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Joseph M. Conte

~ Professor of English, University at Buffalo

Joseph M. Conte

Monthly Archives: February 2017

The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be: 1990s Virtual Reality Enters the 21st Century

04 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by Joseph Conte in Lectures

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Science Studies Workshop, Talks, UB's Humanities Institute, UB’s English Department

UB HUMANITIES INSTITUTE SCIENCE STUDIES RESEARCH WORKSHOP

Friday, February 17th, 12:00-1:30

306 Clemens Hall

University at Buffalo

sega-vr-headset-1993The night of January 17, 1991, when laser-guided smart bombs and Tomahawk cruise missiles rained down on Baghdad at the start of the first Persian Gulf War, marked a transitionary moment from analogue to digital media. The legacy forms of broadcast TV, print fiction, and 2-D cinematic projection would be gradually replatformed by the new media of cable TV, ebooks, game boxes, and virtual reality.

Howard Rheingold’s influential Virtual Reality (1991) touted the “ten-year rule,” according to which computer enthusiasts by the millions—in 2001—would be interacting directly with virtual worlds through their desktop VR engines. But films of the 1990s, such as Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), and novels such as Pat Cadigan’s Synners (1991) and Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark (2000), uniformly present VR as the usher to a postmillennial apocalypse. Their dystopias are a means by which the legacy media of print fiction and the cinema “remediate” both the false promises and the disturbing threats of an artificial reality that would supplant them.

Some say that with the technological improvements introduced by Oculus Rift or Google Glass, VR’s moment in media history has finally arrived in the 21st century; some say that for VR and its funny goggles, its future has already passed.

Joseph Conte

Professor of English
University at Buffalo

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