative Website on Disappearing Media Boundaries

Research Statement

Jenna Ng and Oliver Tomkins

University of York

Introduction
Our creative practice project, “The New Virtuality” (http://www.thenewvirtuality.com) (Fig.
1), 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.

Figure 1: Screenshot of the project website’s landing page

Usually created with imaging technologies such as holographic projection or virtual reality
(VR) and often boosted with AI and machine learning, we argue that these images radically
break down boundaries between virtual and actual realities, truth and fakery, real and unreal.
They signal new directions in understanding visual media across various major tenets of
concern to the study and traditions of media and communications: environment; meaning;
society; culture; interconnectedness; human sensibilities; technological innovation. Where and
how media push the virtuality of images against the actuality of the viewer’s environment is
also about where and how reality is discerned, believed and understood. These realistic images

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thus present an era of mixed realities whose unprecedentedly sophisticated realism and
dominant cultural significance warrant an urgent examination of their meanings, implications
and potentials. In these regards, we argue that they produce a clarion marker of a contemporary
media ecology whose ease of convertibility between virtuality and actuality becomes a signal
fire for the politics of misinformation, post-truth and deep fakery in the twenty-first century.
This marker, then, is what we have labelled “the new virtuality”.

These developments inform the project’s research questions: how to understand this media that
so freely and near-seamlessly mix virtuality and actuality? How to place this phenomenon in
media’s long history of blurred environments, while still appreciating their distinctive newness
and challenges? Where seeing is no longer believing, what are the impacts of the new virtuality
on our apprehensions and constructions of realities? How might this state of mediated reality
relate – as code, as language, as consciousness – to the wider contexts of information that
colour contemporary times?

The aim of this project is to study this phenomenon of mixed realities not only as an
environment of media. More importantly, it is also to consider screen media itself as codes for
the larger entwinements between the anthropology of new beings, the epistemology of new
kinds of realities, and the new literacies with which to carry awareness of today’s most
significant cultural, social and political changes. In an approach described by South African
transmedia storyteller Damien Tomaselli as “new age narrative” (2022), we designed the
project’s examination of mixed audiovisual realities through three modulated voices: academic
research; multimedia expression; and creative fiction. Interweaving academic essay, video,
fiction, interactive story and image galleries, we set up the project as a hybrid work along the
lines of being a para-academic text identified by Joy and Musciandaro in their panel discussion
as “the multivalent sense of something that fulfills and/or frustrates the academic from a
position of intimate exteriority” (as quoted in Boshears 2014, 179). Through three specific
frameworks – historical context; textual reading and theory; fiction and multimedia –
constructed across various voices and valences (see further discussion below), the project
reflects on the new virtuality as a significant media environment with radical impact
particularly on human understanding, discernment and consumption of reality.

We view the project’s significance in two ways. Firstly, it is an original and innovative project
which reflects mixed voices as media ecology across academia and creative work, research and

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practice, text and image, non-fiction and imagination, active and interactive readership. In its
multivalences, the modality of the website itself constitutes part of our argument of
discombobulation in the blurring of realities, setting up a different and little-seen, if at all, way
of leading and presenting academic research. Through its multi-variegated approach, it
re-structures and re-defines the ecology and/or environment in which the academic product
itself is conceptualized, experienced and, indeed, mediatized.

Second, and more importantly, it reflects on mediated mixed realities as an emerging new
framework of reality which requires new understanding. The new virtuality of blurred realities
is no longer about questions of realism or illusion which had followed the advent of
computer-generated imagery (CGI) or even deepfakes. They are about new technical codes and
information which constitute such images, giving rise to new conceptions of ontology,
anthropology, epistemology, literacy, time and space. This is a new media ecology which sets
up increasingly complex linkages between media, codes, expressions, consciousness, change
and history. These ideas not only impact how we may understand our world. They also revise
the orientation of our truth values, and identification of our moral spaces.

Framework I: Historical Context

The first framework is the historical context of this contemporary state of virtuality. Visual
media have always pushed the boundaries between the virtuality of images against the actuality
of the viewer’s environment. Applied across various media from paintings and trompe l’œil to
photography and cinema to VR and immersive environments, practices which muddied images
against their referent are by no means new. This context thus needs to be first established to
understand the continuities and divergences of the present phenomenon, and thereby sharpen
awareness of the new virtuality’s distinctiveness.

