Page - 162 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

162 | Michael R. Heim www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 159–181 eCstAsy? esCAPe? During the twentieth century, many theorists feared that film would destroy live theater, that television would eliminate radio, that DVD recorders would doom real-time television. Hindsight may show such concerns to have been off target, but critical concerns often mark important turning points in media his- tory. After all, radio did eventually come to occupy a different niche in the media environment after the introduction of television; dramatic theater did learn to emphasize certain aspects of live performance once it began competing with film; and live television continues to supply sports and breaking news. Similarly, reviewing past arguments about VR helps adjust how we perceive VR today. the two arguments revisited here were concerns of a conference held at the University of Graz, Austria, in 1999.8 The first is found an essay by Elisabeth Kraus entitled “Virtuality and Spiritual- ity in science fiction Literature”.9 in the essay, Kraus traces the Vr themes run- ning through science-fiction literature, a literary genre potent enough to have created important semantic links between technology and everyday language, inventing terms like “cyberspace”.10 the essay by Kraus provides an insightful overview of several novels by William Gibson and Philip K. Dick, and illuminates the relationship between sci-fi novels and films like the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix (1999). in these works Kraus sees a complex and ambivalent response to virtuality. The novels and films do not simply use cyberspace and virtual reality as props for characters and actions. the narratives go deeper by exploring the positive and negative potentials of computer-generated constructs such as Vr, cyberspace, and AR. These works of fiction stimulate a multivalent criticism of technology looming over the cultural horizon of the 1990s. At that time, many critics, including this author, warned of a threat to reality with the introduction of Vr. A Circe-like “technological Platonism”, we feared, would entrap users in a fascination with a perfect world of mathematically streamlined objects, thus eclipsing the actual imperfect material world.11 such Platonism, Kraus shows, has an explicit and documentable history in the personal background of Dick. the lure of sheer transcendence also runs through the cyberpunk genre of Wil- liam Gibson and Bruce sterling. Kraus’s overview highlights Vr’s transcendence, but the transcendence is a specific kind. The essay’s title conjoins virtuality with spirituality (Religiosität), where spirituality is understood in a very specific way. This spirituality is the “techno-spirituality” celebrated by san francisco author erik Davis. Davis’s 8 the papers are printed in the conference volume Wessely/Larcher 2000. 9 Wessely/Larcher 2000, 65–78. Citations are from the english version provided on CD-rOM that accom- panies the book. 10 Gibson 1984. 11 see, for example, chap. 7, “the erotic Ontology of Cyberspace”, in heim 1993.