Daydream. Segregation from Reality and Stream of Consciousness in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Virtual reality’s (VR) ability to reconcile immediacy and hyper-mediation is one of the most fascinating and contradictory aspects of it: hyper-mediated as the reality it allows access to is entirely constructed and made of media objects, and because the access is mediated by devices, VR is immediate as it fully involves the senses to which it is addressed, excluding other external stimuli. This aspect of exclusion is crucial for understanding the nature and potential of VR: today, immersing oneself in VR does not only mean temporarily estranging oneself from reality, but from a reality clogged with information flows, sensorial stimuli, diversion of attention; it means, in other words, artificially recreating the possibility of focus and daydream, a condition that has been made inaccessible – according to neuroscience – by hyperactivity and information overload. A daydream that’s guided and designed by the author of the VR environment, based on an unprecedented relationship between work and user and precisely for this reason capable of enabling the viewer with a new kind of autonomy and an attitude for digression. Through a selection of VR artworks as case studies, this paper wants to demonstrate how VR, often related to Surrealism for its ability to give life to alternative worlds and to host fragments of the unconscious, is rather closer to the “meridian dream” of De Chirico’s metaphysics, and able to stimulate flows of consciousness, inward looking and abstract thought.