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Not that there is anything particularly new about this, or not enough one would think to warrant such billions. Binocular still imaging is as old as photographic techniques themselves, using double-lens cameras, dual images, and viewers.¹⁷² The first 3-D cinema images were created in 1903.¹⁷³ The idea of closing off immediate context to enhance the effect of the virtual was captured in Morton L. Helig’s US Patent of 1962 for the “Sensorama Simulator”: an “apparatus … to stimulate the senses of an individual to simulate an actual experience realistically … by developing sensations in a plurality of the senses.”¹⁷⁴

In a longer view, the effect of proximity despite distance is as old as drawing and painting (tens of thousands of years), writing (thousands),^§AS1.4.7a printing (a millennium),^§AS1.4.7b linear perspective (half a millennium),^§MS2.2b photography (a century and a half),^§MS2.2.2a cinema (a century),^§MS1.1.3f television (half a century), and the internet (decades).^§AS1.4.7e The “virtual” has been part of our experience of meaning for as long as our species’ practices of recorded and transmitted meaning.

McKenzie Wark calls this telesthesia, or “perception at a distance,” where “we bring what is distant near, and make what is distant a site of action.”¹⁷⁵ Functionally, telesthesia occurs by transposition, where, by fiat of meaning, the far is always ready to be made near, the distant made proximate.

People who work with place as their line of trade – geographers for instance – tend to prioritize proximity. Here is Tobler’s famed first law of geography: “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.”¹⁷⁶ He had come to this conclusion while working on a computer simulation of urban growth in Detroit. When we looked on Google Scholar his original article had been cited 6,146 times, and to establish this degree of academic fame the spatial proximity of his referencers did not seem to have mattered.

In our reading of proximity versus distance in senses of place, this has been a nonsense for tens of thousands of years. There is no reason why the distant should not be just as related as the near, and at times even more related. By transposition, we can make the distant as meaningful as the nearby, or more. Indeed, texts and images transposed across greater distance in space and time may for that very reason acquire an unusual power over us. Religious texts and icons are a case in point.

As for the virtual, there is nothing terribly new in the phenomenology of its transpositions. A 1958 Bell Telephone System advertisement shows a wife sitting on a comfortable chair, apron on, vacuum cleaner behind her, and a small table beside her with a framed picture of her husband. She’s on the phone.

The Telephone Way to a Happier Day

Try it today when the dishes are done, beds made, clothes in the washer. You’ve earned a break.

So relax a little and pick up the telephone. Enjoy a cheerful visit with a friend or loved one.

It’s so easy to do, whatever the miles may be. For no one is ever far away by telephone.

It helps to make any day a happier day at both ends of the line.¹⁷⁷

The husband, and the friend, are virtual, and perhaps happiness too. It’s the same husband, friend, happiness, here or there. But in the nature of transposition, the meanings are not (quite) the same.

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¹⁷⁰ Howard Rheingold, 1991, Virtual Reality, New York: Summit Books; Brian Massumi, 2002, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

¹⁷¹ www.fastcompany.com/3028244/facebook-acquires-oculus-vr-for-2-billion

¹⁷² Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, 1969, The History of Photography, from the Camera Obscura to the Beginning of the Modern Era, New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 253–62.

¹⁷³ R.M. Hayes, 1989, 3-D Movies: A History and Filmography of Stereoscopic Cinema, Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, p. 3.

¹⁷⁴ Morton L. Heilig, 1962, “Sensorama Simulator,” edited by U.S. Patent Office.

¹⁷⁵ McKenzie Wark, 2012, Telesthesia: Communication, Culture and Class, Cambridge: Polity, pp. 15, 207.

¹⁷⁶ W.R. Tobler, 1970, “A Computer Movie Simulating Urban Growth in the Detroit Region,” Economic Geography 46 (Supplement: Proceedings of the International Geographical Union, Commission on Quantitative Methods):234–40, p. 236; W.R. Tobler, 2004, “On the First Law of Geography: A Reply,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94(2):304–10.

¹⁷⁷ http://blog.modernmechanix.com/the-telephone-way-to-a-happier-day/

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 79–80. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

The Place of the “Virtual” §AS1.3.2a