Ken Hillis

Digital Sensations

Considers the cultural and philosophical assumptions underlying virtual reality, and how the technology affects the real world. Virtual reality is in the news and in the movies, on TV and in the air. Why is the technology-or the idea-so prevalent precisely now? What does it mean-what does it do-to us? Digital Sensations looks closely at how the “lived” world is affected by representational forms generated by communication technologies, especially digital and optical virtual technologies. Virtual reality, or VR, is a technological reproduction of the process of perceiving the real, yet that process is filtered through the social realities and embedded cultural assumptions about human bodies and space held by the technology’s creators. Through critical histories of the technologies of vision, light, space, and embodiment, Ken Hillis traces the often contradictory intellectual and metaphysical impulses behind the Western transcendental wish to achieve an ever more perfect copy of the real. He advocates that current and proposed virtual technologies reflect a Western desire to escape the body. Because virtual technologies are new, these histories also address unintended and underconsidered consequences flowing from their rapid dissemination, such as commodifications and the alienation of new forms of surveillance. Exploring topics from VR and other, earlier visual technologies, Hillis’s penetrating perspective on the cultural power of place and space broadens our view of the interplay between social relations and technology.