Neolithic Human Cultures: The Earliest Phase of Virtual Reality

Immersion is a key feature of virtual reality. VR headsets like the Oculus Rift quite literally dictate your audio and visual input. It was hardly a century ago that humanity was in the pre-digital age. Hypnosis and imagination have always been the keys to dreamlike immersion in a fantasy. Like today’s movies and games, religious stories play upon archetypes deep within the collective human imagination. Virtual reality simulations may appear futuristic, but they can be traced back through the whole of human civilization, to its inception point in tribal animistic and spiritual cultures of the neolithic era.

The Allegory of the Cave

Human civilization has always been a virtual reality.  At the onset of culture, which was propagated through the proto-media of cave painting, the talking drum, music, fetish art making, oral tradition and the like, Homo sapiens began a march into cultural virtual realities, a march that would span the entirety of the human enterprise.  We don’t often think of cultures as virtual realities, but there is no more apt descriptor for our widely diverse sociological organizations and interpretations than the metaphor of the “virtual reality.”  Indeed, the virtual reality metaphor encompasses the complete human project.

Virtual Reality researchers, Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson, write in their book Infinite Reality; “[Cave art] is likely the first animation technology”, where it provided an early means of what they refer to as “virtual travel”.  You are in the cave, but the media in that cave, the dynamic-drawn, fire-illuminated art, represents the plains and animals outside—a completely different environment, one facing entirely the opposite direction, beyond the mouth of the cave.  When surrounded by cave art, alive with movement from flickering torches, you are at once inside the cave itself whilst the media experience surrounding you encourages you to indulge in fantasy, and to mentally simulate an entirely different environment.  Blascovich and Bailenson suggest that in terms of the evolution of media technology, this was the very first immersive VR. Both the room and helmet-sized VRs used in the present day are but a sophistication of this original form of media VR tech.

Today, philosophers and critics have pointed out that businesses such as McDonald’s and Starbucks are like virtual realities in and of themselves.  They have a specific and immersive decorum as well as sanctioned behaviors, symbols, and even philosophies.  When you enter Starbucks, you enter Starbucks World.  In contemporary jargon, these are called hyperrealities—they are microcosms with their own purposes and messages.  Disneyland and Times Square are the epitome of consumerist hyperrealities in the United States.  These hyperrealities are cloned (copied and pasted) and hold a global footprint in an ever-homogenized worldwide monoculture.  They are a touchstone of the global capitalist project; many stores in many locations that are nearly exactly the same.  (Similarly, even restaurants that aren’t franchise mega-chains offer differing atmospheres; competing little worlds to wine and dine in.)  Where did the hyperrealities that typify contemporary life get their start?  What happened between the cave paintings, and these franchises that nearly everyone on the planet today knows intimately well?  I’d like to suggest they got their start with the codification of certain places of worship and the belief systems that joined them.

[To read the whole article, by Elliot Edge, click here]

[via Evolve and Ascend…]

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