Water as Virtual Reality, or some initial thoughts on why I like liquidy, watery, slippery things.

In the science fiction film Solaris (based on the novel of the same name by Stanislaw Lem), director Tarkovsky tells a story of a psychologist who gets sent to a space station to check up on a group of scientists who have fallen into separate emotional crises. The space station is orbiting and conducting research on an aquatic planet called Solaris but its mission has been stalled due to the fact that the scientists on board are suffering from what appears to be emotional comas. Not long after the psychologist’s arrival to the space station, he becomes distressed by the presence of his late wife, or a virtual version of her. After her insistent reappearance after each time he kills her, he finally accepting her presence as reality and slowly descends into an emotional crises just like the fate of the other scientists. In the last scene, the psychologist is shown back at his father’s country home, but as the camera zooms out, it appears that he is actually on an island in the Solaris ocean.

Turns out the oceanic planet of Solaris was studying the scientists instead, and the source of all the virtual disruptions that caused the scientists psychological distress.

For me, water allows me to access virtuality through its shape and touch. Its significance in history is undeniable. We come from our mother’s womb which is filled with water. Water is the source of all life on Earth. In many religions and spiritual practices, water also soothes souls and heals bodies. However, water also has destructive properties such as natural disasters. Water is the site of birth, death and rebirth.

I am of course informed by my own experience as an ex-competitive swimmer and now a synchronized swimmer. When I am in water, I am able to move in positions that are otherwise impossible on land without assistance. I am completely transported to another world where the contours of the fantasmatic blends with the physical shapes and edges of reality.

What are some connections we can draw to from water and virtual reality? Well this relationships is of course metaphoric and tangential. Water has been represented in history and literature as sites of liminality. Personally, the feeling of entering water feels like stepping into a different reality, one that is maybe similar to the feelings of putting on a VR headset and entering a virtual world. In my game sketch, I use water as a metaphor to create worlds within worlds such as using the waterfall as a portal and situating my game in a bathhouse, which is filled with different representations of water.

New media theorists have written in the past that the border between the real and virtual world is porous but perhaps this border is a lot more fluid than porous. Water, with all its loaded history and symbolisms, represents the slippery boundaries between our physical “real” world and the virtual synthetic world.