Award Winner for Volume 15
What is Real in the Metaverse? : Realities of Image-Based Communication in Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Realities
The term metaverse characterizes computer-supported media in which primarily image-based forms of virtual realities, augmented realities, and mixed realities can be communicated. Considering these three media forms, two peculiarities stand out. First, pictorial signs create an immersive experience that makes images largely obsolete as a classic form of visual communication. And second, the three media forms cause social constructions of pictorial realities to become increasingly elastic. The following considerations will show how communicated realities in images become more elastic in varying between fact, fake, and fiction, or between sign and matter. Societies construct their image-based knowledge, but this remains purposeful only when consensual corridors orient what is to be considered real, virtual, actual, and moral. Further, the often-misunderstood oppositions between real and virtual are taken up to argue that the virtual is real but not actual. The social construction of image-based knowledge creates a virtual reality in the metaverse. This virtual reality is collectively experienced as real, but in its materiality it is often said to lack actuality. In the last century, the screen still protected the viewer from contact with the physical world. In the twenty-first century, the viewer is supposed to feel immersively involved in order to intensify real contact with virtual matter and virtual energy. The paper explores the question: How elastic can image-based knowledge be to be action-oriented when the actuality of virtual realities is collectively determined?
At the end of the 1980s, I only suspected that the cultural significance of images would grow due to digitalization. But at the time, I failed to realize the potential that artificial intelligence would unfold. Indeed, in this early 21st century, artificial intelligence is driving forward the most powerful disruption in image-production techniques known in history.
AI functions as a medium that includes all previously known techniques of image production. While global society had already learned to cope with vast quantities of images, the future challenge for recipients will be adequately evaluating the elastic realities these images aim to communicate. Philosophers and sociologists have often claimed that the virtual is neither real nor effective in reality. But this view is inaccurate in the age of the metaverse and artificial intelligence.
At present, images are showing more and more virtual things that are part of the meaningful realities in the recipients' lifeworlds. In this way, postmodern societies practice symbolic worlds of meaning in which signs become real to a high degree of freedom independent of their material actuality. In the same way, the new power of generative AI lies in its images, which communicate the virtual in an extremely powerful way as political, cultural and scientific realities. It is irrelevant to the respective actors whether the virtual will ever achieve actuality as long as their images are experienced as real and effective in society. In the present day, images are showing more and more of the virtual in order to socialize a reality that functions without reference to any pre-existing material actuality.
I hadn't expected such elastic realities at the time, but it at least makes current images very creative and extremely imaginative. Perhaps the limited number of realities considered viable by Sir Karl Popper’s paradigm of critical rationalism were merely yesterday’s news. In any case, the future suggests that an expanding multiverse of images will become a real experience. Whether these images will then have anything to do with our physically tangible actuality is another psychological discourse.
—Andreas Schelske