0 Paul Virilio's Concept of Two Realities

Paul Virilio, a renowned critic of art, has a notion about the two realities we live in.

One is real and is intimately and physically connected to us. We have a physical feel for it. The other, or the virtual, is a concept. It lives side by side with the actual. It is a lightshow. It does not even occur in matter but in light and images. It might even be all in the mind. Paul Virilio begs to differ from proponents of simulationaism. He does not believe that through virtual reality, there is any achievement of simulation at all. He rather believes that it is a substitution, in that new technologies are throwing virtual or a modified concept of reality in place of actual reality - what we were all born into.

Conventional art is where the artist had a direct physical connection with his work, but in the post-modernistic age of silicon chips and high speed data manipulation of today, it is on the verge of disappearing.

Digital art exists in virtual reality. Most digital art is just a combination of computer digits, and has nothing to do with the traditional settings under which this art was done or practiced.