Through archival research (including analyses of artefacts, reviews and paratexts) and media
archaeology (Parikka 2012), we traced an arc of visual media history from panoramas, peep
media, Pepper’s Ghost projections, to more modern phenomenon such as 3D cinema, film
marketing and relevant cinema genres. Stitching across this thematic continuity, we linked
these media to contemporary technologies of Virtual and Augmented Reality, bezel-less
television, 3D hologram fans, 3D imaging microscopes and so on. The aim is to construct a
deep context of media with blurred boundaries which anchors the current phenomenon of
virtuality. Its analysis begins with an understanding of precedents and exemplars.

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Our primary vehicle for presenting this historical context is an image gallery, titled “40
Snapshots of The New Virtuality”, which works as a revolving arcade of images (Fig. 2). This
showcase not only enables the viewer to rapidly cycle through myriad examples of the new
virtuality’s mixed realities. The design of the revolving format, supplemented by a succinct
caption accompanying each image, also reinforces the thematic connection of blurred media
boundaries as the viewer loops through the showcase’s examples from “old” to “new” media.
In these ways, the latter connects to the former as a deep context of both media history and
collective environment. The gallery thus functions as both archive and journey: it is a
depository of media exemplars as illustrations of content, as well as a facilitator of that media’s
wider ecology. Besides its presentation of text and image for further understanding this context,
the revolving gallery also adds colour and animation for extra interest.

Figure 2: Screenshot of the revolving image gallery

Framework II: Textual Reading and Theory

The second framework is the connection of theory – particularly from film, screen and media
studies – with textual readings to elucidate our argument of the new virtuality. As with our
work on historical context, we curated the latter based on archival research, reaching across
exemplars and scenes drawn from multiple media sites of paintings, art, cinema, performance,
VR, apps and architecture.

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We chose this methodology of multiple textual readings to deepen our study of mixed media
as a veritable inter/cross-medial environment of blurred boundaries, dematerialization and
limbic spaces. In this way, we situate the phenomenon not only in a historical context of
pastness, but also in a thematic continuity between and beyond screen media. For instance, in
explicating the meaning of disappearing boundaries, we drew on Réne Magritte’s famous
painting, La Condition Humaine (Magritte 1933), and its related critiques to underscore the
resonance between the painting’s message of creative failure between artifice and reality, and
our argument of the new virtuality (Fig. 3). We similarly drew on examples of land art,
performance theatre, even street protests and flash mob appearances, to leverage a cross-media
thematic treatment of mixed realities as illustration and support for our argument. This work
thus articulates the new virtuality in a clear contextualization of its media ecology, supported
by cross-media references, theory and exemplars.

Figure 3: Screenshot of the essay, "Disappearing Difference"

We then stitched together this mosaic of readings and theory to write up the project’s academic
thesis across four essays. The first essay (“Disappearing Boundaries”) traces a historical arc of
media that feature diminishing boundaries. We filled out this arc with analyses ranging across
film marketing, theatre practices, emerging cinema genres, holographic projections and digital
art. The essay argues that demarcations of boundaries, such as via the painting’s frame, cinema
screen bezel, theatre stage proscenium etc, are undone or subverted as much through radical

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marketing and staging practices as from imaging technologies such as VR and holographic
projections. It explicates the new virtuality as mapped across an environment of “old” and
“new” media, and their concomitant inspirations.

The second essay (“Disappearing Difference”) extrapolates that historical account to argue for
the importance of difference as not simply a premise of definition, but also a space for moral
judgement. Media’s consistent manoeuvrings of boundaries between actuality and virtuality
are thus not just trickery or gimmicks, but plays with the notion of difference which are of
social and cultural consequence. At stake here is also the meaning of media that is more than
just enmeshments of virtual and actual realities. Rather, they signal a radically shifting ground
in epistemology, namely, the knowledge, belief and definitions of what is real. The question of
illusion or realism are no longer relevant terms for the image of the new virtuality because their
merged boundaries have effectively changed the prior basis of understanding reality as
something fixed, and then changed or manipulated into something different. Instead, the real
of the new virtuality is an issue of information that transmits facilely across malleable, invisible
and disappearing boundaries. It heralds a different understanding of our world.

