Strawberry Fields

Last night I had one of those dreams where you ‘wake up’ in the dream. I thought I was awake. And I started telling some friends about the dream I just had. But I was still dreaming. For all I know, I’m still dreaming now.

Eventually, it will be impossible to tell the difference between the artist's dream and the audience's reality. You don’t believe me? Consider this computer-generated art from The CG Society. The pink girl above and iguana below are not photographs. They are digitally created artworks.



The iguana looks very real to me. The girl in pink is about one tech-generation away from being completely convincing. Maybe to an iguana, the human picture looks real, but the iguana picture looks totally fake. We're probably just a few short years away from having completely convincing CG actors in movies. "Hey usher, the iguana in the seat next to me keeps stealing my popcorn. There, he did it again! Did you see that? He does it with his tongue!"

In David Cronenberg's film eXistenZ (1999), Jennifer Jason Leigh stars as Allegra, a game designer who creates a virtual-reality game that taps into the players' minds. To play the game, users plug a game port directly into their spinal cord. Part of the game might include you unplugging the port, thinking the game is over. You're back in your familiar living room. But think again. You're still in the game.

Allegra: So how does it feel?

Ted: What?

Allegra: Your real life. The one you came back for.

Ted: It feels completely unreal.

Allegra: You're stuck now, aren't ya? You want to go back to the Chinese restaurant because there's nothing happening here. We're safe. It's boring.

Ted: It's worse than that. I'm not sure... I'm not sure here, where we are, is real at all. This feels like a game to me. And you, you're beginning to feel a bit like a game character.

.

Ted: We're both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don't understand.

Allegra: That sounds like my game, all right.

Ted: That sounds like a game that's not gonna be easy to market.

Allegra: But it's a game everybody's already playing.