On the Edge of the Re(lation)al: Between and Beyond Cyber Realities

This text posits questions that problematise existing frameworks and speculative reconfigurations of what we know and understand to be “real” to explore virtual reality as a post-material construction. How can we differentiate between the real and the virtual? Are such categorisations necessary today? Rather than probing categories, it is useful to investigate the nature and post-materiality of the virtual as a phenomenon that holds increasing currency. That currency may be understood by delineating a brief history of the virtual in the contexts of, on the one hand, technodiverse reconfigurations of the utopian promise of cyberspace and the political potential of Net Art and, on the other, its acquired role within big tech and entertainment, its capacities for surveillance extractivism, and its increasing openness to neoliberal capitalist exploitation.