The third essay (“Virtual Humans”) explicates this new understanding via the key exemplar of
virtual humans: highly realistic computer-generated images of humans or humanoid forms who
appear, move and even engage with actual humans in real-time across increasingly unstable
actual/virtual boundaries. The user thus confronts a state of virtuality that is not quite virtual
nor actual, nor an amalgamation of the two. Rather, it is a limbic space of vacillation between
virtuality and actuality. In this environment of the new virtuality, the simulacra collapses into
the real, where reality and illusion no longer have their old semantic values as counters or
opposites to each other. As such, this media environment points to a regime of truth values
borne of no difference and without positive terms. It underscores a radical disorientation that
comes out of the disappearance of difference – of a nullification of the act of distinguishing –
and its resulting loss of moral bearing.

The fourth and final essay (“The Unreal”) examines the viewer’s discombobulating vacillations
between virtual and actual realities in the new virtuality that culminate with an almost heedless
gluttony of the virtual. These are the implications from this loss of difference manifest as
disorientations of reality which elide the represented, constituting a black hole of
representability that paves the way for a resulting hunger for images and virtual life. In a sense,

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this gluttony received an unexpected boost when various parts of the world largely retreated
into virtual life under the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020-21. While these lockdowns have been
mostly lifted, virtual working and living still continue today. With subdued yet sure
determination, the virtual invades the actual as human activities and socializations shift into
the former in rejection of the latter.

Across these essays, we build the argument of the new virtuality as itself a media environment
comprising of virtuality being its dominant language and component, and with potent
consequences on socio-cultural-political terms. In this vein, too, the metaverse beckons, with
its own capital and power structures with which we need to reckon. Where the world is to be
built in the virtual likeness of everyone and everything in it, that vision perhaps maps out the
ultimate media ecology.

Framework III: Fiction and Multimedia

Finally, we employed fiction and multimedia to wrap our argument in a different colouring –
the warp to the weft of the academic work, in a way.

Inspired by the “scientific fiction” work of Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan, such as their most
recent collaboration AI 2041 (Lee and Chen, 2021), we similarly wanted to use the dramatic
elements of fiction, such as character and plot, to colour and deliver additional life to the
academic argument. We thus intertwined a fictional story into the project in two ways. Firstly,
we anchored the story across two project elements. One is an interactive story written in the
open-source Twine tool that sets the reader at a pivotal moment of choice between characters
related to the protagonist. The second element is an epilogue which explains the story’s premise
of a physically ailing protagonist traversing virtual space with his futuristic carer.

Secondly, we leveraged the connective spaces of the website to present the rest of the fictional
story through text snippets interspersed throughout the academic essays. Red “portal” icons
signal these liminal spaces of fiction which, when clicked, raise texts of fictional scenes
between the protagonist and his carer (Figs. 4A and 4B). Each scene presents an issue of the
protagonist’s being in his virtual world, thus furnishing a fictional canvas on which to further
interrogate and explore the question of mixed actual and virtual realities.

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 Figures 4A and 4B: The "red portal" icon (left) to bring up fiction text (right)

We also used multimedia to add animation and accessibility to the argument’s presentation.
Besides the revolving gallery (see “Framework (I): Historical Context”), we designed image
margins in each academic essay which would roll up alongside the text as the page is scrolled
(Fig. 5). Consisting of primarily still images with occasional videos, the aim of each image is
to illustrate the essays’ textual references. In many cases, though, we also chose the images as
a colouring of the text’s ideas of radical discombobulation from the new virtuality’s blurred
media boundaries. These margins thus provide mood and setting to our argument of
disorientation from the loss of difference, boundaries and moral space.

Figure 5: Screenshot of an image gallery alongside an essay

The images culminate in a 33-minute video essay (Fig. 6) which has also been uploaded onto
Vimeo for online viewing. Comprised almost entirely of archival footage, the captioned video
presents the argument in a more accessible format as compared to text. At the same time, as

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with the image margins, the video essay constitutes part of the project’s argument of the new
virtuality’s poetics: the adrift unsettling of the fudged and the muddied across this new
virtuality – part simulacra, part virtual, part actual – which defines our realities today. Written
in a conscious rhetoric and meter of pensiveness and elegy, with images and music chosen in
similar veins, the video thus functions, so to speak, as a self-reflective audiovisual “mood
board” to the argument.

