VIRTUAL (PRESENT) REALITY

Virtual reality is almost an oxymoron, tending to be used as a synonym for artifice or simulation, and as antonym for reality. There is a countervailing tendency to use ‘virtual’ without the ‘reality’ because its reality is already assumed.
Virtual is the mode of reality implicated in the emergence of new potentials. Is the reality of change: the event.
If the virtual is change as such, then in it can only figure as a mode of abstraction.
The potential of a situation exceeds its actuality. The virtual is not contained in any actual form assumed by things or states of things. It runs in the transitions.
How can the run of the unform be integrated into a process whose end is still-standing form? A still-standing form appears as residue of a process of change, from which it stands out (in its stoppage).
The digitization of the Research Pavilion, the materials generated and gathered with/in the venue in order to take the exhibition online, must then be unsertood as a sign of the passing of a process, of a present that will soon vanish in the continuity of a deformational variation, a cut at any point, a Virtual Present Tour.

After Brian Massumi. Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible. From Hypersurface Architecture, edited by Stephen Perrella, Architectural Design (Profile no. 133), vol. 68, no. 5/6, May-June 1998, pp. 16-24.