Figure 6: Screenshot of the project's video essay

In this way, we also designed the website project to treat itself as a media ecology. It
deliberately reflects its symbolic environment as one constituted of different and, in some ways,
divergent codes and syntax across various vocabularies and literacies: fiction; academia; text;
images; video; sound; colour; movement. Academic channels tend to be narrow, focusing on
set methods and neutrality of tone that do not usually countenance alternative valences or
modes of presentation. On the other end of the spectrum, fiction – even science fiction – spring
out of imagination, speculation and creative treatment. Moreover, as standalone outputs, almost
all academic websites are simply depositories of descriptive pages with hosted links to
resources such as journal articles.

Conversely, the website’s design and implementation are integral to its argument. Its stitching
together of text, fiction, images, interactive story and video through the connectivity of
hyperlinked webpages is itself a meta-reflection of its argument of mixed realities. Its

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solicitation of the user’s puzzling over and piecing together the different fragments of the
website across its pages is our call to their action in similarly constructing their realities across
the actual and the virtual. The significance of the micro media ecology in the website, then, is
to highlight the various and alternative valences with which to understand the new virtuality
and reflect the myriad moods, settings and registers of its operative environment:
discombobulating, disorienting, demanding and precariously dystopic.

The result is a work that is not only more accessible. The project also enables and affords the
conveyance of the moods, emotions, vibrancy and multiple valences with which to colour the
media environment and conditions set by the new virtuality. In these ways, the modality of the
website self-reflectively sets up a different and little-seen, if at all, way of leading and
presenting academic argument and research. It becomes in itself an understanding of academic
discourse as a media ecology which we create, write and generate even as we subsist in it via
our work and labour. Connecting this micro ecology of hyperlinks, texts, voices and genres is
likewise a re-structuring of the usage, conceptualization and description of academic discourse.
In this sense, the whole website itself functions as symbolic environment, underpinned by its
unique multi-variegation of codes and syntax. It subverts the notion of the academic outcome,
its vocabulary and its genres of knowledge production, re-defining the ways in which the
academic product is generated, experienced and mediatized.

Conclusion
In summary, the website examines the media phenomenon of mixed reality as being itself a
new media environment of academic discourse. More substantively, it is also about mixed
realities as media ecology in the sense of being an expression or articulation of the environment
of current post-truth politics and confusion. Where the new virtuality reflects, is the product of,
and engineers that culture of radically shifting values is both in the making of that environment
as well as a part of media’s environment. It is a process as well as an object. To reflect these
multiplicities, the project addresses this phenomenon by deploying various elements of
academic discourse, fiction, interactive story, image and video spread across three frameworks:
historical context; textual reading and theory; fiction and multimedia. Each framework is
characterized by distinct approaches, media elements and genre features as tabulated below:

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 Historical Context
• Image arcade
• Media archaeology
• Exemplars
• Historical continuity
Textual Reading and Fiction and Multimedia
Theory • Creative writing
• Research • Interactive story
• Theory application • Image galleries
• Written essays • Video essay

In its multi-variegated presentations, the project speaks as well to the shifting spaces necessary
for transforming attention, particularly regarding how we know, perceive and become aware
of our lived realities. Such spaces also enable the task to be done of “translating ourselves… to
ourselves” (Goldberg 2015, 165), and the role of media in considering our present social,
cultural and political conjunctures. After all, these make up the very work of understanding
media, if not media itself.

Reference List

Goldberg, D. (2015) “Deprovincializing Digital Humanities”. In: Between Humanities and the
Digital, eds. Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 163-
171.
Lee, K. and Chen Q. (2021) AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future. London: Virgin.
Magritte, R. (1933) La Condition Humaine (The Human Condition), oil on canvas, 100 cm x
81 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
Parikka, J. (2012) What is Media Archaeology?. Cambridge; Malden: Polity.
Tomaselli, D. (2022) “Have a look at Jenna Ng’s New Virtuality website”. Posted October 14,
2022. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/damien-tomaselli_home-the-new-virtuality-activity-
6984548103861243904-GWr2?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop.

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